New Delhi is reluctant to be reminded of two centuries of British colonial rule, writes RAHUL BEDI
INDIA’S FEDERAL capital New Delhi marked its 100th birthday yesterday but without any official celebration of a day that reawakens unpleasant memories of more than two centuries of British colonial rule.
The centenary of the surprise decision by King George V on December 11th, 1911, in an elaborate durbar (royal court) on the outskirts of Old Delhi to shift the imperial capital from Calcutta on the east coast back to the Mughal capital in northern Hindustan’s dusty plains, has been the subject in recent weeks of public lectures and discussion seminars.
However, no official programmes, parades or functions have been organised by the authorities for the city’s 17 million- plus inhabitants to mark the historic event.
“India’s ambivalence about celebrating the founding of its capital New Delhi by the British Raj underlines the pathetic hypocrisy of our political class, which feeds off the empire’s legacy but is unwilling to acknowledge it,” columnist C Raja Mohan wrote in the Indian Express yesterday.
The only feeble ceremony marking Delhi’s founding date was the one in which Sheila Dikshit, the city’s chief minister or super mayor, presided over the launch of an elaborate book detailing the several cities built over centuries in the same area.
“There is ambivalence on what to celebrate and how to celebrate it,” Dikshit said enigmatically last week.
According to folklore, Delhi was the site of the magnificent Indraprastha kingdom founded in 2500 BC, capital of the Pandava rulers of the Mahabharta, the glorious Indian epic (poem).
Thereafter, New Delhi – better known as Dilli – was the eighth city that served as the capital of successive rulers and conquerors between the 12th and the 19th centuries that included Mongols, Turks, Afghans, Mughals and eventually the British, until independence in 1947.
Over a thousand years, Delhi was destroyed and rebuilt several times, often razed by conquerors like Tamerlane, who killed tens of thousands of its residents in one day in the late 14th century.
Designed by British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens on a grand and opulent scale, with tree-lined boulevards overlooked by the imposing, 340-room red sandstone British vice-regal palace and surrounded by grandiose elegant buildings – all of them intact, New Delhi showcased untrammelled colonial grandeur and power.
The imperial capital completed about 1930 was intended as a city for a population of about 500,000. Today, though, it is one of the world’s larger, ever- expanding megapolis – overcrowded, crime-ridden, polluted, buried deep under garbage and teeming with frenetic, smoke-belching traffic and plagued by property prices surpassing those of Manhattan and Tokyo.
The picturesque Jamuna river, on whose banks the city was built and which was for centuries its source of life and sustenance, today resembles a stinking drain choked full of industrial effluents and sewage.
However, a century ago, in the tented city for 25,000 people erected in north Delhi for the royal visit, the newly ascended King George V and Queen Mary mingled with more than 560 grandly accoutered Indian princes and maharajahs, native soldiers and solemn civil servants at the glittering durbar.
It had been meticulously organised by viceroy Lord Curzon before the king made the announcement regarding New Delhi. Curzon had taken a year to fine tune every detail to ensure the pomp, splendour and protocol for the landmark event.
The 40sq km royal camp he had planned had thousands of plush tents, manicured lawns, a postal system, an electricity grid and even a small-gauge rail network with 18 stops.
The king and queen, draped in furs and jewels, greeted their Indian subjects from an immense throne in a cleverly choreographed ritual aimed at asserting British supremacy and resurrecting long- faded Mughal grandeur.
When the king announced on that freezing afternoon that New Delhi would be the new capital of its crown jewel colony – built alongside the old – there was a moment of stunned silence followed by wild cheering.
Not even Queen Mary knew about this tightly guarded secret to shift the capital from Calcutta, where the British increasingly feared rising Bengali nationalism.
The smug British believed they were building a city where they would live forever. They lasted barely a few years after New Delhi was completed and became free India’s capital.
At the country’s partition in 1947 into a secular India and a Muslim Pakistan, following cataclysmic events in which more than one million people died in sectarian clashes and 10 times that number were displaced, New Delhi turned into a massive refugee camp.
Over the next three decades, these refugees, mainly doughty and entrepreneurial Punjabis and Sikhs, turned New Delhi into the frenzied city it is today where modernity and commerce meld effortlessly with the historic.
But as New Delhi observes its 100th birthday, remnants of its colonial past – a stone obelisk proclaiming it as the spot where the king received homage from his Indian subjects – lie scattered in a dirty, unkempt park, known locally as the graveyard of the British empire.
Overgrown with grass and weeds, Curzon’s once grand Coronation Park is a dumping ground for defaced statues of British royalty, including Queen Victoria and viceroys, a private enough spot which nearby slum dwellers use as a public lavatory.