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The building that came to house Indian democracy was not designed as the centre of a sovereign nation. New Delhi was planned around the Viceroy, the Secretariat and the ceremonial projection of imperial authority. A separate legislative building entered the scheme belatedly, after the Government of India Act, 1919, enlarged the machinery of colonial representation. Even when it opened in 1927, the British avoided calling it parliament. “Council House” better expressed the limits of an institution in which representatives could debate while executive authority remained elsewhere.

That reversal gives Sobhana K. Nair’s Housing the Republic its animating idea. The book follows the Council House as it is occupied, altered and gradually made central to the constitutional life of independent India. Its democratic meaning did not reside in the intentions of its architects. It accumulated through political use.

Nair says the book arose from “anticipatory grief” as the old parliament’s active life was nearing its end. It is part biography, part institutional history and part farewell. Yet its affection is supported by extensive research, not sentiment alone. Drawing upon official correspondence, parliamentary debates, memoirs, architectural records and her experience as a parliamentary journalist, she reconstructs both the building’s public history and its untidy inner life.

Sobhana K. Nair, Housing the Republic: A Biography of the Indian Parliament. Bloomsbury India; Rs 699, 238 pages.

She is at her best when entering large constitutional questions through small material details. A foul smell in the Rajya Sabha leads into sealed ventilators, forgotten passages and decades of negligent alteration. A telephone-directory entry placing federal court judges under the home department reveals how a new judiciary struggled to establish even the appearance of independence from the executive. Disputes over rooms, libraries, doors and keys become disputes over institutional authority.

This movement from the apparently trivial to the constitutional is one of the book’s principal pleasures. Nair approaches files with a reporter’s eye for vanity, absurdity and unintended consequence. Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker appear not only as architects of empire but as quarrelsome men whose professional resentments affected a public monument. Bureaucratic records rarely remain bureaucratic for long.

The richness of this material sometimes makes the narrative discursive. A portrait, personality or administrative disagreement may open into an extended miniature history before Parliament House reappears. But the looseness largely suits a work that presents the building as a life rather than a structure: conceived amid dispute, repeatedly altered, adapted to new occupants and burdened with memories its designers could not have foreseen.

The chapters on the making of New Delhi establish the irony at the heart of that life. The legislature was subordinate within a capital organised........

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