Mughal arches, onion domes, chhatri-topped towers. Living in India for five years, I'd Instagram my way through a maharaja's palace, Sikh temple or sultan's fort every weekend. I got used to strolling through scalloped arches. How I miss them!
Which is why I froze in my tracks last winter when I spotted this building in Brighton, on England's south coast. The day was drizzly gray, I'd gone for a bracing swim in the English Channel, and was walking back to the train station, shivering, when I was flooded with warm memories from India.
It's the Royal Pavilion, built in the late 18th century by British royals fascinated by South Asian architecture, as they commandeered the subcontinent. It's funny: In Mumbai, I'd marvel at how many buildings look Victorian, in the same stone and style of my husband's hometown in northern England. Looking up at this pavilion, I realized the British didn't just impose their style on India. They also took India's style home.
Queen Victoria herself — who also went by "Empress of India" — lodged in the Royal Pavilion in the 1830s and '40s, before the construction of railways brought the working-class masses to Brighton — spoiling, she complained, her private seaside oasis. She decamped to Buckingham Palace and took the pavilion's lotus-flower chandeliers with her.
During World War I, the building became a military hospital, treating thousands of Indian soldiers fighting for the British. Separate kitchens catered to different castes. Muslim soldiers prayed to Mecca from the east lawn.
Nowadays, the gardens designed for King George IV are being restored, a green lung for the city. They hosted some of the first weddings after the United Kingdom legalized same-sex marriage in 2014. And having survived centuries of royal caprice, and at least one arson attack, the pavilion is now a museum, open to the masses.
I wonder what Queen Victoria would think of that.
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