India Gate

Highlights

• The India Gate (formerly known as All India War Memorial) is a war memorial located near the Rajpath (officially called Kartavya Path) on the eastern edge of the "ceremonial axis" of New Delhi.
• 13,300 servicemen's names, including some soldiers and officers from the United Kingdom, are inscribed on the gate.
• Following the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, a structure consisting of a black marble plinth with a reversed rifle, capped by a war helmet and bounded by four eternal flames, was built beneath the archway.
• This structure, called Amar Jawan Jyoti (Flame of the Immortal Soldier), has since 1971 served as India's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
• India Gate is often a location for civil society protests, and is popular with tourists.

Dress Code

Modest, respectful clothing is expected at this site.

History

• •The India Gate was part of the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, which came into existence in December 1917 under the British Raj rule for building war graves and memorials to soldiers who were killed in the First World War.
• •The foundation stone of the Gate, then called the All India War Memorial, was laid on 10 February 1921, at 4:30 p.m., by the visiting Duke of Connaught in a ceremony attended by officers and men of the Imperial Indian Army, Imperial Service Troops, the Commander-in-Chief, and Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy.

Architecture

• •The memorial gate was designed by Edwin Lutyens, who was not only the main architect of New Delhi but also a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission and one of Europe's foremost designers of war graves and memorials.
• •He designed sixty-six war memorials in Europe, including the highly regarded Cenotaph in London in 1919, the first national war memorial erected after World War I, for which he was commissioned by David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister.
• •The memorial in New Delhi, like the Cenotaph in London, is a secular memorial, free of religious and "culturally-specific iconography such as crosses".

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