Modern Architectures in History

Modern Architectures in History

Peter Scriver, Amit Srivastava

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780234687
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

A place of astonishing contrasts, India is home to some of the world's most ancient architectures as well as some of its most modern. It was the focus of some of the most important works created by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, among other lesser-known masters, and it is regarded by many as one of the key sites of mid-twentieth century architectural design. As Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava show in this book, however, India's history of modern architecture began long before the nation's independence as a modern state in 1947.
             
Going back to the nineteenth century, Scriver and Srivastava look at the beginnings of modernism in colonial India and the ways that public works and patronage fostered new design practices that directly challenged the social order and values invested in the building traditions of the past. They then trace how India's architecture embodies the dramatic shifts in Indian society and culture during the last century. Making sense of a broad range of sources, from private papers and photographic collections to the extensive records of the Indian Public Works Department, they provide the most rounded account of modern architecture in India that has yet been available. 

References

Introduction

1 Quoted in Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle and London, 2002), p. 9.

2 See, for instance, Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, ‘The Function of Architecture in Cultures-in-Change’, Architectural Design (April 1960), pp. 149–50.

3 C. Correa, ‘Programmes and Priorities’, Architectural Review (December 1971), pp. 329–31; C. Correa, ‘Mulk Raj Anand at 100’, in Mulk Raj Anand: Shaping the Indian Modern, ed. Annapurna Garimella, special issue of Marg, LVI/4 (June 2005), pp. 66–73.

4 Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier, pp. 19–20.

5 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Speech at the Seminar and Exhibition of Architecture’, New Delhi (1959), in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. IV: 1957–1963 (New Delhi, 1964), p. 176. As cited in S. Khilnani, The Idea of India (New Delhi, 1997), p. 135.

6 Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier, pp. 10–20.

7 The growing literature on the postcolonial architecture of India includes several more or less comprehensive surveys, in addition to monographs on individual architects. There is a comparatively larger literature on the architecture and urban design of British colonial India, although little of this deals in any depth or detail with the final decades of colonial-modern building and development. This includes well over twenty book-length works to date wholly or substantially focused on the architecture and urbanism of colonial South Asia: see Select Bibliography.

8 K. R. Sitalakshmi uses the term ‘differential modernities’ to characterize the multifactorial nature of the architectural developments observed in a close-grained study of the architectural history of Madras (Chennai) since the nineteenth century: K. R. Sitalakshmi, ‘Architecture of Indian Modernity: The Case of Madras’, PhD thesis, Anna University, Chennai, 2008. We wish to adopt this apposite term here to describe what earlier might have been deemed as a ‘dialectical’ phenomenon but which also captures the important nuances of ‘difference’ so central to subsequent postcolonial debates about the situated nature of cultural production and its politics.

9 As quoted in the permanent exhibition of Gandhi’s life and work, Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, Ahmedabad. Transcribed by P. Scriver, January 2008.

10 M. K. Gandhi, ‘Talk with Press Correspondents, 28 May 1946’, Harijan (23 June 1946), in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. LXXXIV (Ahmedabad, 1981), p. 226. As cited in S. Khilnani, The Idea of India (New Delhi, 1997), p. 127.

11 See, for example, W. R. Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (London, 1986); and Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver, After the Masters: Contemporary Indian Architecture (Ahmedabad and New York, 1990).

12 For a critical and theoretical discussion of conceptual, methodological, organizational and sociological dimensions of these colonial patterns, beyond the scope of the present study, see Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash, eds, Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London, 2007).

13 See Khilnani, The Idea of India, for a concise study of Nehru’s ideals.

14 India’s exchange with the Soviet Union was, however, more critical and selective than has often been supposed: Khilnani, The Idea of India, pp. 76–7. See also Ramachandra Gupta, India after Gandhi: The History of The World’s Largest Democracy (London, 2007), pp. 201–26.

15 For the ‘kinetic’ versus the ‘static’ dimensions of contemporary Indian urbanism, in the case of Mumbai, see Rahul Mehrotra, Architecture in India since 1990 (Mumbai, 2011).

16 Bruno Latour and Catherine Porter, We Have Never Been Modern (New York, 1993).

chapter one: Rationalization: The Call to Order, 1855–1900

1 Respectively, these were the so-called Permanent Settlement of Bengal enacted in 1793 and Thomas Macaulay’s seminal Minute on Education of 1835. The contexts and consequences of both these reforms have spawned a huge specialist literature. For a concise critical overview, see Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (London and New York, 1998), pp. 67–87.

2 Ernest B. Havell, Encyclopaedia of Architecture in the Indian Subcontinent, vol. II: Medieval and Later (New Delhi, 2000), p. vi. This volume is a reprint of Havell’s Indian Architecture: Its Psychology, Structure, and History from the First Muhammadan Invasion to the Present Day, first published in London in 1913.

3 Opposing poles of this debate are argued in classic studies such as D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (London, 1966), for the affirmative view; and K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance: A Survey of the Vasco da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1898–1945 (London, 1953), for the revisionist nationalist account. See S. Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (New Delhi, 1983), for a later, more balanced appraisal of the Indian experience in particular.

4 Governor General’s Minute of 12 July 1854. Home (Public) ‘A’ Proceedings, 11 August 1854, no. 51.

5 As will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, the prescriptive fostering of specific quasi-traditional types and classifications of labour was a crucial mode of such economic control that was manifested in the fields of building and design. See Arindam Dutta, ‘“Strangers within the Gate”: Public Works and Industrial Art Reform’, in Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, ed. P. Scriver and V. Prakash (London and New York, 2007), pp. 93–114.

6 Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, pp. 48–56.

7 A final damage assessment report was published in the PWD Proceedings in August 1860, compiled on the basis of detailed surveys carried out by the provincial works departments of Bengal, the North Western Provinces and the Punjab. PWD (General) ‘A’ Proceedings, 31 August 1860, nos. 160–64.

8 E. Stokes, The Peasant and the Raj (Oxford, 1978).

9 Thomas Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt [1961] (New Delhi, 1990), pp. xiii, 62; Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, pp. 88–96.

10 Percival Spear, A History of India, vol. II: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978), p. 144. The veins of Utilitarianism in the British Indian polity ran deep. During the first half of the nineteenth century the utilitarian philosophy had been directly infused into the civil service of the Company by various well-placed exponents of that distinctly English tangent of Enlightenment thought. Operating at different levels of the administrative hierarchy, these included at least one Governor General with close links to Jeremy Bentham, as well as John Stuart Mill himself, who joined the London Offices of the Company as a political correspondent in 1823. The classic study of this important philosophical thread in the political and institutional histories of colonial India is: Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959).

11 Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, p. xvi.

12 This influential view has been argued extensively by the historian Thomas Metcalf, including the case for architecture as one of the more pervasive and affective ideological representations of the imperial regime. See: Metcalf, The Aftermath of Revolt; Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (London, 1989); Metcalf, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. III, part 4: Ideologies of the Raj (New Delhi, 1995), although more recent scholarship has raised the cautionary criticism that it possibly over-represents the political intentionality and potency of the colonial regime while overlooking the role of indigenous agendas and agency in the production and appropriation of the colonial built environment. See Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai, ‘Introduction: Architectural Modernities of Imperial Pasts and Nationalists Presents’, in Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture and Modernity, ed. Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai (London, 2012), pp. 27–46.

13 James Fergusson, A History of the Modern Styles of Architecture: Being a Sequel to the Handbook of Architecture (London, 1862). In this work, which was first published fourteen years earlier than his definitive History of Indian Architecture (London, 1876), Fergusson devoted the better part of a chapter to the topic of European colonial architecture in India. His appraisal of the respective built legacies of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and British was not altogether disapproving, but framed within a taxonomic and encyclopedic account of the global diffusion of modern ‘European’ tendencies that tacitly precluded any idea that these buildings could also be regarded as ‘Indian’ architecture. See also Peter Scriver, ‘Stones and Texts: The Architectural Historiography of Colonial India and its Colonial-modern Contexts’, in Colonial Modernities, ed. Scriver and Prakash, pp. 27–50.

14 ‘East...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• modern architectures in history
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• one Rationalization: The Call to Order, 1855–1900
• two Complicity and Contradiction in the Colonial Twilight, 1901–1947
• three Nation Building: Architecture in the Service of the Postcolonial State, 1947–1960s
• four Regionalism, Institution Building and the Modern Indian Elite, 1950s–1970s
• five Development and Dissent: The Critical Turn, 1960s–1980s
• six Identity and Difference: The Cultural Turn, 1980s–1990s
• seven Towards the ‘Non-modern’: Architecture and Global India since 1990
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index