Nouveau Delhi

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The Delhi Durbar of 1911 had been billed as a spectacle that would out-dazzle anything else the British Empire had put up. Thousands of visitors came from far and wide to pay homage,and to insinuate themselves into the choreography of honours and hierarchy. George V must have been resplendent in the bejewelled Imperial Crown made in India for the occasion and thereafter spirited away to be stored in the Tower of London,and he took his time announcing the durbar boons. It was a long-drawn-out ceremony,yet the biggest announcement was a well-kept secret till the very end. In fact,as Nayantara Pothen reports,the military bands at one time seemed to presume that the occasion was over,and had begun to strike the strains of the Coronation March to signal the departure of the royal couple. But George V spoke again,saying the capital would be shifted to Delhi.

The vision for this city to be built at a remove from Old Delhi,or Shahjahanabad,or even Civil Lines,was given away by the name by which New Delhi went temporarily: Imperial Delhi. It would visually represent the British Empire in India in the British Indo-Saracenic architecture so appealing to the then viceroy,Lord Hardinge,who had been a leading advocate of shifting the capital to Delhi as the assertion of an unfaltering determination to maintain British rule in India. More pertinent to the content of Pothens vibrant social history of New Delhis elite in the citys founding decades,the capitals urban design would be embedded with a careful declaration of where and how power and authority rested in colonial India.

Power radiated from the Government House complex,from the viceregal residence now Rashtrapati Bhavan and secretariat buildings North and South Blocks placed in its approach in an open-armed vista. Authority resided in the Viceroys Council and the Central Secretariat,the latter controlled by the Indian Civil Service. And despite the incremental reforms to enable the involvement of elected representatives,the point was seen to be made by the placement of the legislative assembly Parliament House at a distance. An MLA reportedly said: Situated on a lower level than the secretariat8230; it is in the form of a zero which signifies its political significance.

Pothens study ends in 1952,when the will of Indians was determined in the general elections,and the roundedness of that zero-shaped chamber became symbolic of a democratic inclusiveness. That event capped a progressive change in the composition and ways of the New Delhi elite. It is not just that the change came with the ICS admitting more Indians and the racial barriers slowly falling away. Pothen tracks the way in which an imperial order was imposed by the layout of the city and the rules and rituals of the privileged and then how these rules were undermined,appropriated and reconstituted in response to changing political circumstances.

To begin with,it was a sparsely populated city of wide avenues,too official,too new and too unfinished. In this official society,your worth was determined by the Warrant of Precedence. Before World War II imposed austerity and compelled the government to remain in the city in the summer too instead of shifting to Simla,the Delhi season was short,but shot through with a giddy,sometimes forced,frivolity. Viceregal banquets gave visibility to ones place in the scheme of things: the seating arrangement made clear ones place in the hierarchy. While social relations were based on the Warrant of Precedence,there were racial undertones too. Badr-ud-din Tyabji,an ICS officer,would later recall being invited to the Viceroys Ball,yet being told by his seniors wife that he should avoid asking a shy English girl of his acquaintance for a dance,lest it mark her out as the only girl who had no partner but an Indian.

Racial hierarchies prevailed outside official spaces too. The social hub of this Delhi was the Imperial Gymkhana Club,as it was then called,and even as it took its time admitting Indians as members,it denied them voting rights.

The war years transformed New Delhi into a more plural space,though mostly outside of the still imposing Warrant of Precedence. Officialdom was getting more Indianised and recreational spaces in the city allowed for social interactions outside official social functions. The lead-up to Independence came with an overhang of political jostling and new tensions,and the viceregal social calendar became less a way to force gaiety to demonstrate the empires hold than a framework in which to negotiate transition. The Mountbattens were,in fact,astute practitioners of social diplomacy,and they decreed that at least half of all guests at a viceregal function had to be Indian.

As the headiness of Independence was tempered by the violence accompanying Partition,precedence and protocol which the nationalist elite had undermined by breaching its barriers became a way to retain some semblance of control in a chaotic situation that was proving rapidly difficult to control8230; to reinforce authority.

Pothens work draws its vitality from a close reading of memoirs and letters. There is an amusing anecdote about Jawaharlal Nehru,by then prime minister,unintentionally provoking a diplomatic incident by seating the Turkish ambassador at his daughters left at a dinner,and placing a lower-ranked Swedish official at her right. The Turk expressed his indignation by asking his government to recall him!

Knitting the anecdotes and descriptions together is an inquiry into the ways in which Delhi began to extricate itself first from the hold of an imperial social order and then official pageantry. A hundred years after it again became the capital of India,it is a useful statement on Delhis perpetual status as a city in transition.