ABSTRACT
Delhi, the walled city, rich with building traditions, and for Europeans, the quintessential Oriental landscape, encountered dramatic cultural upheavals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reason, science, and the universals of modernism in Europe arrived in India along with an authoritarian imperialism and exploitative capitalism. For their own economic and political ends, the new regime introduced, encouraged, and imposed modernisms which had arisen under different circumstances in Europe and which were presented as the only legitimate expressions to which Indians might aspire. The British brought to Delhi institutions (municipal governance), spatial forms (wide boulevards, house-in-a-garden), technologies (railways, sanitary reform), and concepts (land as commodity, private/public divide) imagined elsewhere and with the expectation of replacing those that existed. Over almost a century from 1857 to 1946, the city grew enormously, though with its urban form remarkably altered. However, if the objective was to achieve a built form and spatial culture that was ‘modern’ from the perspective of Europe, Delhi, a patchwork of many different landscapes, had only partially succeeded.
