City of Djinns. William Dalrymple
TO LIBERTY;
IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED
BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.
I had brought out to Delhi with me a copy of the collected letters of Lutyens. One evening in November I sat in the shade of the chattris beside the two Secretariats, facing down the Rajpath towards India Gate and reading through them. As I did so, I tried to bring the creator of Imperial Delhi into focus in my own mind.
The picture that the letters give of their author is a mixed one. There are certainly elements of the joker and buffoon that Iris had described: Lutyens incessantly doodles on the writing paper, turning the P & O crests on successive letterheads into a tiger, a man with a turban and an elephant. His first action after arriving in India is to play a game of musical chairs (‘Mrs Brodie who weighs 20 stone or more was the most energetic of the party and broke two chairs entirely [amid] many a scrimmage and wild shriek …’). Later, on seeing the hideous government buildings of Simla, Lutyens writes that they are ‘a piece of pure folly such as only Englishmen can achieve: if one were told the monkeys had built them one would have said what wonderful monkeys, they must be shot in case they do it again.’
This playfulness is balanced by ample evidence of Lutyens’s tenacity and stubbornness; a stubbornness which in the end saved New Delhi from both the aesthetic whims of successive philistine Viceroys—Lord Hardinge was determined to build the entire scheme in the Indian version of Victorian mock-Gothic, the horrible Indo-Saracenic style—and from the cost-cutting penny-pinching interference of the civil servants.
But the letters also confirmed my hunch concerning Lutyens’s autocratic tendencies. Like some other of his English contemporaries, he was clearly disillusioned with Parliamentary democracy and found in the Raj what he regarded as an ideal—an enlightened despotism: ‘I am awfully impressed by the Civil Service,’ he wrote to his wife, early on in his Indian travels. ‘I wish they would abolish the House of Commons and all representative government and start the system in England.’ Later, in a moment of fury with a negligent workman, he expressed his opinion that the Empire’s subjects ‘ought to be reduced to slavery and not given the rights of man at all …
Yet perhaps the overwhelming surprise of the letters is Lutyens’s extraordinary intolerance and dislike of all things Indian. Even by the standards of the time, the letters reveal him to be a bigot, though the impression is one of bumbling insularity rather than jack-booted malevolence. Indians are invariably referred to as ‘blacks’, ‘blackamoors’, ‘natives’ or even ‘niggers’. They are ‘dark and ill-smelling’, their food is ‘very strange and frightening’ and they ‘do not improve with acquaintance’. The helpers in his architect’s office he describes as ‘odd people with odd names who do those things that bore the white man’. On another occasion he writes of the ‘sly slime of the Eastern mind’ and ‘the very low intelligence of the natives’. ‘I do not think it possible for the Indians and whites to mix freely’, he concludes. ‘They are very, very different and I cannot admit them on the same plane as myself.’
Considering that Lutyens managed to fuse Eastern and Western aesthetics more successfully than any other artist since the anonymous sculptors of Gandhara (who produced their Indo-Hellenic Buddhas in the wake of Alexander the Great), his dislike of Indian art and architecture is particularly surprising: ‘Moghul architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building,’ he writes in one letter. ‘It is essentially the building style of children [and] very tiresome to the Western intelligence.’ At one stage, after visiting Agra, he is grudgingly forced to admit that ‘some of the work is lovely’, but he attributes these qualities to an (imaginary) Italian influence.
In the end one is left with the same paradox confronted by lovers of Wagner: how could someone with such objectionable views and so insular a vision have managed to produce such breathtaking works of art? Here was a man capable of building some of the most beautiful structures created in the modern world, but whose prejudices blinded him to the beauty of the Taj Mahal; a man who could fuse the best of East and West while denying that the Eastern elements in his own buildings were beautiful.
Authoritarian regimes tend to leave the most solid souvenirs; art has a strange way of thriving under autocracy. Only the vanity of an Empire—an Empire emancipated from democratic constraints, totally self-confident in its own judgement and still, despite everything, assured of its own superiority—could have produced Lutyens’s Delhi.
Pandit Nehru wrote: ‘New Delhi is the visible symbol of British power, with all its ostentation and wasteful extravagance.’ He was right, of course, but that is only half the story. It is also the finest architectural artefact created by the British Empire, and preferable in every way to Nehru’s disastrous commission of a hideous new city by Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. Chandigarh is now an urban disaster, a monument to stained concrete and discredited modernism; but Imperial Delhi is now more admired and loved than perhaps ever before. Nevertheless, in its patronizing and authoritarian after-taste, Lutyens’s New Delhi remains as much a monument to the British Empire’s failings as to its genius.
That month I began to make enquiries to try and track down British stayers-on from Imperial Delhi. For a while I failed to come up with anything: those few who had chosen to remain after 1947 seemed to have either died or recently emigrated. But for the transitory diplomatic community, the British had totally disappeared from Delhi.
Then, in mid-November, I was told about two old English ladies who now lived in the mountains above Simla. They had moved to the hills in the sixties, I was told, but before then they had spent their working lives in Delhi. If I wanted reminiscences of Imperial Delhi, said my informer, then Phyllis and Edith Haxby were exactly what I was looking for. In the event, when I flew up to see them, the two old ladies produced few Delhi memories. But their attitudes gave a sad insight into the fate of those Britons who not so long ago had dominated Raj Delhi, and who had opted to stay on in India after the Empire which created them had dissolved.
Their house had once been quite grand—a rambling half-timbered affair with a wide veranda and cusped Swiss gables. But the Haxbys’ estate had clearly fallen on hard times. A lint of withered spiders’ webs hung from the beams of the veranda. Only thin, peeling strips of burnt sienna indicated that the house had ever been painted. A tangle of thorns had overcome the near-side of the building and docks and ragwort grew from between the paving stones of the path.
At first I thought no one was at home. But after ten minutes of knocking on doors and peering through windows, I was rewarded with the sight of one of the sisters hobbling across her sitting-room. She undid the multiple bolts of the door and slumped down in one of the wickerwork chairs of the veranda.
‘And who are you?’ she asked.
I explained, and to make conversation complimented her on the view from her front door.
‘It may be beautiful to you,’ she said abruptly. ‘But it’s not beautiful to us. We want to go back home.’
Phyllis Haxby was a frail old woman with mottled brown skin and thin, toothpick legs. Her tweed skirt was extravagantly darned and her thick brown stockings were shredded with a jigsaw of tears and ladders.
‘We want to sell up,’ she continued. ‘We’ve been through a very bad time. There are prostitutes living all over the place, making life hell for us. They say we’re English and shouldn’t be here. After seventy-eight years!’
Phyllis grunted angrily and began rapping on the front door with her stick: ‘Edith! Edith! There’s a boy here to see us. Says he’s British. He wants to know about Delhi.’
Then she turned around and began talking to me in a stage whisper: ‘She had a fall today. The prostitutes put dope down the chimney. It makes her want to sleep. She fell on the fender—bleeding from eight a.m. until after lunch. They’re trying to drive us out, you see.’
‘It’s not just dope down the chimney,’ said Edith, who had at this point appeared at the door. ‘They come through the floorboards at night.’
‘Through the floorboards? Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘Of course I’m sure. When