There were all these splendid tribesmen with hawks on their wrists and greyhounds straining on the leash. We rode out like a mediaeval company. When the hounds had stirred up the hares, the hawks were let fly.
‘After I had been in Delhi for a while I began to sober up a little. My father set me down at a table to learn Urdu with a bearded Munshi. Soon afterwards I met Sir John Thompson at a big dinner at Viceregal Lodge. He was Commissioner for Delhi and an old friend of my father. A very intelligent man: he could speak several Indian languages, understood Sanskrit and so on. He said to me: "What do you do with yourself all day?" and I replied: "I sleep late because I’ve been to a party then I go for a ride and …" He said, a little severely: "Has it never occurred to you to study Indian history?" I said "No" and he replied: "I’ll lend you a book on the history of Delhi. You read that and see if it doesn’t inspire you to look around"—which indeed it did.
‘From that moment onwards, wherever I went, I was poking my nose about, looking at the ruins. Most afternoons I used to ride down to the Purana Qila—I loved the Purana Qila—and sit at the top of the Sher Mandal thinking of poor old Humayun tripping down those stairs and killing himself. I always used to come down very carefully. Of course it was all so lonely then. Humayun’s Tomb was absolutely out in the blue. It was open land, strewn with tumbledown tombs and the rubble of ages. Beyond the plains were dotted with black buck and peacocks. You could ride anywhere …’
‘So this was all before Lutyens’s Delhi went up?’ I interrupted.
‘Well, I suppose the building was just about beginning.’
‘Did you ever meet the man himself?’
‘Who? Lutyens? Oh yes. He was a great friend of my parents.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Well, he was very taken with my mother. Because my father’s name was Monty, he used to call her Carlo. That was typical Lutyens. Always making these rather childish jokes.
‘He took me around Viceroy’s House when it was only two to three feet high. What I will always remember was going to one of the staff bungalows. He said: "Look—I planned this with a central space in the middle and eight doors leading off." Some of these doors just led into housemaid’s cupboards. "I thought it would be terribly funny," said old Lutyens—he was absolutely thrilled with this, "that if people had had too much to drink at a big party, they’d come home and they wouldn’t know which was their door. They’d all end up in the cupboards."’
Iris frowned. ‘He was such a silly man. But of course I greatly admire his work. I love New Delhi. I always thought it was so much better than Washington. And you know, people forget that that magnificent city of Delhi was built on such a flimsy basis—both human and material. There was no proper scaffolding or any of the equipment that they have now: no cranes or mechanical things to help with the lifting of weights … I can remember seeing them, these little wizened people carrying great hods of bricks and vast bags of cement. There were myriads of them: climbing up rickety bamboo ladders tied together with string, and all of it getting more precarious as it got higher …
‘Of course, people of my father’s generation hated the whole thing. He and my uncle Harcourt thought it was frightfully extravagant, and that those lakhs of money could have been far better used elsewhere. Moreover they always felt that the prophecy—whoever builds a new city in Delhi will lose it—would come true. If ever anybody raised the subject of New Delhi my father would always quote the Persian couplet in a most gloomy voice. And of course it did come true. Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan … They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.’
I could see Iris was tiring. It was now dark outside and I knew I was soon going to have to leave her. But before I went I wanted to ask one last question.
‘In retrospect,’ I said. ‘Do you think British rule was justified?’
Iris mulled over the question before answering.
‘Well, at the time we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as wicked imperialists,’ she said, answering slowly. ‘Of course not. But you see, although people of my generation were very keen on Gandhi and Indian Independence, we were still very careless. We didn’t give much thought to the question of what on earth we were doing to that country and its people.
‘That said, I can’t forget the sacrifices made by the "wicked" imperialists over the centuries—the graves, so many very young, the friends I have had, and what good people many of them were.
‘But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.’
I walked around Lutyens’s Delhi that November, thinking of Iris. It seemed incredible that someone who had been taken around the foundations of the Viceroy’s House—now the President’s Palace—by Lutyens himself could still be alive and well. The buildings appeared so solid, so timeless, so ancient. It was like meeting someone who had been taken around the Parthenon by Pericles.
To best appreciate New Delhi I used to walk to it from the Old City. Leaving behind the press and confusion of Shahjehanabad—the noise and the heat, the rickshaws and the barrow-boys, the incense and the sewer-stink—I would find myself suddenly in a gridiron of wide avenues and open boulevards, a scheme as ordered and inevitable as a Bach fugue. Suddenly the roads would be empty and the air clean. There was no dust, no heat: all was shaded, green and cool. Ahead, at the end of the avenue, rose the great chattri which once held the statue of George V. Arriving there at the end of the green tunnel, I would turn a right angle and see the cinnamon sky stretching out ahead, no longer veiled by a burqa of buildings or trees. It was like coming up for air.
This was Rajpath—once the Kingsway—one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysées—complete with India Gate, its own butter-coloured Arc de Triomphe. But it was far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe. On either side ran wide lawns giving on to fountains and straight avenues of eucalyptus and casuarina. Beyond, canals running parallel to the road reflected the surroundings with mirror-like fidelity.
Ahead, high on Raisina Hill, crowning an almost infinite perspective, rose a silhouette of domes, towers and cupolas. As I drew near, Herbert Baker’s two Secretariats would rise precipitously out of the plain, their projecting porticoes flanking the hemispheric dome of the Viceroy’s House. East fused with West. Round arches and classical Greek colonnades were balanced by latticework stone screens and a ripple of helmet-like chattris. At the very centre of the complex, the resolution of every perspective in New Delhi, stood Lutyens’s staggering neo-Buddhist dome.
However many times I revisited the complex, I would always be amazed by the brilliantly orchestrated flirtation of light and shade—the dim colonnades offset by massive walls of sun-blasted masonry. Yet the most startling conceit of all lay in the use of colour: the play of the two different shades of pink Agra sandstone; one pale and creamy; the other a much darker burnt crimson. The two different colours were carefully arranged, the darker at the bottom as if it was somehow heavier, yet with the two contrasting tones blending as effortlessly into one another as they once did in the quarry.
It was superb. In the dusk, as the sun sank behind the great dome of the Viceroy’s House, the whole vista would turn the colour of attar of roses. I would realize then, without hesitation, that I was looking at one
