The Lytton Connection To Lutyens’ Delhi
Did the best designed and
most coveted bit of New Delhi start and
finish with Edwin Landseer Lutyens and Herbert Baker, or does the short story have a
back story? In any case, whether in the realms of fact and metaphor, grace and
favour, pen or sword; Lutyens’ Delhi still rules the sub-continent.
It began, on a parallel track, to official
Whitehall and Calcutta/Simla.
The obscure 19th
century writer, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, has left behind at least two lines that
have notched him a couple of cuts on the scratching post of posterity. The
first is lampooned by fashionable creative writing courses on both sides of the
Atlantic. It is the tagline of the annual Bad Writing Awards handed out in the
UK and named after the poor man, to boot. It is: It was a dark and stormy night.
Stood up by itself, I can’t
see what’s wrong with it. Why is it regarded as a hopeless cliché? Did
Bulwer-Lytton pick it out of pantomime or burlesque tradition, tongue in his
cheek, when he inked it in at the start of his novel Paul Clifford in 1830?
In point of fact, the phrase
was actually the start of a reasonably long compound sentence; one that ran to
the size of a short paragraph. So do the good writing course wallahs
actually dislike the turgidity of long compound sentences? They do have a stretch-limo-like construction,
not likely to appeal to Mini-lovers.
Well, probably.
What then, do they like?
Ernest Hemingway, perhaps. Hemingway’s spare, whittled down, implication-laden
short sentences are held up as the gold standard. He was the Marlon Brando cum
James Dean of writing. Why overwrite when you can evoke the angst of
incoherence?
The other line, used so often
that you’d think it came from folklore, is this: The pen is mightier than the sword. There it is, and Edward
Bulwer-Lytton wrote this one too! How did one ‘bad writer’ contribute two
iconic lines? Even if this one does evoke shades of the Fall of the Roman Empire and all the journalistic braggadocio of
Lutyens’ Delhi, all at once.
But I find dark and stormy still fresh and
evocative. It has a pregnant and
suspenseful Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein about it. It raises
expectations. It makes you look forward to what comes next, in a lip-smacking,
ketchup and Tarantino sort of way.
Bulwer-Lytton’s body of work,
prose, poetry and letters, is not
negligible. He didn’t exactly lack readership or critical acclaim in his time
either. To wit, Bulwer-Lytton’s letters to his son and others betray a certain
self-satisfaction. But, all in all, it was probably just as well that he was a
Baron, with an independent income, the sensibilities, friends and connections
to go with the territory.
Come the 20th
century, dark and stormy struck a chord with Charles M Schulz’s star
Beagle, Snoopy. He loved it so much that he made it his own. Snoopy used it
whenever he worked his Olympia Traveller,
pounding away on it. Snoopy, the novelist, atop his dog-house, friend Woodstock
the moulting bird, in attendance; starting, but never finishing, a series of thrillers.
And, then there is the India
connection, through Bulwer-Lytton’s son and grand- children, and it is this: His
son, after turning down the proffered Governorship of Madras, became Viceroy to
India. Robert, Lord Lytton, Viceroy, 1876-1880, presided over a humdinger of a
famine, the first Afghan War and the “Empress Durbar” in 1877 which proclaimed
Queen Victoria Empress of India. He also designed various protocols and
intricate gun salutes to calibrate the relative importance of each of the
princely states, all 558 of them!
Lytton enjoyed himself over
this - some kings with kingdoms the size of football fields got no guns at all,
several middling ones got 9, the biggest and the best got 21, and the Viceroy
gave himself a chandelier rocking 31- so that
no-one was left in any doubt as to which tribe, in effect, ruled India.
But, in his heart, he wanted
to be a writer, just like papa. His letters refer to it time and again, pining,
and sentimental. Robert did write furiously in his youth, stacks of poems of
indifferent quality, using the foppish pen-name Owen Meredith. Only to wilt
gradually, damned by faint praise and stymied by neglect. His novel- in-verse Lucile ,was probably the high-water
mark. It was made into a film too, in 1912, more than a decade after his death
in 1891, but nothing much came of it either.
Fortunately, goaded by his
father, Robert did take up a parallel career in diplomacy. He began as the
Ambassador’s dogsbody at the British Mission in Washington, working for his ‘Minister’
uncle; served happy years in Italy and various spots in Europe; and reached the
zenith of his career in India.
And later, after some years
in the wilderness, he was appointed Ambassador to France. Interestingly, Robert
Lytton even died in the act of composing a poem at the ambassador’s residence
in Paris. And his son, Simla-born, was
briefly Viceroy in the 1920s too. It was a short stint, in between holding down
the seat as Governor of Bengal, between 1922-1927.
This Bulwer-Lytton grandson,
all Victor Alexander George Robert of him, ran into quite a few dark storms of
his own trying to contain the burgeoning freedom movement- scrapping with Sir
Ashutosh at Calcutta University one day, and working out how to keep the
non-violent Mohandas Karamchand at bay on another.
There is more. Robert
Lytton’s daughter Emily married one Edwin Lutyens, the talented arch-imperialist
who designed Rashtrapati Bhavan and a good deal of New Delhi besides. Lutyens
laboured away, anchoring his thoughts on the belief that it would all endure
for centuries. It might, yet, but not as the Raj, which puttered out into
history, just twenty years after Viceroy House was built.
Perhaps Edwin should have taken
a cue from his wife. Emily became the most ardent follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti.
She also befriended the young and promiscuous Annie Besant and the growing
Indian freedom movement.
But Edwin didn’t pay any heed
to Emily’s native infatuations, cursing Indian architectural traditions even as
he stole from them. Ironically though, it is the imperialist Edwin Lutyens, and
not the India loving Emily, who’s remembered, his name, embedded in the power
structure of India.
For: Swarajyamag
(1, 050 words)
October 26th,
2015
Gautam Mukherjee
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