21 April 2016
Indian Thoughts
The new still making good use of the old.
by William Morton
Something that strikes one when visiting India is the extent of the real estate and infrastructure the new State of India inherited from the British when it gained independence. Ranging from railways and canals to barracks and court houses, the legacy may not have been intended but it is immense and fully utilised today. The best example is New Delhi itself.
The capital of India was switched by the British in 1911 from Calcutta to the more centrally located Delhi. It was decided to develop an area in keeping with the city’s new status centred on the Viceroy’s House (now the residence of the President of India) and Parliament and Secretariat Buildings designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker. These are magnificent and suitably imperial buildings which do incorporate some features of Indian architecture, although Lutyens was apparently not initially keen to do that. Surrounding them were built large bungalows for the British administration and now occupied by Indian politicians, senior army officers and members of the judiciary.
The position is repeated in Shimla, the hill station to which the Viceroy moved during the hot weather in the plains. The Scottish Baronial Viceregal Lodge now houses the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies. The Retreat, built to house Members of his Executive Committee, is the home of the General commanding the Training Command of the Indian Army. The Secretariat Building, Gorton Castle, is the office of the Accountant General of Himachal Pradesh, an Indian state established after Independence of which Shimla is part. Barnes Court, the summer residence of the Governor of the British Province of the Punjab, which included Shimla and a very large area which is now in Pakistan, houses the Governor of Himachal Pradesh.
One has to feel somewhat sorry for Pakistan as it missed out at Partition. It did not get a ready-made and handsome capital and its government had to slum it for years in Karachi. Furthermore, the obvious capital for Pakistan was Lahore but the Partition line had left that historic city too close to the border so it was forced to build a new capital, Islamabad.
The British were, of course, not the only conquerors of India to bequeath the newly independent state a fine architectural heritage. It is somewhat ironic that many of the finest monuments in this Hindu dominated state, for example the Qutb Minar and Humayun’s tomb in Delhi and the iconic Taj Mahal, were created by the Muslim Moguls.
Shimla lies at an altitude of over 2,000 metres and was chosen as the summer capital of British India because of its cool climate. We tend to associate monkeys with jungles and it is something of a surprise to find that it is home to a large number of them which are a pest and skilled at stealing food and other items such as spectacles. We watched with interest a macaque loitering by the road as an Indian teenager approached eating something out of a paper bag. When the monkey leapt towards him, the boy did not hesitate – he threw down the bag and legged it.
Delhi is a megacity. The population of the urban area is thought to be around 25 million people (Tokyo has 38 million) and it is expanding towards neighbouring cities like Noida and Gurgaon. It is estimated that Lagos probably has a population of 21 million currently and that it could double in 15 years. Delhi might not do that but it seems all too likely that it will grow enormously. One can only hope its infrastructure will keep up.
Then there is the poverty. You cannot fail to notice the people living in shacks beside the road and railway and in the middle of roundabouts. There is the desperate way in which people beseech you to buy cheap souvenirs, the beggar children performing acrobatics among the traffic on busy roads, the porters carrying loads on their backs, the barber shops consisting of a piece of mirror fixed to an outside wall and a plastic chair. Official figures bear out these impressions. Definitions of poverty differ but on any basis between 20 and 25% of the 1.2 billion population (1951 – 361 million) are thought to live below the poverty line. The World Bank, for example, estimated in 2011 that c. 23.6% or about 276 million people lived below its poverty line of US$1.5 a day. The Indian Government has programmes to combat poverty, but the question which occurs to an outsider is how do you raise such a large number of people who are rooted in a subsistence existence out of poverty. Travelling around India, one sees row after row of small shops, often manned by more than one person, offering the same sort of goods and services such as repairing bicycles or selling car tyres or fruit or cheap woodwork. Presumably the owners make some sort of living but how do you reconcile this world with call centres, software programming and supermarkets? A crucial issue for the politicians of a fascinating country.
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