Book review: Lang, Jon, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity - India 1880 to 1980 (Ahmedabad: CEPT Press, 2022)1
Many questions arise when a fairly well-known historical survey of architecture, the most precise way to describe Architecture and Independence, appears in a revised form. Survey histories of architecture have a well-established literary tradition in the South Asian context. To say the least, they have endured across nearly a century and a half, beginning with the Scottish indigo plater-turned-architectural historian James Fergusson’s three volumes on ‘Indian and Eastern Architecture’ in the 1870s. We continued to see imprints of Fergusson’s tome in architectural surveys produced at the turn of the twentieth century, such as the one authored by the then principal of the Government School of Art, Calcutta, Percy Brown’s Indian Architecture in the 1900s, or the architect and educator Satish Grover’s The Architecture of India in the 1990s, both multi-volume publications, each progressively incorporating recent developments in the field and their attendant projects. However, the problems of how architectural history has been taught in India from these surveys in architecture schools—the present author being a recipient of such an education—has been a matter of productive critical discourse for more than two decades now.2
In any case, architectural surveys can be seen as an outcome of the social and intellectual conditions at the time of their publication. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they gave voice to imperial perspectives on art and architecture in the South Asian region. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, they celebrated how Indian architecture was coming of age—‘On Our Own’, as the architectural writer Malay Chatterjee put it in 1985.3 In this sense, the questions surrounding the appearance of the new edition of Architecture and Independence converge around its timing. The volume, originally published in 1997, and its more recent counterpart of 2022, avowedly celebrate fifty and seventy-five years, respectively, of India’s independence from colonial rule in 1947. Yet practically a generation separates the two releases. The intervening twenty-five years have witnessed key shifts in the modes to study and frame the concepts of architecture, modernity, colonial or indigenous identity in the South Asian context. The timing of the revised volume then prompts us to ask how its approach and contents respond to and engage with the vast body of scholarship following its first release. A related question follows about how the publication adds to what could be learned in 2022 about modern Indian history through its architecture.
Readers must also be informed that soon after this review is published, now being written in September 2023, one of the most recent such surveys of architectural modernity in India, Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava’s India: Modern Architectures in History, is due to appear with a revised preface in an Indian edition. The first edition was published from London for a global audience. The writing of the new preface is a reflexive exercise the authors have consciously undertaken. It endeavours to acknowledge recent research that brings forth fresh perspectives on sites, projects, figures and process within and beyond the contents of the original (2015) publication.4 Globally, such concerns have always emerged when other key, closely scrutinised and often even critiqued, architectural surveys have been (re) written, such as the 2007 (now in its third edition) A Global History of Architecture by Francis D.K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash. The radically reconfigured twenty-first edition of arguably one of the most referred surveys on historical architecture, which appeared in 2018 edited by Murray Fraser and under the title Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture, in fact, features the voices of over eighty architectural historians. This critical exercise in architectural publishing aims to represent a multi-authored contribution reflecting the diverse expertise through which its subject matter is constructed afresh.5
Architecture as political ideology
A reader in India or abroad encountering either edition of Architecture and Independence for the first time need not worry about such issues, nor will they even seem apparent. Such a reader will find in the book a valuable and wide-ranging picture of architecture spanning colonial (1880–1947) and post-colonial (1947–80) India. The dates 1880 and 1980, as the authors suggest, refer to the Indian National Congress emerging in colonised India, the political party associated with the independence movement, and ‘when the architectural profession in India had established its own identity’ (p. xvi), respectively. Their story they weave however begins in 1858, when the British Crown formally began its rule over India, and also extends beyond 1980. The text is structured through nine chapters following a ‘chronological, albeit overlapping, sequence’. In the new edition, the authors retain such a structure as the book, they feel, is ‘simultaneously a treatise on the communication of political aspirations and ideology through architectural form and a study of India’ (p. xviii).
At its best, this historical study uses a wide range of sources and valuable interviews with key architectural figures (p. 343) to look sideways and forward. Rather than a linear history, we witness in its pages a lateral view concerning times, places, people and projects. About two-thirds of the text covers colonial India. This part is refreshing in its departure from a straightforward manner of describing how architecture evolved through imperial edifices or the Empire’s architects. Instead, we are also informed about what happened outside such a mainstream in the 1920s and 30s, for example, how the genesis of India’s earliest architecture firms, its education and first professional association, the still-thriving Indian Institute of Architects, were all interrelated in the context of colonial Bombay.
The post-1947 period features in two chapters, which the authors understand to represent distinct milieux. One covers the period until 1964, following the politics of the nation building paradigm of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The other mirrors the global demise of modernism and the competing ideologies and approaches that ensued within and beyond architecture in India until the 1980s. In these chapters, apart from political ideologies, the narrative is ordered based on clients, architects and projects rather than phenomena. At times, we see the authors valuably reflecting on issues like how, by 1980, ‘the arrogant edge’ of modernist ‘ideology’ was ‘tempered’ by understanding its ‘contributions’ as well as ‘limitations’ in the Indian context (p. 252).
Colonial tools, post-colonial persistence
Despite these many merits, some genuine problems mar the 2022 Architecture and Independence. The new volume appears uninterested in critically re-assessing the 1997 version’s conceptual superstructure, one of politics and ideology, or its underpinning methods to order projects, buildings, styles, figures and phenomena by classifying and categorising them. The authors sometimes admit that such ‘distinctions are less clear than the boldness that categorisation suggests’ (p.201). But in the main, the text consistently reifies the categories problematically defined at the outset through a series of -isms: ‘nationalism’, ‘regionalism’, ‘modernism’, ‘individualism’, ‘traditionalism’, ‘revivalism’, ‘universalism’ or ‘internationalism’. As the noted architectural historian Anthony King observes, for example, when the term ‘international [style]’ was coined in the 1930s with respect to architecture, very few sovereign ‘nations’ existed. Most of Asia or Africa then comprised colonies. King wryly proposes ‘inter-colonial’ or ‘inter-imperial’ in its stead.6 In being preoccupied throughout with ‘the search for Indian identity’ in politics and foregrounding the various ways in which the ‘nation’ was ideologically produced through architecture, this history appearing in 2022, in effect, erases what we now know about the fluid and plural nature of identities. Given that it deals with modern India and its entanglement of cultures and milieux, we learn very little about how ‘Indian’ or ‘foreign’ ideas or knowledge cross-fertilised one another within and through building processes, also often collapsing rigidly divided constituencies of skilled or trained professionals and untrained builders, not to mention Indians and ‘foreigners’, who settled in India and made it a home for their practice.
Given the book’s scope and expanse, such problems might have been excusable in 1997. But that was before critical and global orientations to frame architectural histories of South Asia became an established field. In 1997 itself, an essay written by the art and architectural historian Swati Chattopadhyay, which arguably prefigured such intellectual turns, alerted us to the ‘unstable’ nature of categories and classifiers and their origins in colonial knowledge.7 Social and cultural historians of modern India such as Gyan Prakash and Dipesh Chakrabarty observe how ideas of India, its people and objects entered the colonial gaze and discourse through the ‘science’ of classification. Such a discourse sought to ‘know’ India by measuring, naming and labelling.8 The most glaring paradox of the 2022 Architecture and Independence then is how, to celebrate independence in the twenty-first century, it relies on methods and tools of the coloniser to write the ‘Indian’ identity and ‘nation’ through its architectural stories.
In reconsidering the older narrative, the authors would have benefitted a great deal by engaging with even a few key studies following its 1997 publication. Such scholarship might have helped to understand afresh how architecture and building practices in India navigated colonial power, or how new subjects and subjectivities were produced through spatial practices.9 As the architectural historian Sibel Bozdogan reminds us, politics and ideology can often become untenable as frames of architectural discourse. Unless used cautiously, by taking great care not to reduce architecture to politics while describing the politics of architecture, such frames could distort or obscure more than they illuminate.10
To cite one instance of many such distortions, the authors posit that the site of Santiniketan in eastern India, associated with the prolific writer, poet, educator and intellectual Rabindranath Tagore expressed ‘nationalist pride’ through its ‘revivalist’ buildings. Tagore’s dwellings in Santiniketan are qualified by another strange descriptor, ‘aristocratic folk’ (pp. 124–25). For decades now, Tagore’s critical (and controversial) stance on the validity of nation states, whether western, Indian, or even eastern has kept historians busy.11 Ignoring all such scholarship, to evaluate Santiniketan’s architecture and the multifaceted art practices it intersected with as ‘nationalist’ or ‘revivalist’ seems somewhat simplistic and misleading. Tagore, in fact, mobilised Visva-Bharati, an educational project at Santiniketan as a space where different societies and cultures could cooperate rather assert ‘national’ exclusiveness. A scathing essay on art, best seen in his own words, reveals Tagore's views on ‘Indian’ as a category. Here, attacking the ‘science of classification’ used to label ‘tradition’ in ‘Indian art’, Tagore wrote how ‘human cultures […] ever have the power to combine and produce new variations’. He added, in a statement that seemingly prefigures the dilemma that the authors of Architecture and Independence fail to transcend: ‘Fortunately such intermingling happened when professional art critics were not rampant…’. Tagore believed that the modern world would be the truest if it was plural. He urged artists to ‘vehemently deny their obligation to produce something that can be labelled as Indian art, according to some old-world mannerism’.12 Tagore’s complex stance on modernity thus appears to have baffled the very history that dubs him and built environment practices at Santiniketan nationalist and revivalist and, in a sense, un-modern.
Metanarrative problems
Such tendencies to co-opt complex phenomena into a metanarrative about national or Indian identity seem disconcerting in an architectural history, given the country’s recent and current hyper nationalistic, often aggressive and violent, politics of othering minorities. The book’s release to celebrate the seventy-fifth year of independence in 2022 seems laudable enough. Perhaps the well-timed event also paves the way to attract a wider audience. Still, new readers must also be informed about some of its more precise technicalities. The density of information—people, places, images, projects, buildings—makes the text far from elegant or readable. Some cities are named inconsistently, switching between their post-colonial and anglicised names: Mumbai/Bombay, Kolkata/Calcutta, Chennai/Madras, Bengaluru/ Bangalore. This kind of varying nomenclature might confuse readers unfamiliar with India. Moreover, the illustrations carry no numbers, nor are they signposted in the body of the text. In the book’s fairly clear and legible page layout however, most images appear close to where they are referred. Still, it seems surprising that a publication of such a size and scope omits a clear list of illustrations and their sources, which are relegated to ‘credits’ in a few dense paragraphs within its acknowledgements (pp. x–xiv).
Despite such issues, if the book were used as a reference source, its greatest merit would lie in its encyclopaedic coverage of varied material, sites and figures. Yet, many factual and other errors undermine the publication's credibility, betraying an absence in engaging and fact-checking with sources at a granular level. The well-known artist William Rothenstein’s name is misspelled as ‘Rothstein’ at places, including in the index (p. 166, 364). Even high school history students in India would know the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and not 1888 (p. xvi). Moreover, the dates of some buildings are incorrect, such as the architect Surendranath Kar’s school project at Rajghat in Varanasi (1933–34) dated 1920 (p. 126), an error from 1997—like Rothenstein’s name—gone uncorrected.13 The Ramakrishna Mission and temple complex at Belur (c.1935–38) introduced in the new edition carries the widely inaccurate date of 1957–58. The project is also attributed to the wrong architect and firm. The text names a W.B. Kerr of the Calcutta firm Ballardie, Thompson and Matthews in relation to this project, whereas in reality, with Swami Vijnanananda overseeing the project, it was Major Harold Browne from Martin and Company (another Calcutta firm) who was partially involved in the temple’s design.14 With thorough editing and verification from primary sources about these less-known buildings, many such errors could have been avoided.
- 1. Article revised and expanded for Architexturez Imprints from arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135522000288
- 2. See, for instance: Jyoti Hosagrahar, ‘South Asia: Looking Back, Moving Ahead-History and Modernization’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 61, no.3 (2002), 355–69.
- 3. Malay Chatterjee, ‘1975-1985: On Our Own, the Evolution of Contemporary Indian Architecture', in Architecture in India (Paris; Milan: Electa Moniteur, 1985), pp. 154–72.
- 4. Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, India: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2015).
- 5. Francis D. K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture (Hoboken, N.J: J. Wiley & Sons, 2007); Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture, ed. by Murray Fraser, Bloomsbury Architecture Library, 21st edition. (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), won the Colvin Prize 2020 (SAHGB/ Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain) and the 2023 Architecture Book of the Year Award (Company of Architects)
- 6. Anthony D. King, ‘Modernism: Where We’re at (and How We Got Here)’, in Non West Modernist Past : On Architecture and Modernities, ed. by William S.W. Lim and Jiat-Hwee Chang (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), pp. 28–36 (pp. 30–31).
- 7. Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘A Critical History of Architecture in a Post-Colonial World: A View from Indian Architectural History’, Architronic, 6, no.1 (1997), 1–15 (pp. 9–10).
- 8. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 21–22; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Modernity and Ethnicity in India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 17, no.1 (1994), 143–55 (pp. 148–49, p. 152).
- 9. Many studies on colonial India after 1997, conspicuously absent in the sources referred, include for example, Chattopadhyay's Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern : Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Preeti Chopra, A Joint Enterprise : Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), or edited volumes such as Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, ed. by Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (London: Routledge, 2007), or Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture and Modernity, ed. by Mrinalini Rajagopalan and Madhuri Desai (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
- 10. Sibel Bozdogan, ‘Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey’, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), 52, no.4 (1999), 207–15 (pp. 211–14).
- 11. See Tagore’s lectures which have been an important subject, among other literary works, of continued historical examination in Nationalism (San Francisco: Book-club of California, 1917).
- 12. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Art and Tradition’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, 1 (New Series), no.1 (1935), 5–10 (pp. 6–8).
- 13. Benegal Sanjiva Rao, Letters of Wisdom, 2nd edn (Varanasi: Pilgrims, 2012), a source by the individual who mobilised this project, clearly states that the inauguration of the school building, a project began in 1933, occurred in January 1934, commemorated in a speech by Rabindranath Tagore on the occasion.
- 14. This information, with all details of the project, appears in an account by a draughtsman in the firm Martin and Co. : Gopendrakrishna Sarkar, ‘Belur Math’er Sriramkrishna Mandir’, in Divya Prasange, 3rd edn (Kolkata: Udbodhan Karlaya, 1985) pp 176-85.