New Delhi In Indian political discourse, few expressions evoke the country’s democratic imagination as powerfully as “Loktantra ka Mandir” and “desh ki sabse badi panchayat.” Repeated in parliamentary speeches and public conversations alike, they are more than rhetorical flourishes. They reflect the idea of Parliament as the space where India’s vast and often bewildering diversity finds political expression, where the voices of a nation of over a billion people are channelled through hundreds of elected representatives in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.
Yet, when the history of the Indian Parliament is told, the spotlight invariably falls on its occupants: the towering leaders who shaped its debates, the governments that rose and fell, the speakers who presided over stormy sessions and the Members who gave voice to competing political aspirations. Parliament’s political history has, quite naturally, been narrated through the people who entered its chambers. The building itself has often remained in the background, a silent witness to the great political drama unfolding within its walls.
But buildings, too, have biographies. They carry the imprint of the age in which they are conceived, the ambitions of those who commission them and the ideas, sometimes competing ones, that shape their design. And when the building in question is India’s Parliament, its story inevitably becomes intertwined with the story of the Republic itself.
In Housing the Republic: A Biography of the Indian Parliament, Sobhana K. Nair turns her attention to this less-explored protagonist of India’s democratic journey. Her subject is not merely a structure of stone, columns and corridors, but the remarkable story of how a colonial-era building came to house the world’s largest democracy and how, nearly a century later, it eventually gave way to a new Parliament building inaugurated in 2023. The journey from the old Parliament House to its successor is, as the book makes clear, no less fascinating than many of the political fortunes made and unmade within these institutions over the past eight decades.
Rich in historical research and vivid in architectural detail, the book traces the conception, design and construction of the Parliament complex while introducing the remarkable cast of personalities who played a role in bringing it into being. Architects and administrators, viceroys and colonial officials, each appears in a story that moves well beyond architectural history. The choices surrounding the structure, its design and its symbolism reveal a great deal about the changing ideas of power, representation and nationhood.
That is what makes Nair’s undertaking particularly compelling. She takes what might easily have remained the history of a building and turns it into a wider account of the institution it came to embody. In telling the story of how Parliament was built, inhabited and eventually reimagined, the book also offers a different vantage point from which to look at the evolution of Indian democracy itself. The building, long treated as a bystander to history, steps into the foreground and proves to have a story of its own.
The book is also replete with historical nuggets that offer a revealing glimpse into the minds of the colonial masters who conceived and built modern Delhi, particularly that part of the city which, even today, is popularly celebrated as Lutyens’ Delhi, a phrase that has itself become synonymous with power, privilege and having “arrived” in the Indian establishment.
Nair introduces the reader to a fascinating cast of characters who shaped this imperial project, from Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker to Lord Hardinge, whose interventions proved instrumental in determining the course of New Delhi’s development and the making of its most important institutions. But the book does not treat them simply as architects, administrators and planners. It also reveals their prejudices, rivalries, ambitions and often deeply imperial worldview.
Particularly striking is the portrait of Lutyens himself. The man whose name would, ironically, come to be attached to one of independent India’s most coveted addresses had little but disdain for Indian architecture and, more disturbingly, for Indians themselves. His correspondence and views, as brought out in the book, reveal the language and racial assumptions of an empire convinced of its own civilisational superiority, referring to Indians in derogatory terms such as “blacks” and “blackamoors”. There is an unmistakable irony here: the name of a man marked by such profound contempt for India and its people would eventually become shorthand for the very pinnacle of power and privilege among sections of the Indian elite.
This irony runs through the larger story of imperial Delhi itself. The grand avenues, imposing buildings and carefully planned vistas were conceived as an architectural assertion of British authority, designed to project the permanence and majesty of the Raj. Yet, history had other plans. The structures meant to symbolise imperial power would outlive the Empire and be appropriated by an independent Republic. The Parliament building, perhaps more than any other, came to embody that transformation. Its walls remained the same, but the sovereign power exercised within them passed from colonial rulers to the representatives of independent India.
But Nair’s is not merely an architectural history or an account of the making of the old Parliament House. It also offers a glimpse into the many episodes associated with the institution’s functioning and its place as a witness to some of the most consequential moments in India’s political history. At the heart of this story is the Central Hall—a space that acquired a significance far greater than its architectural purpose and became associated with some of the defining moments of India’s democratic journey. Its absence from the new Parliament building, therefore, marks not merely an architectural change but the disappearance of a space that had, over decades, accumulated an extraordinary historical memory.
The book is filled with many fascinating details related to the Parliament. One particularly surprising revelation is that barely fifteen years after Independence, an idea was floated to construct another building resembling the Parliament House but rising to three times its height. The proposal may never have materialised, but it is one among the many historical gems that make the book rewarding even for readers who believe themselves well acquainted with the history of independent India.
And then there are the anecdotes that reveal how deeply politics, empire and symbolism could intersect in seemingly unlikely places. Nair recounts an episode from the 1932 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. The artist Oswald Birley submitted three portraits: one of Lord Irwin, the former Viceroy of India; another of art historian Sir Robert Witt; and the third of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. However, shortly before the exhibition opened, Gandhi’s portrait was withdrawn by the Academy Council as “undesirable”.
The story, however, did not end with the Royal Academy’s rejection. The portrait would eventually find its way to the very institution at the heart of India’s democratic life. Prabha Shankar Pattani, the Diwan of Bhavnagar, acquired the painting from Birley, who agreed to part with a work he had painted for himself after being told that it was meant for India.
It was Prabha Shankar Pattani’s son, A. P. Pattani, a member of the Constituent Assembly, who presented the portrait to the Constituent Assembly. The painting was unveiled in the Central Hall and went on to become the first portrait to adorn the space where the Constitution was being debated and the future of the Republic was being shaped.
Such stories are what give the book much of its texture. They are not merely curiosities inserted to enliven an architectural narrative; together, they reveal the political atmosphere and imperial assumptions surrounding the building and the institution that would eventually become central to the life of an independent Republic.
Nair, a seasoned journalist who has covered Parliament for years, quite understandably also delves into the great political movements of independent India. Two chapters are particularly revealing in this regard. The one on the Central Hall shows how the space became a witness to the formation of successive governments and political realignments; from the memorable contest between Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai for the prime ministership to the dramatic election of Chandrashekhar as Prime Minister after Devi Lal withdrew his own candidature.
Another particularly interesting chapter, titled “The Echoes Within” which turns to the landmark speeches that once resonated through those walls. These include Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s momentous concluding address to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, a day before the Constitution was adopted, and V. P. Singh’s announcement in Parliament on August 7, 1990, of his government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission’s recommendations, a decision that would profoundly reshape India’s social and political landscape.
Together, such moments underline why the Central Hall was far more than an architectural space. It was a chamber where history was not merely discussed but, at crucial moments, made.
