Did you know that there was a bust of the architect Edwin Lutyens outside Rashtrapati Bhavan?
I certainly did not.
I knew that Lutyens had designed the building as a palace for the British Viceroy and that it had been inaugurated by the Raj in 1931 with celebrations that had not been attended by most freedom-fighting Indian leaders and had been described by Jawaharlal Nehru as being marked by ‘vulgar, ostentation and wasteful extravagance.’
But that they had decided to keep a bust of the architect on display was news to me as I imagine it was to most Indians. Lutyens is better known in England than he is here and most Indians can’t even pronounce his name. (It’s nearer “Luchens” than “Lootyens”.) If he is ever mentioned in India then it is in the context of the city of New Delhi where he designed the buildings in which Prime Minister Modi and his ministers have resided for over a decade. (Curiously the term “Lootyens elite” is used not to describe the elite who actually live in those buildings but as a general abuse for English-language speaking Indians.)
So I don’t think it matters much to us in India whether a bust whose existence we were unaware of is removed or not. But there has, nevertheless, been some measure of debate over the decision to replace it with a bust of C Rajagopalachari the first Governor General of independent India.
The argument against its removal runs like this: it’s all very well to remove reminders of Raj oppressors such as Viceroys, Generals and Governors but why extend this principle to architects? Lutyens did no harm to Indians. He only designed buildings.
| "Why then should we bother too much with a British architect sent here as a servant of the Crown to build a palace for his King’s Viceroy?" |
It’s not an entirely unreasonable argument but it embodies the principle that anyone who designs a grand building should have a statue of himself installed in it. This is a strange position to take. Are we going to erect a statue of Bimal Patel in the new part of governmental Delhi? Why should Lutyens’s supporters insist that he has the right to a bust in Rashtrapati Bhavan? It may well be a magnificent building and nobody is denying him the credit for building it. But a bust? Doesn’t it make more sense to install busts of the important historical figures who lived in that building rather than the fellow who designed it?
What’s worse is the tendency of some Brits to compare the Raj to the Mughals. What about the Taj Mahal then? Somebody tweeted. Wasn’t that a colonial building too?
This should be obnoxious but actually it just sounds silly. The Mughals, for better or worse, became an Indian dynasty. They were not like British colonialists who came here to rob India blind, who crippled our economic development to keep the factories of Manchester and other places in business, and who never ever saw themselves as Indians. Honestly, when I hear this kind of nonsense I feel like bopping the people who spout this rubbish over their heads with a hardcover edition of Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness: The British in India.
And in any case aren’t Lutyens’s Brit fans overstating his importance? The parallel is not with Shah Jahan and the Taj. It is with the architect of the Taj and most of us don’t know his name either. Why then should we bother too much with a British architect sent here as a servant of the Crown to build a palace for his King’s Viceroy?
It may not make much difference to me if the bust stays or goes. But it does annoy me that so many Brits think we are obliged to keep the bust because independent India should remember His Majesty’s Viceroy’s architect.
And the more I hear Brits outrage about the removal of the bust in the manner of Germans of a certain generation singing the praises of Albert Speer the more I start to think that perhaps we should have got rid of the damn thing in 1947 itself.
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