Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

Space Vol. 22, No. 1-4

The SPA Journal of Planning and Architecture 2018

Amateurs and authors: challenges and

potentialities in architectural historiography
of late-colonial India 1
Saptarshi Sanyal
Assistant Professor of Architecture,
School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi
sanyal.sa@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
This paper problematises the notion of architectural ‘authorship’ as a historiographic frame
for reading built environments in the context of late-colonial India. Within this author’s
ongoing research project in architectural history in this particular context, as well as more
widely, firstly, the cognitive limitations of reading modern architecture through the figure of
the bonafide architect are examined and highlighted. Furthermore, the paper discusses the
exigencies of translation in opening up the frame of authorship. This is seen in conceptual
as well as empirical terms. Such problems emerge at the interfaces of both disciplines as
well as cultures. Finally, it advances a conceptually ‘elastic’ mode of reading authorship
through the objects and practices that architectural histories’ examine. In doing so, a shift
in emphasis from the artefact to the process in the discipline and practice of architectural
history and theory is argued for. It is finally posited how, rather than impose a preconceived
story on such or processes, being attentive to how meanings of terms transform across
disciplinary as well as cultural interfaces, can harness these challenges into meaningful
potential for knowledge production.
Keywords: architectural history, late colonial India, architectural authorship, translation

A multi-position problematic to historicise architectural modernity

In a recent international conference at the Bartlett School of Architecture titled ‘A World
of Architectural History’, a Professor from the ETH Zurich’s Institute für Geschichte und
Theorie der Architektur, while discussing future directions of the discipline, emphatically
anticipated the ‘death’ of three axes that have continued to dominate Architectural History
1 This paper draws upon and develops the Position Statement delivered and discussed by the author at sessions comprising
“Field Studies”: the Annual PhD Colloquium of the Princeton University School of Architecture (2-3 March 2019), New
Jersey, USA

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and Theory (AHT) practice globally – the Metanarrative, the Centre and the Author.1
Such a movement has been underway for some time now. Although it is uncertain if these
overarching orientations within AHT practice will ‘die’ easily or be displaced abruptly, it
is exigent to interrogate possibilities of rediscovering and liberating some limitations that
their meanings apply to objects of architectures’ histories. This is premised on how the
notion of a ‘field’ in such histories can be de-layered into several co-dependent but not
necessarily congruent, or exclusive, positions.
Within this broader concern, this essay focuses on architectural ‘authorship’. Doing so, it
considers such authorship’s implications in AHT when extended into, or drawing upon, the
humanities related to its discursive practice. This is advanced in the context of the present
author’s ongoing research and, also in more general interdisciplinary terms. In recent decades,
architectural history within the academy has progressively turned, or perhaps swerved, away
from knowledge production on ‘autonomous’ formal aspects of built environment. Such
shifts have necessitated the inevitable application of theoretical descriptors and categories
that no longer privilege material aspects of architecture in independent objective terms.
Instead, they frame the understanding of built environments’ materiality through multiple
intellectual appropriations, modes of analyses and interpretations.2
Among such shifts, the production of twentieth century ‘modern’ architectural histories
is a rigorously contested arena of intellectual activity. Popular and influential models of
such histories have concentrated on architectural modernity at a macro level, embedded
in societies’ historical objects in time and space. The ‘architectural survey’, a dominant
outcome of this approach to knowledge production, has tended to focus on and construct
distribution of the modern in architecture across various geopolitical, or cultural, scales
and units, foregrounded by narratives of centred origin and peripheral diffusion.3 At the
situated or micro level, the more recent scholarship writes the ‘modern’ in architectural
history through distinct, but often overlapping, pedagogical, economic, political, scientific,
representational and cultural registers4 of institutions, places and communities.
The collective insight generated by these broad modes of historiographic practice have
been further complicated by recognising how built environments can be read through
subjectivities of unequal power across cultures and political contexts.5 This makes the
mutual culture-power interrelationships necessary and substantive frames to query
architectural production in a historical-theoretical perspective. In this sense, the historians
of South Asian colonial-modern architecture Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash,
propose that “architectural histories begin only once buildings have been constructed or re-
presented outside their designers’ minds, thereby becoming a part of social knowledge and

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

experience.”6 Taking this argument further, specifically pertaining to authorship, it may be

pertinent to examine how, the modern architectural historiography of erstwhile colonised
regions, a challenging and cautious endeavour, operates as a ‘field’ of historical objects
through people and processes of built-environment production and their materiality;
simultaneously, it is a ‘field’ of formulations and concepts through which narratives about
these historical objects are framed.
The following pages address this conceptual homology programmatically by presenting
three mutually interrelated discussions. These discussions examine shifting notions of
‘position’ in interdisciplinary modes of study. They inform, more generally, position(s) in
the plural within the AHT field. Firstly, cognitive structures through which certain sites,
architectures and their ‘authors’ could be selectively produced, marginalised or reduced,
overlooked or even precluded in architectural history’s discourse, are examined. The
second discussion highlights key analytical challenges posed by conceptual and epistemic
‘translation’ or crossovers, of descriptors across disciplinary boundaries and moreover,
cultures, in the historiographic enterprise. A third discussion presents how ‘heuristic’
operations in analysing architecture through the historical material on agents and processes
of production can critically contextualise discourses on built environments’ authors. This
carries suggestions for utilising, and expanding, conceptual terrains of extra-disciplinary
and cross-cultural categories in modes of historical knowledge production. Finally, rather
than unproblematic application of historical categories and taxonomies of disciplines
surrounding the materiality of architecture, a critical engagement with them through the
AHT practice is argued for, in the context of current intellectual orientations.

Excavating reductions, absences and preclusions of ‘architectural’ authors

This author’s present research examines departures from mainstream colonial-modern
architecture in British India. It focuses on key sites of built environment production that, in
heterogeneous ways, possibly critiqued imperial-colonial power; power that was manifest
in the latter’s pedagogic, socio-political, aesthetic and formal programme.7 Although the
inquiry is reasonably extensive and pan-geographical, it makes no pretences at reaching
overarching generalisations about the historical-geographical context it is situated in. More
particularly, its premise is constituted by questioning historical narratives that render these
sites as mutually unrelated exceptions or invisible; ones that cast them through reductive
readings even when included in the colonial-modern architectural discourse. It may be
pertinent to ask then, how such narratives selectively push the concerned sites of built
environment production, their producers and processes, to margins of what possibly
constitute pre-scripted notions of ‘architect’, ‘architecture’ and ‘design’ or, for that matter,
‘modern’.

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This demands critical genealogies of these terms and their institutional legitimisations,
interrogating how they structurally produce, reduce, omit or preclude their historical
objects in the modern architects’ or architecture’s hagiographic ‘Life and Works’ rubric.
Can such an endeavour expose bias, or the limits, of such positions in the historiographic
‘field’? Does it problematise notions like ‘modern’, ‘architect’ and ‘design’ in relation to
architectural authorship? This is not a novel enterprise in the AHT discipline. In his life’s
last essay, historian and architectural critic Reyner Banham, in likening architecture to “a
classic ‘Black Box’...[ ]... recognised by its output but not its contents”, argues how its
limited conceptual structure can often be a closed system when theoretically engaging with
diverse contexts of architect-subjects and architectural-objects.8 Banham, for instance, has
prominently drawn attention to limitations of the architecture ‘profession’ when applied
to technology-oriented mass consumption.9 In more recent decades, critical scholars have
unravelled conceptual boundaries of ‘design’ and its complementary notion of ‘modern’
that originated in European Renaissance and post-Enlightenment thought. They trace the
historic genesis of such terms and transition of their meanings across time and languages
through erudite insights.10
At a different end of the spectrum, the ‘architect’ disappears altogether in modes of
historiographical endeavour focussing on culturally endogenous coding or social
production of modern built environments that write whole groups, societies, institutions
or communities as producers, rather than select individual authors.11 Historians of modern
architecture, especially on colonial-modern South Asia, have used this in critically nuanced
and innovative ways, drawing upon disciplines as diverse as literature, politics, cultural
anthropology and sociology. They frame the normative-institutional as well as ethno-
geographic dimensions and processes of craft, building and urban practices as key drivers
of spatial and architectural production. In such narratives, power equations and its attendant
agency are key conceptual lenses of viewing built environments and their production.12
However, despite many valuable inroads into architectural histories of colonial-modern
contexts through the ‘social’ discourses, these histories possibly betray another pole in the
modes of selection and differentiation: a privileging of societies and cultures as conceptual
frames. This points to yet another significant way in which certain sites and their readings
may be selectively produced even if outside an architect-oriented focus. They imply that
non-architects, amateurs or users, even where endowed with agency, are ‘non-authors’ of
architecture. Spatial and material production, in these instances, is historicised through
the collective, under sway of external and/or internal forces. Such narratives, in their
frameworks, could altogether ignore many legitimate actors in the process of architectural
production on the one hand, while on the other, produce ‘societies’ as independent,

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

impersonal, determinants of built environment.

Such polarised ambition in architecture’s historiographical practices, as E.H. Carr
expounds, tends to dichotomise positions between society and the individual – where either
social phenomena are attributed to individuals or, social narratives construct anonymity,
which is often conflated with impersonality.13 Cautioning against binary conceptualisations
in modern architectural histories, the architectural-historian Sibel Bozdogan emphasizes
how “not to dismantle the myth of the architect as autonomous and creative genius by
replacing it with an equally problematic notion of architect as a mere instrument or agent of
historical forces, ideologies, and politics”14 (emphasis mine); both the concepts of authors
(as architects) and non-authors (as society) might produce and preclude, seeing and un-
seeing, selectively.
Figure 1. Rabindranath Tagore and M.K. Gandhi in conversation in a house of
Tagore (Santiniketan, 1935).

Source: Rabindra Bhavana Photo Archives, Santiniketan

Are then, the frames of ‘agent’ and ‘agency’ – broadly conceived – more pliable and supple
for framing multiple positions in architectural history? For a historical analysis of dissent
(thought) and critique (performance) in architectural sites within colonial-modern India,
rather than unproblematic correlations of the ‘heroic’ architect with a canonical architectural
landscape or, cause-consequence-based reading of architecture and its practice brought

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about by socio-cultural, economic or political imperatives, looking through the built

environments themselves as evidence of social concerns outside its disciplinary limits can
be felicitous for producing its ‘agents’ and ‘agency’ less rigidly. In fact, much of emerging
historiographical endeavour on architecture within varied cultural and institutional contexts
has benefited from constructing histories where built environments and their representations
are explicitly read as a ‘medium’ or ‘method’ to understand production of cultural values.15
Such values, moreover, need not be predicated on polar separation of individuals and
collectives. If, instead, architectures are viewed as both the products and agents of historical
processes, how specific individuals or groups work in relation to one another, within a
‘habitus’ as the ‘space of possibilities’, vide Bourdieu,16 helps to read its performance in historical,

Figure 2. The Bose Institute, one of the first interdisciplinary and experimental
scientific research centres set up by an Indian, (c. 1917)
Source: Patrick Geddes (The Life and Work of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, 1920)

cultural and socio-political terms. For contexts like late colonial India, ‘modern’, ‘architect’
or ‘architecture’, without re-working what they connote, have lexical and epistemic limits
if applied for studying architectures as modes of discursive practice. This is especially
relevant where such practices occurred within a historically networked culture of entangled
colonial, non-Indian but not necessarily colonial and indigenous values and, furthermore,
cross-cultural encounters and flows of knowledge in shaping the modern. The forthcoming
discussion explains this, to an extent, in empirical terms. Finally, this should not be

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

understood as a rejection and replacement of such descriptors by artificially inventing new

terminology but, instead, using AHT’s operations to release these descriptors intellectually
and cognitively from unbending or inflexible meanings.

Translating concepts across disciplines and cultures

In the author’s present inquiry, to connect agents, processes and sites of architectural
modernity that complicate predispositions of both modern architect / architecture or, binaries
of colonial-modern normative institutions and colonised-society, crossing disciplinary
boundaries is necessary due to the inherent heterogeneity in its objects of study. Its mode
of historicising architecture needs to be provisionally gleaned from contextually particular
histories of politics, cultural practices, economics or science, as well as disciplines of
art-history and cultural theory.17 However, being attentive to cognitive gaps or epistemic
discontinuities that could inevitably be produced by uncritical transposition – of criteria,
concepts, terms and categories in the histories surrounding architecture’s material discourse
– is indispensable for its approach. Within the limited space of this paper, rather than an
abstract discussion, through more concrete instances within the specific historical study on
colonial-modernity presently undertaken by this author, some of the conceptual issues that
could arise if such an operation is overlooked are examined.

Figure 3. Students constructing their own institution’s spaces as a mode of education

in Santiniketan
Source: Rabindra Bhavana Photo Archives, Santiniketan

Regarding the crossover of disciplinary boundaries, Bourdieu’s ‘field of cultural

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production’ offers the opportunity to simultaneously traverse the geo-political and cultural
macro histories and, the more local, and subjective, micro histories18 of agents and sites;
it is helpful to unravel connected yet diverse departures from the colonial-establishment.
Further, it allows the incorporation of figures that surround architecture’s materiality through
overlapping narratives of literary, cultural, socio-political, artistic, scientific, economic,
educational or spiritual histories on colonial India.19 More specifically, some of the agents
driving processes of experimental built environment production in the sites that the author’s
research investigates include the poet, Rabindranath Tagore, India’s (and Asia’s) first Nobel
Laureate; M.K. Gandhi, a most influential figure in civil disobedience against the colonial
rule; renowned (and one of the earliest) interdisciplinary scientist Jagadish C. Bose; leading
Indian capitalists like G.D. Birla, J.N. Tata and Ambalal Sarabhai, spiritual philosopher and
educator J. Krishnamurthi; Princes (colonial feudal-dependents) like Mysore’s Krishnaraja
Wodeyar IV, Indore’s Yeshwant Rao Holkar II and Lucknow’s Mohammad Ali Mohammad
Khan and, militant-nationalist-turned-spiritual-leader Aurobindo Ghose and his spiritual
partner, “The Mother”, Mirra Alfassa Richard. In varying degrees and modes, their
participation in built environment practices operated through interpersonal relationships
and networks of knowledge flow and exchange, amongst themselves, and with important
figures from both Eastern and Western contexts outside the colonised-Indian territory.

Figure 4. A part sketch of the east facade of Patha Bhavana, Santiniketan, c. 1935
Source: Author

Rather than passive reception of modern ideas, this resulted in critical dialogic collaborations,
apart from those with fellow-Indian intellectuals, with architectural and urban thinkers

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

based outside colonial-India like Patrick Geddes and his son Arthur, Antonin Raymond
and his associates, Otto Koenigsberger, Eckart Muthesius and his designer friends from the
German Werkbund and Bauhaus, Walter and Marion Griffin, to name some. These Indian
and non-Indian personalities and their numerous interpersonal partnerships with those from
various cultures, strata and classes of society, in a historic sense, comprised individuals or
groups as ‘agents’ in the ‘habitus’ of, relatively elite colonised-subjects and extra-territorial
actors. Among other practices, they collectively exercised their agency in the temporal-
cultural ‘field’ of experimentation with built environment production. Such experiments
were manifested at diverse sites like the homes of Tagore and educational environments
at Santiniketan in Bengal, the eponymous Bose Institute in Calcutta, the Retreat (Calico
Museum) in Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s Ashrams in Ahmedabad and Sevagram, Indore’s Manik
Bagh Palace, Vasanta Vihar in Madras, the Lucknow University buildings, Indian Institute
of Science (IISc) in Bangalore or the Golconde dormitory in Pondicherry. The architectures
at these sites were produced by myriad intellectual and creative encounters and enabled by
the combined agency of architects and non-architects. They demonstrably ‘performed’ for
social change in domestic, institutional as well as public spheres of dwelling, primary and
higher education, economics, culture and the arts as well as the sciences, respectively.

Figure 5. Facsimile letter: J.N. Tata to Swami Vivekananda requesting him to

endorse establishing an Indian institute for interdisciplinary postgraduate study
Source: Tata Central Archives, Pune

However, to unpack the material agency of architectural space and form – both literally
and discursively, or even the precise geo-spatial dimensions of such activities, Bourdieu’s
model, in spite of its flexibility, has conceptual limitations.20 He evidently applies it
primarily to literary works and artistic theory; these modes of practice analogically share

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some, but not wholly sufficient and in-depth, affinities with the material medium of the
built environment. While the concept does enable access to heterogeneous figures from
other disciplinary histories surrounding processes of realising architectures in the study’s
‘field’, it cannot simplistically ‘translate’ categories from these histories to qualify the
agents’ architectural mode of practice. Such shortcomings as an analytical frame for the
‘field’ of architectural historiography are exposed primarily in socio-spatially and formally
interpreting performative capacities of these discursively cosmopolitan, but nonetheless,
tangibly ‘built’ and used modern architectural propositions as critiques of the colonial-
state.

Figure 6. The Griffins’ architectural explorations at Lucknow (Tagore Library of Lucknow

University – top; Zenana for Lucknow’s Prince – Raja of Mahmudabad – bottom)
Source: National Library of Australia

These issues are, furthermore, not only at interfaces of disciplinary crossovers but also in
conceptual lexicons travelling across cultural contexts that are not easily comparable. In
critical historical terms, cultural ‘losses of translation’ emerge pertinently in the context of
framing some of the agents, processes and sites mentioned above. For instance, conflation of
dissent and critique with the idea of ‘nationalism’ is evident in the latter’s narrow application
and its continuous uncritical reproduction over two decades of architectural historiography.
A key instance of this is reflected in influential texts spanning from 1997 to 2016 that

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

cover the sites of Tagore’s Santiniketan, the Retreat, Gandhi’s Ashrams, Manik Bagh, the
Lucknow University buildings, IISc and Golconde.21 Produced by reputed architectural
historians both from and outside India collaboratively, the key value of such narratives
lies in making visible some of these less-known sites and their agents (albeit omitting
some as well) in India’s modern architectural discourse. However, the persistent casting
of Santiniketan and Gandhi’s Ashrams as sites of ‘nationalism’ embedded in an atavistic
‘revivalist’ mode of ‘resistance’ to the colonial-modern22 and, IISc, Manik Bagh, Lucknow
University and Golconde as authored by ‘foreign’, or variably, ‘international expertise’23 is
not without problems. There is, of course, no doubt that Tagore, Gandhi and many colonial-
feudal dependents were anti-colonial dissidents, and many of their writings and thoughts
overlapped with nationalist imagination to varying degrees, although in very dissimilar
and sometimes contradictory ways. Neither is there any confusion about the Griffins,
Muthesius, Koenigsberger or Raymond being individuals whose architectural knowledges,
influences and exposures originated outside colonial India. But does it simplistically
imply that these sites performed 24 to construct the divergent values, as imposed binaries
of national and foreign suggest, and not in other, more nuanced, culturally cosmopolitan,
pedagogic and institutional modes? Further, do such readings that rely on the agents’ ethnic
identities alone, not preclude the multi-authored and multi-cultural agency and practice
in their conception, production and performance, as the conceptually reductive groupings
evident even in ways that the texts are structured and sectioned cast them?

Figure 7. Gandhi’s homes as Ashram doubling up as institutions in Ahmedabad (left)

and Sevagram (right)
Source: Sabarmati Ashram Trust and Anthill Design, Ahmedabad

Questions such as these, on the one hand, are central to the limits of the inherently European

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cultural idea, here ‘nation’, for direct application to qualify socio-political and architectural
contours of a colonial context outside the west. Its original institutional formulation is,
what many scholars have expostulated rigorously as, incompatible with the fragmentary,
hybrid and unavoidably plural constructions of nation in postcolonial terms, prominently
for colonised India.25 On the other, casting the sites in neat categories of Indian (nationalist)
- Foreign (international) based on selective association with certain figures, overlooks the
entangled individual and collective authorship, as well as interpersonal thought, exchanges
and ‘creative agreements’ as well as dialogue, inherent to these built environment practices.26

Figure 8. Construction of (left) and completed structure (right) the Golconde

building at Pondicherry
Source: The Mother and Sri Aurobindo Trust, Pondicherry

For constructing such histories, unless the structures and meanings of the descriptive
languages are reworked through empirically rooted cultural understandings, epistemic
gaps extend into intercultural readings, going beyond just problems of other disciplinary
concepts framing architectural discourse. These discontinuities engender, as Scriver and
Prakash point out elsewhere, a paradox of the ‘story’ preceding study of the material
production and spatial performance27 of the architectures in question. From this discussion,
therefore, another order of problems for AHT practice emerges at least at two major levels,
when occupying multiple positions in a focused historical endeavour and narrative.
First, disciplinary lexicons external to architecture cannot be uncritically transposed in ways
that are commensurate with modes of architecturally historicising cultural or social values
and; second, taxonomical categories embedded in specific intellectual-cultural academic
contexts can cause reductive historical readings when directly applied to epistemes outside

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

their cultures of origin, for examining situated architectural practices. The question then
arises, of how the notion of architecture’s authorship within discursive and material
practices of ‘modernity-as-critique’ can inhabit, productively engage with and interact with
‘naturalised’ positions in the humanities that surround architecture’s materiality. Can such
interaction reconfigure binary (is or is not!) and other similar presumptions that have been
‘passed down’ into the ‘field’ of AHT’s discourse, by occupying multiple disciplinary and
cultural positions?

The potential and structures of conceptual ‘elasticity’

These seemingly daunting questions, it can be argued, point to latent opportunities in
architecture’s historiographic practice. As preceding discussions indicate, freeing author-
amateur or architect-society dichotomies from rigid positions provoke may induce ‘cognitive
porosity’ between conceptual compartments that, otherwise, tend to delimit their attendant
academic discourses. Such porosity could inform many nuanced readings of ‘agents’ and
‘agency’ in historicising architecture’s authorship. Problematising synthetic descriptors
borrowed from disciplines external to architecture – such as modernity and nationalism
and, revivalism or resistance, can similarly be quite productive. It makes the categories’
disciplinary and cultural limits explicit in relation to qualifying agents and agency in the
production and performance of built environments. This could facilitate connected study
of critical practices even in dissimilar sites of architectural production. Such portable
framings, in part, gain a desirable currency in interdisciplinary possibilities of AHT practice
to ‘excavate’ authorship from, rather than impose it on, built environment practices and
their histories. These potentials can, however, be realised only by being acutely attentive
to the historical materials in such a field. A ‘heuristic’ approach to apply descriptive
language(s), at least provisionally, may be deemed necessary to prevent architecture’s
historiographic practice from becoming rigidly deterministic. However, it requires the
treatment of built environments’ material and representational registers, not as a closed
system of ‘architectural’ values. Instead, a conceptual ‘elasticity’ of AHT’s interfaces with
disciplines surrounding its material discourse is required. This can reconfigure what the
descriptors communicate, enabling multiple positions to elucidate how architectures shape
other historical experiences and vice versa.
The concept of ‘elasticity’ as pertaining to architectural authorship is hinged on three broad
entities in its temporal field. They comprise external (to architecture) narratives on built-
environments’ agents and/or producers, narratives about the agents’ ideas and orientations,
their performative capacities and dispositions (which, according to Bourdieu, informs their
corresponding social and cultural capital), but most importantly, the historical material that

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bridges the first two entities, such as the materiality of the built environments in question, as
well as archive(s) related to them, which could comprise drawings, still and moving images
or even, textual conceptions or oral descriptions. These entities appear, in their mutual
relationality, to resemble the ‘signifier’ (agents), ‘signification’ (ideas/representations) and
‘sign’ (buildings/sites/archives) triad. In fact, Roland Barthes uses signifier-signification-
sign as a ‘double-triad’ where the sign recursively signifies and structures the signifier to
construct meaning through ‘myth’. Myth itself, he argues, is a ‘mode of speech’, not just
oral but through any mode of discourse.28Barthes’ unorthodox approach arguably shares
only a nominal affinity, in material terms, with the critical AHT practice being argued
for. However, his emphasis on the ‘sign’ is conceptually instructive for this discussion on
theoretical elasticity inasmuch as its rigorous challenge to external theoretical frameworks
in representing it. He argues for the sign’s own performative capacity and agency to ‘tell the
story’ of what it signifies and qualify the disposition of agents who make it signify what it
does. This is not dissimilar to the argument against uncritical imposition (‘story’ preceding
study) of external taxonomic and epistemic categories to historicise architecture. Such
a heuristic mode relies indispensably on the veracity of historic architectures’ material
agency29 and its archival complements as putative ‘signs’ to unpack ‘authorship’ from
practices of their conception and production. The temporal-historical field comprising
‘modes of architectural production’ and/or ‘spatial, material and social practices’, in this
manner, is structurally homologous to, and has ramifications on, the corresponding AHT
field of reading and writing them. Such an approach can be more appropriate to framing
architecture’s historical objects, conceiving the narrative through relevant historical
materials and, making explicit its narrative strategy in relation to those objects and materials;
rather than the absent or latent ‘knowing subject’ that the architectural historian constructs
herself to be.
This conceptual configuration has the capacity, moreover, to investigate modernity in
architecture beyond, a temporal ‘stasis’ of linear origin and diffusion in time and space
within an evolutionary metanarrative. It shifts focus from products (or the architectural
artefact) to reflexive processes (what does thinking through the built environment do
socially or culturally). 30 This brings out how agents’ intentions, thought and action may
have historically engendered the dialogic practices of conceiving and realising built
environments. For instance, in the context of the author’s present study, it can be helpful
to map how critiques of the colonial-state in India were not constant but in continuous
development according to changing political, cultural, economic or social circumstances
of individuals as well as the collective. These dynamics also qualify changing dispositions
of the agents of such a critique and, how architectures’ materiality is prefigured within it.

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

In other words, these architectures’ histories can be constructed as a continuous flow of

conception, knowledge, practice of production and performance. Thus, rather than seeing
sites through static and stable ‘states’ and phases in historical development or diffusion of
modernity, it frames them as processes of how built environments order social knowledge
and values when critically questioning cultures of the colonial-state. By delineating
architectural authorship in these terms, it accommodates modes of analyses beyond
‘autonomous’ conceptions and materiality of ‘modern’ or ‘architecture’, both separately
and collectively. This mode of analyses enables critical and productive interfaces of AHT
practice with the humanities and disciplines related to its field of inquiry.
In the more empirical context of the present research, the historical materials examined – as
the sites and built environments, archives and narratives about them – can then inform a
‘historical-geographical landscape of critique’ of imperial-modernity in late colonial India
through architectures, as much as the cross-cultural thought and values serve to inform the
architectural practices. This anticipates how the sites’ myriad agents and processes drawn
in from other histories, about the aforementioned colonised-elites and their collaborators,
could inhabit narratives of colonial-modern architecture in India through corresponding
histories of the processes and practices of built environment production. The AHT mode,
in this regard, enables the inclusion of both ‘bona-fide’ and ‘amateur’ architectural agents,
financers, the peculiarities of creative, intellectual or physical labour through which they
were conceived and produced and even their construction processes. It also anticipates
a potential of the architectural histories of these sites to inhabit and intersect critically
with cultural, scientific, political, social, spiritual, educational and economic historical
narratives in the context of late-colonial India, by framing their architectures as a ‘node of
relations and practice’ for a multi-modal critique to the colonial-modern state.

Concluding remarks
The ‘elastic’ conceptual outline presented here on plural structures of architectural
‘authorship’, albeit in part referencing particular historiographic operations of this
author’s research on architectural modernity, can be viewed within wider reflections on
producing architectural history within the academy. The exigencies of translation that this
paper discusses in relation to categories, terminology, languages and their lexicons, for
AHT’s present and future circumstance, are evidenced in a meteoric profusion of formerly
colonised, now independent but inevitably marginalised, geopolitical and cultural entities
claiming ‘modernity’ in their historic architectures on their own critical and intellectual
terms. This provoked the anecdotal remark on departures from centrality, metanarratives
and authorship in the introductory paragraphs of this text. The practice of AHT anticipates

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such changes in paradigmatic, not just incremental, proportions.

Specifically, in contested terrains of inscribing architectural modernity, exemplars
of historiographic practice in the past decade and half have underscored a potential in
rendering previously applied theoretical framings from specific contexts of Central and
Western Europe or Northern America, and their intellectual concerns, out of date. On the
one hand, the latter’s erstwhile academic authoritativeness has been superseded by writers
of modern architectural histories that emerge from, or focus on, intellectual and cultural
epistemes from continental African, Latin American, southern, south-eastern and far-
eastern Asian regions, in varying degrees.31 On the other, such shifts have also provoked
fissures within the Western academy’s own monolithic conceptions of itself, which is
increasingly becoming a locus of explicitly identifying with its internal geopolitical and
cultural differences and intrinsic diversities. This shift in the intellectual landscape of AHT,
where many positions can inhabit a collective historiographic enterprise on modernity
and its cultural authorship, are not limited to the discipline of architecture. Edward Said’s
four-decade old, seminal and foundational work on Orientalism, which problematized the
‘modern’ (western) colonial scholarship’s systematic and enduring criteria for making
intelligible ‘exotic’ colonised contexts in sharp oppositional terms, has since given way
to still more nuanced and conceptually open modes to interrogate interactions of, even
colonising and colonised, cultures through myriad and multi-centred constructions of
the ‘modern’. Within the intellectual domain of Sociology of Culture, S.N. Eisenstadt
articulates this as going “far beyond the homogenizing and hegemonic thrust imputed
to the original pattern of modernity.”32 Rather than constructing binary opposition with
‘tradition’, outputs of such intellectual endeavours elucidate an inherent unpredictability
involved in the purportedly ‘universalizing’ modern project, when played out tangibly in the
‘sites’ of colonised territories. They focus on inventive and innovative dimensions of how
corresponding societies in such territories, continuously and reflexively appropriated or
sometimes ricocheted; domesticated, reinterpreted and reformulated33 culturally ambivalent
modernities, variably through the agency of their colonised but social-economic elites
as well as subalterns and, sometimes both. Rather than the ‘modern’ being constructed
against traditions of ossified values, the paradoxical terminology of ‘modern traditions’
continuously re-constitutes, and is re-constituted in historiographic terms by, tradition’s
dynamic and living attributes in modern historical time.34 Across disciplines and their
interstitial and intersectional spaces, the idea of ‘modern’ in the myriad social sciences
and humanities including AHT, could then increasingly and indispensably be framed in the
‘plural’ rather than ‘universal’, in conceptual and empirical terms.

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Amateurs and Authors: Challenges and Potentialities in Architectural Historiography of late-colonial India

These significant changes in the academy do not mean, however, a disqualification of the
historical materials or analytical tools that AHT’s multi-layered field is predicated on. They,
however, certainly point to emerging paradigms wherein these materials and tools are, firstly,
configured in significantly wider thematic and empirical scope and reach. The new AHT
practices will continue to rely, for instance, on literary, artistic, technological or scientific,
pedagogical, economic, political, social and cultural narratives that surround architecture’s
material discourse. But the questions asked of those narratives would be framed through
different positions, concerns and quests for architectures’ interpretations. Second, given
their non-neutrality and value-loaded nature, architecture’s spatial, formal, material and
representational registers will demand acute and incisive attention, not necessarily limited
to serve essentialist preoccupations of a vocation of architecture. They can, instead, also be
vital in articulating concerns beyond its disciplinary limits in relative, comparative and non-
hierarchical terms by speaking to and questioning categories and meanings surrounding
architecture’s discourse. Such a conceptual ‘elasticity’ through which AHT can frame its
historical materials, informed by and informing, a growing range of disciplinary, cultural,
geographical and conceptual vantages, can strengthen its core formation both substantively
and substantially, now and in the future.

NOTES
1 This was the prime argument presented by Prof. Tom Avermaete, Chair of the History and Theory of
Urban Design at the GTA Institute, ETH Zurich (The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology); during
the evening panel session on “Possible futures of Architectural History” on 3 November 2018 as a
part of the Bartlett, University College London’s World of Architectural History Conference from 2-4
November 2018

2 At the global level, influential critical, technological, representational registers that have been explored
in modern architectures through the twentieth century, in the English language, can be traced through
the work of Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine
Age (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1980); Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and
Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1976); Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and
Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996); Robin Evans,
The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000).

3 Relatively formal, centralised narratives in the survey mode of ‘originality and diffusion’ of architectural
modernity where the ‘universal’ is often pitted against ‘regional’ or ‘ephemeral’ qualifiers are seen in
the works of Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1976); Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture : A Critical History, (London: Thames and Hudson,

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 Saptarshi Sanyal

1980); William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1982); Hasan-Uddin
Khan, International Style: Modernist Architecture from 1925 to 1965, (Cologne: Taschen, 1998).
4 A very telling example of this potential is seen in how to study even a single building type through
multiple modes in the introduction to: Anthony D King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global
Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 1-11. Similarly variable registers are visible in the
works of: Gülsüm Baydar, “The Cultural Burden of Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education
(1984-) 57, no. 4 (2004): 19–27. Zeynep Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage,
no. 17 (April 1992); Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century
World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
5 The study of power in architecture has been central to the incisively penetrative work of Anthony D
King, Colonial Urban Development : Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1976); Thomas A Markus, Buildings & Power : Freedom and Control in the Origin of
Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993) ; and more recently in the works of: Kim Dovey,
Framing Places : Mediating Power in Built Form (London: Routledge, 1999). In a more general sense:
the role of power and justice in space has been explored in David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the
Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass ; Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 210-326.
6 Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash, “Between Materiality and Representation: framing an
architectural critique of colonial South Asia” in Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash, eds., Colonial
Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London ; New York:
Routledge, 2007), 11.
7 The author’s PhD research-project, provisionally titled “Shaping the modern: architectural cultures
as critique in late colonial India (1913-48)” examines connected, yet heterogeneous, departures from
mainstream colonial-modern architecture in British India, focusing on the mixed agency of colonised-
subjects and external actors in conceiving and producing built environments and their role in catalysing
social change at specific sites of discourse and materiality, outside the colonial-state’s frameworks of
political administration, cultural injunctions, education and pedagogy, spirituality and economics.
8 Reyner Banham, “A black box: the secret profession of architecture,” New Statesman & Society, Oct
12, 1990, 22-25.
9 Reyner Banham, “A home is not a house” Art in America, no. 2 (1965): 70-79
10 These insights are visible in the very critical study of ‘talking’ about architecture or design, more
specifically, in: Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings : A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2000), 136-141. Jonathan Hill, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative
Users (London; New York: Routledge, 2003). It is also pertinent to mention, in this context, the
significant doctoral research produced by Anthony Vidler at TU Delft, completed in 2005, on the
evolution in historical perspectives of modern architecture, which was later published as: Anthony
Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present : Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, Mass. ;
London: MIT Press, 2008).

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11 This mode can be traced back to the influential study of: Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture
(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969). The perspective on this issue was further developed
through King’s edited work bringing in studies from myriad contexts and building types: Anthony
D. King, ed., Buildings and Society : Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).

12 The idea of normative institutions in ‘engineering’ a widespread production of built environments

and infrastructure in colonial India was pioneered in the doctoral research of: Peter Scriver,
“Rationalization, standardization and control in design: A cognitive historical study of architerctural
design and planning in the Public Works Department of British India, 1855-1901” (PhD diss.,
Technische Universiteit Delft, 1994); later reflected in his article: “Empire-Building and Thinking in
the Public Works Department of British India” in Scriver and Prakash, eds., Colonial Modernities,
69-92; A, later, similarly in-depth analysis related to the role of the Department of Science and Arts
(DSA) is found in the work: Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its
Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2007). Equally critical and valuable ethno-geographic
and anthropological explorations of colonial cities from a postcolonial perspective are visible in: Jyoti
Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism, (London ; New York:
Routledge, 2005) and: Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the
Colonial Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2006).

13 E.H. Carr, What is History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1974; revised ed. 2002), 41-46.

14 Sibel Bozdogan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial

Challenges to the Modern Survey,” Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 52, no. 4 (1999): 207–
15.

15 Andrew Leach, What is Architectural History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 81-96. Leach argues,
in his discussion on “Evidence”, the boundaries and limits of how architecture can be a ‘medium’
through which history is constructed outside the internal concerns of the discipline. Recent efforts
to intellectually develop this are tangibly visible in major international conferences: Peter Scriver,
Amit Srivastava, and Nigel Westbrook, “Architecture as Method: A Report on the Adelaide Congress
2017,” Fabrications 27, no. 3 (September 2, 2017): 425–28 ; equally compelling, are key researches
where the spatio-functional study of geographies, towns and buildings explain colonial governance
and administration by challenging assumed binaries of urban and rural, as seen in: Tania Sengupta,
“Between Country and City: Fluid Spaces of Provincial Administrative Towns in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal,” Urban History 39, no. 01 (February 2012): 56–82.

16 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 78-87.

17 The advancement of the idea of a ‘Virtual Cosmopolis” predicated on print-capitalism has been
discussed in the context of centres and peripheries, and a ‘constructed’ latency in historicising avant-

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garde movements in the visual arts in relative terms, is seen in: Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism:
Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 542–44. For a
more general overview of how narrative structures are constructed on modernity and in post-colonial
discourses, see: Simon Gunn, History and Cultural Theory (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), 126-
30, 156-181. Please refer Note #19 for more details on what some of these sources of ‘other histories’
that are mentioned here are.

18 Pierre Bourdieu The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randall Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993),
61-73.

19 A very short list of some of the foundational texts for modern histories in late-colonial India include,
for politics and nation: Sumit Sarkar, Modern India (1885-1947) (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983); and
more recently: Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia : History, Culture, Political Economy
(New York ; London: Routledge, 2004). For important scientific histories: Deepak Kumar, Science and
the Raj : A Study of British India, 2nd ed., (New Delhi ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). For
economics: Aditya Mukherjee, Imperialism, Nationalism and the making of the Indian capitalist class
(1920-47) (New Delhi: Sage, 2002). Beyond these more wide texts, specific facets of modern figures in
late-colonial India have been examined in detail in works like: Kathleen M. O’Connell, Rabindranath
Tagore: the Poet as Educator (Kolkata: Visva Bharati, 2002); or even unpublished researches related
to architectural thought’s intersection with the orientations of some of these personalities like in:
Venugopal Maddipati, “Selfsame Spaces: Gandhi, Architecture and Allusions in Twentieth Century
India” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2011); Daniel Williamson,“ Modern Architecture and
Capitalist Patronage in Ahmedabad, India 1947-1969” (PhD diss., New York University, 2016).

20 Joe Painter, “Pierre Bourdieu,” in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (London:
Routledge, 2000), 255-57.

21 Four specific texts referred to here in order of dates of publication include: Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai
and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence : The Search for Identity - India 1880 to 1980 (Delhi ;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jon Lang, A Concise history of modern architecture in India
(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002); Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, India: modern architectures in
history (London: Reaktion, 2015); Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai, “Nationalism in Indian architecture:
a modern trajectory in twentieth century India” in Wasana Wongsurawat, ed., Sites of modernity:
Asian cities in the transitory moments of trade, colonialism and nationalism (Berlin: Springer, 2016).

22 Lang, Desai and Desai, Architecture and Independence, 123-126; Lang, Concise history, 7; Scriver
and Srivastava, India, 91-93.

23 Lang, Concise history, 18-38; Scriver and Srivastava, India, 114-19.

24 The idea of ‘performance’ of architectural space is explored in a frustratingly cursory way in: Scriver
and Srivastava, India, 93; in discussing the actual spatial dimensions and its meaning in regard to
Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, in just a brief paragraph.

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25 The fragmentary and plural dimensions of the Indian nation are postulated in detail in cultural framings
of authoritative and controversial works like: Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial
and Postcolonial Histories, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993). Homi K. Bhabha, The
Location of Culture (London ; New York: Routledge, 1994).Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000) and most recently in: Sugata Bose, The
Nation as Mother and other visions of nationhood (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2017).

26 The ‘dialogic’ mode is chronicled through important but less-known works regarding the Golconde at
Pondicherry, Tagore’s interaction with Geddes and the Griffins’ work in Lucknow through: Aurobindo
Ashram Trust, Golconde (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2002) and Pankaj Vir Gupta, Christine
Mueller and Cyrus Samii, Golconde: The Introduction of Modernism in India (Delhi: Urban Crayon,
2010); Bashabi Fraser ed., A Meeting of Two Minds: Geddes, Tagore: Letters (Edinburgh: Word
Power, 2005); Christopher Vernon, “Lucknow’s forgotten Australian-American landscape heritage”
Journal of Landscape Architecture 6, no.1 (Monsoon, 2008): 85-89; respectively.

27 Scriver and Prakash, “Between Materiality and Representation”, 11

28 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993), 109-27; refer to his
discussion drawing from Ferdinand de Saussure on how myths operate as a semiological system and
the signification in the section on “Myth Today”. Such provocations are also apparent in his discussion
in this publication on the “Neither-nor Criticism,” 81-83.

29 Material culture studies have been very important in relation to architectural histories in recent
decades. Although not directly relevant to the discussion on critique through an architectural mode,
critical studies related to how architectural materiality can communicate meaning are important
references, like: Victor Buchli, ed., The Material Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2002). Victor Buchli,
An Anthropology of Architecture (London ; New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); or Mary Douglas, Purity
and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2001).

30 The idea of human conduct through agents and their agency, as continuous flow and a recursive
ordering knowledge, experience and values, through unconsciousness, pragmatic consciousness and
discursive consciousness, is discussed in: Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: outline of
the theory of structuration (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), 6-25.

31 Modern architecture studies of these regions have been emerging through recent works which focus on
Southern America, like: Valerie Fraser, Building the New World : Studies in the Modern Architecture
of Latin America, 1930-1960 (London: Verso, 2000); , Asia: William S W Lim and Jiat-Hwee Chang,
Non West Modernist Past: On Architecture & Modernities (Singapore: World Scientific, 2011);  and
Africa: Manuel Herz, Ingrid Schröder, Hans Focketyn and Julia Jamrozik, eds., African Modernism :
The Architecture of Independence : Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia / Edited by Manuel
Herz ; (Zurich: Park, 2015).

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32 S. N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter “Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities - A Comparative

View” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (Summer, 1998): 4.

33 S.N.Eisenstadt “Multiple Modernities” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter, 2000): 14-16.

34 Of many, two distinct ways of tradition’s reconstitution of modernity may be highlighted here. One is
how architectural modernity is incorporated into ethnic memory in the context of a racially internal
conflict for identity, as evidenced in the case of Eritrea’s struggle for independence not from a European
colonial-modern power, but its assertion of its statehood in distinction to Ethiopia (both of which
were initially colonised by the Italians). The World Heritage Nomination process and contents for its
capital, Asmara, are a testimony to this historical narrative: Edward Denison, Medhanie Teklemariam,
and Dawit Abraha, “Asmara: Africa’s Modernist City (UNESCO World Heritage Nomination),” The
Journal of Architecture 22, no. 1 (January, 2017): 11–53. A second, different, picture is revealed
through Japan’s appropriation of architectural modernity being traced to the Meiji Restoration, as
a modernity that did not ostensibly upset the social status quo and was less fragmented, yet lived in
contradictory anxeities through its ‘everyday’. These are chronicled and mapped out appropriately in
works like: Harry D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet : Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question
of Everyday Life (New York ; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2000), 59-110; S. N. Eisenstadt,
Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2003), 436-55; Arata
Isozaki and David B. Stewart, Japan-Ness in Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006), 3-31;
Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World : The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New
Global Order, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2012), 46-69.

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