CHAPTER 01

Questions Concerning Modernism and Modernity

Section 01: Terms of the Debate

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is

about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel
of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and
hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got
caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This
storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

– Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940

Typically, the debates around modernism in architecture in India locate it primarily as a

formal movement – or if as an attitude, a predominantly formal/stylistic one – thereby
tracing its shifting formal trajectories. Indeed, this is largely true of most aesthetic
modernisms world over, where it is seen as a movement that epitomized form and
formalism; or in other words, as being defined through a series of decisive breaks it made
with form. This formalistic obsession needs to be understood in the context of the
conditions within which modernism emerged. In the context of Europe, modernism is seen
either as byproduct of, or emerging in the specific context of 19th century post-
Enlightenment Europe with the onset of modernity and processes of modernization,
industrialization and the emergence of newer forms of capital. Raymond Williams in his
seminal essay “When was Modernism?” argues that modernism in Europe emerged as a
product of, and in response to the great many changes in public media or the field of

25 
 
cultural production at large – the introduction of photography, cinema, radio, television
reproduction and recording (Williams, 1989: 31-35). Here, the processes of
industrialization and urbanization came to be conceived of as the principal mechanisms of
the transformation in human experience for modernism. Indeed, the story of modernism is
inextricably linked to the multiple attitudes towards modernity and modern life. These
attitudes ranged from a need to get away from the impurities and vulgarities of modern life,
to a task of engaging in a permanent revolution against the totality of modern existence – ‘a
culture of negation,’ of overthrowing tradition and values, and, from the mid-twentieth-
century onwards, an affirmative relation with modernity – to engage it in all its fullness and
richness, breaking down the barriers between ‘art’ and other human activities.

The Experience of Modernity

Attempts to capture the strained, tense and contradictory relations of the modern subject
with the overwhelming conditions of modernity can be seen in many early European
writings. Indeed this ‘culture of interpretation’ that sought to understand the urban
phenomena and its social effects parallels the cultures of modernism that were engendered
by 19th century transformation of traditional cities into the ‘metropolis’. Here, we take into
consideration briefly some of the writings of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter
Benjamin. Their thoughts and writing have been instrumental to the work of scholars
cutting across disciplinary fields ranging from political theory and sociology to cinema,
literature, art and popular culture, media and urban studies and so on. Film historian
Miriam Hansen notes that in their turn to the quotidian and the neglected, these thinkers
belonged “to a larger tradition, related in turn to the philosophical program of ‘the
readability of the world’” (Hansen, 1992: 63).1

We will consider here in particular, their insights into architectural and spatial
dynamics, which has in the recent past been re-discovered by architectural historians and
theorists in the west. Discussing the many aspects of the modernist metropolitan discourse
that was constituted through their writings, architect and historian Anthony Vidler,
                                                            
1
Hansen continues to write, “In the crisis perceived as modernity, this program finds a particular inflection in
the work of Jewish intellectuals – Simmel, Benjamin, Bloch, Franz Hessel, to mention only a few – who
direct reading skills developed in the interpretation of the sacred and canonical texts to the spaces and
artifacts of modern life, trying to decipher a hidden subtext that is referred to redemption” (63).

26 
 
following Michel Foucault’s seminal work (2003 [1973]) regarding the transformation of
the scientific episteme, illustrates the ways in which a specific ‘spatial pathology’ of the
city could be traced in the myriad forms of writing in nineteenth century Europe (Vidler,
1992: 32).2 For instance, he notes that one of the crystallizations of this discourse occurred
with the identification of a new condition of urban anxiety, a spatial disease, namely
agoraphobia (fear of the crowd/fear of open spaces). Alongside this urban pathology that
was of interest to medical professionals, agoraphobia became of interest to urbanists who
saw it as uniquely conditioning the modern city as a whole, as “a disease, that is, endemic
to urbanism and its effects” (35).3 This fear of open spaces which became the basis upon
which city planning was critiqued by the end of the nineteenth century itself, was couched
largely in aesthetic terms, leading thereby, according to Vidler, to a merging of aesthetic
and psychological criteria in thinking about the spaces of the city. Agoraphobia however,
was only one among other pathological characteristics of the modern metropolis that can be
identified in the writings of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin – exemplified for instance
through their interest in notions of ‘the man on the street.’ What came to preoccupy much
of their work was in producing newer conceptualizations of space within which one could
locate the psychological conditions of the modern subject.

One of the classic – not to mention early – narratives of the experience of modernity
can be found in Georg Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” which was
written in 1903.4 A seminal text particularly in the fields of urban sociology and social
psychology, Simmel’s essay paints a detailed picture of the encounter with modernity that
for him can be captured nowhere better than, and perhaps only in, the modern metropolis.
There are multiple tropes that Simmel’s essay abounds with: the metropolis and ‘money
economy’ as site and social relations engendered therein, the subjective realm of the
individual vis-à-vis the objective external overarching forces of society and culture in the
                                                            
2
Vidler notes that the metropolis “by the First World War had become a word that implied both a physical
site and a pathological state, which… epitomized modern life” (32).
3
Vidler continues, “agoraphobia was identified not simply as an affliction of the modern city dweller but as
proof that contemporary cities were in their very form bad for health” (35).
4
George Simmel (1858-1918) was a noted German sociologist and philosopher whose contributions to the
formation of the discipline of sociology have been immense. His writings on everyday life, particularly
aspects of contemporary urban life such as money, psychology and sexuality have offered some crucial
insights into the experience and consciousness of modernity. Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental
Life” was first published in 1903 in German.

27 
 
metropolis, and the contrasting scope and relations of the small town/village. While it
would be crucial to unpack each of these tropes, we will limit our analytical purview only
to a few.5 Simmel sets up a dichotomy here between the interiority of the individual and the
exteriority of social life, i.e., heritage, culture, and society. The struggle for the modern
individual to maintain independence, personality and individuality of existence against
dominant exterior forces is seen by him as a struggle not merely for survival, but for mental
and societal progression. And this conflict, which for Simmel is one of the ‘deepest
problems of modern life’, is precisely what constitutes modern life itself, and the modern
experience. Indeed then in Simmel one finds, rather than a study of the processes of
modernization, a focus on the experience of modern society and modernity itself. As David
Frisby notes, “His conception of modernity is not that of a decisive unilinear process but
rather one of interaction between contradictory dimensions, whose contradictions, in turn,
are not resolved” (2004 [1984]: 27).

It is for Simmel, the blasé outlook that is the exemplar of this ‘intensification of
emotional life’ which is a psychic phenomenon exclusive to the modern metropolis. The
blasé outlook, he observes, is not derived from impersonality (inability to think), but in fact
from influences ‘in a highly personal direction’ – due to an “over-stimulation of the nerves”
to the extent it produces no reaction – it is an inescapable condition. Further, as much as the
blasé person is a ‘man of the crowd’, Simmel notes his “lack of orientation in the collective
life, the sense of utter lonesomeness, and the feeling that the individual is surrounded on all
sides by closed doors” (1921: 321).6 And lastly, the blasé outlook is also seen by Simmel as
deriving from the money economy, particularly in the latter’s ability to hollow out the
qualitative/particular/core nature of things and view them instead via the common
colourless, indifferent denominator of money. And this is why, for Simmel, the metropolis
is necessarily also the seat of this mature money economy. The modern metropolis then, is
the locus of this condition, not because of physical size or density of population, but due to
its ability to transcend this tangible extensiveness of social units and inner/outer freedoms.
In short, this is why for Simmel, the metropolis too is the seat of cosmopolitanism.

                                                            
5
For a detailed analysis of Simmel’s body of work, see Frisby, 2004 [1984].
6
If we use Anthony Vidler’s terms, what is illustrated in Simmel is not simply agoraphobia that characterizes
the experience of the modern subject in the metropolis, but also its obverse, i.e., claustrophobia.

28 
 
 The modern subject therefore, is at once byproduct of and resistance against the
conditions of modernity. This is the contradiction and tension that characterizes for Simmel
the very experience of modernity. We must note however, that resistance is not considered
here in the sense of an external action or even an agentive, self-conscious act, but more as
an internal struggle – an ‘intensification’ of one’s emotional life. And while Simmel in
attributing the incapacitated state of the individual to the metropolis and money economy
does offer a critique of the conditions of modernity, it is neither unconditional nor for him
can critique itself become the objective of thinking. Indeed if anything, he argues, the
attempt must be to ‘understand’ the predicament of the modern subject in its relation to the
historical structures of modernity. For instance, Simmel concludes his essay by stating:

The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies
at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme
individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis. But it
is also the explanation of why indeed they are so passionately loved in the
metropolis and indeed appear to its residents as the saviours of their unsatisfied
yearnings.

When both of these forms of individualism which are nourished by the quantitative
relationship to the metropolis, i.e. individual experience and the elaboration of
personal peculiarities, are examined with reference to their historical position, the
metropolis attains an entirely new value and meaning in the world history of the
spirit… In the conflict and shifting interpretations of these two ways of defining the
position of the individual within the totality is to be found the external as well as the
internal history of our time. It is the function of the metropolis to make a place for
the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its
own peculiar conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and the stimulus
for the development of both. Thereby they attain a quite unique place, fruitful with
an inexhaustible richness of meaning in the development of the mental life. They
reveal themselves as one of those great historical structures in which conflicting
life-embracing currents find themselves with equal legitimacy. (1997 [1903]: 76)

29 
 
In other words, for Simmel, there has been a loss of the progress/growth of individual
culture in the manner that one could see say, in the eighteenth-century. This loss he
attributes to, among others, the growth in division of labour engendered by the money
economy. Indeed, the richness with which there has been a crystallization of de-
personalized cultural accomplishments is perhaps why the ‘personality’ so to speak, can
“scarcely maintain itself in the face of it” (75). Another trope that emerges in Simmel
therefore is of distance – both spatial and mental – where the conflict of the modern subject
could also then be captured in his oscillation between an over-close identification with
things, and too great a distance from them (Vidler, 1991: 7-8). It is as a result of this that
over-exaggerated extremities and peculiarities of individualization must be produced – as is
characterized through the blasé outlook of the modern subject. And yet, given that all of
these forces have been integrated into the totality of our historical life, the task of the
intelligentsia as charted by Simmel is neither to condone it, nor to complain, but to
understand.

Substantially influenced by and a student of Simmel was German cultural theorist

Siegfried Kracauer.7 Writing extensively on the phenomena of everyday life and the
modern masses, much like Simmel and Benjamin, Kracauer’s work was riddled with
prolific readings on seemingly mundane themes such as cinemas, detective novels, arcades,
employment agencies, quadrangles (referring both to spatial and geometric form), and hotel
lobbies. We must note first and foremost for our purposes here, Kracauer’s readings of
architectural space as expressed in his oft-quoted statement that “spatial images are the
dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there
the basis of social reality presents itself” (Quoted in Leach, 1997: 50). Elsewhere he writes,
“The surface-level expressions… by virtue of their unconscious nature, provided
unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely,
knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level
expressions” (1995 [1927]: 75). In his insistence on our decoding ‘surface-level
expressions’, it is not hard to see the phenomenological underpinnings of Kracauer’s work,
and his essay on “The Hotel Lobby” exemplifies one early instance of such an undertaking
                                                            
7
Known primarily for his work in film theory, Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was a prominent cultural
theorist, former architect, philosopher, journalist, and sociologist.

30 
 
(1997b [1927]: 51-57).8 The hotel lobby – a space where the masses would gather for no
other purpose than gathering itself – embodied for Kracauer a form of ‘transcendental
homelessness’ (with Kracauer drawing on Lukács’ notion) and revealed its ornamental or
purely aesthetic purpose that for him characterized modernity and the modern subject.

Beginning the essay by charting out the relationship between spaces/built forms and
their purpose, Kracauer offers a sharp critique of the aestheticization of built forms,
especially those that have lost their original contexts and purpose (purposelessness). He
provides an example here of medieval churches which have been preserved in modern
times that are no longer spaces of worship and are no longer tied to any community. Not in
direct contradistinction to, but as an ‘inverted image’ of the house of God, Kracauer locates
the hotel lobby as a site of the formation of modern communities. It is the ‘negative church’
in that, while it does not presuppose an extant community, it “can be transformed into the
church so long as one observes the conditions that govern the different spheres” (1997b
[1927]: 51). To say therefore that it is an inverted image implies some semblance of parity
– at least on the surface – of the governing principles of these spaces. Indeed it is precisely
this comparative analysis with the house of God that is fascinating in Kracauer’s scathing
indictment of the capitalist logic that undercuts this modern space of the ‘hotel lobby’. This
comparison too is not merely coincidental or a matter of choice, but for Kracauer, integral
to the understanding of this new space and experience of being-in-the-world.

And therefore for him, unlike the church (or any house of God) which is the site
where people go to encounter the one in whose service the church is dedicated to, the
‘guests’ in the hotel lobby neither seek anyone, nor find those who they seek – they are
merely “guests in space as such” (51). While people who visit both spaces share some
detachment from everyday life, unlike those who visit the church, this detachment, he
argues, does not lead those who visit the hotel lobby to re-assure their existence, or
reconstruct their lives as a congregation, or as community.9 The lobby therefore is pure in
its singular lack of purpose. We might note here in passing, the similarity with Simmel in

                                                            
8
In its longer form, “The Hotel Lobby” was part of a study on the detective novel written between 1922-25.
9
We should note here however that this was not intended as a call for masses to congregate at the house of
God. Indeed, he writes that in their formation of a transcendental subject, those who assembled at the house of
God too were detached from ethical resolution.

31 
 
the latter’s comparative analysis of the metropolis with the small town and the community
formations engendered therein.

So too we may note the significance attributed to the connective relation between
space and the psyche in both of their writings. However, unlike Simmel who sees some
productive possibility in the metropolis constituting the ground for newer formations,
Kracauer reserves his optimism. He writes: “The person sitting around idly is overcome by
a disinterested satisfaction in the contemplation of a world creating itself, whose
purposiveness is felt without being associated with any representation of a purpose” (52).
The lobby then, is the site of aesthetics – a purely formal relation that lacks in content, and
that “manifests the same indifference to the self as it does to matter… Just as the lobby is
the space that does not refer beyond itself, the aesthetic condition corresponding to it
constitutes itself as its own limit” (52). We must also recall here briefly what we mentioned
before in passing – that one of the defining characteristics of aesthetic modernism was its
preoccupation with form – purposiveness without purpose. This is a debate we will explore
in depth shortly.

At the heart of this experience in the hotel lobby then is, for Kracauer, the
clandestine character of all activities, a pseudo-life as it were that unfolds in ‘pure
immanence’ and reiterates undifferentiated origins; generating according to him activities
of dissimulation – meaningless activities that are the empty form of possible society,
remaining content with itself in its insignificance. Attributing this condition of modern
experience to the ascendancy of what he calls the capitalist ratio, this is not for him a
critique of reason or rationality itself. Ratio, for Kracauer is a “murky form of reason” and
“is cut off from reason and bypasses man as it vanishes into the void of the abstract” (1995
[1927]: 84). Stating his position in no ambiguous terms, Kracauer’s work then has dealt
centrally with the theme of the impoverishment of contemporary existence, and the
‘transcendental homelessness’ that has become a primary mode of experiencing conditions
of modernity. Unlike Simmel or even Benjamin, it is in Kracauer that one can identify –
and this becomes more evident in his later writings – a more or less thorough critique of the
terrorizing spatial experience of modernity.

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 While one can see the general concept of estrangement brought about by the
metropolis in all their writings, it is in early Kracauer that one finds little evidence of a
move beyond a history of decline. It is only in his later work, particularly on photography,
that he engages with notions of chance or contingency – of the fragmentary relations of
things that would reconfigure themselves, perhaps into something new. Further, we must
note that his ‘turn to the surface’ as a mode of engaging with the contemporary phenomena
of his times is an attempt at legibility – of reading phenomena that were increasingly
focused on the visual. This ‘primacy of the optical’ was a preoccupation for many of these
thinkers, and more so than anyone, in Kracauer. As Miriam Hansen notes, “visuality itself
becomes a cipher that Kracauer explores from a number of different angles, often within
one and the same text” (1992: 66). Indeed, the historical processes through which visuality
became a significant trope led on the one hand according to Kracauer, new forms of
subjectivity, fantasy, pleasure, ideology, and even new possibilities of collective experience.
However, this ‘externalization’ of visuality is that which precisely defines what is repressed
and hidden from public view. In other words, specifically for our purposes here, Kracauer’s
methodology then becomes deeply profound in the context of thinking through and reading
spaces of architecture as allegories of the state of the world.

We move on now to a concept, method and figure most thoroughly elaborated by

and attributed to the work of Walter Benjamin – that of the flâneur.10 Best exemplified
through his groundbreaking Arcades Project (2002 [1982]), the flâneur is for Benjamin, the
quintessential figure of modernity, more specifically, an urban modernity. There are a lot of
similarities that can be drawn between Simmel’s conceptualization of the blasé person and
Benjamin’s elucidation on the flâneur. For instance, both project a ‘feigned
disinterestedness’ which is a product of, and generated in opposition to, the anonymity of
modern existence. So too they are alike in the role of consciousness acting like a buffer (or
in Simmel’s terms, a protective organ), numbing these individuals from the alienating
nature of modernity, the money-nature of social relationships, and the ‘all-too pressing
proximity’ of the crowd. One must note that the deployment of notions of distantiation in
both Simmel and Benjamin are taken to mean both spatial and psychological distance. So
                                                            
10
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a highly influential German philosopher associated with the Frankfurt
School.

33 
 
also, conditions of the modernist metropolis are central in generating figures of the blasé
person and the flâneur.

However, while the blasé person can at times be part of the crowd, the flâneur “is
not so much a creature of the crowd as someone who remains aloof from the crowd, and
observes it from afar” (Leach, 1997: 22). This difference is, as we shall see, crucial. In his
writings on the French poet Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin notes the way in which the
crowd in nineteenth-century writing, has come to stand for, in the ancient sense, the ‘crowd
of clients’, or the public.11 Benjamin recalls the long Marxist tradition of writing on the city
and takes as an instance, Friedrich Engels’s The Conditions of the Working Class in
England (1987 [1887]). Engels writes of the city (of London) as distasteful, lacking in the
pursuit of happiness, and abhorrent to human nature, best exemplified by the masses
endlessly (or ‘without reaching the beginning of an end’ as he puts it) roaming the streets of
London.

Benjamin remarks that this description by Engels, while written with unshakeable
critical integrity, is nonetheless an old-fashioned attitude (1997a [1939]: 23).12 On the
contrary, in living and writing about Paris, to move in this crowd, was natural, and he notes
that “no matter how great the distance which an individual cared to keep from it [the
crowd], he was still coloured by it and, unlike Engels, was not able to view it from without”
(24). This physiognomics of the crowd observes Benjamin, was also captured in literature,
such as in the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, in terms of a reaction to shocks: “If jostled, they
bowed profoundly to their jostlers” (27). These early articulations on the city and the crowd
in tones of horror, revulsion, shock, or as menacing, led on the one hand according to
Benjamin, to (totalitarian) visions of disciplining, and consequently thereby to its obverse
in presenting the crowd in uniformity.

The flâneur by contrast for Benjamin, was first and foremost not the ‘man in the
crowd’, nor was he outside of it, but stood somewhere in the middle of these two. Secondly,
while he was a man of leisure, he was “as much out of place in an atmosphere of complete
                                                            
11
Benjamin attributes this to, among other things, the popularity of the serial novel which for him was the
source of revelation about the ‘man on the street’. For more see, Benjamin, 1997 [1939]: 23.
12
Benjamin writes that this may have been in part due to the provincial nature of Germany from where
Engels hailed.

34 
 
leisure as in the feverish turmoil of the city” (27). Benjamin writes that his “mode of life
still surrounds the approaching desolation of city life with a propitiatory lustre. The flâneur
is still on the threshold, of the city as of the bourgeois crowd… The crowd is the veil
through which the familiar city lures the flâneur like a phantasmagoria…” (1997b: 36). The
gaze of the flâneur is ambivalent, irresolute, and decisively modern. The flâneur then for
Benjamin, is both a historical figure of Parisian modernity, or as Susan Buck-Morss puts it,
of the ‘Ur-forms of contemporary life’, and an analytical tool or better yet, method
(1991).13 His place was the arcades – the site of early forms of industrial luxury,14 which
led Benjamin to situate his own Arcades Project within the arcades in order to construct
what is understood as “a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a
collection of concrete, factual images of urban experience” (Buck-Morss, 1986: 99). She
continues:

The arcades… were a wish-image, expressing the bourgeois individual’s desire to

escape through the symbolic medium of objects from the isolation of his/her
subjectivity… If at the beginning, the flaneur as private subject dreamed himself out
into the world, at the end, flanerie was an ideological attempt to reprivatize social
space, and to give assurance that the individual’s passive observation was adequate
for knowledge of social reality… If the flaneur has disappeared as a specific figure,
it is because the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence,
specifically, the society of mass consumption (and is the source of its illusions)… In
the flaneur, concretely, we recognize our own consumerist mode of being-in-the-
world. (103-105)

And therefore for Benjamin, it was the flaneur whose insights into this consumerist and
capitalist world would prove to be invaluable because he was neither aristocrat nor was he
the man of leisure – loitering was his trade. He writes, “In order to survive under capitalism
he writes about what he sees, and sells the product. To put it plainly: The flaneur in
capitalist society is a fictional type; in fact, he is a type who writes fiction… Rather than

                                                            
13
As historical figure, the flâneur was a marginal social type, not just in Benjamin’s own time, but also in the
time of early industrialism, despite their flourishing numbers then.
14
Benjamin writes that the arcades was the centre of trade in luxury goods, was the scene of the first gas
lighting, and was conditioned by the advent of building in iron. For more see, Benjamin, 1997b.

35 
 
reflecting the true conditions of urban life, he diverted readers from its tedium” (111). In
other words, the flaneur as a man of letters, understood his objective position in the
productive process.

Through their characterization of the blasé outlook, the detached hero (of the
modern detective novel for which the mysterious space of the hotel lobby was
quintessential setting), the empty and abstract spaces of modernity, and the flâneur, Simmel,
Kracauer and Benjamin captured experiences of the modern subject in the metropolis. This
was a modernity that for them could not only be exposed through its capitalist origins, but
also in the case of Benjamin and Kracauer, through its ties to nationalism. Indeed the
eventual progression of the flâneur, despite his politics, is identified as one of self-
deception; his protests become no more than gestures since under capitalism he is
dependent on it. As Benjamin remarked, the nineteenth century writer/intelligentsia “goes
to the marketplace as flaneur, supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer”
(1997b: 36). And yet, there is nonetheless some value invested in these characterizations of
individuations, personality quirks, outlooks and attitudes. In other words, while one can
certainly identify notions of alienation, despair, frustration and so on in their articulations
of the modern experience, to read their work as an expression of a ‘critique’ might not
suffice. What we instead need to pay attention to, is their modes of understanding and
conceptualizing the historical experience of modernity – of experience itself being in
epochal crisis, as it were.

While there were many others who wrote eloquently on the same subject, what sets
these three apart, and is of particular significance to this thesis, is their focus on the twin
conditions of the metropolis (or the modern city) along with new emergent forms of capital
as creating the conditions for the experience of modernity. So also, in their analysis of the
metropolis can be identified an underlying theme of the general concept of estrangement –
both spatial and psychological – of the individual in the big changing spaces of the city, of
classes from one another, of individuals from one another, and the individual from one self,
and so on. A classic example of the working of this leitmotif in all three can be found in the
way that they articulate this new experience of the blurring between the boundaries of the
private and public space – of the bourgeois interior space and the public space of the street

36 
 
or the city. The unsettling, ‘strange’ and often terrorizing feeling engendered by this new
feeling of space is such that the response to private space is of claustrophobia (in the image
of the house collapsing unto itself) and to public space is of agoraphobia (of the fear of
open spaces). So too, in their work (among others) is present the leitmotif of the Marxist
critique of capital in their experiences of/in the metropolis. In Simmel for instance, this is
identified in his characterization of the hollowing out of life engendered through the money
economy with its regulation of all life based on “punctuality, calculability, and exactness”
(1997 [1903]: 70). In Kracauer this can be evidenced in his critique of the capitalist Ratio
that produces a space of void, of empty abstraction. In Benjamin, it is seen among others, in
his characterization of the arcades – that quintessential space of nineteenth-century
consumer fetishism, and the flâneur who epitomizes the ontological dimension of the
advanced capitalist system.

Another reason to have explored their writings derives from the recent impulse
particularly in the field of urban studies to draw on their work to argue for what might be
simplistically put, instances of ‘resistances to modernity.’ In/through their various
narratives, there is identified an unconditional criticism of modernity, premised on which
then, the ‘alternatives’ they supposedly suggest (the flâneur, the blasé outlook, the detached
hero, and so on), are deployed as channeling parallel/alternative experiences of modernity.
What we need to note is that while we certainly see in their writings a critique of
modernization processes, it was certainly not unconditional, nor did it by default imply
‘resistance.’ Resistance as articulated in their writing, it ought to be noted, is not a self-
conscious act of ‘countering’ but a means of counteracting, or to put another way, of
making sense of these experiences.

In this regard, it would be useful to evoke Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of

modernity as an attitude. In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault notes:

… I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a

period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary
reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and
feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a

37 
 
 relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the
Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the
“modern era” from the “premodern” or “postmodern,” I think it would be more
useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has
found itself struggling with attitudes of countermodernity. (1984: 39)

This struggle of modernity with countermodernity is not some struggle between the pre-
modern, the modern and the postmodern eras in a mere teleological sense. Rather, the very
attitude of modernity, as Foucault makes clear, is constituted in/through its struggle with
countermodernity. To put it differently, countermodernity and modernity are at once
constituted in the struggle with one another. This conception of countermodernity will be
returned to time and again in later sections of this chapter, as well as in the rest of this
thesis.

Bringing the discussion back to Benjamin, Kracauer and Simmel, with regard to the
spatial images they present (be it the arcades for Benjamin or the hotel lobby for Kracauer),
very often there is read into them an overdetermination and seemingly self-evident nature.
This in turn has led to their not being considered ‘constructions’ – often textual
constructions – of space immediately thereby associating their historical and physical
referents to those that correspond with the conditions of our own times and spaces. It is
against this (fashionable) trend that we have also elicited some of the key narratives of
Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, to argue that their new conceptions of the spatial
experiences of modernity were not made in the tone of being causes of social change or as
illustrators of social history. Spatial experiences for them constituted primarily analytical
instruments and/or methodological tools through which to elucidate upon both the textual
and social domain. And lastly, it has been to draw our attention to a lineage of thinking and
writing on modernism and modernity in its relation to space and architecture, apart from
that which is commonplace and programmatic as found in much writing from ‘within,’ so
to speak. What they offer are analogous points of entry into histories of ‘the new
experience of space’ characterized through the aesthetic practices of modernism.

38 
 
 While Simmel, Benjamin and Kracauer wrote of the experiences of modernity in
their own times as it were, it would be useful to gain some retrospective insight into the
concept. While there has been a significant body of work on questions of modernity, we
will briefly take into consideration the work of Marshall Berman (1988 [1982]). It has
specific resonances with some of the larger concerns of this thesis, in particular for
Berman’s broader understanding of modernism as a cultural response to modernity. Unlike
many others in the last few decades who have conceptualized modernist practice in extreme
terms of celebration or condemnation, Berman sees modernism as a dialectical process
where one mode of modernism both energizes and exhausts itself attempting to repudiate
an earlier form of modernism. This, as we see throughout the chapters in this thesis,
becomes a most crucial way towards arriving at more nuanced conceptions of modernist
practice.

Arguing that critical thinking about modernity in the latter half of the twentieth-
century seems to have flattened and polarized our experience of it, Berman suggests that
the primary instance of such tendencies can be evidenced in the construction of the
tradition-modernity binary. According to Berman, both uncritical enthusiasts and opposers
of modernity defined it as a tour dé force – as overwhelmingly awesome – and futurist, but
with no role for man. Contrarily, he argues that in the more cautious voices, one witnesses
an acknowledgement of the capacity of modernity and modern technologies to determine
man’s fate; but in these voices there emerges a belief in the capacity of man to understand
it, and to fight it. Somewhat akin to Simmel, this fight or resistance as articulated by
Berman, we must understand, is integral to the paradox and contradiction that modern life
abounds with. And the resistance to it he argues, displays more than anything, a deep
commitment to modernity and its deepest values. In other words, where the former
understanding of modernity denied any role for the modern man as subject, the latter
retained it. However, Berman continues, in light of such a dominant view of modernity as a
totalitarian paradigm, as static, and ‘one-dimensional’, two perspectives emerged – one,
that searched for a vanguard who was ‘outside’ modernity; and two, as a consequence of
this futile search, the acceptance of futility and despair.

39 
 
 Indeed many accounts stress this overwhelming nature of modernity such that in the
process of exploring practices of modernism, the condition of modernity is seen as
unconditionally impinging upon it, where modernism is often solely defined in terms of its
mirroring of all aspects of modern life. Further, it is when modernism is understood as such
cultural ‘reflection’ of a modern social existence that often modernism and modernity are
seen as synonymous. And in turn, such an understanding of modernism and modernity as
being coeval is also largely predicated upon the view that modernism as a cultural attitude
necessarily reflects, and in turn affirms every aspect of modernity and modern life. In
contradistinction to this, Berman offers a definition of modernism as “any attempt by
modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a
grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it” (5). This broad definition
allows him to see a whole range of practices and activities as part of a dialectical process,
while retaining the ability to develop creative interplay among them. And to that extent,
Berman argues, if modernism is thought of as a struggle to make oneself at home in a
constantly changing world, there can be no definitive mode of modernism – it is a constant
struggle. This is the broad conceptual framework of modernism that we will proceed with,
when we examine in the course of this thesis a range of articulations around modernism as
cultural response, aesthetic practice, attitude and experience.

Modernism: Form and Function

While the practices of modernism are inextricably tied to experiences of being modern, it is
in modernism’s self-proclamation of its cultural forms as being ‘avant-garde’15 as opposed
to the low and popular cultural forms that abound modern life, that we also find modernism
moving away from being preoccupied with the conditions of modern life towards
addressing the issue of aesthetic autonomy. While this is only one historical trajectory of
the artistic avant-garde, it has held sway over aesthetic debates for much of the twentieth
century. Indeed, it was argued, the emancipatory potential of art was to be achieved
through its aesthetic autonomy – from content and purpose. It would be crucial to note here
that the argument for aesthetic autonomy in modernist practice was not the same as
                                                            
15
I use this in the sense that art critic Clement Greenberg used the term ‘avant-garde’ to refer to high art
forms and practices by setting them in opposition to what he termed ‘kitsch’ or low art forms. For further
reference see, Greenberg, 1939.

40 
 
arguments for the achievement of an aesthetic standard in the face of the pervasive
condition of modernity, i.e., despite modernity, and not because of it. The latter, falls more
in the line of being a critical response to modernity and modernization by means of an
engagement with it, whereas the former denies, at least in principle, any and all such
engagement.

Following the arguments for aesthetic autonomy, it has been said that “to label a
modern form of art as modernist is to stress both its intentional and self-critical
preoccupation with the demands of a specific medium, and its originality with regard to the
precedents that medium avails” (Harrison, 2003: 192). In fact, it was argued, only by
divorcing itself from the ‘concerns of society’ would modernist art be able to draw upon
the creative dialectic by which its aesthetic or ethical value was sustained; with aesthetic
becoming an end in itself. Or in other words, the obsession of modernist art with form, or
what is understood as formalism, thus becomes only too evident – where it gains elevated
status as avant-garde – such that the form speaks only to the medium and genre itself; not
so much to the conditions of modern life, or even the conditions that produced it as art.

On the other hand, the long history of modernism in the field of architecture also
consists within it a long history of movements against form – encapsulated through the
notion of function. In other words, given as we know that formalism’s self-definition was
made possible only through the externalizing of something else, this ‘other’ of formalism
has at times been simply the so-called ‘content’ of social, political and other concerns. But
at other instances, the ‘other’ of formalism has been identified in the concept of
functionalism, particularly in the context of architecture. For instance, Kracauer, as part of
his discussion around the hotel lobby being the site of the aestheticization of modern life,
notes the difference between the purposive and purpose-free arts through his re-visitation of
Kant’s definition of aesthetic beauty vis-à-vis that of the sublime and the latter’s
relationship to the transcendental subject (1997b [1927]). In his critique of the notion of
‘purposiveness without purpose’ or in pointing to the limits of an aesthetics that is an end in
itself, he argues that such aesthetics, which the hotel lobby embodies, signifies only its own
emptiness.

41 
 
 With regard to discussions around aesthetic autonomy for our specific context of
architecture, it would be crucial to consider the work of Theodor Adorno. His ideas of
artistic autonomy however, differed greatly from advocates of the notion of art for art’s
sake. This is best illustrated in Adorno’s address on the question of functionalism titled
“Functionalism Today,” where we find him arguing against the existence of the notions of
both ‘pure form’ and ‘pure function,’ stating instead that even the so-called ‘purpose-free’
arts have a social function (1997 [1965]). And therefore, it is also in Adorno that we see
articulated the figure of a modernist vanguard who believed fully in the capacity of art to
offer “a vision of an alternative world” (Leach, 1997: 5). His observations on functionalism
were made in 1965 in the immediate context of the functionalist movement in architecture,
and arts and crafts in Germany, particularly the work of architects involved in the
reconstruction of post-War Germany. Adorno frames this debate interestingly by taking as
his entry point the polemical essay by Austrian/Czech architect Adolf Loos16 titled
“Ornament and Crime” (2002 [1913]). Loos’s essay, which was originally written in 1908
encapsulates the beginnings of what in modernist architectural history is considered to be
the ‘Form follows Function movement,’ and it is for this purpose that it will be useful to
briefly capture its main arguments.

For Adolf Loos, the ornament is that impediment in the evolution of humanity and
the development of a national culture. It signals a state of infancy for any developed
civilization, and is tantamount to being criminal.17 Writing in the context of the Arts and

                                                            
16
Adolf Loos was a highly influential architect whose writings on theories of architecture have been seminal
to the formation of a discourse on modern architecture in Europe. Loos reacted against the neo-historicism in
architecture that was the conventional practice in Vienna at the time. He played a particularly important role
through his criticisms of the Vienna Secession – a movement of painters, sculptors and architects that was
formed in 1897 in Vienna. The Vienna Secession itself was a reaction against the conservatism of academic
tradition and historicism in forms of art, and the architects who were part of this movement such as Otto
Wagner, focused on a move towards incorporating purer geometric forms into the designs of their buildings.
However, Loos’s criticism of the Secession was that their designs and fabrications – supposedly new – were
arbitrary and hollow, becoming just another ‘style.’
17
Loos draws parallels between the biological development of a human being from infancy to adulthood
(immaturity to maturity; amoral to moral being) and the civilizational development of man from primitive
being to modern man. He then quickly instances how while for the (primitive and amoral) Papuan, certain
acts such as slaughter and cannibalism would not be considered criminal, a modern man doing the same
would be convicted of crime and termed a degenerate. Attributing the first work of ‘ornament’ to the
expression of ‘natural excesses’ referring to the paintings by cave men, he immediately infantilizes this drive,
making a case therefore for how such acts of satisfying the ‘inner urge’ through erotic symbolism by modern
men would consequently be deemed criminal. The power of this urge of course, is strong, and the measure of

42 
 
Crafts Movement in Vienna, Loos argues that in the history of preservation of art, only
those articles with ‘ornamentation’ (purpose-free/formal) have been preserved, abandoning
thus the simple, elegant ‘utilitarian’ (purposeful/functional) objects of the craftsmen.18 For
Loos, not only was function separate from ornamentation, it preceded it, and was thus more
‘essential’ to objects than ornamentation. He states: “The evolution of culture is
synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use” (30). In short, any
work of ornamentation in the present, would be no more than a retrogressive revivalism.
And ornament, unlike purposeful arts, was without purpose – purpose-free. For Loos
therefore, the elements that modern man ought to draw from the past are not its
ornamentations, and second, what elements one draws on the past, ought not to be
replicated as is, but creatively and innovatively worked upon. Or to rephrase, what was to
be extracted, sublimated or abstracted from the past, was not its ornamentation or its
purpose-free arts, but its functionalism and purposeful arts.

Loos’s separation of the purposive from the purpose-free arts and its implications,
contradictions and predeterminations are thoroughly explicated and critiqued by Theodor
Adorno. Adorno’s lecture “Functionalism Today” was delivered to the German Werkbund
(German Association of Craftsmen) in 1965. Speaking against the backdrop of the
wholesale propaganda of functionalism in architecture in Germany in the context of post-
World War II urban reconstruction, Adorno states at the outset that the anti-ornamental
movement is premised upon enquiring after only that which is ‘essential’ and necessary in
them, reacting against all superfluous elements. This trend, he observes, can be seen even
in the so-called purpose-free arts (high art) where given the absence of a canon, the
responsibility has fallen upon each individual to determine such considerations, regardless
of whether or not it was motivated by external purpose.

                                                                                                                                                                                     
any culture of a civilized nation therefore can be gauged by the degree to which its peoples give in to these
‘urges.’
18
Loos was significantly influenced by the English Arts and Crafts Movement of the time. He criticized the
ways in which its influence was attempted to be subverted by the Arts and Crafts Movement in Vienna,
leading to a retrogressive and defensive nationalism. His critique of the state and the nationalist discourse of
the time, needs then to also be seen in light of the anti-British sentiment and what he termed the ‘false
patriotism’ of the Viennese Arts and Crafts Movement.

43 
 
 Noting that the anti-ornamental movement derives from the Kantian notion of
‘purposiveness without a purpose,’ Adorno argues that this notion does not however,
account for the historical dynamic. The concept of the ornament contained within it, he
argues, a historical dynamic since, “what was functional yesterday can therefore become its
opposite tomorrow” (6). Therefore, to critique the ornament was no more than critiquing
that which had lost its functional and symbolic signification. Further, the question of
functionalism cannot coincide with practical function for, the purpose-free and the
purposeful arts are not in fact opposed. He states, “The difference between the necessary
and the superfluous is inherent in a work, and is not defined by the work’s relationship – or
the lack of it – to something outside itself” (6). This separation between the purposeful and
purpose-free arts, which was absolute in Loos’s thought, one that for Adorno was also
bound within bourgeois cultural criticism, in fact stems from the polemic against/between
the applied arts and crafts. And the problem he notes, underlying Loos’s preaching for a
return to “an honest handicraft which would place itself in the service of technical
innovations without having to borrow from forms of art” is that it is bound to discussions of
objectivity (6). And therefore he concludes, “Purposefulness without purpose is thus really
a sublimation of purpose” (7). Or in other words, there can be no such thing as pure form,
despite pure form or aesthetic autonomy being the truth content based on which the idea of
Art itself operates. He adds, “The illusion of purposefulness as its own purpose cannot
stand up to the simplest social reality” (7-8). Meaning, just as there is no such thing as pure
form, neither is there such a thing as pure function. And therefore, according to Adorno,
what inevitably happens to functionalism is that “the absolute rejection of style becomes
style” (8).

And lastly, in the context of architecture, Adorno observes, “In the productive sense
of space, purpose takes over to a large extent the role of content, as opposed to the formal
constituents which the architect creates out of space. This tension between form and
content which makes all artistic creation possible communicates itself through purpose…”
(13). At the heart of the functionalism debate then, is a struggle against the obscure secret
of the fetishistic character of art. But given that art in order to be art according to its own
formal laws must be “crystallized in autonomous form,” (14) the struggle of functionalism
is in vain, since it is caught up in a series of social entanglements which then reduces all
44 
 
concerns to that of ‘usefulness’ framed thereby in terms of aesthetic insufficiency. The
domain of the aesthetic however, he concludes, is that which can provide new impulses,
forcing us to re-think the separation of domains of purposeful and purpose-free arts,
imagination and ornament, of usefulness and uselessness in art, and so on. Aesthetic
thought for Adorno, becomes the site then, through which these contradictions are not
overcome, but pursued, in the hopes that it can “surpass art by thinking it” (17).

Within architectural history, the centrality and naïveté of the role of ‘function’ to
the modernist movement is one that has been repeatedly insisted upon in terms of critique.
Over the last few decades particularly, this critique has emerged from the postmodernists.
Noting that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism has been articulated
primarily in terms of the shift from ‘function’ to ‘fiction’, Stanford Anderson (1987)
brilliantly argues that not only is “functionalism” an inadequate concept, but that the
recurrent use of it as a definitive principle of modernist architecture, is a fiction that has in
fact dulled our understandings of it, even while we reject it. He takes up the case of the
seminal 1932 exhibition and book titled The International Style organized by Hitchcock
and Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The term ‘The International
Style’ was coined specifically for this exhibition but became more or less synonymous for
all modernist architecture.

Anderson argues that this is ironic especially since one of the criteria that the
authors/curators deployed for the select pieces of architecture that embodied their search
for a new ‘style’, was in fact a primary rejection of ‘functionalism.’ In short, if
functionalism was supposedly central to the modernist movement, what is striking is that it
was precisely its avoidance that made possible inclusions into the mantle of ‘The
International Style.’ Indeed, Anderson notes, Hitchcock and Johnson’s polemic against
functionalism was articulated in simple terms of it’s being ‘an opposition to style,’ and
nothing more. This moment, Anderson argues, was crucial in setting the tone for a debate
that continued for decades between the so-called functionalists and anti-functionalists,
thereby denying a serious study into either the formal or functional characteristics of all
buildings under consideration in the modern movement. He states, “…if it was a fiction to
treat functionalism as a crucial feature of even part of modernism,” within postmodernism,

45 
 
it became “an even grosser fiction to treat the whole of modernism as functionalist” (21).
Much like Adorno, Anderson too proceeds to then argue against the fallacies inherent to an
understanding of functionalism in architecture in terms of its ‘usefulness’.

One of the reasons behind providing some extracts out of this long history of the
debate between form and function is to note its centrality within aesthetic discussions at
large in the twentieth century. More specifically, it is to draw our attention to a lineage of
positions regarding this debate that also finds similar expression within discourses on
modernist architecture in India. While the specificities of this debate will be explicated in
detail in the third and fourth chapters of this thesis, what we need to note for the moment is
the fact that there were similar concerns raised with regard to questions of function and
form, particularly following the moment of high modernism or ‘The International Style’
and the ensuing criticisms that labeled it as being antithetical to the existing cultural forms
and heritage of India. Anderson has noted that allegations of functionalism became central
to the questioning and ultimately rejection of the Modern Movement in architecture.
Functionalism stood for in those debates as being antithetical to form or style. In the
context of criticisms of modernist architectural practice in India, however, we will see the
ways in which more than an opposition between form and function, a coalescing of the two
constitutes the crux of this debate. This will be nowhere more evident than in discussions
around Chandigarh where the supposedly pure functionalism of the International Style, also
came to stand in for pure form. So also, this will be illustrated in the response to revivalist
architecture in the 1960s and 1970s by those championing a ‘truly Indian modernist’
architecture as one that would move beyond questions of style and capture instead the
essence of culture.

Architectural Modernism in India: A Discourse of Form

Against this larger backdrop, we may begin to think through the formalist predicament of
architectural modernisms in India. To begin with, it might be useful to ask what the
architectural modernisms here defined themselves in relation to. Andreas Huyssen notes
that modernism defined its identity “in relation to two cultural phenomena: traditional
bourgeois high culture… but also vernacular and popular culture” (1986: viii). We will

46 
 
begin with the premise that the project of modernity emerged in India through the colonial
encounter and propose, taking a cue from Huyssen, that this high culture against which
architectural modernism defined itself in relation to was predominantly the classical
colonial built forms and spaces. This is more than evident in the anti-colonial rhetoric
inherent to the beginnings of modernist practice that emerged in India. Concurrent to this,
another question for us to explore would be whether, and in what way, this sentiment
against colonial forms and practices of architecture was related to larger discourses on
nationalism. In other words, it will be productive to examine the modalities through which
this initial move of defining modernism in terms of its opposition to colonial forms,
engendered a ‘national’ discourse on architecture. Indeed, one of the anticipations of this
thesis is that we will be able to see a complex relation between nationalism, modernity, and
modernism as constituting the mainstay of architectural discourse in twentieth century
India. This is not merely to be attributed to one of the early formal turns which made a
move towards seeking architectural forms from the national past, i.e. the revivalist project.
In fact, an overview of the long history of architectural modernism in India will evidence to
its predominantly nationalist prerogative, albeit devoid of rigorous conceptual frameworks.

Let us undertake a cursory overview of the normative classifications/categorizations

of twentieth century architectural movements in India made in books that survey this long
history.19 They would undoubtedly provide an insight into these seemingly inherent
formalist tendencies, as well as the ways in which the history of modernist architecture is
seen as a quest for authenticity with regard to expressing the ‘national modern’. All of these
surveys were written post-1990s, and take the period roughly between 1880 and 1990
(oftentimes leading up to 2000) under consideration. This is significant for two reasons:
first, they all mark the late 1980s and early 1990s as constituting a definitive break, mostly
as a result of the onset of processes of economic liberalization, and the globalization of the
world’s economy. The larger changes – be they social, technological or political – are
however, seen as having impacted architectural forms and styles. In other words, this
period is marked as one that saw a fracturing of a predominantly modernist architecture

                                                            
19
The books I refer to here are Bahga, et al, 1993; Desai, et al, 1997; Lang, 2002; Peter-Gast, 2007, among
others.

47 
 
into many types – be it the post-modern, the ‘Modern Indian Vernacular’, the return of the
Neo-Traditional style, and so on.

Such dominant architectural trends post-1990s, on account of their being

contemporaneous to the writings of these surveys themselves, are thereby unable to come
under historical purview, and yet nonetheless signposted. However, insofar as the 1990s are
identified in these books as signifying a break, it makes possible for the authors to look
back at the long history of modernist architecture with a historical lens. In short, while
there were certainly many attempts prior to the 1990s to write histories of various
movements, decades, regions or initiatives within twentieth century architecture,
historicizations of modernist architecture become possible largely in the 1990s.

Returning to the categorization of movements and phases in these texts, it would be

important to note that despite narrating a more or less linear chronology of accounts,
without exception, all books acknowledge the simultaneity of and considerable overlaps
between various phases. While this in itself is commendable, what it will illustrate is its
stress on formal and stylistic breaks. This categorization typically begins with a lack of
clarity around where to locate the architecture (self-defined as the Modern Indian
Architecture Movement) of Sris Chandra Chatterjee20 and other such practitioners in the
decades preceding Indian independence, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. While this
self-stated ‘Modern’ movement called for a return to the cultures of the past thereby
drawing on past architectural forms, styles, and motifs, it has in retrospect largely been
dissociated from the Modern Movement proper.

The Modern Indian Architectural Movement is thereby bracketed off as

‘Revivalism,’ ‘Neo-Classicism,’ or ‘Traditionalism’ in architecture, on account of its
refusal to ‘abstract’ forms, choosing instead to ‘imitate’ them. Conversely, the only way
through which it becomes part of modernist history is when there is no definition of what
constitutes modernism proper – or in other words, where everything is modern. We will
explore this in some detail shortly. So also, in most surveys, there emerges a parallel
question, although to a much lesser degree, of whether one might consider within this

                                                            
20
Chapter 2 of the thesis discusses at length the work of Sris Chandra Chatterjee.

48 
 
lineage of the modern, the works of British architects who set up architectural practices
independent of the PWDs of the British Raj.21 What is significant to note however, is that
in all accounts, without exception, both Revivalist practice and the work of some British
architects are acknowledged as constituting a pre-history of the Modern Movement.22

Next in the linear history of modernist architecture is considered an Early Modern

phase, located between the 1930s and 1940s, leading up to the 1950s, following the
institutionalization and professionalization of architectural practice. This is a phase that
highlights the emergence of ‘first-generation modernist architects’ from India, deeming
them to be inspired by the ‘International Style’ or the ‘International Modernism’ of
Bauhaus architects such as Walter Gropius, Adolf Meyer and other architects like Frank
Lloyd Wright.23 Interestingly, the Art Deco movements that occurred within this period are
also subject to indecision with regard to their status within the modernist paradigm on
account of their ‘derivative’ forms.

Following this Early phase is the decade of the 1950s – of International Modernism
– that is identified primarily as an outcome of the work and ideas of Le Corbusier and the
‘International Style’ in Chandigarh.24 This high modernist moment is also associated with
the early works of Indian architects like B.V. Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde, Charles Correa and
                                                            
21
For instance, Bahga, et al write: “During the period 1925-1947 the truth dawned on British architects that if
their works in India were to pulsate and vibrate with life, these must mirror the culture and the living styles of
the Indians. British architecture in India was now compatible with the habits, ways of life, culture and the life-
giving spirits of the natives… This form of architecture evolved from modern concepts and ideas and could
well be called the harbinger of modern architecture in India… These buildings… provided an admirable
precedent for the advent of modern Indian architecture” (7).
22
Jon Lang terms the period between 1920 and 1950 as the phase of ‘Early Modern Architecture in India.’ He
uses this precisely in the sense of a pre-history to ‘truly modernist’ architecture, which he then qualifies as
having occurred as part of three more or less successive generations. Falling under its purview would be the
Classical and Neo-Classical buildings of British architects and the Art Deco and Indo-Deco – most of which
were primarily located in Bombay, Calcutta or Delhi. He notes that while ‘International Modernism’ was well
under way in Europe by the 1920s, there were only a handful of exceptional instances of such buildings in
India. The last ‘movement’ to fall under this ‘Early’ phase he notes is the Modern Indian Architectural
Movement of Sris Chandra Chatterjee. This movement is seen as a ‘reaction’ to the ‘Western’ modes of
articulation, and is perhaps because of this, or despite this, on account of the importance it accorded to ‘the
desire to be Indian.’ For more, see Lang, 2002.
23
Bauhaus (literally ‘house of construction’ or ‘school of building’) was an art school at Dessau, Germany
which ran between 1909 and 1933 and its aesthetic became hugely influential for modernist architectural
practice. Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, whose
practice consisted of an aesthetic engagement with industrial society. Adolf Meyer (1881-1929) was also a
German architect associated with Bauhaus. Frank Lloyd Wight (1867-1959) was an American architect,
writer and educator who developed the principle of ‘organic architecture.’
24
Chapter 3 of the thesis contains a detailed discussion on Le Corbusier and Chandigarh.

49 
 
Anant Raje, and leads well into the 1960s. Once again, it is the 1950s that simultaneously
saw the post-independent ‘Neo-Classical’ moment of revivalism – along the lines of the
early revivalist moment of Sris Chandra Chatterjee – as can be evidenced in the
architectures of say, the Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi designed by B.E. Doctor, the Vidhan
Saudha at Bangalore built under the supervision of the then chief minister, K.
Hanumanthaiya, or the design of buildings in the new capital city of Bhubaneswar. And
much akin to the early Revivalist moment, here too there occurs the dilemma of
considering this ‘Neo-Classical’ moment within paradigms of modernist histories.

Following this is the late-1960s turn in Modernist architecture – what has been
called the ‘Post-Nehruvian Modernist’, ‘Neo-Modernist’ or most often, the truly Indian
Modernist (Lang, 2002) moment in architecture – which levelled a critique against the
erstwhile modernist movement as being a predominantly ‘stylistic’ one, and inert to the
particularities of location and psycho-social understanding. Instead, this moment is seen as
proposing a ‘conscious’ rendering of the ‘Indian Modern’ and can be evidenced in the
works of Correa, B.V. Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde, Raj Rewal and others. Most of these
architects initially began with an allegiance to ‘International Modernism’ but their ‘truly
Indian’ works are largely read as attempts to strike a balance – tempering both high
modernism and revivalism – by denying the universal claims of modernism, initiating
instead a search for ‘contextualism’; to adapt Modernist ideas to ‘the necessities of India’
(Desai et al, 2007; Lang, 2002; Bahga et al, 1993; Gast, 2007). And lastly, from the late
1970s onwards, postmodernist architecture – what is in such histories loosely understood as
having brought in a pastiche of elements of historical and symbolic importance into
architecture, but working upon and transforming them rather than ‘directly’ copying them
like they claim the Revivalists did. This genre is largely identified in the works of the
followers of American architect Robert Venturi, most notably, Romi Khosla.

Before we examine the implications of such processes of categorization, it would be

worthwhile to contextualize them within attempts made at defining what constitutes
modernism in such writing. For instance, in their book Architecture and Independence,
Desai, et al note:

50 
 
 Modernism is simply a state of being up-to-date. The use of the term here implies
changes from the past in certain structural characteristics of a society as well as the
adaptiveness of socio-cultural systems to change… Modernism is an attitude. It is
based on the perception that change away from the past is required in order to make
the future better… Architecturally, the term ‘modern’ has been applied to whatever
contemporary ideas were regarded as good. The Modern Movement however,
represented a specific set of attitudes towards design. Modern architecture
responded to the need to provide for new patterns of behaviour that resulted from
political and technological change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It
began with a perception that the classical orders of composition do not present a
universal basis for the appreciation of beauty in architecture. (1997: 14-15)

Both generally and in the specific context of architecture, we note the distinction they draw
between the ‘modern’ as a state of being up-to-date, and the ‘Modern’ as consisting of
specific historical attitudes. What is also evident however, apart from the absence of
framing the particular configurations of power that produced a colonial modern, is the
apparent ease with which conditions of modernity coalesce into aesthetic attitudes of
modernism. Second, the latter, despite various shifts and changes, is seen as consisting of
some internal unity and identity, as it were. Further, the defining trait of aesthetic
modernism, as signaled by the Modern Movement, is identified as a specific set of attitudes
‘in design’ that insisted upon a rejection of traditional orders of composition – be they pre-
modern or classical colonial orders – thereby locating modernism squarely in the realm of
the formal.

So also, despite noting modernism’s general movement away from the past, what is
missed out are precisely the terms through which this past was referred to and thereby
repudiated, or the tropes through which this ‘modern’ was claimed. In other words, not
only is there no conceptual move made beyond a general definition of the modern as a state
of being up-to-date, but in so doing, there also seems to be no distinction made between the
‘modern’ and ‘the new.’ It would be useful here to note the distinction that Fredric Jameson
draws between the two. He writes, “…to feel our own moment as a whole new period in its
own right is not exactly the same as focusing on the dramatic way in which its originality is

51 
 
set off against an immediate past” (2002: 21). The specific configurations of this break with
the past, is in a sense that which crucially endows the modern with the specific meaning it
bears to us. And therefore, by eluding the demarcation of a line between experiences of the
‘new’ from experiences of the ‘modern,’ the quest to identify that which was ‘truly modern’
becomes a largely formal prerogative. Not only this, by framing the debate in terms of an
opposition between those who reference the past and those who repudiate it, what is missed
out are the nuances of modernist practice, which this thesis will argue, does not and cannot
indeed repudiate the past in its entirety. The tension between the two modes of practice
then, is perhaps one of who ‘appropriately’ references the past. In other words, this is a
debate of authenticity where the ‘truly Indian modern’ are those successfully strike a
balance between the past and present in their quest to express architectural forms
appropriate for a modern India.

Yet another book titled Modern Traditions: Contemporary Architecture in India by Klaus
Peter-Gast makes an attempt at framing the history of modernism as follows:

The concept of “Modernism” in 20th century Indian architectural development

remains difficult to grasp, as it was used within numerous stylistic developments,
following the spirit of the day. Starting with the efforts made by Europeans in the
1920s, the idea of “modern architecture” as a revolutionary and innovative force
started to make cautious headway in India in the early 1930s. But at that time any
Western thought and practice introduced as a British import was seen as “modern”,
as India had no uniform independent architectural movement in the early 20th
century. Ideas influenced by the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier and then brought to
India were modern, and the subsequent Art Deco movement, influenced by both
regional and exotic motifs, also counted as modern. Even neoclassical architecture
was still pronounced modern into the 1950s and even the 1960s. But Modernism in
India was more like an overall approach to life. It meant designing the world
positively, improving it, doing better than the required standard, being progressive
and inventive, and this certainly included great visionary minds like Tagore and
Nehru. British architects in India felt themselves to be modern, because they could

52 
 
 work within an experimental field, almost without constraints and regulations, with
an unusual degree of freedom. (2007: 19).

While Peter-Gast’s narrative too makes a general definition of modernism as constituted

through its progressive and visionary ethos, what it clearly illustrates however, are the ways
in which architectural modernism in India was historically claimed through formal and
stylistic prerogatives. He notes the ways in which every ‘style’ could legitimately claim
being ‘modern.’ He attributes this on the one hand to the absence of any ‘uniform’
architectural movement indigenous to India, and on the other to the subsequent ‘import’ of
modern ideas from Britain. In other words, while the ‘origins’ of modernism in India may
have been derivative, the absence of any uniform movement, according to him, engendered
a seemingly open-ended approach to what constituted modernism. This is why, as Peter-
Gast argues, it was a modernism within which every ‘style’ could be considered modern,
regardless of their being contradictory to one another.

Such attempts at defining what constituted modernism in architecture in India by all

three texts taken into consideration above first and foremost reinforce the conflation of
‘modern’ with the ‘new’, as is made clear even in Peter-Gast’s narration of how any
stylistic development “following the spirit of the day” deployed the concept of modernism.
Even if, as we know, the question of the new was an important trope through which to
articulate the experience of modernity, none of the authors go into any detail or elaboration
with regard to what constituted this ‘newness.’ Second, they all note the legitimacy of
every claim made to the modern by practitioners of differing and often contradictory styles
in this long history. However, what remains to be explored, are the terms through which
these claims were not just made, but also refuted. This refrain of ‘everything is modern’
points not just to a lack of conceptualization with regard to modernism, but moreover
equates its break with the past, with that of modernity’s break with history. Further, even if
we were to accept that all claims to the modern were legitimate, not all claims were
legitimate in the same way. We need to account for the ways in which historically, certain
movements and phases that made the claim to being modern were commented upon,
evaluated, critiqued and eventually set in opposition to newer claims.

53 
 
 The normative categorizations of the history of the modern movement and their
predominantly chronological narratives indicate more than anything else, a progression in
the quest for an authentically ‘national modern’ architecture. All of these trajectories of the
modern movement are charted and thereby studied predominantly with regard to their
stylistic or formal breaks and departures, while acknowledging considerable overlaps.
Interestingly, while the points of overlap are conventionally located within the domain of
the formal, it is in their sites of opposition that they are seen as being ‘ideological
differences,’ as it were. For example, Charles Correa would be seen as drawing on the
‘International Modern’ style even in his later ‘Indian Modern’ work; but this is to be
understood as a formal prerogative. On the other hand, differences between the
International Style and the Indian Modern style are to be located at both formal and
ideological levels, as though it were possible to neatly separate the two. Similarly, the
‘Indian Modern’ style would differentiate itself from revivalist architecture through
claiming that the motifs and forms it draws on are not part of the project of glorifying the
past but are attempts at making architecture meaningful to the context of India’s present via
a process of ‘abstraction.’

Such an analysis that explicates their dissimilarity locates the site of their
differences on the one hand, as speaking for different ideas and visions of Indianness and
Indian identity. On the other hand, this distinction is marked through the claim that the
Indian Modernists did not take direct references from the past unlike the Revivalists – in
other words, a formal distinction. What we need to note is that these sites of affinities and
divergences, despite having been articulated as purely ‘formal’ ones, are indicators of the
ways in which the very language of architectural forms are embedded in larger cultural and
ideological battles over representation. More importantly, what they evidence to, is the
ambivalence of the relation between modernism as an aesthetic phenomenon/attitude, the
project of modernity, and the idea of modern nation-state. It is this ambivalence that is
conflated within dominant architectural discourses such that modernism/modernist
architecture, modernity, and modern nation-state are seen as coeval and synonymous.
While these and other conflations such as between vernacular and regional or indigenous
and national may be true of aesthetic modernisms world over, it is the precise nature of
them in the context of India – of engendering a deeply nationalist discourse of architectural
54 
 
modernism that is being analysed and unpacked over the course of this thesis. It illustrates
the ways in which such obfuscation has allowed for an engagement with architectural
modernisms in terms of their formal trajectories, of tracing their ‘Western’ origins and
influences, and thereby of delineating their search for Indianness and debating their
‘appropriateness’ or authenticity.

Architectural Expressions of the Idea of India

The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw efforts by British architects in India –
both official and independent – to move beyond replicating existing trends in England and
instead to imagine architectural expressions appropriate in India. Because such efforts took
place over a period of time, their forms, immediate concerns, and contexts were varied. A
singular overriding trope amidst such varied efforts however, can be identified in the
attempt through the professionalization of architects to illustrate its superiority over the
engineering profession which undertook a majority of the construction work for the
colonial government. For instance, the impact of the English Arts and Crafts Movement of
the mid- to late-nineteenth century on British architects in India was significant. Deriving
from the Gothic revival in England, the advocates of this movement in the field of
architecture professed a return to traditional forms.

The impact of this movement is multifarious since it was a precedent not only for
the Indo-Saracenic style but also for many other practices such as revivalism and the later
‘Indian modernist’ or what we call ‘indigenous modernism.’ The peculiar positioning of the
Arts and Crafts Movement in its relation to colonial architecture, specifically the Indo-
Saracenic (which came to stand for Imperial architecture) is explored at length in the next
chapter. There, we also call attention to the ambivalence of the place of twentieth-century
British architecture within the discourse of architectural modernism in India. Despite such
efforts by British architects, it is with the nationalist movement that architectural discourses
associate the beginnings of efforts in arriving at architectural forms best suited to express
the intent involving a search for Indian identity.

This quest for an ‘appropriate architecture for/of India’ as has been noted already,
was raised consistently from the 1920s through to the present, and is integral to the story of

55 
 
architectural modernisms in India. What we will observe here very briefly, but will
elaborate upon in the following chapters of the thesis, are the modes and modalities through
which the question of nation was framed within specific paradigms in these debates. It goes
without saying that these paradigms are not mutually exclusive, and are separated here
purely for analytical purposes.

The first involves a predication of architectural discourse upon the notion of nation
as a pre-given entity about which architecture would contemplate as afterthought for a
suitable expression/reflection. Writings on architecture without exception (to the best of my
knowledge), despite differing opinions on which form/style/phase ‘truly’ expresses the
‘idea of India’, work with the underlying assumption that there exists an entity such as the
nation, which architecture would attempt to express or translate in its most ‘sincere’
manner possible. Both prior to, and after the formation of the modern nation-state, the
conception of nation-as-civilization is central to the framing of modernism in its definitive
relationship to the past. The second paradigm within which the question of nation has been
framed is with regard to the ‘influence’ of Gandhian and Nehruvian nationalisms and their
village v/s city ideals and views on modernity and the modern nation as distinct and
opposing. While a number of binary oppositions underwrite modern architectural discourse
in India, including oppositions between east-west, tradition-modern, vernacular-national,
indigenous-international, and so on, the proposition here is that most of these oppositions
come to be subsumed within an overarching opposition constituted between Gandhian and
Nehruvian thought and ideals.

The third paradigm can be seen in the historical moment of the conflation between
modernism and the modern nation-state. This is to be evidenced for instance, in the ways in
which the Nehruvian vision for a secular modern nation-state that would be free from all
social orthodoxies is normatively read as engendering an attitude in modernist architectural
practice that strove to do away with all its traditional concerns and therefore regarded as
alienating. The site which epitomizes this apparent conflation between modernism and the
modern nation-state is undoubtedly Chandigarh. Indeed, where Chandigarh was
championed for the ways in which it constituted a newer imaginary of the modern nation-
state, it later became the locus of critique by architects, planners and cultural critics alike.

56 
 
 Here it becomes pertinent to draw attention to the one of the modalities through
which this critique was levelled. This involved positing modernism and the use of
modernist language as antithetical to the cultural heritage of India. Post the 1970s
particularly, and well into the 1980s, modernism was repeatedly critiqued and the
Nehruvian ideals were declared as having failed, not only for being derivative – i.e. in
expressing an idea of the modern that was borrowed wholly from the West, but for also
being alienating since it was devoid of any ‘image of India’ – in its failure to understand
the function of architecture as communicating not only meaning, but also identity.
Importantly, despite all such criticism of Nehruvian modernism, most writers are quick to
identify the 1950s as representative of the nationalist nature of the Modern movement in
architecture in India. However, Nehru here is seen as symbol of the nation-state intervening
directly and instrumentally in the direction that the future of modernist architecture is to
take. This is often illustrated by means of reference to his general espousal of cities and
modern lifestyles and values fostered by it. More specifically, it is illustrated through
reading the choice of architect and architecture for the city of Chandigarh as representative
of Nehru’s imagined blueprint for the nation. Corbusier and Nehru together – with
Chandigarh as testimony – have come to stand for a strongly westward-looking,
modernizing, and not to mention, symbolizing the national state’s intrusion into the domain
of architecture and planning.

And lastly, we see the functioning of a paradigm within which the concept of the
‘indigenous’ modern is seen as ‘truly’ and ‘authentically’ expressing national identity. The
associated term with the ‘indigenous’ is often that of the ‘vernacular’. Both terms share an
ambiguous position within architectural discourse. When used interchangeably, they refer
to forms that emerged as a result of, though not necessarily in affinity to, the introduction in
India of western modern architectural practice, the colonial encounter in general. However,
despite this seeming interchangeability, the vernacular is by far the more contentious
category. Sometimes it stands for forms of built practices that existed prior to India’s
colonial encounter. It also refers specifically to built practices in villages following the
onset of modernity. And at yet other instances, it also refers to regional styles. For instance,
Desai et al (1997) write of the vernacular as an architecture that is a traditional practice of
habit, of trial and error. Elsewhere, they describe it as a ‘pastiche architecture of popular
57 
 
taste.’ At yet another juncture, it connotes rural building practices. However, what ties all
three variations together is its location in a sphere ‘outside’ of modernist discourse – as
localized practice that often carries connotations of being retrogressive or an ‘un-self-
reflexive’ practice. It is modern insofar as it is contemporaneous to modern times, but its
practices effectively take place in a seemingly parallel sphere outside modernism.

The term indigenous on the other hand, is not circumscribed by such limitations. As
opposed to the vernacular, in dominant discourses, the indigenous is necessarily a modern
category. Indigenous tendencies are often seen as alternative, necessary steps to move away
from or to counteract the hegemony of the colonial/western or ‘international’ architectural
styles. Therefore, the indigenous is not only framed as steering clear of the ‘retrogressive’
tendencies of vernacular architecture, but more importantly, it is regarded as a deeply self-
reflexive practice, achieving a fitting balance of modernist (here taken to mean western)
principles and seemingly implicit, although largely unexplained ‘Indian’ ones.

It is crucial to note that in much of the writing by modernist architects in India, M.K.
Gandhi becomes an important figure through which they articulate the characteristics of
indigenous architecture. This involved referencing his village ideals, propagation of
Swadeshi, or even principles of ‘simplicity’ and self-reliance and making meaning of them
in relation to larger questions on nation and representation, by means of abstracting them.
The proposition here is that unlike the statist interventions and international aspirations that
came to define the Nehruvian paradigm in architecture, Gandhian principles become one of
the crucial means through which the ideal of the ‘indigenous modern’ or the ‘truly Indian
modern’ is worked out, authenticated and systematically reaffirmed. Indeed, if many of
these architects like Charles Correa, B.V. Doshi and Achyut Kanvinde are championed as
the apotheosis of formalist modernism in architecture that retains and in fact fully translates
the zeal of communicating Indian identity, we see in the last chapter of the thesis that
Gandhian principles constitute in part – not directly or instrumentally – the framing device
through which this is achieved.

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Section 02: The Alternative Moderns

As against much early Western scholarship that framed the discourse of modernity as a
singular process within a universalist history with the West as the axial point from which it
expanded/spread to the rest of the world, there has emerged considerable scholarship
particularly in the social sciences to counter this. Many of these positions have been
articulated against the backdrop of the post-colonial conditions that various previously
colonized nation-states found themselves in. Arguing primarily therefore against the
civilizing mission of colonialism and the Orientalist discourse at work therein, these
scholars, falling largely under the rubrics of postcolonial studies, have argued for the
necessity to ‘de-provincialize Europe.’ The work of postcolonial theories, some of the
major themes of which have been articulated in India via the work of the Subaltern Studies
group, has therefore been to “force a radical re-thinking and re-formulation of forms of
knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western
domination” (Prakash, 1990: 383). There was felt a need to counter the hegemonic
derivative discourse of nationalism and modernity that presented a singular and universal
vision.

For instance, in the context of nationalist discourses, Partha Chatterjee examines the
history of Western thought which posited all non-European nationalisms as derivative
(1986). He argues that an engagement with the complexities of national thought,
particularly as fought out in the terrain of politics will illustrate the fact that, even while
drawing on Western rational thought, nationalism, in its attempt to produce a ‘different’
discourse, rejected all the claims and justifications that were produced with this knowledge
by colonialism. In other words, for Chatterjee, nationalist discourse in India is not
derivative since firstly, it selects only some aspects of Western thought, that too not in its
entirety. And secondly, even when it does so, it is precisely in order to reject colonial
claims of superiority and validations of imperialism which were made employing the same
logic of reason.

So also, various positions have been articulated regarding the discourse of

modernity in India – by placing it vis-à-vis the colonial encounter, the formation of a post-
colonial nation-state, and more recently, the phenomenon of globalization. Interestingly,

59 
 
while the earlier articulations of these theories of modernity and modernization were made
in relation to nationalism and the formation of the nation-state, some of the recent renewed
interest in exploring theories of modernity seems to be driven primarily by conditions of
globalization and the fact of having arrived at what is apparently a ‘post-national’ or
‘transnational’ condition of the present. Despite entirely differing conceptions, the
argument common to all (nationalist, Marxist or postcolonial) perspectives is that
modernity cannot be considered a singular homogenous process; that it was not handed
down to various parts of the world by Europe (the West) – be it through the spread of
capital or of rationalization (Kaviraj, 2000).25

Apart from this commonality around what the discourse of modernity was not, all
these positions are quite different with regard to their theorizations around what modernity
in India was. For instance, one of the major contentions has been with regard to whether
modernity could be considered a ‘rupture’ or a break with the past, and if so, where it might
be located. So also, while many have engaged with these questions at the level of the
political discourse of modernity itself, others have explicated their positions through an
analysis of various cultural manifestations that emerged through the experiences of
modernity – namely modernism. Of particular interest here would be to undertake a brief
overview of those positions that suggest that the experience of modernity in India (and non-
European locations in general) is ‘alternative’ to the dominant narrative.

Indigenous/Alternative Modernities

There has in the recent past emerged the concept of an ‘indigenous modernity’ or more
generally, an ‘alternative modernity’. The articulation of such conceptions can be seen at
work in some scholarship on architectural and urban studies, although certainly not limited
to it. The concept of indigenous/alternative modernities has primarily emerged through
positing a critique of the notion of the ‘masterplan’, or the discourse of planning at large,
which was viewed as a site of imposition of the technocratic will of the architect-planner-
expert upon a populace, the lives of whom from which the expert was cut-off. More

                                                            
25
Sudipta Kaviraj writes that the causal principle at work in the idea of modernity as a singular homogenous
process is either attributed to capital (as in the case of Marx) or to the abstract principle of rationalization of
the world (as in the case of Weber). For more, see Kaviraj, 2000.

60 
 
importantly, such attitudes became signifiers of a form of modernity from without that
imposed itself onto a land and its people. Keeping more or less in line with such critiques,
there has emerged what Gyan Prakash has called ‘the urban turn’. This ‘turn’ broadly
consists of numerous studies that have in the recent past examined the social fabric of the
city anew, no longer constrained by the burdens of academic disciplinary boundaries, or by
the ‘historicist discourse of the nation’ (Prakash, G., 2002: 7).

Through their enquiry into histories of the spatial organization of the city, these
studies present fresh accounts of urban histories primarily through the introduction of a
new range of material such as various forms of literature ranging from prose and poetry to
journalistic accounts and popular fiction, as well as cinema, political history, community
history, oral narratives, forms of civic activism, business and economic histories, and so on.
However, this urban turn, which is at once a method and discipline, runs the risk very often
of conceiving everyday practices of people and places, as inherently acts of subversion,
challenge, negotiation. In these acts then, are located indigenous ways of negotiating
modernity (which planning was quite obviously signifier of) in a manner that do not
dismiss colonial modernity entirely, but stake claim on it as one’s own – as indigenous.

Jyoti Hosagrahar’s Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and

Urbanism (2005) is identified here as one such illustration of this kind. Hosagrahar’s book
provides an account of a series of shifts in the architecture and urban spaces of the city of
Delhi in/through its encounter with colonialism and modernity. To quickly summarize the
book: Delhi was built over a period of time by many Islamic dynasties; it has been capital-
city of the Mughals, of colonial rule, and of independent India. As a city with tremendous
symbolic import, Delhi’s urban landscape has been witness to drastic renewal policies and
programmes. The colonial construction of ‘New’ Delhi under Edward Lutyens and the
Public Works Departments (PWDs) in turn reconfigured the Mughal city (Shahjahanabad)
as ‘Old’ Delhi – the old city. In an attempt at marking its rule as distinct and superior to
earlier Mughal rule, Old Delhi became the predominant site for colonial attempts at
bringing in public health and sanitation policies, altering existing spatial organizations, its
built forms, notions of public and private, and the use of public spaces, and so on.

61 
 
 Hosagrahar argues that an absolute effacement of such existing spaces and built
forms that would be replaced by modern spaces and forms did not occur. Instead, what
emerged was a fragmentary, ever-transitory urban landscape and built environment that
was nonetheless deeply embedded in the ‘modernity’ project. She argues that whereas this
would be commonly read as the ‘failure’ of Delhi to make the transition to modernity, it is
in fact evidence not of a failure to embrace modernity, but rather a means through which
the colonized claimed a modernity that was theirs – a modernity that did not subscribe to
notions of modernity imposed upon them, but rather one that was achieved through various
means of ‘negotiation.’ This experience of modernity outside Europe for Hosagrahar is far
removed from European modernity; emerging as/in entirely indigenous experiences and
forms despite its colonial/European beginnings. In other words, these shifts in architecture
and urbanism particularly in colonial Delhi are sought to be understood through the
framework of ‘indigenous modernities.’

Modernity, as is understood here, is not experienced in its context specificities, but

is an entirely ‘indigenous’ experience for various regions outside Europe to claim as
‘distinct.’ The problem with such a theorization of modernity is however, that firstly, if
‘indigenous modernity’ is the ‘other’ of European modernity – as Hosagrahar clearly
argues –, then in the very positing of itself in a binary relation with European modernity,
thereby defining itself as an opposite system, very often self-fashion itself in similar
hegemonic or dominant structures of power. Secondly, not only is the idea of modernity
fixed or objectified, but also that all contextual engagements with it are viewed as
struggles/resistances against European modernity.

Indeed this championing of ‘negotiations’ or ‘struggles’ as ‘indigenous resistances’

to European modernity is deeply problematic since it works with the presumption that the
struggle is between the non-modern and the modern paradigms (as if there were ‘not yet
modern’ areas), whereas in fact the ‘struggle’ – and it is imperative to identify struggles –
needs to be viewed as occurring within the discursive terrain of modernity itself. We have
to reiterate the heterogeneity of modernism as a discourse because modernity can never
exist in pure form or ‘as such,’ but rather in relation to an anti-modern. The process of
modernization involves the production of a practically infinite range of cultural hybridities.

62 
 
The argument is not that there are no processes of homogenization involved in the
mechanisms of modernization. However, reducing modernity to merely the imposition of a
standard homogeneity is ahistorical: for there can be no such thing as the modern unless
there is an anti-modern against which it can be dialectically defined. As Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari suggest, we can see such deterritorialization in terms of the production of an
isomorphic, rather than a strictly homogenous world system (2004 [1987]).26

Further, although Hosagrahar problematizes the ways in which modernity was

constituted in opposition to a traditional ‘other’, the concept of indigenous modernities as a
framework by itself reconstitutes this binary – subscribing to the notion of an exclusively or
‘distinct’ modernity, which contradictorily is argued as having ‘negotiated’ with European
modernity. So also, because then the struggle is seen as between the modern and the non-
modern/indigenous, there is an invariable romanticization of the indigenous that is
predetermined to arrive at a proposition (bordering on revivalism) of a return to indigenous
forms – be it the indigenous city, its spatial organizations, traditional forms of community-
based housing and so on. In turn, this romanticization spirals into an unproblematic
championing of indigenous spatial organizations, which in fact, it is crucial to note, were
sharply structured on caste, class and communal lines, not to mention part of structures and
economies that were dynastic and/or feudal.

This imperative to articulate an alternative or indigenous conception of modernity,

particularly at a specific point of time in history, needs to be examined. At first glance, it
seems to arise from an opposition to earlier hegemonic Western conceptions of modernity
which situated the West at the center from which modernity expanded to the rest of the
world. It is no coincidence then, that it also draws on the work of postcolonial criticism in
general and the Subaltern Studies group in India in particular, whose imperative to refute
                                                            
26
Modernization is a discourse that inhabits the interstices and the limits between itself and its erstwhile,
defining those limits and thus in effect capturing its others in that process. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A
Thousand Plateaus, “the problem of diffusion, or of diffusionism, is badly formulated if one assumes a center
at which the diffusion would begin” (481). Instead as they suggest, diffusion “occurs only through the placing
in communication of potentials of very different orders: all diffusion happens in the in-between, goes between,
like everything that ‘grows’ of the rhizome type” (481). Modernism is however preeminently an arborescent
rather than merely a rhizomatic discourse (or rather it is at once rhizomatic and arborescent). If it develops in
the in-between, at the limit between nodes of simultaneity (societies, spaces, culture), it also reorders those
nodes in terms of an overbearing arborescent lineage that denotes the various “stages” of its own completion
or in other words the scale of modernization and development with which we are all familiar.

63 
 
allegations of a ‘derivative’ discourse has been one of the primary modalities through
which it has argued against both Western and nationalist (and in some cases, Marxist)
hegemonies, or what could be called, ‘master narratives.’ These arguments against the
Eurocentrism of theories of modernity and modernization have found once again a new
lease of life in the recent past – under the aegis of globalization and the proposition of a
postnational or transnational present. In other words, the emergence of a theory of
indigenous modernity would need to be located in its framing vis-à-vis both postcolonial
theories and globalization.

It would be useful then to return to Partha Chatterjee, whose work, while not
thoroughly/only postcolonial criticism, falls somewhere in the relationship of it with
Subaltern Studies. To reiterate once again, Chatterjee argues that while non-European
thought certainly drew on Western forms of rational thought, it did so to produce a
‘different’ discourse, and further to invalidate the very dominant Western discourses. The
nature of this ‘different’ narrative within which national identities are constructed is argued
by Chatterjee elsewhere in his discussions on modes of civil society, as to be found in the
domain of the community (1990). Without elaborating any further on this, it would be
necessary at this juncture to situate the work of Chatterjee within a specific trajectory of the
writing of histories of nationalism.

With postcolonialism and its reconfigurations of historical and contemporary

experience (as postcolonial), at once, the colonial encounter was able to become the object
of historical study in a way that was markedly different from nationalist histories, with the
latter in turn exposed for the binaries operative within its discourses. It is precisely in this
unpacking of nationalist histories that we may identify to some extent the nature of the
‘different’ discourse that non-European nationalisms are argued by Chatterjee as producing.
The general argument of postcolonial and subaltern studies is that nationalist histories, in
their setting up colonialism in an oppressive and oppositional relationship to the nation (as
state and civilization) only reversed and therefore persisted with the binaries that
Orientalism (and by extension colonialism) as a discourse was premised upon. This thereby
produced a view of national history and culture that was, much like colonialism and
Western domination, both essentialist and deeply ahistorical. As Gyan Prakash writes,

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“when nationalism, reversing Orientalist thought, attributed agency and history to the
subjected nation, it also staked a claim to the order of Reason and Progress instituted by
colonialism; and when marxists pilloried colonialism, their criticism was framed by a
universalist-mode-of-production narrative” (1990: 383).

On the contrary, postcolonial studies, it was argued, was not defined in a

determinate relationship of opposition to the colonizer – it sometimes did acknowledge
and/or maintain strong connections with the colonizer, but via exploring the relations of
power that were operative in various contexts. Such forms of the re-writing of national
histories were then strongly driven by an imperative (among others) to present a nuanced
and complex understanding of the relationship of politics with concepts of modernity and
formations of the modern nation-state. Or to put it another way, it sought to explore the
historical dynamics between the nation-state and the conditions of modernity in its specific
relationship to the level-playing field of politics. As Prakash further explains, “criticism
formed in this process of the enunciation of domination occupies a space that is neither
inside nor outside the history of western domination but in a tangential relation to it. This is
what Homi Bhabha calls an in-between, hybrid position of practice and negotiation…”
(383). In other words, it is in this ‘in-betweenness’ – between an investment into the
undoing of Eurocentrism, and reclaiming the domain of History and the notion of the
political, that we are to locate the significance of the work of postcolonial studies.

We may note here however, that postcolonialism itself has been subject to
significant critique, among others, particularly on the grounds of its globalizing ambitions
for cultural discourse through its demolition of ‘binarisms,’ and thereby revealing
“societies globally in their complex heterogeneity and contingency” (Dirlik, 1994: 329).27
Arif Dirlik for instance, notes that the themes claimed for postcolonial criticism resonate
with concerns and orientations that have their origins in a new world situation that has been
variously described as global capitalism, late capitalism, and so on. He argues, “…first, that
                                                            
27
Arif Dirlik, via reviewing the term ‘postcolonial’ notes that its provenance is the same terrain that once
went by the name of Third World, and that the global appeal of postcoloniality seems to cut across national,
regional, and even political boundaries, thereby at least on the surface substantiating its claims to globalism.
Noting that there was a postcolonial consciousness and scholarship prior to the existence of the coining of the
term itself, Dirlik proceeds to situate its global condition within its First World origins. For more see, Arif
Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism” Critical Inquiry
(1994), pp. 328-356.

65 
 
there is a parallel between the ascendancy in cultural criticism of the idea of postcoloniality
and an emergent consciousness of global capitalism in the 1980s and, second, that the
appeals of the critical themes in postcolonial criticism have much to do with their
resonance with the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships
caused by changes within the capitalist world economy” (331). This he clarifies, is not so
much to do with a coincidence of time, but in the sense of one being a condition for the
other.

Dirlik further argues that postcolonial history, in/through its repudiation of all master
narratives, also resists all spatial homogenization and temporal teleology. This, he argues:

…requires a repudiation of foundational historical writing… The most significant

conclusion to follow from the repudiation of foundational historiography is the
rejection of capitalism as a foundational category on the grounds that “we cannot
thematize Indian history in terms of the development of capitalism and
simultaneously contest capitalism’s homogenization of the contemporary world.”…
Postfoundational history, in its repudiation of essence and structure and
simultaneous affirmation of heterogeneity, also repudiates any fixing of the Third
World subject, and therefore, of the Third World as a category… [With]
postcolonialism’s stance on contemporary global relations (and of its claims of
transcending earlier conceptualizations of the world)… attention needs to be shifted
from national origin to subject-position; hence a politics of location takes
precedence over politics informed by fixed categories… Since postcolonial
criticism has focused on the postcolonial subject to the exclusion of an account of
the world outside of the subject, the global condition implied by postcoloniality
appears at best as a projection onto the world of postcolonial subjectivity and
epistemology – a discursive constitution of the world, in other words, in accordance
with the constitution of the postcolonial subject, much as it had been constituted
earlier by the epistemologies that are the object of postcolonial criticism… One
might go so far as to suggest that, if a crisis in historical consciousness, with all its
implications for national and individual identity, is a basic theme of postcoloniality,
then the First World itself is postcolonial. (334-36)

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One of the reasons behind providing this rather lengthy citation28 is to point towards the
conceptual problems that are inherent to postcolonialism as concept, method, and condition.
While one certainly would not wish to identify the work of the Subaltern Studies collective
as belonging to this stream of thought entirely, in its association with postcolonialism, it
has by and large been represented, as Dirlik points out, in the enunciation of postcolonial
criticism. In that sense, Chatterjee’s conceptualization of nations and nationalism, which I
previously identified as standing between postcolonial studies and the subaltern studies,
might against this light be re-framed as belonging more properly to the work of subaltern
studies, but often read against the light of, or made into a general principle of
postcolonialism. Once this happens, as Dirlik notes, what occurs is that it may seem to
downplay the role of colonialism itself in history. More importantly, for our purposes here,
what we wish to take away from this astute critique of postcolonialism by Dirlik is with
regard to its relationship with global or late capitalism. It will then be possible to argue that
while not applicable to all claims for a ‘different’ discourse (since this has taken many
shapes), the conception of an ‘indigenous’ discourse of modernity however, fails to locate
its own imperatives within its emergence through the history and expansion of global
capitalism.

By returning to Hosagrahar, we may now be able to better situate her own framing
of discussions on notions of the ‘modern’ and processes of modernization. For Hosagrahar,
modernity is an “essentially global project” (perhaps rightly so, especially today) and she
points to the “fundamental connections of economic, political, and cultural inter-
dependencies across the world” that constitute it as being so (2005: 1). However, this
acknowledgement of the global project of modernity via a focus on its ‘inter-dependency’,
says nothing in particular about the nature of her position vis-à-vis global capitalism itself,
at least explicitly. In not stating it, what is implicit to her framing of an ‘indigenous modern’
then, is its own complicity with the processes of global capitalism. This will be unpacked
later. Further, keeping in line with this notion of indigenous modernity that is part of a
‘global project’, and its focus on the ‘cultural’, the nation as political entity, is absent in
what then is to be understood as essentially a postnational narration.
                                                            
28
Within this citation, the lines in double-quotation marks are from Prakash, 1992: 13. The square brackets
are mine.

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 And lastly, it would be important to pursue Hosagrahar’s brief reference to the work
of Arjun Appadurai (1996) – in particular, his discussions about modernity’s being at large,
and its irregularly self-conscious and unevenly experienced nature. Appadurai’s
theorizations are seen as enabling the location of her work as part of a project seeking to
“acknowledge the plural forms of modernity and to legitimize its many interpretations”
[Italics mine] (Hosagrahar, 2005: 2). When re-positioned as assertions of difference, these
alternative/ indigenous/ plural modernities, seem to signify two shifts: As M. Madhava
Prasad has argued, “…one is the assertion that there are different modernities, specific to
different regions and nations. The other, conflicting notion, is that beyond these
specificities, there remains a modernity with a capital M, still bearing its historical burden
and retaining its pre-eminent position in the world” (1998: 1021).

This is especially so, as Prasad argues, when one works with a conception of
modernization as initiated from above, written into which is a presumption of there being
areas of the world outside the purview of what is ultimately a capitalist culture (1021). In
light of this, it will therefore be extremely important to think through Appardurai’s
articulations about ‘modernity at large.’ Through a very brief engagement with his work, an
argument will be made with regard to the fact that these notions of ‘indigenous’
modernities at the very least emerge squarely within globalization’s ‘postnational’ moment.

Modernity according to Appadurai can no longer be examined in relation to its

workings within nationalism, but within the context of globalization and the ways in which
it shapes and alters our experience of the modern (1996). Taking media and migration as
effects that reflect “the work of the imagination” that modern subjectivity is constituted by,
he argues that they have the tendency to destabilize the role of nation-state as key arbiter of
social change. In other words, for him, the ‘cultural’ processes of globalization allow for
the regressive tendencies inherent to nationalism to be left behind, in order to arrive at what
he terms a ‘postnational’ condition. Media and migration both have the tendency to
irregularize and destabilize (for both persons and images) a sense of belonging that is
categorically/exclusively local/national or regional. It is this relationship that defines for
Appadurai the core link between globalization and the modern.

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 His theory of modernity as a rupture – emphasized by electronic mediation and
migration – is different from earlier postulations. He argues that 1. It is not teleological; 2.
It is not premised upon a large-scale social engineering project but by transformations of
everyday ‘cultural’ practices; 3. It is ambivalent with regards to the impact of modernity
upon issues of nationalism, violence and social justice; and 4. This rupture is transnational
or postnational, moving away from classical theorizations deep-rooted in the salience of
nation-states. He writes, “Globalization has obscured the lines between temporary locales
and imaginary nationalist attachments” (10). The nation-state then for Appadurai is “on its
last legs” (19). Given that it is a system that is part of an interlinked system which today is
riddled with diasporas, migration and rampant media communication, the nation-state is no
longer going to be the arbiter of the relation between globality and modernity. Appadurai
therefore proposes that we are now living in an era of the ‘postnational.’

This for him is conjunctural to the era of globalization and the subsequent/
simultaneous emergence of counternational and metacultural identity-based ‘culturalisms’
that have the potential to be not only transnational, but also strengthen the relation between
modernity and globality. Taking Anderson’s proposition of the ‘imagined community’
forward to what he terms ‘imagined world’, this moment of global flow, for him, allows for
contestatory and subversive community formations that could once have never been
achieved in the time of sovereign nation-states. However, it is crucial to ask at this juncture,
how different the force of this new imagination (that is specific to a deterritorialized
disjunctured world) is, from nationalist imaginations – at least politically. Given his
emphasis on the ‘cultural dimensions’ however, it seems that the difference is only in terms
of the scope of possibilities, exposition to media, or to fantasies that have geographically
exploded.

Appadurai’s narrative of the nation-state ultimately is one that posits the nation-
state to be in crisis with the onset of globalization, and as opposing entities. In doing so
however, the nation-state is explicated in solely oppressive terms in order for a globalized
(flat) world to exist and succeed. One must clarify that this is not to say that the nation-state
cannot be framed so, but that the process of his explication refuses to engage with the
nation in its political dimensions, regardless of framing it vis-à-vis ethnic violence or

69 
 
patriotism. For instance, he writes, “Patriotism which emerges from the strong link between
nation and state, is today in crisis since the nation-state itself is in crisis… Nationalism and
ethnicity… feed each other, as nationalists construct ethnic categories that in turn drive
others to construct counterethnicities, and then in times of political crisis these others
demand counterstates based on newfound counternationalisms. For every nationalism that
appears to be naturally destined, there is another that is a reactive byproduct” (161-2).
Therefore, Appadurai champions this era of the postnational, elaborately explaining its
implications:

… we are in the process of moving to a global order in which the nation-state has
become obsolete and other formations for allegiance and identity have taken its
place. The second is the idea that what are emerging are strong alternative forms for
the organization of global traffic in resources, images, and ideas-forms that either
contest the nation-state actively or constitute peaceful alternatives for large-scale
political loyalties. The third implication is the possibility that, while nations might
continue to exist, the steady erosion of the capabilities of the nation-state to
monopolize loyalty will encourage the spread of national forms that are largely
divorced from territorial states. These are relevant senses of the term postnational,
but none of them implies that the nation-state in its classical territorial form is as yet
out of business. It is certainly in crisis, and part of the crisis is an increasingly
violent relationship between the nation-state and its postnational Others. (169)

The nation-state is therefore superseded by the global order. Appadurai further locates his
work in the context of what he argues is an emerging dominant position within
contemporary thought that identifies, often solely, the realm of the cultural as central to
contemporary understandings of modernity. However, in locating culture as the focal point
through which he examines processes of modernity and globalization, not to mention
conditions of the nation-state, Appadurai’s work seems to address only the cultural
question, thereby keep away the political, in arguing for the obsolescence of the nation-
state. In his focus on asking the question, “What does globalization do to culture?” it
becomes only too easy then to negate the role of the state in domain of the political, and its
role in the ideology of global capitalism. So also, his understanding of globalization

70 
 
implicitly assumes the ‘flatness’ of the world, located within the paradigm of assuming an
‘economic globalization’. Indeed this glorified perspective on media and migration is made
possible only by viewing them as byproducts of globalization and not as counterparts of the
process itself.

As Fredric Jameson notes in passing, “To call this [free-market position] a media
victory is to underestimate the displacement onto language and terminology of political
struggle today” (2002: 10). In other words, what is missed out in Appadurai’s analysis is of
globalization as a structural and political phenomenon, a consideration of which would
have brought under its purview the shifting role of the nation-state therein, indeed, even a
critique of it, rather than hurriedly dismissing it. This point is eloquently articulated by
Partha Chatterjee (1998) who critiques Appadurai by arguing that the intention of moving
‘beyond the nation’ especially by working with a conception of global modernity once
again reinforces a colonizing pattern/intent. Chatterjee on the other hand proposes that it is
only by focusing ‘within’ the nation, i.e., through examining the relationship of democracy
and political society that the modernity project will itself destabilize. But before we
consider any further the implications of the relationship of global capitalism to modernity,
it would be important to examine another conception – one that bears only some similarity
to Hosagrahar’s proposition of an ‘indigenous’ modernity – that of pirate modernity.

Pirate Modernity

A significant work in the context of newer debates around architectural discourse and the
urban phenomenon over the last decade is Ravi Sundaram’s Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s
Media Urbanism (2010). Taking the capital-city of Delhi as his object of enquiry,
Sundaram primarily explores the centrality of media in its multiple dimensions to
understand the contemporary urban phenomenon. So also, in the face of technocratic
attempts at planning the spaces of the city combined with the overbearing presence of
media and media technologies, Sundaram identifies piracy or pirate cultures as providing
enabling resources for the subaltern urban population. Akin to Gyan Prakash’s critique of
planning ideals (discussed in detail in the next section of this chapter), Sundaram
extensively elaborates upon the ways in which planning, and particularly the notion of the
‘Masterplan’ – which is seen as the postcolonial elites’ solution towards materializing the

71 
 
vision of the Nehruvian ‘Ideal city’29 – lost its transformative zeal between the 1970s and
1980s. Centralized efforts at controlling the urban sprawl, Sundaram argues, failed in part
due to decentralized policies of planning and media life. The emergence of the middle-class
legal and civic subject, the innumerable non-legal housing sites, non-legal small-scale
production and industrial sites, the overarching print-media discourse on urban chaos, and
the simultaneous proliferation of media technologies, have all but dismantled, according to
Sundaram, notions of the Ideal city.

Particularly in the context of studies on Delhi, Sundaram’s work locates itself as an

offshoot of the kind of work that initiatives like Sarai have engaged with over the last
decade – in his study of bazaars, streets, housing societies, small production centres,
networks of piracy, non-legal sectors, legal battles for/ around the city, and the failure of
planning.30 Sundaram in his book postulates two forms of modernity – one, of civil and
legal subjects that uses the language of rights to make claims on the city, and the other, of
pirate modernity, embraced by those constituting ‘political society.’ The forms of pirate
modernity are read by Sundaram as disrupting state-produced forms of technocratic control
which were ironically engendered through the creation of newer market forces post 1990s.
But not only does it disrupt, pirate modernity is seen by Sundaram as an enabling factor for
the subaltern population in the city. It is enabling in that, these subaltern populations have
access to resources such as electricity, water or media technologies by pirating them (read:
the emphasis on their being agents), which would otherwise have been, economically or
otherwise, unviable for them to attain. Read particularly in the context of slums and the
pirating of water and other resources therein, the proliferation of piracy is seen by
Sundaram as both, byproduct and illustrator of the failure of planning.

However, what one needs to bear in mind while engaging with discourses of
planning, modernity and the practices of modernization is that it an argument like
Sundaram’s can only be made with the presumption where planning and modernity are
defined as top-down initiatives that exemplify the so-called ‘grid-work’ of modernity. The

                                                            
29
The Ideal City refers generally to modernist utopias of the planned city, but in Sundaram’s case also to Le
Corbuiser’s conception of the Radiant City as ideal.
30
Various projects have been undertaken by Sarai, an initiative of Center for Studies in Developing Societies,
New Delhi, under the banners of Cybermohalla and Social Media.

72 
 
problem with such a narrativization is two-fold: first, that while it is entirely right in
defining planning as top-down, to see it as solely a mechanism of state control is a form of
essentialization. And second, in so doing, it neglects the obverse of state control which is
state apathy and neglect towards these populations that constitute political society. So also,
it would be important to note the relationship of legality to piracy. That, in nation-states
where the rule of law prevails, and where in a globalized economy the movement of
technology and market supply is legalized, piracy would be deemed criminal/illegal, and
therefore minimal. It is the absolute effectiveness of the rule of law which determines this
relationship to piracy. The relationship of the state and capitalism (while in many senses, an
originary relation) is in India only growing, frighteningly fast however, and is ‘incomplete.’
We may note in passing that the term ‘incomplete’ is used here precisely in the sense that
Jürgen Habermas has deemed modernity an ‘unfinished project,’ with all its ambiguity that
“allows one to entertain the possibility that it is not yet complete,” and its problematics
therefore (Jameson, 2002: 11).

But given that this relationship is not yet ‘absolute,’ Sundaram’s work contrarily
seems to presume it as being so – in fact, it is the a priori condition for postulating the
theory of pirate modernity. That this relationship is in process can also be evidenced by the
fact that for instance, in nation-states such as India, one does not yet possess a clear picture
of the binary between the domains of legality and illegality. This will be elaborated upon
later. The use of subalternity then by Sundaram to champion the proliferation and the
enabling nature of pirate cultures seems to be premised upon an existing functioning model
of binary between the legal and illegal, where in fact, it hardly exists. In other words, it
would be difficult to posit piracy as flourishing in a situation such as in India, where the
rule of law has not yet come into its own. In conjunction with this, postulating that the
prevalence of pirate modernity (as some form of a subculture) signifies failure of state
control would once again only be possible in a state where the rule of law is absolute. One
would then also have to ask and re-think what exactly failure means in this context, and
whether in fact it is so. Further, to work with a singular definition of piracy would involve a
dismissal of the piracy facilitated by capitalism and the processes of globalization itself, not

73 
 
to mention those facilitated by the state, particularly with regard to their reliance on
informal sectors of the economy and ‘illegal’ immigrant workforces.31

And lastly, in his deployment of ‘political society’ as the site of/for pirate modernity,
Sundaram’s work seems to draws on the lineage of the work of Partha Chatterjee, closely
resembling in particular Chatterjee’s deeply conscientious essay-cum-question, “Are Indian
Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?” (2003: 170-85). Chatterjee’s essay on the conditions
of the Indian metropolis (bordering on the catastrophic) begins with the following premise:
that there have been attempts in the recent past to clean up cities, rid public spaces of
squatters and encroachers and reclaim it for proper citizens through forms of civic activism;
that this move towards suburbanization of the middle class is simultaneous with the move
(civic and legal) to preserve architectural and cultural heritage in cities; and lastly, even
with reclamations of public space by citizens proper, there is a proliferation of segregated
spaces in the city for the elite.

However, it is in the modes and modalities of his address that we can locate the
nuances of Chatterjee’s concerns. The Indian city post-1990s seems to take after the post-
industrial model of the city that became globally available, and this atmosphere and process
of economic liberalization has been central in the shift to a service-dominated urban
economy, witnessing unprecedented levels of segregation/exclusive spaces for the elite, and
a simultaneous surge in activity and visibility of civil society. More importantly,
liberalization and the notion of global connectivity has put immense pressure on
government policy which, instead of its erstwhile practice of catering to/caring for
members of ‘political society’ (who are not citizens, but population), has now turned
towards improving infrastructure and creating suitable conditions for the new service
industries – leading ultimately to increased social disparities.

As part of the process of placing this new scenario of the metropolis in perspective,
Chatterjee does a few things: first, to chart a history of the post-independent Indian city via
examining the nature of a participatory urban community that was fostered by members of
civil society in the 1950s and 1960s; second, to chart a history of the terrain of political

                                                            
31
This is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Sassen, 1998.

74 
 
society at the same time via exploring the work of governmental administration (be it for
electoral mobilization or through the logic of welfare distribution) in following a different
logic, including the emergence of a substructure of para-legal arrangements, to cater to
members of this political society; and third, to trace how and when the citizens proper
retreated into civil society. In doing so, he argues that the retreat (by citizens into civil
society) was caused in part due to their lack of connect and control over the metropolis
which largely followed colonial and imported Western models, and in part due to the lack
of any new models for the Indian industrial metropolis – one that was finally attained only
with the post-industrial city of global capital.

In one sense, Chatterjee’s essay can be thought of as a pre-history to Sundaram’s

narrative which begins by exploring the urban phenomenon post-1990s. Seen this way,
Sundaram’s impetus to examine and even celebrate pirate cultures and pirate modernities
does seem to arise from similar concerns about the conditions of the Indian metropolis
today. What is striking in Chatterjee’s essay, in somewhat of a contradistinction to
Sundaram’s postulation, is his exploration of urban life and the formation of communities
as committed to a ‘moral map’ (however flawed). Neither does he celebrate the failure of
planning, nor does he celebrate or for that matter even frame political society as a site of
subversion.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in his brief but brilliant reference to the fact
that “Suburban railway authorities in Bombay and Calcutta, when calculating their budgets,
routinely assumed that half or more daily commuters would not buy tickets” (176). Political
society then, for Chatterjee, is a murky and fraught terrain – with governmental
administration addressing population groups through multiple and flexible policies, for
various reasons not all of which were conscientious, yet done so without jeopardizing
overall structures. If such a conceptualization of the terrain of political society can in any
way be made to speak to Sundaram’s text, it would be in recognizing that piracy as a
domain does not and cannot exist outside the lens of modernity (with a capital M),
structures of government, and the expansionist, exploitative tendencies of global capitalism.
Rather, it exists precisely in/through this relationship. Lastly, and most importantly, when
Chatterjee turns to the decades post-1990 to examine the ‘unresolved questions that

75 
 
confront our urban present’, he notes, “it is possible that the absence of a plan – a moral
map or an imagined morphology – is not a bad thing… And yet, I seriously worry about the
capacity of unselfconscious local practice to beat back the formidable challenges posed by
the material as well as the imaginative forces of the new regime of globality” (190). What
this signals is first, the need for citizens to step out of their shells of civil society and
collectively engage with the conditions of our urban present. Second, it asks whether there
is any salience in ‘self-conscious’ intellectuals merely anticipating ‘unselfconscious’ local
practices to withstand the challenges posed by forces of global capitalism.

A Singular Modernity?

In stark contrast to such theories of alternative/indigenous/pirate modernity, and as a result

of and in response to them, Fredric Jameson puts forth the position of ‘a singular modernity’
(2002). Jameson begins with the premise that until recently, in full postmodernity, there
was a general agreement on all the undesirable features of modernity, which were all
different versions of each other. While this ought to have led to a ‘wholesale liquidation’ of
all things old, one curiously witnesses the return to, and re-establishment of them. This
return to the concept of modernity, which is not the same as it was before, is therefore, for
Jameson, curious. And while it may be tied to postmodernism, which ironically celebrated
the end of modernity, Jameson argues that its deeper motivations lie “in the new global
market, and not least in the global marketplace of ideas.”32 This he argues is so, not least,
due to one of modernity’s inescapable dimensions, namely modernization.

Modernization’s close ties with technology and notions of progress, and particularly
the changing contexts, meanings and versions of it over time and space (keeping in mind
Stalinist modernization and its critique by the West), had led to critiques of modernization
from various quarters. Jameson then writes, “Yet it is difficult to imagine how one can
shape an attractive political programme if you believe in the ‘end of history’ and have
excluded the dimension of the future and of radical change (let alone of ‘progress’) from
your political thinking” (8). The revival of the concept of modernity, he argues, is
somewhat of an attempt to solve this problem by means of suggesting that despite the

                                                            
32
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, pp. 7.

76 
 
discrediting of modernization, socialism, industrialization and so on, under-developed
nations still look forward to a ‘simple modernity’ as it were. This re-introduction into
discourse of the term ‘modern’ then is part of a ‘fundamental political discursive struggle,’
where free-market positions (that the West possesses something no one else has, but which
others ought to desire for themselves) are identified with modernity and are habitually
grasped as representing what is modern. The reassuring and ‘cultural’ notion embedded in
this ‘alternative’ modernity, overlooks therefore, the “other fundamental meaning of
modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself” (12).

Here however, we might wish to bring in a theorization of modernity from the

domain of postcolonial theories which will be useful insofar as this thesis primarily
concerns the architectural experience of colonial and postcolonial modernities in India. The
work of Timothy Mitchell (2000) offers a highly nuanced reading of modernity, beginning
by arguing against articulations of singular, global and alternative modernities. Mitchell
notes that recent moves to portray modernity not as a Western prerogative and instead as a
global phenomenon, while acknowledging the significance of non-Western contexts and
contributions, invariably measure these contributions to a singular history of modernity. He
further argues against theories of alternative modernities which in highlighting the multiple
origins of modernity do not account for what has provided imperial modernity its
hegemonic power. So also, that the vocabulary of alternatives still implies an underlying
singular modernity which has a multiplicity of ‘cultural’ forms in local contexts.

Finally, Mitchell analyzes works that place the empire (colonialism and imperialism)
within histories of modernity, to argue that modernity was a product of the interaction
between West and non-West. Mitchell’s contention with this mode of argumentation is that
it assumes the apriori existence of the very categories of the West and its exterior. Instead,
he argues that this interaction through colonialism produced the very categories of West
and non-West. In that sense, it is for Mitchell a colonial-modern but not necessarily a
modernity produced through interactions between West and non-West. In effect, Mitchell
argues that even theories that posit a singular modernity on account of modernity’s
inextricable ties to capitalism (Jameson) are problematic. First, that in presenting capitalism
and economic development at the heart of the modernity project, these works fail to take

77 
 
into account the colonial processes that underwrite capitalism’s own expansion. Second,
that in presuming a singular modernity, the latter is attributed a certain fullness or
coherence which modernity never had.

Mitchell here argues that while we must acknowledge the singularity and
universalism of modernity, we must all the same be attentive to the role of its constitutive
outside – the dangerous supplement in a sense – which makes this project always
incomplete. These elements that form the constitutive outside invariably infiltrate and
compromise that history, whose exclusion is necessary for the logic of modernity to be
articulated and realised. In other words, if modernity is defined by its claim to universality,
this universal is always an impossible realization as a result of its constitutive outside. Not
only this, these developments from the constitutive outside do not allow capitalist
modernity to proceed in any direct or coherent fashion, continually forcing it to reframe,
mutate, and multiply, thereby depriving it of any essential principle, unique dynamic, or
singular history (12).

Mitchell proposes that what gives the European-modern its coherence is the “way in
which the modern is staged as representation” (16). The argument is that the colonial-
modern produces an effect (a truth-effect) about the modern which we recognize as reality.
However, what in fact occurs is the production of a distinction/dualism between image and
reality, where the image suggested the promise of a reality which would perennially remain
incomplete. Representation however, gains its efficacy for the ways in which its referents
(the real – be it people, nation, economy) are produced to appear as though they existed
apriori to representation itself (19). And in relation with this, Mitchell argues that “each
staging of the modern therefore, must be rearranged to produce a global history of
modernity, and yet each requires forms of difference which introduce the possibility of a
discrepancy, that return to undermine its unity and identity” (xiv). In other words, Mitchell
argues that there was no such thing as a coherent original modernity to which one could
return to. And yet, insofar as a specific form of colonial modernity became hegemonic, we
must account for their ‘constitutive outsides’ that were so central to the very production of
this hegemonic modernity, such as slavery, colonialism, race, and so on.

78 
 
 In light of such theorizations, what this thesis attempts is an engagement with
precisely these notions that cluster around the word ‘modern’ in architectural discourse in
India. It examines the relationship between the concept of modernity and practices of
modernism, the various notions engendered in/through them. Modernism in architectural
discourse to a great extent has been written off as belonging to an older model, as noted
above through Jameson, as a place of centralized power and the realm of top-down
planning and statecraft. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, the thesis attempts to
provide some conceptual clarity amidst the general obfuscation around discourses on the
modern, in particular the ‘national modern’ in the field of architecture. It examines this
relationship between modernism, modernity, and the modern nation-state as played out in
architectural discourse in India for the most part of the twentieth century. It demonstrates
through the following sections and chapters that it is only through an unpacking of this
relationship that the modalities through which this quest for a ‘national modern’ in
architecture can be understood.

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Section 03: Marg: Writing Architecture

This section of the chapter explores the periodical Marg which began in 1946 and the role
of its editor Mulk Raj Anand as a case study. Marg is seen here as not merely creating a
site/platform for discussion on questions of what the nature of modern architecture should
be, but more importantly as performing the complexities of this debate through the work of
its editor, its editorial pieces, and its vanguardist role in setting the terms and visions for
modernist architecture in India. Examining some specific editorials and essays, particularly
between 1946 and the 1970, it explores the possibility of arguing that in lieu of the
missing/absent modernist manifestos on art and architecture, Marg effectively functioned
as a manifesto for modern architectural practice in India. Further, it will also argue that
despite the latter’s staunch support of the Chandigarh project, the many differing and often
contestatory positions presented by Marg captures the general confusion and uncertain
nature of what constitutes modernism in architectural discourse in India.

Architectural Discourses through the Prism of Periodical Studies

In the process of examining the nature of written discourse on any form of cultural
production, the role of periodicals has to be understood as rather unique in its constituting
of various identity formations in particular, and its relation to the body-politic of the nation
in general, via processes of dissemination. It is well known that print media in the form of
newspapers and periodicals, through the very modes, means and modalities of
dissemination have contributed immensely to varying discourses on the nation and region.
Indeed while the role of print media, or ‘print capitalism’ in producing what Benedict
Anderson has called ‘imagined communities’ of the nation is acknowledged, we are equally
aware of the fact that it is a domain of contestations, negotiations and resistances. In other
words, despite print technology’s power and reach to synchronize lives and provide a sense
of being together in the world at a moment, print media has at different historical junctures
contributed to the shaping of diverse, and often conflicting political, cultural and linguistic
formations.

Periodical studies as a field of academic enquiry is still-emergent, and its history is

in part attributed to the work of Cultural Studies, the school of New Historicism, and the

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‘cultural turn’ in departments of language and literature at large. As part of their attempts to
understand “how literary texts influenced readers and society in general…,” much scholarly
work engaged not only with the history of particular periodicals, groups of periodicals, or
the work of their editors, but also with the cultural work performed by them
(Johanningsmeier, 2012: 592). The other condition that is acknowledged as having played a
significant role in the emergence of periodical studies is the more recent development of
digital archives that have allowed for such studies ‘on a broader scale than ever before’
(Latham and Scholes, 2006). Indeed while periodicals were earlier examined only as
containers of ‘discrete bits of information’, the rapid expansion of new media technologies
have transformed the ways in which we view, understand and gain access to these objects.

Sean Latham and Robert Scholes33 write, “This immediacy, in turn, reveals these
objects to us anew, so that we have begun to see them not as resources to be disaggregated
into their individual components but as texts requiring new methodologies and new types
of collaborative investigation” (518). Keeping in mind the ways in which cultural studies
exposed the artificiality of distinctions between high and low forms of art, and of literary vs
journalistic writing, and showed that periodicals in fact were a site where high literature, art
and advertising mingled, Latham and Scholes argue that periodicals must necessarily be
seen as cultural objects, as opposed to either/merely literary or journalistic ones.

As part of the process of studying the ‘periodical context’, scholars have drawn
attention to the significance of exploring the very periodicity of the periodical, or what has
been called the periodical-ness of periodicals (Turner, 2006). This ‘periodical time’ – of the
periodical’s dealing with the present, continuously; and periodicity being a condition of
periodical print – negates the possibility of examining the periodical as a static, stable or
absolutely coherent site of discourse. However, it is precisely this periodicity and
temporality, further complicated through processes of dissemination, that locate periodicals
as active, heterogeneous, plurivocal sites of discursive formations. Mark Turner in his
study on the significant differences with which the notion of the future is conceived,
constructed and accounted for by print media in the nineteenth century writes that “these

                                                            
33
Sean Latham and Robert Scholes are directors of the Modernist Journals Project, Brown University;
University of Tulsa. http://www.modjourn.org/. Date accessed: 01 January 2015.

81 
 
distinct temporalities in print media suggest and construct different socio-cultural
understandings about time, in a period in which temporal shifts and disruptions were a sign
of its modernity” (312). It is also this framing of the periodical as negotiating with
periodicity and the notion of time that marks it as distinctive from other forms/genres of
print such as books. Margaret Beetham for instance, points to the periodical’s ‘double
relationship’ to time, in that, the periodical is at once part of a continuous series, and a
single issue (1996: 12). Beetham elsewhere argues that the “binding” of periodicals is in
fact an attempt at rescue – either “into book form which is physically [and conceptually]
more stable,” or rescue “from the periodical into a recognized genre” such as fiction, essay,
or poetry (1990: 25).

Keeping in mind this overview, the intent here is not to demarcate or pinpoint the
ideological underpinnings of MARG as a periodical, be drawn to making conclusive
interpretations, or view it as mere ‘carrier’ of architectural or cultural discourse. Rather, it
is to open up the periodical as a site of contingency, associations, and pluralization.

M.A.R.G. – Planning, Dreaming and the Manifesto

M.A.R.G. was an acronym for the Modern Architectural Research Group formed by Mulk
Raj Anand along with a number of other architects.34 That the acronym for both the group
and as a result, the periodical, came to bear in ‘happy coincidence’ the Sanskrit equivalent
to the English word ‘Pathway’ is noted and celebrated by Anand in the very first editorial
of Marg titled, “Planning and Dreaming”:

It is because an architect seems to us a symbol of the resurgent India, that the

Modern Architectural Research Group has come forward to sponsor this magazine
of architecture and art. And it is the very happiest coincidences that the abbreviated
designation of this association, MARG, should also be in classical Sanskrit the
equivalent of the English word Pathway. For that it what our society intends this
journal to be – a track which will connect us to the great highways of the new

                                                            
34
The Modern Architectural Research Group comprised of Anand himself, architect and town planner Otto
Koenigsberger, and Sri Lankan architect Minette de Silva, Bombay-based architects Minoo Mistry and J.P.J.
Billimoria. Minette de Silva’s sister Marcia (better known as Anil) was Marg’s assistant editor. For more see,
de Silva, 1998.

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 Indian civilization that will be built up, in spite of the difficulties and travails that
we will have to face in the jungle that our rulers have made of our world. [Italics
mine] (1946: 5)

Indeed, that ‘society’ intended this journal to ‘be’ so, perhaps is a referent to both, the
standing of its editors and group members particularly in the upper echelons of Bombay
society35 and their self-appointed roles as vanguards of a modern national culture. It is
important to note here the terms via which the present has been described here – of
‘resurgence’ and ‘new civilization’, and of architecture as ‘symbol’ of this.

That Anand and his cohorts decided to name themselves the ‘Modern Architectural
Research Group’ is by itself telling. Other than Anand, all other members of MARG36 were
practicing architects and planners. Many scholars have noted that the name (MARG) was
inspired by and is a direct reference to the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group
in London.37 The MARS Group, founded in 1933, was an “association of architects and
allied technicians united by a common belief in the necessity for a new conception of
architecture and its relation to society” (Gold, 1995: 244). It was modeled after other such
independent architectural organizations formed in parts of Continental Europe to support
the practice of modernist architects, and to represent the respective modernist practices of
their nations at CIAM.38 The MARS Group was then and today best known for its
publication of a Master Plan for London in 1942. Its extensive campaign in favour of
modernist ideals has been retrospectively critiqued as occurring “in the face of public
indifference and the persecutions, real or imagined, inflicted by a hostile architectural
establishment” (Gold, 1995: 244). During his stay in UK, Mulk Raj Anand is said to have
met the MARS Group, eventually becoming an active member of it (Dasan, 2008). In that
sense, Anand before returning to India, already worked with a notion that modernist
architecture formed a crucial part of the process of ‘nations becoming modern.’

                                                            
35
For a description of Bombay’s social scene in the 1940s, of which Anand and others were very much part,
see Lee and James-Chakraborty, 2012.
36
Henceforth, the group will be referred to as MARG and the magazine will be referred to as Marg.
37
Although mentioned in just passing reference, this connection has been noted in writings of Dalvi, 2005;
Lee and James-Chakraborty, 2012 and others.
38
Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, or International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM)
was formed in 1928 as an international organization committed to the spreading the reach of the Modern
Movement in architecture.

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 Regardless of whether the group consciously named itself after the MARS Group,
MARG’s work had been noted by James Richards, the London-based editor of The
Architectural Review periodical who drew parallels between the work of MARG and the
MARS Group. Richards wrote, “I have recently heard news from one of their number
[Minette De Silva], who is now in this country, of a small group of young architects in
Bombay who seem to have ideas and an international outlook as well as enthusiasm, and
have banded together under the name of MARG. They unknowingly chose the same title as
the English group that fifteen years ago tackled just the same task in this country” (de Silva,
1998: 79).

This citation by MARG of the MARS Group flag posts some conceptual parameters
that Marg (the magazine) began functioning within, such as the primacy accorded to
architecture in understanding/improving social conditions, the role of a ‘new’ conception of
modern architecture as the harbinger of this social movement, the significance of an
independent group of intellectuals/vanguards who would act as a “pressure group” to put
forth their ideas to the general public, the policy-makers, and practicing architects and
planners, and lastly, the need for a representative body (even officially) that would state the
objectives and needs of a national modern architecture for India to an international
community, thereby claiming and becoming part of it.39

Being a magazine of “architecture and art,” the scope of Marg was vast: it
extensively surveyed pre-colonial art and architecture, modern and contemporary art and
architecture, museums and questions of heritage, craft and folk arts, performing arts,
photography, and so on. It is also important to note here that the focus of the magazine also
shifted at various historical junctures – seen for instance, in the way in which there was a
declining interest in architecture beginning in the late 1950s itself. And apart from this, one
sees within the very contributions on architecture themselves, numerous and often
seemingly contradictory prisms – of countering both dominant colonial scholarship and
‘revivalist’ tendencies amongst Indian nationalists, of celebrating national heritage and
regional heritage without subsuming either into the other, of insisting on embracing the

                                                            
39
Minette de Silva represented MARG at CIAM VI in Bridgewater, England in 1947 as the delegate for
India-Ceylon, with MARG from then on becoming part of CIAM.

84 
 
modern and the ‘new’ while being simultaneously enchanted and perplexed by the past,
thereby engaging in a perpetual struggle to draw on the work of the past in its tempered
service to the present.

To that extent, this thesis does not presume to undertake even a cursory exploration
of the numerous sites and examples of architecture presented by Marg.40 What it does
however, is to limit its analytical purview to examining the conceptual frameworks through
which Marg constituted an architectural discourse on the national modern. For instance, its
initial interest in surveying “allied arts” was primarily anchored through the editorial
group’s investment in architecture. The opening editorial of the magazine by Anand defines
its breadth:

We consider Architecture, of course, as the mother art. And, therefore, we shall

naturally include within our orbit of discussion all the arts which help us to live and
move in the houses and workshops we build. (1946: 6)

Clearly the built environment was the most proximal concern of the group. And the
architect occupied central position in this narrative. What is important to note is that this
seemingly ‘natural’ inclusion of ‘all the arts’ was in fact historically a move against the
grain.41 We must remember that Marg began publishing around the time that the
professionalization of architecture was finally taking off.42 While other periodicals were
either turning exclusively to architecture (such as the Journal of the Indian Institute of
Architects), or relegating architecture to a miniscule presence within the larger cultural
domain (visual and performing arts), Marg curiously positions architecture as the axial
point through which the social and cultural domain is to be considered.

The editorial continues:

                                                            
40
For a concise account of Marg’s engagement with architectural modernity, see Lee and James-Chakraborty,
2012.
41
I do not count here periodicals that began prior to the 1930s for they emerged from different socio-
historical contexts.
42
This is not to deny the colonial beginnings of the professionalization of architects, the institutionalization of
architectural education and so on. It is simply to flagpost the time when this long process finally began to
crystallize (in both the meanings – of fully formed, and ossification). For a history of the professionalization
of the field in colonial and nationalist histories, see Glover, 2012.

85 
 
 We have literally, and metaphorically, to build a new India. And, as architects of
this new India,… we must… achieve a true synthesis between the lasting values of
our past heritage and the finest impulses of the new modern civilization which has
been growing up around us. (6)

In conjoining the role of architects (of the literal kind) with that of the ‘architects
(metaphorical) of this new India,’ in a double move, the vision of a ‘new civilization’ was
to be realized through architecture, and architecture was in turn handed a ‘vision.’ The first
article in the magazine following the editorial was titled “Architecture and You,” and was
jointly written by members of MARG (1946: 7-16). It begins by taking the reader on a
quick, caricaturish journey of how the built environment was the framework upon which
great civilizations were built, the article makes a series of loud (literally) proclamations:

ARCHITECTURE – What does it mean to us?

To most it signifies nothing more than an ornamented shell which is the outcome of
their likes and dislikes, prejudices and idiosyncrasies, without any clear relation to
the function of living in an organised society.

BUT THIS IS NOT ARCHITECTURE. ARCHITECTURE IS EVOLUTIONARY.

IT IS THE SYNTHESIS OF A STRUCTURAL SCIENCE AND AN EXACT
ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL NEEDS

Take the Indian street scene:

It is a conglomeration of hybrid architecture…

Are we so crazily unbalanced or as affected as the above mixture of spurious

antiquity and vulgar modernity would suggest?

WHAT SIGNIFICANCE AND RELATION TO OUR MODERN WAY OF

LIVING HAVE THESE STYLES? NONE AT ALL.

86 
 
 Because each of these styles in building was an expression of the particular age to
which it belonged…

AND WHAT DO WE DO?

WE BORROW THESE STYLES…

WHERE IS TRUTH IN ARCHITECTURE?

Are we so bankrupt in imagination and inspiration that we are unable to create our
own art forms giving expression to our modern way of life with that freedom which
is still before us – the freedom which a wise use of the machine as a new and
wondrous tool can bestow on us?

WHAT IS THIS NATIONALISM IN ARCHITECTURE?

The general implication is a grafting of an architectural expression, in vogue in a

bygone age, onto a structure arising from our present day condition built for our
present day needs.

BUT SURELY THIS IS A FORM OF RETROGRESSION – A FORM OF

ESCAPE IN THE ABSENCE OF OUR ABILITY TO CREATE A NATIONAL
CHARACTER EXPRESSIVE OF OURSELVES TODAY IN THE 20TH
CENTURY.

MODERN SCIENCE AND THE MACHINE SPEAK A COMMON LANGUAGE,

WHICH, IN BREAKING DOWN THE OLD REGIONAL AND SOCIAL
BARRIERS, GIVES AN EXPRESSION OF LIFE COMMON TO ALL THE
PEOPLES IN THE WORLD.

87 
 
 “In this age of steel and steam the tools with which civilization’s true reward will be
written are scientific, thoughts made operative in iron and bronze and steel and in
the plastic processes which characterize this age, all of which we call machines…”

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT – “Modern Architecture”

‘Destination Man’ is the aim of our new society. This ideal demands an architecture
dedicated to human needs and interests – Humanist Architecture. (1946: 7-16)

The reason for providing this long citation is to illustrate that, even though only stated
explicitly in retrospection, Marg without a doubt presented a manifesto – or perhaps a
series of manifestos – for modernist architecture in India (Anand, 1963: 2-3). And this
particular proclamation – in articulating the proximal relationship between architecture and
‘people’ – was based on the presumption that this relationship was previously unarticulated
and un-thought by all – those building, commissioning, seeing, thinking, and writing about
architecture. It is a call that signposts the role of this ‘new’ conception of architecture – as
science, as irreducible to being typecast into ‘styles’, as needing to give expression to
‘national character’ of the day, and with the ‘machine’ in playing a ‘constructive’ role in
breaking down ‘regional and social barriers’, to arrive at a common ground with all the
peoples in this world.

This ‘newness’ and being part of one world, is also stated in “Planning and Dreaming”:

There is a certain continuity in contemporary culture which is running through the

world from Moscow to Paris, London to Bombay, Shanghai to Honolulu, and New
York to Buenos Aires. It is the same kind of continuity which spread to the
metropolises of the world through the scientific ideas of the nineteenth century…
Certainly the currents of internationalism in thought are beginning to flow among
those who seek peace and work for a more intense and subtle civilization where
people can enjoy the plenty which science is in a position to afford us today…
planning is like dreaming – dreaming of a new world… (1946: 3-6)

These few sentences firmly locate India as partaking of the spirit of internationalism which
is a byproduct of this quest for peace and newer order, and carries with it a confidence and

88 
 
belief in the role of science in order to achieve this. This internationalism it seems, is more
palpably felt in the ‘continuity in contemporary culture’ that is shared by all the
metropolises of the world; akin to the continuity spread over metropolises of the world in
the 19th century due to the spread of scientific ideas. In that sense, Marg right at its outset
does not define it’s present as the beginning of a quest for modernity, but already identifies
it as belonging to a second historical moment, and as one that demands keeping an eye on
the past, precisely in order to be able to move forward. It is in the degree to which it re-
calls the past and calibrates its role in building and dreaming the ‘new civilization’ that we
need to pay attention to. The argument here is that, while it is in this definition of and
relationship to the past that Marg qualifies its present and forecasts demands for a future,
the definition to the past is itself often contradictory. Nonetheless, what is clear is that
Marg presented not just one, but a series of manifestos for modern architectural practice in
India, and this specific dynamic of being both periodical and manifesto needs to be taken
into account.

The modernist manifesto is itself a singularly unique ‘form’ of articulation. In

writing about The Communist Manifesto, Martin Puchner writes, “Divided between doing
away with the past and ushering in the future, the Manifesto seeks to produce the arrival of
the ‘modern revolution’ through an act of self-foundation and self-creation: we, standing
here and now, must act!” (2006: 2). He continues about the nature of manifestos in general,
“Manifestos tend to present themselves as mere means to an end, demanding to be judged
not by their rhetorical or literary merits – their poetry – but by their ability to change the
world… it is their form, not their particular complaints or demands, that articulates most
succinctly the desires and hopes, maneuvers and strategies of modernity: to create points of
no return; to make history; to fashion the future” (2).

Following this, we would need to undertake a reading of Marg not only as

periodical in its periodical-ness, but also as manifesto – as intervening in the present, past
and future at once. In other words, in Marg we have two seemingly distinct engagements
with time coming together. As periodical form, it engages with, as mentioned before, a
double-relationship with time – at once a single issue, and a continuous series. As
manifesto, it is a singular act – an act in/of time – making history, redefining the present,

89 
 
and envisioning a future. The argument here is that in subsuming/placing the manifesto
form within the periodical form, Marg thereby allows the ‘timeliness’ of the manifesto to
be deferred, while keeping intact the formal tone of the manifesto throughout.

Discussing Marg’s dreams of a planned city, particularly of New Bombay, articulated

incessantly in the 1960s, Gyan Prakash writes:

The modernist manifesto offered a brave new world, but they were really no more
than a “shrilly puritanical backlash” to the actual conditions of the city. Their ideal
of a rationally planned city held up the lure of order and harmony in the face of
unpredictability and chance of the actual city. The dream of a new city, where
spatial design was expected to shape a society of harmony and goodness, could only
be a ‘flight into Utopia,’ the ‘creation of a preferred reality far removed from the
complexities of urban planning for an existing city.’ (2010: 286)

Prakash continues to discuss and problematize the modernist ‘faith in the power of reason’,
the displacing of the social space of the city into a notion of the city as ‘spatial machine’,
and the delegation of the work of planning solely to ‘experts’. He frames Marg as an act of
the intelligentsia claiming to act on behalf of ‘illiterate people’ (Prakash quotes Anand
here), thereby critiquing how this single issue of Marg dedicated to the planning of New
Bombay constituted for Anand and the Bombay intelligentsia, a ‘public conversation’.
More importantly, demonstrating how ‘politics and society’ which was suppressed by the
planners took over the eventual planning of New Bombay, Prakash argues that modernist
planning, rather than addressing issues of social desires and needs, focuses solely on
creating a rational and efficient social space. And the failure of modernist planning for him,
results not only in the disenchantment of the people with the ideal of the state, but also
signals that these dreams of newness, are fundamentally those of the elite (282-87).

Prakash’s argument is certainly valid on many counts, especially about the elitist
nature of Marg’s discourse, the top-down nature of modernist planning, the ground reality
of everyday ‘politics and society’ that were seen as obstacles to the modernist dream, and
so on. However, it would be important to look at Marg as a site that was riddled with
contestations and contradictions, in an attempt at not taking an absolutist position. For

90 
 
instance, we might note here that the discourse of the modernist planned city in and of itself
does not preclude considerations of society and/or politics, nor does it preclude possibilities
of ‘chance’ and ‘unpredictability.’43 Further, while one might articulate certain shared
values and notions between forms of modernisms, the avant-garde, and the manifesto, we
also have to think of them in historical terms. In that sense, the role of Marg needs to be
understood vis-à-vis its adaptation of both periodical and manifesto forms in precisely
those historical terms. The argument here is in fact, that Marg’s contribution to
architectural discourse was more than ‘manifesto’ and more than ‘periodical’; if anything,
it was its ‘periodical-ness’ through which it put forward time and again, its manifestos for
architecture.

Martin Puchner continues to write about manifestos that they “need to be

recognized not only as symptoms and indices of social formations, as superstructure, but
also as moments of actual or attempted intervention, perhaps even as instances of the
superstructure altering the base” (2006: 2). In other words, while they might occur in the
social or cultural realm, they are not merely reflections/symptoms of, or reactions to
economic and other transformations, but play formative or transformative roles. Here, it
would be necessary to acknowledge that while Marg as manifesto actively ‘intruded’ or
intervened in the realm of architecture and planning, it was in turn absorbed by the latter as
well. Despite it being the work of a few members of an elite intelligentsia, Marg since its
inception was crucial in the interventions it made into architectural and planning practices.
Its active envisioning of the role of the architect and planner in the process of ‘nation-
building’ was instrumental in shaping conceptions and notions of the role of architects as
well as what constituted modern architecture in India. Indeed if anything, Marg then
becomes a classic instance through which one can capture some key aspects of the

                                                            
43
It might be useful to draw on the work of Michel de Certeau, who argues for acknowledging the difference
between the concept of city (or concept-city) and urban practices (1984). What is useful in Certeau’s
conceptualization is the possibility for the existence of the practices of everyday life that escape this
‘totalizing eye’. In other words, at times, presenting such a sweeping critique of the very notion of ordering of
spaces as effected by planning results in a misunderstanding of the efficacy of both urban practices and of
planning, for it essentializes both. While planning has historically constituted what Certeau calls a ‘strategy’,
– willful ‘productions’ by institutions and structures of power – and is often the ground upon which one can
locate acts of chance and unpredictability, the existence of the latter – what Certeau would call ‘tactics’ – is
not predicated on the former. Doing so would unjustifiably posit the two solely in an essentialized and
oppositional relation, thereby devaluing the work of chance and foreclosing all possibilities in planning.

91 
 
modernist discourse in architecture, such as its “self-authorizing and self-canonizing
ambitions and its grandiose claims to have broken with the past” (Puchner, 2006: 6-7).
What exactly this break with the past entailed, is an issue we will examine at length in the
next chapter.

In the context of studies on manifestos, it would be useful to invoke the work of

Gregory Ulmer (1994). While discussing the Surrealist Manifesto, Ulmer notes that all
manifestos of the avant-garde belong to the tradition of the ‘discourse on method’ and
proposes that they tend to include a common set of elements: Contrast, Analogy, Theory,
Target and tale (CATTt) (8-11). Contrast for Ulmer refers to distancing oneself from an
‘undesirable example… whose features provide an inventory of qualities for an alternative
method.’ This act of opposition, inversion and difference for Ulmer constitutes the
‘culmination of the opening move’ by the manifesto, and is often hyperbolic. The way for
method to become invention is by relying on Analogy and chance. It invents a dialectic by
identifying a figurative analogy – an incomparable contrast to ‘induct’ new meaning.

A new Theory then is invented, drawing upon other theories whose arguments have
been accepted ‘as a literal, rather than figurative analogy.’ The Target is often identifiable
in terms of an institution whose needs have motivated the search for the method. This
element therefore provides an inventory out of ‘what is lacking or missing, or out of the
excess of a new situation for which no practices yet exist.’ The Tale (also the tail-end of the
elements) is the representation of this invention or new method in some form or genre. This
element often ‘turns out to be a dramatization of the theory of knowledge appropriate for
the human subject envisioned by Theory.’ Ulmer concludes by writing that it is often the
‘tale’ that generates the other elements appropriate/suitable for it.

Since Ulmer considers these elements as generally applicable to all modernist

manifestos, if we consider Marg as manifesto, we would be able to identify the following:
Tale: Marg’s ‘tale’, the form of its presentation and the style of its essays, is that of the
periodical and manifesto. Immediately then, it does more or less, than a ‘proper’ manifesto,
which is a timely and often ‘political’ vanguard. As manifesto, Marg evidently uses
rhetoric, it dramatizes, it is polemical, and timely. As periodical, it constantly defers the

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timeliness of the call made by the manifesto through re-writing and often re-visiting its
positions, to once again engage in rhetoric and polemics. Contrast: Marg makes its opening
moves primarily by positing itself in opposition to the discourse of revivalism. While it will
be elucidated in the next chapter, it bears mentioning here that the opposition is not so
much with the use of the ‘past’ in its service to the present, but to a specific attitude of this
relationship to the past – as national ‘style’ or as ‘form.’ It is via its continued opposition or
‘contrast’ to revivalism-as-national-style and that Marg is able to re-valuate and articulate
its own relationship to the past, and on the basis of this, posit a new mode of thinking for
the present and future.

Analogy: The figurative analogy here that allows this ‘new invention’ to be
articulated is that of democracy. Democratic ideals – democratic rights, its respect for life,
its assurance of the independence of the individual – are viewed as creating the most fertile
conditions for the growth of organic forms of architecture (and of democracy itself). Theory:
The features of this new writing bear a general relation to the theory of the progressive
‘national modern’. Although these might be articulated in a more analogical nature than
theoretical, one can clearly evidence at work in Marg a notion of emancipatory/progressive
(secular) nationalism which is rooted in its conditions of modernity (and not in the
retrogressive nationalism of revivalism) and that is at once also part of an international
community. This national ‘modern’ then is to be understood in all its variegated
connotations – be it the modernist ‘dream’, the ideal of the modern man, modernization and
the new order that is brought about by science, rationality and order, and modernism – the
cultural practices of modernity. Target: The immediate domain of application of this new
writing in Marg, at least for our purposes here, can be attributed to the field of architectural
practice. However, Marg did also call for a change in the status of architecture itself – in
signposting its very literal role in constructing a built environment for the nation.

So also, while it must be acknowledged that planning has historically been deployed
in many instances in order to re-order spaces of the city by relegating the ‘unplanned’
(meaning here the poor and the slums) to its margins or outside its limits, that in itself is not
the premise that modernist planning as a discourse at large is based upon. Such a critique of
the discourse of planning itself seems to draw its lineages only from the critiques of say,

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the Haussmanization of Paris, which would in effect lead us to the abandonment of
planning as a whole, leading ultimately in turn to what is often uncritically described as
‘organic’ city – an un-planned city. If such a hypothesis is self-defeating, we can presume
from critiques of the planned city the anticipation for a more considerate notion of planning.

And it is important to stress this, that, rather than painting Marg with a single
accusatory brush of being ‘modernist,’ a close examination of it as a periodical reveals a
relatively confused, but largely open attitude towards what might constitute modernism for
architecture and planning in the specific context of India. Much scholarship has relegated
Marg as solely a champion of the Chandigarh project. Marg certainly was a champion of
Chandigarh, with Mulk Raj Anand, playing a decisive role in calling to the state’s attention
the work of Le Corbusier for constructing the new capital of Punjab (Dalvi, 2005: 17).
However, it is also within the pages of Marg that we can see conflicting discussions on the
nature of modernist practice in India. For example, Andrew Boyd’s essay titled “An
Approach to Modern Indian Architecture” (1949) highlights and discusses with exceptional
clarity this very conflict. He writes:

…in India more people besides architects will be concerned, if only because
architecture has strong attraction for nationalists as a symbol of their ideas. There
will be – there must already be – a demand for architecture to be an expression of
the national spirit… Modern Indian architecture must be first and foremost
distinctively Indian… Continuity is something worth having and expressing. Those
‘internationalists’ who deny it are going to have a continued series of
disappointments. But this line in practice means, so easily, the attention fixed on the
past, imitation of old forms in new structures to conform to ‘styles,’ the hopeless
effort to continue handicrafts really obsolete… The second policy stresses the need
for modernity and appeals to the Modern Architectural Movement… In the hands of
large numbers of builders and designers who were influenced by it, it becomes itself
a ‘style,’ that is, a system of forms to be imitated rather than a system of principles
to be applied. ‘Modern Architecture’ has not cured modern architecture… But how
will this [modern architecture] meet the demand for continuity and expression of
national feeling? In the only way this has ever been done, indirectly and

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 unselfconsciously, not by making it a primary aim. Continuity only comes when it
is genuine, it cannot be forced or pretended… We should realize that to build up the
expressive and decorative side of architecture a very great deal more is needed than
individual genius, architectural schools and a movement of intellectuals… When
the masses of India have something to express, when the architects are drawn from
the masses when they are in touch with them and design to please them, when they
submit their schemes to their criticism so that they both teach and learn from them,
then Indian architecture will be in a position to start developing as an expressive art;
and there is no doubt that the genius of the Indian people, when liberated on that
scale, will make of it something that will eclipse their own past. (4-8)

This brief extract from a longer, and as is evident, critical essay on the role and vision for a
national modern in architectural discourse is only one such instance, out of many others
that clearly illustrates the fact that Marg was not an un-critical champion of ‘modern
architecture’. If anything, the presence of such essays only further complicates and
undercuts Marg’s own manifestos for modernist practice. The argument here is in fact that
Marg played an important role in the constitution of a discourse on modernist architecture;
one that can be located in the performative tensions between its role as periodical, and its
ambitions of presenting an avant-garde manifesto. In lieu of the absence of any manifestos
on modern architectural practice in India, Marg’s presentations of manifestos become all
the more important.

In fact, the editorial “Living, Working, Care of Body and Spirit” written by Mulk
Raj Anand, that appeared in Marg’s 1963 issue dedicated to ‘Contemporary Indian
Architecture,’ acknowledged a failure of Marg’s mandate for architecture (2-3). Anand’s
editorial begins by charting the trajectory of Marg as a magazine that was dedicated
primarily to architecture with the premise of spreading the knowledge of “ancient and
contemporary principles of architecture in our country and abroad” (2). It goes on to then
state: “All the same, we must confess, we failed to generate a movement” (2). Attributing
part of the reason for this to the MARG group’s own inconsistencies in pursuing
discussions on architecture, it also blames the intelligentsia as one that was more interested
in a ‘pot pourri’ of articles from what they considered to be a coffee-table magazine. In

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refusing to bend to such ‘fashionable’ demands, the editorial describes how the magazine
dedicated a series of issues to the serious study of pre-modern Indian architecture and allied
arts, intending for this magazine to become an ‘imaginary open air museum’ of India and
Asia. It goes on to state:

The cliche used by people, who understand neither the Manasara, nor Leonardo
nor Frank Lloyd Wright, is that we in India are not Indians anymore but prefer the
‘international’ style. Perhaps there is an element of truth in this vague charge.
Certainly, however, we are not wasting money on domes... We are frankly, self-
consciously, modernist who follow Tagore when he said:

‘I strongly urge our artists vehemently to deny their obligation carefully to produce
something that can be labelled as Indian art according to some old world mannerism.
Let them proudly refuse to be herded into a pen like branded beasts, that are treated
as cattle and not as cows.’ (Meaning of Art)…

At any rate, the ancient Indian view of man and the modern human scale of Le
Corbusier’s modular have much in common... The architecture of humanism seeks
to embrace today the profoundest principles which lie at the base of the integral life
of a man... If the Indian middle class can accept the flush lavatory in every house,
then why can it not try to absorb the other experiences in straight line, cube,
rectangle, curve, sphere, convex, concave, and triangle, of its own inheritance in the
geometry of the new vision. As Jawaharlal Nehru has recently said: ‘Our
intelligentsia refuses to think.’ But the mission of the architect today... is the belief
in the poetry of structure. And every one of those structures must be a challenge
which can give a ‘knock on the head’ of all the mechanically-minded believers in
practical common sense. As the task of the new generations of our country-men will
be to wipe out the shame of having two-million soul-bodies on the pavement of
Bombay, and two and a half million soul-bodies in the gutters of Calcutta, apart
from four hundred and thirty six-millions living in the abject squalor of dirty lanes
and alleys of feudal walled cities and rat infested hovels of cancerous villages –

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 there will inevitably be plenty of building activity. The question is: Will any part of
it aspire to architecture?

In other words, despite its all too many problems, it would be important to equally
acknowledge the broad and often conflicting ambit of positions, perspectives, and
interventions undertaken by Marg. So too, while the discourse deployed to describe the
‘un-planned’ conditions of the city was predominantly medical or pathological, it might
also be argued that the aim of architecture and planning as foreseen by Marg was not to
‘cut them out like a cancer’ but rather to acknowledge that they lay at the heart of the desire
of building – and not simply building, but of building architecture.

Further, while it is well-known that Marg was part of a larger ‘nationalist’ or

‘nation-building’ discourse, the discourse on modern architecture in India too has primarily
been a national one. However, the broader interest of this thesis, is not in merely presenting
a critique of the ‘national’ discourse that many modernist projects, including architectural
ones, were part of, but is in examining the precise nature of the degrees to which they laid
claim to the modern, and what they meant by ‘modern.’ All the various historical
movements and phases in modern architectural history in India simultaneously claim the
status of ‘national modern’ for themselves, while refuting what came before.

Marg, despite its many contradictory essays and articles, while not explicitly stating
the nature of what it considered ‘modern,’ does provide some indications of it through its
denunciations of certain claims made to the modern. Foremost amongst these, is what
retrospectively came to be termed ‘revivalism,’ which will be closely examined in the next
chapter. However, another denunciation that Marg made was with the forms of modern
architecture already existing in Indian metropolises of the time, particularly in Bombay.
This had to do with the Art Deco movement which Marg if not vehemently, at least
sufficiently was against. And with the Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects (JIIA)
being a champion of Art Deco, the next portion of this chapter examines the nature of their
conflicting relationship to the modern.

Marg and JIIA – Art Deco and the Proto-Modernism Debate

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Marg, which brought out its first issue in 1946 was certainly not the only periodical of its
time that published extensively on architecture. However, apart from the European,
particularly British, magazines that carried occasional essays on Indian architecture,44 there
were only a handful of such periodicals published from India.45 Of these, the preoccupation
with architecture in most was limited to exploring the architectural history and heritage of
pre-colonial/pre-modern India – albeit through the lens of a national aesthetic.46 The first
periodical that was exclusively dedicated to publishing on the contemporary architectural
practice in India of its time was the Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects (JIIA),
which began in 1934 as a quarterly published from Bombay by the Indian Institute of
Architects (IIA). The attempt here is not to examine in detail the writings of JIIA, but to
mark it as one among other significant points of reference through which to locate the
discourse on architecture as presented in/through Marg.

Marg and JIIA have previously been referred to in the same breath – as part of a
shared national discourse on architecture and planning, which, despite their minute
differences supposedly partook of the same project.47 While both periodicals may have
been concerned at large with the state of architecture and planning in India, they were
certainly not the same. The argument here is that their divergences can be marked precisely
in the nature of their being, and laying claim to, the modern. JIIA being an official
periodical with its allegiances to the Art Deco movement in Bombay was ‘pragmatic’ in
spirit. Marg on the contrary, with its conscious positioning as a vanguard intervention, was
right from the outset, resoundingly utopic and avant-garde. Indeed the near absence in
Marg of any conversation with JIIA or of the architectural discourse that the latter engaged

                                                            
44
British magazines such as The Builder (1843-1966), Journal of the Society of Arts (1852-1908), Journal of
the Royal Institute of British Architects (1893-ongoing), Studio (1893-1964), The Architects’ Journal (1896-
ongoing), Asiatic Review (1914-1952), Architectural Design (1930-ongoing), and American magazines like
Architectural Record (1891-ongoing), Architectural Forum (1892-1974), International Studio (1897-1931),
and Journal of the American Institute of Architects (1913-2006) published occasional articles on Indian
architecture. Most of these articles were written by British/American architects, historians and journalists,
with articles ranging from discussions on the state of contemporary architecture and town planning in India,
architectural firms in India, on the work of individual architects (mostly British or American) in India, to
looking at new large-scale ventures in India like Chandigarh.
45
The Bombay Builder was one among them. It was published from Bombay, beginning in 1865.
46
Some examples of English periodicals would be Rupam (1919-1939) published from Calcutta by the Indian
Society of Oriental Arts; and Roopa-Lekha (1939-ongoing) published from New Delhi by the All India Fine
Arts and Crafts Society.
47
See Prakash, 2010: 251-289.

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with, despite both periodicals being published out of, and being concerned with, the city of
Bombay, is by itself a phenomenon that requires closer attention.48

The Indian Institute of Architects was formed in Bombay in 1917 and modeled
itself after similar counterparts in America and Europe.49 It was formed as a national body
of architects with the following motto: “[to] encourage the study of Architecture, to elevate
the standard of Architectural Practice and by mutual support, to promote the interests of
Architects throughout India” (IIA).50 Another objective of the institute was “the
advancement of architecture and the promotion of social intercourse amongst past members
of the Sir J.J. School of Arts, lecturers and members of the profession” (Billimoria, 1942:
2013-10). The formation of the Institute in that sense stands as a marker of the
formalization of the architectural profession in India. Certainly there were other factors
such as the development of architectural firms and of architectural education, and the
Indianization of practice in general, that contributed to the professionalization of the field
in India (Desai, et al: 140-46). Nonetheless, the formation of a professional society such as
the Indian Institute of Architects was central to the coming into existence of an
architectural community – both formal and imagined.

Being a mouthpiece of the Institute, JIIA published writings primarily by architects

covering a broad range of topics – practices of individual architects and firms, views on
various architectural and urban forms across towns and cities of India, housing and design
schemes, urban plans, and so on. Particularly between 1934 and the early 1940s, given that
it was the de facto mouthpiece of architectural practice of the country, JIIA carried some

                                                            
48
A rare exception to this would be the publication in JIIA of an essay authored by the MARG team. For
more, see M.A.R.G., 1947.
49
In 1917, the association was first established as ‘The Architectural Students Association’, comprising of
Architecture alumni from the Sir J.J. School of Art. In 1922, it was renamed the ‘Bombay Architectural
Association’ on account of its growing members and role. It became affiliated with the Royal Institute of
British Architects (RIBA) in 1925. In 1929, it was now the ‘Indian Institute of Architects’ and was registered
under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860 as a voluntary organization of architects. The Institute, right
from the beginning has been headquartered in Bombay.
50
In its early years, the Institute drew its membership largely from European architects based in India,
professional Indian architects who had trained in the West and returned to India, and those trained at the Sir
J.J. School of Art, Bombay.

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significant essays that examined the conceptual paradigms of modern architecture in India
via exploring the specifics of architectural and planning practices in Bombay.51

With Bombay being a center of trade and industry, as well as of the architectural
profession in India, the mandate of JIIA for the development of architecture and planning
was rooted in conditions produced in/by the city. And with the emergence of the Art Deco
movement in Bombay, the Indian Institute of Architects and JIIA played a central role in its
dissemination.52 Art Deco can simply be understood as a mix of styles representing the
modernization of life, of industrial modernity, celebrating the rise of commerce and
technology, and as signifying “the dynamism and rationalism of industrial capitalism”
(Prakash, 2010: 100).

It signaled a move away from the aesthetics of colonialism to one of “capitalism,

playing a powerful role in binding commerce with design” (95). As Bombay-based
architectural historian Mustansir Dalvi has written, Art Deco was meant to “reflect the
image of the modern, ocean-voyaging/jet-setting, international Indian, emerged from the
shackles of backwardness and ignorance, seeking his place in the New World as an equal”
(Quoted in Prakash, 2010: 103). The past – both civilizational and colonial – summed up
here as a condition of ‘backwardness and ignorance’, clearly had no place in this movement,
except as a reminder of its ‘shackles’. This break (rather literally expressed by Dalvi) with
the past, in conjunction with a newly emerged, free, forward-looking, outward-looking
citizen of the world, was undoubtedly modern. In other words, Art Deco, while marking a
break with colonial aesthetics, was not so much a nationalist, anti-colonial movement, as
much as it was one driven by capital (Prakash, 2010: 104). And this meant that it was not
so much avant-garde as it was a champion of the new; or as Gyan Prakash writes, “it was
not utopian but pragmatic” (96).

Interestingly, despite noting this feature of Art Deco, it bears mentioning that Prakash too,
clubs JIIA and Marg together in his analysis of the debates on architecture and planning in
Bombay. Despite their shared concerns for the development of architecture and planning of

                                                            
51
JIIA carried some important articles by Claude Batley, K.H. Vakil and others which were published before
1940. A more in-depth study of this journal is needed to be undertaken in the future.
52
For more on Art Deco and its relation to the city of Bombay, see Prakash, 2012: 95-104.

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Bombay, the two periodicals functioned with rather different notions of what constituted
the modern. Indeed, this very pragmatism of the Art Deco movement, as articulated
in/through JIIA, coupled with the lack a ‘vision’ document or manifesto for the movement,
despite it being very much a ‘modern’ phenomenon, has led to the former being considered
a ‘derivative,’ and ‘decorative’ ‘style’. This is precisely where one might in fact locate the
point of disjuncture between Marg and JIIA. Marg deliberately dismissed practices such as
Art Deco as part of the cacophony of ‘modern styles,’ rather than embodying the ‘modern
in spirit.’ The MARG team wrote in their manifesto “Architecture and You”:

Take the Indian street scene: It is a conglomeration of hybrid architecture – Indo-

Gothic, Mogul, Renaissance, Classical, Byzantine, Assyrian, Indo-Saracenic – and
if not this, it is a whole row of jerry-built houses – the so-called ‘Modern Style’.
What significance and relation to our modern way of living have these styles? None
at all… And what do we do? We borrow these styles… Are we so bankrupt in
imagination and inspiration that we are unable to create our own art forms giving
expression to our modern way of life with that freedom which is still before us – the
freedom which a wise use of the machine as a new and wondrous tool can bestow
on us? (1946: 10)

Anand in another Marg editorial in 1952 wrote:

Since most builders want their buildings to be either obviously ‘Modern’ or ‘Indian’,
the results are frequently most unfortunate… Most of the new buildings in
Bombay… are examples of this kind of design. …to distinguish contemporary
designs from those of other periods by calling them ‘modern’ is meaningless. The
lack of good contemporary architecture in India is because architecture, in recent
times, is held synonymous with decoration. (1952: 1-3)

Responding to such criticism by Anand and his work in Marg of the Art Deco movement –
which included thereby within its ambit the institutions supporting it (IIA and its journal) –,
Mustansir Dalvi notes that Anand’s “appreciation of the development of contemporary
architecture is problematic, for he [thereby Marg] seems to enter the discourse at a point
where modernism as seen in Indian architecture is already developed” (2005: 20)

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Attributing it partly to Anand’s absence from India during the 1930s and 1940s, Dalvi then
makes a case for recognizing the Style Moderne (Art Deco), a global idiom, as being
already prevalent in Bombay in the decades before Marg.

Elsewhere, Dalvi draws on the writings of JIIA to argue against a recent trend
which seems to historicize the Art Deco phase as “a hesitant kind of Modernism waiting for
the arrival in India of foreign Modern masters for legitimacy… Bombay’s Indian firms
were practicing an international modern architecture a full thirty years before India gained
its freedom… The great Modern masters, at least in the initial years, had no significant
impact on Bombay because the city already had a tradition of Modernism for the last
quarter century or so” (2010). In other words, Art Deco according to him, was as much in
favour of the use of rational theories, science and technology, of orderliness, and most
importantly, of functionalism – as the international style of high modernism; and that
therefore, there could be no reason to categorize it as some kind of ‘proto-modern’
movement.

At the crux of Dalvi’s disgruntlement with Anand/Marg and other critics of Art
Deco is their denial to architectural practice of Bombay in the 1930s and 1940s, the label of
being ‘modern.’ The above mentioned quotations from Marg however, shed some light on
its position regarding modernist practice in Bombay of these decades. First and foremost,
for Marg, such seemingly modern practice was to be understood as a ‘style’ – in that it was
mannered and procedural. To attribute this meant in effect stating that such efforts were
predominantly formal in nature, lacking conceptual grounding and thinking. Secondly, this
‘modern style’ is seen as one in a chain of styles that are decidedly Western, or hybrid
(Indo-Gothic, Indo-Saracenic) but the impetus for which was initiated by the West. In other
words, Art Deco was understood to be derivative. Last, and in conjunction with the
previous two points, the problem underlying both ‘Modern’ (Art Deco) or ‘Indian’
(revivalist) styles for Marg was precisely that they were styles; formal experiments that
bore no relation to the conditions of modern life that India was experiencing. Both, in
Marg’s perception were derivative – while the former drew its formal inspiration from the
West, the latter derived it from the past. In that sense, neither actively engaged the present,
or the future – formally or conceptually.

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The Architect and the Engineer

A parallel development that occurred in these decades also needs to be briefly addressed
here. This concerns the professional community of architects and planners that the Indian
Institute of Architects, via JIIA sought to address. The circulation of JIIA was amidst this
community, keeping them abreast of their peers’, the Institute’s, and the state’s activities
pertaining to architecture. To that extent, one might argue that the journal, while certainly
providing a platform for the articulation of issues concerning professional architects, never
explicitly located architectural practice within a larger creative, cultural, inter-disciplinary
paradigm. Its mandate in fact, was quite the opposite – to accord the profession of
architects and planners primacy.

In other words, along with the professionalization of architecture, of which the

formation of a body such as the IIA is symbolic, arose a need to in fact bracket architecture
away from the arts as well as the sciences. The argument here is that, central to this process
of professionalization of the field was a double move – one that simultaneously re-
positioned architects away from being considered merely ‘artists’ or ‘designers’, and away
from being considered merely ‘engineers’ – towards becoming aesthetically informed
social engineers.53 The history of architectural education similarly illustrates this double
move, or perhaps double bind, where courses in architecture were for the most part, at least
initially, set up either in existing colleges of art, or colleges of engineering.

So also, it is important to note that the figures of the traditional mistri and sthapati
became other points of reference and distantiation in this process. The ‘new architects’
regarded and dismissed the mistris as traditional engineers with no aesthetic standards, and
the sthapatis, as relying on pre-modern aesthetic principles and construction methods
without any regard for modern advancement in building technologies (Desai, et al, 1997:
177). However, given that architectural education had not yet taken off in India, therefore
there being very few professional architects, the engineers were predominantly in charge of
public building activity. This can be seen also in the building activities of the Public Works
Department (PWD) – the official architectural firm for the nation in a sense – which was
                                                            
53
For a brilliant and detailed historical study of the conflicted relationship between the two professions of
architects and engineers in the Western context, see Saint, 2007.

103 
 
undertaken by engineers. The PWDs had formally been merged with the engineering
profession since mid-nineteenth century, a fact much lamented about by many such as the
English pedagogue, artist, designer and institution builder, John Lockwood Kipling who
remarked that this merger led to the formation of a “highly centralized departmental system
which prescribes the form of all buildings… it is.. fatal… to art” (1886: 1-5).

The PWDs themselves had very few architects until the early twentieth century.
Further, given this absence of professional architects and conversely the abundance of
mistris and sthapatis, the engineers saw themselves as builders and all architects as
‘decorators’. Therefore, as part of the process of professionalization, the ‘new architects’
had to simultaneously distance themselves from traditional notions of art and aesthetics
(sthapati), through architectural education re-position themselves as having imbibed
professionally a sense of both, modern aesthetics and structural knowledge of buildings, re-
position the engineer as lacking aesthetics, thereby creating a third space for themselves as
new architects – aesthetically informed social engineers.

In that sense, it was with the flourishing of architectural education – of which the
Indian Institute of Architects was an active supporter and promoter – that architects slowly
began to be inducted into the public building process. And it is aesthetics or a notion of
aesthetic superiority that becomes central to the professionalization of the field, separating
thereby the architects from the engineers – with the latter now reduced to mere skilled
contractors/builders. This new attitude and reversal of the binary between architect and
engineer finds brief reference in the work of Desai, et al, who write:

Interestingly, while in Europe architects were being told by Le Corbusier to emulate

engineers, the professional organization in India [IIA] was fighting to escape the
influence of engineers. It was not really until after Independence that the architects’
own professional independence from engineers became established. Even then the
Public Works Departments of both Central and State Governments were, as most
still are, headed by engineers who often bypassed the architects working under them
for the design of major projects. (1997: 144)

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This ‘bypassing’ of architects by the PWD engineers is a clear indicator of the long-
standing tussle between architects and engineers over the task of designing public buildings.
And for reasons of either bureaucracy, centralization, inefficiency, lack of aesthetic
judgement or for being merely ‘utilitarian’, most architects and architectural historians
(often rightfully) present a critique of the engineering profession and the PWD, without
however questioning the inherent body/mind or art/craft (skill) binary at work in the
architectural discourse. To that extent, while the professionalization of the field may
certainly be read as a move towards technocratism, a notion that comes to be associated
more with planning, it was, at least in the field of architecture, always supplemented by a
discourse on aesthetics.

What we also find in these fraught professional relationships is a curious way in

which the three figures (craftsman/master-builder, architect, and engineer) come to stand-in
for something more: the craftsman/master-builder as embodiment of the pre-modern, and of
tradition; the architect/auteur as dreamer; and the engineer/draftsman as representative of
the status quo of the state. Of the three, the engineer in particular is a faceless, anonymous
figure – emblematic of a cog in the wheel – mirroring the facelessness of modernity, as it
were. Unlike the other two, he is a product of modernity.

105