Cultivating Imperial Identity: the Garden City and Urban Landscapes in London, Calcutta and Delhi, C

CULTIVATING IMPERIAL IDENTITY: THE GARDEN CITY AND URBAN LANDSCAPES IN LONDON, CALCUTTA AND DELHI, C. 1860-1931 BY KAREN ANN RODRIGUEZ’G DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois of Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Antoinette M Burton, Chair Professor Tony J Ballantyne Associate Professor Dana Rabin Assistant Professor Rini Bhattacharya Mehta ii Abstract My dissertation considers how the cultivation of the garden was tied into the development of the colonial modern in the 19th century and early 20th century, setting in place value systems rooted in the link between horticultural space and urbanity itself in both metropole and colony. By considering the garden as imperial place-maker, I analyze how the garden was transmitted across multiple geographies and scales, foregrounding it as a modern site not just of aesthetic appeal but of disciplinary power. It was at once a mechanism for sifting out the difference between imperial subject and citizen and a space of collective identity in an often turbulent imperial context. The urban morphologies of London, Calcutta and New Delhi – the British imperial capitols studied here – reflect the fractured nature of local, national and imperial debates about open space, the place of the living and the dead, and questions of imperial and even global identity. As a civilizing paradigm, the urban garden landscape both in England and in India solved crises of material and social ills brought on by rapid urbanization, neutralized class consciousness and integrated the working classes and natives into the national/imperial landscape, and regulated both errant English and Indian bodies. This ‘greening’ of the urban landscape was linked to a specific form of imperial modernity, a material and discursive representation of social progress on an extra-national scale. By the second decade of the 20th century, my project shows how the garden had come to be identified as a space to not only cultivate the land but produce a civic and imperial identity at multiple scales and across shifting geographies. iii This work is based on a wide range of British and Indian government reports, newspapers, periodicals, journals, travelogues and other accounts, archival work done in the India Office Records held at the British Library, the manuscript collections of Lord Hardinge (microfilm) and Lord Curzon at the British Library, the letters of Edwin Lutyens to his wife, Emily, held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the collections of the Royal Botanical Gardens held at Kew, and the archives of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the London County Council, and the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association at the London Metropolitan Archives. iv Acknowledgements That the road to finishing this project was long barely speaks to the twists and turns it took over the course of several years. The gratitude I feel for the support I have received is deep, and the debts that must be paid are many. At the top of that list sits my advisor, Antoinette Burton. Her intellectual acumen and prolific body of work can be intimidating, but she succeeded in convincing me that research and writing is a journey and nurtured my often manic creative process with weekly meetings and caffeine at Espresso Royale. Her tough love mentoring has motivated me; her advice is now the lore of Team Empire (as those of us under her wing have called ourselves. I also thank her for her encouragement to spread my intellectual wings and venture outside the discipline of history in studying spatiality, even as she tired of my various renditions of “space, the final frontier.” I would not be the historian I am now without her influence, and I am happy to have the opportunity to thank her. The rest of my dissertation committee was also exceptional in terms of intellectual support. Tony Ballantyne, amongst many other things, urged me to position myself more critically within a historical geography of empire and imperial networks and think more deeply about the ‘place-making’ of empire. He also worked magic in a frightfully busy calendar, moving things around in order to participate in my defense early in the morning via telephone from New Zealand. Dana Rabin reminded me to “remember the 18th century” in the long arc of the 19th century garden more specifically and British empire more generally. She also reminded me to breathe. Rini Mehta asked, “where are the people?” and pointed me to literary resources to v recuperate those missing bodies in the representations of open space. That some of those bodies are still’ missing’ is more the fault of the writer than the advisor. Beyond my committee, I have had the good fortune of exceptional faculty both within and outside my department. My minor field course work and conversations with Dianne Harris and Amita Sinha in Landscape Architecture, both graduates of the ‘Berkeley School’ of landscape studies, pushed me to think about the experience and representations of space. Tamara Chaplin’s now infamous dance studio episode in her course on the body not only is part of the lore of our department, but in operating for a moment outside the traditional seminar structure, she moved me to think about the question of ‘affect’ in boundary-making, and how one responds to being ‘out of place’ in uncomfortable and unfamiliar environments. That I responded to such discomfort with sarcasm and self-deprecation was perhaps a surprise to no one; that it has informed my work surprised everyone. I was the first of Team Empire to travel beyond the UK archives; my physical as well as intellectual experience of the ‘space’ of Delhi and Calcutta influenced my project profoundly. I am grateful for my affiliation with the American Institute of Indian Studies in Delhi: the gentle humor of the Institute’s cook who promised to assuage my homesickness and culture shock with the baking of an ‘American’ apple pie; and the support of the administrative officer who took time out of a busy day to accompany me to the Foreign Registration Office, where we both were confounded at the reaction of the officer who ‘interviewed’ me. That interview, while producing palpitations, made me rethink what I meant by the ‘making of the modern British self,’ a quite useful, if at first traumatic, intellectual exercise. I regret not being able to return for a tour of the agent’s Delhi. I am also thankful to Devdan Choudhuri and his mother, owners of the guesthouse in Kolkata where I stayed. Devdan helped me orient myself ‘spatially’ in the city by drawing vi several helpful maps, accompanying me on my first visit to both the Botanical Gardens and the Victoria Memorial, and making sure the server was turned on every morning at 7am so I could check my email or Skype with my family back home. Special acknowledgment also goes to the library and archival staffs in Illinois, India and London who made my research possible: the specialists and other staff at the British Library’s Asian and African Reading Room, particularly those who patiently acquainted me with the labyrinthine archival structure that is the India Office Records; the staff at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew; the Victoria & Albert Museum where I read Lutyens’ letters to his wife, their patience when in the first week I constantly approached them to help interpret Lutyens’ horrible handwriting, and Charles Hinds’ helpful advice to compare Lutyens’ work on the Hampstead Garden Suburb and the design of New Delhi; the staff at the London Metropolitan Archives who helped me locate other useful archival sources when “we” discovered that the horrible condition of the John Gibson manuscript collection prevented its use (for 10 years, minimum), and looked the other way when I stood on their tables to take digital pictures of maps of London. The staff of the National Archives of India helped find and mail needed documents when serious illness forced me to leave the subcontinent. In Illinois, I would have been lost without the support and enthusiasm of Kathryn Danner and her staff in Interlibrary Loan services, whose Herculean efforts provided much needed resources and materials. Their unflagging dedication to my finishing my project deserves special recognition. My work has been generously supported by dissertation research awards from the University of Illinois History Department, and the Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Global and Transnational Studies Dissertation Fellowship, and the Theodore Pease. I am also grateful for the administrative support and expertise of Tom Bedwell, (the retired) Jan Langendorf, the late Judy vii Patterson, Elaine Sampson, and Shannon Croft, whose help over the years has made the day-to- day business of obtaining a PhD much easier to navigate. Finally, I wish to thank my friends (grad schoolies and otherwise), who have made the process of obtaining my doctorate tolerable. Danielle Kinsey first made me think about the question of ‘going native’ with regard to the burial of the dead in India; Debbie Hughes talked me out of a tree my first year of grad school—you know what you did, I don’t have to elaborate it here. Jamie Warren, Melissa Salrin, Erica Fraser, Amanda Brian, Anita Bravo, Alice Jones- Nelson, Jess Kamm, Melissa Rohde-Cherullo, Anna Claydon, Veneta Ivanova, Bao Bui, Srirupa Prasad, Karen Yuen, Rachel Shulman, have all in some way, offered good cheer and camaraderie. Jennifer Guiliano in particular – through phone calls, pro-seminar and trips to Olive Garden, Za’s and elsewhere as ours and the C-U’s culinary tastes progressed –we gnashed our teeth and laughed out loud at the dramedy that is graduate school.

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