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Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860-1910 Author(s): Thomas R. Metcalf Source: Representations, No. 6 (Spring, 1984), pp. 37-65 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928537 . Accessed: 21/06/2014 14:34

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THOMAS R. METCALF

Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 18601910*

SPEAKING BEFORE the Society of Arts in 1873 on architectural art in India, T. Roger Smith, recently returned from Bombay, concluded his discus- sion by urging that

as our administration exhibits European justice, order, law, energy, and honour-and that in no hesitating or feeble way-so our buildings ought to hold up a high standard of European art. They ought to be European both as a rallying point for ourselves, and as raising a distinctive symbol of our presence to be beheld with respect and even with admiration by the natives of the country. 1

No sooner had Smith taken his seat than William Emerson, who had just com- pleted a design in an Indic style for a college in Allahabad, rose to dissent. The British, he maintained, should not carry into India a new style of architecture, but rather should follow the example of those whom they had supplanted as rulers, the Muslims, who "seized upon the art indigenous to the countries con- quered, adapting it to suit their own needs and ideas." Indeed, he insisted, "it was impossible for the architecture of the west to be suitable to the natives of the east."2

A debate was thus joined that was to rage unabated for over fifty years: whether in their building in India the British ought to look to their own, or to India's architectural traditions. The choice between styles did not reflect solely aesthetic concerns. As with the contest between Classical and Gothic in Britain, such decisions involved as well larger conceptions of national identity and pur- pose. Indeed, by providing a vocabulary for the consideration of those questions, the architectural debates themselves shaped and defined Britain's conception of its national purpose.3 In the colonial environment the bricks and mortar carried with them especially far-reaching significance. The choice of styles, the arrange- ment of space within a building, and of course the decision by the government to erect a particular monument, all testified as both Smith and Emerson were aware, to a vision of empire. Sometimes these conceptions moved the architect in the design of a building; at others they lay embedded beneath the surface. In either case the varied ways empire was represented in these buildings help us to understand the assumptions that shaped Britain's imperial enterprise. This paper

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is an examination of the meaning and implications of the use of Indian archi- tectural styles by the British Raj.

Regardless of their commitment to a particular style, all architects who worked in the Empire shared a measure of common ground that set off their work from that at home. Most central was a concern with political effect. The classically- educated Briton, as he built his empire, invariably conceived of himself as fol- lowing in the footsteps of the ancient Romans. With its roads, its system of law, and its monumental structures spread across the face of the ancient world, Rome stood always as an exemplar to spur the British on in their own imperial enterprise.

Were the British occupation of India to terminate tomorrow, the visible tokens of it would survive in our canals, and our railways, our ports, and our public buildings, or, at least, the remains of them for centuries to come.

Those like Smith, who rejected the emulation of indigenous styles took from Rome a further specific architectural precedent:

They unquestionably not only cut their roads and pitched their camps in Roman fashion, but put up Roman buildings wherever they had occasion to build; ... the Roman gov- ernor of a province in Gaul or Britain continued to be as intensely Roman in his exile as the British collector remains British to the backbone in the heart of India.4

But British builders in the Empire sought as well to take into account what they saw as the special demands that the climate, and with it the colonial style of life, imposed on architecture. As a result, all agreed that successful colonial build- ing involved the incorporation or adaptation of some elements of indigenous design. For their private residences the colonial British adopted the single-storied bungalow, with pitched roof and expansive veranda, set in a spacious compound ringed with servants' quarters. This arrangement of space substantially altered the nature of the indigenous bungalow, but it at once secured the ventilation the English required in a hot climate and marked out their separateness as a colonial elite.5

In public and monumental structures a number of indigenous structural features were regarded as essential for comfort. Even Smith, though he sought precedents for most of them in the "sunshiny regions" of Europe, could list what was required: walls of ample thickness to ward off the heat, an absence of vertical features such as buttresses that might interrupt the flow of air, a "constant pref- erence" for horizontal cornices to cast shade, "frequent and ample" openings, piers and columns "frequent and numerous," a "constant use" of balconies and corbelled projections, roofs "sometimes flat, sometimes domical," and above all "an ample space allowed the whole building and its surroundings."6 Colonial architecture in sum, no matter of what elements particular buildings were con-

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structed, remained always distinct. Neither European nor Indian, it made tan- gible, and helped define, the uniquely colonial culture of which it was a part.

During the first decades of their rule in India, following the victories at Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1763), the British gave little thought to architecture. For the most part they were engaged in extending and consolidating their hold over the subcontinent, a task not completed until the mid-nineteenth century. Nor was the commercially-minded East India Company, ruler of Britain's eastern possessions, eager to expend its profits on what they regarded as the needless extravagance of showy buildings. Hence the presidency capitals of Madras, Bom- bay, and Calcutta were alone during the early years of British rule adorned with buildings of some architectural distinction. Each had at its core a massive fort, the seat of colonial government for the city and its hinterland; arrayed outside its ramparts were mercantile offices, civic buildings, churches, clubs, official res- idences and other structures required by the colonial elite.

In their architectural style these buildings transplanted contemporary Euro- pean forms to Indian soil. Cities founded as trading outposts, and subsequently developed as centers of European commerce and government, the presidency capitals, with their substantial white populations and British forms of local self- government, to some degree were regarded as extensions of Europe in Asia, and their architecture inevitably reflected this conception. In Madras and Calcutta, which experienced sustained growth from the later decades of the eighteenth century onward, the predominant architectural motif was Classical. Madras build- ings ranged in style from the Wren-inspired Renaissance of Fort St. George (c. 1760) to the Greek revivalism of the Banqueting Hall (1802) and Collectorate (1817), while in Calcutta, proverbially a city of gleaming white "palaces," Welles- ley's baroque Government House (1802) was surrounded by such classically pro- portioned structures as the Doric Town Hall (1813) and Metcalfe Hall (1840). By the time the western capital of Bombay had spurted to wealth and prosper- ity-in the middle decades of the nineteenth century-Gothic had triumphed in England's "battle of the styles." Hence Bombay's major civic structures were clothed in Gothic forms. Indeed so totally is Bombay's architecture a product of its mid-Victorian boom that the city retains to this day a distinctively Gothic appearance.

The colonial buildings of this era were not without political significance. As Sten Nilsson has pointed out, their Classical forms "began to contain forces that were not to be found in the prototypes; they stood as symbols of a conquering militarism and a culture and a race which considered themselves superior." Yet the demarcation of England's new role in Asia took the shape not of devising new architectural forms but rather of enhancing the impressiveness of the old. Lord Wellesley's Government House sought to project for the first time an image

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of British power: to make clear that India was now "to be ruled from a palace, not from a counting-house; with the ideas of a Prince, not with those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigo." But, although it was an imposing structure with its stately central pile, curving wings, and ceremonial stairway, the building remained firmly rooted in the accepted conventions of the baroque idiom. It was no more than a grander version of the aristocratic country seat on which it had been modeled, Robert Adam's Kedleston Hall. In the days of the "Company Bahadur" up to mid-century, British buildings in India remains always, as Nilsson wrote of Calcutta and Madras, "projections of Greece and Rome."7

In 1857 Britain's hold over India was shaken by a revolt, the so-called "Sepoy Mutiny," which, though originating in the armed forces, spread rapidly through- out northern India. The uprising was suppressed ruthlessly within little more than a year. Nevertheless the events of that year shattered British complacency. In 1858 the East India Company was abolished, and direct Crown rule instituted; at the time, determined to avoid any further challenge to their rule, the British undertook a more thorough and systematic governance of their vast Indian possessions. The white garrison was substantially increased, and a comprehensive network of railways was laid down. A central Public Works Department had already been established in 1854; a decade later consulting architects were appointed in each province, and the Government set on foot a building program that spread new roads, irrigation canals, military cantonments, and civil stations across the face of India.

As the sinews of rule were strengthened, so too during these years did the British begin to formulate an ideology of empire. The construction of a concep- tion of Britain as an imperial power, which lay at the heart of the late-century "new imperialism:' first took shape in India in the 1860s and 1870s as the British grappled with the problems of post-Mutiny reconstruction. The capstone was Disraeli's proclamation in 1877 of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. Though subjected to much satirical criticism in an uncomprehending England, this act nevertheless at once defined, and inaugurated, Britain's self-conscious presen- tation of itself as an imperial power.

Effective imperial rule required not only troops and expressive symbols but knowledge. Throughout the late nineteenth century the British sought to com- prehend, and thus to control, the colonial peoples and their past. In India this took the shape of such institutions as the Census (first taken on a nationwide basis in 1872), the Archeological Survey, and the production for each province of detailed gazetteers and ethnological surveys. In the process the range and character of India's architectural heritage became known in the West for the first time. Much of this was the work of James Fergusson (1808-1886). He began his studies, unsupported by government, in the 1830s while employed as an indigo merchant in Calcutta. In those days, as he told the Society of Arts in 1866, "the

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subject of Indian architecture had hardly been touched.... No attempt had been made to classify them [India's buildings] and the vaguest possible ideas prevailed as to their age or relative antiquity." When he returned home in the early 1850s he found an unsympathetic public, "not then prepared for such works," and so for a time abandoned his enterprise. In the post-Mutiny years the more sup- portive climate of opinion, as the British sought a fuller understanding of their Indian subjects, gave Fergusson at last an audience, while the dissemination of photography during these same years helped make familiar India's novel archi- tectual forms. Anyone, Fergusson wrote, "at a small expense may now make himself master of any branch of the subject.?8 This self-confident sense of mas- tery informed above all Fergusson's own magisterial History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, first published in 1876, and for the subsequent half-century the final authority on the subject.9

Britain's effort to grasp India was shaped by a search for those categories that would reveal the essential and enduring structure of its society. One such category was caste. A comprehensive but loose ordering of India's peoples based upon Hindu notions of purity and pollution, with countless local variations, caste was elaborated by the British into an intricate and rigid system of hierarchy, enforced by the courts and defined by the decennial censuses. Another, and for the British more central, marker of identity in India was religious affiliation. From the early days of British rule the entire population, apart from tiny scat- tered minorities, was fitted into two mutually exclusive, and comprehensive, cat- egories: those of "Hindu" and "Muslim." In the process, as part of the larger transformation of India during the nineteenth century, localized identities in which religion was only one of many elements, and which itself took varied forms, gave way to membership of two all-embracing and India-wide communities.

British study of India's architecture at once reflected this colonial sociology and reinforced its hold. The "architecture indigenous to the soil" as Fergusson called it, that is, buildings erected in states with Hindu rulers, was labeled "Hindu," while the buildings of the Muslim dynasties that ruled between 1200 and 1800 A.D. were classed together as "Saracenic," a term for Islam derived from the European encounter with the Arabs of the early conquests. All scholars, and especially Fergusson whose work was devoted to its elaboration, recognized that India's architecture comprised a number of different styles corresponding to various "ethnological" and political divisions among its people; Fergusson himself counted thirteen distinct "Saracenic" styles. Yet it was accepted as a matter of course that "the division of the whole of India into two great classes-Hindoo and Saracenic-was undoubtedly happy and true." The insistence on the cen- trality of a religious identity, which took shape in fixed architectural styles, defined an India that was in effect an "Orientalist" construct: a timeless land of tradition- bound peoples for whom religion alone had meaning.'0

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For the most part the British disdained the so-called "Hindu" style. Lord Napier, amateur student of architecture and Governor of Madras, in a speech in 1870 acknowledged that Hindu building "is imposing; it is even poetical ... ; yet, regarded both from a scientific and an aesthetic point of view, it is manifestly defective." The ruling feature of this style, he argued, was "the horizontal line: the wall or the column supports a beam, the beam supports a flat roof. When the building is lofty, the fabric ascends by successive horizontal stages, one suc- ceeding another in diminishing proportions to the apex." Though such a struc- ture might rise with a "certain measure of continuity and elegance," with its method of construction "ingeniously concealed" by decoration, still the inherent "mechanical deficiencies" of the style could always be discerned. Hence, Napier concluded, the Hindu style was "unavailable, under the present Government, for the purposes of the State, and ill-adapted for the common and public use of the collective people." It was alone suited to domestic building, where its principles of shade and seclusion fitted it ideally to social and climatic needs alike."

The arch and dome, the principal features of the "Saracenic" style, were by contrast, in Napier's view, the "most beautiful, the most scientific, and the most economical" ways of covering large spaces. Saracenic forms were in consequence, he argued, as suitable for modern buildings-railway stations, theatres, galleries, and lecture halls-as for their traditional employment in mosques and tombs; and he even urged the Government of India to adopt this as its official architec- tural style (Fig. 1).12 What made the Saracenic as a style so much more appealing? Part of the answer no doubt lies in its engineering, which managed stresses so as to avoid the "vast application of material in its most weighty and expensive form" that the horizontal style demanded. But most important surely was the associa- tion of the arch and dome with early Christendom, with the Roman and Byzan- tine empires, and with Renaissance notions of ideal beauty. Moreover, as the style associated with the Indian empire the British had themselves recently dispos- sessed, that of the Mughals, its use would enhance their own sense of power and majesty. Of the indigenous styles the Islamic was, simply, the most suited for the representation of empire.

Lord Napier himself inaugurated the new era by employing R.F Chisholm (1839 -1915), the Government Architect, to design a building in the "Mussulman style" for the Madras Board of Revenue (Fig. 2). With this design, Napier proudly proclaimed, Chisholm "has paid the first tribute to the genius of the past; he has set the first example of a revival in native art, which, I hope, will not remain unappreciated and unfruitful." Chisholm too saw his role as that of advocate for a new archiecture. He told the Madras University Senate in 1869:

We have arrived at a most important period in the history of architecture in this country, and it will be decided in the course of the next five or ten years whether we are to have a style suited to the requirements of this country, or whether we are to be the mere copyists

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FIGURE 1. The tomb of Nawab SafdarJang, near Delhi, c. 1760; an example of the "Saracenic"-styled architecture of India's Muslim rulers. (From James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Vol. II, plate XXXIV)

of every bubble which breaks on the surface of European art, and import our architecture, with our beer and our hats, by every mail-steamer which leaves the shores of England.'3

But the "Saracenic" style did not win an easy or an immediate public accep- tance, nor were its elements elaborated without extended experimentation. Chisholm proposed to inaugurate the new era by establishing a professorship in architecture at the Madras University; the scheme was rejected by a unanimous vote of the Senate. Just a few years before, in 1860, Madras had celebrated its escape from the Mutiny by a Memorial Hall executed in a pure Greek style. This building was to be the last classically designed structure in Madras, and marked as well the end of the era of unself-conscious "projection" of European styles onto Indian soil. Yet its erection testified to the strength of established conven- tion. Indeed the bulk of Chisholm's own building during his first decade in Mad- ras owed little to Indic influence. He had initially been drawn to the city in 1864 from the Bengal Public Works Department by the announcement of a competi-

Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860-1910 43

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Consulting Architect to the Madras Government. The style was, however, "pure Italian" derived from Renaissance classicism. His design a few years later for the Senate House of the University, extravagantly idiosyncratic with a huge raised hall, was described as one that "leans to the Byzantine."1l4 Clearly, in his early work, apart from the Revenue Board building, which was in any case modeled on the existing "Saracenic"-styled Chepauk Palace of the Nawabs of the Carnatic, Chisholm moved but slowly toward his goal of developing a style "suited to the requirements of this country."

Yet these early buildings were not wholly unrelated to his larger concern. Though he deprecated Gothic style as "parched and shrivelled in India, the Italian, if not the equal of indigenous styles "as regards suitability to the climate and to oriental scenery;' was still "distinguished for lightness and elegance:' In the same way, so-called "Byzantine" styles, with their "quasi-Oriental" character, represented an effort to devise some sort of compromise between the familiarity of the European and the strangeness of the Indian. Lord Napier had urged the

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use of Byzantine styles in India especially for those types of buildings, such as Christian churches, where Europeans would feel uncomfortable in Saracenic surroundings. The two styles, he wrote, "have ever retained a certain family likeness, and the common possession of the dome constitutes a capital point of union." Besides, as the "most venerable" of Christian styles, Byzantine could never be "repugnant" in an ecclesiastical structure.15

While Chisholm was developing an Indic style for colonial building in Mad- ras, architects elsewhere in India were moving toward the same objective. Of these perhaps the most prominent was Major C. Mant (1839-1881) of the Royal Engineers. Mant first made his mark on Indian architecture with two Gothic designs in the Bombay Presidency: a high school in Surat (1868), and a town hall in Kolhapur (1872). These structures were "adapted to the requirements of the climate" by such devices as arcaded verandas running along the entire length of the building, but they remained otherwise obstinately European.'6 From 1872, however, until his death by suicide a decade later-he was distraught at the possibility that one of his structures might collapse-Mant devoted himself wholly to elaborating an Indic style. He was fortunate in winning the patronage of Sir Richard Temple, successively Governor of Bengal and of Bombay. One of the most powerful Indian officials of his day, Temple prided himself on his connois- seurship of India's ancient architecture, and "warmly appreciated" Mant's efforts to incorporate such designs into his own building.'7 Through Temple's influence Mant secured from the Government of India in 1875 a commission-for the Mayo College, Ajmere-that was to announce the coming of age of what was to be called "Indo-Saracenic" architecture (Fig. 3).

The Mayo College had its origin in a scheme by Lord Mayo as viceroy of India (1869-1872) to educate the sons and relatives of the ruling princes of Rajputana (now Rajasthan) in an environment as closely as possible resembling that of an English boarding school. Only in a proper public school, Mayo's For- eign Secretary wrote, could the young chief escape the intrigues of the palace zenana (women's quarters), where much of his boyhood education took place, and the "fawning parasitism, inseparable in the East from rank and coming power." Under the instruction of an English staff, these desert rulers, now attached to the Raj as its loyal "feudatories," would learn not only English and mathematics but games and discipline. Educated as "ordinary gentlemen," they would, so the British conceived, on their return home be in a position to "revolutionize" their states.'8 A governing body of ranking European officials and Indian princes was formed under the viceroy to oversee the operation of the college. The Indian Government took upon itself responsibility for constructing the central college building, for lectures and academic functions, while the major princes each agreed, over the objection of officials who would have preferred English-style mixed boarding, to build a residence for the boys from his state.19

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FIGURE.3. The Mayo:College, Ajmere (photo. autho)..

The question of the appropriate architectural style for the college building provoked a controversy that raged for five years, involved the submission of seven separate designs, and delayed the start of construction until 1878. Not surpris- ingly, this protracted debate brought into the open the conflicting sets of assump- tions, hitherto barely visible, as to how the Empire ought best to be translated into stone; hence it is worth looking at in some detail. Three alternate concep- tions-which may be called the Classical, the mixed "Hindo-Saracenic," and the "pure" Hindu-shaped the debate. The Classical was Lord Mayo's original pref- erence. In the summer of 1871 he asked J. Gordon, Executive Engineer for the college, to prepare a plan for a "plain but handsome Hall, with classrooms sur- rounding a pillared verandah." The princes, when belatedly consulted over a year later, gave their support too, for reasons we will discuss presently, to this "Grecian" design. In the meantime, however, Mayo had changed his mind. In December 1871 he requested Gordon to prepare a "Hindoo" design. Mayo acknowledged that a Classical design might be "superior in beauty essentially," but it was, he had now decided, "less appropriate" for a princely boarding school than a design based on "Hindoo models."20 Exactly what a Hindu design ought to consist of, however, or where appropriate "Hindoo models" were to be found, was by no means clear. Two opposing views soon emerged: one found its inspi-

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FIGURE 4. View of the Central Pavilion in the Palace at Dig. (From Fergusson, Thstory of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Vol. II, p- 180)

ration in the deserted eighteenth century Jat capital of Dig, near Agra; the other in the architecture of the ancient Hindu temple. Each depended upon detailed historical research, and carried with it the assumption that the British had mas- tered, and so could turn to their own purposes, India's architectural heritage.

In Mayo's view the best "Hindoo models" were those of Dig, which he instructed Gordon to visit and sketch before drawing up his revised plan for the college (Fig. 4). Gordon visited not only Dig, but the nearby Mughal capitals of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri, and six months later submitted a design in what he called "a modern Hindoo or Indian saracene style" of architecture. It was, he insisted, "not a mere copy" of any historic building, but a design that embodied the "spirit of the style suggested to me," and was at the same time suited to the "requirements of a College and to the present age.'2 l The "best authority" on Hindu architecture was, however, perhaps not surprisingly, judged to be the Director of the Arche- ological Survey, General Alexander Cunningham; and so Mayo submitted Gor- don's design to him for an opinion.

The palace at Dig, Cunningham asserted, in opposition to Mayo, though the residence of a Hindu prince, was in its architectural style "purely Mahomedan,"

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with "very little if any trace of the real Hindu architecture about it, either in its outlines or in its details." Hence Gordon's design belonged, with Dig, to the "common class of modern Mahomedan garden architecture." The British knew, or rather he, General Cunningham, knew, even if the Rajas of Dig did not, what Hindu architecture consisted of. Its most striking feature, pronounced the self- assured archeologist, was a "rich profusion of ornament, not a mere surface scratching intended to take the place of mouldings, but delicately carved lines of foliage, which cover the mouldings themselves... ." Cunningham then pro- ceeded to alter Gordon's design by adding a pair of small closed turrets, canopied balconies supported on brackets, and two open cupolas in the upper parapet; at the same time he struck out "the plain hemispherical or round domes," which, he said, were "purely Mahomedan." Hindus, he admitted, among them the Rajas of Dig, did occasionally make use of similar domes. So also, he argued, with a stupendous leap, "do they make use of English shoes; but no one has yet ventured to call them Indian shoes because they have been partially adopted by the Hin- doos." Hindu domes, he explained, were constructed by layers of overlapping stones and thus presented externally a series of horizontal lines or steps, "of which the Hindoo architect availed himself in ornament."22 For Cunningham clearly the categories of "Hindu" and "Muslim," in keeping with the conventions of colonial sociology, were mutually exclusive. To be properly Hindu a building had to conform to certain stylistic principles which the archeologist, who had studied the whole of India's past, was most competent to delineate. Furthermore, older structures built before the time of Muslim rule were by virtue of that antiquity regarded as authentically "Hindu"; later buildings, such as those of eighteenth-century Dig, were by contrast inevitably debased.

The viceroy, by now Lord Northbrook, acknowledged that "on the question of what is, and what is not, purely Hindu in architecture" he could not question the opinion of "so high an authority as General Cunningham." Nevertheless, while anxious always "to secure a thoroughly Hindu feeling throughout the design," he sought as well to make the proposed structure consistent with "the style of architecture affected by the Rajpootana chiefs themselves"; and there was no doubt, as the Secretary to the Public Works Department pointed out, that "in modern times the Hindoos have borrowed very much from the beauties of the Mussulman architecture."23 Hence there was no necessary barrier to the use of a "mixed" style. For inspiration Northbrook turned at this point to the work of Major Mant, who had just completed in the high school at Kolhapur his first Indic design. In early 1873 the hapless Gordon was dismissed, and an assistant engineer, R. Joscelyne, instructed to adapt the Kolhapur design to the require- ments of the Mayo College. Joscelyne's scheme, submitted in March 1874, was ultimately judged unsatisfactory, so early in 1875 Northbrook commissioned Mant to draft an original design of his own.24 Although the first was rejected as

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too costly, the revised draft, approved by -the -viceroy, was unveiled in January 1877 on the occasion of the first meeting of the Mayo College Committee. Con- struction commenced in January 1878, and the building was finally completed in 1885.

What does this extended controversy tell us about the way empire took shape in architecture? Why, in the first place, did the government choose the mixed "Saracenic" style over the "pure" Hindu or the European Classical? In support of his design Mant argued that the "fusion" of Hindu and Muslim architecture that had grown up in Rajasthan and elsewhere was "admirably suited" to the needs of modern building, met the exigencies imposed by the climate, and "har- monizes with the traditions of the people." But, sensitive to Cunningham's criti- cism, he insisted further that

great care has been taken, in preparing this design, to use only such Mohammedan fea- tures and forms as the Hindus of Rajputana have themselves universally adopted, and in using them, to so subordinate them to Hindu feeling and treatment, and to so supplement them by purely Hindu forms and details, that the whole building may be almost literally described, as being an adaptation of modern Hindu domestic architecture, and therefore thoroughly suitable, as far as architectural style is concerned, for a College in which the sons of Rajput Chiefs and Nobles are to be educated.25

No doubt to some degree, iri rejecting a purely "Hindu" style, the Govern- ment recognized that the endeavor to enforce such a style could lead only to the arid scholasticism of a Cunningham. The Hindu religious faith, they had to admit, like all others, had never carried with it a commitment to any particular style of architecture. The Rajas of Dig were by no means exceptional in drawing upon varied elements, reflecting the fashion or "taste" of the times, for their buildings without regard to the religious convictions of those who might first have used them. To have insisted upon the use of only "Hindu forms" would have been to be more Hindu than the Hindus. "Pure" Hindu architecture too, as Mant and others before him argued, "from its massive construction and elab- orate ornamentation" was "scarcely capable of satisfactory adaptation to modern requirements."26 Yet there was surely more to it than this. Lord Northbrook, in announcing his preference for Gordon's over Cunningham's design, said that he did so "as a matter of taste."27 However, more than simply aesthetic considerations were involved. Lacking the dome and the arch, and overwhelmed with orna- mentation, so-called "Hindu" architecture did not convey an adequate sense of sovereignty and majesty, and hence was politically unsatisfactory. An architecture primarily of temples, and of a people conquered by both Muslim and British alike, it had of necessity to remain confined to its traditional domestic and sacral purposes.

The Indo-Saracenic style by contrast ideally suited the needs of British colo- nialism. In it not only could the distinct "Hindu" and "Saracenic" forms be melded,

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FIGURE 5. An ornamental chattri on the roof of the Albert Hall, Jaipur, c. 1876.

but the British, self-proclaimed masters of India's culture, could in the process shape a harmony the Indians themselves, communally divided, could not achieve. Indo-Saracenic thus found its widest application in buildings meant for Indians, but where the content and meaning of the structure were defined by the colonial ruler and embodied British definitions of appropriate behavior. Mayo College obviously served precisely this function. Indeed, a college of Indo-Saracenic design encapsulated in itself the assumptions, and contradictions, of colonialism: the structure defined for the Indians their past, while the curriculum-based on European learning-laid out for them their future. In similar fashion, several of the most spectacular Indo-Saracenic buildings were museums, among them the Albert Hall in Jaipur (Fig. 5), the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, and the Victoria Memorial Hall in Madras. As a museum by its very nature was a showcase of India's past as organized and classified by its colonial rulers, an Indo- Saracenic structure-whose architectural forms reflected precisely the same enterprise-was altogether appropriate.

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But why did the British reject with so little hesitation, when it was the princes' own preference, the Classical design Mayo had first proposed? Certainly once Mayo had abandoned the "Grecian" design there was no looking back. In large measure this decision reflected the considerations that underlay Chisholm's orig- inal objective in the 1860s: to derive from India's indigenous traditions an archi- tecture suited to the needs of the British Raj. But there were further specific reasons that impelled the British to insist upon an Indic design for the Mayo College. The college was, after all, meant for the use of the sons of the princes of Rajputana. These princes, though now incorporated as "feudatories" within the British imperial system, represented some of India's most ancient ruling dynasties, and hence in themselves personified that link with India's past that the British sought for their own Raj. Thus it was unthinkable to set down a Grecian temple for their use in the middle of the Rajasthan desert. The princes might wish to emulate the West, and to enhance their own self-esteem by surrounding themselves with the architectural styles of their rulers. One might even argue that, as the curriculum of the new school was to be Western in character, as for that matter was the whole concept of a boarding school, surely the buildings in their style ought to reflect this orientation. As we shall see, the architecture of the College was by no means devoid of Western symbolism. But precisely because the princes had by the later nineteenth century become in such large measure creatures of the colonial order, it was for the British all the more essential that these men define their rulership in terms derived from India's past, and mark out visibly in architecture their distinctive status.

Nor did the princes raise a protest. Their continuing position as rulers was dependent upon the support of their colonial overlord; as "protected" princes they could ill afford to defy their master. Furthermore, insofar as the princes defined themselves as traditional rulers-and they had of course no other claim upon legitimacy-the clothing of structures meant for their use in a traditional Indian idiom could only enhance their kingly role. They were in the end confined by the assumptions which alone gave validity to their rule. Although given the freedom to build their boarding houses according to their own designs, the princes for the most part simply handed over the money to the College Executive Engi- neer, who was then left in charge of the design and construction. Although the various states' houses are by no means identical, none ventures far from the Indo-Saracenic idiom of the main college building.28

As the "Hindu-Saracenic" (or "Indo-Saracenic") established itself as a rec- ognized colonial building style, the British turned for inspiration and models to the medieval cities of northern India. Dig was lavishly praised. Fergusson described its buildings as surpassing all the Rajput palaces in "grandeur of conception and beauty of detail," while Sir Richard Temple called its buildings "unsurpassed on earth" for "tasteful ornamentation, gracefully refined." The finish of detail within the boldness of outline, Temple wrote:

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FIGURE 6. The Audience Hall, Bijapur, c. 1600; such romantic ruins inspired Indo-Saracenic builders. (From Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Vol. II, p. 278)

the chiaroscuro produced by the shadows from the projecting eaves; the arrangement of arched windows and doorways; the exquisitely projecting balconies; the balanced pro- portion between the whole and the parts; the combination of straight lines, curves, and angles; the adaptation of the stone material to the climatic surroundings-render it quite a study in the art of producing beauty. A school of architectural design could not do better than send out a class of students to note and mark this structure.29

The British found other attractive examples of what they regarded as "Hindu- Saracenic" building in the capitals of several of the lesser Islamic states, above all Gaur, Bijapur, and Ahmedabad, where vigorous independent building traditions had grown up; in the Rajput capitals, above all Amber and Jaipur, whose archi- tecture joined indigenous and Mughal styles; and to some extent in pre-Mughal Delhi (Fig. 6). About the high Mughal architecture of Agra and Delhi the British were ambivalent. From first to last the "peerless" quality of such structures as the Taj Mahal was never questioned-indeed Temple spoke of the Great Mogul as "the greatest architectural genius that ever lived"-though some skeptics did wonder whether Italian artists had not taken a large role in the decoration of

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Agra's monuments. The British nevertheless regarded these stupendous build- ings, with their marble facades and inlay of semi-precious stones, as too "florid" and "showy"; perhaps too they did not wish to have their own work judged next to that of Shah Jahan.30 For the Europeanized post-Mughal buildings of Lucknow and Hyderabad, on the other hand, they had nothing but contempt. The pseudo- classicism decked out in tawdry stucco favored by the Nawabs of Oudh was not the kind of compliment India's colonial rulers sought from their subjects.3'

In applying the term "Indo-Saracenic" to this wide array of historic buildings, the British were not defining a coherent era in the history of Indian architecture. Rather, by lumping these historic structures under a common label together with their own, the British endeavored to lay claim to a direct line of descent from the Rajputs and Mughals to themselves. James Ransome, Consulting Architect to the Government of India, in 1905 discussed, without any sense of incongruity, the Mughal tomb of Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri (c. 1580), and the Albert Museum at Jaipur (1876) as being representative samples of "Saracenic work.:32 As a term for scholarly analysis, "Indo-Saracenic" has in recent years been increasingly jettisoned as too vague and inclusive, and it now has no place in academic discourse on India's architecture. Yet as an artifact of colonialism the term remains useful as a way of describing British building that sought to model itself upon, or sought inspiration from, these earlier structures.

The balance of stylistic elements, and the sites from which models were selected, varied for each building, depending on the objectives and interests of the archi- tect. By and large the more remote and inaccessible sites such as Gaur and Mandu rarely figured in British building. Simply too little was known about them. By contrast, the Mughal buildings of Delhi and Agra, visited annually by thousands and mapped in detail, provided a rich source of stylistic elements, from copings and plinths to pillars and brackets.33 In the Mayo College design, as we have seen, Mant endeavored to draw the bulk of his stylistic elements from Rajput building. The plan nevertheless found room for a wide array of design elements. It included, among others, plain and cusped arches drawn from later Mughal work, several so-called Bengali, or "drooping," chattris (porticoes) of the same period, small domed entrance porches, an overhanging chajja or eave of pre- Mughal style, cupolas of varied forms at the angles, and two octagonal minarets at the front terminating at the roof level in cupolas crowned by "the well known Hindu 'Sikra' domes." Above it all soared a clock tower 94 feet high (Fig. 7). The "most prominent feature in the design," the clock tower, wrote Mant,

has a richly moulded and slightly spreading base, and is taken up as a square to the height of 22 feet from the ground. From this point it is chambered to an octagonal shaft, which, at the height of 58 feet, corbels out again to the square form.... Above the corbelling bold stone brackets support a narrow projecting balcony, with perforated stone railings,

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FIGURE 7. The Clock Tower at the Mayo College.

above which rises the square clock chamber (with marble angle shafts), terminating in a richly corbelled cornice and crowned by an iron gilded dome of ornamental design, the sides of which, being pierced by open arcading, will allow the sound of the gongs of the clock . .,. to be heard freely below.34

Even that pre-eminent symbol of British technology, the clock, was cast in an Indo-Saracenic form.

The profusion of design elements in the completed structure makes it clear that Mant had made no attempt to be faithful to the style-the "taste"-of any particular period of India's past. Clearly, one of the attractions of Indo-Saracenic for the British builder was the freedom it afforded to "mix and match" elements of design. Chisholm himself had no doubt as to how to proceed. The architect, he said, "may choose the comparatively easy archaeological road, copying piece- meal and wholesale structures of the past, or he may endeavour to master that spirit which produced such works, and select, reject, and modify the forms to

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suit the altered conditions."35 India's architectural heritages were as colors on a palette. Reflecting the Orientalist conceptions of the times, they were at the deep- est level similar and interchangeable. Once mastered, they were available for any purpose the colonial ruler considered appropriate; none needed to be taken seriously on its own terms.

One unifying feature of much Indo-Saracenic architecture was a search for the "picturesque." The cult of the picturesque was also a feature of Victorian Britain, but in India, where the British lived surrounded by the "exotic" and unfamiliar, it was an almost invariable accompaniment of art that sought to take the environment into account. Much of the attraction of remote and ruined capitals was to be found in their "picturesque" situation. In the space of a few pages James Fergusson, in his History of Indian and Eastern Architecture praises the "fairy-like" setting amidst lakes and hills of princely palaces from Udaipur and Bundi to Orccha and Amber. They are, he said, "seldom designed with much reference to architectural symmetry, but are nevertheless always picturesque and generally most ornamental objects in the landscape where they are found."36 The search for the picturesque could sometimes lead to extraordinary, if not absurd, results. The Mayo College tower, Mant proudly announced, "has been purposely placed at an angle and out of the centre of the building to obtain a picturesque effect" and to take the place of a massive central feature such as a dome. The bureaucrats in the central secretariat were not impressed. The clock tower, wrote back the Public Works Secretary, "is not only not quite consistent with the rest of the building but also gives it a lopsided effect," and so should be eliminated. Undaunted, Mant insisted that to omit the tower "would make the design some- what tame and commonplace in its grouping, and wanting in spirit and pictur- esqueness of character." In the end the Government gave way. The tower, one official noted, "certainly is inconsistent, but as the rest of the design is by no means a pure style, and is a resultant of the combination of two or more styles, I do not think the addition of another style in the tower is objectionable, rather it is advantageous, as marking a further transition and the commencement of a new era."37

In what way does the Mayo College tower mark "the commencement of a new era"? Mant does not tell us, but the symbolic meaning of such a tower is clear enough. The clock tower, frequently attached to the Victorian town hall, was a common feature of the urban landscape of provincial Britain. Nor were towers wholly unknown in precolonial India. But for the most part, following the precedent of the Qutb Minar set up by the first Muslim conquerors of Delhi about 1200, they told of conquest, not the hours. From the 1860s onward the British erected clock towers, usually free-standing, in the major cities of northern India. Delhi obtained one some 1 10 feet high opposite the town hall in Chandni Chowk, at the expense of the municipality, as one of the first "improvements" in

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the city following the devastation of the 1857 mutiny.38 In Lucknow the British induced the trustees of the Huseinabad Endowment, a Shia charitable body estab- lished by the rulers of Oudh, to meet the cost of a soaring tower some 221 feet in height adjacent to the burial ground of Nawab Mohammed Ali Shah.39 Set down in the two centers of the 1857 revolt, these structures can hardly be regarded as other than latter-day Qutb Minars, to mark out the presence of a new con- queror in the land. Lesser towers in cities like Ludhiana and elsewhere no doubt made the same point. Colleges were especially favored with towers. Sometimes these reflected the munificence of large donors, like the Maharaja of Viziana- gram, whose gift of ?10,000 was commemorated with a 200-foot-tall bell tower at Muir College, Allahabad. But political symbolism was surely never distant. It takes little imagination to see in the open iron dome which caps the Mayo College tower a symbolic representation of the British Crown: the Raj triumphant! The clock itself already had a symbolic significance as an element of "the new era." The British had always railed against the laziness and lethargy of their Indian subjects. With its hourly chiming gongs, the clock helped to remind the students and passersby not only of the supremacy of the Raj but of the virtues of punc- tuality. The modern world in India, as it had been for the peasant-become- factory-worker in Britain a half-century before, was to be marked by discipline and orderliness.

The crown surmounting the Mayo College was distinctive in yet another way: it was made of iron forged in a British foundry. The "new era"-and of this the British were in no doubt-was to be scientific and technological. Its "skin" might be of an ornate Indic design in marble, but the interior structure of the Mayo College incorporated the latest technology. In the roofs, Mant wrote:

full advantage has been taken of the capabilities of cement concrete, which is to be used in flat slabs not exceeding twelve feet in span; spans of this size being obtained by throwing arches across the rooms, where possible .. . and elsewhere (as in the main entrance porch and lecture hall) by provision of iron girders....40

This unity of "European science" and "native art" was central to the conception of Indo-Saracenic architecture. Sir Richard Temple, in his eulogy of Mant, put the matter concisely. You may ask, he said,

why, if the native architecture is so extremely good we should not follow it absolutely- follow it pure and simple-in our Anglo-Indian structures. Well, gentlemen, there is this particular reason: If you are to construct buildings which are perfect in respect of utility and convenience, then you must call in the aid of European science . . . [Mant's distin- guishing merit] was this: that whereas some of his architectural and artistic predecessors transplaced European styles bodily into India ... he tried instead to hit on some style which should unite the usefulness of the scientific European designs together with the beauty, taste, grandeur and sublimity of the native style; and this style he called the Hindu- Saracenic."4

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Once the style had been elaborated, the question remained: how widely ought Indo-Saracenic to be used, and for what kinds of structures was it appropriate? The Public Works Member of the Viceroy's Council in 1877 wrote:

There can be little doubt that buildings for native purposes, such as the following, should be built in some style of native architecture: temples, mosques, palaces, colleges, schools, markets, hospitals, asylums; whilst those specially for the comfort and wants of Europeans, such as residences, churches, offices, railway buildings, etc., are more appropriate for some European style adapted to the various climates of India.42

But the matter was not so simple as that. As a colonial regime the British had no intention of constructing mosques or temples. As we have seen, schools and colleges, with museums, were ideally suited for Indo-Saracenic architecture, and were commonly constructed in it. As the style became acccepted in the later nineteenth century, public buildings meant for the joint use of Britons and Indi- ans, including banks, railway stations, and even some government office blocks, were also frequently clothed in Indo-Saracenic forms. This was most strikingly the case in Madras. Here the influence first of R.E Chisholm, and then of Henry Irwin, as Consulting Architects to the Government, was decisive in raising an array of imposing Indo-Saracenic buildings that dominate the Madras skyline to the present day. Among these are such diverse structures as the State Bank, the Law Courts and adjacent Law College, the Victoria Technical Institute, and the Egmore Railway Station. The Law Courts along the strand, capped by a tower used as a lighthouse, were designed by Irwin on the pattern of Chisholm's Rev- enue Board buildings. Like its predecessor, though on a much larger scale, the Law Court design incorporated arches extending from floor to ceiling; these "were borrowed from the designs of the Pathan buildings of the fifteenth century, where they were used in domed mosques, and were intended to throw light into the highest recesses of the domes, and shew their beautiful ornaments."43 The Egmore Station, designed a decade later in 1902, boasted a "Mogul style of architecture" with "intricate stone carving, fantastic-shaped brackets, drip stones, and rich friezes that at once attract the attention of any observer to the excellence of the structure from an architectural point of view."44

In buildings meant primarily for European use, especially in port cities such as Bombay where European forms continued in favor, Indo-Saracenic decorative motifs were frequently added to basically Gothic structures. Such a melded archi- tecture reassured the public with its familiar forms while introducing a touch of the "exotic." E W Stevens's stupendous Victoria Railway Terminal, for instance, and the Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway offices, though wholly Gothic in style, were decorated with Indic carving and details, carried out by students of the Bombay School of Art, that lent the structures a vaguely "Oriental feel- ing.'45 But Bombay remained wedded to its Gothicized forms. Even though

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Chisholm in 1888 won the first prize in an open competition for new Bombay Municipal Offices, his Indo-Saracenic design was shelved, and the commission awarded to the trusted local builder F W Stevens.

Gothic and Indo-Saracenic could also be joined in larger, if idiosyncratic, conceptions, for the arches and ornamentation the two shared made them to some degree compatible. Perhaps the most notable mixture of the two, which made its author's reputation as an architect, was William Emerson's Muir College, Allahabad. In part in order to accommodate a large bell tower, Emerson

determined not to follow too closely Indian art, but to avail myself of an Egyptian phase of Moslem architecture, and work it up with the Indian Saracenic style of Beejapore and the north-west, combining the whole in a western Gothic design. The beautiful lines of the Taj Mahal influenced me in my dome over the hall, and the Indian four-centered arch suggested itself as convenient for my purpose, as working in well with the general Gothic feeling.46

He further blended "Gothic tracery" with Indian geometrical perforated stone- work, Gothic shafts and caps with Indian arches, and set his domes on "Gothicized Mohammedan pendentives and semi-circular arches."

The building of churches in an Indo-Saracenic style posed especially intract- able problems. Like other public buildings of the same era, Indian churches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries followed contemporary English Georgian styles. The British modeled their Indian churches above all upon St. Martins in the Field, Trafalgar Square, for this church with its soaring tower not only was located at the heart of the Empire, but detailed published plans of the structure existed for the guidance of overseas engineer-builders.47 By the 1 840s, under the influence of Pugin and the "ecclesiologists," Gothic had become accepted in India as in England as the appropriate style for church architecture. Even in Calcutta, with its wholly Classical facade, the cathedral (1847) was put up in a Gothic style. In time the conventions that governed church architecture became so rigid that it was inconceivable to build an ecclesiastical structure in other than a Gothic style. Emerson's cathedral in Allahabad, though barely half a mile from Muir College, was strictly Gothic. Indeed, far from modeling the cathedral on the College, Emerson found in the proximity of the cathedral reason for refrain- ing from "a rigorous adherence to the Saracenic style" in the college design.48 Likewise, the renowned Indo-Saracenic architect Swinton Jacob, while construct- ing the elaborate Albert Hall in Jaipur, put up the city's Anglican church in a severe early English style. The church, he wrote, must be "in keeping with a style with which all our feelings of devotion are associated." The only modifications he would allow were those dictated by a concern for climate: a high nave with clerestory windows protected by projecting sunshades to increase ventilation without heat and glare; and a flat ceiling with hooks to which a row of punkahs (fans) could be attached.49

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Any attempt to introduce Indo-Saracenic elements into a church structure at one provoked a fury of controversy. Mathura, a small north Indian district town adjacent to the sacred Hindu shrine of Brindaban, was graced, after its consecration in 1856, by an airy and elegant Anglican church in Italianate style for the use of the garrison. However, there was no Catholic church; this the Catholic officer in charge of the district in the 1870s, E S. Growse, determined to set right. An enthusiast for Indian arts and crafts, Growse designed the ground plan and general proportions "in accordance with ordinary Gothic precedent, but then set out to make the rest of the church "purely Oriental in design." The carving in the doorways, the tracery in the windows, the kiosks set on the sides of the dome, all were "specimens of native art." He had further intended, he wrote, to model the dome itself on the shikara, or spire, of a Hindu temple at Brindaban. Fearing opposition, however, Growse "altered it into a dome of the Russian type, which also is distinctly of Eastern origin and therefore so far in keeping with the rest of the building." As every compromise must, he sighed, "it fails of being entirely satisfactory."50

Similar attempts at an Indo-Saracenic Christian architecture elsewhere fared little better. The building of the Madras Y.M.C.A. in a style consistent with the adjacent law courts provoked an outraged correspondent to ask Indian Engineer- ing why "the authorities of this Christian Institute have ordered their architect to design this building in Heathen Architecture? It may have been so designed on the same principle that the Teetotal Preacher has a drunken man beside him, to emphasize the hideousness of the crime." Surely, the writer went on, echoing Napier's recommendation of some thirty years before, "there are plenty of Ori- ental Christian edifices, in and around Armenia, of Byzantine Oriental type which would have carried out that great and first principle of Architecture, I mean 'Fitness' better that the absurd caricature it now presents.",51 When a storm of criticism broke around the Cambridge Mission for putting up their Delhi College in a "Mughal" style (Fig. 8), the principal defended his decision by an appeal to the universal character of the Christian faith:

I should have thought that it was somewhat late in the day for anyone to argue that a Christian College must necessarily be designed in some style of architecture already con- secrated, so to say, to Christian use.... [He could conceive] no nobler task for the Christian architect in this country than after patient sympathetic and accurate study of the best periods of Indian architecture, both Hindu and Mahomedan, to endeavor to fashion out of the models he has studied, new forms, not slavishly imitative of the old, but adapted to meet the needs of Christian worship and life.52

At no time, even as a secular form, was Indo-Saracenic exempt from criti- cism. Always there were those who argued, with Roger Smith, that the British ought "proudly and truthfully [to] mark our sojourn in this country" with "an indelible history in brick and stone of the Anglo-Saxon rule," and not make "the

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NOITH on FRONT ELEVATION

FIGURE 8. St. Stephen's College, Delhi. (From Indian Engineering, 11 October 1890, p. 292)

noble art of architecture a living lie by affecting foreign styles."53 At home there was always grumbling at the Indian Government's commitment to the strange and unfamiliar Indo-Saracenic. The Builder, though upset at Chisholm's unfair treatment in the Bombay municipal competition, nevertheless found it difficult to share his-and Fergusson's-enthusiasms. The editors wrote in a leading article:

You may learn to like anything if you try hard enough. Fergusson made Indian architec- ture his specialty, and managed to work himself up into an enthusiasm (not always com- municated to his readers) even over things that are like the architecture of nightmare, without form, proportion, or logic.

Of Indian buildings only the Taj Mahal was "marked by a purity of line and balance of proportion which may really be called quite Greek." They expressed their preference for a European style adapted to suit the climate and conditions of India, and lamented that British India's cities were still "much in want of their Norman Shaw."54

Only a very few critics perceived that Indo-Saracenic was fundamentally flawed: a colonial style masquerading as a "national" one. E. B. Havell, critic and art school director associated with the burgeoning arts and crafts movement in England, argued that a true Indian architecture could only come about by encouraging its untutored master builders, and giving them a free hand to work within their own traditions. Of the British "Indo-Saracenic" architect, he wrote scornfully that he

clothes his engineering with external paper-designed adornments borrowed from ancient buildings which were made for purposes totally foreign to those which he has in hand. The engineering is more or less real (according to the skill of the designer); the "style" is purely artificial.... [The British did not] come as the Moguls did, to learn the art of

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building from the Indian master builder, but-on the false assumption that art in India vanished with the last of the Moguls-to teach the application of Indian archeology to the constructive methods of the West, using the Indian craftsman only as an instrument for creating a make-believe Anglo-Indian "style"'55

In the end, in the years following 1912, Indo-Saracenic succumbed before the forceful genius of the man who was to be British India's "Norman Shaw": Edwin Lutyens, the builder of New Delhi. Swinton Jacob's buildings, Lutyens reported to his collaborator Herbert Baker during his first tour of India, "are all made up of tit bits culled from various buildings of various dates put together with no sense of relation or of scale. I do want," he insisted, "old England to stand up and plant her great traditions and good taste where she goes and not pander to sentiment and all this silly Moghul-Hindu stuff.,56 A decade earlier, Indo- Saracenic had already been forced onto the defensive. From the late 1890s onward in Europe a resurgent Classicism had swept aside Victorian Gothic-as Lutyens wrote in 1903, "In architecture Palladio is the game...." As these changing pat- terns of taste altered architectural styles in Europe, they also affected imperial building. In India this Classical revival gained its first triumph with the 1905 Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. Although it was designed by William Emerson, the guiding hand was that of the Viceroy Lord Curzon, who insisted that "a structure in some variety of the classical or Renaissance style was essential.?57 James Ransome, the Government's Consulting Architect during this decade, for the most part too sought inspiration from European Classical designs.

So it is not surprising that when the decision was made in 1912 to build a new capital at Delhi, the vision that informed it bore the impress of European and of classical forms. Elements of the older vision survived, above all in the placement of the new Delhi adjacent to the old Mughal capital. The British still sought to capture for their empire the majesty of their predecessors. The Viceroy Lord Hardinge also fought for a decorative scheme that would at least give an Indian appearance to the facades of these Classical structures. But henceforward Classical styles were to inspire Britain's building in India. They alone, as Herbert Baker wrote to The Times, "embody the idea of law and order which has been produced out of chaos by the British Administration."58

The Indo-Saracenic, then, shaped Britain's conception of how its empire in India ought to be marked in stone for some fifty years, from 1860 to 1910. Insofar as it involved a repudiation of Western forms, this architecture sought to define Britain's empire in Indian terms. It endeavored to draw upon the legitimacy of the Mughal Empire-and, occasionally and ambivalently, of Hindu rulership. In so doing this architectural enterprise was part of a larger effort, in the years after the 1858 inauguration of Crown governance, to create for Britain in India a "secure and usable past." The elaboration of distinctive rituals and dress, the forging of special ties with India's princes, the proclamation of Victoria as Empress

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of India-all were directed to this same objective. As the Viceroy Lord Lytton wrote of the grand Imperial Assemblage he had convened in 1877 to proclaim Victoria's new title, it would conspicuously "place the Queen's authority upon the ancient throne of the Moguls, with which the imagination and tradition of [our] Indian subjects associate the splendour of supreme power."59

Yet at no time did the British ever cease to define themselves as above and apart from their Indian subjects. They never, for instance, built temples or mos- ques, acts by which previous rulers had sought to bond themselves to their sub- jects and make manifest the righteousness of their rule. The British after the 1850s vigorously disavowed any involvement whatsoever with Indian religious institutions. They set out instead systematically to order and classify the elements of India's heritage. Its peoples, its languages, its philosophies, its styles of build- ing, were all labeled and defined. Set apart from the West, India had become an object. In this respect the elaboration of Indo-Saracenic architecture was part and parcel of the contemporaneous listing of tribes and castes, the recruitment of "martial races" and award of princely gun salutes. Yet like colonialism itself, the buldings spoke with an inconsistent voice. The schools, office blocks, railway stations, and even clock towers the British built derived from Western models, and signified new values and new technologies at work in India. Yet their facades announced a "traditional" India-unchanging, stable, deferential, with a past defined for its people by its colonial masters. The Mayo College typifies the contradiction, for in it the architectural elements of the past defined a space within which a new learning took place.

The use of Indian forms to represent Empire testified in sum to a double claim. Buildings put up by the Raj for its purposes, these structures proclaimed the supremacy of the British as they sought to reshape India. At the same time they asserted a claim to knowledge, and hence to power, from within. Britain not only ruled, as the Romans had done, but had mastered the Orient. As the Viceroy Lord Hardinge wrote to Lutyens, when the latter wanted to use the round instead of the pointed "Saracenic" arch in New Delhi, "In your London surroundings you cannot feel the whisperings of the East, but I have lived fifteen years in the East, and I know and feel the language of Eastern buildings."60 New Delhi, and the coming of Indian nationalism, were each in their own way to confound this claim.

Notes

* This paper is part of a larger project, in which some of the issues raised here will be developed further, on the relationship between architecture, the ideology of impe- rialism, and the creation of a distinctive colonial culture in the British Empire. I wish

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to thank Catherine Asher, Thomas Laqueur, and Barbara Metcalf for their helpful comments and suggestions during the writing of this essay, and Paul Rabinow for stimulating discussions over several years on the larger questions of colonialism. I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for fellowship support that enabled me to carry out field research on colonial architecture.

1. T. Roger Smith, "Architectural Art in India," meeting of 28 February 1873, Journal of the Society of Arts (hereafterJSA), XXI (1873), 278-86, esp. p. 286.

2. Ibid., pp. 286-87. For a further account of Emerson's views see "A Description of Some Buildings Recently Erected in India, With Some Remarks on Domes and the Mingling of Styles of Architecture," meeting of May 19, 1884, Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects (hereafter TRIBA), 1st ser. XXXIV (1883-84), 149-57, esp. p. 152.

3. For a similar controversy in Britain see Ellen K. Morris, "Symbols of Empire: Archi- tectural Style and the Government Offices Competition,"Journal of Architectural Edu- cation, XXXII (1978), 8-13.

4. Smith,JSA (1873), 279-81. 5. For the evolution of the colonial bungalow see Anthony King, "The Bungalow," Archi-

tectural Association Quarterly, V (1973), 6 - 25; and Colonial Urban Development (London, 1976), pp. 123-54.

6. Smith,JSA (1873), p. 286. There are numerous discussions of adaptations that ought to be made to take account of India's climate. See, e.g., James Ransome, "European Architecture in India," meeting of 23 January 1905, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (hereafterJRIBA), 3rd ser. XII (1905), 185 -99.

7. Sten Nilsson, European Architecture in India, 1 750 -1850 (London, 1968), pp. 105, 162 - 64. For a detailed account of Wellesley's Government House see Curzon of Kedleston, British Government in India (London, 1925), vol. I, pp. 39-74.

8. James Fergusson, "On the Study of Indian Architecture," meeting of 21 December 1866,JSA, SV (1866), 71-79, esp. p. 71.

9. Fergusson's History of Indian and Eastern Architecture comprised vol. III of his com- prehensive history of world architecture. It was republished as late as 1910. For brief unsatisfactory accounts of Fergusson's career see M. Craig, "James Fergusson," in J. Summerson, Concerning Architecture (London, 1968); and Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters (Oxford, 1977), pp. 260-67.

10. See, e.g., Fergusson,JSA (1866), pp. 71-72 and passim; Smith,JSA (1873), 278-79; J. Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (rev. ed. London, 1910), vol. II, pp. 186-90 and passim; R.F. Chisholm in discussion of Ransome "European Archi- tecture in India,"JRIBA (1905), 200. For a stimulating discussion of these themes see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). Though I do not agree with his impu- tation of political motives to all European scholarship on the "East," nor with his often polemical tone, Said's insights have stimulated and helped shape my own study of the ways the British created knowledge of, and represented, "India" in architecture and scholarship.

11. "Modern Architecture in India," The Builder XXVIII (August 27, 1870), 681. 12. Ibid., 723 (September 10, 1870). 13. "Architecture in Madras," ibid. XXVII (June 5, 1869), 449; ibid., XXVIII (December

31, 1870), 1047; and "The Revenue Board Buildings in Madras;" Professional Papers on Indian Engineering, 2nd ser., vol. I (1872), 1-2.

14. Administrative Manual of the Madras Presidency (Madras, 1885), vol. I, p. 375.

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15. Ibid., p. 535; The Builder XXVII (June 5, 1869), 449; and ibid. (August 27, 1870), 682. 16. "The Surat High School," Professional Papers on Indian Engineering, 1st ser., V (1868),

315 -16. For an account of Mant's career see R. Phene Spiers, "The Late Major Mant, R.E.," TRIBA, 1st ser., vol. XXXII (1881-82), 100-102.

17. Temple comment on Spiers, ibid., pp. 103 -105. 18. Major-General H.D. Daly to C.U. Aitchison, Secretary of Government of India in

Foreign Department, 5 August 1870; and Note by Atchison of 23 August 1870, National Archives of India (hereafter NAI) Foreign Political A Proceedings December 1870, Nos. 608-609.

19. On the boarding arrangements see Agent to the Governor-General Rajputana to Political Agent Marwar 24 May 1873, NAI Foreign General A Proceedings July 1873, No. 14. For a detailed account of the early years of the College, which remains to this day (though no longer open only to princes), a highly select boarding school, see Herbert Sherring, The AMayo College-A Record of Twenty Years 1875-1895 (Calcutta, 1897).

20. Secretary Govt. India Public Works Dept. [PWD] to Exec. Engineer Mayo College 7 December 1871, NAI PWD B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Proceedings April 1872, No. 1-4; and Note by C. W. Buckland 2 May 1872, Foreign General A Procs. June 1873, No. 114-37. Part of the objection to the Grecian design stemmed from the very high cost of quarrying and conveying the large blocks of marble that the scheme required.

21. J. Gordon to Sec. Govt. India. PWD 26July 1872, B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Procs. September 1872, No. 7-18.

22. Maj.-Gen. A. Cunningham to Sec. Govt. India Home Dept. 9 July 1872, ibid., No. 17. 23. Sec. Govt. India PWD to Exec. Engineer Mayo College 27 August 1872, ibid., No. 18. 24. Proposed Design by R. Joscelyne of 24 March 1874, B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Procs. B May

1874, Nos. 31-33; and Govt. of India to Agent to Governor-General Rajputana 6 March 1875, B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Procs. B March 1875, Nos. 10-12.

25. "General Description of the Design for Mayo College," B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Procs. March 1877, No. 6.

26. Ibid. 27. Sec. Govt. India PWD to Exec. Engineer Mayo College 27 August 1872, B. & R.-Civil

Bldg. Procs. September 1872, No. 18. 28. For the boarding houses see H. Sherring, The Mayo College, pp. 20-50. 29. Fergusson, History, p. 178; and Sir Richard Temple, "Picturesqueness in Reference to

Architecture," TRIBA, 2nd ser., V (1889), 58. 30. Temple comment in discussion of Mant, TRIBA, 1st ser., XXXII (1881-82), 105;

Colonel Sir Andrew Clarke in ibid., 107; and Chisholm, "New College for the Gaekwar of Baroda," TRIBA, 1st ser., XXXIII (1882-83), 142.

31. Fergusson, History, p. 181, and "On the Study of Indian Architecture,"JSA (1866), 77.

32. Ransome, "European Architecture in India," JRIBA (1905), 197-98. 33. For a comprehensive series of drawings of Indian design elements see the twelve

oversized volumes by Col. S. S. Jacob,Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details (London, 1890).

34. "General Description of the Design for Mayo College," B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Procs. March 1877, No. 6.

35. Chisholm, "New College for the Gaekwar of Baroda," TRIBA (1882-83), 141. 36. Fergusson, History, pp. 170-81.

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37. "General Description of the Design for Mayo College," B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Procs. March 1877, No. 6; Sec. Govt. India PWD to Mant 7 October 1876, ibid., No. 7; Mant to Sec. Govt. India PWD 1 November 1876, ibid., No. 11; Note of G.F.L.M. 18January 1877, ibid., No. 15.

38. The Builder XXXII (14 February 1874), 130, 133. 39. Ibid. XLIX (1 August 1885), 170. 40. "General Description of the Design for Mayo College," B. & R.-Civil Bldg. Procs.

March 1877, No. 6. 41. Temple comment in discussion of Mant, TRIBA. 1st ser., vol. XXXII (1881-82), 104. 42. The Builder XXXVI (22 June 1878), 636. 43. Indian Engineering (16 July 1892), 52. 44. Ibid. (18 July 1908), 46. 45. Ibid. (I June 1889), 512; and ibid. (2 June 1894), 432. 46. Emerson, "Description of Some Buildings Recently Erected in India," TRIBA (1883-

84), 152. Despite his dislike of Indo-Saracenic, Roger Smith praised the "attractive design" of Muir College as the one exception to his general rule. "Architectural Art in India,"JSA (1873), 281.

47. See Nilsson, European Architecture in India, pp. 126-30. 48. The Indian Engineer (1 May 1886), 41; Indian Engineering (5 February 1887), 64. 49. S. S. Jacob, "Jeypore Church-Rajpootana," Professional Papers on Indian Engineering,

2nd ser., VII (1878), 211-14. 50. E S. Growse, Mathura-A District Memoir (1882; Delhi, 1979 reprint), pp. 161-62,

419-20. The dome in fact bears little resemblance to any Russian model. 51. Indian Engineering (22 July 1899), 59. 52. Ibid. (5 July 1890), 11. See also E.B. Havell, Indian Architecture (London, 2nd ed.,

1927), p. 256. 53. W. N. Pogson, ES.A., in Indian Engineering (30 August 1890), 170. 54. The Builder LV (3 November 1888), 313 -14. 55. Havell, Indian Architecture, pp. 237- 38. 56. Lutyens to Baker, 8 May 1912, Royal Institute of British Architects, Baker Collection,

1/6/8; and Lutyens to Baker, 29 December 1912, Baker Collection, 1/7/6. 57. Curzon, British Government in India, vol. I, pp. 177-201, esp. p. 189. 58. Herbert Baker, Architecture and Personalities (London, 1944), pp. 218-22. For the

larger controversy over New Delhi see my "Architecture and Empire," History Today, XXX (December 1980), 7 -12; and Robert Irving, Indian Summer (New Haven, 1981).

59. Bernard Cohn, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 165-209, esp. pp. 187-88.

60. Hardinge to Lutyens 4 August 1913, Hardinge Papers, vol. 112, p. 68a.

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