the more often I came and looked, the more I felt a nagging reservation. This had less to do with aesthetics than with comparisons with other massive schemes of roughly similar date that the complex brought to mind. Then one evening, as I proceeded up the cutting and emerged to find Baker’s Secretariats terminating in the wide portico of the Viceroy’s House, with this great imperial mass of masonry towering all around me I suddenly realized where I had seen something similar, something equally vast, equally dwarfing, before: Nuremberg.
In its monstrous, almost megalomaniac scale, in its perfect symmetry and arrogant presumption, there was a distant but distinct echo of something Fascist or even Nazi about the great acropolis of Imperial Delhi. Certainly it is far more beautiful than anything Hitler and Mussolini ever raised: Lutyens, after all, was a far, far greater architect than Albert Speer. Yet the comparison still seemed reasonable. For, despite their very many, very great differences, Imperial India, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany all belonged to comparable worlds. All were to different extents authoritarian; all made much of magnificent display; all were built on a myth of racial superiority and buttressed in the last resort by force. In the ceremonial buildings of all three, it was an impression of the might and power of the Imperial State that the architects aimed above all to convey.
To do so they used the same architectural vocabulary: great expanses of marble, a stripped-down classicism, a fondness for long colonnades and a love of Imperial heraldic devices: elephants’ heads, lions couchant, massive eagles with outstretched wings. Of course, much of the similarity is due to the fact that Speer and Lutyens were commissioned to build monuments of state at roughly the same time. Moreover, Speer appears to have drawn on Lutyens’s experience and style. Yet there can be no doubt that New Delhi was very deliberately built as an expression of the unconquerable might of the Raj. As Lord Stamfordham, Private Secretary to George V, wrote in a letter articulating the King Emperor’s views on his new capital: ‘We must let [the Indian] see for the first time the power of Western civilization …’
In New Delhi, as in Fascist Milan or Nazi Berlin, the individual is lost; the scale is not human, but super-human; not national, but super-national: it is, in a word, Imperial. The impression of the architect as bully receives confirmation in the inscription that Lutyens ordered to be raised above the great recessed ivan gateway of the Secretariats.
For those who like to believe in the essential benevolence of the British Empire it is a depressing discovery, for it must be one of the most patronizing inscriptions ever raised in a public place:
LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE;
A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY;
IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED
BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.
I had brought out to Delhi with me a copy of the collected letters of Lutyens. One evening in November I sat in the shade of the chattris beside the two Secretariats, facing down the Rajpath towards India Gate and reading through them. As I did so, I tried to bring the creator of Imperial Delhi into focus in my own mind.
The picture that the letters give of their author is a mixed one. There are certainly elements of the joker and buffoon that Iris had described: Lutyens incessantly doodles on the writing paper, turning the P & O crests on successive letterheads into a tiger, a man with a turban and an elephant. His first action after arriving in India is to play a game of musical chairs (‘Mrs Brodie who weighs 20 stone or more was the most energetic of the party and broke two chairs entirely [amid] many a scrimmage and wild shriek …’). Later, on seeing the hideous government buildings of Simla, Lutyens writes that they are ‘a piece of pure folly such as only Englishmen can achieve: if one were told the monkeys had built them one would have said what wonderful monkeys, they must be shot in case they do it again.’
This playfulness is balanced by ample evidence of Lutyens’s tenacity and stubbornness; a stubbornness which in the end saved New Delhi from both the aesthetic whims of successive philistine Viceroys—Lord Hardinge was determined to build the entire scheme in the Indian version of Victorian mock-Gothic, the horrible Indo-Saracenic style—and from the cost-cutting penny-pinching interference of the civil servants.
But the letters also confirmed my hunch concerning Lutyens’s autocratic tendencies. Like some other of his English contemporaries, he was clearly disillusioned with Parliamentary democracy and found in the Raj what he regarded as an ideal—an enlightened despotism: ‘I am awfully impressed by the Civil Service,’ he wrote to his wife, early on in his Indian travels. ‘I wish they would abolish the House of Commons and all representative government and start the system in England.’ Later, in a moment of fury with a negligent workman, he expressed his opinion that the Empire’s subjects ‘ought to be reduced to slavery and not given the rights of man at all …
Yet perhaps the overwhelming surprise of the letters is Lutyens’s extraordinary intolerance and dislike of all things Indian. Even by the standards of the time, the letters reveal him to be a bigot, though the impression is one of bumbling insularity rather than jack-booted malevolence. Indians are invariably referred to as ‘blacks’, ‘blackamoors’, ‘natives’ or even ‘niggers’. They are ‘dark and ill-smelling’, their food is ‘very strange and frightening’ and they ‘do not improve with acquaintance’. The helpers in his architect’s office he describes as ‘odd people with odd names who do those things that bore the white man’. On another occasion he writes of the ‘sly slime of the Eastern mind’ and ‘the very low intelligence of the natives’. ‘I do not think it possible for the Indians and whites to mix freely’, he concludes. ‘They are very, very different and I cannot admit them on the same plane as myself.’
Considering that Lutyens managed to fuse Eastern and Western aesthetics more successfully than any other artist since the anonymous sculptors of Gandhara (who produced their Indo-Hellenic Buddhas in the wake of Alexander the Great), his dislike of Indian art and architecture is particularly surprising: ‘Moghul architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building,’ he writes in one letter. ‘It is essentially the building style of children [and] very tiresome to the Western intelligence.’ At one stage, after visiting Agra, he is grudgingly forced to admit that ‘some of the work is lovely’, but he attributes these qualities to an (imaginary) Italian influence.
In the end one is left with the same paradox confronted by lovers of Wagner: how could someone with such objectionable views and so insular a vision have managed to produce such breathtaking works of art? Here was a man capable of building some of the most beautiful structures created in the modern world, but whose prejudices blinded him to the beauty of the Taj Mahal; a man who could fuse the best of East and West while denying that the Eastern elements in his own buildings were beautiful.
Authoritarian regimes tend to leave the most solid souvenirs; art has a strange way of thriving under autocracy. Only the vanity of an Empire—an Empire emancipated from democratic constraints, totally self-confident in its own judgement and still, despite everything, assured of its own superiority—could have produced Lutyens’s Delhi.
Pandit Nehru wrote: ‘New Delhi is the visible symbol of British power, with all its ostentation and wasteful extravagance.’ He was right, of course, but that is only half the story. It is also the finest architectural artefact created by the British Empire, and preferable in every way to Nehru’s disastrous commission of a hideous new city by Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. Chandigarh is now an urban disaster, a monument to stained concrete and discredited modernism; but Imperial Delhi is now more admired and loved than perhaps ever before. Nevertheless, in its patronizing and authoritarian after-taste, Lutyens’s New Delhi remains as much a monument to the British Empire’s failings as to its genius.
That month I began to make enquiries to try and track down British stayers-on from Imperial Delhi. For a while I failed to come up with anything: those few
