At the lobby of the jahanuma Palace in Bhopal–now a hotel–is a formal portrait of Bhopal’s begums. Fully clothed in burqas, they are seated in tiers, as in any formal group photograph. The photo caption below reveals the names, “Seated from left to right: Begum Jahanara, Begum Noor, Begum…” and so on.

For a long while I stood back and pondered the riddle of the photograph. Was this a form of royal social record, even though no identifiable body part was visible? Or was it some sort of satire? The photograph’s essential criteria to reveal were stymied by the Islamic drapery’s criteria to conceal. It was like someone assessing car designs by comparing chassis numbers. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Perhaps the photographer had even asked the begums to smile behind their veils.

....

I often remember the Oldenburg line, only as a continual reminder of the necessity of stupid in architecture. Clever had been the desired apprehension in buildings that had long pretended to be more than what they were. But without the bittersweet experience of risk and pleasure, architecture fell lamely into a professional trap. The monochromatic practice of building with a straight face and following the stifling rules of cultural obligation, social status, and the physics of gravity, left every new design a mere mock drill in industrial assembly, tinged with the architect’s personal aesthetic armoury, a defeated deflated spirit.