Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (47 page)

Some of the imperial settlements, especially those that deliberately reflected functions of the imperial mission, had come in their maturity to possess the quality of art. Bombay in India was one, Penang in Malaya another.

Bombay had been acquired by the British in the days of Charles II, long before the birth of the Indian Empire, but it was the imperialism of the High Victorian age, inspired by a masterful and self-righteous set of convictions, which made it a great city. In its nineteenth-century plan, as in distant English prototypes, the British municipal virtues were exemplified in stone, and all its monuments stood testimony to their appointed values. Enterprise, for instance, the first and most fundamental of the imperial qualities, was magnificently embodied in Bombay’s Victoria Terminal, the headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, which provided a symbolic centre-piece for the entire city. It was one of the supreme memorials of the railway age anywhere, part Oriental, part Gothic, all unmistakably imperial, carved about with crests, emblems and gargoyles, with stained glass windows like a cathedral’s and brass-bound teak doors like a palace’s, and gigantic lions guarding its central staircase. The Punjab Mail and the Delhi Express snorted all the more purposefully for the splendour of its girdered roof, and it was only suitable that from its central tower there should gaze down upon the commuters the busts not merely of Queen Victoria and her Viceroy Lord Dufferin, but the Company Chairman and his Managing Director too.
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Order was embodied in the monumental Secretariat, overlooking the long Maidan beside the sea, from whose lordly galleries, shaded
by gigantic rattan screens, the imperial administrators could survey their passing subjects in the blazing sun below, or keep an eye on the cricket on the green. Down the road was Law, in the fabric of the hardly less overpowering High Court, and all around were the structures of Enlightenment: the University, supplied with a ceremonial tower by a public-spirited Parsee; the Prince of Wales Museum, with a dome copied in a scholarly way from the Bijaipur Mosque in Mysore, and a genial statue of the Prince himself, the future Edward VII, meditating in the gardens in front; the School of Arts and Crafts, an institution in the progressive spirit of William Morris and the pre-Raphaelites (and truly a memorial to its age, for here in the Director’s House, still standing cool but dusty among its lawns of buffalo grass, trellis-shadows on its floors, hammocks beneath its banyans, was born the laureate of Empire, Kipling himself).

Healthy Pleasure was not forgotten in this architectural catalogue—
mens
sana
in
corpore
sano
was always an imperial motto. The promenade along Back Bay was developed Brighton-style, to give the citizenry of all races the benefit of fresh sea air out of the west, while parks and gardens proliferated. The Bombay Gymkhana Club was built not in the Gothic mode but in a rustic mock-Tudor, an affirmation perhaps of underlying pastoral values, and marvellously preposterous on the foreshore was the Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the great hostelries of Empire, so open-minded in its hedonism that even the great black jazz musicians of America were to be heard there.

And so to Profit, if not a virtue, at least an intent. The urge for profit was implicit everywhere in Bombay, and set the seal upon the city as a work of Victorian allegory: in the dockyards clanging and smoking on the eastern shore, in the grand Mint and the Cotton Exchange, in the portly old offices of Horniman Square around their gardens, in the queues of the taxis and the rickshaw men, in the ships that lay perpetually beyond the Gateway of India, and the dhows threading nimble passages among their anchorages. It was a shabby old city by the 1930s, but its patina of age and dereliction served only to bind its symbolisms together, and make it feel more than ever a category of art.
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Bombay was a picture in cracked and sombre oils. Penang, which reached its zenith in the 1930s, was a watercolour place, and stood above all for the serenity of Empire—for there were many parts of it that really did provide solace, for rulers and ruled alike. Penang had been British almost as long as Bombay, but since it suffered no social problems on the Indian scale, no terrible pressures of poverty or congestion, it had retained down the years a truly eighteenth-century elegance of manner, and looked like an imperial settlement in a diorama, or a quiet corner at Wembley. Penang Island was about fifty miles round, and lay three miles off the mainland coast in a blue and generally languid sea. A busy ferry connected its capital, Georgetown, with Port Butterworth on the mainland, but still it retained a pleasant island feeling, secluded, almost private. Nearly everybody liked Penang, and this affection was apparent in the look and feel of the island, which was green, and had agreeable beaches, and nice buildings, and often basked in a seductive sense of
dolce far
niente.
Penang lived by the export of rubber and tin from the Malay forests, but it had a gently festive feel too, softened by the blandness, the sense of fading virility, that was so characteristic of the late Empire.

The great charm of the place, the circumstance which gave it its air of artistic composition, was its microcosmic completeness. Within the perimeter of the island the whole pattern of imperial life in the tropics was conveniently displayed, as in an exhibition. On the southern shore, nearest the mainland, stood Georgetown. Here were the docks, and the Government offices, and the racecourses, and the
polo ground, and the Penang Club of course, and all the usual appurtenances of a colonial town in the tropics. A delightful esplanade sauntered by the sea, with a cenotaph commemorating the dead of the Great War, and grouped all around were the white City Hall, the Supreme Court, a nice Anglican church with a spire, and a marvellous old imperial cemetery littered with the broken columns, rotundas and veiled urns of the Empire’s funerary tradition, its tombs often moulded together by age and dilapidation, and coloured by drooping frangipani.

In their downtown offices, built in the truest 1930s Georgian along King Street and Caernarvon Street, Pitt Street and King Edward Place, the imperial businessmen in neatly pressed shorts and open-necked shirts supervised the imperial accounts and took their fair share of the imperial spoils. The Eastern and Oriental Hotel—the ‘E and O’
to every imperial traveller—sprawled cheerfully beside the water beyond the Esplanade, old Fort Cornwallis crumbled away beside the sea, and all over the city, filling its streets in like a filigree, embroidering its edges, were the bazaars and booths and stilted houses, the fishing huts and tenements, the mosques, temples, monasteries and Chinese restaurants of the various indigenes.

And just along the road from Georgetown, thus concentrating the whole aesthetic of the imperial east into a few delightful square miles, there stood the island’s hill-station. In India, where hill-stations were invented, hundreds of miles separated Calcutta from Darjeeling, Madras from Ootacamund. Here one did the journey in half an hour, by way of a bustling little funicular railway, completed in 1923—which, lurching and slithering upwards through several layers of tropical foliage, with a change of trains half-way, deposited you blithely on the sunny green upland of Penang Hill, 2,500 feet above the hot and bustling city.

The Governor had a bungalow up there, Bel Retiro, whose classic drawing-room views had been made familiar by many a beloved print, and there was a little village of attendant bungalows, for lesser officials, and a police station with a sergeant on duty to look after it all. Nearby was the Penang Hill Hotel, set among gardens: and on its verandah, looking across the lawn to the sweep of the
distant sea, drinking a cool Malay stengah you could experience, as in some participatory theatre, the whole pattern of tropical empire, the leisure and the authority of it, the prospect of reward, the sweep of the eastern shore, the orchids, the remoteness, perhaps a little of the boredom, and possibly, if it were a Thursday afternoon, the tinkle of a piano slightly out of tune, the thin thread of Mr Ribiero’s Goan violin, from the tea-dance in the lounge behind.
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The institutional art of the Empire was seldom a success, at least in the twentieth century, because its message was seldom very decisive. It was compromise art, appeasement art, and it lacked the punch of certainty. Kuala Lumpur, for instance, the capital of British Malaya, was scarcely an imperial capital at all, so assiduously were its offices supplied with domes and Moorish arcades, so closely did its railway station approximate to a mosque, so modestly was the cricket club tucked away amidst the surrounding arabesques. Canberra, the capital designed for the Australians by the American architect W. B. Griffin, was hardly more assertive, being a kind of half-cock Washington, all avenues and artificial lake, where it took an age to walk from one Ministry to the next, and nothing but the scale of the place seemed to have anything specifically Australian about it. In South Africa the most thoroughly imperial of all the imperial architects, Sir Herbert Baker, created a Government headquarters intended to seal once and for all, in stone, the reconciliation of Boer and Briton. High above the old Transvaal capital, Union Buildings looked out across the Apies valley with a noble air, but not much fire—absolutely symmetrical, absolutely balanced, its wings balanced, its columns and fountains balanced, its war memorials all aligned, tree facing tree, peony matching peony,
cactus aligned with cactus, giving the whole ensemble a suggestion of grand but sterile ritual, like a permanent thanksgiving service.

But in the last generation of their power the British did build themselves one truly colossal self-memorial. The world might soon forget the messages of Canberra, K.L. or even Pretoria, but for better or worse, right or wrong, New Delhi, the capital of imperial India, would remain for ever an embodiment of the British presence. The imperialists intended it so, and they spent some thirty years putting the notion into practice. There were craftsmen in India who spent a working lifetime constructing this pyramid of the Raj: it was as though the British instinctively prepared for the end of their supremacy with an indestructible monument to themselves, like Ozymandias in the sand. The foundation stone of New Delhi was laid by King George V when he went to India for the Coronation Durbar of 1911; by the 1930s it was still only half-built.

Like those other capitals, New Delhi as a whole lacked conviction. Built on the hillock called Raisina, outside the walls of old Delhi, it was splendid, it was beautiful, but it was faintly at odds with itself, as though it was not altogether sure what it was supposed to commemorate. It was too late for arrogance, too soon for regrets, and one could not be sure whether these structures were intended to be the halls of an eternal dominion, or whether their architects foresaw, as the sublimation of their art, Indians themselves sitting in graceful succession upon these thrones of power. When New Delhi was started, the New Imperialism was hardly over, the Great War had not happened, and if the Empire had lost its aggression, it had certainly not lost its complacency. Twenty years later the fire had left the imperial idea, and Gandhi was able to squat on the viceregal floor, as one senior official remarked of his visit to Irwin, eating ‘some filthy yellow stuff without so much as by your leave’. No wonder the great new capital lacked
insolence.

The architects of New Delhi were the ubiquitous Baker, who had spent almost his whole working life in the Empire, and Edwin Lutyens, who had hitherto had little to do with it, and it is revealing that the weakness of New Delhi lies mainly in Baker’s work, the true magnificence in Lutyens’: as though the one architect were faltering in his imperial convictions, while the other had none.
Though they were old acquaintances, they were temperamental opposites. Baker was shy and un-social, and disliked the formalities and pretensions of Anglo-Indian life: ‘Ned’ Lutyens was witty and gregarious, was married to the daughter of a Viceroy, and relished every garden party and gymkhana. For twenty years they worked in an anomalous and later uncongenial partnership—his Bakerloo, Lutyens called it—each spending some six weeks of each year in India. English masons went out too, and the consulting engineers were British, but most of the work was done by an army of Indian labourers, men and women, working under able Sikh contractors to whom the building of New Delhi was a career in itself.
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The setting was solemn, and the structures of the new capital looked out across a dun plain littered with the abandoned fabrics of predecessor empires. This was deliberate, for New Delhi was intended to evoke the historical consequence of Delhi—the Rome of Asia, as Murray’s Handbook used to call it, where a dozen dynasties had risen and fallen into decay. The main axis of New Delhi ran exactly east and west, but a secondary alignment, 60 degrees off, connected Raisina Hill directly with the great Jami Masjid mosque, the masterpiece of the Moghuls in the heart of old Delhi. Like a Chinese city governed by the principles of Feng Shui, it obeyed injunctions apparent only to its creators, and incorporated esoteric messages of its own. It was ornamented everywhere, for instance, with clusters of stone bells, meant to suggest the alleged Indian prophecy that when the bells of Delhi rang no more, the Raj would come to an end, and it was replete with improving texts and symbolisms, like the nauseating injunction to the indigenes that was affixed enormously to the Secretariat:
Liberty
Does
Not
Descend
To
A
People.
A
People
Must
Raise
Themselves
to
Liberty.
It
Is
A
Blessing
That
Must
Be
Earned
Before
It
Can
Be
Enjoyed.
There were Meanings all over New Delhi, and far away down the ceremonial approach, Kingsway, ornamental pools, tracks and shrubberies seemed to suggest astronomical implications, like the mystic lays and circles of the
ancients. New Delhi was intended to be, so its architects said, neither British, nor Indian, nor Roman: simply Imperial.