Land Acquisition, Landlessness, and the Building of New Delhi

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.KeywordsLand TenureLand AcquisitionColonial GovernmentIndian FarmerTown PlannerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.