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 of the greatest marriages of architecture and urban planning ever to have left the drawing board.
Nevertheless, 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