An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj

"An Imperial Vision" explores the relationship between culture and power as revealed in the architectural forms the British used in their buildings in India between 1830 and 1930. It illustrates how, in the years after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British gradually acquired a vision of themselves as something more than conquerors. In the author's view they saw themselves as legitimate rulers linked directly to the Mughals and so to India's past. This assumed connection was the origin of the distinctive "Indo-Saracenic" architectural form as well as other imperial styles. The author contends that from the great monuments of New Delhi to obscure structures in remote towns up country what the British built in stone reflected political decisions they had made as imperial rulers. For over 50 years such architecture helped sustain a new ideology of empire. But, by the 1920s the vision and the power that had upheld the Raj begun to slip away, in spite of the massive building projects Lutyens and Baker were bringing to fruition in the plains of Delhi.