INSIDE THE GRANDEST PALACE EVER BUILT
and stables and kennels for the horses and hounds of the Royal Delhi Hunt, as well as an operating theatre and hospital ward.
At 200,000 sq ft it was one of the largest seats of government in the world and has been described as “the last great palace ever built”. The finishing touch was the bells it was said would ring if British rule of India ever ended. They were made from stone and incapable of pealing.
One final source of disagreement was the long avenue leading up to the Viceroy’s House. Lutyens, who visited New Delhi every year to oversee the painfully slow progress of his most ambitious project, was furious when he realised that the crest of a long avenue leading up to the palace obscured the view from afar. He proposed a more gentle incline but that would have meant moving tens of thousands of tons of earth and the budget was already blown.
All the arguments were forgotten when the keys to the palace were handed over to Lord Irwin, the first viceroy to live there, in 1929. He is said to have likened the daunting 11 miles of corridors to a maze. Gandhi took tea there with him.
At the time it was claimed by patriots that Lutyens had created a new capital of India that would endure for hundreds of years.
As Lord Stamfordham wrote, it was “a symbol of the might and permanence of the British Empire” that had been commissioned specifically so that “the Indian will see for the first time the power of Western civilisation”. In fact the palace was home to the viceroys for only 18 years and was vacated when Lord Mountbatten stepped down, marking the end of three centuries of British rule.
MOUNTBATTEN held the post for only six months in 1947 but during the period depicted in the film he and his wife Edwina were renowned for their lavish parties. After all, before moving to India, Lady Mountbatten had enjoyed a fashionable and privileged life in London that was almost totally dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure.
In the film the Mountbattens, who had 500 Hindu, Muslim and Sikh servants living downstairs, are portrayed as well-meaning but naïve puppets of the British government. They presided over the division of the country into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan and, as the split dawns, the house and its contents are to be divided between the two new states, including the silverware and the books in the library.
In 1950 the first president of India took up residence there and it was renamed Rashtrapati Bhavan – the President’s House. It still serves that purpose and whatever misgivings originally existed, they were soon set aside.
In 2011 relatives of the 300 families who were evicted to make way for the palace began a claim for compensation against the Indian government. It was said that money set aside to pay them off when the Viceroy’s House was being built on their land was never handed over.
It seems that controversy will always surround this behemoth. Yet for most Indians this fusion of south Asian and Western design styles is now regarded with a great sense of pride and has become a very different type of symbol: for the largest democracy in the world. Viceroy’s House is in cinemas from March 3.