Life in the Civil Station: Delhi in an Age of Empire and Transition, 1858–1911

This paper highlights how socially and culturally derived values from metropolitan Britain interacted with the indigenous milieu of the Delhi civil station and shaped the development and use of the culture space and the surrounding city in the late nineteenth century. The evolution of Delhi as an Indo-British urban town, containing the three fundamental, functional parts of the, ‘native city,’ ‘cantonment,’ and ‘civil station,’ bear testimony to the combined industry of the Indians and the British, with the goal of mutual political, social and economic benefit. The layout and usage of the colonial bungalow-complex compound existed within both the contrasting and complementary local culture of Delhi. Owing to the interface between indigenous and British value systems, the civil station of Delhi consequently became the culture space for the development of an Indo-British synthesis apparent in Delhi’s increasingly varied population, the status assumptions inherent in the hierarchical divisions within the city’s colonial community, daily lives and interactions of the British memsahibs and their servants, physical layout of the bungalows as well as recreational activities, all of which then combined to influence the spatial development of Delhi. Through the lens of colonial government and local administration directives, city newspapers, first-hand accounts, and memoirs, this paper analyzes the layout of the civil station, and its implications for social organization in late nineteenth century Delhi. Processes of both contention and collaboration, and overall development become apparent through the analysis of the actual structure of the civil station, reflecting the manner in which the cultural interactions between the Indians and the British were constantly reshaping categories of the foreign versus the indigenous, of the colonial versus the colonized, of the dominant versus the subservient.