India is currently going through a COVID-19 crisis. Most of the news from India in the international media is regarding the brutality of this ‘second wave’ of COVID-19 catastrophe. The government has issued new movement restrictions allowing only essential services. Noteworthy is the categorization of New Delhi’s Central Vista (hereafter CV) Project as an essential service, on which the construction continues, amidst the pandemic, vaccine scarcity, and economic setbacks. In this context, it becomes pertinent to (re)visit what this project means, beyond its apparent extravaganza. This essay historically situates critiques by architects-urbanists on the CV project as an indicator of how the profession sees and self-narrativizes its role.

On 18th October 2019, a winning bid was announced for New Delhi’s Central Vista Project, a plan to reshape Edwin Lutyens’ capitol complex - the seat of the Indian federal government.1 The project includes among other buildings, a new parliament that will sit beside the old Hebert Baker design, a new Prime Minister’s residence and office, and new central secretariat buildings that will consolidate federal government offices, along Lutyens’ famous east-west axis (Figure 1). For many Indians, struggling with the economy much before Covid 19 came along, the INR 20,000 Crores2 Central Vista (CV) Project does not seem to stir much emotion. The populist right-wing government enjoys widespread support among India’s upper middle classes - the section who have the cultural capital to make a difference if at all they did take an interest in the project. Nonetheless, the architectural community in Delhi has been less forgiving. The last two years have seen a flurry of architects and urbanists articulating their critiques and condemnations through op-eds in newspapers, magazines, online portals, and news channels. They have been joined in by international celebrities like Anish Kapoor3 who have argued forcefully that it represents an assault on Indian democracy, a demolition of its modern, secular ideals and the building of a new India with a non-democratic, sectarian identity by the right-wing ruling party.

What then has been the relationship of architecture (understood in this instance as a discourse produced by architects) with ‘democracy’? Importantly, what does the CV project tell us about the contemporary condition of architecture in India? How does the profession see and self-narrativize its role? To answer these questions we briefly analyse the arguments for the CV project and the primary critiques against it, identify its primary themes and situate it within a longer historical frame. To summarize what follows, our argument is that architects have conceived their relationship of architecture with democracy primarily through three phenomenon – identity and informality both of which have been undergirded by, the third, an essentially statist, developmentalist agenda. The CV project shows the continuation of this phenomenon with a few changes: questions of identity have become moot while the affect of informal activity has come to be the primary architectural marker of democracy. 

The Critiques of the Central Vista Project

The specific critiques levelled by architects on the Central Vista project have primarily taken five routes:

a) the lack of a design competition open to all architects, b) the lack of democratic participation in design, changes to land use and on the larger issue of rebuilding in what is claimed to be the heart of India’s national space, c) concerns over undermining heritage character of Central Vista, d) reduction, if not destruction of public space, and e) the elimination of ‘green’ space4.

At the onset it has to be mentioned that all questions/contestations about due process (including questions of heritage, change of land use, environmental clearance etc.) have been documented thoroughly and settled on a point-by-point basis by the Supreme court of India5. Interestingly, the judgment is an extended deliberation on what constitutes due process and rule of law. However, a short overview of the critiques of the project and the claims by the project architects is necessary for an architectural review67. The project in its present form proposes no external change to the five buildings built by Lutyens and Baker on the Central Vista: the President’s house, the Parliament, the North and South Block, the National Archives, and the India Gate. Of these buildings, the first three along with the India Gate, form the anchors of the nationally recognized imageable, ‘Central Vista’ space (Figure 2). This is a three-kilometre axis from the Lutyens monumental India gate to his piece de resistance, the President’s house which is framed by the North and South Block designed by Herbert Baker. (Figure 3)

By being broadcast repeatedly since the 1950s to represent the Indian federal government, this axis of the Central Vista is argued to be the ‘imagined’ space of the nation-state. The new additions claim to leave these buildings untouched and to remove the many years of unsightly modifications (including air conditioners, ducts and such) to it, thus rendering the popular public association with Central Vista heritage, narrowly associated with the iconic Lutyens-Baker buildings, rather irrelevant. Concerns raised by heritage experts about the impact of the new buildings on the character of the central vista precinct remains although cases citing heritage concerns have been dismissed by the courts8. Whether or not one agrees with it, the court has argued that there is no heritage buildings/precincts ipsofacto inviolable by law9. Further, the North Block and South Block offices which are the key to the framing of the ‘Vista’ are as proposed by the project architects to be preserved to create a museum of Indian civilization, throwing open the erstwhile corridors of power to the ‘public’. (Figure 4)

The primary move of the proposal, however, is the removal of a whole host of offices built after independence on either side of the east-west Central Vista axis due to reasons ranging from severe lack of space to violating earthquake and fire codes10. These offices are to be replaced with ten new secretariat buildings and a conference centre connected at basement level by internal transportation (Figure 5). Critics have raised two issues related to this: the destruction of secretariat buildings, the IGNCA, the national museum and the national archives annexe. The second, the character of the Central Vista space without these buildings and with the new buildings. The project architects claim that the new modern office blocks situated as they would be behind the reflecting pools and trees (albeit in a revitalized landscape) would preserve the Central Vista character. While the issue of a heritage audit for these post independent additions is left unaddressed, most of the buildings to be razed have not figured as exemplary artefacts of modern architecture and except for Vigyan Bhawan none of them were on the original INTACH modern heritage list11 (Figure 6). The new parliament, the primary ‘iconic’ addition of the project, has been critiqued as an unnecessary replication of an existing facility. The critics also claim that more built space around the Central Vista axis will reduce the total open space of the area. This is disputed by the architects who claim they are not only increasing the floor area efficiency of the existing plots on which these offices sit but also developing the entire bureaucratic apparatus as an ‘efficient’ modern office space within a Transit Oriented Development scheme connected to Delhi’s metro rail system.

Lutyens Delhi was designed as a colonial white town with its leafy boulevards and bungalows within parks (largely artificially created with flora drawn from all over the British empire) which has remained in marked contrast with the growing metropolis of Delhi. The urban form of Delhi is often compared to a doughnut, with Lutyens Delhi, the residence of the elite, forming the sparsely populated green void in the centre. An elite space, currently argued to be the ‘public’ space of the city, it contains much of the nation’s cultural institutions like museums – which boast of some of the lowest footfalls in the world.  The argument of the critics of the project, however, is that this makes Lutyens Delhi the metropolitan region’s primary ‘green lung’ and the CV lawns around the India Gate Delhi’s primary public spaces inhabited by residents, visitors, vendors, cricket playing kids, and protests (Figure 7).

The public space argument is countered by the project architects who point out that the primary public space around the India Gate and the reflecting pools around is being enhanced rather than reduced or changed. They claim that with the new eco-diversity gardens in the Presidential Estate, museum of Indian civilization and the extension of the CV till the Yamuna River, a substantial increase in the public realm is at hand. The alteration to the landscape has been criticized to be inappropriate and amateur12. Critics focusing on public space have however mobilized archival photographs of a few events from the last 70 years in which crowds have flooded CV space to show the criticality of the space to democracy (Figure 8). The same events been cited by the project architects to show their inspiration behind returning the loci of state power to the people including through the Museum of Indian Civilization13.

How then do we read these arguments and counter arguments?

Three themes stand out from the many arguments listed above: a) the idea of a ‘democratic’ process b) the claim of CV as democratic space and c) the absence of familiar questions of architectural identity – the staple of modern architectural discourse in India. The first theme although valid in itself is unfortunately nothing new. Open national level architectural design competitions of unimpeachable character and acclaimed results have been few and far in between in post independent India. Public projects across India are routinely awarded in the bureaucratic, opaque way in which CV project was awarded. Heritage buildings that fall outside the 100 year rule of the Archaeological Survey of India are regularly damaged, altered or razed across the country. It could be argued that no other government has moved so zealously to pursue its agenda and single mindedly ignored the Delhi (and thus ‘Indian’) architectural establishment. But these aside, what is of interest to this essay are the discourses around the last two themes, especially because the project architects and the critics seem to be on the same page about the two issues. Both sides assume CV as the heart of democratic public space and neither seem to be interested in the discourse of identity. These understood historically shed a good deal of light on the discourse of Indian modern architecture.  

Democracy, Development and Identity

It is well known that Nehru, who called Lutyens Delhi “rather pretentious”14, and “a place without a soul and a spirit”15 endorsed Corbusier’s architecture in Chandigarh as one that “hits you on the head and makes you think”16 attempting to settle differences in the issue of architectural identity of the democratic state. This post-independent question of identity however was in a sense a continuation of the battle of styles17 of 19^th century India. Lutyens design of the buildings of CV exemplified the Empire’s quest to make architecture represent both ‘Indian’ and ‘European’ identity. Indian architecture was understood largely as distinct religious categories like Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, ‘Indo-Saracenic’ and so on while the European as primarily Palladian classicism (See cover image). The debates continued to play out in the metropolitan northern Indian centres after independence, although the issue of European was substituted by ‘Modern’.

The 1959 seminar on architecture, in which Nehru made his comments on Chandigarh, was organized by Achyut Kanvinde and discussed these questions in a milieu for a national policy on architecture. It is an important early moment to understand how architects understood democracy in a disciplinary sense. In the eleven talks given on the subject, Kanvinde’s invocation is the only one that makes the connection explicit18. His equation of democracy with “science, technology and humanities as the backbone of [democratic] culture, shifting the emphasis of architects role” is reflective of the broader assumptions of the other panellists. Democracy was subsumed within technology, modernity, and engineering which were in turn implicitly understood as both the sign and means of fulfilment of the welfare of the people19. In short, what made the post independent state democratic and different from the British Raj was its developmentalist vision and architecture was to embody it and be its sign. This developmental mission, whether Chandigarh or Bhakra Nangal Dam, was automatically understood by architect-experts as the sign of democracy whether or not democratic processes governed the planning of these projects or determined the displacement of communities.

Nevertheless, the rejection of older (religious) styles, grandiose scale, and concern with a modernity that was not copying the West were important arguments at the conference. Charles Correa connoted the house around the courtyard as a model of a “clear, concise” core “clear and hard as a theorem” around which the “lyricism in the Indian temperament” could flourish20. This play between core (architectural identity) and lyricism (informality) could be read as one architectural theorem of democracy. It should, however, be noted that discussions on institutional buildings were in stark contrast to the ones related to public housing for the masses, which were understood as an infrastructural issue to be confronted pragmatically. Nehru who discussed ‘architecture’ with regard to the institutional buildings of Chandigarh, was often more concerned about cost of construction and land when it came to housing21. Thus, the line between architecture as a developmental tool of the democratic state and as a cultural artefact fashioning a new identity for the nation state did exist but was thin.

Nevertheless, the search for identity22 as some historians have termed it, did reach an apogee (most famously in the public institutional buildings of Correa, Balkrishna V. Doshi, Raj Rewal, among many others) in the 1970s and 80s. Much of this work was both historicized and self-narrativized as a new paradigm: connecting to ‘authentic’ historical roots or being locally ‘appropriate’ while holding on to and legitimizing the ‘modern’ – which essentially meant the developmental imperative of the democratic state. This narrative was a natural extension of the historical teleology fashioned by Indian nationalists during the early twentieth century. As analyzed by Partha Chatterjee and many historians, in this nationalist imagination (both right wing and mainstream, even today), ‘India’ refers, at its earliest instance, to a glorious ‘Hindu’ Vedic India followed by subsequent layers produced by other ethnic and religious groups. This narrative has traces of European periodization of antiquity - the classical age, medieval (Dark Ages), and modern. This imposed periodization rendered the glorious past as the ‘Hindu’ era, which was subsequently damaged by Muslim ‘invaders’ and ‘Christian’ colonizers from whom control had to be wrested back. In the secular version, this was so that ‘India’ could be put back into its rightful developmental trajectory. A good example of the persisting problems of periodization, despite the best intentions is the architecture exhibition of the Festival of India23 in 1985 organized by a team led by Charles Correa. (See footnote 23 for a more detailed discussion.)

Architecture as Developmental Infrastructure

As we have seen, most critiques of the CV project seem to have primarily gone with technocratic and processual critiques keeping clear of architectural questions. One reason could be that the designs are evolving and haven’t been presented in great detail but it is also certain that the buildings themselves are fairly muted – ‘quiet’ as the architects themselves put it. For a Hindu nationalist, arguably culturally nativist political dispensation, the architecture seems to be largely devoid of questions or dilemmas of identity that have marked the discourse of Indian modern architecture for much of the last five decades. In fact, the past work of the project architects in the last two decades excels in the silence of its forms, at an architecture that works as infrastructure, often in smooth foam finished concrete and cuboidal forms with little interest either in the formal/spatial pyrotechnics that marks post liberalization Indian architecture (see Figure 9) or a reliance on ‘authentic’ materiality and ‘craft’ that boutique critical practices have resorted to. The winning proposal was marked by its almost completely infrastructural and facility planning approach as opposed to others who attempted to produce grandeur, meaning, and iconicity through architectural form, public space, siting and so on (see other proposals24). The project architects emphasized that their selection reflects the fact that there is the right architect for the project not merely the right design25. In so much as what was being referred to is the experience of the firm in dealing with large infrastructural projects in close consultation with the leaders of the current dispensation, it is not illogical to think that this came about because the firm’s design sensibilities also find favor with them26. The only critique of architectural form and space has been a playful reference by one of the critics equating a subdued and rather indifferent spire on top of the new triangular parliament (kept lower than the existing Martyrs memorial) to a Hindu temple shikhar27 (Figure 10). The firms many presentations on elevational schemes and so on, of the new parliament follow this self-imposed bureaucratic approach of following similar material palettes, existing heights, fenestration patterns and so on. These have hardly evoked a response28.

As popular narratives go liberalization of the Indian economy since the 1990’s has directed architecture towards the expression of private and corporate wealth29. Public architecture when not completely bizarre (see Figure 11) seems to have finally entered its present state - a phase of studied silence. The CV is set to be its crowning achievement. Like the Gujarat Secretariat and even other corporate buildings of high quality in India, the buildings now express a crisp, clean and efficient corporate modernity that makes traditional questions of identity (other than ‘sustainability’ rating and efficiency) largely meaningless. The developmentalist state thus needs no legitimization or ‘Indian identity’ adjustment other than its own physical presence. This also makes ideological critique through/of architectural form near impossible. If attempted, like Anish Kapoor, the argument turns back on itself sounding self-contradictory and in his case seeming to favor an imperially destined status quo.

It is important to note however that the place destined for ‘architectural affects’ has been largely taken over by infrastructure. While infrastructural projects in the form of smart cities and bullet trains tend to be iconic and spectacle like (see Video), architecture in its traditional form tends to be an infrastructural base/background. Observe the Sardar Patel statue30 (Figure 12), Dandi memorial centre31 (Figure 13) as a case in point. Perhaps this is but a manifestation of a larger global shift from a disciplinary to a territorial biopower, but the CV buildings are a mere continuation of this tendency. The buildings themselves are and are presented as merely infrastructural – “increasing productivity and efficiency” by centralizing bureaucratic power32. No further proof of the singularity and clarity of the infrastructural vision seems to required after the point by point response put out by the government as recently as July 2^nd 33.

On Central Vista as Democratic Space

The idea of CV itself as a symbol or ‘heart’ of the democratic space of the nation is quite strained. While the CV may evoke the imagined space of the democratic nation-state through repeated (and choreographed) televised performances and symbols of state power, Delhi’s urbanism (and that of most cities in India) is outside the ambit of direct electoral democracy. If a la David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city is the control/participation over the processes of spatial production, Delhi has been the leitmotif of its opposite. Since the very first Delhi Masterplan of 1961 it has been the archetypal model for post-independent city planning and policies - a largely technocratic top down vision of growth and change34. The creation of urban environments has always been a state subject in India wherein elected municipalities are granted only with maintenance and the state governments are responsible for urban planning. In Delhi, which is not organized as a typical state, electoral democracy slips further as CV falls under New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC, a non-elected municipality with nominated bureaucrats) and urban planning is undertaken by Delhi Development Authority (a bureaucratic body under the central government). This is the (non) democratic reality of CV and that of the larger Lutyens Delhi area, which is governed by powerful bureaucrats of the Central Government (who are also residents of Lutyens bungalows). In this sense the architects of the project can only be accused of ‘more of the same’ than any radical disruption of the institutional set up35. However, the question of democratic space does demand more reflection.

Prior to the controversy most architects would admit that CV was the antithesis of a climatically appropriate public space for Delhi except in the late evenings and short periods in the winter. Its relevance as a space of democratic protest although strained is repeatedly used by both the architects and critics, often showing the same photographs of exceptional events like Independence day in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral procession in 1949 and the Nirbhaya Protests among others (Figure 14). Contemporary claims to the contrary, apart from the televised upper middle class candlelight vigils, protests are limited to such exceptional occasions over the life of the republic – where the space itself had little to do with ‘encouraging’ such action. Rather the events as well as its readings have always had more to do with the seeming transgression of a space identified with near absolute governmental control. The democratic protest space assigned since the 1980s (far before the ruling right-wing government came to power) is near Connaught Place, tactfully kept away from the capitol complex like the British Imperial designers intended. It has not been the case that post independent institutions, architects or planners charged with building on these sites have reversed this course. Along with the archival photographs of exceptional events in which masses thronged CV (which the project architects also use) the primary evidence cited for CV’s democratic character is the informal activity around India Gate.

While informality as a historical discourse in the post-independent nation state requires a longer treatment, suffice it to say here that it is striking that informality – theoretically the ‘surplus’ of planning - is what is implicitly understood as ‘democratic’ about space. In this sense informality has always been the urbanistic equivalent of identity in Indian architecture. Although in Lutyens Delhi (NDMC) informality is usually restricted brutally and effectively what is probably being mentioned are the vendors (in mobile carts) who provide the visitors of the area with snacks and sell toys to kids along the CV but especially around the India Gate area (Figure 15). It is a fact that the advances made in State policy to recognize informal urbanism as well as official welfare programs over the last three decades of economic liberalization largely identifies the individual primarily as an economic agent36. It is this economic and ultimately developmental agent that architects seem to so often depend on to produce the affect of ‘democratic’ space.

Towards Democratic Space: Dandi not Delhi

Are there other imaginations of the commons? Most definitely, and a long history of them. Gandhian ‘swaraj’, discontinuous with popular manifestations of modernity and individuality and developmentalism never imagined the site of the state as the locus of ‘community’, rather on a particularly dynamic idea of the ‘local’. Consider when on April 6, 1930, Gandhi picked up a few grains of salt from a nondescript beach on the western coast of Gujarat breaking the British Empire’s salt tax. It became the most significant event of the Indian Independence struggle and certainly one that cemented Gandhi as the spiritual and political leader of modern India. Hundreds of thousands came out to break the law and in the non-violent exercise of satyagraha. Dandi, or as Time magazine called it, ‘a miserable little beach town’37 had become that day in April, the foremost public space in British India. The march both constructed the iconic image of Gandhi captured by newsreels, photographs, postal stamps and the now banned 500 Indian Rupee note – the 61-year-old half-naked man with his walking stick walking with an inimitable intensity through rural India (See image, A 2005 stamp sheet of India dedicated to the Salt March). Importantly, he had strung together countless forgotten little villages and hamlets into a continuous public space stretching from his ashram to the Indian Ocean, starting hundreds of such protests. All of them marched not to the British civil lines or governor houses but to hardly known locations near the ocean. The Empire had to reluctantly rush from their barracks, police stations, and secretariats to Dandi and a hundred other places by the sea to arrest freedom fighters.

The event was a concrete manifestation of the idea of the local, which as Ajay Skaria and Alon Confino puts it, is “the set of practices which emerges in intimate relationship to nationalism, which even in some ways sustains nationalism, even though the places it produces cannot be understood within the same logic…. Nationalism does not exhaust, sublate or transcend this local; rather this local continues to live…beyond and alongside it”38. It is from this local that new political and conceptual practices emerge rather than in the abstract time and space of the nation. The local during the Salt Satyagraha (and in most Gandhian action) became the national displacing Delhi. Delhi was forced to move to Dandi and a hundred other little villages far away from the comfortable spaces of State power. The State was forced to act on unknown points on the map and on another kind of local, the body itself – the ultimate site of Gandhian swaraj.

Abstract theory or examples from history are hardly needed. The example of Shaheen Bagh39 offers us one of many imaginations of the local. It sits not more than a few dozen kilometres away from CV – the example of working class, Muslim women who catalysed a transformation of the banal infrastructural spaces of their neighbourhood (a 4 lane road) into the fountainhead of a nationwide political protest against new citizenship laws. Crowd sourced place specific art installations40, libraries and food counters were set up in this mini protest city inspiring similar spaces across India, from Kolkata to Kozhikode. It took an unprecedented global pandemic to halt these protests. As for the farmers protest, not even the pandemic could. Architects desiring well ‘developed’ space in Lutyens Delhi for the ‘masses’ to democratically protest and self-actualize need not really worry.

Postscript

Much of the analytical and historical parts of this article was written in mid 2020 when the critiques of the project by the architects were being actively published by the print and digital media. It however seems from the recent tide of newspaper reporting that more than a few journalists are starting to question the architectural critiques and the critics of the project. This is in addition to the fine imposed by the Delhi High court for "motivated petitions" against the project.

See, Reshmi Dasgupta, "Central Vista Diaries Part 3: How green was my Rajpath anyway?", Firstpost, June 13, 2021. Oopalee Operajita, "A fact check for Anish Kapoor and other Central Vista project critics", The Indian Express, June 12, 2021. Coomi Kapoor, "Views on Central Vista project are polarised along political lines", June 14, 2021. Abraham Thomas, Delhi HC’s refusal to stop Central Vista work challenged in Supreme Court, Hindustan Times, June 10, 2021

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• 1. The bid was won by HCP Architects.
• 2. Approximately 2670 Million USD
• 3. Anish Kapoor, “Modi the Fanatic Is Using the Coronavirus Crisis to Destroy India’s Heritage,” The Guardian, May 21, 2020,
• 4. Narayan Moorthy, “Taking Delhi from the People,” India Today, February 17, 2020
  • AGK Menon, “Behind Modi’s Plans to Redevelop the Central Vista Is a Covert Political Agenda,” The Wire, May 23, 2020
  • AGK Menon, “The Problem with the Proposed Redevelopment of Delhi’s Central Vista,” September 20, 2019
  • Rajiv Bhakat, “What a Comparison of Great Central Vistas Tells Us About Modi’s Plans for New Delhi,” The Wire, April 5, 2020
  • Prem Chandavarkar, “The Central Vista Redevelopment and ‘Democracy, Participation and Consultation’: What Does This Really Mean?,” ArchitectureLive!
• 5. Supreme Court of India https://main.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2020/8430/8430_2020_34_1501_25340_Judgement_05-Jan-2021.pdf
• 6. Presentation - Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi - YouTube, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXbvc3oLIBk&feature=youtu.be
• 7. Bimal Patel, “Democracy, Participation and Consultation,” Journal of Landscape Architecture, no. 61 (2020): 84–97.
• 8. Rohan Deshpande, “Centre’s Rs.20,000 Crore Central Vista Redevelopment Plan may sit at odds with Delhi Heritage rules”, Scroll.in, June 11, 2020
• 9. Supreme Court of India, page 318, https://main.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2020/8430/8430_2020_34_1501_25340_Judgement_05-Jan-2021.pdf
• 10. Ibid, See the complete list of reasons in the Supreme Court Judgment as supplied by the Government (Delhi Development Authority)
• 11. Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, INTACH. A Tentative List of Post-Independence Buildings to be notified as Modern Heritage Buildings of Delhi. Delhi Urban Arts Commission, 2013, https://architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-166747
• 12. Pradip Krishen, “Plans to Replant Central Vista Another Worrying Sign of the Project’s Direction,” The Wire, July 20, 2020
• 13. Presentation - Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi - YouTube, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXbvc3oLIBk&feature=youtu.be
• 14. Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. Volume 4 (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1964).
• 15. Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. Volume 2 (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1958).
• 16. Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, 1964.
• 17. Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
• 18. The word democracy was used only by Kanvinde and Warerkar M.R. The latter said,” But a democratic government represents the collective conscience of the people and the architects as citizens concerned most with it, can influence the formulation of this policy for the good of architecture.” – Achyut Kanvinde, ed., Seminar on Architecture (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1959).
• 19. This is a point emphatically made by Partha Chatterjee in his analysis of Indian Economic Planning. He is however not referring to architecture in his study. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993).
• 20. Charles M Correa, “Architectural Expression,” in Seminar on Architecture, ed. Achyut Kanvinde (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1959), 48–50.
• 21. Venkat Krishna Dhage, “Prime Minister’s Letter to Chief Ministers of States about the Development of Cities” (Rajya-Sabha Debates, February 18, 1960), http://rsdebate.nic.in/handle/123456789/562101.
• 22. Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence: the search for identity - India 1880 to 1980 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000)
• 23. The Festival of India was one of the most sophisticated (and successful) attempts to tell the story of ‘Indian’ architecture. organized by the Indian Government in the mid 1980’s in North America and Europe. To be fair, it was intended to be secular, showing India as a mythical palimpsest, like the Nehruvian historiographical ideal, where ‘many India’s’ (“parallel structures”) exist simultaneously. Toward this end the architecture exhibition attempted to pursue thematization to overcome the pitfalls of linear periodization. However, the chronology of this palimpsest still unravels along the afore mentioned fault lines – the initial Vedic layer, one of Mandalas and Vedic altars tends to have a solidity as the original and, in the case of the exhibition, becomes its very sign. What follows, Islam and Colonial Modernity seems fundamentally alien despite the attempt of weaving them together. What the exhibition does towards this end is to show the Vedic imagination of the cosmos (the Mandala aka the original layer) as absorbing the new layers - the Islamic ‘Garden of Paradise’ and the ‘Age of Reason’ of the Europeans. However, the developmental narrative is always close at hand. What follows the prelude of ‘tradition’ is Contemporary Architecture, coterminous with democracy, beginning with the section ‘Modernity: Inventing the Future’. This new developmentalist democracy is birthed by Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru. But it is Nehru and the “new temples of India” – the imposing dams of Bhakra Nangal and the hard infrastructures of modernization – that crosses over into Modernity along with Chandigarh. Gandhi makes a return only in the last section titled as “Looking Beyond: the start of a new Vistara” coming after both “Modernity” and “Roots: Culture as Deep Structure”. This ‘start’ is a revalorization of “indigenous traditions and technology” in the Gandhian ethos and through housing reaches out to “a majority of the people”, unlike the cultural and institutional projects of ‘Roots’ section. The trajectory of contemporary architecture that begins with the hard infrastructures of modernization is thus pushed further and further back into the past as the chronology moves forward. First to a more classical past for “cultural resonance” through institutional projects but ultimately to create appropriate housing infrastructure. Thus the circle is completed – one of the very first images of the catalog under the humanistic “Architecture as a measure of man” is that of street dwellers that combine the mythic with the modern – the informal ‘architect’ has already absorbed the developmental vision.
• 24. Subhayan M, “Six Final Proposals of the Parliament & Central Vista Redevelopment Project – Sthapatya,” November 2, 2019
• 25. Patel, “Democracy, Participation and Consultation.”
• 26. Shikha Trivedy, “Parliament to Kashi Vishwanath: Why Modi Always Hires Architect Bimal Patel for Pet Projects,” The Print, December 4, 2019
• 27. Menon, “Behind Modi’s Plans to Redevelop the Central Vista Is a Covert Political Agenda.”, The Wire, May 23, 2020
• 28. Except of course Anish Kapoor’s recent outburst calling the project architect “third rate” which does not seem useful as an architectural critique to say the least.
  • Anish Kapoor, “ Modi’s bulldozing of parliament shows him as the architect of a Hindu Taliban”, The Guardian, June 4, 2021
• 29. Rahul Mehrotra, Architecture in India: Since 1990 (Mumbai: Pictor, 2011).
• 30. “Statue of Unity Guide - Your Guide to Sardar Patel’s Statue,” accessed August 8, 2020, https://statueofunity.guide/.
• 31. “A Salt-Mound-Shaped Museum Is a Befitting Tribute to Mahatma Gandhi,” World Architecture Community, August 7, 2017
• 32. Central Vista Debate: Ar Bimal Patel’s Exclusive Presentation for MASA on 13th June 2020 - Sthapatya, 2020,
• 33. News Laundry Team, “Government responds to Newslaundry article on Central Vista”, News Laundry, June 02, 2021
• 34. Nipesh Palat Narayanan, “The Delhi Bias: Knowledge Hegemony of India’s Slum Governance,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 41, no. 1 (January 2020): 105–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12306.
• 35. Ironically, the point-by-point response of the housing and urban affairs ministry to the critique (notably points 6 and 7) illustrates this continuity (although on a much smaller timeframe than what we argue here). The justification towards the top-down manifestation of projects and arbitrary changes in the regulations could be read in the ministry’s own words at “Government responds to Newslaundry article on Central Vista” News Laundry, June 02, 2021, https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/06/02/government-responds-to-newslaundry-article-on-central-vista
• 36. Nipesh Palat Narayanan, “The Making of Slums: An Analysis of Debates in the Indian Parliament, 1953–2014,” Economic and Political Weekly, Under Review.
• 37. “INDIA: Gandhi at Dandi,” Time, April 14, 1930,
• 38. Alon Confino and Ajay Skaria, “The Local Life of Nationhood,” National Identities 4, no. 1 (March 2002): 10, https://doi.org/10.1080/14608940120115657.
• 39. Shivam Vij, “The People's occupation of Shaheen Bagh speaks truth to power,” ThePrint, January 20, 2020
• 40. “The Art of Resistance:Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh has turned into an open air art gallery”, Scroll.in, Jan 23, 2020, https://scroll.in/article/950720/the-art-of-resistance-delhis-shaheen-bagh-has-turned-into-an-open-air-art-gallery