India Gate has the rare distinction of being one of the few attractions in Delhi that benefits from being visible from a great distance, rather than being crowded in by surrounding buildings. If you stand outside the Presidential Palace at the far end of Rajpath with the government buildings around you, you can look straight down this regal artery and see the 42m-high India Gate standing proudly in the distance, looking a little like an Asian Arc de Triomphe. And like the Arc de Triomphe, the India Gate also sits effectively at the middle of a giant roundabout.
As befits a monument to the noble dead of the First World War, the architect Edwin Lutyens laid out the streets of this area of New Delhi to give sufficient prominence to the sacrifice of those it commemorates. It was originally
known as the All India War Memorial but is now widely referred to as India Gate.
Lutyens was the architect and planner behind New Delhi and he brought a degree of order and structure to the streets that few Indian cities had seen before. The great boulevard of Kingsway - now known as Rajpath - ran West to East from what was then the Viceregal Palace (now the Presidential Palace or Rashtrapati Bhawan) to the India Gate. The second great street called Queensway (now Janpath) ran north south with the two roads crossing between the palace and the Gate.
From the time it was constructed, the area between the palace and the India Gate was the setting for all major ceremonial processions before Indian Independence and is often featured in film footage from the period between the two World Wars. It is still a focal point for the Republic Day celebrations every January.
The construction of the India gate took about 10 years from the laying of the foundation stone in 1921 to its completion and its dedication by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin in 1931. It was intended to honour tens of thousands of Indian soldiers killed fighting for the Allies in the First World War and in the later Afghan wars. Although many of the dead are unnamed, there are approximately 13500 names inscribed on the memorial and above them all the word 'India' is carved into both sides at the top of the archway.
In the 1970s an 'eternal flame' was added under the arch to honour the dead of the 1971 Indo-Pak war and this is guarded by soldiers. These days you cannot walk through the gate although I'm sure on earlier visits I was able to do so. There's a rather elegant covered podium behind the gate which looks a little like the Albert Memorial in London and was originally designed to hold a statue of the King but the statue was removed after Independence.
To visit the gate, you'll probably need a taxi or an auto rickshaw as the Metro system doesn't go very close and this is a bit of a walk from anywhere else. I've been several times and each time I'm a bit dumbstruck by this giant yellowy-pink arch standing proudly, surrounded by uncharacteristically neat and manicured lawns.
Getting across the road is your first challenge and sometimes there's nothing for it but to put your head down and charge through the traffic. Once you are on the island in the middle of the traffic you'll find plenty of people selling all sorts of strange things - from the obvious ice-creams and postcards, to toy birds twittering in cages and whatever this year's gimmicky toy might be. There are quite a lot of small beggar children but if you ignore them long enough and make it plain you aren't about to give them money, they'll eventually give up and find new people to pester.
There is a boating lake to one side of the Gate with brightly coloured boats shaped like swans and you may also catch a few people in the water with a cake of soap having a really good scrub-down wash. In the gardens around the gate there are usually young men playing a scratch game of cricket, courting couples billing and cooing, families indulging in complicated picnics and lots of coach parties of Indian school children being told about their country's great history.
On our visit in 2007 we were with two British Punjabi friends and as the husband walked past a group of local teenagers, one of them called out 'Hey Baldie' in Hindi, teasing him for his crew cut. Sadly they picked the wrong tourists and couldn't have predicted that his wife's addiction to Bollywood films means she has picked up enough Hindi to understand them. She stormed over to the boys and gave them a real dressing down about the need 'wash their mouths out with soap' for being so rude and to 'show some respect to their elders'. It was quite a performance and it's hard to imagine anyone would dare try that with a bunch of 'hoodies' on the streets of the UK. The poor boys looked quite shame-faced by the time Kuljit had finished with them.
Standing below the gate and looking up at it, the main inscription says "To the dead of the Indian armies who fell honoured in France and Flanders Mesopotamia and Persia East Africa Gallipoli and elsewhere in the near and the far-east and in sacred memory also of those whose names are recorded and who fell in India or the north-west frontier and during the Third Afghan War" and you can't fail to be moved by the enormous number of Indians who made the ultimate sacrifice to support a war taking place a very long way away that had little to do with life in their own country.
India gate is a place to promenade, take in the views and the gardens but most importantly to stop and think about the past and the bravery of the armed forces.
There always seems to be a snake charmer in the parking area when I go there too - scary! Paula x
anonymili 18.05.2009 13:38
Oh and your friend Kuljit probably knew she'd be safe in telling off those teens. They might be a bit cocky but if you call them on it, they're very meek and respectful generally I've found...
anonymili 18.05.2009 13:37
"Getting across the road is your first challenge" really made me chuckle as I SO know where you're coming from, I think this applies anywhere in India though, although the locals don't seem to have any fear of stepping out in front of bikes, cars or buses.... Fabulously reviewed. x
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