Jerry writing
Gavin Stamp
Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj Jan Morris with Simon Winchester (OUP £15)
The Queen's Christmas Message last month was remarkable not least for mentioning the name of an architect. Never mind that, as with a plate in the book under rte, vlew, a building by Herbert Baker in New was described as being Lutyens's Viceroy's House; the mention was a ,salutary reminder that, as well as systems of transport, defence, law and government, the British Empire left in India an architec- tural legacy which is still of functional and symbolic value. This architectural legacy is much less coherent, much less easily classifiable than that left in Europe by the Romans or that in Asia and Africa left by the Portuguese, even if the buildings instantly evoke Britain `1(.:1 13. ritish eyes. The buildings of the British — of the Empire as a whole, for that i:atter — present a challenge of classifica- tion to architectural historians and totally defeat those who wish to identify a British I'upetial style, There was no such thing. The interest of the buildings of British India 'os that they are complex, quirky, confused, dd and varied, with the occasional out- burst of stunning grandeur. If a majority of glo-Indian buildings are vaguely classical in style that is because the majori- IY, of buildings erected in England between 1°0 and 1940 were Classical.
The architecture of British India was usually a memory of buildings back home: a memory dimmed somewhat by time, distance and by the relative lack of expertise possessed by the Anglo-Indian builders. When not ecclesiological Gothic, churches are versions of that vital prototype, St Mar- tin's-in-the-Fields with its combination of steeple and portico; Government House, Calcutta, was loosely based on Adam's original design for Kedleston while the High Court in the same city is a typical mid- Victorian version of the Cloth Hall at Ypres. To make these comparisons is not to diminish the Indian variant for changes always occured to make the design more In- dian in character: additional columns to make a deeper portico to provide more shelter from the sun, for instance, or those gauche details which, show that the buildings were erected by practical engineers rather than by trained architects.
Then there are the buildings which are products of a very British attempt to reflect Indian conditions and respect Indian tradi- tions: Romantic developments of the Gothic Revival into that magnificent mongrel called `Indo-Saracenic', with Moghul cornices and rooftop pavilions, cusped arches and bulbous domes. And then there is the bungalow, that most happy creation of Anglo-India and a building type which, for once, influenced England (at the seaside) rather than vice versa.
All these buildings are still in use and still impressive in appearance, despite the In- dian indifference to the need for maintenance. The President of the Indian Republic lives in Lutyens's Rashtrapati Bhavan, Bombay University happily func- tions in the Gothic buildings erected from designs sent out by Sir Gilbert Scott, justice is seen to be done in the extraordinary Indo- Saracenic High Court of the 1880s in Madras and steam trains puff in and out of the `V.T.' station in Bombay: a building more elaborate and more amazing than even St Pancras. Bombay today seems a less spoiled Victorian city than, say, Bradford or Leeds and, after all, three of the prin- cipal cities of India — Bombay, Madras and Calcutta — are essentially British crea- tions.
Although the quality of the accompany- ing photographs by Simon Winchester makes it clear that they were taken very recently, Jan Morris's text is mostly written in the past tense, as if the buildings no longer stand and are the products of a long lost civilisation. Tribute is paid to British buildings in the concluding paragraph 'Lofty or modest, elegant or preposterous, they are a testimony to a great historical adventure, and to the passage through these improbable landscapes of a remarkable people: testimony in fact to a brutal virtue, like it or not' — but there is little accept- ance, as there was in the Queen's Message, that India, once the jewel of the Empire is now the jewel of the Commonwealth, that India is now a great nation still with strong links with Britain and that we can be proud of our legacy there.
The tone of Miss Morris's account of the builders — architectural, that is — of the British Raj is depressingly familiar: at once sentimental and patronising. The quaint- ness of Anglo-Indian buildings is conveyed by fictional evocations of their users — Dear God, how much longer till home leave? "To the club, Abdul, there's a good fellow . . ." ' while, throughout, there is a faint tone suggesting that the Empire was both wicked and a joke.
Now of course buildings cannot be separated from the society which creates them and I do not wish to maintain that ar- chitectural history must be dry and unemot- ional. This is a general, all-embracing survey which fulfills a need. In a broad col- ourful picture perhaps errors of fact do not matter much: I suppose anyone can mis- count the number of columns in a portico when describing a building, but 1 ought to admit that I find it peculiarly infuriating not merely to be misquoted but to have a statement attributed to me which I have never made. What I suspect is that Jan Morris cannot really see or, rather, she only sees what she can write evocative passages about. I find it extraordinary that the Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta, which contains Neo-Classical tombs of a size and splendour unequalled in Britain, is barely mentioned while other buildings are only considered in terms of a general view of the rise and fall of the Raj.
The author believes that, in the 20th cen- tury, the British lost their assurance in India and so the buildings suffered, even though some of the very best buildings, as architec- ture, were raised in the last years of the Em- pire. But is it really true to say about the British Raj: 'When it lost its assurance, it lost its virtue: and so did its constructions'; and even if this is true, what does it mean? Surely nobody who has seen New Delhi with eyes unclouded by prejudice can ac- cept that Lutyens and Baker ... faltered in New Delhi because the real meaning of the project was uncertain; but Sam Russell, who was only a sapper subaltern, never put a foot wrong when he designed the Hyderabad Residency.' In fact, if you look at the Residency you will see that, im- pressive and elegant though it is, the pro- portions have gone wrong and it's full of botches, like column capitals colliding.
Perhaps it is all a matter of generations. Born, as I was, after the Partition of India, 1 do not wish to bring back the Empire but nor do I feel obliged to feel guilty about the achievements of the British Raj, even while being aware of the disreputable episodes. Stones of Empire is valuable as the first book (which is in itself surprising) to begin to chart the vast and rich field of British im- perial architecture, but I do not think its text is fully in sympathy with the increasing number of visitors to India who feel drawn there by our cultural links and who, I think, are both amazed by and rather proud of the built legacy of Empire. The field, for- tunately, is still wide open and it now needs an historian who can recognise that the real inspiration behind the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta is not the Taj Mahal but the City Hall in Belfast.
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