Place · planned imperial capital · India

New Delhi, Lutyens' plan

Date

1912–1931

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

28.614, 77.210

Worth knowing

The move was announced by George V at the 1911 durbar and the first foundation stones were laid at a site on the Ridge, then dug up and carried south when the plan changed. Lutyens gave the Viceroy's House a dome derived from the Sanchi stupa and chattris on the roofline, and fought Baker for years over the gradient of the approach, which hides the building from the Great Place until you are almost at it.

Connections (12)

• Successor capital ofKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan

  The capital moved from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, announced by George V at the Durbar, partly to get away from Bengali political agitation after the 1905 partition of the province and partly for the prestige of ruling from the Mughal capital. Lutyens and Baker then took twenty years over the new city, which was inaugurated in 1931 and served its empire for sixteen years.

• Succession in timeRed Fort, Delhi

  The Red Fort was where Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried in 1858 and where Nehru raised the flag in 1947 — the end of Mughal rule and the beginning of the Republic performed on the same ground. Between the two, the British moved the capital from Calcutta back to Delhi in 1911 and built Lutyens' axial city three kilometres south, finishing it less than two decades before they left.

• Sacred transplantSārnāth

  The lion capital from Ashoka's pillar at Sarnath, carved in the third century BCE for a Buddhist site, was adopted in 1950 as the state emblem of the Indian republic, and the wheel below it went onto the flag. So the seals of a government sitting in Lutyens' imperial capital carry an image made for the place where the Buddha first taught — a deliberate choice of an Indian antiquity older than any of the powers that had ruled from Delhi.

• Power passed toOld Goa

  Portugal refused to negotiate over Goa after 1947, arguing that it was not a colony but metropolitan territory. Nehru's government, under pressure after the 1955 satyagraha was fired on, sent the army in on 18 December 1961; the Governor-General surrendered the next day. Lisbon recognised the transfer only in 1974, after the Carnation Revolution ended the Estado Novo.

• Power passed toPuducherry (Pondicherry)

  France and India agreed a referendum of the enclaves' elected representatives, held at Kizhur near Karaikal on 18 October 1954; the de facto transfer followed on 1 November. The Treaty of Cession was signed in 1956 and ratified in 1962. Unlike Goa, French India changed hands by vote and treaty rather than by an army, and kept its French civil law for those who claim it.

• Contemporary capital withViceregal Lodge, Shimla

  British India had two capitals at once for most of its life: a winter seat in the plains and a summer seat at seven thousand feet. New Delhi was finished in 1931 and the Shimla migration continued until 1939. The 1945 Simla Conference and the Cabinet Mission's 1946 talks were held uphill, which is why partition was largely negotiated in a hill station.

• CampaignJallianwala Bagh

  The Rowlatt Acts of 1919, passed in Delhi over the unanimous opposition of the Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council, extended wartime detention into peace and produced the hartal that Amritsar's crowd had gathered after. The Hunter Committee censured Dyer and he was retired; the Commons and the Lords argued about him for a decade. Non-cooperation began the following year.

• AnalogueChhatrapati Shivaji Terminus

  Lutyens' Delhi and the Bombay terminus are the two clearest statements of what the Raj wanted architecture to say, forty years apart and in opposite directions. The station is Gothic revival with Indian detail applied to a wholly European structure; New Delhi is classical with Buddhist railings and chattris built into its mass. Both were finished just as their purpose ran out.

• Monument relocationFīroz Shāh Kotla & the Topra pillar

  Firoz Shah moved an Ashokan pillar from Topra to his new capital in 1354; five and a half centuries later the British moved the capital itself to Delhi and built a new city around the same river plain. Both were deliberate claims on Delhi's accumulated authority, and Lutyens's planners surveyed and preserved the earlier cities' monuments as part of the plan.

• PrecursorJaipur walled city

  Jaipur of 1727 and New Delhi of 1931 are both planned capitals with a ceremonial axis, a fixed street hierarchy and a controlled elevation, laid out two hundred years apart by a Rajput ruler with a Bengali planner and by two British architects. Lutyens's team surveyed Jaipur; the hexagonal geometry and the axial vista are not borrowed from it, but the claim that India had no planning tradition is not sustainable beside it.

• Succession in timeChandigarh Capitol Complex

  New Delhi was finished in 1931 and Chandigarh begun in 1952, and the second is a deliberate answer to the first: no axis to a viceroy, no classical order, sectors instead of avenues, and a capitol set apart from the city rather than above it. Nehru asked for something unfettered by the traditions of the past, and got a European modernist's version of that.

• Site withinDelhi

  New Delhi, Lutyens' plan lies within Delhi — the two sites sit about 0 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. New Delhi, Lutyens' plan is one of the specific sites that give Delhi its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.

On these journeys

• Colonial & republican urbanism
• Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
• Delhi — the seven cities and beyond
• British India — 1600 to 1947

Sources

Wikipedia, “New Delhi”. Robert Grant Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi (1981); the Delhi Town Planning Committee reports, 1913.

• Wikipedia — New Delhi