Built on Bias

London Letter

Unmasking the prejudices behind Lutyens’ architectural legacy in New Delhi

Approach from the east hiding the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Pic – Wikipedia

By Shyam Bhatia

When Edwin Lutyens was commissioned by the British Empire to design a new capital for India in the early 20th century, he was entrusted with more than buildings. He was asked to give architectural form to imperial authority — an ambition that would take shape in New Delhi and in what is today Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Lutyens remains widely regarded as one of Britain’s foremost architects. His work in India is often described in terms of scale, symmetry and permanence: a city laid out with clarity, its avenues ordered, its central vista commanding. Much of that landscape still defines the ceremonial and political core of modern India. The buildings have endured. Their aesthetic authority has rarely been in doubt.

But alongside this public legacy, there exists another record — less visible, but no less important.

In private letters written between 1912 and 1914, while he was working on the new capital, Lutyens recorded his impressions of India with striking frankness. These were not official statements or considered essays. They were informal, often hurried observations written to his wife. Precisely for that reason, they carry a particular weight. They reveal what he thought when he was not performing for an audience.

Writing from Madras, he described the people he encountered as “degenerate,” remarking on their appearance in terms that were both sweeping and dismissive. He notes, almost in passing, that others considered them intelligent — but the acknowledgment makes no difference to his conclusion. It is registered and then ignored.

This pattern repeats itself across his correspondence. The judgments are not isolated or offhand. They accumulate.

India, in his view, is repeatedly characterised as chaotic, unclean, excessive. Its cities repel him with what he sees as disorder and sensory overload. Its religious life is treated not as belief but as spectacle — something to be reduced rather than understood. Its people appear not as individuals with distinct identities, but as a collective presence, flattened into type.

At times, the language becomes openly crude. He resorts to racial terms that were common within imperial discourse but are jarring to modern readers. There is a tone of irritation that runs through these passages — a sense not simply of difference, but of impatience with that difference.

Even where admiration appears, it is qualified to the point of disappearance. The Taj Mahal, for example, is acknowledged as remarkable, but dismissed as something other than “architecture” in the serious sense of the term. Indian buildings are described as lacking structure or discipline — “tents in stone.” Craft traditions are treated as decorative rather than intellectual achievements, the work of hands rather than of minds.

What emerges from these observations is not merely prejudice, but a coherent framework. Lutyens did not see India as possessing an architectural or civilisational tradition equal to that of Europe. Where he recognised merit, he attributed it to external influence — Italian, classical, or vaguely “Oriental,” but not fundamentally Indian. The implication was clear: value came from elsewhere.

India, in this view, required instruction. Western architectural principles would impose order, teaching Indians how to think spatially, how to build with discipline, how to organise the built environment according to rational principles. Architecture, then, becomes more than design. It becomes pedagogy — and, by extension, control.

At one point, reflecting on the difficulties of working with Indian craftsmen, Lutyens goes further, suggesting that the problem lies not simply in training but in the men themselves. The remark is brief but revealing. It points toward a belief that hierarchy is natural, even necessary — a belief that echoes wider currents in early 20th-century imperial thinking.

These assumptions were not confined to architecture. They extended into politics. Lutyens wrote of Indian aspirations to self-government in terms that suggested immaturity rather than legitimacy. The nationalist movement appeared to him less as a political awakening than as a form of misbehaviour — an impatience that risked disorder.

The conclusion followed naturally from the premise: authority must remain in British hands, at least for the foreseeable future.

This matters because Lutyens was not simply describing India. He was shaping it.

The city he helped design was intended as the administrative and symbolic centre of British rule. It was conceived not only as a place to govern from, but as a place that would express governance itself. The built environment was meant to communicate stability, hierarchy and permanence.

Seen in that light, the physical layout of New Delhi takes on a deeper significance. The separation between the new imperial capital and the older city of Shahjahanabad is not merely practical. It establishes distance — spatial and symbolic. The elevation of the central complex, crowned by what is now Rashtrapati Bhavan, creates a vantage point from which power looks outward and downward. The long, straight avenues impose a geometry that contrasts sharply with the dense, irregular patterns of the older city.

These choices can, of course, be explained in aesthetic terms. But they also align closely with the attitudes expressed in Lutyens’ letters. The city embodies a particular ordering of space — one in which authority is central, elevated and removed.

Architecture here functions as ideology made visible.

After independence, India did not reject this landscape. It absorbed it.

The buildings that once housed imperial administration were taken over by a democratic state. Their meanings shifted, even as their forms remained. Ceremonies once associated with colonial power were reinterpreted within a national framework. Over time, the architecture became part of India’s own institutional identity.

This process of adaptation has been both practical and symbolic. It reflects a broader pattern in postcolonial societies: the reuse of inherited structures in new political contexts.

Yet adaptation is not the same as endorsement.

The question of how to use a building is different from the question of whom to honour.

The recent removal of Lutyens’ bust from Rashtrapati Bhavan, replaced by that of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, reflects this distinction. It forms part of a wider reassessment of the symbols associated with colonial rule — visible in the renaming of roads, the recontextualisation of institutions, and the re-evaluation of public figures.

Such changes are often described as erasure. In practice, they are better understood as acts of selection. Every society chooses which aspects of its past to foreground. Commemoration is not neutral; it is a statement about values.

Lutyens’ reputation, meanwhile, continues to exist in multiple forms. His buildings remain central to the functioning of the Indian state. His name is still associated with a particular vision of urban order. At the same time, objects connected to his life — such as caricature busts and personal artefacts — circulate in museums and collections, carrying with them traces of how he saw himself in relation to India.

These afterlives are not incidental. They show how cultural authority persists, even as political authority changes hands.

There will, inevitably, be those who argue that Lutyens should be judged within the context of his time. The early 20th century was shaped by imperial assumptions that are now widely rejected. On that level, his views are not unusual.

But the letters suggest something more than passive reflection of prevailing attitudes. They reveal a sustained and articulated hierarchy — one that spans culture, religion, aesthetics and governance. It is this coherence that gives them their force.

Lutyens’ architectural achievement is not in question. Few architects have shaped a capital city with comparable clarity or ambition. His work continues to define one of the most recognisable urban landscapes in the world.

Yet the same mind that produced that clarity also imposed limits — on what it could see, and on how it understood the society around it.

The distance recorded in his letters is not simply personal. It is structural.

And once that distance is acknowledged, it becomes difficult to treat the architecture as entirely separate from the ideas that informed it.

Shyam Bhatia is a London-based Indian-born British journalist, writer, and war reporter. He has covered conflicts in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Sudan, and is a former diplomatic editor for The Observer.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 8 May 2026