Irving, Robert Grant, Indian Summer: Imperial Delhi, PhD thesis, Yale, 1978. Brief summary.

“Transfer of the Indian sear of government from Calcutta to a virgin site near Delhi was … (m)eant to embody "the ideal and fact of British rule in India," the capital stirred controversy from the first dramatic announcement of its conception at the memorable Durbar of 1911. This study, which attempts to bring the city to physical life against the background of contemporary political events, derives from research in private and public collections of manuscripts, printed documents, newspapers and journals, and architectural drawings in India and Britain, as well as from visits to pertinent buildings.

Sporadic suggestions for removing the capital from Calcutta dated from the eighteenth century, but the unrest inspired by Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal in 1905 proved the catalyst for sweeping administrative changes made by Lord Hardinge, Viceroy from 1910 to 1916, in cooperation with his Council, the India Office, and King George V. The complex web of reasons for the decision to change the capital ranged from Viceregal vanity to the necessity of placating Muslim opinion, but public pronouncements dwelt on factors such as Delhi's geographical centrality and the undue influence of the Bengal business community. Calcutta^'s Europeans, aided in England by Curzon, mounted a vociferous but unsuccessful attack on the transfer.

Selection of an appropriate site on the Delhi plain by a British Town Planning Committee proved to be a protracted exercise and fraught with controversy, as was the selection of the architects and the highly political question of an architectural style. Outbreak of war and spiralling costs nearly led to mutilation if not abandonment of the entire scheme as late as 1923. The project was further hampered by a major aesthetic dispute over the visual relationship between the principal governmental edifices….

The geometry of the city plan, relentlessly invariable and exclusive, linking in a single pattern many diverse parts, seemed symbolic of the Imperial attempt to impose unity and even uniformity on India's institutions.” From the abstract.