A year after the British Crown decided to shift the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, discussions took place on the location of the new imperial capital. Edwin Lutyens with Herbert Baker carried the day but there were other competing visions for the city too and central Delhi could well have been called "Leslie's Delhi" and not "Lutyen's Delhi". An alternate design and model was suggested by Sir Bradford Leslie for making the new capital.
Sir Bradford Leslie was an acclaimed engineer of the British Indian Empire whose famous works include the 1887 Jubilee Bridge, also known as the Hooghly Bridge. He also supervised the building of the Icchamati and Kumar river bridges, before returning to Britain, in 1862 to design bridges for railway lines in South Wales. He also designed an unusual floating bridge which straddled the Hooghly in Calcutta for 70 years and the Gorai River Bridge near Kushtia in present-day Bangladesh.
In Africa, he designed a railway line in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) in 1904 at the time when the British were colonising Nyasaland, the new area that had opened up along the shores of lake Nyasa. The railway line was meant to ease the movement of white settlers as they moved into Nyasaland. He designed the entire railway line without ever having visited Nyasaland in a challenging terrain and in a distance of 185 Km of the rail line, the difference in elevation was over 3700 feet. This Shire Highlands Railway, as it was originally called, was opened to traffic in 1908 though extensions and other constructions went on till 1935.
Leslie's design for the new imperial capital in Delhi was in competition with the design proposed by Edwin Lutyens. The plan put forward by Lutyens was to build the new capital in a largely rural area near the Raisina village with no connection to Delhi's existing European community. The plan entailed uprooting several villages including Raisina, Malcha, Kushak, Talkatora, Moitibagh etc. Sir Bradford Leslie disagreed with the vision and prepared a town plan that placed the capital back within Delhi's European civil lines as this was the area where the British already had their presence. He agreed with the idea of Delhi as the new capital because the city has a fair weather from the beginning of September till the end of March, for seven months a year. He also justified Delhi as an ideal place for the new capital as it was equidistant by rail from Calcutta, Karachi and Bombay. He also felt that placing the capital in Delhi would bring it nearer to the hill stations of Landour and Mussoorie. He just did not agree with the health and sanitary conditions that the location offered and this he intended to remedy by creating an artificial lake with the purpose of removing the insalubrity' of the place by building a weir across the river Yamuna. In his suggestion, Delhi was to be built using bricks or concrete made of bricks in an India-European fusion architecture. Material for making the bricks could easily be arranged from places nearby Delhi and from the soil that was to be scooped up in making the lake.
Bradford Leslie's design for the new imperial capital presented in December 1912, was centered around proximity to water to improve the hygiene of the place. His ideas were heavily influenced by his personal life and experiences. He had lost his daughter, wife and son-in-law to Malaria, all within three years, and himself had suffered repeated attacks of malaria. In his view, due to the dead flat geography of the Yamuna plains, the area became a 'Malaria nidus' of many square miles after the rains. He also observed that there was much less prevalence of plague and malaria in cities such as Banaras, Patna and Calcutta that were situated on perennially flowing rivers. Therefore he planned the creation of a lake on the 'swampy dry season bed of the river Yamuna to solve the disease-related problems.
Additional land for the city could be reclaimed by building an embankment, alongside the river which would run a wide boulevard, lined with "trees, shops, restaurants, theatres, clubs, hotels, and cafes". His target was to place Delhi at least on 'par with Calcutta in point of Salubrity'.
In his comparisons for similar seats of power, he used the examples of London, Paris and Canberra which were located around water bodies. In London, it was a one square mile quadrilateral figure containing Westminster Abbey, Houses of the Parliament, Buckingham Palace, government offices and Belgravia next to the Thames River. The official quarter of Paris was a triangular area of 2 1⁄2 square miles next to the Seine River. In India itself, he drew a similar comparison to Calcutta where a quarter square mile of open space accommodated all the government buildings around the Ganges. All of these were located around a flowing river. Similarly, Canberra was built on a series of lakes and water bodies.
Leslie's proposal was rejected in favour of Lutyens's design and led to the creation of the Lutyens zone, what we now know as the Parliament building, Rashtrapati Bhawan, North Block, South Block, the India Gate and Kartavya Path among others. The Capital on the Raisina hill is easily one of the most recognized and magnificent seats of power in the world. A metonym for power and authority in India it has lent its name to the now famous 'Raisina Dialogue', a flagship event of the Ministry of External Affairs.
Sir Bradford Leslie, died in his London home in March 1926, aged 95. However, the fact stays that had his design and ideas found acceptance, the Delhi that we would have known would have been 'Leslie's Delhi' and not 'Lutyens Delhi'. While the idea was discarded after a final examination in London, it is another twist of history that Edwin Lutyens was a part of the committee that had in the initial analysis turned down the idea of Bradford Leslie in July 1913.
Puneet Kundal IFS is an Additional Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK