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31 Most scholars of thE ARCHITECTURE of the British Empire focus on the question, how was empire represented in its architecture? Buildings and architectural style were of particular importance in the Victorian era because, as the architectural historian Mark Crinson notes, “to build was to create meaning”—yet the meanings ascribed to style were contested.1 The meaning of architectural style and the appropriate style for empire were hotly debated in colonial India.In 1920, John Begg (1866–1937),consulting architect to the government of India from 1908 until 1921, observed that there were two schools of opinion on how to build in India. The first school made the case that the British should take the Romans as their model and plant British architecture as well as British notions of justice, law, culture, and order not only as improvements but also to reflect the brilliance of the empire, while civic architecture should reflect all these qualities to the Indians. In contrast, the second school maintained that there was a living tradition in Indian architecture that needed to be nurtured and sustained by curbing outside influences and that the carriers of this living tradition, Indian craftsmen, native architects, or master builders—mistris and stapathis—needed to be patronized. Begg tentatively named the two schools “the Roman school” and “the ‘swadeshi’ school” respectively; the architectural historian Philip Davies would later call them “the aesthetic imperialists” and the “native revivalists.”2 Thomas R. Metcalf ’s insightful analysis of Indo-Saracenic architecture in India shows that the debates and divisions between various schools of thought were considerably more nuanced than such binary oppositions allow. While 2 Anglo-Indian Architecture and the Meaning of Its Styles 32 Anglo-Indian Architecture and Meaning acknowledging that the British drew on classical European forms to represent empire as they had long done in Europe, Metcalf shows that the revolt of 1857 brought a change of heart. After this period the British sought to project themselves as legitimate successors to the Mughals—in other words as indigenous rather than foreign rulers. Such a reworking of the ideology of empire required a new architecture, the Indo-Saracenic architecture that was at once European but at the same time linked to India’s past through its mastery of Indic detail.3 Builders of the Indo-Saracenic style do not fit neatly into either of Davies’s categories. It was, after all, not just a question of style but of how to build, and “native revivalists” did not necessarily approve of Indo-Saracenic architects since they, rather than native craftsmen, retained control of the design and construction process. This chapter shows that the meaning of architectural style was far less fixed than Metcalf’s account would have it.Metcalf’s focus on imperial ideology obscures the varied applications of the Indo-Saracenic style, which was not simply deployed or even commonly understood by its practitioners to show that the British were legitimate successors of the Mughals. It was also used in Bombay, for example, to mark a break between the practice of architects and engineers. After India became part of the British Empire, many architects and of- ficials were critical of the architectural style of previous British forces in India. The attempt to find an appropriate Anglo-Indian style remained a concern for officials and architects until independence in 1947 and spanned a continuum from Classical,Gothic Revival,and Indo-Saracenic styles to those who rejected the control of buildings by architects or engineers in favor of the native mistris, who would, on their own, develop a style that reflected the synthesis of Indic traditions and European forms. The styles that emerged or remained dominant after 1857 and the meaning of these styles were influenced by local conditions. At least for its architects, the Indo-Saracenic of Madras did not have the same meaning as the IndoSaracenic of Bombay. Apart from the Indo-Saracenic, were there other ways of showing that the British were indigenous rather than foreign rulers? Sir Bartle Frere, who promoted the use of the Gothic Revival in Bombay, spoke in 1870 of the development in that city of what he hoped would become “an indigenous school of Anglo-Indian architecture, as extensive and as distinct as the pure Hindu and Mahometan schools of former days,” a statement that makes one question the exclusive claims made on behalf of the Indo-Saracenic.4 And yet, once again, despite the focus on imperial ideology...

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