"Delhi is not just a city, it's an emotion." - Khushwant Singh - Indian poet and author
So, we left the tangled lanes of Old Delhi and reunited with the coach we made a ponderous approach towards nearby New Delhi.
Sometime around the end of the nineteenth century the British decided that Old Delhi no longer suited them so they undertook to build a new modern city to the south. Turns out they did a lot of cultural vandalism with the demolition of palaces and Havali town houses built in Islamic style and made alterations to the infrastructure but they couldn't make it work for them so they came up with New Delhi.
The British abandoned old Delhi and designed and built a new city in the imperial style to the south. Victorians had an idea to civilise India and confirm the permanence of the British Empire by building massive public buildings in the architectural style of a country five thousand miles away. A railway station, a government building and grand structures from which to administer this bit of the Empire. Wide roads and boulevards, a tramway system, vast open spaces and public gardens and a victory arch, the India Gate which looks very much like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
I found bus tour through the congested streets of New Delhi to be a bit of a drag with very little to interest me. Kim must have agreed with me because she slept through the whole thing. Kim always sleeps on planes and trains and buses. The grid system plan made it feel like Milton Keynes and did nothing to improve traffic flow or congestion and progress was slow and painful. Not a lot of point it seems to me of looking at far away things through a coach window, I want to get down and see it up close. I was glad when it came to an end when we stopped at a restaurant for lunch. Curry of course but really rather good.
I got a sense that in India there are few good feelings towards the British Raj, New Delhi is a symbol and a reminder of colonial rule that cannot be forgiven in the same way that the colonial rule of the Mughals can. The Mughals were colonisers from the north from as far away as Uzbekistan, their empire was won in military combat, they suppressed the local population, ruled as minority Muslims in a a country of Hindus and imposed high taxes to support their ambitions. They built palaces and temples in the style of Baghdad and Persia and all of this has been absorbed into modern India, it is part of the psyche of modern India, an integral part of its history in a way that the British legacy is not.
In India there are statues and monuments celebrating the Mughal Kings and Princes but as far as I could see all memories of the British Raj has been swept away. No statues here of Queen Victoria, the once Empress of India.
I debated this point with tour guide Rahi and he was quite insistent that the British were unwelcome colonisers but the Mughar Sultans and warriors were quite acceptable and have contributed greatly to modern India, he knows better than me of course but I respectfully disagree. At university I studied history and I remember professor Gwynne Williams who was most insistent that as a student of history it was most important to challenge, challenge, challenge and then challenge some more.
I think the answer may lie in our own history. In 1066 England was invaded by the Normans who won the Battle of Hastings and over the next hundred years or so replaced the Anglo Saxons, appropriated the land, imposed punitive taxes and established a new form of government and administration. This must have been quite a shock and can't have been very pleasant at the time but a thousand years later we celebrate the Norman Conquest as an integral and important part of our history.
From my lead soldier collection...
So, my point is this, the British Raj is modern history, still raw in memory and it may take a long time to reassess the true impact and legacy of British colonialism. It has been airbrushed away. History is always being reassessed.
After lunch we moved on to the Mahatma Gandhi Park where India's greatest ever was cremated in 1948. There were lots of statues of Gandhi here and I suspect that there are so many statues of him in India and across the World that it is impossible to count them all. There is a statue of him in the city of Hull about forty miles away from where I live.
The final visit of the day was to the UNESCO World Heritage site Qutb Minar a seventy-two metre high minaret built entirely of brick and constructed in the twelfth century by a tribe of colonisers called the Ghurids from Persia, modern day Afghanistan, who predated the Mughals. I have been researching a little of India history and the list of invaders, colonisers and empire builders is as long as the river Ganges. Not just the British then? It was the Silk Route thing, silks and spices from India going north to Persia and beyond.
India has forty-two World Heritage sites, the sixth highest country in the World. Italy has the most at fifty-nine.
On the coach ride back to the hotel tour guide Rahi made some announcements about the following day train ride to Jaipur which included the shocking news that we would be leaving the hotel for the station at six o'clock in the morning!
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