Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  And so to Profit, if not a virtue, at least an intent. The urge for profit was implicit everywhere in Bombay, and set the seal upon the city as a work of Victorian allegory: in the dockyards clanging and smoking on the eastern shore, in the grand Mint and the Cotton Exchange, in the portly old offices of Horniman Square around their gardens, in the queues of the taxis and the rickshaw men, in the ships that lay perpetually beyond the Gateway of India, and the dhows threading nimble passages among their anchorages. It was a shabby old city by the 1930s, but its patina of age and dereliction served only to bind its symbolisms together, and make it feel more than ever a category of art.1

  Bombay was a picture in cracked and sombre oils. Penang, which reached its zenith in the 1930s, was a watercolour place, and stood above all for the serenity of Empire—for there were many parts of it that really did provide solace, for rulers and ruled alike. Penang had been British almost as long as Bombay, but since it suffered no social problems on the Indian scale, no terrible pressures of poverty or congestion, it had retained down the years a truly eighteenth-century elegance of manner, and looked like an imperial settlement in a diorama, or a quiet corner at Wembley. Penang Island was about fifty miles round, and lay three miles off the mainland coast in a blue and generally languid sea. A busy ferry connected its capital, Georgetown, with Port Butterworth on the mainland, but still it retained a pleasant island feeling, secluded, almost private. Nearly everybody liked Penang, and this affection was apparent in the look and feel of the island, which was green, and had agreeable beaches, and nice buildings, and often basked in a seductive sense of dolce far niente. Penang lived by the export of rubber and tin from the Malay forests, but it had a gently festive feel too, softened by the blandness, the sense of fading virility, that was so characteristic of the late Empire.

  The great charm of the place, the circumstance which gave it its air of artistic composition, was its microcosmic completeness. Within the perimeter of the island the whole pattern of imperial life in the tropics was conveniently displayed, as in an exhibition. On the southern shore, nearest the mainland, stood Georgetown. Here were the docks, and the Government offices, and the racecourses, and the polo ground, and the Penang Club of course, and all the usual appurtenances of a colonial town in the tropics. A delightful esplanade sauntered by the sea, with a cenotaph commemorating the dead of the Great War, and grouped all around were the white City Hall, the Supreme Court, a nice Anglican church with a spire, and a marvellous old imperial cemetery littered with the broken columns, rotundas and veiled urns of the Empire’s funerary tradition, its tombs often moulded together by age and dilapidation, and coloured by drooping frangipani.

  In their downtown offices, built in the truest 1930s Georgian along King Street and Caernarvon Street, Pitt Street and King Edward Place, the imperial businessmen in neatly pressed shorts and open-necked shirts supervised the imperial accounts and took their fair share of the imperial spoils. The Eastern and Oriental Hotel—the ‘E and O’ to every imperial traveller—sprawled cheerfully beside the water beyond the Esplanade, old Fort Cornwallis crumbled away beside the sea, and all over the city, filling its streets in like a filigree, embroidering its edges, were the bazaars and booths and stilted houses, the fishing huts and tenements, the mosques, temples, monasteries and Chinese restaurants of the various indigenes.

  And just along the road from Georgetown, thus concentrating the whole aesthetic of the imperial east into a few delightful square miles, there stood the island’s hill-station. In India, where hill-stations were invented, hundreds of miles separated Calcutta from Darjeeling, Madras from Ootacamund. Here one did the journey in half an hour, by way of a bustling little funicular railway, completed in 1923—which, lurching and slithering upwards through several layers of tropical foliage, with a change of trains half-way, deposited you blithely on the sunny green upland of Penang Hill, 2,500 feet above the hot and bustling city.

  The Governor had a bungalow up there, Bel Retiro, whose classic drawing-room views had been made familiar by many a beloved print, and there was a little village of attendant bungalows, for lesser officials, and a police station with a sergeant on duty to look after it all. Nearby was the Penang Hill Hotel, set among gardens: and on its verandah, looking across the lawn to the sweep of the distant sea, drinking a cool Malay stengah you could experience, as in some participatory theatre, the whole pattern of tropical empire, the leisure and the authority of it, the prospect of reward, the sweep of the eastern shore, the orchids, the remoteness, perhaps a little of the boredom, and possibly, if it were a Thursday afternoon, the tinkle of a piano slightly out of tune, the thin thread of Mr Ribiero’s Goan violin, from the tea-dance in the lounge behind.1

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  The institutional art of the Empire was seldom a success, at least in the twentieth century, because its message was seldom very decisive. It was compromise art, appeasement art, and it lacked the punch of certainty. Kuala Lumpur, for instance, the capital of British Malaya, was scarcely an imperial capital at all, so assiduously were its offices supplied with domes and Moorish arcades, so closely did its railway station approximate to a mosque, so modestly was the cricket club tucked away amidst the surrounding arabesques. Canberra, the capital designed for the Australians by the American architect W. B. Griffin, was hardly more assertive, being a kind of half-cock Washington, all avenues and artificial lake, where it took an age to walk from one Ministry to the next, and nothing but the scale of the place seemed to have anything specifically Australian about it. In South Africa the most thoroughly imperial of all the imperial architects, Sir Herbert Baker, created a Government headquarters intended to seal once and for all, in stone, the reconciliation of Boer and Briton. High above the old Transvaal capital, Union Buildings looked out across the Apies valley with a noble air, but not much fire—absolutely symmetrical, absolutely balanced, its wings balanced, its columns and fountains balanced, its war memorials all aligned, tree facing tree, peony matching peony, cactus aligned with cactus, giving the whole ensemble a suggestion of grand but sterile ritual, like a permanent thanksgiving service.

  But in the last generation of their power the British did build themselves one truly colossal self-memorial. The world might soon forget the messages of Canberra, K.L. or even Pretoria, but for better or worse, right or wrong, New Delhi, the capital of imperial India, would remain for ever an embodiment of the British presence. The imperialists intended it so, and they spent some thirty years putting the notion into practice. There were craftsmen in India who spent a working lifetime constructing this pyramid of the Raj: it was as though the British instinctively prepared for the end of their supremacy with an indestructible monument to themselves, like Ozymandias in the sand. The foundation stone of New Delhi was laid by King George V when he went to India for the Coronation Durbar of 1911; by the 1930s it was still only half-built.

  Like those other capitals, New Delhi as a whole lacked conviction. Built on the hillock called Raisina, outside the walls of old Delhi, it was splendid, it was beautiful, but it was faintly at odds with itself, as though it was not altogether sure what it was supposed to commemorate. It was too late for arrogance, too soon for regrets, and one could not be sure whether these structures were intended to be the halls of an eternal dominion, or whether their architects foresaw, as the sublimation of their art, Indians themselves sitting in graceful succession upon these thrones of power. When New Delhi was started, the New Imperialism was hardly over, the Great War had not happened, and if the Empire had lost its aggression, it had certainly not lost its complacency. Twenty years later the fire had left the imperial idea, and Gandhi was able to squat on the viceregal floor, as one senior official remarked of his visit to Irwin, eating ‘some filthy yellow stuff without so much as by your leave’. No wonder the great new capital lacked insolence.

  The architects of New Delhi were the ubiquitous Baker, who had spent almost his whole working life in the Empire, and Edwin Lutyens, who had hitherto had little to do with i
t, and it is revealing that the weakness of New Delhi lies mainly in Baker’s work, the true magnificence in Lutyens’: as though the one architect were faltering in his imperial convictions, while the other had none. Though they were old acquaintances, they were temperamental opposites. Baker was shy and un-social, and disliked the formalities and pretensions of Anglo-Indian life: ‘Ned’ Lutyens was witty and gregarious, was married to the daughter of a Viceroy, and relished every garden party and gymkhana. For twenty years they worked in an anomalous and later uncongenial partnership—his Bakerloo, Lutyens called it—each spending some six weeks of each year in India. English masons went out too, and the consulting engineers were British, but most of the work was done by an army of Indian labourers, men and women, working under able Sikh contractors to whom the building of New Delhi was a career in itself.1

  The setting was solemn, and the structures of the new capital looked out across a dun plain littered with the abandoned fabrics of predecessor empires. This was deliberate, for New Delhi was intended to evoke the historical consequence of Delhi—the Rome of Asia, as Murray’s Handbook used to call it, where a dozen dynasties had risen and fallen into decay. The main axis of New Delhi ran exactly east and west, but a secondary alignment, 60 degrees off, connected Raisina Hill directly with the great Jami Masjid mosque, the masterpiece of the Moghuls in the heart of old Delhi. Like a Chinese city governed by the principles of Feng Shui, it obeyed injunctions apparent only to its creators, and incorporated esoteric messages of its own. It was ornamented everywhere, for instance, with clusters of stone bells, meant to suggest the alleged Indian prophecy that when the bells of Delhi rang no more, the Raj would come to an end, and it was replete with improving texts and symbolisms, like the nauseating injunction to the indigenes that was affixed enormously to the Secretariat: Liberty Does Not Descend To A People. A People Must Raise Themselves to Liberty. It Is A Blessing That Must Be Earned Before It Can Be Enjoyed. There were Meanings all over New Delhi, and far away down the ceremonial approach, Kingsway, ornamental pools, tracks and shrubberies seemed to suggest astronomical implications, like the mystic lays and circles of the ancients. New Delhi was intended to be, so its architects said, neither British, nor Indian, nor Roman: simply Imperial.

  The capital proper was conceived in three parts: the Secretariat, the circular Assembly Chamber, the Viceroy’s palace. Around it was laid out a garden city for the chiefs, bureaucrats and feudatories of the Indian Empire. The richer princely States had their ownpalaces, surrounded by a Princes’ Park closed to the public, and radiating from several hubs ran the domestic streets of the civil service and the military, each planted with a different kind of tree. The Commander-in-Chief, the second most powerful man in India,had his own palace, due south of the Viceroy’s, and half-way along the axis to the Jami Masjid a big shopping plaza was built, providing a sort of junction between India of the Raj and India of the people. Kingsway ran for two miles straight as a die from the Viceroy’spalace towards the great ruined citadel of the Purana Qila, and there were plans to complete the conception with a ceremonial boulevard along the river.

  The Secretariat buildings, facing one another at the western end of Kingsway, were Baker’s work. They were grandiose but weak, and managed in a curious way, rare in monumental architecture, to look rather smaller than they really were. Their immense colonnaded façades, eaved and turreted, and riddled with huge echoing courts and staircases, felt oddly insubstantial from close quarters, and Baker’s characteristic progressions of vistas, arches seen through arches, columns ending arcades, belvederes and courts and galleries, worked less well in the changeable and dust-laden Indian light than they did in the clarity of Africa. The buildings looked what they were, institutional, and if their eaves and shady corners made them pleasantly cool in summer, generations of civil servants were to curse the name of Baker when the bitter Delhi winter reached through the unglazed staircase windows.

  Beyond them on the hill, though—the Acropolis, Baker thought, to their Propylea—Lutyens built the greatest monument of the imperial architecture, the Viceroy’s palace. Its presence was weakened by a squabble between the architects. It should have beenapproached as through a ravine between the Secretariat buildings, but Baker declined to reduce the gradient of the roadway, so that an unworthy bump in Kingsway obstructed the central view, and weakened the impact of the palace. Even so, it formed a tremendous climax to the capital. Lutyens conceived it as the destination of a colossal ceremonial way: away from the river boulevard to the east, up the uncompromising unwavering Kingsway, past the tall white figure of King George V in his cupola, under the Arch of India inscribed with the names of the imperial war dead, between the lofty slabs of the Secretariat, through the tall wrought-iron gates of the palace entrance, across the gravelled courtyard with its grave viceregal statues, up the immense ceremonial steps, through the arched loggia, and so, hardly deviating an inch from the start of the main east-west axis two miles away, directly into the throne room of the Viceroy of India, where the Crown’s Anointed, seated with his lady in the sumptuous regalia of his rank, would greet you with a fitting condescension, and accept your humble courtesies.

  In designing this unexampled palace Lutyens made no concession to the imperial falter. Perhaps he had not noticed it. He built the house as for an absolute monarch, a later Moghul—India, he said, had made him ‘Very Tory—pre-Tory, feudal’. Certainly he seemed to accept implicitly the old Anglo-Indian maxim that to rule India successfully a ruler must live magnificently. Grander and grander had risen the structures of Indian sovereignty, ever gaudier trundled the elephants of Empire, until in New Delhi ‘Ned’ Lutyens, the urbane and puckish creator of English country houses, built upon Raisina Hill a palace fit for a Sun-King.

  It was bigger than Versailles in fact, and perhaps more powerful, for it was more compactly structured. It was 600 feet square, more or less, and including its twelve enclosed courtyards, covered four and a half acres. Lutyens designed it all, down to the 130 chairs of the State dining-room—it was said to be the largest project ever undertaken by a single architect. It was not at all like his neo-Georgian fancies of Kent or Sussex, with their gentle brickwork and unassuming entrances, its style being set by a rather bizarre central feature, a vast shallow dome of faintly Byzantine bearings. In fact this was curiously derived from the celebrated Buddhist stupa at Sanchi in Bhopal; in adapting it Lutyens cut off its base, lifted the whole of it bodily, so to speak, as he might remove the dome of St Paul’s, and deposited it, complete with its surrounding balustrade, on top of a squat square tower.

  The rest of the house was just as boldly hybrid. If it was like a gentleman’s country house in some ways, it was like a despot’s castle in others. Its comfortable private quarters were balanced by immense offices of State, and its wings and courtyards were linked by interminable bazaar-like corridors, marble-arched and marble-floored, whose traffic of liveried servants, aides and hurrying bodyguards gave the building the feel of an arcaded oriental city of its own. The garden was part rose-bed English, part water and clipped trees in the Moghul style, and all through the courtyards and passages cobra-fountains spouted their water into the sunshine, and lines of elaborate lamps swung heavily in the breeze.

  The Viceroy’s private quarters were like rooms in the stateliest but most comfortable of English country houses—the Lutyens vernacular enormously magnified. The baths were Romanly lavish, the lavatories had the very latest kind of flushing system, there was a handsome loggia suitable for conversation pictures and a classic country gentleman’s library of fiction, travel, history and biography. The Durbar Room was circular, lofty and awesome, with a floor of porphyry and columns of yellow jasper. The grand central staircase was open to the sky. The Council Chamber was decorated with a fresco, covering one entire wall, showing the imperial air route from London to New Delhi, complete with hurrying flying-boats and biplanes, and a puffing foreign locomotive, somewhere in the Alps, admitting that in the 1920s even Viceroys h
ad to come part of the way by train.

  Deep below stairs laboured the servants. Nearly 6,000 of them manned the great house, and they lived in a township of their own, just out of sight in the viceregal estate beyond the gardens. More than 400 of them were gardeners, and fifty of them were boys whose only job was to scare the birds away from the vegetables. In the basement of the palace, running the entire length of the building, a great household community was always at work. The pot-cleaners perpetually scoured their great copper pans, the chicken-pluckers squatted among their feathers, the linen-men stood guard over their cavernous linen-cupboards, the dish-wallahs laboured up to their ankles in washing-up water. The kitchens, hung picturesquely all about with skillets, skewers and choppers, were equipped with the latest English electric ovens, and generally presided over by a French chef. The stables housed a regiment of cavalry. English mechanics tended the three Rolls-Royces in the garage, sewing-men sat at their machines in the Tailors’ Shop, numberless pheasant hung in the Game Room. There was a Tinman’s Room, and a tent store, and away at the north end between the carpet godown and the tiffin rooms, the ever-busy Viceroy’s Press clanked away at its menus, court circulars, seating plans and confidential agendas—His Excellency’s visit to the dentist that morning, or the arrival of Sir Hector and Lady Edgington-Shore (from Calcutta, to the Minto Suite).

  From the start opinions varied about New Delhi. Visitors who saw it first at moments of great ceremony or delight, when the crimson-jacketed lancers were parading in the Great Square, when the howdah’d elephants majestically advanced along Kingsway, when the handsome young ADCs, elegant in navy drills and sky blue lapels, welcomed one so charmingly to the ballroom, and the Viceroy’s house was a pageantry of uniforms, saris, ball gowns and decorations, scented with orange blossom from the garden and roofed by the stars above the great open stairs—people who saw it first in its lordly moments were generally overwhelmed, and thought the capital a worthy crown to a tremendous enterprise. On a stifling dusty day when nothing much was happening it seemed less impressive, and then most observers thought it too big, or too pompous, or not Indian enough, or not British enough. One Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, even wondered if it was sufficiently large. Perhaps it was at its best, though, seen through eyes of gentle irony, as Forster might have seen it—early on a spring morning, say, when the dewy haze was beginning to clear, when the heat was starting to shimmer in the air and the old walled city was astir with the sun—when the early-morning riders were trotting along Kingsway, and the first buses rumbling shakily towards Connaught Place. Then if you stood far back from New Delhi, down by the river, say, with the cracked monuments of other empires lifeless all round, and looked back over the dun and green expanse of the Kingsway gardens, glistening here and there with dew and lily-pond, then its proud distant bulk up there, towered, domed and flagged in the morning, looked a thousand years old itself, and perhaps, in that fallacious morning light, a little dishevelled already, like the dead tombs and fortresses all round.1