3 - They, the People

Summary

Meet together if ye will, but do not meet in a mob.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, An Address to the Irish People

On the ruins of a hundred empires,

They go on working.

—Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Ora Kaj Kore’ (They Go On Working)

These down-trodden classes are tired of being governed. They are impatient to govern themselves.

—B. R. Ambedkar, Constituent Assembly Debates, 25 November 1949

The British Empire in India had begun with the conquest of Bengal, and Calcutta was its administrative and economic centre for a century and a half. The empire's largest metropolis, it was a space of unavoidable entanglements of the colonial rulers with Indian society. With the rise of anticolonial politics at the turn of the century, that proximity became a source of anxiety. In 1912, faced with growing political unrest and revolutionary terrorist activities in Calcutta, the British government of India decided to shift the capital to the city of Delhi, the former seat of power of the Mughals. Along with a symbolic continuity with the last Indian sovereign, Delhi offered empty land suitably distant from the settlements that remained from the Mughal era. In that space, separated from the increasingly raucous natives, a new imperial city could be built. The task of planning and building that city was given to the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker. The buildings were monuments in the neoclassical style – the quintessential imperial architectural form, their ‘assertive magnificence’ and geometric clarity triumphantly announcing their superiority and separation from the society on which they were imposed. Around these buildings, tree-lined blocks were laid out following Beaux-Arts formalism. They were populated by spacious bungalows, the most archetypical of colonial houses designed specifically to provide the inhabiting officer with the necessary distance from the masses outside. The centrepiece of this design was the grand palace for the viceroy. A contemporary imperial writer wrote, approvingly, that the architecture was ‘a shout of the imperial suggestion … an offence to democracy, a slap in the face of the modern average man’. To the biographer of Lutyens, writing soon after India's independence, ‘New’ Delhi was ‘the last splendid assertion of European humanism, before the engulfing of its ideals in racial and ideological confusion’.