Around the time that Edwin Lutyens was giving final touches to the city of Delhi, which he laid out as an architectural marvel, he embarked on the most ambitious project of his life in the United Kingdom.
In 1930, he submitted his design for the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool. If it had been built, envisioned as the largest church ever, it would still have been in the making, much after Lutyens' death. The proposal was abandoned after World War II due to a lack of funds. Today, what remains of that dream is the model of a fascinating, vast domed structure placed in the centre of the Liverpool Museum and some crypts that lie beneath the floor in the Liverpool Cathedral – a modest structure designed by another architect that was built on the site earmarked for the original.
Lutyens was already in his sixties when he designed the monumental cathedral. He knew with absolute certainty that he would never see it finished. The scale of the building required at least 200 years to complete. And yet he poured himself into it. Every detail, every proportion, every stone was thought through, giving us insights into a man building for the ages rather than for himself.
That tells you something important about Edwin Lutyens - a man who could pour himself into a project, embedding himself deeply into its every detail, proportion, shape and material, not because he wanted to build for himself but for the ages. He built because he believed in the power of architecture to mean something, to say something about the people who commissioned it, and the people who used it.
Lutyen’s dream structure was never built.
Symbolism of Lutyen’s Delhi
His greatest completed work stands not in England, but in India. New Delhi that Lutyens designed alongside Herbert Baker between 1912 and 1931 during the imperial British empire is one of the most ambitious acts of city-building of the twentieth century. The wide tree-lined avenues, the spacious junctions, the Parliament building sitting in its middle — all of it was conceived as a cohesive idea.
The scale of this city-building was not the only statement Lutyens made. He also knit into it the many layers of India’s vibrant cultures and its history. Rather than imposing a purely European style, Lutyens drew from everything around him. The red sandstone used for his buildings is the same stone the Mughal emperors chose for their forts and palaces. The decorative details were borrowed from Hindu temples, Mughal architecture, Jain and Buddhist traditions. He weaved together the glorious past with the colonial imperial legacy.
Whatever his intention was, Lutyen gave us a capital city with a shared architectural language – symbolising its vast and complex civilisation. As Delhi earned the notoriety of becoming the most chaotic and polluted city in the world, Lutyen’s Delhi gave us the relief of a sense of space, proportion, and greenery, and with grandeur and aesthetics.
Democracy Doesn’t Live in Buildings
When India gained independence, it declared itself free and became the world’s largest democracy; the buildings stood where they were. The inhabitants changed. So, did the meaning of those buildings: neither enriching nor threatening the democratic quotient of the country.
This is not something that the present Narendra Modi led BJP government, in its bid to showcase the optics of ‘decolonisation’, understands. In an attempt to stamp a new identity on the capital in the name of ‘indigenous’ and ‘modern’, Lutyens Delhi is being torn apart limb by limb.
When the world declared a pause and an emergency during Covid pandemic, and people in India were dying of disease, neglect and hunger, the Modi government speeded up its ambitious and deeply controversial scheme to demolish and rebuild the Central Vista in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi. pollution
The grand ceremonial avenue was torn down and redesigned. The surrounding colonial-era buildings, which housed ministries and museums, were cleared away. An ugly eyesore came up as a new parliament building. Despite controversies and opposition, the project was hastily pushed through with unusual speed.
Rewriting History
A government that has no place for complexity, nuance or historicity, wants to impose a neat and tidy narrative, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ culture and an untrue version of history. The vision of a seamless transition through the many phases of India’s history that Lutyen laid down through his architectural design has no place in Modi’s India. Neither does Lutyens.
The country of teaming millions has become too small to house the statue of the man who designed a historic city – a man who was British, a man who reminded of a colonial legacy with its unpleasant memories.
For those who want to sanitise, erase and rewrite history by removing statues, renaming cities and roads, the logic of the removal of Lutyen’s statue may seem straightforward and logical. But history and culture do not neatly fit into logical boxes. They demand an understanding of their complex layers, their richness, their shame, their brutality, and their contradictions with honesty.
Lutyens' Delhi, like all architecture built by colonial powers, is a mass of many contradictions. It was built by a colonial empire using local labour and local materials to project imperial power. It was also a work of genius that mirrored many cultures and housed the temple of Indian democracy with dignity for over seven decades. In knocking it down, we turned our backs to an understanding of this complexity.
Lutyens made something extraordinary – something that was both Indian and imperial; it imbued grandeur. Neither by taking a wreck-ball to destroy what he made, nor by removing his statue can the colonial past be undone. One can, at best, remove a piece of the story.
Conversely, the removal of his statue, or bulldozing what he built, does not make us more modern, democratic, or more rooted in our culture. Such acts are simply reminiscent of what happened to the Bamiyan Buddha statues.
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