AS A child growing up in New Delhi in the 1930s, Patwant Singh could not have asked for more. “The magnificent sweep of this imperial city which the British were building, with a passion which matched that of India’s Mughal rulers, was heaven-sent for us.” He recalls the “gracious vistas of King’s Way . . . with its broad well-cut lawns and lines of trees extending as far as the eye could see.” Much as he and his playmates loved watching the pageantry, their greatest joy was climbing the trees along the wide boulevard for the succulent fruits of jamun or racing their bicycles through the water of the canals that paralleled its grassy margins. What a contrast to the “noisy, grilling heat of the old Indian city.” It was a grandiose reimagining of the English garden city, “Hampstead enlarged on a giant scale and transposed to Asia.”1
The Imperial Capital
At the great durbar of 1911 King George V announced that the British, too, would now leave their stamp on Delhi in the form of an imperial capital that would overshadow in brilliance even that of their Mughal predecessors. But where the Mughals had made a habit of shifting capitals, the British in India had known only one, Calcutta, so that the decision was abrupt and, in many quarters, unpopular. It took almost twenty years to complete New Delhi, in contrast to the less than a decade required for Shah Jahan’s capital. Furthermore, the Mughal emperor could draw on a ready lexicon of forms and spaces, one that allowed for innovation and experimentation, as in the case of Akbar’s Fatehpur Sikri, but mainly for perfection, as in the case of the Red Fort. The riverfront site chosen for Shahjahanabad marked the apogee of a tradition begun by his great-great-grandfather Babur over a century earlier. The emperor could mobilize the finest artists and craftsmen, but he could also overrule them if he chose to; if there was opposition to any of his decisions or horror at his extravagances, we do not hear of them.
As heirs to nineteenth-century historicism, the British had all too much choice. They also had to reckon with diffused authority, with commissions and bureaucracy and Parliament, to say nothing of the vociferous opposition of Calcutta’s partisans, including Lord Curzon himself. There was a king, with very definite ideas, but also a viceroy (and viceroy’s wife), with equally definite ideas; there were a host of architects and city planners, some already with long experience of India, others entirely unfamiliar with the subcontinent, all of them eager to put their stamp on the great work at hand. Events, too, intruded: domestically, the escalating pace of Indian nationalism; internationally, a world war, then a worldwide depression.
The decision to relocate the capital had been almost accidental, with minimal consultation and no planning. It was pointed out that Delhi had time-honored associations with imperial rule, Mughal and pre-Mughal, that it was more centrally located than Calcutta, and that it was much closer to the summer capital of Simla. These arguments did little to appease the diehards in Calcutta who were dismayed at losing their privileged economic and political position as second city of the empire. Invoking the cadences of the Old Testament prophet, an English-language newspaper warned that those making the move would suffer “the swamps and heat, the boils and blains, the snakes and insects”—as if Calcutta could not match Delhi plague for plague.2 “They are going to Delhi, the graveyard of empires to be buried there,” commented one Bengali, sounding a note that would be oft repeated.3 Ramsay Macdonald, the first Labour prime minister, who had visited the city in 1909 and 1912, had been struck by its resemblance to a “vast churchyard.” “For what reason Providence only knows,” he declared, “the Government decided to build new palaces and offices and bring itself bag and baggage to this city of ruins and of tombs.” To escape from the raucous clamor of Bengali nationalists, “we determined to regild the thrones of the Moguls and sit down upon them.”4
Although Curzon himself had idly considered moving the capital to Agra and had not hesitated to choose Delhi for his Imperial Durbar, he led the charge against the transfer. He was motivated partly by a genuine love of Calcutta (unfathomable to most Britons), even more by pique that his new Victoria Memorial, intended to be the architectural jewel in the colonial crown, would now be marginalized. Delhi, he argued, was a backwater, “a cemetery of dead monuments and forgotten dynasties.” The East India Company had sacked Lord Wellesley for his extravagance in building Calcutta’s Government House over a century earlier, but that would be a mere “bagatelle,” he insisted (correctly as it turned out), compared to the expense involved in the new undertaking.5 There were, indeed, so many second thoughts after the decision was announced that had not work already started and considerable sums already been spent, the outbreak of World War I might well have dealt a deathblow and caused the whole idea to be scrapped.6
But proceed it did, albeit with many questions still to be answered. Where would it be situated? Who would design it? Should it reflect Indian styles or European? For whom was the city to be designed? Would it be a collection of administrative buildings or a place to live? What would be its relationship to Shahjahanabad and all the other Delhis? How, for that matter, could the builders pick their way around all the ruins? And could even the hardiest planners create an oasis of greenery on the dusty plain?
Two days after the Coronation Durbar, George V had laid a foundation stone (rumored—erroneously—to have been a hastily acquired tombstone) on the durbar site. This spot, however, proved to be far from ideal, and a location to the south was finally chosen as more suitable to the grand vision that was unfolding. Government House was to crown Raisina Hill, a spur of the Ridge, with opposing Secretariat Buildings slightly below. An almost two-mile avenue would terminate in a monumental arch, the War Memorial, beyond which (later) stood the statue of George V and the ruins of the Purana Qila, the alleged site of the protohistoric Indraprastha. Radiating out from this were residential zones for civil and military personnel and the huge numbers of workers required for the machinery of government. In contrast to Babur and Shah Jahan, the British were so fixated on an acropolis-like eminence that they ignored the riverbank in the debates about possible sites. To be sure, the Yamuna had meandered to the east in the intervening centuries and no longer lapped at the battlements of the Red Fort.
Grand processional avenues were a hallmark of capitals. In another time Edwin Lutyens, the presiding genius of the imperial city, need have looked no farther for inspiration than Shahjahanabad’s Chandni Chowk, where elephants once progressed in stately ranks from Fatehpur Mosque along a “very wide and straight” street to a “great square” before the gates of the Red Fort.7 But in the aftermath of the Uprising of 1857, mosque, avenue, and fort were sad shadows of their former selves. As for London as model, late Victorians felt embarrassed about the lack of broad avenues and triumphal vistas in the city—nothing to rival Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards and the Champs Elysées. In the decade following the queen’s death in 1901, the Mall was redesigned as a more imperial processional way, with the newly erected Admiralty Arch at one end and a statue of Queen Victoria in front of Buckingham Palace at the other. Not much could be done with that unprepossessing pile of a palace, but it did benefit from a facelift and a reconstruction of the facade to focus on the balcony where the king and queen could make their own version of darshan. This project was completed just as planning was underway for New Delhi.8 Since Lutyens had the rare opportunity of creating a new capital from scratch, however, he was inspired far more by examples such as Washington, Canberra, and Pretoria (built by Herbert Baker, who would be his primary collaborator on New Delhi). Here, with almost unlimited land and largely untrammeled by history, he could fashion a city truly worthy of an empire.
The overall plan of the new city consisted of a complicated interplay of equilateral triangles and hexagons, intersected by several cross avenues at right angles and an abundance of roundabouts.9 This plan was inspired, according to Lutyens, by the viceroy’s command that one avenue should lead to Purana Qila and another to the Jama Masjid, the most important mosque. In other words, there should be an antiphony between the old city and the new. While Lutyens had a very low opinion of Mughal architecture (he dismissed it as “piffle”), it suited his Beaux-Arts aesthetic to use major monuments to provide “visual accents” to the main axes of the new city. Dotted amid the green parkland, they might, with some imagination, evoke the pavilions and gazebos of an English garden. The myriad lesser monuments, on the other hand, he considered simply “nuisances” and not worth zigzagging around when they got in the way of his geometry: “Imagine the Place de la Concorde with tombs anywhere or everywhere about it, in the middle of the road, half on & half off pavements.” In fact, even the Purana Qila is off-center as the endpoint of the Kingsway, thanks to the “inflexible rigidity” demanded by the symmetry of the master plan.10
The House on the Hill
and the Garden Imperial
The focal point for all the geometry is Government House, later renamed Viceroy’s House, atop Raisina Hill. A huge structure whose facade is exactly the length of Buckingham Palace, it dominates the surrounding plain, as it was intended to do.11 King George made it clear that he would like to see a heavy Mughal flavor to the capital “if it were not dreadfully expensive.”12 Lord Hardinge as viceroy stated his preference more generally as “Western architecture with an Oriental motif.”13 After Lutyens was chosen as its architect, Hardinge sent him to tour major Indian monuments—Agra, Indore, Mandu, Sarnath—in hopes he would be inspired to create an architectural synthesis of East and West.
These tours did nothing to shake Lutyens’s conviction that India had “no real architecture and nothing is built to last, not even the Taj.” The Taj had charms, he acknowledged, as did some other tombs: “They are empty of people, quiet, square, simple and green, and this is only when money is spent on repairs, upkeep, etc. When in ruins the buildings, especially the Mogul, are bad and have none of the dignity a ruin can have that has been the work of any great period.” By moonlight, he conceded to his wife, “the patterns [of the Taj] disappear and the architectural forms merge into a fog of white reflection, leaving the great turnip of a dome as a bubble posed in space”; “It is wonderful,” he allowed, “but it is not architecture and its beauty begins where architecture ceases to be.” Inspired by nothing grander than carpets, it could never stand comparison with the great works of the Greeks, Byzantines, Romans, or of later giants such as Mansard and Wren.14 In the end he did incorporate more elements of Indian architecture and decoration into his work than he cared to admit, all the while insisting on his primary allegiance to the classical tradition and its western heirs, above all Christopher Wren.15
However strongly he rejected Indian architecture, Lutyens found Indian gardens more to his liking. Those of the Taj Mahal, he declared, were “delicious—clear western skies, gorgeous colours and dark glossy trees and the pools and water channels full,” and he added, “We spent a good deal of time with the gardener looking at trees and shrubs and finding out what will and will not do at Delhi.”16 Here at least was an Indian art form he could embrace. Lady Hardinge had fallen in love with the Mughal gardens of Srinagar in Kashmir and wrote Lutyens of her desire for such a garden at the new viceroy’s house, with “terraces to start from the very top of the Ridge and come to the house.” She had arranged to have the Kashmiri gardens carefully photographed for his “edification,” adding, “I can only tell you it was a dream of loveliness.”17 Both she and Lord Hardinge were familiar with Constance Villiers-Stuart’s pioneering work on Mughal gardens, a book intended to influence the planning of New Delhi as much as to make the forgotten treasures of Indian garden craft better known. Back in London, Villiers-Stuart had mobilized the Royal Society of Arts to support an “Indian Garden”—“a Royal Garden of Unity,” as she termed it.18
The stepped terraces fell victim to the shift in site from Ridge to Raisina Hill—the slope was simply too slight—but on other matters Lady Hardinge found a ready listener in Edwin Lutyens. And a knowledgeable one. For over twenty years he had collaborated with Gertrude Jekyll, the influential English writer and designer who “affected the gardening habits of two generations.”19 Lutyens had met Jekyll in 1889 when she was forty-five and already a formidable figure in the garden world and he an unknown, awkward, and largely self-taught architect of twenty. So successful was their partnership that over the next twenty-five years they worked together on more than a hundred projects, perfecting what Jane Brown has referred to as the “peculiarly English art” of creating “dream houses and their even more magical gardens.” Lutyens knew nothing—and cared to know nothing—about horticulture (and never had a garden of his own); he happily left the selection and arrangement of plants to Jekyll. But he was as concerned with the design of the garden as with the architecture that accompanied it and with harmonizing both.20
Perhaps because he was self-conscious about his lack of formal education, more likely because he thought visually rather than verbally (he had an almost infallible visual memory), Lutyens avoided committing his theories to paper or to the lectern. A rare exception comes in some remarks prepared for a meeting of the Architectural Association in 1908: “A garden scheme should have a backbone—a central idea beautifully phrased. Thus the house wall should spring out of a briar bush—with always the best effect, and every wall, path, stone and flower bed has its similar problem and a relative value to the central idea.” If this has strong echoes of Jekyll’s phrasing, it is hardly surprising since she had helped him put his thoughts together the previous weekend.21 Mostly, however, he was an incessant doodler, jotting sketches and notes on any scrap of paper at hand, often flavored with puns—he was an inveterate, not to say compulsive, punster.
Through Jekyll’s connections and then through his own after he married a daughter of Lord Lytton, viceroy of the 1877 durbar, Lutyens became one of the most sought-after architects of the day. For the Edwardians, “‘a Lutyens house with a Jekyll garden’ was . . . the outward symbol of good taste and financial success.”22 At first associated with the “Surrey style” of his home region, before long he was designing and remodeling houses for the well-todo from Cornwall to Northumberland. His work often appeared in the pages of Country Life (for whose editor he designed or renovated several houses), epitomizing the tastes of the “golden afternoon,” the last era in which wealthy clients could afford to commission large country houses and gardens and the staffs to maintain them—Jekyll’s own Munstead Wood, by no means a palatial estate, depended on the labor of seventeen gardeners, and she was a hands-on gardener herself.23
How then did a man known primarily for picturesque villas land the most audacious commission ever for imperial architecture and city planning? Lutyens seems to have bested his rivals through a combination of Lytton family influence, well-connected clients of his own, and a knack for charming highly placed people when it most counted—for example, King George and Lady Hardinge.24 It also helped that he had designed the Central Square of Hampstead Garden Suburb, an early foray into city planning. India itself held little appeal for him, neither its people nor its culture (India “makes one very Tory and pre-Tory feudal,” he confessed to his wife), but it promised the chance to realize ideas and forms that had been dancing in his head in the twenty years since he had drawn a Castle in the Air to amuse his patron, Barbara Webb; all that it needed now was the “dome from St. Paul’s and a Palladian portico”—and a garden worthy of a castle.25
It must have been an enormous relief for Lutyens to turn to the gardens at last during a visit to India in the winter of 1917 after five years of incessant wrangling over almost every detail of the Viceroy’s House and the surrounding capital. The Government of India, he wrote his wife, have “commanded a Mogul garden which means terraces, water ways, sunk courts, high walls, etc. etc. and have at the same time allocated sufficient money to plant a certain area with shrubs and no more. It is too Alice in Wonderlandish for worlds. However it will come in time.”26 Lady Hardinge, the chief inspiration for the garden, had died suddenly in the summer of 1914, leaving him without her sympathetic presence and warm support in his battles with almost everyone. To be sure, the world war had hugely complicated matters, but he was not a man to show much patience with opposing views or with red tape: “When God created the world he started a bureaucracy which he could not control and which Newton called gravity.”27
The garden waited on the house. Then there was a great rush to complete it as the time drew near for Lord and Lady Irwin, the current viceroy and vicereine, to move in. Fortunately Lutyens could count on a topnotch assistant to take charge of the planting. William Robertson Mustoe was a Kewtrained horticulturalist attached to the Punjab administration until seconded to New Delhi for the crucial years 1919–1931, and Lutyens got on very well with him. It is not clear whether Jekyll herself offered any suggestions for the enormous flower borders—she was by now almost blind and unable to stir far from home—but they were planted very much according to her precepts and color harmonies.28 Like Jekyll, Mustoe served as an alter ego, someone who complemented Lutyens’s sense of garden design with a thorough knowledge of plants and who could carry on in his absence.29
Lutyens came out to India almost every winter. In January 1929 he was breakfasting daily with Mustoe. “[He] has done extraordinarily well with the gardens,” Lutyens enthused. “Last winter they were a desert,” strewn with debris. “Now full of roses and beautiful roses. The tanks run and reflect and ripple and my rainbow in the deep fountain has come off—a vivid rainbow and children can find its start.”30 In the butterfly garden, the mignonette perfumed the air. The Irwins came frequently to survey both house and garden, proving to be ideal “clients”: Lord Irwin pronounced the garden “too lovely for words.” The Indians, too, were appreciative, calling the gardens “Gods own Heavens.”31 Then, disaster: at the very end of the month frost killed many of the plants. “Mustoe was in tears. His car wouldn’t start and he couldn’t get to the gardens before sunrise to pour cold water on them to present ice thawing too quick and the Indian Mallis [malis] he found standing around doing nothing.”32
Fortunately, by the time of the official inauguration in February 1931 they had recovered. Emily Lutyens accompanied her husband for the festivities, her first visit to the site of his long labors. During those two decades she had been estranged, living in her own Theosophy-obsessed world as a disciple of Annie Besant. But the attractions of theosophy had finally faded and, if she had never been much interested in her husband’s architecture, she had to recognize at long last the magnitude of his achievement. She was enraptured with the garden: “Though so formal, yet everything has grown up so quickly, and flowers are set in such masses, producing a riot of colour and scents, that, with the fountains playing continually, there is not the least sense of stiffness.”33
When completed, the gardens of the Viceroy’s House covered some fifteen acres, stretching a half-mile from the west loggia of the house to the potting sheds at the farthest end (Fig. 50).34 Its whole configuration could only be seen from west windows of the house (or from the air) because of its raised position above the plain and its surrounding walls. An early drawing had depicted a state garden flanked by privy gardens, but this was abandoned in favor of just the state garden with its strict geometry of paths and watercourses.35 Beyond this was a narrower garden with an enormous stone pergola down the center, a high-walled “purdah garden” that blocked off tennis courts to right and left and led to the circular butterfly garden with its round pool, so that the whole complex ended “in the shape of a ping-pong bat.”36
The state or Mughal garden (sometimes also referred to as the Indian garden) was rectangular, measuring 200 by 175 meters (656 by 574 feet) (see Pl. 23). Two parallel channels ran north and south—in contrast to the single central channel typical of Mughal gardens—intersected by two running east and west from square basins immediately below the house. At the intersections were six fountains consisting of three tiers of red sandstone disks, from the center of which rose hexagonal fountains that sprayed foam to a height of twelve feet, before it fell onto the disks that were perforated so that the water could seep gently from one layer to the next. (Some of these fountains proved recalcitrant or exploded like a geyser when finally coaxed into action.)37 A network of lesser channels, pools, steps, bridges, and raised walkways accentuated the grid pattern of the garden, enclosing plots of lawn and flowerbeds. There were stone planters strategically set along the watercourses. An early photograph shows purple violas in stone planters bordering a pool (Fig. 51).38 Flowerbeds, too, were coped in stone, “profusely planted in the English fashion, so that the flowers, grown to twice their English size,” spilled out over their margins, nicely softening the rigidity of the chessboard patterns of the overall plan.39 In the garden proper, the slope was too gentle for the more dramatic cascades of water Lady Hardinge had loved in Kashmir, but Lutyens took advantage of the high retaining walls to create a twenty-foot waterfall from the North Fort to a basin below.40
Fig. 50. Layout of the Mughal garden, Viceroy’s House, New Delhi
[From A. S. G. Butler, with George Stewart and Christopher Hussey,
The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens, 1950]
Fig. 51. Mughal garden, Viceroy’s House, New Delhi, 1934
[Sir Andrew Buchanan]
Flowers depended on the season; some were massed in low beds, others set out in combinations of varying heights and textures “to create a pyramid of colours.” They were the classics of the English garden: dahlia, poppy, larkspur, verbena, chrysanthemum, Sweet William, cosmos, sweet pea, aster, stock, lupin, petunia, daisy, marigold, carnation, even bulbs such as narcissus, freesia, lily iris, and daffodil. Gaillardia, sunflowers, cosmos, and zinnia braved the harsh heat of summer. Roses—perhaps the largest variety in the world (more than 250)—were the glory of the garden. They bloomed throughout the year, but reached their peak soon after they were pruned in October.41 “I have never seen better roses anywhere in England than those in New Delhi,” declared Lady Beatrix Stanley, vicereine during a brief interregnum in 1934.42 In contrast to the flowers, the garden’s trees, shrubs, and creeping vines were primarily native species or tropical imports. When the garden was first opened for public view, they had not yet had time to mature. Most conspicuous were the evergreens, such as the moulsri, a typically Indian tree which bloomed in May and June, spreading a “mild sweet fragrance throughout the garden.” It was pruned in a mushroom shape. There were two large lawn areas, one adjacent to the building, the other, much larger one in the center of the garden. They were planted in doob grass, originally brought from Belvedere House in Calcutta. It had a coarser texture than the classic English grass and had to be removed once a year before the monsoons: then new top soil was spread and three weeks later a new crop of grass sprouted.43 As Christopher Hussey points out, this “Viceregal lawn” lies on the axis of the dome of the house, enclosed by “jeweled parterres,” and was intended for the garden parties and receptions “which were the social raison d’être of the garden.”44
Most observers were not fooled by the “Mughal” garden, so ardently dreamed of by Lady Hardinge. Robert Byron stated the obvious when he referred to it simply as “the Mogul garden, brightened with English flower beds and borders.” Lord Irwin, the first tenant, thought it the ideal setting for the house, “with the combination of its Oriental design of water and lawns and formal trees with the riot of colour from the best of Western flowers.”45 Closest of all to the mark is the comment that it was “‘Mughal’ as seen by a man famous for the very English gardens he created with Gertrude Jekyll.”46 This was not really surprising considering that the Mughal gardens Lutyens inspected—the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Shalimar Garden in Lahore, and the gardens of the Red Fort and Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi—had all been heavily restored (not to say “Curzonised”) in the English manner (the gardens he much appreciated at Lucknow were post-Mughal in any case). While Lord and Lady Hardinge were familiar with Villiers-Stuart’s work, we can’t be sure Lutyens even looked into it, given his lack of intellectual curiosity about Indian culture generally, to say nothing of the fact that he was not much of a reader.
Nevertheless, he would have found the basic formulae of a Mughal garden congenial precisely because in so many ways they matched his own precepts of garden design. He shared the Mughal passion for order and symmetry, expressed through rigid geometry; he could happily accept a space enclosed in stone, constructed on a pattern of grids around a unifying plan of waterways, with squares of turf, flowers, and trees. As for water as a focal point of gardens, his partner Gertrude Jekyll had written the book on water gardens— quite literally—although she preferred a more natural layout to one employing modules and symmetry, choosing when possible to build her gardens along riverbanks and around ponds. She loved to stock her pools with water lilies (real ones), and with the abundance of new varieties “an important modern pleasure ground is scarcely complete without its lily tank.”47 Lutyens was equally fond of water. On his first visit to Delhi in the spring of 1912 he had gone early to the Red Fort and arranged to have the fountains turned on so that he could observe both sound and sight of cascading water (in the Hayat Baksh?—unfortunately no one mentions just where in the Red Fort this took place).48
The large, tiered disks in Lutyens’s fountains are sometimes referred to as lotus leaves but in fact are modeled not on the dainty lotus but on the giant leaves of the Victoria amazonica water lily, a native of South America.49 The lotus, as Lutyens was surely aware, was a sacred flower to both Buddhist and Hindu, a symbol of creation. The lotus motif was adopted by Muslims in northern India well before it was widely used in Mughal art to symbolize fertility. The fountains of the Taj Mahal take the form of lotus blossoms, lotuses encircle the base of the dome and crown its top, lotus flowers etched in pietra dura adorn its walls. In stylized form the plant was carved into the scalloped edges of the octagonal pool—perhaps the pool had once been full of lotuses themselves.50 Plinth patterns derived from the lotus are common in the Red Fort, and the domes of the Moti Masjid are surmounted by marble lotus petals.51 For good measure, there was the example of Lady Curzon, who had worn a dress of white satin embroidered with lotus leaves for her first “Drawing Room” (a reception for some five hundred ladies)—the “only part of the Indian India that Mary chose to embrace.”52
Lutyens was happy to incorporate the lotus motif elsewhere. The Jaipur column is a prime example, with its imperial orb, lotus flower, and hexagram. The five-petaled lotus flower inlaid in marble in the vestibule of the great Durbar Hall may have been intended to echo the splendid lotus on the floor of the Rang Mahal in the Red Fort.53 (Lutyens was also taken by the peepal, a sacred tree in India, whose leaf he adapted in an intricate pattern for the underside of the chajjas, the projecting stone slabs providing shade for the Viceroy’s House.)54 So, why the sandstone water lilies in the garden rather than lotuses? It may of course have been a statement of imperial hubris—the Victoria amazonica (née Victoria regia) was the pride of British horticulturists and indelibly linked with the Empress of India herself—but Lutyens was not as imperial-minded as many others, including his colleague, Herbert Baker.55 Could it simply be that the irrepressible punster was indulging in a private joke?
Be that as it may, the mantle of the “Mughal” garden sat lightly on Lutyens’s shoulders. He did not feel the need to raise the walks well above the parterres, nor to plant fruit trees for fragrance and produce. The Long or “Purdah” Garden has twelve-foot walls that even a voyeur mounted on an elephant would not have been able to see over, but there is no zenana attached, no harem provided for the viceroy’s ladies, only the flanking tennis courts.56 Everywhere one finds imports from the many gardens he had created with Gertrude Jekyll: terraces, pergolas, oeil de boeuf ovals pierced through stone walls, topiaries, gazebos, herbaceous borders, and lawns.57 At the central intersection of the water channels in the classic Mughal garden there would have been a raised stone platform, the chabutra, with a pavilion or simply a silken tent furnished with carpets and cushions. Here the ruler and his guests could catch the breezes from the water and the fragrances of flower and tree. In Lutyens’s design there was no central intersection, but instead a large lawn between the channels, which Jane Brown has aptly pronounced “a symbolic triumph for the English way of gardening,” as well as “a carpet for the viceregal garden party tent.”58
The quintessential Lutyens/Jekyll touch, however, was the sunken butterfly garden at its farthest end. It was a “secret garden,” a private retreat, entered through an iron gate in the sandstone wall, down sets of stone steps to a large round pool set in banks of flowers enclosed within a round wall. Here are the mignonettes and roses, jasmines and verbenas—everything to delight the butterfly. Ten years earlier he had designed just such a garden for Lady Sackville, filling it only with butterfly-luring blossoms, so that from a distance the shimmer of their wings looked “like brilliant patches of flowers.”59
Behind the scenes, another world existed to care for the garden. It required a staff of 418, fifty of whom were assigned solely to scaring off predatory birds (unlike the resident peacocks which ranged freely), and another twenty to flower arrangement. Hidden from general view, too, was a sixteen-acre “utility garden.” It provided cut flowers for the palace, vegetables and fruit in season for the kitchen, and rosebushes to replace three thousand annually. The garden staff was only part of the more than two thousand needed to run the miniature city that was the Viceroy’s Palace and for whom quarters were discreetly tucked away at the northwest corner of the compound.60
Lutyens and Mustoe counted on the passage of time to bring their garden to maturity. What they hadn’t reckoned with were the depredations of Lady Willingdon, successor to the agreeable Lady Irwin as vicereine. Lady Willingdon fancied herself a gifted decorator and made numerous “improvements” to house and garden without consulting Lutyens or anyone else. She redid many of the rooms in her favorite shade of mauve, provoking Lutyens to refer to her as “the mauvey sujet”—a more appropriate sobriquet than he realized, since she left a trail of mauve not only through the Viceroy’s House but across the entire subcontinent. She also hung a huge chandelier in the Durbar Hall, turned the stone elephants at the gates into garden gnomes, and cut down a number of gum trees, replacing them with cypresses. Lutyens prevailed upon Queen Mary to protest, but to no avail. When the Willingdons came home on leave, Lutyens confronted her in person. “I told her that if she possessed the Parthenon she would add bay windows to it. She said she did not like the Parthenon.” Fortunately, the next viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, invited Lutyens to undo the damage. Accompanied by a stenographer and the faithful Mustoe, Lutyens took an inventory of Lady Willingdon’s “vagarious vagaries” with an eye to correcting them. His letters to his wife overflow with diatribes against “that Willingdon Bitch.” In one he even drew a design of a fountain to commemorate her reign: a very vulgar pair of buttocks with legs sticking up in the air and water spurting out of its private parts. He noted with malicious pleasure that his drawing enjoyed so much success that he made a number of copies. The lions were returned to their perches in the forecourt, the “silly cypresses” uprooted, and the garden restored to its earlier state.61
The renowned traveler Freya Stark was a guest in the Viceroy’s House toward the end of World War II. The viceroy was away and had arranged for the gardens to be open to the public in February and March (as they still are), at the peak of their winter bloom. “It was extraordinary how alive and agreeable it made them,” she wrote. “There is no point in having pomp unless there is a crowd to enjoy it.”62 Pomp indeed.
The Green City
Christopher Wren, the builder of Hampton Court for William III, was, in Jane Brown’s words, “the last compleat architect in terms of masterminding the whole concept, the total visual effect of house and grounds as much as construction details.” But even Wren was thwarted in his bid to build London anew after the Great Fire of 1666. Lutyens accomplished what was denied his “spiritual mentor,” not only building a great palace and garden but also laying out a new city. He oversaw “every aspect of the construction, from the shape of the doorknobs in the Viceroy’s palace to the types of flowers suitable for planting in the roundabouts.”63 This was the commission he had longed for all his life, but he could hardly have imagined in the early days of 1912 that it would consume so much of his life and bring as much disappointment as success. “In a trite sense, Delhi proved a perfect example of the old warning: be careful what you wish for, for it might come true.”64 During an exasperating argument about both design and money, he declared that the new city should be called “Bedlampore”: “It is like composing an opera when they leave out the fiddles and all but one wind instrument, and leave you a banjo with one string.”65
The durbars had provided a rehearsal for city planning. Hardly had the dust settled from the festivities of December 1911 when the entire durbar area north and west of the city was transformed into a temporary capital to which flocked thousands of administrative emigrants from Calcutta. They were housed in bungalows or substantial well-furnished tents, set in beautiful gardens. So impressed was the Delhi Planning Committee with their enthusiastic gardening that its final report declared, “If in future the inhabitants in the new capital area pay as much attention to their gardens as many of the inhabitants have during the period of construction, the results should be a gorgeous blaze of colour and a riot of bloom.”66 The Circuit House, built originally for Curzon’s use at the 1903 durbar, served as the interim residence for the viceroy until the palace was ready for occupancy in 1929 and could boast an already well-established garden. Rechristened Viceregal Lodge, it was a “typical Indian bungalow of the grander sort writ large.” Lady Reading, the viceroy’s wife, wrote home in wonder about the garden, intentionally or unintentionally repeating a phrase from the report: “Holly hocks much taller than I am, the herbaceous border a blaze of colour and all for Christmas!”67
To the south in what had once been the small village of Raisina, the imperial capital was gradually—very gradually—taking shape. Unlike Wren, Lutyens and his fellow planners were not faced with a densely populated warren of narrow streets and impossibly complex property claims. It was mostly agricultural land, the price was low, and there were no vocal business interests to resist the government’s appropriation of ten square miles for the new city and fifteen for the cantonment, an amount attacked as extravagant at the time.68 The 440-foot-wide avenue leading from the Viceroy’s House to the War Memorial and the statue of King George was the rigid spine of the city (see Pl. 24). Bordered by a series of rectangular lawns and pools of water, it was intended as a purely ceremonial way, not as a residential or a commercial thoroughfare. Unlike Chandni Chowk in Shahjahanabad, the “bazaar” at Connaught Place was offset at some distance to the north.
Kingsway, later rechristened Raj Path, was the embodiment of dominion. The palace stood at its apex, with the Secretariats flanking the Great Court. Off to one side as something of an afterthought was the circular Council House for the legislative chambers. Lutyens originally designed four cultural buildings appropriate for the avenue, but only the India Record Office was actually built. The other structures lining the way between the Secretariats and the Arch are guest houses for members of parliament. Of course the Indian princes wondered where they fit into the picture. The answer was: peripherally. The most important, such as Hyderabad and Baroda, were given sites on Princes Park, around the statue of King George, others were distanced according to their place in the pecking order.69
Most of the area extending to the north and south of Kingsway was set aside for the residences of officials, although some staff had houses on the vast viceregal estate itself. They were housed by rank and race. Thus bungalows of junior European officials (“thin white”) stood on higher ground above junior Indians (“thin black”), with houses of senior officers (“rich/fat white”) still higher. Even individual roads were segregated by rank, so that those in the know registered exactly the grade of the residents in the bureaucratic pyramid.70 Lutyens and his colleagues built more than five hundred bungalows, each set in a spacious lawn (how spacious, of course, depending on one’s status).71
With so much land at his disposal, not only could Lutyens mete out residences to each according to his station, he could also realize his own vision of the garden city. Both Hardinge and Herbert Baker claim that at the same time plans were made for the new capital, they were also made for the improvement of the old city: remedying the defective sanitation system, laying out gardens and lawns, repairing roads, and beautifying the surroundings of famous monuments such as the tombs of Humayun, Safdar Jung, and the Lodi emperors, along with “many smaller tombs and old gardens with their baradaris,” which “we were able to embrace in our plans for the larger city; and by restoration and care of their gardens, groves, and fountains, as far as the limitations of water and cost would allow, to bring back some of their former glory.”72 Foremost among these sites was Lady Willingdon Park, named for Lutyens’s nemesis, which incorporated the Lodi Tombs. After independence it was renamed Lodi Garden.73
Nevertheless, the new city was built entirely separate, indeed, insulated, from the old, an echo of the White Towns and Black Towns of the early presidency cities.74 A glance at photographs from the 1930s to the present— and even more graphically a satellite view via Google Earth—makes vividly clear not only the contours of the imperial city but also how it contrasts with Old Delhi: low housing density, wide streets, and, above all, trees (Fig. 52). Kingsway was a vast park, laid out with reflecting pools in the Great Place filled to the brim; broad canals stretching the length of the avenue; riding paths reminiscent of Hyde Park; trees providing shade for the tracts of greensward.75 The European quarter, stretching from Connaught Place in the north to Safdar Jung’s tomb in the south, “presents the aspect of a forest,” as Robert Byron wrote already in 1931. “Each house is set in a compound of two to three acres, whose trees have matured in ten years and will become enormous in twenty.”76
Lutyens and Mustoe oversaw the selection of trees for the major avenues with the same care bestowed upon the viceroy’s gardens, but probably unaware that tree-planting, imperial or otherwise, had a venerable history: “Plant a tree, dig a well, write a book, and go to Heaven,” ran the folk adage.77 European travelers in Mughal India remarked on the trees that lined the major routes leading from Agra and Delhi. The road from Agra to Lahore, noted Roe, was planted on both sides with trees “like a delicate walke.”78 They do not mention the types of trees chosen, but Jean-Baptiste Tavernier comments that not all survived. In fact, it was not easy to find species adapted to the climate of northern India, trees that could provide maximum shade but also adapt to Delhi’s extremes of temperature, the dust, and the “loo,” the hot, dry winds that blew from the deserts of Rajasthan. A nursery was created at the Talkatora Gardens, once a small Mughal garden but in a tumbled-down state until Mustoe took charge. Here he experimented with various trees, and tried them out in gardens of larger government houses before planting a whole avenue. Walter George, an architect and landscape designer who worked closely with Mustoe, has left a fascinating account of how avenues, buildings, and trees were designed together as much as possible—and the fiascos that resulted when they weren’t. Inevitably, there were many frustrations. For one thing, the planters could not get the engineers to decide how far apart to place street lights. For another, allowances had to be made for roundabouts, most of which had been determined by then, but also for the gates of individual plots, which had not.
Fig. 52. Aerial view of New Delhi
[Center for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University]
When they began their work, New Delhi had no unfiltered water supply. Mustoe had to reopen old wells that had been filled in, using bullock carts and bhistis (water carriers) to transport the water to the trees. Next he had to devise a system of six-foot-long taper pipes, three of them sunk around each tree, so that the water would reach all the way down to the roots; watering on the surface alone would cause the roots to turn upward. He also had to take into account that fill had been used in many places and that this would be apt to settle. His solution was to observe plots through at least one monsoon season, preferably two, before planting any trees, to see how much settling occurred. “In this manner,” George explains, “road by road, the tree-planting of New Delhi was done, beginning in the cold weather of 1919/20, and was mainly completed by the cold weather of 1924/25, except for certain roads which had not yet been formed, because the area was not free.”79
In the end only eight kinds of trees were chosen for the main thoroughfares; none was native to Delhi except for the amaltas planted later along Akbar Road. Almost entirely missing were many North Indian favorites such as mangoes and shisham.80 Perhaps the most unusual, and controversial, aspect of New Delhi’s tree planting was the decision to plant a single species per avenue. For the Processional Way, the planners’ preferred term for Kingsway, Lutyens wanted the biggest tree available to match its monumental scale. The imli or tamarind was the initial choice but was turned down in the end in favor of the jamun or its close relative, the rai jamun.81 It is a tall spreading tree that takes about eighty years to reach full maturity and produces small fruit. Tamarind trees, with an expected lifespan of five hundred years, were planted along Akbar Road, although their small leaves did not provide much shade; other favored trees were the neem, ficus, peepal, and arjun.
George defended the practice of using a single type tree along Kingsway against critics who charged that it was monotonous:
If the intention is to create the impression of spaciousness, or unlimited space, and of order within that space, then such a scheme as this will produce it as no other will. In my opinion, and in that of other Horticulturalists, this is a most masterly piece of planting. From any point in the area, the eye is free to range to infinity, and is not confined between long rows of trees; everywhere, the eye sees groups of trees, with specimen trees standing free, showing their full shapes, but still there remains an indefinable feeling of order, although the order cannot be identified; the effect produced is of freedom within order, the highest possible achievement in design, comparable with Shakespeare’s blank verse or even with the freedom within order which is the secret of the universe.
Later he adamantly opposed proposals to increase plantings—maybe even add peach trees—along the Processional Way: “If the main characteristic of New Delhi, which is spaciousness, is to be preserved, then ‘hands off.’” Further encroachment of any sort, he warned with perhaps some exaggeration, and “the finest street in Asia” would turn into another Chandni Chowk, “a narrow crowded street confined by slums.82
George did acknowledge that elsewhere the roadside trees were sometimes a bit too uniform, allowing that it would have been nice to have more variety but that “what was known and available had to be planted.”83 As it was, some of the species did not thrive or grew so thickly that they blocked views of Safdar Jung’s tomb or the radial approaches to the Secretariats. The problem was compounded by the unchecked planting and rampant growth of shrubberies, which in time contended all too successfully with the roadside trees, hiding the houses behind them and in the end making all neighborhoods look so much alike that the stranger was hard put to it to find his way.
Public gardens compensated for the lack of variety in tree planting along the avenues. In more sheltered locations it was possible to grow trees not suitable for exposed spaces. Thus, at the center of Connaught Place’s concentric circles of shops a large lawn was laid out with a fountain in the middle and an array of trees, many of them with brilliant blossoms: flamboyants, gulmohurs, ashupals, and maruls, as well as the ubiquitous jamun.84 There were lawns and flowerbeds in the Viceroy’s Court, in the Great Court between the two Secretariats and in their north and south approaches; gardens within the circular Council Hall; and gardens around the War Memorial. Roundabouts often served as mini-parks, sometimes protecting historic monuments.85 An awed visitor described the imperial capital as he found it during the monsoon season in 1937: “The layout is superb. . . . Its beautiful roads lined with trees from all parts of India, its long vistas of lights at evening, down roads that seem never ending—its velvety lawns and wealth of gorgeous flowers all combine to makes a memory picture and must be seen to be believed.”86
Official and princely houses matched the public display. Residents added flowers and shrubs and trees to their bungalow sites with just the zeal anticipated by the Planning Committee’s report. The Chief Engineer for Imperial Delhi, Teja Singh Malik, included in his spacious garden examples of each of the trees chosen by Mustoe and Lutyens for the city’s avenues, as well as lawn and flowers and potted plants.87 During the Second World War, a nurse billeted with a family on Akbar Road described the beautiful garden where she often chose to sleep: “I enjoyed those long still nights in the garden with the scent from the flowers—nicotine, stocks, flowering frangipani—perfuming the air.” Like Hindu and Mughal gardens of old, it had evidently been planted for both day and night. In the loveliness of the moonlight, white flowers were dazzling and all other colors whitened.88
Mustoe’s agenda also embraced the afforestation of the Ridge. In 1911–12 there were no trees on the Ridge, only scrub; the rest was bare rock. Lutyens had it all declared a Forest Area, protected against any cutting without permission, and Mustoe set to work finding trees that could withstand the harsh conditions. He at last settled on Mexican Morn as more drought resistant than any Indian species. Once this became established, other species could be planted. By 1939 virtually the entire Ridge had been planted.89
“A Majestic Garden”
“Sifting the layers of memory,” Christopher Hussey observes, “gardens form the connecting background rather than the buildings in [Edwin Lutyens’s life]; the lovely sequence from Miss Jekyll’s at Munstead Wood to the enameled carpets of Delhi, gardens of which the geometry left nothing to chance yet the forms and colours of nature were given their freedom, and the shapes of trees seen to greater advantage for their harmonized surroundings.” These elements, he adds, were Lutyens’s “first love . . . and remained a prime inspiration of his creative invention.” Delhi itself might be seen as a “majestic garden,” presaging the aging architect’s vision of a new London rising from the ashes of the Blitz in World War II.90
It may seem strange to characterize thus the man who created the world’s greatest imperial capital. Although the early Surrey houses of the Lutyens/ Jekyll partnership have an intimate and domestic atmosphere that is remote from the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, certain aesthetic principles remained constant threads in his work. Most importantly, the triad of house, garden, and site form an organic whole. Ideally, the site inspires the initial concept, then, “gardens spring from the doors and windows of the house”—from the rear, since the front was designed primarily as an introduction to the house. Then both gradually revealed themselves, with elements of architecture such as pergolas reappearing in the garden. Brown writes of “that magic point where the house met the garden, and the beguiling could begin. In stepping on to the terrace, the multi-dimensional, sensual world of the garden began to assert its power.”91
Indeed, the terrace was a central feature in Lutyens’s gardens. Not only did it “settle” a house into its site, but it also provided just the right venue for tea, as indispensable a convention in India as in Surrey.92 In the Viceroy’s House, one steps out from the West Loggia onto the grassy terrace with a paved walk down the center leading to an intimate patio, the terrace serving as prelude to the formal vastness of the state garden. In practice, the western exposure must have limited al fresco tea parties to the winter months; at other times, tea could be taken in the West Loggia, the great verandah designed to provide the transition from house to garden. Other smaller loggias within the palace opened onto interior courts, and there were views of the Mughal Garden from the State Dining Room and State Ballroom, but the West Loggia was the most important, occupying the center of the west or garden front. With an enormous sixty-five-foot-long barrel vault ceiling, it faced the garden through a row of coupled columns; between them fountain basins were set in the sills. Intended as the intersection of house and garden, it is in Hussey’s view “the most enchanted of all these architectural lungs that interpenetrate the palace.”93
It is tempting to compare the loggia with Mughal pavilions that serve much the same purpose as zones of transition. Perhaps because the nomadic Mughals began with gardens and temporary structures, only gradually evolving toward stone pavilions, the buildings of the Red Fort have a lightness and openness entirely lacking in the loggias of the Viceroy’s House—Anisha Mukherji aptly refers to the former as “flexible stone tents.” The Red Fort is dominated by one-story pavilions, connected to each other by colonnades and gardens, rather than by a single freestanding palace (see Pl. 25). Formerly, awnings and canopies extended the pavilions into the garden, enfolding its fountains and runnels of water and providing coolness and shade in the Delhi heat. Screens and water in turn projected shifting patterns and reflections which made external space function virtually like a building. The result was permeability between interior and exterior, an interpenetration of house and garden, so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. All of which contrasts with western concepts of the relationship between a palace and its gardens, where the boundary between outside and inside is “more definite and acute” even when views and openings are carefully calculated.94 As we have seen, Shah Jahan enhanced this effect by carrying the garden right into the buildings of the fort: decorating floors and walls with inlaid floral patterns. Lady Willingdon, for her part, accentuated the westernness of the Viceroy’s House by glazing the loggias.95
Capitals of Empire
The imperial impulse to build monumental capitals has a long history. What seems surprising, indeed, is that Mughal and Briton came to it so late in India. Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay just grew, with little coherent planning, as did most other colonial cities.96 Bangalore was an exception, being both a “garden city” and, to a large extent, a planned city.97 Of Mughal emperors, Babur and Jahangir were far more interested in creating gardens, for both aesthetic and political reasons. True, Akbar had expressed his catholic tastes in architecture and religion in his short-lived capital of Fatehpur Sikri, but it was left for his grandson Shah Jahan to implement an actual vision of urbanism in the service of court life and imperial spectacle. Sylvia Crowe characterizes the city of Shahjahanabad as “magnificent in scale, highly sophisticated in character, and executed with a wholly imperial disregard of cost.”98 The same might be said of New Delhi, although to Lutyens’s frustration the cost could not be wholly disregarded. Shahjahanabad drew on an architectural vocabulary reaching back to Cyrus’s garden at Pasargadae (sixth century b.c.e.), refined in Persia, and stamped with the Mughals’ own fusion of Muslim and Hindu elements.99 Shah Jahan was looking over his shoulder at Shah Abbas’s capital of Isfahan, just as Lutyens could not ignore Washington. Both Shahjahanabad and New Delhi are laid out according to rigid patterns of geometry and conceived of as new creations in the landscape rather than reconstructions of older centers, although New Delhi nods in passing to the remnants of earlier cities.
In keeping with their roots in the Western classical tradition, however, the planners of New Delhi chose an acropolis-like height, even if raisina Hill is not as lofty as they might have wished. This was intended to guarantee that it would be the focal point of city planning and that it would not be blocked or overshadowed by any neighboring structure. In Shahjahanabad, it is the Jama Masjid that rises above the surrounding city, tangential to the major thoroughfare, the Chandni Chowk, which leads to the Red Fort. The riverfront location of the fort provides not only a modicum of protection but also ensures that nothing can rise behind it to detract from its preeminence. Equally important, it places the fort squarely in the Mughal tradition of the riverfront garden.
But there are other major differences between the cities that relate especially to the disposition of open spaces and gardens. Shah Jahan began planning for his new city by acquiring large tracts of mainly agricultural land around the future fort. He then gave gifts of land as rewards to his favorites, keeping some of it as royal properties. Much of it was planted in gardens and orchards that were exempt from taxation, effectively creating a green belt around the built areas. To provide water for irrigation, he supervised the construction of a vast network of canals, repairing and extending the skeleton already in place. Once the fort was completed, princes and amirs built great houses with their walled gardens, and larger gardens were added throughout the city. Most of these gardens, like the gardens within the Red Fort, were private, but they were opened at certain times of the year. There were no suburbs as such, but rather large royal and aristocratic preserves, gardens and hunting lodges outside the city walls.
Within the city, bazaars, workshops, mosques, and private residences coexisted cheek-by-jowl. There was no real segregation between rich and poor. The luxurious houses of the rich could be found in virtually all parts of the city, interspersed with the mud and thatch houses of the poor. François Bernier saw both great opulence and great squalor when he visited in 1638. Those who were neither very rich nor very poor lived in havelis that tightly lined the narrow lanes leading to the wider streets of the bazaars. Typically, the upper stories of these houses projected out over the street, almost meeting their neighbors across the way and providing welcome shade and protection from rain. Invisible from the street, verandahs opened onto interior courtyards usually planted with trees, creating what one writer has termed “an introverted Garden City.”100
Contrast this pattern of high-density urbanism with the low density of New Delhi, where all the streets were wide, not only the vast, parklike main thoroughfares. Reflecting British ambivalence toward “trade,” commerce was banished to Connaught Place, and industry and manufacturing were absent altogether. There was no provision for the poor save for the army of servants attached to the Viceroy’s House. It was ostentatiously a city of administrators, living in self-contained residential “colonies” that were virtual bowers of greenery. One-story villas were detached from each other and set well back from the street in the midst of a lawn with garden behind. Roads were clean and quiet, conspicuous more for automobile than pedestrian traffic. Once Mustoe’s trees had matured, they helped to compensate for the heat-absorbing expanses of black asphalt. Nowadays many residents of New Delhi live in flats rather than bungalows, but as Sunand Prasad observes, the design of the flats “subscribes to the same values as the villas,” that is, a preoccupation with “space, light and greenery and display.” They differ from the older havelis in their freestanding, outward orientation—curiously public in contrast to the private, inward orientation of Mughal urban architecture.101
One of the main critiques leveled against New Delhi as conceived and executed by Lutyens and Baker and their associates was that it was not really a city at all but a glorified cantonment, with its civil and military “lines,” its government house, and its clubs, set apart, as cantonments always had been, from India itself. Yes, its avenues were verdant oases in the best tradition of the “garden city,” but they were also devoid of street life because there was little to attract it. Such was the lack of urban vitality that “at night dogs come out of the houses to sleep in the streets where they are guaranteed an undisturbed peace.” Another critic refers to the “Crusoe-like individualism of the scattered and formless bungalow compounds.” Kingsway might be grand for ceremonial pomp and circumstance, but it led nowhere anyone wanted to go.102 At best, it was very much like England on a Sunday, with families picnicking on the greensward while their children vied with the monkeys for the fruit of the jamun trees, walkers bestrode the footpaths, or equestrians cantered on the bridal trails.
Even Patwant Singh, who had such happy memories of growing up in 1930s New Delhi (his family was very much involved in the construction of the city), acknowledged that it lacked the “pulsating life of a typical Indian city with its kuchhas, katras, and mohallas (traditional neighbourhoods and meeting places); its galis and havelis (narrow lanes and old houses with their interior courtyards); its tantalizing temptations and spaces teeming with life, leavened with history and offering continuity as well as emotional and nostalgic fulfillment.” For this, one had to go to Chandni Chowk in the old city: “so chaotic, so crowded, so colorful, so demented, so full of life and excitement and so noisy, so marvelously cacophonous—the very antithesis of the Raj Path,” in the words of the architectural critic Peter Blake. “Nobody had designed it, and yet it was the only place really worth being in. . . . It was what urban life was all about.”103
For all their differences Lutyens and Shah Jahan found common ground in their love of imposing symmetry and geometric patterns on the landscape, and in treating house and garden as one. Hussey saw the Mughal Garden in the Viceroy’s House as a “wonderful affirmation of the power of intellect over nature, in this case an arid, treeless, rocky, and inhospitable nature.”104 Here Lutyens created a mosaic of plants, trees, water, walkways, and lawn that Babur might have recognized when he set out to tame the disordered and dusty wastes of Hindustan. But gardens were not mere “pleasaunces.” They also encoded notions of what it meant to be civilized and justified the rule of one people over another. Shah Jahan was an imperialist to the marrow, giving the Mughal ideology of “garden imperialism” its most extreme expression. His palace was a garden wherein he threw down the gauntlet to Spring itself, perhaps even to Paradise.
Lutyens, on the contrary, was an indifferent imperialist, unlike his erstwhile partner, Herbert Baker. He was first and foremost a folly builder—and in Nikolaus Pevsner’s view the Viceroy’s House “beats any other folly in the world.” Only to the extent that his ideas of gardens and their place in domestic and public space distilled a very English synthesis of tradition, and to the extent that he believed this tradition could and should be imposed on subject peoples, could he be called an imperialist. As Robert Byron observed, “If the Viceroy steps out to pick a rose, he can look up to find the very horizon in deferential alignment with himself. Such is a proper setting for a ruler.” “But,” he adds, “the architect has given his heart to the pansies as well.”105 If, in the end, Lutyens did incorporate elements of indigenous architecture and garden design—Ridley refers to his style of Indian motifs within the framework of western classicism as a variant on “Hobson-Jobson” (the Anglo-Indian argot)—he was drawn as much to Buddhist architectural forms as Islamic or Hindu, although Buddhism had long since disappeared from India. But his criteria were above all aesthetic, not political. He was in fact supremely apolitical all his life. Nevertheless, as work on the capital dragged on through the 1920s, even he could not escape doubts about the longevity of the British imperium in the face of escalating nationalism.106
The creation of New Delhi was without question a monumental achievement. The architectural critic Peter Blake labeled it a “vast, overwhelming, mindboggling statement about who was who and what was what—a staggering demonstration of British imperial power.”107 And a staggering demonstration of cultural hubris as well in imposing the alien aesthetics of the English garden city on India, from the majestic Kingsway, essentially sterile for all its trees and greenswards and canals, to the “gigantism” of the Viceroy’s House and garden, to the myriad bungalows on their oversized plots of lawn. By the time New Delhi was formally inaugurated in 1931, the triumphalism of December 1911 already seemed the echo of a distant age. Sixteen years later the era of the Raj would end and New Delhi would join the roll call of earlier imperial capitals that had risen and fallen in India.