On Feb 23, 2026, President Droupadi Murmu unveiled the bust of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, India’s first Governor-General, at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, formally replacing the bust of British architect Edwin Lutyens that had stood there since the colonial era. The occasion marked the beginning of Rajaji Utsav. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the replacement a day earlier during the 131st episode of the radio programme Mann ki Baat, linking it to his ‘Panch-Pran’ pledge, specifically committing to “freedom from the mentality of slavery” and declaring that “today, the country is leaving behind the symbols of slavery and has begun to value symbols related to Indian culture.”
(right) Bust of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the first and only Indian Governor General of independent India. Photograph: Rashtrapati Bhavan
While this was definitely a headline-friendly gesture that may have fired many Hindu nationalists, to fix colonialism by removing symbolism is to miss the enormous ways in which colonialism evolved historically.
Edwin Lutyens designed New Delhi. Working alongside Herbert Baker, Lutyens spent nearly two decades designing what we now call Lutyens’ Delhi: Rashtrapati Bhavan (then Viceroy’s House), the North and South Blocks, India Gate, Hyderabad House, Baroda House, Patiala House, Connaught Place, and the ceremonial axis then called Kingsway, now Kartavya Path. M.N. Buch, noted Urban Planner and Civil Servant, in his paper Lutyens’ New Delhi—Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, writes about New Delhi,
“A Republic needs a symbol of pride; and Lutyens’ New Delhi makes precisely that statement, establishes precisely that symbol for the Republic of India. … The whole of Delhi, of which New Delhi is an integral part, is not only representative of an unparalleled heritage, but it offers a constant voyage of discovery in which the past fuses into the present and is projected into the future.”
Historically, this makes Lutyens enormously significant as an architect and town planner whose designs encode an entire ideology of power. As historian Dr. Narayani Gupta notes in her article “Edwin Lutyens’ Delhi is Unique; India’s Political Class must not Tamper with it”, the original Kingsway axis was modelled on European Renaissance cities and designed to communicate hierarchy rather than democracy; there was no Parliament or Supreme Court in Lutyens’ original plan because such institutions simply did not exist.
This is precisely why this act of replacing the bust is complicated. Because removing Lutyens’ bust does not equate to the erasure of our colonial history or architectural history. We aren’t obligated to preserve a colonial architect’s image inside India’s presidential Palace. But, irrespective of his bust’s presence, the buildings remain. The city remains. Because it was never his bust that preserved or threatened his legacy or our architectural history. That is a distinction worth maintaining.
On the other hand, introducing the bust of C. Rajagopalachari (a freedom fighter who served as the last Governor-General of undivided India and the first Indian to hold the office, and later as Chief Minister of Madras State) inside a building designed to represent colonial power is quite meaningful. In a way, it is a symbolic inversion. A building built for a Viceroy is now inhabited by an Indian President. That transformation is, in itself, more eloquent than any statue swap.
Lutyens designed a city meant to last a lot longer under imperial rule, which lasted for only 35 years more. Doesn’t that irony already seem decolonising enough?
So, when the current Government of India describes the act of removing the Lutyens’ bust as “freedom from the mentality of slavery”, they are conflating two very different things: the symbols of colonialism and the structures of the colonial mindset.
While the bust was the symbol (similar to many other symbolic representation of colonialism that exists in India’s built environment), the colonial mindset continues to exist within our habits, our governance, in how our institutions relate to citizens, and perhaps most critically, in how Indians relate to one another along the lines of caste, language, class, and gender. The removal of a statue does nothing to dismantle the ingrained colonial mindset, but everything to relocate them and declare them as solved.
This is where I feel that real danger lies (which is far subtler than the erasure many seem to point out). What does this kind of symbolic politics do to our historical narratives, architectural archives, and the understandings of the past? What happens when the conversation about what these building designs mean—about the way they were built, about the spatial logics, about the hidden political agenda—gets replaced by a triumphalist narrative of “we removed the bad symbol, therefore we are decolonised?” That is not history. That is the performance of history.
In 2002, the World Monuments Fund placed Lutyens Delhi on its list of the 100 Most Endangered Sites, recognising that the district had been “reinterpreted over time, becoming an integral part of India’s civic and cultural landscape”. It is a historical architectural legacy. A serious engagement with this legacy would, in fact, ask tougher questions when it comes to talking about decolonising: why does the spatial logic of the Central Vista still orient itself around a single axis of power, with citizens kept at a ceremonial distance? Why did the new Parliament building, designed by an Indian architect under the Indian Government, largely replicate the same hierarchical spatial logics as the previous ones?
For comparison, an Oxford college (Oriel College) backtracked on its previous decision to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, ignoring the recommendation of an independent commission, which angered people. Following the legal and regulatory advice that made extraction from a Grade II* listed building prohibitive, the college installed a small information plaque instead describing Rhodes as a “committed British colonialist” whose activities “led to great loss of life.” This satisfied almost no one: the Rhodes Must Fall movement dismissed the sign as trivialising the pain caused by Rhodes. Others argued that it was unbalanced in the opposite direction. But the plaque prompted more discussions and reckoning with their racial and colonial legacies.
(right) Rhodes Building, Oriel College. Source: Oriel College
When it comes to Lutyens’ bust, the Indian Government not relocating or introducing a plaque providing adequate historical context that presents the ideological and historical context of the building, which would have invited citizens into a more open encounter and discussion about our colonial and architectural history, is a missed opportunity.
Another argument, which I think tends to get lost entirely, about colonial statues and city redesigns is that the colonial mindset did not arrive in India on a British ship. Colonialism compounded and, in many cases, codified existing social (particularly caste), political, and economic hierarchies. The British colonisers used the caste system instrumentally through administration and the built environment. These hierarchies themselves are far older that have survived everything. Caste discrimination continues in access to resources and spaces, and is so deeply embedded within us that a debate about a British architect’s bust seems almost beside the point, as we are yet to free ourselves from the caste-based mindset, which is far more ingrained than the colonial mindset.
Although it may seem that I am dismissing symbolism entirely, I promise I am not. Symbols also matter.
What a country chooses to honour inside its presidential house is a statement. But removing a colonial architect’s bust and equating it to a step in removing the colonial mindset is not it. Decolonisation is not an aesthetic project, even if aesthetics are a small part of it.
It requires structural reforms of institutions built upon colonialism. It requires an honest and critical conversation with history, which means neither treating colonial symbols and architecture as neutral decoratives nor performing their removal as if the underlying power structures have vanished.
Lutyens’ bust probably did not belong in the courtyard, but changing the statue does not change the room.
Sources
- Dr. Narayani Gupta, “Edwin Lutyens’ Delhi is Unique; India’s Political Class must not Tamper with it”, Sahapedia
- Jamie Grierson and Damien Gayle, “Oxford College Installs Plaque Calling Cecil Rhodes a ‘Committed Colonialist’,” The Guardian, October 11, 2021
- Livia Gershon, “Why a New Plaque Next to Oxford’s Cecil Rhodes Statue Is So Controversial,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 13, 2021
- Rhodes Must Fall
- World Monuments Fund / Lutyens’ Delhi, DailyArt Magazine
- Press Release from the President of India
- THE NEW DELHI by Herbert Baker, Published in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts
- Maya M. Tola, “Edwin Lutyens and the Shaping of New Delhi,” Daily Art Magazine, July 10, 2025
- Design of Delhi: Edwin Lutyens, Asia Society
