Beating Retreat
The Beating Retreat parade is as finely managed as a TV set. The buildings are Rome reflected through Britain, the uniforms and pomp Britain, Indianized. Off in the distance the road rises, creating an artificial horizon. First the cavalry, then the bands, then the camels appear, eighteen on each side in silhouette. The bagpipers come waggling their bodies side to side, playing something Scottish and then something Indian. Then the marching bands, which for aural surprise are the opposite of rock.
A yowling toddler sat behind me and occupied herself by plucking at my arm hair with fascination. She clearly doesn’t have Punjabi parents. Another kid behind us, before anything interesting happened, liked to ruin the surprise. He was a walking, talking movie spoiler. Up front, two air force generals’ daughters sat with cameras, which made the ban of my own, unenforced at last, all the more piquant.
You’ll see the photos where they’ve flipped the lights. Rashtrapati Bhavan and the circular Parliament building are outlined like gingerbread houses, the largest lighting job I’ve seen since the Champs-Élysées on New Year’s Eve. Turn your back and you’re walking down a wide, 1.5 mile-long imperial boulevard toward India Gate.
What you don’t see in the photos is the gasp when the lights come on all at once. You don’t see the security men pausing dramatically before peeling away from the running boards of their SUVs. You don’t hear the Rashtrapati Bhavan tower bell chiming into a marching band tune, and you will not see the central dome flickering silkily over the horizon.
on Sunday, January 28th, 2007, 5:59 pm in Holidays, Military › 
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It’s interesting that most Indians’ experience of Republic day is so closely linked to the architecture (and ritual ?) of Imperial Britain. Dalrymple in City of Djinns compares the architect Lutyens to the Nazi Albert Speers :), and says that the architecture reflects his love of authoritarianism. I’m sure both Speers and Lutyens were channeling Imperial Rome.
Well described.
One thing to note. Bagpipes are a Scottish thing. Why on earth Indians hanging on to this colonial relic? It makes them look ridiculous and confirms to the British that the Indians are not a particularly original or inventive lot.
“Another kid behind us, before anything interesting happened, liked to ruin the surprise. He was a walking, talking movie spoiler.”
That was me at 7 years old, watching my first republic day parade in real-life.
I was Sooooo excited.
Just because colonization is bad, that doesn’t mean India can’t adopt the good things that cam out of it. For example, the Mughals colonized us too, uniting India and the British further united us, albeit against them. It helped us in the long run and it was necesary. Besides, if it hadn’t been the British, it would have been someone else. India was far too rich and much too internationally unaware for noone to take advantage of her. Colonization was a necessary evil, like Friction, or the nasty greenies your mom used to make you eat.
I wasted many years trying to deny the foreign influences within the Indian culture; such a futile exercise when trying to define “being Indian”. India was conquered and colonized by many nations followed by an evolving revolution. It is now a conglomerate of cultures unique in this way.
So, we play bagpipes.
As Amitabh would say, Parampara, Pratistha, Anushasan.
Bagpipes are not exclusively Scottish… they are also found in Spain, Italy, France and Ireland, and they have an ancient pedigree…
The earliest possible reference to a bagpipe occurs around 400 BC, when Aristophanes, the Athenian poet jibed that the pipers of Thebes (an enemy of Athens) blew pipes made of dogskin with chanters made of bone. Several hundred years later, Suetonius described the Roman Emperor Nero as a player of the tibia utricularis (Life of Nero, 54). Nero is reported to have said he would play the bagpipe in public as a penance for not winning a poetry contest.Dio Chrysostom, who also flourished in the first century, wrote about a contemporary sovereign, probably Nero, who could play a pipe (”aulein”) with his mouth as well as with his “armpit” (Or. 71.9). From this account, it has been deduced that a true bagpipe was used  having a blowpipe, bag and a chanter; probably a double chanter since double pipes were used at this time). A coin of Nero depicts a bagpipe, according to the 1927 edition of Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
-Wikipedia