India replaces British architect statue with independence hero

NEW DELHI: India unveiled a bust of an independence-era nationalist icon at the presidential palace on Monday, replacing a monument to British architect Edwin Lutyens in a symbolic break from its colonial past.

Lutyens was the chief architect of New Delhi, the area that houses India’s power centre, and still often referred to as Lutyens’ Delhi.

His bust was replaced with that of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, known as Rajaji, a towering statesman, jurist and writer who served as Governor General from 1948 to 1950, bridging the transition from British rule to the modern Indian republic.

“This initiative is part of series of steps being taken towards shedding the vestiges of colonial mindset and embracing, with pride, the richness of India’s culture,” said President Droupadi Murmu in a statement.

Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long sought to eliminate remnants of India’s colonial past by reshaping several key British-era relics with his own mega projects.

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In 2023 he inaugurated a grand new hexagonal national parliament, replacing a colonial-era building, also designed by Lutyens along with his British colleague, Herbert Baker.

Modi said the move to replace Lutyens’ bust was part of initiatives to achieve “freedom from the mindset of slavery”.

“Statues of British administrators were allowed to remain… but those of the nation’s greatest sons were denied space,” he said in a radio broadcast on Saturday. “Today, the country is leaving that colonial mindset behind.”

In 2022, Modi’s government erected a statue of an independence hero venerated for taking up arms against colonial rule – but controversial for his collaboration with Nazi Germany’s war machinery.

The statue of Subhas Chandra Bose was placed in a canopy near the India Gate war memorial in New Delhi on a long empty plinth that had once housed a statue of British monarch King George V.

The canopy, too, had been designed by Lutyens.

Lutyens’ great-grandson, British biologist Matt Ridley, said he was “sad to read that the bust of Lutyens (my great grandfather) is to be removed from the presidential palace he designed in Delhi”.