New Delhi: New annotated edition - Paperback

by Robert Byron (Author)

"THAT New Delhi exists, and that, twenty years ago, it did not exist, are facts known to anyone who is at all aware of the British connection with India. It is expected, and assumed, that the representatives of British sovereignty beyond the seas shall move in a setting of proper magnificence; and that in India, particularly, the temporal power shall be hedged with the divinity of earthly splendour. To satisfy this expectation; New Delhi was designed and created. But that the city's existence marks, besides an advance in the political unification of India, a notable artistic event, has scarcely been realized. Nor is this surprising in a generation which has been taught by painful experience to believe architectural splendour and gaiety inseparable from vulgarity. Of the city's permanent value as an aesthetic monument, posterity must be the final judge. But to contemporaries, and in the darkness of contemporary standards, the event shines with a Periclean importance." - New Delhi, Robert ByronJust before New Delhi was inaugurated as capital of colonial India in February 13, 1931, the magazine "The Architectural Review" published an issue devoted to a study of the new capital of India, with texts, criticisms, and photographs by Robert Byron. In this edition, the texts and photographs of the author are complemented by annotations. The ebook edition also contains links to modern photos of the buildings and places.

Author Biography

Robert Byron (26 February 1905 - 24 February 1941) was a British travel writer, art critic and historian. Byron traveled to widely different places; Mount Athos, India, the Soviet Union, and Tibet. However it was in Persia and Afghanistan that he found the subject round which he forged his style of modern travel writing, when he later came to write up his account of The Road to Oxiana in early 1936, in Beijing, when he found himself alone in house of Desmond Parsons, the unreciprocated love of his life. Robert Byron died in 1941, during the Second World War, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a U-Boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland, en route to Egypt. His body was never found.