The Anglo-Indian architect Walter Sykes George (1881-1962): a modernist follower of Lutyens

Walter Sykes George (1881-1962) was a remarkable Anglo-Indian architect. Obituaries in Indian and British journals cast him as a ‘Renaissance’ man: an artist, Byzantine archaeologist, architect, town planner, philosopher, historian, public intellectual, humanist, Modernist, even an Indian nationalist.2 He features prominently in one recent history of modern architecture in India, a rare accolade for an ‘Anglo-Indian’ architect – an architect born in Britain who practised and lived for much of his life in India.3 In spite of being one of New Delhi’s most prolific architects, his name does not appear in Philip Davies’s Splendours of the Raj, even though his colleagues Robert Tor Russell (1888-1972), Arthur Gordon Shoosmith (1888-1974) and Henry Medd (1892-1977) all do.4 Of the members of the so-called ‘Indo-British School of Architecture’ who followed Herbert Baker (1862-1946) and Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) to Delhi, he was alone in staying in his adopted country after Independence in 1947.5 His two greatest achievements are Kashmir House (1927-29), which he co-designed with Lutyens, and the rebuilding of St Stephen’s College (1939-52), part of the University of Delhi, and one of India’s most elite higher education establishments. [Opening paragraph]