New Delhi: New Annotated Edition

Introduction

Just before New Delhi was inaugurated as capital of colonial India in February 13, 1931, the magazine The Architectural Review published an issue devoted to a study of the new capital of India, with texts, criticisms, and photographs by Robert Byron.

Robert Byron

[1]

Robert Byron (26 February 1905 – 24 February 1941) was a British travel writer, best known for his travelogue The Road to Oxiana. He was also a noted writer, art critic and historian.

Byron was educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, from which he was expelled for his hedonistic and rebellious manner. He was best known at Oxford for his impersonation of Queen Victoria.

Byron traveled to widely different places; Mount Athos, India, the Soviet Union, and Tibet. However it was in Persia and Afghanistan that he found the subject round which he forged his style of modern travel writing, when he later came to write up his account of The Road to Oxiana in Peking, his temporary home.

An appreciation of architecture is a strong element in Byron’s writings. He was a forceful advocate for the preservation of historic buildings and a founder member of the Georgian Group. A philhellene, he also pioneered, in the English speaking world, a renewal of interest by Byzantine History. Byron has been described as one of the first and most brilliant of twentieth century philhellenes.

In 1929 Byron travelled to India and visited the region (including Tibet). Later he wrote about India in articles as well as in his book An Essay on India (1931).

He attended the last Nuremberg Rally, in 1938, with Nazi sympathiser Unity Mitford. Byron knew her through his friendship with her sister Nancy Mitford, but he was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis. Nancy Mitford hoped at one stage that Byron would propose marriage to her, and was later astonished as well as shocked to discover his homosexual tastes, complaining: This wretched pederasty falsifies all feelings and yet one is supposed to revere it.

Byron’s great, though unreciprocated, passion was for Desmond Parsons, younger brother of the 6th Earl of Rosse, who was regarded as one of the most magnetic men of his generation. They lived together in Peking, in 1934, where Desmond developed Hodgkin’s disease, of which he died in Zurich, in 1937, when only 26 years old. Byron was left utterly devastated.

An acquaintance from early days, Evelyn Waugh, noted Byron’s gumption. In 1928 he wrote to Henry Yorke I hear Robert has beaten us all by going to India in an aeroplane which is the sort of success which I call tangible. But writing in 1948, Waugh said of Byron in a letter to Harold Acton: It is not yet the time to say so but I greatly disliked Robert in his last years & think he was a dangerous lunatic better off dead. The passionately anti-communist Waugh believed that during the 1930s Byron had become pro-Soviet, though Byron’s – and Waugh’s – biographer Christopher Sykes firmly denied any such sympathy on Byron’s part.

Robert Byron died in 1941, during the Second World War, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a U-Boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland, en route to Egypt. His body was never found.

Bibliography

Europe in the Looking-Glass. Reflections of a Motor Drive from Grimsby to Athens (1926)

The Station (1928) – visiting the Greek monasteries of Mount Athos

The Byzantine Achievement (1929)

Birth of Western Painting. A History of colour, form, and iconography. G. Routledge, 1930.

An Essay on India (1931)

The Appreciation of Architecture (1932)

First Russia, Then Tibet (1933)

The Road to Oxiana (1937) – visiting Persia and Afghanistan

Imperial Pilgrimage (1937) – a small guide to London from the London in your pocket series. London, London Passenger Transport Board, (1937)

Letters home, London, John Murray, (1991). ISBN 0-7195-4921-3

References

Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900-1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Norwich, John Julius (1996) Byzantium – The Decline and Fall, Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-011449-2

D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007).

Waugh, Evelyn; Edited by Mark Amory (1980). The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 1-85799-245-8.

Lutyens’s New Delhi

[2]

Largely designed by Lutyens over twenty or so years (1912 to 1930), New Delhi, situated within the metropolis of Delhi, popularly known as Lutyens’ Delhi, was chosen to replace Calcutta as the seat of the British Indian government in 1912; the project was completed in 1929 and officially inaugurated in 1931. In undertaking this project, Lutyens invented his own new order of classical architecture, which has become known as the Delhi Order and was used by him for several designs in England, such as Campion Hall, Oxford. Unlike the more traditional British architects who came before him, he was both inspired by and incorporated various features from the local and traditional Indian architecture – something most clearly seen in the great drum-mounted Buddhist dome of Viceroy's House, now Rashtrapati Bhavan. This palatial building, containing 340 rooms, is built on an area of some 330 acres (1.3 km2) and incorporates a private garden also designed by Lutyens. The building was designed as the official residence of the Viceroy of India and is now the official residence of the President of India. The new city contains both the Parliament buildings and government offices (many designed by Herbert Baker) and was built distinctively of the local red sandstone using the traditional Mughal style.

Many of the garden-ringed villas in the Lutyens' Bungalow Zone (LBZ) – also known as Lutyens' Delhi – that were part of Lutyens' original scheme for New Delhi are under threat due to the constant pressure for development in Delhi. The LBZ was placed on the 2002 World Monuments Fund Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites. It should be noted that none of the bungalows in the LBZ were designed by Lutyens – he only designed the four bungalows in the Presidential Estate surrounding Rashtrapati Bhavan at Willingdon Crescent now known as Mother Teresa Crescent. Other buildings in Delhi that Lutyens designed include Baroda House, Bikaner House, Hyderabad House, and Patiala House.

A bust of Lutyens in the former Viceroy's House is the only statue of a Westerner left in its original position in New Delhi.

New Delhi

Plate I. January 1932. New Delhi; Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker, Associated Architects. This view of the general lay-out of the city is taken from the dome of the Viceroy’s House. In the foreground is the Viceroy’s Court, containing the Jaipur column, which will be completed by a bronze extension and glass star, adding in all another forty feet to its height. Beyond are the two Secretariats, each with dome and tower. In the distance can be seen the King’s Way and waterways, and the Memorial Arch on the horizon.

I.–The First Impression

1.–Preconceptions

THAT New Delhi exists, and that, twenty years ago, it did not exist, are facts known to anyone who is at all aware of the British connection with India. It is expected, and assumed, that the representatives of British sovereignty beyond the seas shall move in a setting of proper magnificence; and that in India, particularly, the