Bust the Myths, Not the Busts
From Sir Edwin Lutyens to Sir Sobha Singh and Sir Ganga Ram—why the makers of Delhi, Lahore and Patiala belong to civilisation, not to flags
Author credentials
KBS Sidhu, IAS (retd.), served as Special Chief Secretary to the Government of Punjab. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The KBS Chronicle, a daily newsletter offering independent commentary on governance, public policy, hi-tech and strategic affairs.
From a Bust Controversy to a Bigger Question
The removal of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ bust from the new Parliament complex has revived an old and uncomfortable question: who really “built” Delhi? Lutyens, as the principal architect of New Delhi, undeniably shaped its imperial geometry. Yet this moment of symbolic revision also invites a more honest inquiry — whether we have mistaken the designer for the maker.
For Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs — especially those whose families knew Lahore before 1947 and then rebuilt life in Delhi — the debate is not merely aesthetic or ideological. It touches memory. Cities were lost, cities were gained and rebuilt, and entire lives were reassembled under the shadow of Partition. In that experience lies a deeper instinct: a city is not built by ideas alone. It is built by risk, labour, enterprise, and the stubborn intelligence of those who turn drawings into stone.
If the new Parliament precincts are to become a space for civic remembrance, it should not narrow history. It should widen it.
Lutyens Drew the City. Punjabis Built It.
This is not an argument against Lutyens. It is an argument for completeness.
New Delhi did not rise from blueprints by imperial willpower. It rose because Indian builders executed it at scale — at a pace, complexity and reliability that the public narrative rarely credits.
Sardar Sujan Singh and his son, Sir Sobha Singh, stand at the heart of that story. Their construction enterprise became synonymous with the physical making of New Delhi — government buildings, residences, institutional structures, neighbourhoods and the everyday architectural texture of the capital. Sobha Singh’s name entered the city’s folklore as the “builder of New Delhi”, but in the grand narrative he is too often treated as a footnote to the fame of Lutyens and Baker.
Yet the truth is plain: empires may supply the design; cities require builders.
The Lahore Parallel: Sir Ganga Ram’s Larger Genius
The Delhi story naturally leads to Lahore, because the Punjabi tradition of building did not stop at the Yamuna. It flourished across undivided Punjab — and the most luminous example is Sir Ganga Ram.
If Sujan Singh and Sobha Singh represent the contractor-builders who physically executed New Delhi, Ganga Ram represents something even broader: engineer, planner, architect, investor, philanthropist and social reformer in one. He is remembered in Lahore as a foundational figure of the city’s modern civic life — not because he claimed greatness, but because his buildings and institutions became inseparable from Lahore’s identity.
Here is the point many in Delhi instinctively feel but rarely articulate: the men who built our cities before Partition were not working for future countries. They were building a region — a shared civic landscape — with modern institutions meant to serve ordinary people.
Hospitals and the Irony of Memory
Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital is an emotional anchor for countless families. It is one of the capital’s most respected medical institutions and part of the lived history of post-Partition rehabilitation. But it also contains a poignant irony: the Delhi hospital is, in a sense, a memorial to a man whose most celebrated works stand in Lahore.
That irony becomes even sharper in the famous Partition anecdote often retold through the lens of Punjabi dark humour: during the communal frenzy, a mob attacks Ganga Ram’s statue in Lahore; in the chaos a rioter is injured; and suddenly the slogan of hate collapses into a cry of necessity — “Take him to Sir Ganga Ram Hospital!”
Whether retold with small variations or not, the story captures a moral truth that feels undeniable. When life needs saving, ideology cannot substitute for institutions. Hatred may choose targets, but gratitude keeps returning to the builder’s legacy.
Patiala: Proof That Builders Ignore Borders
Patiala completes the arc — and strengthens the central argument.
Before he became inseparable from Lahore’s modern civic history, Sir Ganga Ram’s career also touched the royal city of Patiala. Under the patronage of its rulers, he is credited with shaping or overseeing key civic and institutional works — the kind of state buildings through which a capital expresses order, education and public purpose.
This matters because it breaks the temptation to confine Ganga Ram to one city or one national story. His professional footprint runs from princely Patiala to metropolitan Lahore — and from there into the larger canal-colony imagination of Punjab. His work belongs to an era when civic building was a form of moral ambition: to create schools, hospitals, courts, secretariats — not for a religion, but for a functioning public life.
Patiala, Lahore and Delhi together demonstrate something that politics finds inconvenient: the map of craftsmanship does not match the map of sovereignty.
Why the Builders Should Be Above the Culture Wars
The controversy around Lutyens’ bust risks becoming a predictable contest — remove one statue, install another, declare victory. But the deeper lesson is the opposite: our public memory should become more spacious, not more cramped.
Lutyens’ role as the imperial architect is a matter of record. But Sujan Singh and Sobha Singh represent the Indian enterprise without which the imperial project could not have materialised. Sir Ganga Ram represents a still wider category — the civilisational builder whose institutions endured not only the end of empire, but also the catastrophe of Partition.
If we reduce commemoration to a zero-sum game, we do violence to history. Cities are not created by a single name, a single community, or a single ideology. They are built by collaboration across race, class and faith — and later inherited by citizens who give them new meaning.
The Final Thought: Builders Belong to Civilisation
The most important truth is also the simplest: real creators stand above nationalities and religious faiths.
A hospital does not ask a patient’s religion before offering care. A school does not inquire into ancestry before teaching. A court does not demand a passport before dispensing justice. Once a building enters daily use, it acquires a new citizenship — that of its users. Model Town belongs to its residents. Sir Ganga Ram Hospital belongs to its patients. New Delhi belongs to the millions who walk its avenues.
So yes — remember Lutyens, because history should not be airbrushed. But also remember Sujan Singh and Sobha Singh, because cities are made by those who build them. And remember Sir Ganga Ram, because his brick-and-mortar compassion survived the very hatreds that tried to deface him.
Busts fade. Builders endure. And the builders of Delhi, Lahore and Patiala deserve a place not in a narrow nationalist argument, but in the shared civilisational memory of Punjab and India — including those in the diaspora who carry Lahore in the family photograph, Delhi in the lived present, and Patiala in the pride of inheritance.
Agree. IS johar , an actor , used to say “we are ugly , the leaders we elect are reflection of our own faces “ !
Senior retired general of army stated as under. He didn’t want to be identified publicly.
Dear KBS,
Thank you for trying to penetrate the rhinoceros hide like mind of the current dispensation.
It is not merely architectural design, skilled labour and labour that built New Delhi but also, money. Imperial Delhi may have been designed by Lutyens and Baker- of Baker's Ovens- but it was paid for by the teeming, toiling millions of Indians and built by them. Labeling, acronyms and hype that are a key feature of today's India do not hide the truth that gleams through the subterfuge- why so insecure?