New Delhi reaches 100 next month, not knowing whether to mark the birthday with celebrations of its runaway success or to ignore a date that revives memories of British colonial rule.
On Dec. 12, 1911, King George V called all Indian princes and rulers to a durbar pageant on a flat piece of land north of the old city of Delhi and declared the national capital would move there from Calcutta, now known as Kolkata.
The decision, which came as a surprise even to senior British officers, was based on worsening unrest in the Calcutta region and Delhi’s more strategic position in the center of the subcontinent.
One hundred years on, Delhi is a vast megacity at the heart of India’s booming economy with up to 18 million inhabitants living in sprawling low-rise suburbs that stretch across the Yamuna floodplain.
“Yes, there is ambivalence on what to celebrate and how to celebrate,” Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit admitted early this month, as questions grow over whether any major events are planned for the city’s centenary.
“[The] ministry of culture has to draw up a plan ... I feel they don’t have a clear direction yet,” she added.
The site of the lavish 1911 durbar did not actually become “New Delhi,” as ground to the south of the old city was preferred, and the spot instead became a graveyard for British imperial statues discarded after independence in 1947.
Derelict and forgotten for decades, Coronation Park is now undergoing a slow renovation process, but it will not be ready for any celebrations on Dec. 12.
For A.G. Krishna Menon, the Delhi head of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, glossing over the events of 100 years ago is to try to rewrite the past.
“This is a chance to increase awareness about the city around us,” he said. “There is a debate on whether we should be celebrating or not, but, as conservationists, we say it is part of history that must be recognized.”
“New Delhi was designed by the British, but could not have been built anywhere else due to the Indian craftsmen, builders and Indian sensibilities,” Menon added.
In the eyes of many visitors and locals, New Delhi’s grand imperial architecture is one of the great sights of India, including the 340-room presidential palace from where the British viceroy once ruled over the nation.
Menon believes the buildings and monuments are now rightly a symbol of national pride.
“When I stand there, a lot of things resonate. All of it adds up to a positive idea of the country,” he said.
Indians often point out that Delhi was previously a major Mughal capital and that the “New Delhi” built by British architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker was just the latest of several cities in the same area.
“This is an occasion to mark 1911 as the re-emergence of Delhi as a capital,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, an Indian historian who specializes in the British Raj.
“India lived under an occupying power then and the British thought they would be here for centuries when they built New Delhi, but the empire was gone just a few years later,” Rangarajan added. “Colonial rule was often painful, but it is seen here as just another layer of history.”
Lutyens himself harbored racist views about the Indian people and very few locals turned up to celebrate the city’s inauguration when it was finally completed in 1931.
RSS