Delhi (14 page)

New Delhi was built for modern rule via the car and telephone. For all the wider city's older history, then, it shares the air of other modern purpose-built capitals like Canberra, Brasilia, and Islamabad. Deliberately selected for their more central locations, in the face of more populous and difficult metropolitan rivals, such cities have frequently struggled to carve out an identity of their own. Delhi, like Washington, D.C., risked becoming a bureaucratic enclave in a city of tombs. As Curzon had argued so passionately in 1912:

There is serious danger that, when you have built your capital at Delhi, the Government will become more isolated, more bureaucratic, less in touch with public opinion than it is now. You are going to create a territorial enclave; you are also going to run the risk that your Government will become a political enclave.'

Few would argue against this charge now.

Some of its continuing unpopularity stems from this mechanical character, only weakly grafted onto the pre-existing organic body. A cyborg or a doll might be more human than a robot, but they are still less than loveable.

Not all planned cities were lucky enough to have a prehistory, though, or to avoid the concrete architectural psychosis of Le Corbusier. (His modernist masterpiece, the city of Chandigarh, is less than 200 kilometres away.) With his friend-cum-nemesis Herbert Baker, Lutyens would design a city perhaps second only to Saint Petersburg among planned cities—and more visually arresting, and hubristic, even than Peter the Great's painted city of bones.

The centrepiece of New Delhi was designed as an acropolis, a city on a hill to echo the Capitol in Rome. But Lutyens' Delhi refers to more than the grand area on Raisina Hill. Unlike Chandigarh or Brasilia, it is no desert of slabs, but a surprisingly green zone for all its pollution. His mentor and professional partner, Gertrude Jekyll, was a garden designer. New Delhi was landscaped as much as constructed. Lutyens takes popular credit for the broad leafy avenues, watercourses and lawn-lined bungalows that make up the bulk of New Delhi. Its trees bear fruit and flowers. His masterwork, the Viceroy's House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan), is almost as celebrated for its huge gardens as for its combination of European and Indian elements. The scheme was unashamedly elitist, enforcing the physical distance between ruler and ruled—but at least in the form of a garden city rather than a concrete jungle. It is an endangered species, however, as developers seek to move in.

On one of these leafy avenues, I met a senior politician at his home. It was disconcertingly easy to access, guarded only by peacocks and a single skinny guard. Three other petitioners and I sat in an anteroom, the rooms lined with bookshelves and portraits of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, and the politician himself. His reading tastes were impressively catholic and leaned towards the academic, though several of the books were his own. After only a few minutes I was ushered through into a tasteful office full of dark wood furniture. He stood to greet me, a thin grey pencil moustache in a white kurta.

The sociologist Susan Ostrander points out some of the perils of interviewing elites. They are inclined ‘to “just talk”—easily, freely, and at great length, but not necessarily to the issues in which the researcher is most interested'. How true, Prof. O., how true. She recommends looking ostentatiously bored, all but tapping your watch, until they shut up and you can get on with your questions. This did not seem like an option to me: first, because it's very rude, and secondly, because it is totally ineffective.

The politician had the air of a man who said ‘
Enchanté
' when introduced to colleagues' nieces. He was charming, erudite, and utterly deft in evading my questions. He had an answer for everything, sweeping forwards and backwards through Indian history. Like a Victorian gentleman, he flowed with apposite quotations—Dickens! Kipling! Nehru!—and I could see why he had the ability to virtually filibuster the Indian parliament single-handed.

At the end of the hour (such generosity with his time! I marvelled), I was very gently guided back out with the promise of another interview at the time of my choice. I left with a smile and a sheaf of notes. It was only later, sitting in an auto on the way home, that I realized I had learned precisely nothing. This gloriously charming evasion is a gift, a gift that could only exist in a democracy. I felt almost jealous of the sheer skill.

For all this greenery, the stony final product at the centre of the scheme still seems to embody some of the less likeable characteristics of its notorious, pun-loving architect. It is brilliant, troubled, egotistical, gripped by financial worries, and at times faintly absurd. In fact, one commentator notes that the dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan bears a striking resemblance to Lutyens' own bald, precise and ‘phenomenally round' head.

The dusty surrounding tarmac is almost empty, but for a smattering of police and the yellow slashes of traffic barricades. The flat roundness of Sansad Bhavan, home of the Indian Parliament, lies on one side like a great toothy burger. Inside sit two houses, the more powerful Lok Sabha (House of the People) and the indirectly elected upper house, the Rajya Sabha (Council of States). I say the houses sit: in fact over the last couple of years Parliament has been plagued by adjournments, disruptions and walkouts, losing a third of its scheduled time. Sansad Bhavan's circular shape is echoed outside by the television vans, their bloom of satellite dishes angled to the air and lapping up every second of evasive drama.

From here it is an intimidating and lonely stroll upwards. At the top of the slope on the sweeping approach from Rajpath (the Kingsway) sprawls Rashtrapati Bhavan, the president's house and still the largest head-of-state's residence in the world. Its classical dome and spiny column are just visible through delicate ironwork, levitating on grass. The gateposts are set with elephants and little fat-kneed cherubim. It sits a little too far back for real effect, Lutyens having lost the battle with Baker—his ‘Bakerloo'—to secure the prime location.

Somehow approaching heavily guarded public landmarks always brings out the sweaty palms and shifty eyes. Never google terrorist behaviours before setting off on holiday, because the tourist ticks a lot of them off: carrying lists of major buildings, photography, backpacks, crowded areas, regular cash withdrawals, hostility to locals and attempts to aggressively avoid their questions… I tottered up the slope, trying to look inconspicuous. My bag looked menacingly swollen on my hip. Even my walk felt guilty. Maybe my sunglasses looked suspicious—perhaps I should take them off—or maybe that looked worse. I twitched with the dilemma. My camera was in my bag and it was all very photogenic, but I felt certain a red sniper dot was already hovering over my back. Should I walk faster, or did that look too purposeful for a tourist? Should I walk more slowly, or would that look like
loitering with intent
?

The thickset symmetrical cuboids of the Secretariat buildings are not Lutyens' but Baker's. North and South Blocks rear up on each side, looking strangely wet-footed in their two-toned stone. Each holds a series of bureaucrats and government departments (and, if my sources are correct, the occasional rogue monkey). Together they provide India's skull, sepulchral and oddly hollow-eyed with their lines of columns and helmeted domes. In 1929 Georges Clemenceau exclaimed, ‘What beautiful ruins this will make!' (In the event, it was Clem's ruins which almost came to India: laden with toxic waste, the aircraft carrier
Clemenceau
was due to be scrapped in Gujarat. After public protest it was forced to return to France—and eventually ended up coughing asbestos at the English port of Hartlepool.)

This is isolation and arrogance institutionalized in stone, as Curzon warned. The bureaucratic nucleus, the brain of India, is set above and apart from the rest of the city. Above, curiously, Baker's old colonial inscription has been preserved. It is a sneer of cold command which even the then viceroy found ‘rather pointed':

Liberty will not descend to a people;

A people must raise themselves to liberty;

It is a blessing which must be earned before it can be enjoyed
.

The scale of this central hub is vast and pitiless—it has unsurprisingly been likened to fascist architecture. The individual citizen is left unmoored, the sun beating down on hot flat stone.

But there is something more. The politicians and bureaucrats, too, are dwarfed, the rulers themselves mere squatters in the vast monuments. Lutyens' ambition was on a superhuman scale, soaring impassively above the prosaic realities of power. There is a reason that New Delhi combines architectural concepts and motifs that reference great capital cities from ancient Rome to Haussmann's Paris, Christopher Wren's London and Mughal Delhi. It seeks to be impervious to history and the small things of men. Lutyens' vision extended even beyond the great pink-mapped empire of the British: ‘The Viceroy thinks only of what the place will look like in three years' time. Three hundred is what I think of.'

Don't be fooled by Lutyens' stone edifices. He was always famous for sketching dreams and building impractical fairytale houses. Delhi is a city made of paper as much as mortar, a city of money and files.

The Indian state is a paper tiger. It is prodigiously productive in inky terms. The central government representatives I have met have been genuinely impressive, committed, knowledgeable and educated. They are attempting to build a state recognizable in Washington, D.C. and Berlin, a state based on rulebooks and rationality. The Secretariat and its ilk burst with paperwork: reports, protocols, inventories, statements, briefings, letters, laws, memos, registers, accounts, notes, schedules, charts, specifications, catalogues, programmes, orders, inspections, certificates and censuses. They build towers out of reams of paper, statistical fortifications to keep out reality.

But this castle of paper cannot support the billion-plus people who crowd upon it. Technical capacity to
develop
policies is high—but their implementation is half-fictional. Targets are set, and repeatedly missed. The ubiquitous audits and evaluations neatly quantify shortcomings and explain defeats away into blank white oblivion. The state collects information, files and orders it. Much of this paperwork is not read by anyone. But it has its own strange dystopian logic. Writing is power, especially in a country which still has high illiteracy rates and overvalues English.

The Indian state too often looks like a brain in a jar, dreaming beautiful but ineffectual dreams. In the words of economist Lant Pritchett, ‘India today is a
flailing
state'. Its head remains sound and functional, but is ‘no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs'. Critics are divided about whether this is simply a sign of chaos, or of a more sinister indifference towards the poor which disregards the state's own hyperactive failure.

Off I set to take a look at this papery side of Delhi. A PhD student can hardly fail to sympathize with its forlorn efforts, after all.

Shastri Bhavan, home to the coal, oil and mines ministries alongside law, culture, and women's development, sprawls—but not in Lutyens' elegantly autocratic style. Instead, it's more reminiscent of the giant blocky pisspots of Bucharest and other Soviet concretocracies, a set of box files rearing out of a short layer of trees. Outside, rows of flabby white Ambassador cars loll next to kebab stands and flabby brown soldiers.

Inside was structured chaos. Piles of people clamoured for a chit permitting entry, as a woman in the corner stamped blank documents with religious fervour. I had a moment of too-British hesitation, but eventually plucked up courage and thrust myself forward. Unsmiling, a finger on an entry in a thick inky ledger, the guard made a quick phonecall. I signed, signed again, and got my paper pass.

Within the building, the ministries jumble upon one another. It is a maze of brown walls, half-broken lifts, and grey rooms bursting with dusty files. The air was dim and sticky with the faint pervasive smell of the gents'. I paced through, slowly at first and then more desperately. The room numbers were mysterious, in that nagging way that appears logical at first glance. Peons shuffled past, mustering only vague curiosity as I scrutinized sign after sign after sign.