Colonial & post-colonial Indian architecture

Story hook

It is 23 December 1911. King George V has just made his Delhi Durbar announcement — the British capital will be moved from Calcutta to a new city to be built south of Old Delhi. The British architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker are summoned to a closed-room competition. The brief: design the imperial capital of British India — viceroy's palace, secretariat blocks, processional axis, ceremonial avenue. The budget is unlimited. The political stakes are everything.

What emerged over the next twenty years was Lutyens' Delhi — a 26 sq km imperial city centred on the Rashtrapati Bhavan (then Viceroy's House) atop Raisina Hill, flanked by Baker's two Secretariat blocks, anchored to the bow-curve of the Parliament House (Baker, 1927), and connected to the India Gate (Lutyens, 1931) by the 3-km Rajpath / Kartavya Path. The architectural language was a deliberate hybrid: classical European proportion fused with Indian Mughal and Buddhist motifs (the Rashtrapati Bhavan's dome explicitly modelled on the Sanchi Stupa). Inaugurated 10 February 1931, the capital lasted as a British seat for sixteen years before becoming, in August 1947, the seat of independent India's government — a fate Lutyens and Baker had not planned for.

The colonial architectural inheritance is fraught. It is the buildings we work in — Parliament, courts, universities, railway stations. It is the buildings we walk past — Victoria Terminus, Gateway of India, Madras High Court. And it is the post-independence response — Chandigarh's Le Corbusier modernism, IIT Kanpur's brutalism, Charles Correa's regional modernism, B.V. Doshi's vernacular humanism. Understanding this 160-year arc is understanding the visual texture of contemporary urban India.

Why this matters for UPSC

Colonial and post-colonial architecture appears in Prelims once every 2-3 years — architect identification (Lutyens, Baker, Le Corbusier, Correa, Doshi), building style classification (Indo-Saracenic vs Neo-Classical vs Modern), and award recall (Pritzker prizes to Doshi 2018). Mains uses it for "syncretism of styles," "post-colonial nation-building," or "modern heritage" questions. Interview boards probe it for heritage-vs- development trade-offs and the Pritzker prize context.