Lutyens: The man behind the myth

Were Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect credited with creating New Delhi, alive today, he would have relished the vilification of his name. He would have loved nothing more than the “elitist” label — all his life, he yearned to belong to Britain’s moneyed and titled class. In his remorseless climb up the greasy pole he was like Thackeray’s manipulative, social-climbing heroine Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. 

For the same reasons, Lutyens would have scorned Narendra Modi’s desire to irrevocably alter the Central Vista. In 2019, Mr Modi declared: “I could neither make the Lutyens’s world a part of me nor me