The Indian government's rushed redevelopment of the Central Vista in New Delhi fails to move on from the colonial history of Edwin Lutyens's original project, writes Amit Khanna.
For millennia, kings and rulers have built so that they may live forever, and history has only been selectively kind. In New Delhi, Narendra Modi is pushing through a project that is remaking the centre of the city, a vast Haussmann-isation of the Central Vista.
Launched in 2019, but not due to complete until 2026 at the earliest, this $2.7 billion project will see the colonial-era administrative centre in New Delhi completely overhauled. A new parliament has already been built, with a whole suite of government and cultural buildings – including a prime-ministerial residence – due to follow, plus the overhaul of the public spaces along the three-kilometre strip of land.
There is significant opposition from the architectural community to the rushed redevelopment plan
Modi is attempting to solve a fundamental issue. India's administration has grown with its population, and his bureaucrats are currently spread out all over the capital city, while most of the older buildings are falling apart.
It is a much-needed densification of power, and one that will remain long after power at the centre has changed hands, but what will be the legacy of his ambitious vision?
Lutyens was appointed to design the new capital for Delhi in 1912, in a rare case of a government opting for the best candidate. It was a choice mirroring the trajectory of a life and career that broadly coincided with the height of the British empire.
In her fond biography of her great grandfather, The Architect and His Wife, Jane Ridley paints a vivid portrait of Lutyens as a man with the necessary will to transform his sketches into reality via the complex bureaucratic web of the British government's India Office.
The task in Delhi was to deliver an edifice of power and permanence. In this, Lutyens succeeded, though at a cost: his work in Delhi, like that of Albert Speer in Nazi Germany, became emblematic of domination on a biblical scale.
A century later, there is significant opposition from the architectural community to the populist Indian's government's rushed redevelopment plan, with calls for the preservation of both the urban structure and the local ecology. There is talk of the preservation of the buildings themselves, now showing their age after a hundred years of systematic bureaucratic neglect and a haphazard network of retrofitted services.
The chosen facade is hardly breaking the shackles of colonial domination
Lutyens himself, ever the pragmatist, would likely have been astonished at the efforts to conserve his buildings beyond their functional life. He was, above all, an architect who lived for his next project, and it is not hard to imagine that, given the chance, he would have welcomed the opportunity to build anew by tearing down the old.
Indian architecture firm HCP has been appointed to the project. Within the annals of modern architecture in the subcontinent, the work of HCP stands out for its clarity of architectural intent and strict adherence to an honest expression of materiality.
Its eponymous founder, Hasmukh C Patel, started building in the post-independence era where Lutyens and his contemporaries left off, and produced an oeuvre of crisp exposed-concrete public buildings in Ahmedabad. Now helmed by Hasmukh's son, Bimal Patel, the studio's more recent buildings are generally sensitive to the local climate and often built using local materials and resources.
However, what HCP has produced in Delhi is a radical departure from its well-known aesthetic. The exposed brick and concrete sharpness has been replaced with a sort of faux Lutyens-esque classicism, complete with sandstone plinths and tall collonaded verandahs.
The new parliament is a well resolved, beautifully built and generally well-detailed building. However, the material expression reverts to the choices made by Lutyens under pressure from governor-general Lord Hardinge – red and beige sandstone are intricately detailed to create a surface texture and proportion more reminiscent of buildings made across Europe hundreds of years ago than of a contemporary public building in Asia.
For a nation (and incidentally, a government) that prides itself on its modernity and the digital age, the chosen facade is hardly breaking the shackles of colonial domination, and may just be reinforcing how strong they remain in the public consciousness of what it means to be grand.
It would have repulsed Lutyens to be so exclusionary
And the parliament building is just the beginning of a vast panoply of projects planned along the Central Vista, gradually replacing and subsuming institutions that benefited from the immense scale of the open space afforded by the grand boulevard running through the site, now called Rajpath.
Planted originally with Jamun trees, the fruits of which were thought to pay for the maintenance of the gardens and were a favourite haunt of napping government servants, lunching students and smooching couples, the gardens are now increasingly off-limits, and thousands of trees are being cut to make way for the buildings.
In the evenings, the broad road leading up to the presidential palace used to be overcrowded with ice-cream and street-food vendors, hawking their wares to weary Delhiites in search of a breezy evening walk. Now it is cordoned off and strictly guarded against casual loitering.
One can hardly blame the authorities for wanting to keep their precious new buildings under lock and key. Stray incidents of terrorism are rampant globally and Delhi's huge population of urban poor are unwelcome in the manicured environs of power in the capital.
Gone are the vendors, the amorous visitors, and the middling bureaucrats (who will soon be able to nap in their swanky air-conditioned offices), and in their place is a sort of urban dead zone – a public place without the public. It would have repulsed Lutyens, who was not an imperialist, to be so exclusionary.
For thousands of years, local kings and invading armies have created their own cities here
As the centre of Delhi is reimagined, it is hard not to see parallels in history. For thousands of years, local kings and invading armies have created their own cities here. Forts still dot the landscape from Mehrauli in the south to Tughlaqabad in the east and Chandni Chowk in the north, every arriving emperor looking to stamp his authority in the region through a programme of building.
It is unsurprising therefore, to witness the building efforts of the current regime following the two historic practices of rebirthing the capital. First is to subsume the old into the new – by forcing HCP to design a building that looks like it always belonged, thereby creating a false sense of continuity while gradually removing the privileges of public space.
And then there's the second, more ominous trend of attempting to leave a lasting edifice in the fickle dust plains just before the end of the empire.
Amit Khanna is design principal at Amit Khanna Design Associates.
The photo is by Abhishek Choudhary.
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