THE RAJ

• Opportunity to visit seven World Heritage Sites.

This tour starts from Calcutta which was the administrative capital of British India during the period 1700 - 1912.Calcutta witnessed a spate of buildings largely influenced by the conscious intermingling of Gothic, Baroque, Roman, Oriental and Islamic schools of design. Government House, Calcutta, built in the 19^th century, is modelled on Kedleston Hall The House was once the seat of the Viceroys of India. From here you then move to Lucknow where in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British garrison based at the Residency were besieged by rebel forces. During the siege of the Residency, it was the students of La Martiniere College which came to its defence, resulting in the college becoming the first college in the world to receive battle honours of the British Empire.  After the British annexed Agra in 1803, the city became the headquarters for the presidency in the northwest provinces. Modern Agra is composed of the ancient city and the nineteenth-century British cantonment.   

Following the British decision to shift the capital of imperial India from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911, two british architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker were commissioned to design a new city. The British contribution to Delhi were the India Gate, the Vice regal Lodge which is now the Rashtrapati Bhawan, the Houses of Parliament, and the Government Secretariat buildings. Lutyens Imperial Delhi with boulevards and tree lined wide avenues, sprawling bungalows and low rise buildings is today the capital of modern India. Shimla was the summer capital of the British - during the hot season the Viceroy and the high government would come down here from Calcutta. In 1668  Bombay, ceded in 1665 to Charles II as part of a marriage settlement from the Portuguese crown, became the seat of the British East India Company's western presidency. The Gateway of India  built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary to Mumbai, became symbolically the gate through which the British left India when the last British troops to leave India,  passed through the gate in a ceremony on February 28, 1948.

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