In Pursuit of Legacy. Walking a straight line from India Gate towards the seat of government. February 23, 2025.

Edwin Lutyens. c. 1912. Plan of Imperial Delhi.

In Pursuit of Legacy was a city walk staged by Delhi based arts collaboration First Draft and guest artist Nick Ferguson. Over the course of an evening some 15 participants set out to walk and talk their way along the central visa from Delhi’s India Gate towards the presidential palace. In line with previous events, contributors were given what the collaboration term a ‘prompt’ meaning a word or phrase around which responses can be organised. For the purposes of this event, the prompt was ‘mobility’ and was accompanied on the day with a printed ‘lay out plan’ of Imperial Delhi, a document thought to reflect the original 1912 conception of the vista by British master planner and architect Edwin Lutyens. What follows is a collectively drafted and edited record, which is to also say an ongoing reflection and revision, of just some of the many responses, observations, conversations interventions that constituted the evening’s drafting.

First Draft’s Instagram post is here

Below are photos and notes from contributors.

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The designated path is marked on the map as Kingsway. With independence in 1947 Kingsway gave way to a Hindi translation, Rajpat, and in 2022 under Prime Minister Modi was renamed Kartavia Path (The Path of Duty), reportedly (Times of India) in a bid to shed its colonial association and acknowledgement of the nation’s democratic freedom.

Issues around statecraft, democracy and civic space surfaced repeatedly over the course of the evening. For some, the language of power is the same whoever is in power, wherever you are in the world. There are the same straight vistas, fountains, monuments and lawns. To this extent, New Delhi offered a blueprint for how power might be spatialised. We asked who had access and how this has changed over the course of time. As if by way of portent, this conversation was drowned out by a dusk gathering of birds in a nearby tree. They seemed to  be protesting or at the very least  expressing strong views. Whatever their precise purpose they were  certainly asserting the right to crowd the public sphere. Forced to listen, we paused for a samosa.

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India, it was noted, had no significant centralised civic architecture or landscaping before these were imposed upon it by the British. Perhaps national governance functioned by other means (a point to follow up) but there is no question that once constructed, it was a conduit for the version of modernisation that emerged following independence. In this connection, one contributor also raised the question of the original civic function of India Gate. For, although not constructed until the 1930s and commemorating the Indians who gave their lives in the Great War 1914-1918, it is nevertheless marked on the original layout plan. Was the arch planned as a triumphal arch such as those in Europe such as L’ Arc de Triomphe, the Brandenburg Gate and Marble Arch that respectively mark the grand civic parades of Paris, Berlin and London? In which case, its change of political function to cenotaph represents a significant shift in the way that the path was imagined to function.

The matter was also raised of the transfer to Coronation Park of the statues of notable public figures that had adored the city in colonial times, and of parallels between this graveyard of monuments to those in Eastern Europe now filled with Soviet era monuments of Stalin and Lenin. A debate soon ensured over the extent to which nomenclature is coercive and or/violent. For some, there is undoubtedly a power of persuasion exercised over the body and mind of a citizen placed within a civic space as imposing as the grand vista. But further demands are made upon a citizen’s conduct by certain place names. In which case, what demands are present in Kartavia Path that are not present in Rajpath, and vice versa? And how might a citizen’s ‘duty’ today, wherever they are in the world, be distinguished from subjecthood within a globally dispersed condition of Empire?

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Taking mobility as a reference to ordinary everyday acts of subversion to administered space, one contributor sought to overwrite the straightness of the designated path with a meandering citizens centred counterpart. We saw printouts of the snaking, stalling, enquiring trip one contributor had captured using Strava and noted how little relationship its ‘tactics’ (De Certeau, Walking in the City)  bore to the strategist’s paths.  Another touchstone was the debate around public space and democracy sparked by Richard Serra’s notorious Tilted Arc (1981) that briefly occupied Federal Plaza, New York City, US, before its controversial eviction by the Genera Service Administration.

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Another response took mobility in its economic sense and sought to compare the cost of an ice cream at different proximities to India Gate. It transpires that, contrary to experiences from this contributor’s childhood memories, the price is consistent.

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Another response took as its genesis an inconsistency in the layout plan’s commitment to cartographic convention. It was noted that on the one hand, the plan enables orientation within a wider representation of territory through the inclusion of an arrow signalling the direction of magnetic North. On the other, it breaks with this convention by rejecting the alignment of north with the top of the page in favour of a 90-degree clockwise rotation so that the arrow North points out from the right of the frame. One immediate response was a refusal of this proposition by rotating the map back again and read it sideways on. Another was to think a bit more about why the map was rotated in the first place. At one level it might simply have been a pragmatic use of a printed page whose orientation is by default portrait: the path is long and narrow and fits better running top to bottom. However, this analysis would seem to miss the iconographic similitude of the reoriented map with the apse of a Christian Church. Perhaps the visual analogy is a bit of a stretch: but it is worth pointing out that the whole thing looks like a crucifix on which the royal residence finds itself at the top (the place reserved for the Son of God) and the people who walk dutifully through the arch stand at his feet. And as anyone who has visited a Byzantine Church knows, the top is never just the top. It signifies an ascension – a transfer of value – from the dark material to the airy spiritual world. In which case, the layout would seem to read as a kind of secularised church.

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The original plans for New Delhi included a programme of mass tree planting. We heard how some imported variants do not sit well with public health in this urban setting. For example, xxx have led to asthma. In this connection the concept of global history (as opposed to world history) was raised because of its capacity to understand the connections between things such as disease. The conversation turned again to human and more than human cohabitation and the grim story emerged of monkeys being removed from the park and fed to leopards in a newly opened sanctuary.

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Further Reading/Viewing