“Ladies and gentlemen, try and imagine this area empty as far as you could see,” says Sunil Raman to his small flock of about 20 sneakers-clad walkers. Around us is a swathe of churned-up, dusty land just beginning to show signs of paved paths and occasional sandstone markers. A few labourers tinker in the distance, the women wearing bright saris. To one side is a patch of kikar trees. Beyond the low walls is the intermittent racket of a road that leads out of a busy market.
We are standing atop a stepped podium at the base of a tall obelisk that marks the spot where King George V and Queen Mary of England sat on a pair of thrones (reputedly fashioned from a symbolic 1,911 kg of silver) as they received the acclamation of an assembled crowd of officials, Indian princes and subjects in December 1911. They had been crowned King-Emperor and Empress of India, and they were soon to announce a corresponding shift of the Indian capital from commercial Calcutta to imperial Delhi.
“It requires an effort of will,” says Raman as we squint into the distance. It does indeed. The site of this tamasha is today’s Coronation Park near Nirankari Colony in north Delhi. Ten minutes’ drive to our south is Delhi University. As Raman tells us, this entire area was the site of a vast tented encampment set up for the Durbar. It accommodated some 100,000 people, from British officials to the Indian princes, each with his own enclosure, and the vast number of bureaucrats and service-providers who made this temporary city possible.
Raman is a suave former BBC journalist, and together with army officer Col (retired) Rohit Agarwal he researched the massive but very efficient bandobast, not excluding the mindbogglingly complex protocol, that conjured up and sustained this camp. What came out of several months of intensive work in the National Archives and elsewhere was Delhi Durbar 1911: The Complete Story (Roli, 2012), a book to mark the 1911 Durbar’s centenary.
This first non-official account of the event and its backdrop (there are several official accounts and eyewitness descriptions) is a collection of anecdotes, photographs and details, gleaned directly from the records, that cover everything from the light railway line laid till Tis Hazari to bring the monarch direct from Bombay to the electricity, water, telephone, postal and telegraph system, the order of precedence, shuddh milk supplies and Brahmin cooks laid in just for this event. Everything that could be sold, the camps and furniture, was afterwards sold, and earned the government £400,000. The whole thing was dazzling and incredibly bureaucratic.
Gesturing broadly with his arms, Raman asks us to imagine two semicircular pavilions of seating at a distance from the throne platform. One is very large and accommodates upper-class subjects (including, he says, Jawaharlal Nehru, M A Jinnah and Madan Mohan Malaviya). The other is smaller but still accommodates 12,000 maharajas and British officers, “Roughly where the woman in a pink sari is working,” says Raman. While the Baroque music of Handel plays, 50,000 soldiers parade past. The climax of the event is the acclamation, scheduled for exactly noon so that no shadow is cast. The coronation itself — though George V’s crown cost Indian taxpayers £600,000 — has taken place in England because, says Raman, the Archbishop of Canterbury has declared that the king cannot be crowned in a non-Christian country.
There are some minor crises, says Raman, such as the one caused by the Nawab of Malerkotla who wants to bring both his wives. The British are strict: you can bring only one wife. Ultimately protocol yields to a fiction: one wife is also the nawab’s cousin, so she comes in that capacity and is not officially acknowledged. There is also the awkward fact that the king’s voice is quite feeble and very few people hear what he says.
Imagining oneself into 1911 doesn’t work — the present is too drab by comparison and the past by now too alien. The group of walkers trickles off the podium to explore the five statues (and a few empty pedestals) behind. One is the glowering figure of King George V that used to stand under the arch near India Gate, displaced here by independent India. The others, says Raman, though evidently of high British officials, are unidentified because nobody has taken the trouble to find out who they are. Several others have vanished, into private collections or official residences.
One of the workers watching us stumble through the scenery informs us that the work on this park will take another year to complete — which means that modern and less efficient Delhi will have missed this important anniversary by more than a year.
Sunil Raman will lead another Durbar walk in March. For details, visit the book’s Facebook page
