In the Footsteps of Lutyens and Baker

Report by Edward Greenfield

This was the imaginative title of a tour of India sponsored by the Lutyens Trust last autumn and devised by Roderick Gradidge, our authoritative tour leader, to visit the Indian monuments, palaces, fortresses and tombs, inspected by Lutyens and Baker as they prepared their grand plans for New Delhi.

It was a varied and characterful group of Trust members (including, as reported, “even a music critic”) that began with a week-long survey of Delhi, including historic sites, and progressed through Arga, Orcha, Sanchi and the ruined city of Mandu. With the help of Gradidge’s meticulously detailed, comprehensive notes (163 close-packed pages of them) we were better able to appreciate how Lutyens drew detailed inspiration from much that we saw, while never creating the “fake Indian architecture” he despised. Over and over again his visual memories were plainly the source of inspiration for his New Delhi plans, as for example the great dome on Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan), echoing the Tomb of Hoshang Shah at Mandu, with aspects of the Taj Mahal dome also reflected.

What triumphantly emerged at the very start of the tour was the glory of Lutyens’s whole conception for New Delhi, reflected not just in his own work but in Baker’s too. Exceptionally we were allowed to make an extensive visit – thanks to the good offices of the Trust’s patron in India, Professor Mansinh Rana – to Rashtrapati Bhavan, now the home of the President of India, Dr K R Narayananm and normally shut to the public. There we met the President who, after a long talk with Roderick Gradidge asked him to make a report on our findings and recommendations from the tour.

We were also generously entertained to dinner by Lutyens enthusiast Mrs Sunita Kohli.