New Delhi is not new anymore; it completed a hundred years as India’s latest capital last month. Though the foundation stone for the new capital was laid in 1911, it took the British 20 years after that to build it. And, it was not until 1931 that Lord Willington could inaugurate it and manage to occupy the Viceregal Lodge on Raisina Hill.
It was not an auspicious start for the British empire. A former Viceroy was making his state entry when a bomb was thrown into the howdah on top of his elephant, but he escaped unhurt, although the man holding the state umbrella was killed on the spot.
I visited New Delhi for the first time in 1944, a year before the end of World War II, and stayed at a friend’s quarters in the Viceregal compound. It was not so much a compound as a small town within a town, complete with its own bazaar, milch cows and horses, and also a camel and three tame tiger cubs in a small 200. For a boy coming from crowded Bombay, it was a place straight out of Rudyard Kipling, with a real jungle full of foxes and wolves just outside the main gate.
The friend was an under-secretary attached to the secretariat of the Viceroy’s naughty wife with whom his relations were not smooth, or so he used to say. I do not know what had happened between them, but there was a war on.
The Viceregal Lodge itself was more like a set in Arabian Nights, as Bollywood would have imagined it. Everything was on a vast scale, the lawns, the corridors, the doorways - through which elephants could pass - and, of course, the bathrooms, of which there were at least a hundred. Tall ferocious men with beards stood at attention at every corner. Since they never uttered a word, I used to think they were dumb, brought especially - this is what I imagined - from Khyber Pass or some such place to keep a watch on people like us. And there were peacocks too, who ate out of our hands, always flying from treetop to treetop, making funny noises.
New Delhi was not much of a city, certainly not on par with Bombay, then the second largest city in India, after Kolkata. Many buildings were still under construction and there were enough marble slabs lying around to dress a Taj Mahal. It was also very expensive. You could not get a cup of tea without shelling out four times the money you paid in Bombay. In Wengers, a lively place, tea always came with a tea pot on a tray and always two cups, not one, and you paid four annas for it, four or five times as much as you shelled out in Bombay.
This was in 1944, only three years before independence, but the British had no idea they were living on borrowed time. There were British officers every where, in khaki short pants and open-necked shirts, but they were always busy as if carrying a message for the Viceroy or someone else in the vast secretariat on Raisina Hills and had no time for anything or anyone else. There was, of course, cricket on Sunday mornings and sometimes you could see whole families going to church in buggies. The Regal Cinema in Connaught Place showed only English films and the place used to be crowded for Sunday morning shows packed with American GIs and their girls, all chewing gum like sheep, followed by a snap-up lunch of cold beer and fish and chips in Standard, a restaurant right next to Regal.
As night fell, and it always came suddenly, as everything else in the north, an eerie calm descended on the city, and you hurried home fearing for ghosts. Once, I walked all the way from Bengali market-which was not much of a market in those days but Nathu was very much there-all the way to our compound, through all those avenues and roads where not a soul was to be seen. There was little traffic on the roads, except for solitary tonga on its weary way home.
A couple of days later, we were bound home, back to Bombay, leaving behind the horses and the tiger cubs, and the ferocious men with scimitars glinting in the sun.
Somehow, I knew I would be back again, and for a much longer stay. In my next trip, I stayed for 50 years!
This article was originally published on February 18, 2012.
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