When Edwin Lutyens—the British architect who designed imperial New Delhi and what is now Rashtrapati Bhavan—wrote about India, he was not always speaking in generalities. In one striking passage from his private letters (1912–14) describing Madras (now Chennai), he calls the people “degenerate—very dark, very naked” with “awful faces”, dismissing them even while noting that Freeman Freeman-Thomas, marquess of Willingdon, “says they are most unusually intelligent”. The evidence does not alter the judgement. It’s simply ignored.
The extracts cited here are drawn from Lutyens’ private correspondence with his wife Emily, held in the archives of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. While the letters have long been available to scholars, passages such as his remarks on Madras have remained largely overlooked in contemporary debates about his legacy.
These letters, written while Lutyens was designing the new imperial capital for British India, now carry renewed relevance. The recent decision to remove his bust from Rashtrapati Bhavan and replace it with that of C Rajagopalachari has reopened questions about how India remembers those who shaped its colonial past. Seen in that context, Lutyens’ private views matter.
They are not isolated remarks. Across his correspondence, he returns to the same themes with striking consistency. India, for him, is “barbaric”. Its aesthetics are “childishly vulgar”. Its cities repel him with “dirt, filth… stench and hideousness”. Its religion—dismissed as “bull, cow and monkey worship”—is treated as absurdity rather than belief. Its people appear as “every sort of black body doing every sort of thing”.
At times, the language is cruder still. He refers to Indians as “niggers” and “blackamoors”, complains that “some fat blacks” have occupied a ladies’ carriage, and mocks what he sees as their inability to use basic facilities. Even the sons of Indian princes are reduced to caricature, observed with a mixture of condescension and disdain.
Even in architecture, his judgements follow the same line. The Taj Mahal is “wonderful”, but “not architecture”. Indian buildings are dismissed as “tents in stone”. Indian craftsmen produce “hideous vulgarities”, lacking any real understanding of construction.
More revealing still is the theory behind the contempt. Lutyens writes that he does not believe there is “any real Indian architecture or any great tradition”, describing it as “the building style of children”. What is admirable, he suggests, comes from elsewhere—“an Italian or a Chinaman”. India, in this view, must be taught: Western tradition must intervene so that Indians can learn to “think in three dimensions”.
At one point, reflecting on Indian artisans, he goes further. The difficulty, he writes, is finding the right men: “Government ought to breed them… A job for the Eugenic Societies.” This is not casual prejudice. It’s a worldview.
And it extends into politics. Lutyens describes the nationalist movement as children rebelling against their nurse. He writes that the “average Indian seems a hopeless creature” and suggests it will be years before Indians are “fit to govern themselves with any sense of justice or fairness”. Representative government, in his view, risks disorder rather than progress.
He admits, too, to a deeper distance. “The horror of India has not gripped me at all,” he writes, adding that the real difficulty lies not in the physical country but in “the people and their minds”—a distance he resolves not by understanding, but by reduction.
He was not an observer passing through India. He was designing its imperial capital. The buildings that followed—most notably Rashtrapati Bhavan—were intended to express authority, permanence and control. They were, in effect, architecture as ideology.
Seen in that light, the familiar features of Lutyens’ Delhi take on a sharper meaning. The distance from the old city, the elevation of the imperial complex, the strict geometry of its layout—these are not simply aesthetic choices. They reflect a hierarchy the letters articulate openly.
For decades, independent India has lived with—and adapted—that inheritance. Lutyens’ buildings have been absorbed into the life of a democratic state, their meanings reshaped by use.
But the question of honour is separate from the question of use.
The removal of Lutyens’ bust from Rashtrapati Bhavan sits within a broader, longer process—visible in the renaming of roads, institutions and public spaces—through which India is reassessing the symbols of colonial authority. This is not erasure, but reordering: deciding who is honoured, and on what terms.
The afterlife of Lutyens’ reputation is captured not only in stone but in objects. A caricature bust he kept in his Delhi office—wearing an Indian chhatri like a hat—was later taken back to London and now sits in a museum collection. The symbolism is difficult to ignore. Indian architectural forms are appropriated, stylised and made part of his self-image, even as the culture that produced them is dismissed in his letters.
There will be those who argue that Lutyens should be judged in context—a man of his time, reflecting the assumptions of empire. That is true, as far as it goes. But the letters go further. They are explicit, repeated and argued. They reveal not just prejudice, but a coherent racial and civilisational hierarchy—one that spans culture, religion, aesthetics and political authority. And that hierarchy shaped how India was seen, and therefore how it was built.
Lutyens’ achievement is not in doubt. But neither is the distance he placed between himself and the people he was building for. His letters show a mind that could order space with brilliance, but could not—or would not—grasp the society around it except by diminishing it.
And once that distance is visible, it becomes part of the architecture itself.
(Views are personal)
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Shyam Bhatia
Senior journalist based in London and author of The Quiet Correspondent