INTRODUCTION

This thesis explores the ways in which the national modern has been constituted as one of
the definitive paradigms of architectural discourse in twentieth-century India. It critically
analyses the modalities through which this double bind of the national modern – emerging
in and through the complex encounter with colonial and postcolonial modernities – as a
particular configuration, has enabled the production of architectural discourses on
modernism in India as a ‘different discourse.’ As part of proposing this conceptual and
methodological framework, this thesis takes into account a range of articulations around
both the ‘national’ and the ‘modern’ in their multiple and often contradictory meanings and
connotations, from across historical junctures. In particular, it examines three dominant
concepts/notions – of revivalism, modernism and indigenism – to explicate the specificities
and correlations of their differing claims to this ideal. In that sense, the national modern is
understood here not as a coherent or unified discursive paradigm; rather, its incoherence
and internal contradictions are understood as markers of its heterogeneity.

This thesis begins from a premise that there is a need for critical reflection on the
nature and history of modernist architectural practice in India. There is, it argues, a dearth
not simply of an engagement with historiography, but also of an engaged practice of
architectural history/theory at large. It becomes necessary to call attention to this for, unlike
many other fields of creative practices, architecture and planning concern most directly the
shaping of the built environment through the construction of social spaces and the spatial
ordering of our social lives, as it were. There are a number of reasons for this predicament,
such as, for instance, the absence of institutionalization of the field of architectural
history/theory in India. As is well known, much has been written and lamented about the
decrepit condition of architectural education since its inception. However, by virtue of the
focus on architectural and planning ‘practice’ – urgent as the concerns were even in the
decades following the formation of the modern nation-state – the institutionalization of
architectural history/theory in order that the field be equipped with historical,
methodological and conceptual frameworks, has never transpired, nor has its absence been
acknowledged.

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 There certainly are schools of architecture in India that offer courses on theories and
histories of architecture and planning. However, this is not the same as institutionalizing a
programme that would enable the emergence of a body of critical scholarship on
architectural practices – be they contemporary, modern, colonial or pre-colonial – and the
discursive fields they inhabit. Instead, what we effectively have at present is a curious, not
to mention deeply problematic predicament – of there being no architectural historians. It
would be important to clarify that this does not imply an advocacy of the notion of
disciplinary ‘expertise.’ Rather, the very invisibility of the absence of the discipline is
signposted by the simple reason that the field would stand to gain from the interconnections
of theory, history and practice. If contemporary architectural and planning practice
occupies one end of the institutional spectrum, there is at the other end the discipline of art
history within which considerable work on the history of architecture has been undertaken.
Yet, art history’s preoccupation has largely been with the pre-modern/pre-colonial to
colonial periods, with the modern and the contemporary rarely, if ever, coming under its
purview.

Notwithstanding this institutional lacuna, there is an abundance of written material

on architectural practices, even if it has for the most part been in the form of general
histories. These often provide simplistic narratives, consisting of numerous conflations and
binary oppositions, and most crucially, are devoid of significant methodological and
conceptual frameworks. Further, whether as a consequence of this lacuna or not, what we
find is a substantial body of literature that has for the longest time been consolidated
through writings by practicing architects themselves. A cursory overview of titles being
published to date will bear to this. While the nature of this particular practice needs to be
explicated for its complex dynamics, an undertaking of this sort is beyond the scope of this
thesis. Taken together, all these practices have constituted the domain of writing as one that
is predominantly focused on describing and interpreting individual monuments/sites as
objects, or through undertaking monographic studies on the works of individual architects,
including at times autobiographical statements. The field as a site of enquiry, within which
the domain of history, theory, and practice can be resituated and reconfigured, has hardly
come under the purview of serious thinking.

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 Recently, there is a proliferation of academic writing that provides new frameworks
through which to engage with twentieth-century architectural discourses in India. Emerging
largely from the West (including Australia), these works, as compared to the existing
modes of scholarship, have provided a more holistic, critical and broad picture of the field.
Much of this is a byproduct of the institutionalization of postcolonial studies, South Asian
Studies, and most crucially, architectural history/theory.1 This has led to a substantial
refiguring of architectural histories by developing alternative frameworks such as Third
World, non-West, colonial, and postcolonial modernisms and modernities.2 Parallel to this
is the larger millennial crisis that architecture has undergone in its ‘rethinking’ of the field,
involving a repudiation of the disciplinary insularism and its formalist prerogative. This has
in turn led to the acknowledgement of “a consistent body of critical thought on architecture
that exists outside of mainstream architectural discourse” (Leach, 1997: xii).

Emblematic of the intersection of these two modes of rethinking is, for instance, the
ongoing Architext series with the stated objective of “bringing the theoretical insights of
[the social sciences and humanities] into the discourse of architecture and urban design.”3
Beginning from the premise that conventional architectural discourses have (mis)treated the
building as an art or technical object, and pushing for views that recognize it as ‘social
object,’ the Architext series is in fact symptomatic of the cultural, urban, and not to mention
postcolonial turn in the domain of architectural history/theory.4 Such bodies of scholarship
are significant for their renewed engagement with fundamental concerns of architectural

                                                            
1
For a discussion on the disciplinary shifts in architectural history in America, see Jarzombek, 1999. This
essay was published in a special issue on ‘Architectural History 1999/2000’ in the Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians. For a discussion on the challenges to architectural history from postcolonial theories,
see Bozdogan, 1999.
2
Among others, see Scriver and Prakash, 2007; Lu, 2011; Lin and Chang, 2012, King, 2004; Rajagopalan and
Desai, 2012.
3
Routledge has published the Architext series since 1999. Edited by Thomas Markus and Anthony King, it has
consisted of numerous single/multiple authored and edited books. The series editors note in their introduction
to the series that “Particular attention will be paid to issues of gender, race, sexuality and the body, to
questions of identity and place, to cultural politics of representation and language, and to the global and
postcolonial contexts in which these are addressed.” See Editors’ note to the Architext series in all the books
produced within this series such as Hosagrahar, 2005.
4
Akin to the Architext series is the Studies in Modernity and National Identity series published by the
University of Washington Press. Edited by Sibel Bozdogan and Resat Kasaba, this series consists of, but is
not limited to, a body of scholarship on architecture on the non-West in relation to questions of modernity, the
nation-state and nationalism. For examples of books within this series, see Prakash, V., 2002; Bozdogan,
2001.

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discourses. For instance, questions of form are historicized and contextualized; the
architectural ‘object’ is repositioned within the larger built environment, etc.

In particular, the ‘critical turn’ has been instrumental in facilitating the rethinking of
the field of architecture and urbanism, through invoking the writings of Walter Benjamin,
Georg Simmel, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre and articulations therein of the
fragmented/spatial experiences of modernity, urbanity and urban practice, everyday
practices, and so on. Similarly, the influence of Michel Foucault’s work has been seminal
in calling attention to space, spatiality and spatial practices in their relationship to
power/knowledge. One of the clearest indicators of the influence of this critical turn in
restructuring the field of architecture and planning can be seen in the way that recent
scholarship examines the spatial ordering of even the conventional monumental objects of
its analysis, not to mention re-situating them within larger contexts, such as of the urban. Its
influence can also be seen in the discipline of art history where the work of a scholar like
Donald Preziosi has been central in questioning the very self-identity of the art object, thus
requiring it to be framed within art/historical, social and other contexts. The influence of
these and many other seminal thinkers has led to a renewed interest in the study of
architecture across the globe and has played a crucial role in reconstituting the discipline
itself.

Even the emergence of newer scholarship under the larger rubric of urban studies
(what Gyan Prakash calls the ‘urban turn’) can be seen as a byproduct of the influence of
such a body of critical thinking ‘from without.’ This recent reconfiguration of urban studies
marks a shift from prior emphases on urbanization, urban systems and histories of cities (or
as the American historian and critic Lewis Mumford termed it, ‘the city in history’). These
were conducted primarily through the disciplinary lenses of geography and planning, or
later yet, sociology and public administration.5 As compared to this, the newer frameworks
offered through urban studies cannot simply be considered as an amalgamation of existing
                                                            
5
In the context of India, R. Ramachandran, for instance, traces the beginnings of urban studies to the period of
1915 with the impact of the work of Patrick Geddes in the University of Bombay. He does however
acknowledge the substantial work of urban studies as occurring in the post-independence period within the
social sciences in areas of geography, sociology, economics and public administration. Even so, we may want
to distinguish this from the post-1990s ‘urban turn’ that Gyan Prakash has discussed. For more, see
Ramachandran, 1995. For an introduction to some shifting positions in the earlier history of urban planning in
India, see Patel and Deb, 2006. On the urban turn, see Prakash, G., 2002.

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disciplinary methods. Rather, what they explore is the phenomenon of urbanity itself, i.e.,
referring to a set of transformations that characterize contemporary society as distinct from
the tangible and physically bound/determined city.6 In other words, the urban becomes in
such studies, both the object of enquiry and method. The city is examined here for more
than just its physical-material dimensions in relation to planning, by means of exploring a
range of issues that together constitute its urbanity, including political and community
histories, everyday practices, land economies, networks of capital, and so on. And
technologies and technocracies of planning become in such work a problematic that
demands critical analysis. In the context of India, writing as part of this ‘urban turn’ has
emerged since the late-1980s, although by and large from within the social science
disciplines such as history and political science, and not so much from within
architectural/urban/planning disciplines.7

Much of this rethinking within the larger field of architecture, planning and urban
studies has also emerged from the theorization of some fundamental conceptions on
modernism, modernity, and nations and nationalisms. For instance, in the context of
nationalism, we know since the seminal works of Ernest Gellner (1983), Benedict
Anderson and others, of the modalities through which nationalisms think and create the
nation as an imagined political community (Anderson, 2006 [1991]). As compared to
earlier theorizations which defined the nation through a set of abstract and/or external
criteria, these works were crucial in positing the ideological creation of the nation as central
to understanding national movements. In the ‘non-Western’ contexts, the work of Partha
Chatterjee (1986) has been seminal in challenging Western and Marxist doctrines of
nationalism for producing non-Western nationalisms as ‘modular’ and derivative, thereby
overlooking the many contradictions and particularities that are constitutive of them.

Such critical thinking on the national question by means of an engagement with

nationalist ideologies and movements has problematized the very political structure of the

                                                            
6
The intellectual tradition that such works implicitly draw on can be traced to the distinction between the
‘city’ and ‘urban’ made by Henri Lefebvre. For a detailed theorization of this distinction, see Lefebvre, 2003.
7
We refer here to the works such as by Oldenburg, 1984; Dossal, 1997; Gupta, 1998; Srinivas, 2001;
Heitzman, 2004; Chattopadhyay, 2005; Nair, 2005, Prakash, 2010; Sundaram, 2010 and others. It must be
noted here that even urban studies, despite fast emerging as an area of considerable academic interest, has not
been institutionalized in academic programmes.

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modern nation-state. There have emerged however, in recent contexts of globalization,
theorizations of the move towards a postnational condition (Appadurai, 1996). The
regressive and ethnocentric nation-states are argued here as soon to become obsolete as a
result of globalization and the increase in transnational community formations and
solidarities, which throw into crisis the sovereignty of the nation-state. In this thesis, the
problematics inherent to the nation-state as a political structure and ideologies of
nationalism are fully agreed upon; so also, the necessity to question and think beyond the
nation-state is acknowledged. However, it would be possible to posit that the nation-state
cannot be wished away as Appadurai does, moreover with a conception as problematic as
that of global modernity. This is especially so in light of nationalism’s continued efficacy
not merely in statist discourses and practices, but more crucially within practices of
everyday life.

Similarly, there have been several theoretical positions that have called into
question the oppressive nature of the Enlightenment scientific rationality, humanism and
notions of progress that underwrite the project of modernity, as can be seen for instance, in
the work of Michel Foucault (1984). As part of this critique, modern institutions,
disciplinary formations, conceptions of knowledge, and so on, are seen as integral to the
consolidation of structures of power and domination. More recently from the domain of
postcolonial theories, there has emerged a critique of the very claims to a universalism and
the Eurocentrism of modernity, and not to mention the colonial and imperial histories
underwriting it, as can be seen in the work of Timothy Mitchell (2000). Rather than
subscribing to either a singular global history or to the call for recognizing plural histories
of modernity, Mitchell calls attention to modernity’s ‘constitutive outside’ – the absent
presence of which necessarily makes the repeated staging of modernity perennially
incomplete. And insofar as modernity can be “provisionally understood as the modes of
experiencing that which is ‘new’ in ‘modern’ society,” (Frisby, 2013: 1) this thesis
examines within architectural discourses the specific modalities and contexts of articulating
this experience across different historical junctures, in light of the encounter with colonial
and postcolonial modernities.

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 Alongside this questioning of the Enlightenment rationality and empire
underwriting modernity, there has been a problematization of the very salience of
modernism as a cultural response to modernity and processes of modernization. For
instance, the millennial crisis of the field of architecture is in part, a byproduct of
postmodern theories which have critiqued modernist architecture and planning on account
of its utopianism, scientific rationalism, and most crucially, its totalizing vision. In
conjunction with this, the modernist preoccupation with ‘purity’ in form and function, and
its repudiation of the past were also called into question. This has led to significant
revaluations of modernist aesthetics, practices and discourses, thereby enabling a rethinking
of the field itself. So also, recent scholarship drawing on postcolonial and critical theories
has posed a challenge to the universalist and post-ideological claims of modernism. Even
though the criticisms of modernism with regard to its larger aesthetical and ideological
project are valid, this thesis posits that an absolute rejection or repudiation of modernism
would be a disservice to the heterogenizing intents of such critique itself.

To that extent, the last two decades or so bear witness to the incipient emergence of
a substantive body of scholarship on histories/theories of architecture and planning in India.
And yet, as we mentioned above, much of existing writing, barring the most recent
scholarship, has been of a general kind, in what might be considered descriptive and
analytical modes. This thesis does not dismiss or consider these as supplementary to the
constitution of the field, but rather as instrumental in its shaping, and thereby examines the
nature of the discursive realms they inhabit. This has at times demanded a resituating of the
material itself; for instance, to examine the content within periodicals as part of the larger
role of periodicals themselves through newer frameworks such as of Periodical Studies and
Manifesto Studies. Periodical Studies enables a conception of periodicals not merely as
containers of, or as producing discourses, but as sites of discourses themselves. Similarly,
through Manifesto Studies, modernist practices and articulations of it are explicated in/for
their very porousness; as revealing through their very forms and structures the conceptual
premises, processes, vulnerabilities and problematics. These and other such frameworks are
employed to show up here the confusions, contradictions and ambivalences of the field,
rather than conceiving it in absolute terms.

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 In other words, while one might not find a ‘critical body of thinking’ on architecture,
this thesis posits that a critical analysis of the conceptual underpinnings of such seemingly
‘uncritical’ writing is central to understanding in its full ‘complexity and contradictions,’
the constitution of an architectural discourse on the national modern. Here it must be
stressed once more that despite its seemingly coherent façade, the national modern was no
unified or monolithic discourse but in fact riddled with contradictions and incoherencies. It
is with the aim of clarifying the heterogeneous nature of this seemingly unified field that
this thesis examines the operativeness therein of many binary oppositions (such as of East-
West, tradition-modern, international-regional, national-vernacular, etc.) and of conflations
between modernity, modernism and the modern. Indeed, as will be evident, the ‘national’
and the ‘modern’ (or the Indian-modern) have themselves been at times constituted as
binary oppositions, and the chapters of this thesis critically examine the particularities of its
configuration at shifting historical junctures, and the implications they carry. In so doing, it
illustrates that rather than viewing it as a paradox, binary opposition, or an oxymoron, the
national modern is in fact a double bind that results from the experience of colonial and
postcolonial modernities.

It is primarily due to this very nature of the field as outlined above that a
methodological reading of it has itself become part of the work undertaken in this thesis.
And in this sense, undertaking an enquiry of specific monuments or sites, barring a few
instances, has been beyond its scope. Indeed, what would come under the purview of this
thesis has itself undergone significant changes over the last few years precisely as a result
of the dearth of conceptual and methodological frameworks. Initially, the plan was to
engage with specific monuments as case studies within each of these broader moments of
revivalism, modernism and indigenism. For instance, the Birla temples built across many
regions since the 1930s and the Bharat Mata temple in Banaras built in the late 1920s were
considered examples of revivalist architecture. These built forms were to be examined for
the ways that they mapped the imaginary spaces of the nation as well as the newer ordering
of spaces they charted out, particularly insofar as they were religious spaces. However,
there was an absence of larger and more rigorous conceptual frameworks regarding the
relationship of revivalism to modern architecture and modernist aesthetics within which to

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locate these and other such sites. In effect, it necessitated that the thesis enquire into, and
address these and other such lacunae, and not to mention conceptual obfuscations.

Therefore, in arriving at some broader methodological constructions and conceptual

frameworks for a critical understanding of architectural discourses in the twentieth-century,
engaging with a singular/specific site would have been limiting. In and through this process
however, it is anticipated that newer possibilities in imagining specific areas of research in
the future will emerge. And so, rather than bringing under its purview a single object/site,
this thesis examines various interrelated yet dispersed factors that have contributed to the
consolidation and formation of the discursive field. For instance, the larger literary debates
and the theorizations of architecture that are identifiable therein have conventionally been
overlooked or viewed as supplements even though they have played a constitutive role in
shaping the field.

So also, the complex terrain of what in this thesis I am calling the ‘national modern’
is explored through bringing to fore some key issues such as authenticity, revival, utopia,
modernity, indigenism, tradition, and so on. These are not treated as nominal and fixed
categories; rather, their constructions are complicated in order to illustrate their conceptual
porousness. Similarly, the thesis explores the work of a few canonical figures whose
contributions in shaping the architectural discourses in India have been seminal. These
include Mulk Raj Anand, Charles Correa, M.K. Gandhi, Le Corbusier, Rabindranath
Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others. The intention behind this revisitation is not to
further canonize or valorize these figures, but to place them within specific historical
contexts and problematics and critically examine each of them in/for their singularity and
continued relevance within the field. At the same time, this thesis also calls attention to the
work of a relatively neglected figure such as the architect Sris Chandra Chatterjee whose
contribution has otherwise been largely framed as regressive. This thesis will however posit
that he played an instrumental role in constituting a discourse on the national modern
through his revivalist practice at a particular historical juncture in the early-mid twentieth
century.

To that extent, the conception of the domain of architecture in this thesis does not
follow the conventional understanding, i.e., as built politics. For, such a view is predicated

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on the notion of there being something inherently political – liberating or oppressive –
within the built form itself (Leach, 1999). It would be useful to draw on Michel Foucault’s
observation that “it can never be in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of
freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom” (Foucault, 1997[1982]: 351). It is in this
sense that the title of this thesis – ‘building the national modern’ alludes only at some level
to the relationship of architecture and nation-building, as in, the built expressions of
national identity. But more importantly, it refers here to building and writing architecture,
as a way of constructing social spaces of the ‘national modern’ – a trope, an aesthetic, a
predicament, an ideal.

Chapters

The first chapter of the thesis titled, ‘Questions Concerning Modernism and Modernity’
broadly examines the nature of what makes things modern rather than whether it was
modern. Or in other words, it begins from the premise that the architectural discourses on
modernism in India have largely been preoccupied with the question of whether certain
movements, forms and styles were modern. Thereby, they are already predicated on a
notion of what constitutes the modern, as if inherently existing or implicitly understood. So
also, there occurs within such discourses a conflation between the related yet distinct
conceptual paradigms of the modern, modernity and modernism. Rather than participating
in such a debate based on such assumptions, this chapter, by means of reviewing some
literature from across disciplinary contexts and genres and historical junctures, explores the
shifting conceptions of these concepts at varying points in history.

To begin with, it lays out some of the key terms through which debates on
architectural modernisms in general have been framed. Given that modernism is broadly
understood as a cultural response to modernity and processes of modernization, it
undertakes an overview of some key texts on the experience of modernity that belong to a
‘culture of interpretation’ towards modern life, the urban phenomena and its social effects.
In particular, it examines some writings at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe from
the domain of critical theories, such as Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
(1903), Siegfried Kracauer’s “The Hotel Lobby” (1995 [1922-25]), and Walter Benjamin’s
writings on Paris and the figure of the flâneur (1920s-1930s). While there have been many

10 
 
thinkers and writers who have articulated eloquently the experience of modernity, the
reason behind focusing on Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin’s work in this thesis is due to
the 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, a crucial reason behind eliciting some their key narratives is to draw attention to a
lineage of thinking and writing on modernism and modernity in its relation to questions of
space and architecture. For, what they offer are analogous points of entry into histories of
‘the new experience of space’ characterized through the aesthetic practices of modernism.

Together, these works have enabled a rethinking of architectural and urban histories
and practices; this is crucial especially in the context of discussions on modernism as these
writings complicate not just its conventional histories, but also articulations around
modernism’s passing or obsolescence in our contemporary contexts. Further, they signpost
some methodological possibilities for how we may think, understand, and construct
histories of architectural modernism in the context of India. Addressing the complex
relationship between modernity, modernization and modernism as has been dealt with in
their works, is deemed central to the development of architectural thought, and in realizing
the potential of architecture as a cultural and representational practice.

Given that Simmel, Benjamin and Kracauer wrote of the experiences of modernity
in their own times as it were, this chapter also briefly examines some retrospective insights
into the relationship of modernity and modernism. Here, Marshall Berman’s All that is
Solid Melts in the Air (1988 [1982]) becomes important in the context of this thesis for his
analysis of modernist architecture and its relationship with the metropolis. For instance,
Berman’s focus on Brasilia, the newly designed capital city in the 1950s, bears significant
resonances with Chandigarh, the trope through a discussion on modernism is undertaken in
the third chapter of this thesis. Both Brasilia and Chandigarh share many commonalities –
they were new capital cities, built ex nihilo in the 1950s, in post-World War II contexts, by
newly democratic modern nation-states, by modernist architects. So also, Berman’s broader
conception of modernism is recognized as immensely useful in this thesis.

Following this, it examines two of the definitive preoccupations of modernism

through the debate between form and function. Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”

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(1913), and the response to it in Theodor Adorno’s “Functionalism Today” (1965) come
under our purview as two of the most seminal texts that encapsulate the terms of this debate.
Adorno in his response to Loos’s polemical text argued against notions of both ‘pure form’
and ‘pure function.’ Adorno returned to Loos’s essay at a crucial juncture – that of post-
World War II urban reconstruction in Germany. And the whole debate bears significant
resonances with debates simultaneously occurring in India around questions of revivalism
and modernism in relation to an architecture that would best express national identity.
Indeed, the importance of this debate, in particular, Adorno’s text, in the context of
architectural discourses on modernism lies in his argument that even though one can
categorize works as pure ‘form’ or pure ‘function,’ these are historically non-delineable
categories, for as Adorno argues, functionalism is not about function. So also, both Loos
and Adorno framed their polemical arguments within the immediate contexts of the Arts
and Crafts Movements in their respective times. Resonances of debates on ornament and
form in light of the impact of the English Arts and Crafts Movement in India are marked in
the second chapter of this thesis which engages broadly with the concept of revival.

Further, given that functionalism was considered to be a core concern of modernism,

this chapter examines through invoking the work of Stanford Anderson (1987) the ways in
which the postmodernist criticism of all modernist architecture as ‘functionalist’ was in fact
the work of fiction. Anderson’s work revisits the seminal exhibition ‘The International
Style’ in 1932, which was in fact responsible for the coining of this term that has come to
be synonymous with modernist practice. Noting the very absence and rejection in the
exhibition of functionalism, Anderson argues that the functionalist prerogative of
modernism was in fact fiction. Revisiting this debate howsoever briefly becomes useful for
the reason that the very notion of modernism as an international style, claiming universality
became in the post-colonial context in India, a matter of great debate. For instance, the third
and fourth chapters of this thesis explore the ways in which this functionalist prerogative
and the ‘international’ claims of modernism begin to be critiqued and rejected, leading
towards a quest for identity that would attempt to resolve the double bind of being modern
and being Indian.

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 This chapter also examines the modalities through which the relationship between
modernism and modernity has been articulated and framed in architectural historiography
in India. In particular, texts that survey the history of twentieth century architecture in India
are explored for the terms through which they articulate the break with history that
modernity brought about. A majority of these histories date from the 1990s and after, which
coincides roughly with the period that they identify as witnessing the fragmentation of
architectural practices in India. In other words, the very emergence of such survey writing
with a historical lens is made possible in and through this break both within the field and
without (economic liberalization and so on), in the 1990s. Much of this writing constitutes
the core of what can be considered the mainstream in architectural history, and therefore
becomes very significant to investigate particularly for the ways in which they define what
constitutes modernism.

The argument here is that the categorization and chronology of various phases of
modernist architecture in these texts are necessarily predicated on formalist and stylistic
prerogatives, i.e., on an understanding of modernism as making a series of deliberate
breaks in/with form. Further, it posits that all of these histories, despite disclaiming a linear
narrative for architectural practice, progressively chart out the history of modernism as a
quest for the ‘national modern.’ These texts identify the culmination of this in the post-
Nehruvian era of the 1960s to the 1980s with the emergence of a ‘truly Indian modern’
architecture, precisely in terms of its formal prerogatives. Further, the ways in which they
articulate the relationship of modernism to the modern nation-state are examined. In this
regard, one of the crucial arguments made is that such texts fail to capture the experience of
the ‘new’ that is so central to the break with modernity, except by means of a general
reference to social, cultural and technological changes. Not only this, there is evident in
them a conflation of the ‘modern’ with the ‘new’ such that the former remains at the level
of indicating a mere state of being up-to-date, rather than being set in dramatic opposition
to something that went before. This thesis argues that these histories frame the national
question within a series of binary oppositions; so also, the nation here is understood as a
pre-given entity whose identity, essence or ethos, architecture would attempt to truthfully
express.

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 Given our concern with regard to questions of modernity, we examine some recent
revisitations within the field of architectural and urban studies of the question of modernity,
in particular two texts, Jyoti Hosagrahar’s Indigenous Modernities (2005) and Ravi
Sundaram’s Pirate Modernity (2010). Hosagrahar’s work takes the city of Delhi as its site
to examine colonial restructuring and effacing of ‘Old’ Delhi in an attempt at ‘making it
modern.’ The failure of this process, rather than implying a failure of Delhi to make the
transition to modernity, is read by Hosagrahar as a means through which the colonized
claimed a modernity that was their own – an indigenous modernity which despite colonial
beginnings was outside the realm of European modernity. Similarly, Sundaram’s work
opens up salient questions about the specific nature of the postcolonial Indian situation.
Once more with Delhi as the site, it examines the role of piracy or pirate cultures as
providing enabling resources for the subaltern urban population in the face of pervasive
technocratic attempts at planning and surveilling spaces of the city. Pirate modernity for
Sundaram is, unlike the language of rights used by members of civil society, a form
embraced by members of political society, and evidences the collapse of the Ideal
city/technologies and technocracies of planning.

While acknowledging the contributions of such texts in their deterritorializing

imperatives, this thesis puts forward some contentions about both texts. In particular, the
argument is that their proposals for various alternative modernities reproduce the very
hegemonic structures through unwittingly mimicking the structures they are countering.
Further, in positing the subjects of their enquiry (the indigenous and the pirate) as
evidences of resistance that illustrate the failure of hegemonic forces of modernity,
institutionalization, technocracy, and so on, they run the risk of romanticizing all
‘negotiations’ as ‘resistances’ and existing conditions as idyllic. More importantly, they
essentialize the other, i.e. the state, as homogeneous and unidimensional. Indeed, this is
nowhere more evident than in the focus of both these texts on mechanisms of state control
(one colonial and the other postcolonial), and the neglect of its obverse that is state apathy
and neglect towards these ‘populations.’

These texts are positioned in light of the conceptual forays made by postcolonial
theories that have taken on some of the foundational assumptions and characteristics of

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Western modernity by challenging its claims to universalism its framing of non-Western
modernities as derivative. As a result of such interventions, a remarkable change was
brought about in the ways that the colonial encounter became an object of historical study –
markedly different from earlier nationalist histories, which in themselves were unpacked
for the binaries within which they operated. Alongside acknowledging its radical
interventions, this thesis also examines arguments levelled against postcolonial criticism,
such as the ways in which its repudiation of all master narratives and binaries also
repudiates all foundational historical writing (Dirlik, 1994).

In this context, given that the two texts under consideration (Hosagrahar and
Sundaram) concern alternative proposals around modernity, the theoretical articulations
around modernity as a global project are examined through a critical analysis of the work
of Arjun Appadurai. For Appadurai, as briefly outlined above, the cultural processes of
globalization are seen as facilitating a postnational condition, whereby regressive
tendencies of nationalism are destablilised and irregularised. Here, the argument is that in
positing the global against the national as opposing entities, both are essentialised and
generalized; the former becomes the site of liberation, and the latter, of oppression. Further,
it is argued that in its focus primarily on the cultural or economic dimensions of
globalization, the role of the state in the political domain is overlooked by Appadurai and
globalization is itself not sufficiently articulated as a political process. Further, drawing on
Partha Chatterjee’s critique (1998) of global modernity as an inherently colonizing
process/pattern/intent, it is posited that these theories of alternative/plural modernities, need
to examine their propositions in light of the historical-political conditions of their own
emergence.

The work of Fredric Jameson (2002) is also examined in this regard. Jameson,
acknowledged the critique of the older hegemonic forms of modernity yet argues against
the recent proposals of ‘new’ modernities – be they in the form of alternatives or plural or
otherwise. For Jameson, in their attempt to shape a political programme that is not marred
by a postmodernist ‘end of history’ teleology, these alternative modernities in fact seek
more complete modernities and processes of modernization, for they ignore the other
meaning of modernity which is, according to Jameson, capitalism itself. This call by

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Jameson for a singular modernity then, is a means of working with a conception of a
hegemonic modernity against which radical programmes may be envisioned.

All of these conceptions of modernity – alternative, plural, global and singular – are
examined for the problematics underwriting their conceptions by Timothy Mitchell (2000)
who, drawing on the experiences of non-Western modernities, argues that the very
conception of a universal hegemonic modernity and the processes of capitalism that it was
invariably tied to, emerged in and through the process of colonialism and imperialism. This
does not however mean that modernity was constituted in the interaction between West and
non-West; on the contrary, the very categories of East and West were produced through
this interaction. In other words, placing colonialism and imperialism at the heart of
modernity enables us to see that modernity is produced as the West. Taken in this sense,
Mitchell’s contention with Jameson’s argument for a singular modernity would be that if
capitalism underwrote the singular history of modernity, capitalism was itself enabled in
and through processes of colonialism. Not only this, the colonial-modern then is defined in
relation to its constitutive other, the suppression of which is necessary for modernity to
maintain its hegemony, but also the silent presence of which nonetheless disrupts the
unified or coherent understanding of modernity.

These theorizations around questions of modernity are pertinent in light of the

concern in this thesis with regard to the ways that the modern has been articulated within
architectural discourses in India. Indeed, the conflation between the modern, modernity and
modernism becomes a central conundrum for us to address. Keeping this in mind, this
thesis also undertakes a brief case study of the periodical Marg (1946-ongoing) and its
constitutive role in shaping the architectural discourses on modernism. Here, the
frameworks of periodical studies and manifesto studies are employed in order to read the
ways in which they correspond with the double-function and form that Marg performed
and embodied, that is, of the interplay between the periodical and manifesto. Periodicals, as
is well known, play a crucial role in the formation and dissemination of ideas regarding a
field, thereby helping shape and consolidate it as well. And the emergent discipline of
periodical studies has increasingly become important for the ways that it situates the
periodical as an object of analysis anew. Manifestos on the other hand, in their very form

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present themselves as belonging to the here and the now, of effectively capturing the
moment, of articulating desires, manoeuvres and strategies, and of fashioning the future.

Marg is here is taken as a fulcrum around which it will be possible to identify the
terms of this debate around the ‘national modern’ in architecture. It is seen as not merely
creating a platform for discussion on questions of what the nature of modern architecture
should be, but more importantly as itself a site that performed the complexities of this
debate. One of the arguments here is that, despite or perhaps because of its vanguardist
self-positioning, Marg presented a manifesto for modern architecture in India. This we note
is significant not just in view of the absence of manifestos for architecture, but more
because Marg provided a vision for architecture, and in so doing, identified architecture as
the site through which a future for the modern nation could be realized and materialized.
And despite its staunch support for the Chandigarh project and the retrospective positioning
of Marg as a champion of ‘modernism,’ this thesis attempts to illustrate that rather than a
singular ideological position, one can identify many contradictory positions of Marg and its
founding editor Mulk Raj Anand. It posits that Marg captures the general confusion and
uncertain nature of what constitutes modernism itself in architectural discourses in India.

The second chapter of the thesis titled, ‘A Matter of Style: Renaissance and/or
Revival,’ broadly undertakes a study of specific moments in the long history of the concept
of revival and the related concept of renaissance, as pertains to architectural discourses.
The aim of this enquiry lies in charting revivalism’s positioning within histories of
modernism, for, revivalist practices too, laid claim to being modern. This becomes relevant
especially in light of the fact that modernism proper did not dissociate itself from ‘tradition’
or ‘history’ as such, but more specifically from the ways in which practices of revival
constituted ‘tradition’ and ‘history.’ Within histories of cultural practices, revivalism
therefore inhabits a peculiar place in that it inhabits the time of modernity, but is a
precursor to modernism, and also emerges within contexts of nationalism. The modalities
through which revivalist practices lay claim to the ‘national modern’ therefore come under
the purview of this chapter.

To begin with, this chapter engages with colonial architectural discourses and the
emergence of a notion of revival therein. It lays out the conceptual frames within which

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practices of architectural revival emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
Europe: first, in the form of the Classical revivals as part of the invention of a civilizational
past in Greece and Rome; and second, in the form of the Gothic revivals which derived
from contexts of medievalism, romanticism and romantic nationalisms, with every nation
in Europe tracing the legacy of the gothic as its indigenous style. This association of
architecture with national expression becomes crucial for, this is a notion that comes to
dominate the concerns of architectural practice throughout the nineteenth and much of the
twentieth century. In the context of India, much of mainstream architectural discourse, it
will be argued, continues to frame the history of twentieth century architecture as a
progressive quest for an architecture that can best express both its modernity and national
identity.

The popularity of the Gothic revivals saw intense debates with regard to the notion
of authenticity and imitation where on the one hand, when drawing upon the classical/true
orders, the revivalists were alleged as ‘copyists,’ and when straying away from the
‘original,’ they were derided for failing to capture the ‘essence’ of the classical/true orders.
The contradictions of this are explicated through an analysis of the work of architectural
historian James Fergusson (1862) who marks a distinction between the ‘True’ and
‘Imitative’ Styles. The impact of the Gothic revivals was far-reaching and can be seen in
the influential English Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris, John Ruskin and
A.W.N. Pugin. The Arts and Crafts Movement – one that has a bearing on art and
architectural practice in India – is discussed for the ways that it forms the context of the
debate around form and function.

The practices of architectural revival in the context of India are important and have
been subject to extensive academic scrutiny. In such scholarship, colonial architecture, and
in particular, the emergence of the Indo-Saracenic as the official style of the empire, is
largely read as symbolic of the consolidation of imperial rule. Even the impact of the Arts
and Crafts Movement among practicing architects and pedagogues in India is seen in such
works as reaffirming colonial rule. However, what is of importance to note is that within
most architectural histories, colonial architecture and the discursive fields they inhabited
become inadvertently dissociated from the modern movements. This chapter argues for the

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necessity of acknowledging the role of colonial architectural discourse in our understanding
of modernist practice for the simple reason that, the Indian experience of modernity was
shaped through the encounter with colonialism. Indeed, this colonial history of modernity,
as already mentioned, was definitive in constituting architectural discourse in India as
caught in the double bind of being ‘national modern.’

In continuation, this chapter explores differing conceptions of architectural revival

and three specific positions around it in the first half of the twentieth century. It analyses
Orientalist positions in early twentieth century through the writings of arts administrator,
pedagogue and art historian E.B. Havell in the early twentieth century. In particular, it calls
attention to the case of a 1913 petition led by Havell, signed by many English dignitaries
demanding that the city of New Delhi be built by traditional master-builders and craftsmen.
In this regard, this chapter also undertakes a brief but careful exploration of the writings by
one of the most significant, yet neglected architects in the history of the twentieth century –
Sris Chandra Chatterjee. The Indian revivalist architect par excellence, Chatterjee’s works
are scrutinised in order to better understand his articulations on what constituted ‘modern’
Indian architecture. And in conjunction with this, it examines a single piece of writing by
Mulk Raj Anand which undertakes a critique of the revivalist proposals of Sris Chandra
Chatterjee, championing instead the notion of an Indian renaissance. The various claims
and counter-claims to the ‘modern Indian’ made by Havell, Chatterjee and Anand come
under the purview of this chapter. Given that revivalism has largely been dismissed on
account of its expressing a form of cultural nationalism, this thesis argues that the revivalist
articulation of the national in the work of Sris Chandra Chatterjee needs closer scrutiny for,
the modern itself seems to be the essence and destiny of his imagination.

In a slight departure from discussions on revival, this chapter also explores the ways
in which some architectures of nationalism have elided being framed within the revivalist
paradigm in architectural histories. Here, it briefly looks at the ashramic models of
architecture in Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan and M.K. Gandhi’s ashrams. Indeed,
not seen as part of revivalism or modernism, both projects have been accorded a singular
position within architectural histories owing to the larger intellectual and political
significance of the figures themselves. In the context of Tagore, this chapter examines the

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lineages of the ‘artistocratic-folk’ paradigm of Santiniketan, and in Gandhi, the emergence
of a vernacular national sphere. One of the arguments here is that perhaps the singularity of
their positioning within architectural histories mirrors the singularity of their utopian
imaginaries as closed-off spaces. For instance, in the context of Santiniketan, this chapter
argues that Tagore’s ashramic ideals were not modelled after some Rousseauesque back-to-
nature philosophy, but rather that it involved a careful and deliberate production of nature
itself. In the context of Gandhi’s ashrams, this chapter argues that if the village was the
focal point of Gandhian counter-modernity, then the ashram was its utopic mirror. The
significance of engaging with their projects and the architectural and spatial lineages they
draw on lies in their repeated invocation by practicing architects, planners and historians
alike as providing an alternative to the dominant tendencies of modernism. Indeed, given
that they were not architects, this chapter examines the ways in which their specific moral
and politico-religious ‘ideals’ are abstracted into universal aesthetic and spatial ideals such
as of austerity, simplicity, modesty, and so on.

If revivalism was hesitantly positioned within histories of twentieth century

architecture, particularly in relation to modernist practice, the next chapter of the thesis
titled ‘The Ideal of a National Modern: Chandigarh as Trope’ explores a site that is in
the context of India commonly considered to be the apotheosis of modernism itself: the
much celebrated and equally derided site of Chandigarh. This chapter engages with
Chandigarh only tangentially, by means of placing it amidst a series of examples, contexts,
and discourses. These include notions of the state-engineered city, high modernism and
technologies of modernity and modernization, alternative proposals of the organic city and
building ‘from below,’ the pre-modern/pre-colonial city, utopia and the nation-state, and
lastly, the expressive compulsions of architecture.

In that sense, as the title suggests, this chapter identifies Chandigarh as a trope and
engages with a diverse spectrum of critical responses to it. Despite being an overworked
area, it neither (re)validates the Chandigarh project nor dismisses it outright. It argues
however, that Chandigarh can be seen as the moment of the culmination of ideals around
the national modern, not as its moment of deviance. To begin with therefore, this chapter
lays out the terms of its engagement with Chandigarh as both architecture and city. A

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significant portion of this involves taking stock of a broad range of positions articulated
thus far, including both celebration and condemnation and the multiple strands in between,
as well as of recent propositions that have studied it afresh and anew. Chandigarh is
situated here within discourses on modernist architecture and planning, to reaffirm the
dialectical movement of modernist practice. So also, this chapter signals the necessity of
examining diverse practices of architectural modernism in their specific discursive relations
and signs.

Following this brief overview, it examines the ways in which narratives around the
construction of a new capital city have always been paralleled by the invocation of
comparative images of the old or historical city. In particular, the ‘street,’ an urban
phenomenon whose absence in the modernist planned city in such narratives is seen as
marker of its own lack of urbanity. In this regard, this chapter explores some crucial
theoretical formulations around the capital city of Brasilia whose comparisons with
Chandigarh are many. Further, if many accounts posited the old and new city at opposing
ends of the spectrum of urbanity, this chapter examines the incorporation into the modernist
city, images of the old city such as the bazaar and the street. Not only this, within the
context of India, if conventionally Chandigarh is placed amidst other new capital cities
such as Gandhinagar and Bhubaneswar, this chapter also explores early writings that have
placed it in the lineage of Indian planned cities of Fatehpur Sikri and Jaipur.

And in conjunction with what is largely a discourse on authenticity, this chapter

analyses the ways in which Chandigarh has become the bedrock of the ‘legitimacy’
question: between creative freedom of the practitioner versus the expressive and
representative compulsions of a contextual practice. It explores the modalities through
which conventional architectural histories have posited Chandigarh as symbolic of the
Nehruvian, statist, westward looking outlook, with no expressive ties to India. The
invocation of the opposition between Gandhian and Nehruvian ideals of the village and city,
and nation at large, comes under the purview of this chapter. Here it also examines writings
in the last few decades that have attempted to contradict the universalist claims of
modernism through examining the expressive compulsions of Chandigarh’s architecture. It
further takes on the argument that Chandigarh went against the decolonizing intent, to posit

21 
 
that despite many problematics inherent to the project, it nonetheless consisted through its
idealized vision, an egalitarian impulse which is crucial to mark, especially in light of
contemporary conceptions of cities through attributes such as ‘smart.’

And insofar as Chandigarh is a site that sees the conflation of Le Corbusier’s

conception of urban utopia and Nehruvian notions of socialism and not to mention his
statist-technocratic utopia, this chapter in conclusion briefly charts the differences and
overlaps between concepts of utopia, urban utopia and utopian socialism/social utopias in
the context of the discourses on modernist planning. It explores the modernist
preoccupation with social transformation or ‘social engineering’ in their planning of cities
and examines some of the most pervasive critiques of this undertaking. The relationship of
architecture and planning with social change in that sense is what comes under the purview
of this portion of the chapter, for, implicit to the critique is the emergence of alternative
visions and proposals to the modernist city/planning. The argument here is that contrary to
conventional opinions, much of the anti-modernist or anti-modern visions of the city that
emerged were not ‘organic’ in the sense of un-planned or spontaneous, but in fact both
scientific and utopian.

If Chandigarh was the moment of high modernism, the last chapter of the thesis
titled, ‘Indigenous Modernism: Truth in Architecture’ examines the post-independence
period and the emergence of what in mainstream architectural discourses has been called
the ‘truly Indian modernist’ practice. The post-independence moment, especially towards
the end of the 1950s witnessed a substantive distantiation by most professional Indian
architects from revivalism, and to a lesser extent, from the universalist claims of
modernism. This chapter argues that the postcolonial double bind of being ‘national
modern’ led to a specific mode of practice that was neither nationalist nor ‘universal’
modernist, but involved instead a careful reconfiguration of modernist idioms along with
notions of the singularity of ‘culture,’ to produce a practice which we mark as indigenous
modernism.

To begin with, this chapter analyses an early and seminal essay by the art critic
Geeta Kapur (1969) which engages with the artistic practices of indigenous modernism.
Kapur’s essay becomes significant by the reason that is one of the few (if not the only)

22 
 
attempts at theorizing the notion of indigenous modernism in the larger context of cultural
practices in India. So also, it is relevant in its marking of a distinction between this self-
reflexive, singular, postcolonial practice of indigenous modernism which is in quest of
identity, and the earlier practices of borrowed/spurious modernisms as well as the
‘defensive chauvinisms’ of nationalist revivalisms. While acknowledging the import of
Kapur’s framework, this chapter argues that in its marking of the indigenous modernist’s
quest for identity as more ‘genuine,’ the dialectical movement of modernism is
relinquished, posing its history instead as a progressive quest in which the postcolonial
subject is ‘at home in the world.’ So also, it is argued that the native intelligentsia/
intellectual who will undertake this radical quest claims representativity – of speaking on
behalf of the people – by means of recourse to an authenticity discourse. And finally, it
notes the ways in which the indigenous modernist is always already located within a
national framework, which in turn necessitates critical analyses to examine the ‘sources’ of
its claim to authenticity.

This chapter also examines some incipient articulations around an indigenous

modernist practice made by architects in a ‘Seminar on Architecture’ in New Delhi (1959).
This is an important historical event for many reasons, of which this chapter focuses on a
few, such as the ways in which the distinctiveness of the national character of modernist
practice is reiterated and yet distanced from earlier revivalist articulations of it. So also, the
very international claims of the ‘International Style’ begin to be questioned in this seminar,
and there emerges a view to articulate this distinctiveness through questioning what
architecture is capable of expressing, leading to the invocation of notions of temperament,
lived traditions, the folk, and so on as representative of an authentic cultural source.
Following this, this chapter undertakes a brief discussion on the distinction between
indigenous modernism and an architectural discourse on regionalism or critical regionalism.
The argument here is that while indigenous modernism certainly is part of a larger
discourse on regionalism, the latter is more a descriptive category aimed against a notion of
a universal modernism, and consists within it an array of conflicting practices. Indigenous
modernism on the other hand, it argues, consists of a very specific mode of identifying the
‘source’ of a singular culture as an authentic repository.

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 In light of this broader introduction to the conception of an architectural practice of
indigenous modernism, this chapter undertakes an analysis of some of the writings and
works/projects of the architect Charles Correa, as an indigenous modernist. While not
necessarily positing all of his work as indigenous modernist or that Correa was the only
practitioner of this kind, this chapter proposes through a reading of his works what
precisely is meant by this notion. Correa’s theses begin from a position regarding climate
and the necessity of architecture to pay attention to the specificities of the built
environment. However, these typologies evolve to stand as representative of aesthetical and
philosophical traditions, with connotations for living, building and dwelling – ways of
inhabiting the world. In this regard, this chapter examines a number of tropes that Correa
employs such as the past, the sacred, chaos, open-to-sky, meandering pathways,
renunciation, and so on, and it reads three of Correa’s projects in light of this.

The argument here is that in conceiving of culture as ‘source,’ of tradition as

palimpsest, and of transformation as an interventionist act, the indigenous modernist marks
not only his difference from earlier conceptions of culture as ‘form,’ but also his own place
within the palimpsest, thereby deriving/laying claim to authenticity. So also, this chapter
argues that rather than being seen as counterproductive to the decolonization process in its
invocation of national culture, indigenous modernism was in fact central to the process in
its fusion of the modernist idiom with culture as ‘source.’ In other words, in this chapter,
the attempt is to insist that we must account for the depth of the postcolonial double bind,
in particular for the national intelligentsia, whose quest for identity is premised on the ideal
of a national modern. And in conclusion, the thesis posits that insofar as the ‘national
modern’ is the overarching and definitive paradigm of postcolonial cultural practice, it can
never free itself of this double bind.

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