Is Delhi a modern-day Versailles?
JAIPUR: Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and the last days of the Empire, Britain’s colonial past has been the subject of much debate.
With ‘Ten Cities That Made an Empire’, British Labour Party politician, historian, and broadcast journalist Tristram Hunt has gone beyond the now-familiar argument about the empire being good or bad and taken a fresh approach towards Britain’s colonial past.
Through an exceptional array of first-hand accounts and personal reflections, he portrays the imperial cities of Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta (Kolkata), Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and 20th century Liverpool: their architecture, culture, and society balls; the famines, uprisings and repressions that coursed through them; the ghostly bureaucracy which ran them, and the British supremacists and multicultural trailblazers who inhabited them.
Speaking at a session on the book at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Saturday, Hunt said, “New Delhi was an intensely modern project… the most modern up-todate theorem of town planning, transport management, landscape architecture and city beautiful styling were transplanted on to one of the most ancient sites of India. Again, the hubris of imperialism created a modern-day Versailles.”
In response to a British-Asian member of the audience who wondered why Indians saw the Mughal Empire as good and the British Empire as bad, senior journalist and political commentator Swapan Dasgupta quipped that the Mughal Empire had been given the “ISI” stamp of being a good empire. “The British Empire is yet to get that.”