India Gate

India Gate is the great sandstone arch that closes the eastern end of Kartavya Path, the ceremonial avenue of New Delhi, and it is first of all a war memorial. It commemorates soldiers of the Indian Army who died between 1914 and 1921, in the First World War on fronts from France and Flanders to Mesopotamia, East Africa and Gallipoli, and in the Third Anglo-Afghan War. More than 13,000 names are carved on its surfaces. The Duke of Connaught laid the foundation stone of what was then called the All India War Memorial on 10 February 1921, and the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, inaugurated it ten years later, on 12 February 1931.

The designer was Edwin Lutyens, the principal architect of New Delhi and a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, whose Cenotaph in London had set the tone for secular remembrance after 1918. India Gate follows the same idea: no crosses or religious symbols, only mass, proportion and inscription. It rises about 42 metres from a low base of red Bharatpur stone, with the word INDIA and the years 1914 and 1919 in Roman numerals on the attic, a band of sunburst motifs below the cornice, and a shallow bowl on top that was meant to hold burning oil on anniversaries. Strictly speaking it is a tetrapylon, with arches on all four sides: broad, tall openings on the long faces and smaller, partly closed ones on the short ends. Lutyens reused the design at smaller scale for the Arch of Remembrance in Leicester, and the two memorials were twinned in 2017.

The monument has kept absorbing new layers of meaning. After the 1971 war with Pakistan, the Amar Jawan Jyoti, a black marble plinth with an inverted rifle, a helmet and eternal flames, was placed under the arch and served for half a century as India's tomb of the unknown soldier. In January 2022 that flame was merged with the one at the new National War Memorial, completed in 2019 on the lawns immediately beside the gate and dedicated to soldiers who died in the conflicts of independent India. About 150 metres east of the arch stands a stone canopy by Lutyens that once sheltered a marble statue of King George V; the statue was removed in 1968, and a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose was installed there in September 2022.

New Delhi was laid out by the British as their capital, a planned city of broad avenues and lawns beside the far older cities of Delhi that earlier empires had ruled from. The India Gate lawns are one of its best-loved public spaces, especially in the evening, when the arch is floodlit, and around Republic Day on 26 January, when the national parade runs down Kartavya Path from Rashtrapati Bhavan. Access close enough to read the names is restricted, but they can be searched on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's database.

Getting there

India Gate is about 2 km from the centre of New Delhi. Indira Gandhi International Airport (DEL) is about 15 km away in a straight line. The monument stands in open parkland at the hub of the C-Hexagon road ring and can be reached by taxi or auto-rickshaw from anywhere in the city; the National War Memorial is on the same lawns.