Years later, the management theorist C. Northcote Parkinson would cite the building of New Delhi among many examples in formulating his ‘second law’, that institutions build their grandest monuments just before they crumble into irrelevance. Morris describes in lavish detail the imperial durbar conducted by Lord Curzon in Delhi, where, amid elephants and trumpets, bejewelled maharajas paying tribute and a public assembled from all four corners of the subcontinent to view the imperial panoply, ‘theatre became life’.
