Abstract
As architects and high officials debated the symbolic relationship of architecture to empire and as town planners worked out the final details of their town plan, land acquisition officers from the Government of India began the tedious process of assessing and acquiring lands for the new capital on a monumental scale. With the aid of the Delhi District’s Land Revenue Office, town planners designated approximately 40,000 sq. acres to the south-west of the existing city of Delhi. The proceedings represented a moment when British abstract notions about imperial legitimacy, about the architectural aesthetics of empire, and, indeed, about the contribution of the British Empire to India’s progress ran up against material reality. This chapter examines the manner in which New Delhi’s abstract imperial vision was played out against and made possible by real people on the ground. In particular, it focuses on the colonial mechanisms of domination and subordination inscribed in New Delhi at its most basic level — namely, the land upon which the city itself was actually built. It does so by looking at the enclosing of lands and the removal of Indian communities for the building of New Delhi. Most dispossessed agriculturalists were given cash awards for their Delhi lands and offered the opportunity to purchase new lands in the neighbouring Punjab districts of Karnal and Rohtak or farther away in the new canal colonies of the Punjab’s Lower Bari Doab.
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Notes
See Amartya Sen’s forward to the 1996 republication of Ranajit Guha’s A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), ix–x.
Thomas Metcalf, ‘The British and the Moneylender in Nineteenth-Century India’, The Journal of Modern History, vol. 34, no. 4 (December 1962), 390–7. British district collectors often complained that endemic rural debt stemmed from the poor economic choices made by Indian farmers. According to these officials, Indian famers too often lavished moneys on non-revenue yielding expenses such as weddings, births, and burials or on religious rites when they should have been using their moneys to improve their farms or to pay off old debts. Thus they placed family, community and religion over sound economic planning. Of course, it was these very social and cultural practices and many others that held together local communities. Metcalf has published considerably on the topic of land tenure, land revenue, and the mutiny. Along with the above, see ‘The Struggle over Land Tenure in India, 1860–1868’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (May 1962); ‘The Influence of the Mutiny of 1857 on Land Policy in India’, The Historical Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (1961); and ‘Landlords without Land: The U.P. Zamindars Today’, Pacific Affairs, vol. 40, no. 1/2 (Spring-Summer, 1976).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a Secret: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 81.
Thomas Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 55.
Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
Michael Mandelbaum, Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government (Philadelphia: Public Affairs, 2007).
John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: The New Press, 1998), 17.
David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia: The New Cambridge History of India, Volume 4, Part 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22.
P. J. Marshall, Bengal, The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 149–50.
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001). Davis argues that late nineteenth-century famines were caused by the incorporation of the tropical zone into a global capitalist market centred on London.
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© 2015 David A. Johnson
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Johnson, D.A. (2015). Land Acquisition, Landlessness, and the Building of New Delhi. In: New Delhi: The Last Imperial City. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469878_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469878_8
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