Britain and the World 8.

1 (2015): 27–50
DOI: 10.3366/brw.2015.0166
# Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/journal/brw
Print ISSN: 2043-8567; online ISSN: 2043-8575

Competing Visions of Empire in the Colonial Built

Environment: Sir Bradford Leslie and the
Building of New Delhi
David A. Johnson1

On December 12, 1911, George V publicly announced at the end of his imperial
Delhi Durbar the Government of India’s decision to transfer the capital of the
Indian Empire from Calcutta to Delhi.2 The proclamation generated great
enthusiasm at first, but within weeks open criticism of the plan began to appear in
Calcutta’s European press and in Parliament as the political and economic
consequences of the decision became apparent. The viciousness and duration of
the criticism, which continued into the mid-1920s, suggests that there was much
more at stake than the transfer of the capital. Indeed, the building of New Delhi
represented a new imperial vision for the twentieth century where traditional
forms of dominance and privilege were rewritten.3 Examining the people who
were most upset by the transfer as well as what in the new colonial policy made
them the angriest helps us to understand the full meaning and impact of this
particular building project, one of the most ambitious the British had ever
attempted in India. In the past, scholars have concluded that New Delhi

1 David A. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Colonial and Transnational History at

the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Ideas found in this article are further developed in his
forthcoming book New Delhi: The Last Imperial City (Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2015).
2 The king’s imperial durbar was held in the Delhi area, just north of the European civil
lines and the Mughal city of Shajahanabad (or old Delhi). Two previous imperial durbars had been
held in the same location for Victoria (1877) and for Edward (1903).
3 David A. Johnson, ‘A British Empire for the Twentieth Century: The Inauguration of
New Delhi, 1931’, Urban History, vol. 35, no. 3 (2008).
28 David A. Johnson

symbolized the British Empire’s power, breadth, and permanence in

South Asia. While this paper certainly accepts the coercive symbolism found in
New Delhi, it embraces, more importantly, a second consideration as well: the
new city was meant to encourage Indian consent to Britain’s colonial
domination.4
The current paper examines the emergence of New Delhi’s hegemonic
imperial vision by looking at the controversy surrounding the precise location of
the new capital in the Delhi area and the larger political and economic
implications this entailed.5 This early history of the building project is important
because it occurred before the selection of architects and architectural styles, two
topics that have consumed the interests of most Delhi scholars.6 Anthony King,
for example, rigorously detailed New Delhi’s layout and the architectural styles
employed by its two primary architects – Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker –
who physically rendered the colonial social order and its world through the
colonial built-environment.7 Robert Grant Irving also focused on Baker and
Lutyens, arguing that the design of their city reflected Britain’s unification of an
extremely diverse South Asian continent. Metcalf’s intellectual history of British
architecture in India, on the other hand, convincingly showed that New Delhi
represented the culmination of a long history of experimentation in colonial

4 One of the more intriguing aspects of studying New Delhi is that the built landscape,
what one sees, does not necessarily reflect what one reads in the archives. The grand imperial
architecture and geometric layout of the town plan with its multiple traffic circles and intersecting
avenues has encouraged scholars to see the city as an expression of Britain’s attempt to control India
by re-imposing its coercive authority in the first decades of the twentieth century. But, as this paper
shows, the language of the most important colonial officials – the viceroy or the secretary of state for
example – reflected a willingness to engage educated Indians in a dialogue about political reform.
5 I use the term ‘hegemony’ in a specifically Gramscian-Marxist context to signify state
forms of manipulation that encourage subjects to consent to their coercion. Hegemony, as a
historical tool, is a productive way to resolve the contradiction between the capital’s colonial built
environment and the language of political reform that was used by high-ranking officials when
discussing the building project.
6 See Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment
(London, 1976); Robert Grant Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker, and Imperial Delhi (Yale,
1981); Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Oxford, 1989); Jan
Morris, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj (Oxford, 1983); Sten Nilsson, European
Architecture in India, 1750–1850 (London, 1968); and Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British
Architecture in India, 1660–1947 (London, 1985).
7 King, 183. For King, the choice of a building site for the new capital, just to the
southwest of the old Mughal city of Shajahanabad on relatively undeveloped agricultural lands,
allowed city planners and architects ‘free expression’ concerning ‘colonial theories of social, ethnic
and occupational segregation’.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 29

architecture that ended with the building of New Delhi as a symbol of Britain’s
power and permanence in India.
Yet considerably important decisions that had lasting impacts on the new
capital were made long before the formation of the Imperial Delhi Committee
and its architectural board, the government apparatus that physically designed and
built the city. When rumours began to reach London that the official town
planning committee – which consisted of George S.C. Swinton, serving as chair;
John A. Brodie, a sanitation engineer; and Edwin Lutyens, a noted architect of
buildings and landscapes – had decided on a building site far removed from the
European civil lines, Sir Bradford Leslie, an eminent railway engineer with long
experience in India, prepared a town plan that placed the capital back within
Delhi’s existing European community. Whereas the official town plan generated
little or no revenue, existing solely as a site of imperial government, Leslie’s town
plan fused the work of imperial government with finance by using private
investments to build necessary infrastructural improvements and certain
important city spaces. Thus, in Leslie’s plan, the new capital would become
both a site of government as well as a revenue generator that created wealth and
opportunity for private investment. Leslie’s plan, its eventual rejection by the
Government of India, and the controversy over the exact site of the new capital is
significant in that it highlights early twentieth century arguments over who
should benefit from empire and the meaning of British rule in India.
The current study raises important questions about the historical models we
use to understand the imperial project in India. While considerable and often
exceptional historical work has been done on the history of British-India in
general, much of it has been done by historians specialized in South Asian rather
than British history. The problem here is two-fold. South Asian historiography,
because of its often subaltern orientation, leaves little room for analyses of the
liberal imperial project and subsequent attempts at conciliation because it is so
focused on the coercive aspects of British imperial rule.8 This is not to suggest
that scholars have entirely ignored the role of liberal thought in the imperial
project, but it is to say that liberalism has been under-examined as a tool of
empire. Second, these studies often encourage us to lose sight of the forest for the
trees. We learn a great deal about the disruptive impact that British rule had on

8 Notable exceptions are Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth
Century Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999); Barry Hindess, ‘The Liberal Government of Un-
Freedom’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 26, no. 2 (2001): pp. 93–111; and Theodore
Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth Century Visions of a
Greater Britain (Cambridge, 2011).
30 David A. Johnson

local Indian communities, but we learn little about the relationship of India to
Britain’s world system as well as the larger concerns and debates that shaped the
general thrust of colonial policy. This is not to say that Lord Hardinge – Viceroy
of India between 1910 and 1916 and the man most responsible for transferring
the capital – crafted a new vision of empire that was any less oppressive than
Ranajit Guha’s description of colonial rule as a ‘dominance without hegemony’.9
In fact, Hardinge’s vision was likely more insidious in that it encouraged Indians,
by offering political reforms, to discipline themselves as more loyal colonial
subjects. But this historical process is difficult to examine and understand using
the historiography available to South Asianists.
In contrast, this study examines the earliest stages of the building of New
Delhi as a British imperial story set in India. It does so by using P. J. Cain and A.
G. Hopkins’ ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ thesis to better understand the criticism
generated by the transfer of the imperial capital from Calcutta, a city built for and
by maritime commerce, to Delhi, a city rich in Indian imperial history but lacking
significant commercial and financial importance.10 In particular Cain and
Hopkins are used to understand why the major criticism of the policy emerged
within the business community in Calcutta and amongst certain Parliament
members who were tied either to the old colonial system or to commercial and
financial communities in Calcutta and London. Much of their concern had to do
with the manner in which the building of a new capital transformed the business
of British rule. Cain and Hopkins argue that London-based financiers, who were
heavily engaged in imperial investments, drove both imperial expansion and the
reasons for having an empire in the first place. They do so, partially, by building
on John Hobson and V.I. Lenin’s economic critiques of empire. Hobson saw
empire as a corrupted form of British capitalism that evolved in response to
Britain’s endemic domestic under-consumption caused by the poverty of the
labouring classes.11 The lack of consumption at home encouraged those with
capital to invest abroad. For Lenin, empire was the result of monopoly capitalists
who, after swallowing up all the capital they could find at home, forced their
respective nations to expand into Africa, Asia, and Latin America in search of
fresh markets and investment opportunities. As such, empire was ‘the last stage of

9 See Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India
(Harvard, 1998).
10 See P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion,
1688–1914 and British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990 (London, 1993).
11 John Hobson, Imperialism, A Study (1902). Hobson’s study was a powerful economic
critique of British imperialism.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 31

capitalism’ just before its violent collapse, which the world currently was
witnessing first-hand with World War One and its subsequent horrors.12
While Lenin and Hobson differed in their final conclusions,13 both saw
imperial expansion driven by the desires of powerful finance capitalists who were
intimately and influentially connected to government policy makers. Similarly,
Cain and Hopkins argue that London-based financiers had deep historical
connections to Britain’s landed elites, the traditional leaders of English society.
Because England’s aristocracy saw finance capitalism as a respectable way to spend
one’s time and money, many members of London’s financial community were
either drawn from England’s landed elites or shared similar public school
educations and other cultural affinities. Thus, London’s masters of finance were
deeply intertwined with a powerful rentier class who often offered up its male
scions to England’s political class. Industrial capitalists from provincial cities such
as Manchester were important economic forces, but their lack of shared cultural
experience with England’s traditional elite meant that their political influence was
limited.
The current study also draws inspiration from John Darwin’s conclusions that
in the early twentieth century Britain’s primary colonial concern was consolidating
those regions that were essential to the British world system. Clearly, Calcutta’s
commercial community, as a long-standing and powerful bridgehead, felt itself
threatened by the transfer of the capital to Delhi and was irate about its loss of
influence over the government’s financial and commercial policies. Yet Bengal’s
anti-colonial agitation, which had reached a fevered pitch by 1910, was beginning
to damage the economic health of Britain’s world empire. According to
Sir George Paish, a contemporary liberal economist, India accounted for almost
11 per cent of Britain’s direct investment worldwide in the first decade of the
twentieth century.14 Additionally, Britain held 49 out of 72 millions sterling
(around 70 per cent) of India’s import trade, with fully half of this total coming
from Lancashire cotton piece goods.15 It was this exact imported good that
Indian nationalists had quite wisely decided to boycott, giving their anti-colonial
agitation a powerful economic sting. Boycotts were made worse by the rise of

12 V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

13 While Lenin saw imperialism as a necessary and unavoidable step in capitalism’s
material history, Hobson believed that capitalism could be reformed by investing in domestic
institutions that improved the conditions of Britain’s labouring classes, making them consumers that
helped close Britain’s under-consumption gap.
14 The percentage is based on the research of Charles Feinstein, ‘Britain’s Overseas
Investments in 1913’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XLIII, 2 (1990): pp. 288–295.
15 Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson, Letters to Nobody, 1908–1913 (London, 1921), p. 159.
32 David A. Johnson

foreign competition in the global market place. Since the late 1880s, Britain’s
share of Indian imports had fallen from 91 to 70.5 per cent.16 While Britain
clearly maintained a large advantage over its foreign competitors, the downward
trend was unmistakable. Thus, regaining stability in Bengal was not simply an
Indian matter; the health of Britain’s world economic system required it.

I.

Hardinge arrived in India in 1910 in the midst of rapid economic development,

foreign competition, and social and political transformation in India. He had
spent his entire career either in the Foreign Office or abroad as a diplomat.17
While he was deeply conservative in his worldview and intensely loyal to the king,
he was a pragmatic imperialist who practiced a kind of ‘Old Diplomacy’ learned
from Lord Dufferin, his mentor in Istanbul and Cairo.18 For both men, this kind
of diplomacy meant searching for balances of power to achieve security in the
British Empire even if its realization meant unpleasant conciliations. Hardinge’s
Indian viceroyalty must be seen in this light. Though often bigoted in his views of
Indians, he was willing to set aside these assumptions in order to achieve security
on the subcontinent. Hardinge was the kind of official who, as Darwin argues:

. . .equated empire with the exercise of global power and treated

their formal empire of dependent territories as components of a
world system strategically dependent on Britain, economically
complementary to Britain and culturally under its influence. So
long as constitutional change made no difference to these
fundamentals, British policy makers were able to regard it as an
inconvenient, sometimes distasteful, necessity, but not of over-
riding importance.19

Hardinge considered his reversal of Lord Curzon’s 1905 partition of Bengal

the single most important decision of his viceroyalty. Upon first arriving in India,
he was hesitant to change the policy but began to change his mind as he

16 Ibid.
17 He would stay in the diplomatic service for nearly 43 years, holding the highest
positions offered by the service and in the process becoming one of the most decorated officers
outside the royal family in British history.
18 Hardinge served as one of Dufferin’s private secretaries.
19 John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford, 1991),
p. 4.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 33

experienced partition’s ‘festering political sore’ and the near breakdown of security
in northeast India.20 Partition divided Bengal into a largely Moslem East and a
largely Hindu West and was seen by many Bengalis ‘as an act of flagrant injustice
without justification’.21 Still, it was not until John Jenkins offered Hardinge a
memorandum that contained an ambitious vision that Hardinge began to
formulate a definite strategy for dealing with India’s anti-colonial agitation. In the
memorandum, Jenkins, who as Home Member of the Viceroy’s Executive
Council was responsible for security in India, argued that political stability could
be achieved only by following an approach that simultaneously transferred the
capital from Calcutta to Delhi and reversed the partition of Bengal. The
ambitiousness of the scheme required an equally grand announcement.
George V’s forthcoming visit to India in late 1911 offered the perfect
opportunity to stun the entire empire. Additionally, the royal visit had raised
expectations that the king would make an important announcement since, as
Bernard Cohn has shown, Indian imperial durbars were important opportunities
to cement imperial relations by having the emperor receive homage from his loyal
subjects and in return to bestow gifts on them.22 The scheme would satisfy
these expectations by removing the major cause of Bengal’s unrest, partition,
while the change of capital would stir the imagination of the Indian people
since ‘Delhi and empire have been associated from time immemorial’.23 Hardinge
sent the proposal to Lord Crewe,24 Secretary of State for India, on 19 July 1911,
urging secrecy in the matter to make the king’s announcement more magisterial
and, perhaps more importantly, to avoid parliamentary debate that might
weaken the policy. In the end, only twelve people in India and roughly an equal
number in Britain knew of Hardinge’s plan. The king kept the scheme so secret
that the queen was just as surprised as everyone else when he announced it at the
durbar.25
The ambitious scheme was aimed specifically at reducing Indian antagonism
to British rule, particularly among western educated Hindus in Bengal. In this

20 Charles Hardinge, My Indian Years: 1910–1916: The Reminiscences of Lord Hardinge of

Penshurst (London, 1948), p. 36.
21 Ibid.
22 Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in The Invention of
Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 165–210.
23 Hardinge, p. 37. The quote is from John Jenkins but appears in Hardinge’s memoire.
24 While Lord Crewe, as Secretary of State for India, was Hardinge’s nominal superior as
head of the India Office, Hardinge dominated the discussions that went into drafting the new
colonial policy that transferred the capital.
25 Hardinge, p. 45.
34 David A. Johnson

regard the policy articulated what Hardinge’s Indian government as well as the
India Office in London believed was the general thrust of British rule in India in
the twentieth century: to work to incorporate greater numbers of educated Indians
in the work of government and to devolve, when possible, administrative issues to
provincial and local governments. Seeking greater alliances with this western
educated elite would hopefully solve perhaps the most worrisome aspect of the
outrages; the perpetrators were often young, educated Indian men from
respectable families. Politically empowering the right kind of educated Indian
had become even more important after the passage of the Indian Councils Acts in
1909, which expanded the number of elected Indian officials in legislative councils
throughout British-India. Hardinge’s new scheme was published as a state paper
that included an important announcement in paragraph three:

. . .In the course of time, the just demands of Indians for a larger
share in the Government of the country will have to be satisfied,
and the question will be how this devolution of power can be
conceded without impairing the supreme authority of the
Governor General in Council.26
Coupled with the Indian Councils Act of 1909, paragraph three signalled the
government’s sanction of political devolution as a political goal. The fact that the
Government of India foregrounded its new and far-reaching colonial policy with
a statement like the one above shows the interconnectedness of political reform
and the transfer of the capital. The city eventually built in the Delhi area would
symbolize this new vision of empire in India.

II.

George V’s announcement of the Government of India’s new colonial policy

stunned members of Parliament. Some applauded the king’s proclamation, which,
much like Queen Victoria’s in 1858, seemed to offer a new direction in British-
Indian relations. Others were horrified by it. The members who stood in defence
of the transfer of the capital and its other administrative changes shows that the
new policy represented something far greater than a mere change of where the
colonial government did its business. John Morley, one of the last liberal lions in

26 Governor General in Council, ‘Transfer of the Seat of Government of India from

Calcutta to Delhi and the Creation of a New Lieut.-Governorship at Patna’, Home Department,
Public Branch, no. 448, 1923.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 35

Parliament and the Secretary of State for India who initiated the 1909 Councils
Act, cautioned critics of the new policy that ‘many predictions about India in
the past have failed to come to pass’.27 Here, Morley was alluding to his own
council reforms, which he believed had ‘turned out extremely well’.28 Likewise,
Antony MacDonnell was a powerful voice of support in the Lords. MacDonnell
had served in high office throughout India, had helped pass the Bengal Tenancy
Act of 1885, which secured protection for tenant farmers, and had challenged
Curzon’s partition of Bengal. In his defence of the new policy, he referenced
Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation to India, ‘in their prosperity will be our
strength, in their contentment our security, and in their gratitude our best
reward’.29 According to MacDonnell, the partition of Bengal by Curzon had been
a breach of the queen’s proclamation, but India’s new policy would close the gap,
‘Happy Bengal, fortunate England, now that the breach has been restored from
the throne’.30 Lord Reay, who had served as Governor of Bombay and Under-
Secretary of State for India, called the new policy and the pageantry of its
announcement ‘an unprecedented event in the brilliant annals of India’.31 George
Harris, who also had been Governor of the Bombay Presidency, agreed, calling
the transfer and the king’s announcement ‘a stroke of genius’.32 Lord Ampthill,
who had been Governor of Madras and had a history of supporting Indian
nationals, also praised the new policy and its announcement, ‘I confess that I
admire the courage of those who made themselves responsible for this new policy,
for it was a courageous act. . .In my view this scheme appeals to the imagination
and. . .it is a great act of imperial statesmanship’.33
Other Parliament members saw the king’s proclamation and the secrecy
surrounding it as a gross violation of Britain’s constitution and the new policy as a
major threat to the business of British rule.34 Lord Curzon, in particular, led a
full-throated assault against the building of the new capital throughout 1912 in

27 Hansard’s House of Lords Debates, vol. XI, 22 February 1912, p. 232.

28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 219.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., p. 198.
32 Ibid., p. 203.
33 Ibid., p. 221.
34 Throughout 1912, considerable Parliamentary debate, especially in the House of
Lords, dealt with this question of constitutionality. Had the king over-stepped, with encouragement
from Lord Hardinge, his constitutional limitations by publicly announcing such a drastic change in
colonial policy. The constitutional question and its resolution have been covered by R.E.
Frykenberg, ‘The Coronation Durbar of 1911: Some Implications’, Delhi Through the Ages: Selected
Essays in Urban History, Culture, and Society, ed. R.E. Frykenberg (Oxford, 1993).
36 David A. Johnson

the House of Lords, using his substantial oratorical skills to undermine every
aspect of the transfer of the capital. No aspect of the new colonial policy was
spared his caustic, often vicious, cross-examination. In particular, Curzon and his
allies focused their criticism on two related questions: what would the building of
a new imperial capital do to Indian finances and how would it damage Indian
commerce by removing the Government of India from the bridgehead at
Calcutta?
Throughout 1912, when the topic of New Delhi came up in both the Lords
and the Commons, parliamentary members showed concern that the transfer
would isolate the colonial government from what gave British-India its life’s
blood – commerce. ‘When you have built your new capital’, Curzon asked in the
Lords, ‘will it be a source of influence and of strength to your government? Will it
enable them better to understand the heart of India, and to grasp its problems’?35
No, warned Curzon, it would become both a ‘territorial’ and a ‘political enclave’,
‘aloof from public opinion’, ‘shut off from the main currents of public life’, and
‘immersed in a sort of bureaucratic self-satisfaction’.36 Calcutta, in contrast, had
brought the government into contact with the ‘surge and movement of life. . .you
heard the opinions of every variety and form – opinions of merchants, bankers,
traders, businessmen of every sort’.37 It was from Calcutta that Britain had forged
an empire in South Asia.38 For Curzon, the city had ‘always seemed. . .to be a
worthy capital and expression of British rule in India, it is English built, English
commerce has made it the second city in the Empire. . .English statesmen,
administrators, and generals have built up to its present commanding height the
fabric of British rule in India’.39 Summing up what he believed to be Delhi’s
greatest flaw while at the same time disparaging industrial capital, Curzon
declared, ‘Delhi cannot be a great commercial city – it can only be a
manufacturing city or a distributing centre on a small scale – for the trade of
India must rest on the sea’.40 Curzon’s comparison here is striking in the way it
underlines Cain and Hopkins’ argument that the commercial sector and the
financial institutions that made it operate were paramount in Britain’s imperial
economy. Similarly, Lord Lansdowne, who had been Viceroy of India between

35 Hansard’s House of Lords Debates, vol. XI , p.161.

36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 See Peter J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828, vol. 2,
The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge, 2006) and Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society
and the Making of the British Empire, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge, 1988).
39 Hansard’s House of Lords Debates, vol. XI , p. 145.
40 Ibid., p. 161.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 37

1888 and 1894, reminded the Lords that the opinion of the Calcutta Chamber of
Commerce should not be ignored since it represented a significant segment of
the Indian commercial community. He pointed to one of its recent publications
concerning the transfer to Delhi of the Department of Industry and Commerce:

For nine months of the year the Department will be completely

cut off from the commercial centres of India. What merchants
want is ready and convenient access to the responsible financial,
commercial, and railway officers of Government, the officers who
are in authority and with whom the decision in important cases
rests.41

The shift to Delhi would place the department nearly 1,000 miles from Calcutta
and Bombay, the two largest commercial centres in India.
If critics in Parliament were upset by the new capital becoming isolated from
commercial opinion in Calcutta, they were even more agitated by the question of
how the Government of India planned to finance the building project. The
Government of India estimated that the building of the new capital would cost
£4,000,000. Curzon, and most others, believed this estimate was far too sanguine
(they were right).42 In three long-winded diatribes – once in February and twice
in June 1912 – Curzon fumed against the government’s financial strategy.43 The
Government of India proposed that moneys would come from surplus revenues in
India and from Indian and British loans if necessary. Fleetwood Wilson, one of
the most enigmatic finance ministers in the history of British-India, had regularly
created large budget surpluses since 1910. These surpluses, as long as they lasted,
would be drawn on for the building of the new capital. Herein lay one of the more
astonishing aspects of the early financing of the building project. Much of this
surplus came from opium revenues. Wilson consistently and consciously
underestimated government revenues earned from the opium trade in order to
create surpluses that could be drawn on for ad-hoc government needs. This
allowed the government to avoid raising taxes in an already antagonistic political

41 Hansard’s House of Lords Debates, vol. XII, 17 June 1912, pp. 124–125.
42 Curzon more correctly estimated that the cost would be closer to £8,000,000–
£12,000,000. As the main proponent of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, Curzon had a relatively
good appreciation for the current cost of large building projects in India. In the end, the final cost to
build the new capital was closer to £16,000,000.
43 The bill received three readings in the House of Lords, once in February and twice in
June 1912.
38 David A. Johnson

climate in India. While the amount of government controlled Indian opium being
grown and sold was declining due to British and Chinese agreements, the cost per
chest of opium continued to rise with the subsequent higher demand.44 Yet
Wilson continued to estimate government opium revenues based on old estimates
that undervalued the cost per chest of opium. For example, Wilson estimated a
general surplus of £819,200 for the 1911–12-budget year; in reality, it reached
£4,848,300. In that year, the opium revenue surplus, which amounted to
£2,069,100, accounted for 43 per cent of the entire budget surplus.45 In many
ways, this was an example of simple budget manipulation to create revenue
surpluses, but it also reflected the colonial government’s desire to win back Indian
opinion, which had been diminished by such autocratic policies as the partition of
Bengal or by such insults as the Ilbert Bill controversy.46
Curzon disparagingly referred to Wilson’s budgetary practices as ‘fancy
surpluses’ because he considered them artificial in nature. He and his
parliamentary allies argued that, first, these surplus revenues would be
insufficient to build the capital and that, second, the unpredictability of
surpluses would create ‘obscurity and mystery in the matter’ of making annual
budgets and tracing expenditures.47 As Curzon claimed, ‘this is the most gigantic
leap in the dark that the financiers of India or of this country have ever taken’.48
The government’s financial plan for the building of the new capital changed the
very nature of imperial rule in India. For Curzon and others, the time-tested
approach to finding capital for a large colonial building project was to seek it from
investors. In this way, much more exact and predictable amounts of capital could
be raised, and, perhaps more importantly, interest rates on investments could be
guaranteed either by government or by some other source of revenue, as Cain and
Hopkins have argued. But drawing capital from revenue surpluses precluded
investment opportunities and thus generated no additional wealth for individual
‘gentlemanly capitalists’ or for larger financial institutions.
If surplus revenues were insufficient, the Government of India would seek
British and Indian loans. Yet looking for capital in this way caused another major
problem. The high cost to build New Delhi would force the Government of India

44 R.K. Newman, ‘India and the Anglo-Chinese Opium Agreements, 1907–1914’,

Modern Asian Studies, vol. 23, no. 3 (1989): pp. 525–560.
45 Hansard’s House of Commons Debates, East India Revenue Accounts (Indian
Budget), vol. 41, 30 July 1912, pp. 1937–1940.
46 See Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate
Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995).
47 Hansard’s House of Lords Debates, vol. XII, p. 94
48 Ibid., p. 90.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 39

to obtain loans that would deplete an already shrinking supply of capital for other
building projects. For critics like Curzon, capital used for the new capital could be
better invested in revenue-earning projects such as railways and canal colonies. To
make his point, Curzon noted that investors had taken up only 15 per cent of a
recent £3,000,000 loan in 1911. For Curzon, this suggested an already
unfavourable lending market for Indian loans, ‘Will any Lord tell me if the
money raised by ordinary loans in India and this country is to be shared between
Delhi on the one hand and railways and irrigation works on the other, that the
latter will not suffer’.49 The fact that major amounts of capital would need to be
spent on the building of a new capital that existed solely as a site of government
was anathema to those imperialists who saw empire as a means to create wealth.
As Curzon concluded, ‘it is inevitable that. . .you will be taking the money of the
Indian taxpayer, not for the most remunerative of expenditure such as railways
and irrigation, but for the purely unproductive object of building your new capital
on the plains of Delhi’.50
After months of heated debate, it was clear to opponents of the transfer
that the government was not going to reverse its policy, and that, indeed,
it would have been impossible to do so since the king had made the new policy
a royal proclamation. In this moment of parliamentary angst emerged a figure,
Sir Bradford Leslie, who descended as a kind of saviour who would set the
colonial world right again. On 12 December 1912, exactly one year after the
king’s proclamation, Leslie read a paper before the Royal Society of Arts in
London titled ‘Delhi: The Metropolis of India’.51 Leslie embraced the transfer
of the capital but attempted at the same time to incorporate the commercial and
financial concerns of men like Curzon and his allies. He did so by drawing on his
own extensive experience as an engineer and a railway builder in India.

III.

Leslie was born on 18 August 1831 in Portman Place, London to a family

of skilled artists and engineers. His grandfather was a friend of Benjamin
Franklin’s, and his father and younger brother were Royal Academicians.52

49 Ibid., p. 94.
50 Ibid.
51 Sir Bradford Leslie, ‘Delhi: The Metropolis of India’, Journal of the Royal Society of
Arts, vol. 61, no. 3136 (1912): pp. 133–142. See also ‘Royal Society of Arts: Award of Medals’, The
Times, 3 July 1913, p. 4.
52 His father had painted the Duke of Wellington to celebrate the queen’s coronation.
40 David A. Johnson

At the age of sixteen Leslie was apprenticed to Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

one of the nineteenth century’s foremost engineers. His Indian career began
in 1865 when he was appointed chief engineer of the Eastern Bengal Railway
and by 1876 he had become agent and chief to the East India Railway,
overseeing an estimated 40,000 Indians, 1000 Europeans and 600 Eurasians.
One of his most notable works, which earned him a knighthood in 1887, was
the building of the Jubilee Bridge spanning the Hooghly from Calcutta to
Howrah.53
After returning to England in 1887 he became a notable intellectual and
social gadabout who gave talks and offered advice on a diverse array of topics
including preservatives in food, plague, salt on snow, and Willet Time (daylight
savings).54 Above all, he was recognized as one of England’s foremost authorities
on railway building, routinely appearing in the editorial or business sections of
The Times as an expert examiner of prospectuses on publicly offered railway
companies.55 In these examinations he made it clear that the importance of
colonial railways lay in their ability to better connect local markets to Britain’s
much larger maritime commercial empire. Leslie continued to be active in a
variety of professional and financial organizations and railway companies after he
left India.56 But his greatest association was his directorship, beginning in 1895,
of the Southern Punjab Railway. The Southern reflected a typical model of
colonial infrastructural development. It was publicly traded, it advertised
subscriptions from private investors, and it received important guarantees on
those investments. In return the Government of India received 52 per cent of the
Southern’s gross receipts and could purchase the railway after 21 years of
operation. Like other colonial building projects of the era, the Southern was a
relatively safe investment in that the Secretary of State was required to pay back
capital expenditures if the company failed to make a profit.

53 ‘Jubilee Honours for India’, The Times, 16 February 1887, p. 12. The bridge received
its name in honour of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
54 ‘Obituary: Sir Bradford Leslie: A Great Builder of Bridges’, The Times, 22 March
1926, p. 19.
55 ‘Classified Advertising: Miscellaneous Companies’, The Times, 11 December 1905,
p. 19.
56 He was an officer and member of the Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers and
was an Officer of Public Instruction. He was a member of the East India Association and the British
Farmers Association. He was a trustee for debenture holders for the Ramnad Raj Sterling Loan and
the Ramnad Zemindary Sterling Debenture Loan. Along with the above-mentioned East India
Railway, he was involved in the British Central Africa Company and the Oudh and Rohilkund
Railway Company.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 41

Leslie’s success with the Southern and other business ventures was based on
his understanding of the deep, reciprocal relationship between the world of
finance and the world of empire building. This understanding was highlighted in
1912, near the end of his professional career, when he read his paper in front of
the Royal Society of Arts.57 His town plan for the new imperial capital,
unsolicited by the Government of India, allayed many of the fears previously
voiced in parliament. Its strength lay in the manner in which it brought
government and commerce into an intimate relationship with each other both
during and after the capital’s building stage. Government and private business,
just as they had always done in railway development, would form a mutually
beneficial partnership.
Though the official town plan had yet to be published by the Government of
India, it was well known in England that the official town planning committee
had selected a building site to the southwest of the existing Indian city in a
relatively rural part of the Delhi District. Leslie, in contrast, placed his town plan
in the current European civil lines just to the north of this city. Leslie’s plan
reaffirmed the traditional relationship between government needs and private
interests in the colonial built environment, and it offered a powerful alternative to
the official town plan.
The central piece of Leslie’s town plan was a weir across the Yamuna River.
The weir symbolized Leslie’s own philosophy that government and private
companies working in tandem best served the public need. Placed just across from
the southern-most gate of the old city (the Delhi Gate), the weir achieved two
important tasks. First, it included a power plant, which would produce enough
electricity to light the new and old city as well as to run area factories and
tramways. Second, the weir created a large lake that would provide a fine effect for
the new capital and improve the overall aesthetics of the area. The new
government buildings and the residences of high officials, sitting on the west
bank, would overlook the lake. In response to concerns that the civil lines was
simply not large enough to accommodate the needs of the new capital, Leslie
argued that land could be reclaimed by building a stone embankment that

57 The paper was followed by a lively discussion amongst the audience which included
some of the most influential members of London’s art world including Ernest B. Havell and Sir
George Birdwood, both of whom had a long running debate about whether or not Indian art
reflected a grand tradition or was merely decorative. J.D. Rees chaired the meeting and the
discussion. He had been one of the most vocal critics of the transfer of the capital but refused to
allow questions or comments of a political nature. Instead, the discussion mainly concerned the
appropriate architecture to be adopted and the hope that the Government of India would include
Leslie in future deliberations.
42 David A. Johnson

Figure 1:: Leslie’s Plan for the Northern Site (Courtesy Royal Society of
Arts, London).58

58 Leslie, ‘Delhi: The Metropolis of India’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 61,
no. 3136, (1912): p. 135.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 43

extended into the lake. According to Leslie this would add an additional two
square miles for building purposes. In addition, Leslie argued that the increased
value of this reclaimed land, which would be rented to private businesses, would
more than cover the cost of building the embankment, the weir, and the power
plant.59
Indeed, the possibilities of economic gain were so great that Leslie believed a
private company would take responsibility for building the weir, its power plant,
and the embankment, leaving the Government of India simply to erect the
government structures. As Leslie claimed:

The rental commanded for frontages on the boulevard, added to

the value of the electric power generated at the weir, would be so
considerable as to make it probable that a company could be
formed for undertaking the construction of the dam and weir and
of the dredging and reclamation in consideration of the revenue
to be derived therefrom.60
Interestingly, Leslie had one particular company in mind: his own. Before the
decision to transfer the capital, Leslie and several other wealthy investors had
invested in a London-based company, The United Provinces Power Company,
which earlier had received a concession from the Secretary of State for India to
satisfy Delhi’s growing demand for electricity.61 The building of a new capital in
the Delhi area offered tremendous economic opportunity for well-positioned men
like Leslie with access to investment capital. Leslie seemingly saw no
contradiction in promoting a town plan that personally enriched him and his
business partners. And why should he have felt any qualms about this union
between a public building project and his own personal economic gain? After all,
as Cain and Hopkins have shown, men like Leslie had been doing it in the open
for years. In the end, for Leslie, both government and commercial interests would
bear the burden of building the capital – benefiting government through reduced
expenditures and providing private individuals and businesses with commercial
and investment opportunities.
In addition, the lake would transform the new capital into something more
than a place of government business; it would become a site of tourism through its
various recreational and entertainment opportunities. A wide boulevard open only
to pedestrians and passenger vehicles would run the entire length of the new

59 Ibid., p. 139.
60 Ibid.
61 Lord Hardinge Official Correspondence, Major General Beresford Lovett to
Hardinge, 23 December 1911.
44 David A. Johnson

embankment. Trees, shops, restaurants, theatres, clubs, hotels, and cafes would
line this thoroughfare,62 causing Leslie to claim that ‘with so many and such
varied attractions Delhi is certain to become a favourite rendezvous with
tourists. . .making Delhi the true Indo-European Metropolis’.63 Simla, the
government’s summer capital located high in the Himalayas, was known as a
place of refuge and relief from the hard work and heat of the plains. Leslie’s
lakeside city would do something similar, not only extending the amount of time
government officials desired to spend in the capital but also attracting non-
government individuals from all walks of life.
Furthermore, Leslie’s town plan maintained the connections and relations
that the civil lines and the old city had established earlier and used many of the
conveniences already present in the area such as the Delhi Railway Station and
the post office. While building in the civil lines meant some disruptions for
Delhi’s European community, in general it would remain relatively intact. Local
businesses potentially benefitted from having more government officials and
private citizens in their city, and residents could enjoy the new beauty of their
surroundings on a daily basis. As a cost-saving measure, Leslie’s capital used the
civil lines’ existing infrastructure – rail, telegraph, roads, and water filtration
system – much of which had been improved for the king’s 1911 durbar.
The lake created by the weir also improved the general health of the Delhi
area, which had a reputation as one of the dirtiest cities in northern India. The
city was notorious for a particularly nasty boil that plagued inhabitants. Lord
Lansdowne, when criticizing the decision to transfer the capital from Calcutta to
Delhi, reminded the House of Lords, that the boil could reach three to four
inches in diameter and lasted five to ten months.64 The area also was prone to
malarial conditions due to poor drainage and the nearness of the Yamuna River,
which rose and subsided with the seasons, creating breeding grounds for
mosquitoes. Leslie argued that the lake created by the weir would help eradicate
the breeding places of malaria carrying mosquitoes by permanently inundating the
swampy bed of the Yamuna.
In Leslie’s plan the west bank of the lake housed a highly developed
metropolitan area of government, entertainment, and European residences.
A second municipal colony for Indian clerks and their families was planned for
the lake’s east bank. These two communities, forced together during the day due

62 Leslie, p. 138. A secondary road would run behind the shops for the purpose of
moving trade goods. Leslie did not want to recreate problems such as were seen in London where
delivery carts often congested the streets.
63 Ibid., p. 139.
64 Hansard’s House of Lords Debates, vol. XI, pp. 238–239.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 45

to the work of colonial government, would be separated during times of rest.

Segregated into their own colony, Leslie argued, Indian clerks and their families
would enjoy open-air bathing along newly built ghats and have their own schools,
temples, and mosques. Leslie consciously created two municipal colonies – one
European and lying within the heart of the colonial government and the other
Indian and removed from the seat of colonial power but still an important source
of labour for the colonial administration. For Leslie, the lake and its two colonies
created tremendous opportunities for commercial development and thus
strengthened the bond between private enterprise and the Government of
India. For example, Leslie envisioned a private ferry company to taxi Indian
government workers from their homes on the east bank to their offices on the
west bank. The ferry service was a perfect example of Leslie’s desire to use the
building of a new capital to benefit commerce in the imperial world. His town
plan called for important civic needs, such as transportation and lighting, to be
turned over to the private sector, theoretically lowering the cost of government
while encouraging private investment in municipal services.
Leslie’s plan for how the new capital would be financed and built exemplified
the way in which his professional past influenced his town plan. Just as his
Southern Punjab Railway was built using private investment but serviced by the
Government of India, the building of a new capital would use private investment
to build the new capital’s most important features, the weir and the embankment.
For those critics who feared that the new capital would be devoid of commercial
opportunities, Leslie’s plan once again brought the colonial government into
intimate contact with commercial interests in India. A mix of private companies
and private investments would bear much of the cost of building the new city,
and subsequently they would reap many of the economic rewards. In this way,
the cost to government to build the new capital at Delhi would be reduced,
freeing government revenues for other, more remunerative building projects like
railways.
In the end, the power and attraction of Leslie’s town plan was that it made
the new capital a revenue producer rather than a revenue consumer both during
and after the building of the city. In Leslie’s philosophy, commercial and
investment opportunities should be first and foremost in the minds of colonial
officials. What caused him to draft an alternative town plan was Hardinge’s
seemingly dangerous erosion of the traditional public/private model. The
Government of India and its town planning committee had ignored or failed to
recognize the importance of the private business sector in building and servicing
the new capital. While Leslie’s proposed capital could never fully imitate
Calcutta’s commercial success because of its distance from important ports that
connected India to Britain’s global commerce, the new capital at Delhi still could
46 David A. Johnson

be a thriving city of government, commerce, and recreation if built in the civil

lines.

IV.

Leslie’s paper added a new dimension in the criticism of the Government of

India’s new policy. For antagonists like Curzon, Hardinge’s government had been
wrongheaded in its policy to transfer the capital in the first place, and now its
decision to place that capital far from the civil lines simply highlighted the
government’s irresponsibility. It was inconceivable for critics that the civil lines, a
space of not only British residency but also memory, would be separated from the
new capital by an Indian city. Curzon’s dismay was clear when he referred to the
official building site as a ‘region of stones and snakes’.65 With questions being
raised in parliament concerning the selection of a town site and with members of
Parliament openly questioning the competency of the officials making these
decisions, Lord Hardinge decided to push back by taking an approach that was
diplomatic but devastating for Leslie’s plan.66
Hardinge had his official town planning committee prepare a special report
that systematically undermined Leslie’s proposal. The committee argued that
Leslie’s lake, the central piece of his plan, would create major back flooding just
north of the civil lines and worsen the area’s already high water table.67 Thus the
malarial conditions that Leslie believed his lake would alleviate might possibly be
made worse by the damming of the Yamuna. Leaving no stone unturned,
Hardinge had an additional special health committee of medical and health
officers formed to examine the civil lines.68 This committee examined the Delhi
District’s malarial survey, which was based on spleen counts known as the splenic
index, taken of children in the region.69 This survey showed that 65 per cent of
children tested in or near the civil lines had enlarged spleens, which meant that

65 Hansard’s House of Lords Debates, vol. XII, p. 95. Curzon was relatively familiar with
the Delhi area since he was interested in its architecture. He had authorized stabilization work on
the Qtub Minar during his viceroyalty.
66 Lord Hardinge Correspondence, ‘Report of the Committee Appointed Under the
Orders of his Excellency the Viceroy to Report Upon the Comparative Healthiness of the Proposed
Northern and Southern Sites for the New Imperial City of Delhi’, 4 March 1913.
67 Ibid., ‘The Case of the Northern Site’ by E. Cotes and ‘A Reply to Mr Cotes’ Brief
Summary by Captain Swinton’, 10 March 1913.
68 Ibid., ‘Report of the Committee Appointed Under the Orders of his Excellency the
Viceroy to Report Upon the Comparative Healthiness. . .’.
69 Chief Commissioner’s Office, Delhi, ‘Report of a Committee Ordered to Assemble
By G.O.C.C.’, 16 September 1845, Education Department, no. 8, 1916. In the mid- nineteenth
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 47

they had suffered from fever. In the south, where Hardinge planned to build the
capital, this percentage dropped to 23 per cent.70
Health issues aside, there were two other flaws with the civil lines as a possible
building site for the new capital. It simply carried the wrong imperial history, and
it was far too limited in size to hold the kind of city and vision that Hardinge
hoped to achieve. Historically, the civil lines housed virtually all the great artefacts
of a British presence in the Delhi area. Of these, none were more important than
the monuments, buildings, and geographical features that carried memories of the
1857 Indian uprising. The ridge to the west of the civil lines, Flagstaff Tower, and
Hindu Rao’s House had served as important bulwarks where British forces had
dug in and held out for months against multiple Sepoy attacks. These historic
sites were ever-present reminders of British imperial heroism and the great
sacrifices that both British men and women had made in defending and securing
the British Empire. But this history was a story of conflict, and no lake or
promenade could erase the life and death struggles that had occurred in 1857 on
the ridge overlooking the civil lines. Nor could it elide the horrific recapture of
Delhi by British and Punjabi troops who immediately began to exact their
vengeance on mutinous Sepoys and innocent civilians alike.
Hardinge’s new imperial vision demanded a different space and history
altogether, one that was largely free of British and Indian antipathies and thus
open for a new interpretation. Leslie’s plan for the civil lines was rooted in British
commerce and thus the larger empire, but Hardinge envisioned a capital that was
distinctively for an Indian Empire. Writing to Herbert Baker, who later became
one of the capital’s chief architects, Hardinge argued, ‘. . .the aim must be to
achieve a style which will be symbolic of India of the twentieth century, with its
British and Indian administration’.71 The goal was not simply to imprint British
architectural ideals on an Indian landscape, as had been done at Calcutta, but to
build a capital that represented a new era in British-India relations. As Hardinge
explained early in the planning stages, the city must reflect ‘a broad classical
style with an Indian motif. . .the architecture must be combined with a spirit of
the east such as will appeal to Orientals as well as to Europeans’.72 And as he
repeatedly reminded his planners, ‘it must be remembered that it is not a
British administration that is building the new city, as was the case when

century, health officers discovered that children who had been exposed to high fevers caused by
illness such as malaria had enlarged spleens.
70 Lord Hardinge Correspondence, ‘Report of the Committee Appointed Under the
Orders of his Excellency the Viceroy to Report Upon the Comparative Healthiness. . .’.
71 Ibid., Hardinge to Baker, 30 August 1913.
72 Ibid., Hardinge to Curzon, 30 October 1912.
48 David A. Johnson

Calcutta was built, but a British-Indian administration that is charged with the
task’.73
The problem with Leslie’s vision for the northern site was that it did little to
resolve the imperial problems that led to the transfer of the capital from Calcutta
to Delhi in the first place. Indeed, Leslie’s plan, though highly original, would do
little to curb the forces of Indian anti-colonialism. What was needed was a new
imperial vision that recaptured the imagination of the Indian people. Imperial
stability in the present required a new way of thinking about the past and, indeed,
the future. Educated Indians were not to be feared but to be won over by British
good will and the promise of future political advancement. This new vision of
empire was represented by paragraph three of the official government dispatch,
shown above, that announced the building of the capital, and it could be seen in
the very words of Hardinge and other high ranking officials. At his farewell
banquet given by Indians in Simla in 1913, Fleetwood Wilson claimed that a new
era was dawning in India where ‘we shall have to resort to the more difficult arts
of persuasion and conciliation, in the place of the easier methods of autocracy’.74
He ended his farewell speech by quoting the words of Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Into
that heaven of freedom, my Father, let this country awake’.75 In the House of
Commons in July 1912, Edwin Montagu,76 the Undersecretary of State for India,
took the imagery a step further by claiming that the new capital would serve as an
almost sacred symbol of a new British-India, made stronger by merging what he
saw as the national traits of both:

The golden thread of Oriental idealism is being woven into the

drab web of our scheme of life, and our sciences and government,
which we have so laboriously inherited and are handing down, is
being offered to the Oriental to help him in material progress,
and the East and the West together, united and assisting one

73 Ibid., Hardinge to Lutyens, 28 March 1913.

74 Wilson, p. 193.
75 Ibid., p. 195.
76 Edwin Montagu was a strong supporter of Indian political advancement and travelled
to India twice to study the problem, once as Undersecretary of State for India and once as Secretary
of State for India. His most significant piece of legislation in this regard was the 1917 Montagu-
Chelmsford Agreement, which outlined further political devolution. The agreement became the
road map for a new Indian constitution passed as the Government of India Act of 1919. The act
divided up government responsibilities – known as reserved and transferred subjects – between
Indian provincial governments and the Government of India.
 Sir Bradford Leslie and the Building of New Delhi 49

another, are constructing in India. . .the lasting temple of their

joined ideals.77
New Delhi would stand, again claimed Montagu, for a new British-Indian
relationship that would be ‘consummated’ on the ‘virgin soil’ of the south site.78
Thus, Leslie’s arguments based on commercial concerns failed in the face of the
south site’s potential for re-writing the imperial relationship between Britain and
India in the twentieth century.
For officials like Hardinge, Wilson and Montagu, Leslie’s plan represented an
old model of colonial rule that had run its course. India’s changed political
conditions, exacerbated by previous colonial policies like the partition of
Bengal – truly a kind of dominance without hegemony – demanded a new
approach to an India which was undergoing tremendous political, social and
economic transformations caused by its long interactions with Britain. The new
capital symbolized Britain’s attempt to resolve the contradictory goals of giving
Indians greater political power while at the same time strengthening Britain’s
paramount power in India. In response to these conflicting pressures, the official
town plan took on the contours of a large federal capital that symbolized the unity
of India’s diverse peoples under the supreme authority of the Raj.79 During the
second half of 1911, when the Government of India was debating whether or not
to transfer the capital, high officials argued that just as Washington D.C. was not
associated with any one state, India’s new capital should not be intimately tied to
any one province such as Bengal, Bombay, or Madras.80 The concept of a federal
capital again emerged during the planning stages of 1912–1913 when the official
town planning committee and high officials in the Government of India
examined the actual town plans of two other federal capitals, Canberra and
Washington D.C.81 Within this colonial federalism, British officials were willing
to give elected Indian officials more power in the provinces as long as the political
centre, now at New Delhi, remained securely in British hands. Thus, while
Britain devolved many political issues to increasingly Indian dominated provincial

77 Hansard’s House of Commons Debates, pp. 1907–1908.

78 Ibid., p. 1883. ‘Virgin soil’ is a bit of an over statement since many Indian villages, later
acquired by the Government of India under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, were located on the
southern site. The act allowed the colonial government to acquire private lands for public use.
79 See Irving, Indian Summer.
80 Governor General in Council, ‘Transfer of the Seat of Government of India from
Calcutta to Delhi’.
81 Herbert Baker, ‘Architectural Design: Symbolism in Stone and Marble’, The Times, 18
February 1930, p. 50.
50 David A. Johnson

legislative assemblies, British colonial officials remained in control of the most

important state functions including foreign policy, the military, and the police.
In the East India Budget debate of 1913, Noel Buxton wonderfully captured
the basic contradiction that plagued the British empire in this era of rapid colonial
development and subsequent political disruption when he claimed, ‘the great test
of the future. . .is the reconciliation of democracy and imperialism’.82 Hardinge
and others were trying to resolve that issue with the decision to transfer the
capital, to end unpopular colonial policies such as partition, and to include greater
numbers of Indians in the colonial administration. The building of New Delhi
and its vision paralleled a series of political reforms that increasingly gave Indians
more political power.83 Yet Buxton’s declaration remained as unfulfilled in 1947,
when India received full independence, as it did in 1913, suggesting that empire
systemically lacked the capacity to reform itself. Perhaps Gandhi’s greatest
inspiration, if I may, was his realization that empire, no matter how reformed-
minded its officials may want to be, must always maintain a monopoly over the
state’s most coercive powers, and that this alone erodes any possibility of true
democratic advancement.

82 Hansard’s House of Commons Debates, vol. 56, 7 August 1913, p. 1889.

83 These reforms included the Montagu-Chelmsford Agreement in 1917, the
Government of India Act of 1919, the Indian Statutory Commission in the late 1920s, the
Round Table Conferences of the early 1930s, and the Government of India Act of 1935.