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By Rajat Ray
It would not be out of line to see New Delhi as a physical representation of colonial India. The body of the city was laid out with the magnificent Viceregal Palace set in a park on the hill with two voluminous secretarial blocks on its immediate flanks. These formed the monumental ‘Capitol’ or the ‘head’ on the western end of a long avenue running like a spine. Interestingly at the opposite end of the avenue on the east are an assembly of
smaller palaces of the kings of the Indian princely States, who were subjugated to the crown, by battles and treaties. These edifices were arranged in a multi-layered ring around a sprawling hexagonal lawn in the middle called the ‘Princes’ Park. Eventually in the centre of that hexagon a towering statue of King George V, the father of New Delhi, was placed within the cupola already standing tall in anticipation. This completed the Princes Park as a picture of surrender of the Indian rulers to the King of England standing at the focal centre of a vast monument of victory.
It’s a quick and cheaper alternative of making a new capital. Not quite any big vision, it is a collection of a number of large and small projects
That widest avenue of the city, a ceremonial showpiece boulevard with its tree-lined lawn-scape, acted as the central axial spine about which the city was spread out symmetrically to the North and the South. This axis represented power; military troops paraded up and down this place and a band would perform ‘beating the retreat’ in front of the Capitol. Before the statue was placed in the Cupola, on this axis was erected the all-India War Memorial Arch. This grand monument of “remembrance” of the soldiers killed in the world war, is now the India Gate. Farther on the axis near the Viceregal lodge stood the column commemorating the coronation of George V, in whose name the avenue was called the Kingsway.
Perpendicular to the Kingsway intersecting it right in the middle was laid the other axis called Queensway presumably honouring Queen Victoria’s memory. This axis connected the Connaught Circus Market in the North, the functioning symbol of ‘Trade and Commerce’; and the proposed New Delhi Cathedral in the South, symbolising ‘Religion’; two arms of the Victorian colonial grip. Such disposition would not be accidental but could only be inspired by the ideology of the Empire.
If this was one monumental representation of the substance of colonial India, concurrently there was yet another within the same field and in fact at the heart of it. At the crossing of the two axes is ‘Orientalists’ India’ with its four pillars. Documents and Records, Scriptures and Knowledge, Archaeology and History and Ethnography and Culture, the lenses through which the colony was defined, in the form of the four orientalist institutions: the Archive, the Library, the Museum and the Theatre, the respective four corners created by the intersection. With all that the Kingsway would be the ‘Central Vista’ from the imperial perspective.
While pushing the latest technology to the forefront, the architects appear to have intelligently reduced the daunting task of making designs, working, drawing and construction to a reasonably comfortable level by creating one clean block that is repeated twelve times, and replicating a circle into a triangle by stretching corners
The original British Parliament of India or the Council house, now the Sansad bhawan, was accommodated at the foothill of the Capitol to its left. The new born colonial legislature was still under the gaze of the imperial executive. Turning away from the bi-lateral symmetry of the master design, it was placed on another axial line of vision from the viceroy’s palace passing through the centre of Connaught Circus to reach the Jama Masjid in the walled city.
The layperson does not have access to structuralist readings and may not understand the symbolic meaning of European neo classical architecture to denigrate or appreciate it. The less read in this area, may however, experience the grandeur and relate to the beauty of good architecture.
After Independence, the Jawaharlal Nehru-led government did not tamper with the existing architecture. Nehru’s vision of a contemporary city, one that united social classes and accepted modernity, was Chandigarh. A symbol of new India, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier implemented a modern city in Chandigarh according to Nehru’s vision. Then again, British architect Edwin Lutyens’ Delhi for George V was much akin to the genre of (Pierre Charles) L’Enfant’s DC for George Washington, Speer’s Berlin for Hitler, or a new Moscow for Stalin by his architects.
Will Lutyens’ Delhi, the Delhi that British architect Edwin Landseer Lutyens built, become any other architects' Delhi?
But, the new ‘Central Vista Redevelopment’, does not belong to this class. It’s a quick and cheaper alternative of making a new capital. Not quite any big vision, it is a collection of a number of large and small projects. A new parliament off the axis, and new Government office buildings on the axis, each approximately the same size of the new parliament in perimeter, one convention centre, two new very large adaptive, reuse projects, make the new Central Vista core. From the North Block and the South Block, ministers and officers are released from their huddle and lined up along the Raj path in larger new blocks, making it into a modernised “Mantri & Babu Path”. This is celebrating the legacy of post-independence governmentality and pampering the bureaucracy in service of the State. This is accomplished by demolishing those houses of History and Culture and Records in the centre, and vestiges of the 'orientalist project' are removed in the process. This echoes the current regime’s tendency to rewrite the history of India by shuffling both fact and evidence. Collections of the museum that would be demolished will be taken to the vacated North and South blocks and rearranged.
We don’t know the proportion of the contribution of the client and the architects in determining this configuration. While Lutyens and company could not stick to their deadline of four years that rolled into two decades, architects in this case have to meet deadlines, they have to be champions of delivery. They are not George’s Lutyens or Nehru’s Le Corbusier. They may not even have been given a totally free hand, but have taken up this unprecedented challenge.
This echoes the current regime’s tendency to rewrite the history of India by shuffling both fact and evidence
While pushing the latest technology to the forefront, they appear to have intelligently reduced the daunting task of making designs, working, drawing and construction to a reasonably comfortable level by creating one clean block that is repeated twelve times, and replicating a circle into a triangle by stretching corners. There goes a victory against fancy imagination! They have thereby also managed to remain within certain virtual boundaries, not crossing what one kind of keen heritage expert defines as limits. Further they struggle for no ingenuity and waste no time with determining the appearance of the new buildings simply by almost exactly copying the system of the existing structures; and that actually excites another kind of heritage advocate.
Some philosophically-oriented architects and some practicing architects have been fighting losing battles protesting against Central Vista and other changes in historical structures. They keep borrowing weaponry from environmentalists and lawyers, but are not able to locate or reach specific targets. So, New Delhi may give in and go the way the present government wishes. But will Lutyens’ Delhi, the Delhi that British architect Edwin Landseer Lutyens built, become any other architects' Delhi?
(Rajat Ray is a professor at the University School of Architecture and Planning, Indraprastha University, Delhi)