With the assaults of 1857, another metropolis, it seemed, had joined the perennial fate of cities built at Delhi. And in the years thereafter, Delhi became an image for European travellers of the impermanence and folly of human ambition. In 1912, an Italian poet landed there in search of heat to ease his tuberculosis. Journeying southwards from Shahjahanabad across the plain that led to the Qutub Minar, he witnessed a:
… transition from the living city to the city of the dead. Finally there are no more houses inhabited by humans; those populated by monkeys have begun… The ruins extend into infinity; the entire steppe, as far as the eye can see and beyond, is the vast cemetery of a city destroyed and rebuilt ten times over in the space of four thousand years… Here, in this desert of rubbish, the reigning chaos of neglect and oblivion is such that the researcher must have the giddy sensation of being hurled five hundred, a thousand, thirty thousand years back into the abyss of time: from the final Islamic splendour of the Great Moghol to the dark Brahminism of the imposing early Jain and Pali structures, in the dim night of the Vedic origins…
I find native and European scholars on the job: archaeologists, experts, architects making models and taking measurements. England is readying for a colossal undertaking: breaking into the bone cave these dead cities are immured within, restoring the ruins, and reordering them decorously in the light of day. A worthy undertaking, yet one I doubt will be favourable to the poetry of these memories. I do indeed thank heaven I am able to visit them today in their state of desolate neglect.20
But the poet viewed these goings-on through a tuberculose haze. The “colossal undertaking” for which England was readying was not one of restoration. Their project, like so many Delhi rulers before them, was to level and build again. From that year onwards, the great majority of these “unending ruins” was razed and the next ‘New Delhi’ spread out, like a fresh table cloth over the remains of yesterday’s dinner, on top.
The declaration by King George V that the capital of British India would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi had come in 1911. Calcutta had become a problematic centre for the British. Educated Bengalis, increasingly dismayed by their political dispossession, had made the British capital also the principal laboratory of anti-imperial thought. Gauche attempts to control Bengali unrest through policies of ‘divide and rule’ had backfired. The British decided to run elsewhere, and Delhi was the obvious choice. In a letter of 1911, the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, wrote:
Delhi is still a name to conjure with. It is intimately associated in the minds of Hindus with sacred legends which go back even beyond the dawn of history… The Purana Kila still marks the site of the city which they founded and called Indraprastha, barely three miles from the south gate of the modern city of Delhi. To the Mahommedans it would be a source of unbounded gratification to see the ancient capital of the Moguls restored to its proud position as the seat of Empire. Throughout India, as far south as the Mahommedan conquest extended, every walled town has its ‘Delhi gate’… The change would strike the imagination of the people of India as nothing else could do, and would send a wave of enthusiasm throughout the country, and would be accepted by all as the assertion of an unfaltering determination to maintain British rule in India. It would be hailed with joy by the Ruling Chiefs and the races of Northern India, and would be warmly welcomed by the vast majority of Indians throughout the continent.21
But despite these appeals to Delhi’s glorious past, the British were determined to build there a city that would negate everything it had previously been. The imperialists would design a city so geometrically European that it would defeat, with its very layout, the benighted orientalism of all its past and set the stage for a new, enlightened future.
In the British city there would be none of those narrow streets with which Shahjahanabad — and numberless other places with a similar climate, from Toledo to Venice to Baghdad — had prevented direct sun from reaching pedestrians. Such tiny lanes, with their unpredictable twists and windowless walls, filled Englishmen with unease. British urban theory was still governed by nineteenth-century ‘miasmic’ myths of pathology, which held that diseases arose out of bad or stale air, and, from the British perspective, Shahjahanabad was a breeding ground, not only for the insidious spells and complots of the oriental, whom white men would never be able to pursue through such winding alleys, but also for foul vapours, madness and disease. The British city would be conceived to attract light and air to disperse the miasma: the architect, Edwin Lutyens, was a lover of the English countryside and took his inspiration from the theories of Ebenezer Howard, whose book propounding the material and spiritual advantages of garden cities was just then generating an intellectual movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Lutyens determined that Delhi would be a combination of city and countryside, like Howard’s utopia: buildings would be sparse, low, and separated by expansive gardens; wide roads and parks would keep the city fresh and well ventilated; a large lake, formed by damming the Yamuna, would give city dwellers access to water and open skies (though this part of the plan was never realised). All in all, a reversaclass="underline" where Shahjahanabad’s streets were narrow and labyrinthine, New Delhi would have vast, geometrical avenues; where commerce in the old city took place in a profusion of packed bazaars, it would be confined in the new to a pillared circle, eventually named Connaught Circus. Where Shahjahanabad was a city, it could be said, New Delhi was a bureaucratic village — for though it would contain administrative buildings of stupendous size and grandeur, its dispersed, pastoral layout, whose open spaces were emptily monumental, left few places for any kind of urban bustle. There was almost no provision in the plan for venues of pleasure and congregation, nor for merchants and their trades, nor for housing for the poor — all of which had been conspicuous features of the old city.
Like previous building projects on this left bank of the Yamuna river, New Delhi was a heroic enterprise. Thirty thousand workers levelled the land with pickaxes and explosives, while trains brought continual shipments of stone and steel on purpose-built railway lines. Dust and noise erupted in choking clouds from the twenty-two-acre masonry yard where stone was sawn and chiselled into shape, while smoke poured out from the dozens of kilns where the bricks were fired. From the Italian poet’s “vast cemetery” emerged the sketch of a city, at the centre of which sprawled an implausibly vast hexagonal plaza from whose points diverged six boulevards of astonishing breadth towards the ancient cities of Delhi. Observers must have had a sense of folly, for while the first levels of the buildings gave proof of stupefying scale and bewildering style, the city itself remained utterly conceptual, without inhabitants or culture. It was as radical as new beginnings could be: it was not at all certain how, or even if, it could work. When the First World War drained the enterprise of money and energy there were many calls, in fact, for its abandonment; but still the work pressed on, and the new capital of British India was finished within two decades.
It was a city of surprisingly graceful buildings — far more so than those built in London at the same time — and it recalled, quite self-consciously, the ethereal splendour of Athens and Washington, DC. As it came to life, the alien city, whose sapling-lined avenues petered out into the dusty brush, also introduced to this place an entirely unaccustomed ethos.
In order to turn their majestic emptiness into a real city, the British needed people to live in it, which few wished to do. Most of those managing the building project, British and Indian, lodged their families in the old city, or just outside its walls in Civil Lines, where there was commerce, social life and entertainment. In order to get these people — the suppliers of labour, stone, furniture, alcohol, food, and all the rest — to move into the new city, the administrators offered them large plots of land at a greatly discounted rate. So the contractors came. They snapped up sites in the centre of the city for their own mansions, and also bought up large areas of city land as investments. Rich already from the money they had made, by fair means and foul, during Delhi’s construction, the estates they now owned in the centre of what was to become a major capital city guaranteed their families wealth and prestige for a century to come. These contractors, in fact, became Delhi’s new aristocracy.