New Delhi—Making of a Capital is a broad canvas, consisting of pictures, drawings, press clippings, correspondence between those involved in the making of the imperial capital, and two excellent essays by Malvika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee.

Mukherjee looks at the shift of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi, the reasons and the logic of the move. Malvika’s much longer piece essays the actual building of the capital, the tussle between those conceptualising the symbol of “permanence and order”, the giving of the contract to Edward Lutyens, his sharing it with Herbert Baker, and Lutyens’ own evolution as he struggled with his own ideas on how to cast the Empire’s ideas in stone, slowly absorbing elements from India—small symbols so that it may be slightly reflecting its context, but not at anytime be able to escape or grow larger than the larger imperial design.

Mukherjee’s piece sets the tone for why the shift from Calcutta was necessary. It was more than just the “salubrious climate in Delhi from October 1 to May 1”. He discusses the coronation of King George V and the politics of what was happening in Bengal just a few years before the shift, the storm over the bid to partition the state, the Swadeshi movement that arose as a result, and the experience after the Revolt of 1857—which forced the British to acknowledge the centrality and imprint of Delhi on the imagination of the subjects as a ‘capital’, and therefore the desire of the colonial masters to capture it.

... contd.