Legacies of Indian Modern Architecture

March 3rd, 2016

After the Master by Vikram Bhatt & Peter Scriver

Lecture by Dr. Gauri Bharat

Written in the year 1990, After the Masters by Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver discusses the identity of contemporary Indian architecture that emerged in the mid twentieth century. The book is structured in five segments: India- Problems & Prospects, Roots & Modernity, Alternatives for a Developing India, Architect & the Marketplace and Emerging Architecture. Each segment is illustrated with several architectural projects in India, dominated largely by works in Ahmedabad and New Delhi, due to the authors’ familiarity with these two cities.

The text talks about how effectively the Modernist ideology tries to achieve an appropriate self-conscious, regionalist expression. The book is written with a euro-centric audience in mind and portrays the modernity existing outside Europe as the ‘other’ modernity, the ones who don’t have trajectories or a detailed past. How do we then, look at regional modernity? How do we develop a native framework to understand architecture as a discipline?

The first two decades post independence saw a colonial beginning of the architectural profession in India and was marked by catalytic Modernist projects of Western masters, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn and their legacies that shaped Indian architecture. Alongside, vernacular architecture of India brought about the ‘Indianness’ in contemporary architectural production. Much of postmodern architecture was built in Corbusierean aesthetics, marrying it to climatic conditions.

The book sites India as a ‘developing country’ that has its economic and technocratic limitations. The building industry is typically labour-intensive as opposed to the developed nations. This technical backwardness can be looked as an opportunity in architectural inventions than a hindrance.  Modernist aspirations exist in spite of these challenges and become a constant source of inspiration to the architects of this recently emerging independent nation. The skilled craftsmanship and high quality materials are historical and ritualistic links of the rich heritage to contemporary architectural production. It is interesting to note that the text discusses the role of an architect in a ‘developing country’ as not merely that of producing iconic institutional buildings but that the architect responds to the need of the growing middle class and acts as an agent of social change to take up more socially relevant projects. The contemporary Indian architect reacts to the market and as inappropriate as it may sound, he follows the law of demand and supply to delve into commercial and corporate architecture. In the rapidly urbanizing India, the Government remains the major client for the construction industry. As practiced in the colonial times these numerous public amenities were undertaken by the Public Works Department that consisted of only engineers who built structurally sound repetitive architecture, limiting a larger impact of the architects in the Indian scene. This practice is gradually changing by collaborations of the PWD with architects.

The book has a rhizomatic approach of global architecture. The narrative consistently focuses on the backwardness of a developing nation in relation to the western developed countries and belittles its modernity. While many architectural projects are discussed at length in the various segments, the imagined standard of the third world country architecture doesn’t allow the authors to fully appreciate any of the works. The authors briefly touch upon the influences that Indian projects had on Corbusier’s parallel works, but have not fully explored the idea. The text leaves one with an itch to investigate the idea of Indian modernity and to explore the idea of parallel multiple modernities.

(Word count: 561)