Mr. Rainbow: The Strange Ride of Sir Edwin Lutyens

New Delhi is a garden city, an imperial green space, a modernist utopian vision of uncrowded, miasma-free healthful urban freedom, an ordered architectural engine for the creation of a new order, a neo-classical phoenix arisen over the crumbling remains of a necropolis for the decadent and the dead.

New Delhi is a chaotic, disintegrating heat sink, a Russian roulette wheel for pedestrians and motorists, a teetering harbinger of a globalizing process of meltdown and urban decay, an icon of the inequality of resource distribution that is at the heart of the "new" India's political economy, a sanctuary for the elite and a deathtrap for the weakened.

Today, with the help of an exhibit sponsored by British Petroleum, I consider the mixed legacy of New Delhi's designer, the English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

"Rashtrapati Bhavan in Context: The Work of Sir Edwin Lutyens OM", up at the British Council until the 5th of November, charts the career and influences of an architect whose career spanned the high noon of British imperialism in India--and whose own work moved from a rusticating neo-traditional Arts and Crafts romanticism to a stolidly neo-classicizing Imperialist style. While it probably comes as no surprise that the British Council, together with its corporate sponsor British Petroleum, is little inclined to provide a critical reading of the Rashtrapati Bhavan's (or Viceregal Palace's) "context", never fear: this is what blogs are for.

Lutyens's first big commission--and the one that earned him his early fame--was a large, Arts and Crafts style garden house in Surrey, built in 1896 for the famed garden designer and author Gertrude Jekyll, called Munstead Wood. Although very early, Munstead Wood proves to be a key chapter in the story of Lutyens's development as an architect--it is a kind of huge, neo-traditionalist "cottage", built in a self-consciously stripped down vernacular architectural style, almost exclusively using local materials. The interiors are austere, with a minimum of ornamentation.

All this was entirely in line with its patroness's zeal for the Arts and Crafts movement. Indeed, Munstead Wood--along with the many other similar projects that followed on its heels for the young Lutyens--became an important touchstone for a new generation of Arts and Crafts architects in England. It struck me as entirely ironic that Lutyens, who was to eventually become one of the most obviously imperialist British architects of the twentieth century should have cut his teeth designing in an idiom pioneered by William Morris, whose aesthetic convictions were inseparable from his advocacy of Socialist causes--a politics that eventually endeared him, albeit posthumously, to the cultural nationalists of the anti-colonial Indian Independence movement.

But perhaps there was always something Janus-like about the potentialities inherent in the nostalgia of the Arts and Crafts movement--on the one hand we have William Morris, whose radical aesthetic was matched by his radical politics--on the other we have a Lutyens, or better yet a Sir George Birdwood, whose dedication to the cause of Indian craft traditions was only matched by the egregious racialism evident in his dismissive attitude toward the idea that Indian art was worthy of study and preservation.

His infamous declaration that India was utterly devoid of any "fine art"--made at the annual meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in 1910--provoked a heated debate, exposing deep rifts between the progressive, "new Orientalist" art historians and critics (like E.B. Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy) who overturned the conventional idea that "fine art" was inherently superior to "craft", and the paternalistic old guard, who thought that "craftsmanship" was decidedly secondary to "fine art" but all the poor natives could aspire to without British help. Both groups, it should be noted, identified India's "authentic" and "indigenous" aesthetic with "crafts"--they only disagreed on how those crafts should be evaluated vis-a-vis the Western fine art tradition.

By 1910, just two years before his work on a "new" Delhi was to commence--following the announcement by King George V that the seat of the Government of India was to be shifted there from Calcutta--Lutyens himself would have sided with Sir George Birdwood, if he had been paying any attention. There is little evidence that Indian art interested him before his commission to work on the new imperial capital of Delhi. By then, little remained of his dalliance with the homely Surrey cottage-style Arts and Crafts vernacular of his early work, other than a preference for working with local materials and a paternalistic condescension toward "his" carvers and craftsmen.

While the intimate and picturesque architecture of Munstead Wood does little to prepare us for the anti-pedestrian, awe-inducing imperial vistas of monumental New Delhi, the turn that Lutyens's work took beginning around 1903 helps make more sense of his design for the capital. It seems that Lutyens's ambitions had wearied him of his successful career as a designer of English neo-traditionalist country homes and pushed him on toward what he saw as greater things: specifically "the big game" of British monumental architecture.

His work becomes exemplary of a broader shift toward a classicizing idiom that appropriated the symmetry and order of Christopher Wren's large-scale London buildings and attempted to extrapolate from them a conservative "national" architectural style. The results were, suffice it to say, at best boring and at worst horrendous. The British Council exhibit does us the dubious favor of documenting some of his awkward designs from this period.

Some of his projects from the period between 1907 and 1912 (when he started work on New Delhi) are particularly hideous--ranging from the proto-fascist British School at Rome (1911-1912) whose design is lifted almost directly from the upper storey of St. Paul's western facade, to his stiff and boring competition design for London County Hall (1907-1908). Looking at this work makes you realize just how hard he must have worked in order to have attained such an exquisite degree of non-threatening mediocrity and predictability--one sufficient for being entrusted with the job of designing a new capital for the "jewel in the crown."

One of the things you'll hear most often from Lutyens-boosters about New Delhi's monumental architecture, especially about his design for the Rashtrapati Bhavan (or Viceregal Lodge, as it was then known), is that it shows some sort of deep reverence for India's architectural heritage, or that it represents a fusion of "Western" and "Eastern" classical architecture.

This euphemistic canard, not surprisingly, finds prominent mention in British Petroleum's patronizing spiel found on the wall of the exhibition: "One of the key themes of the exhibition is the interplay of influences in both directions: the deep influence of India (and her strong aesthetic traditions) on the work of Lutyens, as well as the influence of British architectural traditions on India's capital city. This accommodation of different cultural traditions is a theme which resonates for us as a company: we believe that we will be a stronger organisation if we can accommodate diversity in our styles of work."

This statement is so ingeniously disingenuous--mischaracterizing both Lutyens's architectural practices and its own global corporate culture in one fell swoop, while giving both an undeserved pat on the back in the process--that it could only have come from a corporate committee. And indeed it has. But it serves as a convenient entry point for a critical interrogation of this particular "theme" in discussions of New Delhi.

What was the nature of Lutyens's particular style of "cultural accommodation?"

Well, for one, it was reluctant: early sketches of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, nee Viceregal Lodge, from 1912-1913 show it surmounted by a High Renaissance (or what the punning Lutyens would have referred to as High Wrenaissance) dome--it was only under pressure to "Indianize" his design that he settled on the current design, one that draws from the ancient Buddhist stupa at Sanchi.

This brings me to another key aspect of Lutyens's accommodating style: it was highly selective. Another early sketch shows the facade of the building decorated with very subtly pointed "Mughal" arch windows. He later rejected this design, saying "one cannot tinker with the round arch. God did not make the Eastern rainbow pointed to show his wide sympathies." In fact, Lutyens found most traditional Indian styles of architecture to be hopelessly ornate, or exotic, or "Muslim".

He wrote that "the Mughal architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building covered with a veneer of stone or marble and very tiresome to the Western intelligence." He held a particular disgust for the "Indo-Saracenic" style of architecture that was once the rage in colonial India--a style that blended neo-Gothic with Mughal architecture, best exemplified by the Victoria Terminus (now the Chhatrapati Sivaji Terminus) in Bombay (1878-1887).

To Lutyens's eye, the Victoria Terminus must have seemed an utter abomination, a ridiculous miscegenation of two hopelessly decadent and superficial styles of architecture, fused in a misguided attempt to bridge the gap between East and West. It was only under political pressure from the then-Viceroy of India Lord Hardinge that Lutyens agreed to incorporate some carefully chosen "Indian" elements into his design.

His ensuing forays (mainly armchair) through India's architectural heritage ended up traveling in quite the opposite direction from the Indo-Saracenic. Instead, Lutyens chose to draw from the newly identified sites of India's own "classical period", a concept and designation that resulted entirely from colonial historiographical, art historical, and archaeological practices. Sites like the 3rd century BCE stupa at Sanchi, or the ancient Buddhist Ajanta caves, all of which were basically unknown before being excavated, displayed and disseminated by the colonial state as representative of a pre-Muslim indigenous Indian "golden age", provided Lutyens with what amounted to an end-run around the messy and all-too-proximate "mixed" cultural heritage of northern India, with its "black towns" and "unhealthy air".

Instead he took recourse in an architecture that left little lasting impact on later styles of Indian design. While the simplicity and evident "classicism" in ancient Buddhist architecture must have appealed to Lutyens on an aesthetic level, it seems reasonable to suggest that its remoteness from the distressingly chaotic reality of India's present appealed to him on a deeper, more ideological level. It is not coincidental that the excavation work on Sanchi's famous stupa was being carried out in 1912 and 1913, the very same years that Lutyens was undertaking his work on New Delhi.

The enshrinement and privileging of the "pre-Muslim", ancient Indian "classical period" by colonial historical discourse is well known. It fit in with a historical narrative that traced India's history as one of a long slow decline, a loss of sovereignty and identity to the invasive depredations of the "foreign" Muslims, whose despotry and decadent cruelty and hedonism led to their own downfall and the restorative arrival of the benign British Imperium, whose guiding hand would lead India back to its "Golden Age", representing to it its own past in a way that "she" could not do for "herself". India's history, following this narrative, was the story of a great fall--from the masculine, enlightened rationalism of Aryan ancient India to the servitude and corruption of the Semiticized "Islamic" medieval India. The design of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, consciously or otherwise, recapitulates some of the core ideas that guided the British colonial project. Lutyens's designs for Delhi are, if nothing else, complex representations of a newly excavated "classical Indian" aesthetic vocabulary articulated within an imperial British grammar. The fact that the new city was to be built around and over the scattered mausolea of long-dead "Muslim" rulers only heightened the sense of arrival of something ordered and new.

The "selective" nature of Lutyens's design for Delhi is also evident in his gridded layout of New Delhi's wide avenues and boulevards--one finds interspersed, here and there, the architectural remains of Delhi's medieval past, "accommodated" in the new city. Here, there was an overwhelming emphasis on the preservation of religious architecture, to the exclusion of domestic, or more "secular" monumental architecture. Again, what we see here is an inclusion of carefully edited "Indian" content within a resolutely logical, Imperial and "non-Indian" form. In a sense, they are no more at home within New Delhi's traffic roundabouts than the "Buddhist" dome on top of the Viceregal Lodge--a building which was erected over the site of the demolished, and architecturally "unworthy", village of Raisina.

The big picture here is that this "style of accommodation" is one that was right at home in a colonial state, because it was designed principally to move in one direction: the form would remain "logical" and "Western", while carefully selected "native" content would be welcome as a gesture of inclusion and as a consideration of "native" sentiment. It also brings us full circle to Lutyens's peculiar beginnings as an adherent of the Arts and Crafts style. The one clear connective thread that binds imperial New Delhi to Gertrude Jekyll's friendly garden cottage is his use of local building materials and craftsmen in the service of a new interpretation of "tradition". There is a careful balance of power--native materials and crafts traditions must be disciplined, trained, carefully molded, crushed, carved and overseen in order to ensure that they remain in a supporting role, that they don't upset the order of the design and distract from the architect's singular vision.

All of this raises an uncomfortable question in the context of post-colonial India--what does it mean that India's post-colonial elite moved so seamlessly into the world that Lutyens designed?

It is unfortunate that British Petroleum has seen fit to characterize the architectural practices of Lutyens as a kind of model for multicultural inclusion, but not surprising. Even now, in the post-colonial days of the corporate imperium we can easily find similar "accommodations"--sites of profitable hybrids formed from "native" content and "non-native" form: Pizza Hut's success in India came about only after a revamping of their menu to include "native" flavors; Disney Corporation has learned the same lesson, retooling their Disney Channel shows to accommodate "local" tastes and giving its obscenely popular "High School Musical" a Bollywood-style remix. One can even find it in less obvious places--the widespread appropriation of kitschy Bollywood samples in hipster electronic music is a perfect example. To pretend that these encounters are somehow egalitarian and that the "influence" flows both ways equally between the "global" and the "local" is entirely disingenuous: we know who sets the rules for inclusion--it's easy: nowadays all you have to do is follow the money.