ABSTRACT
In many ways the history of New Delhi is a Great War story. Though the original reason for transferring the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911 pre-dates the war and was done for reasons specific to Britain’s colonial rule in India, the city was still in the design stages when Britain became immersed in the war. 1 Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker, the renowned architects who designed and built the new capital, had focussed their attention until then on the central forum where the main government structures, Government House and the Secretariats, would rise. 2 Dozens of square kilometres of land had been purchased for the capital and its adjacent military cantonment, but the two architects and the Government of India remained undecided on some of the more important features that would occupy
1 Lord Hardinge, Viceroy of India from 1911 to 1916, transferred the capital from Calcutta to Delhi as part of a strategy to reunite the province of Bengal, which Lord Curzon had partitioned at the end of his viceroyalty in 1905. Curzon hoped that partition would break the Indian nationalist movement in Bengal, but the exact opposite occurred. Angry nationalists began a campaign of violence that included assassinations and bombings. The situation became so volatile by the time of Hardinge’s arrival in 1911 that he began actively looking for a way to reverse partition. His solution was to link the end of partition to a new and much larger colonial policy: the transfer of the capital to Delhi by royal proclamation. George V announced the transfer at his 1911 imperial durbar (royal assemblage) held at Delhi. Immediately after announcing the transfer, he called for the re-unification of Bengal as a gift to the people of the province for losing the imperial seat at Calcutta. Thus, in the eyes of the public and in point of legislative fact, the transfer became the government’s primary colonial policy and all subsequent changes, such as the reversal of partition, became ancillary components of this new direction in British rule.
