Public Lives, Private Places: British Houses in Delhi, 1803-1853

Within two hundred years of arriving in India as merchant adventurers, Britain's East India Company was effectively in control of this diverse country's government and natural resources. Analyses of the relative ease with which this happened, and of subsequent effects upon India, continue to challenge scholars in a changing intellectual climate. This dissertation focuses on British occupation of Delhi, the Mughal "seat of empire". It examines the problem of British domestic settlement patterns in the city in the early 19th century, asking how they related to and resisted the spatial inscription of the pre-existing built environment. Challenging the widespread assumption that the desire to maintain cultural distinctiveness was central to the colonial context, it takes the specific encounters of individual Britons to argue that, in Delhi at the time, there was a complex interrelationship between British and late Mughal culture. This is read through the siting and plans of new buildings; the re-use of palaces and other monuments; and the ceremonial use of the built environment. The first chapters of the dissertation provide a select historical background to the study of houses in early 19 th century Delhi by surveying Mughal Delhi before the British arrival; Surat, the site of the first British factory in the 17th century; and Murshidabad and Calcutta in 18th century Bengal. Subsequent chapters turn to elite houses associated with both public and private British use in 19th century Delhi. Chapters 4 and 6 examines adaptive re-use of sub-imperial Mughal palaces and monumental religious structures used as houses; while chapter 5 looks at new houses in which Indian forms, adapted to viable living in the climate, were assimilated into British patterns of use. Historic preservation is used as an indicator of changing British knowledge of India, and as further evidence for the distinction between official and individual attitudes.