Journey
Colonial & republican urbanism
Four cities the British built or remade, three railways that reorganised Indian distance, two planned capitals — one imperial and one republican — and one deposed king's house, put beside the planned city a Rajput ruler laid out two centuries before any of them, because that comparison is the whole point of the set.
Stops (11)
- Fort St George, Chennai · 1640
The first English fortification in India, on a strip of beach bought from a Vijayanagara feudatory, with the weaving village of Madraspatnam beside it. The Company first collected revenue, minted coin and held a court here, so the machinery of a colonial city appears before there is any territory to govern.
- Kolkata: Fort William & the Maidan · 1690 · capital to 1911
Three villages on the Hooghly became a fort, then the seat of Bengal's revenue administration, then the capital of British India, with the cleared field of fire around Fort William surviving as the Maidan. Most nineteenth-century Indian reform movements first argued with each other in this city. The Bengal Renaissance, the Brahmo Samaj and the Indian National Congress all have addresses within a mile of the Maidan.
- Victorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai · 1860s–1940s
A Victorian Gothic seafront facing an Art Deco one across a maidan — the High Court, the University and the Secretariat on one side, and the cinemas and apartment blocks of the 1930s on the other. Two imperial generations in one sightline, built on ground reclaimed after the Fort walls came down.
- Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus · 1878–1887
Bori Bunder, where India's first train left for Thane in 1853, rebuilt as a Gothic cathedral to the railway with Mughal detail, a dome and a figure of Progress on top. The station is where the colonial city stopped being a port with a hinterland and became the head of a network.
- Mountain railways: Darjeeling · 1881
The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, two-foot gauge, climbing two thousand metres by loops and Z-reverses rather than tunnels because tunnels cost more. It was built to carry tea down and planters up, and the town at the top of it existed because the administration wanted somewhere cool to sit. The town at the top of it existed because the administration wanted somewhere cool to sit through the summer.
- Nilgiri Mountain Railway · 1899–1908
The Nilgiri Mountain Railway, using an Abt rack and pinion on its steepest section — the only rack railway in India — to reach Ooty at an average speed under ten kilometres an hour. Both mountain lines exist because the government of India migrated uphill every summer. Both mountain lines exist because the government of India migrated uphill every April until 1939.
- Viceregal Lodge, Shimla · 1888
The Viceregal Lodge on Observatory Hill at Shimla, Scottish baronial in Himalayan pine forest, from which half of every year's government of India was conducted until 1939. The 1945 Simla Conference and the 1947 partition discussions were held in it, so partition was largely negotiated in a hill station. Partition was therefore negotiated largely in a hill station reachable only by mule track until 1903.
- Thibaw Palace, Ratnagiri · 1906
The house at Ratnagiri where Thibaw, the last king of Burma, lived out thirty years of exile after the annexation of 1885, with his household and a Company pension. It is the counterpart to Bahadur Shah Zafar in Rangoon: two empires ended by deporting their last monarch to the other's coast.
- New Delhi, Lutyens' plan · 1911–1931
An imperial capital laid out on axial sightlines below Raisina Hill, twenty years in building and finished sixteen years before the empire it was built for ended. Lutyens and Baker gave it a dome from Sanchi and chattris on the roofline, and the Republic inherited it intact. The Republic inherited it intact and still governs from it, which no other Delhi has managed.
- Chandigarh Capitol Complex · 1952–1965
Le Corbusier's Capitol Complex for a state that had lost Lahore to Partition: the Secretariat, the Assembly and the High Court around a plaza that was never finished. It is the only modernist World Heritage property in India and the first Indian city planned after independence. Nehru asked for something unfettered by the traditions of the past and got a European modernist's version of that.
- Jaipur walled city · 1727
Jaipur, laid out on a nine-square grid derived from shastraic planning with colonnaded bazaar streets of uniform height, two centuries before any of the colonial plans above it. It is here to correct the assumption that Indian urban planning began with the Europeans who wrote about it. It is here to correct the assumption that Indian urban planning began with the Europeans who wrote about it.