Tensions manifested: Reading the Viceroy's house in New Delhi

Interactions between Asian cities and European nations from around the midninteenth century to the mid-twentieth century are best captured by a series of tensions. The most evident was outright colonization by European countries such as the UK, the Netherlands and France, but other forms of cultural and economic colonization also occurred through the travel of ideas and the ubiquity of trade. At the same time, the peoples of Asia were far from passive recipients of European ideas, often appropriating them to their own needs and contexts, infecting them with their own intentions, languages and consequences and exporting them back in subtle ways to the colonial powers. The tensions between this European colonial dominance and Asian urban resistance are found in language, literature, music, attire and architecture of the time: Hindi words found their way into the English language and Indian cotton was used to manufacture English clothing. The many efforts of the British Empire to supposedly civilize its Asian colonies revealed as much about their vanity and codifi cation as the concrete manifestation of Asian-European tensions. One such manifestation is the Viceroy’s House (now known as Rashtrapati Bhavan or President’s House) in New Delhi, designed by the British architect Edwin Lutyens and built between 1912 and 1931