Why Delhi? The Move From Calcutta
When King George V visited Delhi in 1911 for a durbar, a pompous royal ceremony, he announced the capital would move to Delhi and that the city would be refashioned accordingly. Some snapshots.
King George V and Queen Mary in a chariot proceeded towards the Red Fort in Delhi in December 1911. This was the first time a British monarch came to India. ALKAZI COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY
King George V and Queen Mary addressed a crowd in Delhi from the Red Fort. ALKAZI COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY
A century ago, Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy of India, laid out in a letter why Britain should move the capital of its empire to Delhi from Calcutta.
- DESHAKALYAN CHOWDHURY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
- Lord Curzon had ordered the building of an imposing memorial to the late Queen Victoria in Calcutta, a city which the British had created. Above, the memorial. Click here to view full slideshow on the Delhi Durbar.
In a letter to the Earl of Crewe, Secretary of State for India, sent from Shimla to London on Aug. 25, 1911, Hardinge pointed out that it has “long been recognized to be a serious anomaly” that the British governed India from Calcutta, located on the eastern extremity of its Indian possessions.
He then turned to more pressing reasons to move away from Calcutta, which for 150 years had served as Britain’s capital in India. For one, the Indian Councils Act of 1909, legislation passed by Britain’s parliament known as the Morley-Minto reforms, had allowed Indians for the first time to stand for legislative council positions.
For years the British had ruled by fiat from Calcutta, the commercial hub of India which the East India Company, in the eighteenth century, had developed from a small fishing village. Now, Hardinge argued that the rising importance of elected legislative bodies meant that Britain needed to find a more centrally located capital.
But Hardinge’s subsequent point to Crewe explains why the British were in such a rush to get out of Calcutta. The viceroy alluded to burgeoning opposition to British rule in Calcutta that was making it less than a hospitable home.
Britain had faced a rising tide of calls to extend a measure of self-rule to India since the late nineteenth century. That movement became most violent in Calcutta, the commercial and literary center of the country. In 1905, the British had cleaved Bengal, a massive and powerful province centered on Calcutta, in to two portions in an attempt to weaken this opposition to their rule.
The decision only inflamed nationalist sentiment, leading to a call for a boycott of British goods and, eventually, bombings and political assassinations in Calcutta.
According to Rudrangshu Mukherjee in the book, New Delhi, Making of a Capital, the idea of moving to Delhi was first mooted in June 1911 by Sir John Jenkins, a senior member of the government of India, as part of a plan to assuage these nationalist forces. The other part of the Jenkins’s proposal was to reunite Bengal, with redrawn boundaries.
The plan won approval from senior British officials and King George V, who only six months later during his visit to India, the first by a British monarch, announced the reunification of Bengal and the immediate move of the capital to Delhi.
The announcement, which King George made at an Imperial “durbar” – a gathering of Indian princes – in Delhi was a closely guarded secret. It was acclaimed by those in Delhi but met with hostility from many other quarters, especially in Calcutta.
For one, Delhi, an ancient city which had been the capital of Mughal India, was not yet set-up to accommodate the British, critics said. It would take twenty years for the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker to complete “New Delhi,” a zone of grand avenues, stately buildings and whitewashed bungalows on the southern extremities of what now is known today as “Old Delhi,” the original Mughal city.
Lord Curzon, a former viceroy who had taken the decision to partition Bengal, was among the loudest naysayers. In a speech to the House of Lords, Curzon singled out why the government was rushing. “They desire to escape the somewhat heated atmosphere of Bengal,” he told the assembled grandees.
Hardinge had championed Delhi for its geographical position in the center of northern India and its links with the Mughal empire and Hindu “sacred legends.”
Curzon retorted that Delhi, in his view, was far from other important centers of British India, including Madras and Rangoon. And he pointed out the Mughals, long resident in Agra, had only made Delhi the capital “in the expiring years of their regime.”
- ALKAZI COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY
- A portrait picture of Lord Hardinge.
British traders, largely located in Calcutta, a trading and jute processing center, also were furious over the secrecy. “The commercial classes view with apprehension the removal of the Government from all contact with mercantile and manufacturing interests,” a correspondent for The Times newspaper said in a report on Dec. 28, 1911. Curzon echoed this, claiming the government would live “shut off…from the rest of India.”
Mr. Mukherjee, the author and historian of Delhi, said in an email that Curzon, while viceroy, had seen Delhi as a place to “confer honors and baubles” to India’s princes. In 1903 he had organized an extravagant durbar in Delhi.
But Curzon, and other imperialists, also had tried to build up an “independent imperial heritage and tradition of the British Empire,” Mr. Mukherjee said. That was why Curzon had ordered the building of an imposing memorial to the late Queen Victoria in Calcutta, a city which the British had created.
In the end, the Victoria Memorial was only inaugurated in 1921, a full decade after Calcutta had ceased to be the capital of British India. The British bureaucrats, meanwhile, were living cramped in temporary quarters in Delhi’s Civil Lines district, waiting for the completion of the new administrative capital – but far away from the troubles in Bengal.
World War I had imposed severe cost restrictions on – and a new round of British opposition to – the construction of New Delhi. By this point, though, it was too late to change course. The new city was formally inaugurated in 1931. Within sixteen years British rule in India came to an end and India’s political class moved in to what is still today a bureaucratic city, aloof from much of India.
As for Calcutta, it remained an important trading and industrial center after 1911. But then in 1947, following the Partition of British India, which turned over parts of Bengal to the new country of Pakistan, the city began a precipitous decline. Cut off from its supplies of raw materials like jute, which were located in what was now Pakistan, Calcutta’s processing industries suffered. The city, in short order, became synonymous with poverty.
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