Gordon Sanderson’s ‘Grand Programme’: Architecture, Bureaucracy and Race in the Making of New Delhi, 1910-1915

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between choreography of India’s monuments and imperial hierarchies of race. It does so by situating one man’s professional biography within the structures of authority and privilege to which he owed his position. Gordon Sanderson was appointed Superintendent of Muhammadan and British Monuments in Northern India in 1910 and was charged with overseeing the exploration and conservation of archaeological monuments in the new imperial city at Delhi. The classification of India’s architectures offers a uniquely revealing insight into imperial ideologies of race and place. During his brief career, Sanderson demonstrated an intense dislike for the principles and practises of imperial architecture . Sanderson believed in a profound connection between landscape and architecture, a theory for which he found an antithesis in the imperial Public Works Department. Ultimately, and paradoxically, his work was deployed by the Government of India as a repudiation of the credibility of Indian design and architecture.