![]() ![]() As on a war memorial you might find on any village green in England, only in sandy red rather than grey stone, the names of dead soldiers and their ranks were listed stiffly. In a heavily wooded part of the city – one of the quirks of a city as large and old as Delhi is that there are whole swathes of, basically, jungle in the middle of town – I climbed over an embankment and a couple of spiked iron fences with padlocked gates to find a dusty monument built in the neo-Gothic style of an Eleanor Cross. One of my abiding memories of a trip to Delhi a few years ago was seeking out a colonial memorial to Britons killed in the Indian rebellion of 1857 (or the “Mutiny”, to use its more politically loaded name). Some of these are remembered well, and others less so. ![]() While the legacy of empire is still being contested – read Empireland, Inglorious Empire, Natives or any of the other half-dozen high-profile books on colonialism published over the last few years – one area in which a huge amount of exchange between India and Britain has been acknowledged is architecture and design.įrom Lutyens’ civic street plans for New Delhi to the massive Gateway of India built to commemorate George V’s visit in 1911, markers of British imperial rule still stand across the country. From the establishment of the East India Company in 1600 through to Partition and independence in 1947, British colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent lasted for centuries, profoundly affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. ![]()
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