Just Like That | Lutyens’ Delhi: Racist legacy behind the city’s elite address

THose down who unrecorded in sir edwin landseer luytens’ new delhi weigh themselves privileged, and in many respects they are—wide, tree-lined roads, better-assured amenities, low population density and an enviable location. Yet few may realise that the area they take pride in is named after one of the most racist men of his time, a figure who held absolute contempt for Indians and made no attempt to hide it.In 1985, the publishing house Collins in London brought out a book, The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Lady Emily, an unabashed and incontrovertible record of what Lutyens thought of Indians and India.Nothing about India impressed Lutyens—not the architecture, not the philosophy, not its culture, not its topography, and certainly not the colour of its people.On arrival in 1912, during a journey from Delhi to Bombay, he had this to record: ‘Some fat blacks (had) occupied the only lady’s carriage—and you mustn’t occupy a carriage they have used’. At Daly College in Indore, he described the students as ‘dear little nigger chaps’. In Benares, while cruising down the Ganga, he primarily noticed ‘every sort of black body doing every sort of thing’. About the people of Madras he wrote: ‘But oh the people—the scallywags. Awful faces, to me degenerate, very dark, very naked, and awful habits of hair dressing’. Back in Delhi at a state ball where Indian royalty was present, he observed that the Indian rajas didn’t dance, ‘which is a pity, but the only possible solution to the horror of seeing a black man embrace a white woman’.The ‘natives’, he wrote, ‘do not improve with acquaintance. They are children without the charm of heaven…. The average Indian seems a hopeless creature’. ‘I am not impressed by the intellectual side of any religion I have seen here’, was his contemptuous dismissal of our remarkable spiritual heritage. About his personal staff, his condescending comment was that they were ‘various people with odd names who do all the things that bore the white man’. He was convinced that the British had the right to rule such people, and on occasion his bias could become vicious. Annoyed by what one of his minions had done, he fumed: ‘They ought to be reduced to slavery and not given the rights of man at all and beaten like brute beasts and shot like man eaters’.Indian architecture revolted him. The Hindu temples along the ghats of Benares appeared to him like ‘a cactus or children’s toy tree on a steep mountainside, decorated at the top with flags on crazy bamboo poles’. About the Qutub Minar he ruminated: ‘Why should we throw away the lovely subtlety of a Greek column for this uncouth and careless and unknowing and careless shape?’ The exquisite pietra dura panels of the Red Fort he labelled ‘tommy rot’. Holkar’s palace in Mumbai he thought was ‘very vulgar’, and the palace at Udaipur ‘barbaric’. Even the magnificent Taj Mahal did not amount to much for this man. ‘People go head over heels with their admiration for the Taj’, he lectured his wife, ‘but compared to the great Greeks, Byzantines, Romans…it is small but very costly beer’.The Indian craftsmen he worked with drove him to despair. ‘They know only the most terrible patterns and those nerve-wracking sodden gods and goddesses… Thank Very God of Very God that he wrought not our world on such lines’. As he inspected his handiwork in the finishing stages, he observed how ‘careless the Indians were… forever damaging things and the messes they make! Horrible!... And the Indian never finishes anything and breaks fifty per cent of what he temporarily fixes’. He wanted to buy a Buddha for his wife, but nothing came up to par: ‘Lord, how ugly everything Indian and Anglo-Indian is’.The irony—as always of colonised societies—is that while in Britain itself Lutyens’ work was reviewed and criticised, in India he is almost deified. The truth is that it was Viceroy Hardinge who made Lutyens reluctantly incorporate some Indian tokenisms in his architectural plans. For a man who was convinced that Hindu architecture was ‘beyond understanding’ and Mughal architecture was ‘piffle’, and that only the European classical style was always ‘better, wiser, saner’, it is no surprise that the greatest concentration of Indian motifs—elephant legs and sandstone bells—are found in the service entrance and guardhouse of Rashtrapati Bhavan.Even the great dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan, which Lutyens’ apologists think is Indian in theme, was, as its builder himself recorded, meant to conjure ‘the topeed head of a British soldier, district officer, missionary or viceroy, while great arms below grasp to subdue in their embrace an alien land and culture’.Lutyens’ Delhi may be a coveted place to live in, but Edwin Lutyens was an illiterate, arrogant and racist disgrace for Indians and the great civilisation we are heir to.(Pavan K Varma is an author, diplomat, and former member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). The views expressed are personal)