In 1969, two years after the completion of his seminal campus project – the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India (IITK: 1960-67), architect Achyut Kanvinde wrote a book titled Campus Design in India: Experience of a Developing Nation, co-authored by American architect H. James Miller. The book claimed to serve as an instructive guide for designing good campus environments in postcolonial India and was framed in response to the unprecedented impetus provided to tertiary education in the 1960s by the Indian government as a part of its post-independence nation-building agenda. Interestingly, the book showcased Kanvinde’s IITK campus as an exemplar within local campuses of past and present and further contextualised it in the emerging international discourse on campus planning that reflected the post-war tertiary education boom. Through this alignment between national goals and international themes, Kanvinde and Miller presented the book as a manifesto of institutional campus for a modernising India. This paper focuses on a synthesised reading of Campus Design in India and the IITK design in order to understand the way in which international architectural and urban principles were received, adapted and selectively translated for the Indian context. In particular, it draws attention to the factors that complicated the translation such as the consideration of pre-colonial models, the idea of university as a secular temple, and India’s partnership with the West for technological and economic development. The paper argues that Kanvinde’s book presented progressive concepts of campus planning but filtered them through the lens of nation-building ideology and history. The book also provides insights into Kanvinde’s IITK design revealing the struggle of localisation which the paper argues is manifested in the form of competing concepts of systems and symbols, and technology and elemental forms which were negotiated through a unique conception of nature.

This paper is concerned with the development of university campuses in post-independence India that received unprecedented political impetus during the 1960s. Closely tied to postcolonial nation-building agenda and the Cold-War politics of foreign aid, the growth of higher education in India significantly coincided with the tertiary education boom in the post-war international context. The emergence of an accompanying discourse on campus planning which drew on post-war revisionary modernism became a reference point for Indian campus design. But how was the importation of international disciplinary themes justified and translated for the Indian cultural and material conditions where it was ultimately realised and acquired meanings? The paper seeks to answer this question through a parallel focus. First, it examines a seminal campus project of the 1960s – the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK, 1960-67) designed by the leading modernist architect, Achyut Kanvinde. As one of the first comprehensively planned institutional schemes after independence (1947), the campus is also critically well-received in the history of Indian modernism and is seen as an explicit manifestation of post-war Euro-American disciplinary ideas in India.1 Second, the paper undertakes a close reading of the locally well-known but previously unstudied book titled Campus Design in India: Experience of a Developing Nation (1969) co-authored by Kanvinde.2 Published merely two years after the completion of initial phase of IITK, the book was the first systematic and substantial contribution to the theme of Indian campus planning. Interestingly, Kanvinde’s IITK campus was featured throughout the book as an exemplar of successful campus environment and further contextualised through a discussion of local and international case-studies. This paper argues that a dual reading of the campus and the book not only provides new insights into Kanvinde’s IITK design but it illuminates reception of international ideas and their translation that had to be filtered through the consideration of historic models, national ideals surrounding mass education and internationalism of aid politics.