Rashtrapati Bhavan, which straddles 3,000 acres of woodlands, manicured lawns and laid out gardens on Raisina Hill in Lutyens’s Delhi, was neither designed nor built for the notional head of the Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic of India (thankfully we have been spared the acronym SSSDRI). It was meant to be the residence of the Viceroy, the representative of the Emperor on whose empire the sun never set. To pretend otherwise would be self-deceiving.

History, however, has a nasty habit of taking unforeseen twists and turns. The dazzling pomp and pageantry that marked the durbar in Delhi a hundred years ago would not have offered the smallest clue that it was also the last display of imperial grandeur. Between 1911 and 1947, Great Britain was reduced to Little England; the sun had set on the empire long before the Union Jack was replaced by the Tricolour.
Free India was saddled with the trappings of British power, among them the majestic Viceroy’s House. Mahatma Gandhi’s suggestion that it be converted into a public hospital was politely but firmly waved aside; it became the residence of the Governor-General, and after the birth of the Republic, the home of the President.