A big birthday as the capital city celebrates a re-emergence

INDIA HASN’T really known quite how to mark the first centenary of the founding of its modern capital city, Delhi, by the British in 1911. It is not quite politically correct to celebrate things done by former colonial masters, even though many of the country’s elite continue to polish their English accents, and relish their links with long-dethroned maharajas and lesser royal families. Times change of course. India is no longer a struggling underdeveloped nation but an internationally recognised economic power, albeit with many problems of under-development. Britain on the other hand, no longer rules the waves and has become an island of declining economic and political importance, located geographically and emotionally offshore from the European continent. Rather like India’s old maharajas, it still carries some clout internationally, even though its current Prime Minister, David Cameron, likes rather obsequiously to underplay its importance when on foreign visits. Strong ties remain between the two countries, strengthened by the councommon language of English that has become Britain’s most enduring worldwide colonial legacy. The young flock to the US for university education and most parents aspire for their children to become Harvard graduates and US investment bankers, rather than British equivalents. But the UK is more accessible, and it has become fashionable for the rich to have a flat in London, especially in Mayfair where businessmen such as Anil Agarwal of Vedanta and Subrata Roy of Sahara have set up kudosseeking camps — Agarwal by buying a palatial former Rothschild’s house and Roy by buying the Grosvenor House Hotel. But India still could not be expected to celebrate a British century so, after much debate and procrastination, it was eventually decided early last year to mark not the anniversary of King George’s mela, but the historical ‘re-emergence’ 100 years ago of Delhi as the capital. Re-emergence of course was a neat word, making the celebrations a sly dig at the British who had earlier moved the capital from Delhi to Calcutta in the late 18th century. Last month, I drove to Coronation Park in the north-eastern outskirts of the capital, where statues of King George and other dignitaries were dumped on brick plinths in the 1960s by a government that was unsure what to do with these embarrassing relics of a not-sodistant past. Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union and China (plus the US more recently in Iraq) demolish such statues, but the world’s largest democracy has been more self-consciously caring, and instead of carting King George’s statue off from the India Gate canopy on Raj Path to a stone breakers yard, planted him along with his peers in the distant park. The forsaken location was an apt choice for the statues — not only was it largely hidden from view, but it was also the site of three imperial British durbars. The third of these huge celebrations of colonial pomp and power was the one in 1911, when King George visited the councommon try with his wife, Queen Mary, to mark his coronation a few months earlier. Addressing some 100,000 spectators of varying grandeur on December 12, he announced the new capital, which was eventually built in the 1920s and 1930s. While Delhi was growing into a conurbation of approaching 20 mn people, grass grew around the crumbling imperial monuments, encircled (as I discovered when I last went there a decade or so ago) by a wall and rusty gate with a padlock that a bored attendant would sometimes open to curious (usually British) visitors. Several statues vanished, leaving topless plinths that added to the desolate symbolism. Some went to welcoming destinations in the UK, Ireland and Australia — Rufus Daniel Isaacs, the first Marquis of Reading and a Viceroy in the 1920s, for example now stands in the English town of Reading where he was taken by his family. At the park last month, I found 200 or so labourers shifting earth and chipping stone walkways to mark the re-emergence’ anniversary with new ornamental gardens. King George’s statue, and a ceremonial column with a plaque that he unveiled in 1911 to mark his coronation a few months earlier, will be the notable features at the revived park along with four other remaining British statues. Conservators have sometimes tried to clean up the site in the past, and eventually Delhi authorities agreed that the park should be renovated and expanded, and that is what is now happening, with the main part due for completion in August. “It doesn’t matter if it was the Moguls or the British. We are interested in conserving history and we can’t not do it just because it’s King George the Fifth”, says A.G. Krishna Menon, who heads the Delhi branch of INTACH, the conservation organisation that is running the work with Delhi authorities. The Delhi of today is a proud city of immigrants, notably people who fled from Pakistan after Independence in 1947, and who have turned it into a major business centre as well as a seat of government. Now it is a home of millions who throng here for work, especially from the poorer states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, as well as multi-national companies and others that have helped build the chaotic under-resourced satellite city of Gurgaon and the neater satellite of Noida. It is a city of energy, vibrancy, resourcefulness and skills — all more evident in old Delhi than the wide and elegant but rather antisocial Lutyens bungalow zone of the 20th century city. And it has a rapidly growing and efficient metro railway. But there is also worsening pollution, corruption, illegally dangerous buildings, poverty and the brash selfishness of the newly rich. But though often condemned by its residents, with the best-off usually saying they would prefer to live somewhere else, it is a place that people always come to with hopes and dreams, and that will continue, as will the links with the British. The views expressed in this column are of the author alone.