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Capital idea
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Delhi is believed to be 5000 years old, as it is mentioned in the Mahabharata. But archeological sources do not bear this out. The city rose to prominence in the 13th century, during the Sultanate, and basked in glory through the Mughal era. In the first decade of the 20th century, the government of British India began to consider shifting the capital from Calcutta to Delhi because of the latter’s locational advantage from the administrative point of view. The shift was announced in the Delhi durbar of 1911, and the foundation stone for the viceroy’s residence was laid soon after. Two British architects, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, were entrusted with the task of planning the city. It was named ‘New Delhi’ and inaugurated by Lord Irwin on February 13, 1931.
Nayantara Pothen’s book covers the period between 1931 and 1952. It is doubtful whether these decades can be called ‘glittering’, but Pothen seems to imply that all that ‘glittered’ in the newly built city was not gold. Her study delves into the making of the imperial capital in the 1930s, its cosmopolitanism, its spasms of communal tension before and after Partition, charting out a continuity in the transition to post-Independence India.
Pothen uses memoirs, published diaries, letters and interview transcripts. Her subjects are “members of a privileged section of New Delhi”, for the simple reason that their autobiographical outputs are prolific. Dipesh Chakrabarty says that in elite-nationalist autobiographical texts the “construction of the public self consumes any glimmer of an intimate, private self”. Pothen meets this charge by observing that, for her subjects, the public and the private were interconnected in a social ritual which “became a form of political expression and a means of articulating identity”. She also notes that women’s writings give a more detailed view of New Delhi’s social life than those of their male counterparts.
The first chapter focuses on the deliberations that went into the planning of the city. The choice of a site south of Shahjahanabad was not accidental. The north was rejected on the grounds that it was too cramped, too closely associated with the memory of previous rulers and harboured too many “rebellious elements”. The new site, crowded with monuments and other insignia of regal grandeur, was deemed a perfect seat of imperial power, more suitable for drawing allegiance and minimizing dissent. Pothen points out how the racial and socio-political hierarchy was built into the architectural designs of the city, and this hierarchy was maintained in distributing residential plots.
The second chapter, “White Man’s Show”, is a study of how Europeans and Indians mingled in the new capital’s social sphere, reflecting what Homi K. Bhabha calls the colonial “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite”. One of the glaring examples of rigid colonial protocol was the ‘Warrant of Precedence’, a document categorically defining the social status of members of the Indian civil service and military. The Warrant was a source not only of inter-racial, but also of intra-racial segregation. It influenced every aspect of official social life, from the entitlement to housing to the entitlement to seats in a dinner party.
But the hierarchy, de rigueur in times of peace, came under stress during the turbulence of Partition. Pothen depicts a traumatized city where the collective communal identity took precedence over personal identity. As for the city’s elites, Pothen observes, “The protection accorded them by virtue of their position in society could no longer be taken for granted”. The book makes for an engrossing read, more so because of the anecdotes it contains. Such anecdotes provide what Stephen Greenblatt calls a “touch of the real”.
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