%0 Book Section %B Vistāra - The Architecture of India, Catalogue of the Exhibition %D 1986 %T M.J.P. Mistri: Descendant of Master Builders – Excerpts from an interview with Smita Gupta %A Mistri, MJP %E Smita Gupta %E Carmen Kagal %K 20th Century Architecture in South Asia %K Festival of India %K M.J.P. Mistry %K Vistara (1986 Exhibition) %X

A little less than two centuries ago, an adventurous young Parsi by the name of Mistri undertook the arduous journey to Bombay from his native Navsari in Gujarat, lured by tales of this rapidly growing city. In the years to come, as the city prospered, so did his family. Today, his descendant Minocher J. P. Mistri, courtly and gentle, laments the rapid decay of the boom metropolis his forefathers helped to build. Sadly, with M.J.P. Mistri’s generation (his elder sister, too, is an architect – she was, in fact, the first woman to join the profession in this country in 1936) his family’s association with the building profession will die. None of the present generation – despite the ready-made practice – has the desire to carry on the occupation of their ancestors.

Interestingly, Mistri and his sister are the first trained architects in the family. Their father, Jamshetji Mistri, sent all his children to England to study. While the two daughters were recalled after they had finished school, the sons stayed back. At the public school where he was studying, Dulwich College, M.J.P. Mistri found himself taking to fine engineering – machine designing (sic) – a subject which he hoped to pursue thereafter. His father, however, had different plans. He wanted him to become an architect and persuaded him to enrol just for a year at the School of Architecture in London (run by the Architecture Association).

In the course of that year, a holiday in France brought him in contact with the famous French architect Le Corbusier and Mallet Stevens. He immediately began to read everything that Le Corbusier had written, attended his lectures and even ventured to discuss things with him. And so M.J.P. Mistri became an architect. After working for a while in England, he returned to India in 1939, because his father’s health was failing. His elder sister had already joined the family firm after a stint at the Sir J. J. School of Architecture.

Mistri’s career saw him building in Bombay, Karachi (where his father had established an office and elsewhere in the country. He recalls with pride the low-income tenements he built in 1940, which still stand without a crack, and hospitals in Ahmednagar and Anand. Mistri remembers the time when the Emperor Reza Shah Pehelvi commissioned the firm to build the houses of Parliament and a large textile mill in Teheran. All the drawings were prepared and all the plans and specifi approved and eventually submitted in Teheran. But while the schemes were being processed in the country from which the Parsis flled in A.D. 650., turmoil resulted in the emperor’s abdication.

M.J.P. Mistri recently spoke at length of his family’s association with the building profession.

%B Vistāra - The Architecture of India, Catalogue of the Exhibition %I The Festival of India %P 222-226 %& Talking to Architects