This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historical meaning through its concerns with craft. It investigates three facets of her oeuvre—her building, her writing and teaching, her design and handicraft—through the lens of her pictorial autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. She identified this remarkable publication as her ‘archives’, documenting in it her life and work (in the absence of a dedicated collection of records), and the equally notable twentieth-century sites and spheres through which she moved. Few careers invite critical investigation of South Asia's modern architectural forms and history as does that of De Silva, an understudied figure credited as a pioneer: a Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient, a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Associate, a co-founder of the journal MARG, a participant in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and an architect practising in a range of discursive media. This article argues that De Silva positioned her intellectual and practical labour as a basis for authority rooted in a situated knowledge. In a reading of gender, caste, race and labour that maintains a scholarly scepticism about the purpose of the artist's biography, this article recovers her life and work from a fragmented archive, including an interview with De Silva in the year before her death, as well as a consideration of craft—interrogating each vis-à-vis the politics of historiography.

This research was sponsored by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship of the United States-India Educational Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Provost's Post-Doctoral Program for Academic Diversity at New York University. The Author wishes to acknowledge support from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, the Sir J.J. College of Architecture and School of Art, the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies, the MARG Foundation, the family of Ian Pieris, the office of Ashley de Vos and Minnette De Silva and her survivors. John Rogers, Vasuki Nesiah, Rachel Lee, Journal of Architecture editors Charles Rice and Peter Gibbs-Kennet, and two anonymous reviewers generously read and critiqued this essay, and I received feedback in public presentations given at the National University of Singapore Department of Architecture, the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, the Sir J.J. College of Architecture, the Centre for Public History, Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology and 1 Shanthi Road, as well as from students in my New York University course, 'Modern Architectures of South Asia'. I am grateful for this engagement, and any errors in the article are my own.

Please note that whilst 'de Silva' is the more common spelling of the Sri Lankan surname, this article follows the preference of its subject, who elected the spelling 'De Silva'. Also, please note that pages from the subject's autobiography have been reprinted here, including images and photographs published by the subject without or with incorrect attribution. These images have been included here in order to discuss the artist's interest in authenticity and her use of the copy in crafting her pictorial autobiography; I attempt to attribute authorship to the best of my ability.