As historian Narayani Gupta writes in Delhi Between Two Empires (OUP 1997): ‘A long processional avenue was planned from the fort through Delhi Gate, past a park and a boulevard with the houses of Indian princes lining both sides. Another was to cut through the side of Jama Masjid from the proposed King Edward Memorial Park, and bear southwestward to the new railway station, whence another road was to lead to Kashmiri Gate.’These roads were never built. Thus it was that the sharp contrast between an expansive residential area and an over-congested commercial slum was formalized and perpetuated. Shahjahanabad was deliberately left to die as a neglected memory of a rejected past. And New Delhi was created as a ‘new’ statement of imperial intention, even if its architects, in an act of benign indulgence, took some architectural motifs of the past and incorporated them in the red sandstone buildings on Raisina Hill.
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