Mistri, who came from a prominent Parsi family in Bombay (now Mumbai), is widely believed to have been the country’s first qualified woman in the profession. In 1936, she graduated with a diploma in architecture from Mumbai’s Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art and went on to work in the family business, designing everything from churches to factories in a career that spanned almost half a century.

Since then, many Indian women have taken to architecture, though their names are often not as recognisable as those of men such as Charles Correa or B V Doshi, both in India and abroad.

However, Mary Woods, author of Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi and an architecture historian at Cornell University, is trying to change that.

When Woods first came to India in 1998 as part of a faculty exchange programme, she met some pioneering women, including Brinda Somaya, one of the country’s most successful architects and conservationists. In time, Woods was convinced there was a story to be told about the long history of Indian women in the field and their unique approach to design that blended traditional methods and materials with modern styles.

“There is now, over the past maybe 40 or 50 years, a good literature on the history of women architects and issues of gender and design but they tend to be exclusively about women in the West,” Woods said, noting that this narrow view excluded the unconventional work being done in India. ... Nearly 44% of India’s 58,646 registered architects are women, according to the Council of Architecture. Compared to the US, where women make up just around 26% of the total number, that’s pretty impressive. However, Woods’ research showed that, like in most other professions, these women have to contend with a field that isn’t always hospitable.

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In the years after Independence, the focus was on building institutions required for a new nation state. Despite the difficulties of convincing the government to grant commissions for large projects to women, architects such as Hema Sankalia and Urmila Eulie Chowdhury managed to build housing projects, state institutions, and other structures that established them as pioneers in the field.

Take for example Delhi-based Revathi Kamath, one of the many taking on the tough task of preserving centuries of local traditions while still producing iconic modern structures. Often called the “queen of mud architecture,” Kamath pioneered the use of a material normally relegated to India’s most impoverished communities to build luxurious structures, including a resort in Rajasthan and the Tower House in South Delhi’s tony Hauz Khas neighbourhood.

Kamath has also worked with steel to create a massive and complex gateway for the O P Jindal power plant in Chhattisgarh. Reinterpreting tribal designs for ladders and swings, Kamath built a 33-metre high structure, the tallest stainless steel edifice in south Asia.

For Woods, Kamath’s work is notable for bringing traditional crafts into the 21st century. “She’s able to bridge both the contemporary and the traditional,” she said.