Modernism, modernization and post‐colonial India: a reflective essay

Abstract

As a result of political changes stemming from independence and partition, India was forced to build new state capitals and add extensions to existing cities to provide homes to refugees, house state governments, and deal with urban congestion. Although the British had built New Delhi as the new capital of the Raj at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were hardly any trained Indians to undertake the task of planning and architecture. While British India had done a remarkable job in educating Indians in liberal arts and law, it had done very little to promote disciplines such as engineering, architecture and technical education.

The development of Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar and Gandhinagar, between 1949 and 1982, represents a fascinating study of practical politics, personal ambitions of politicians and Western planners, and the high ideals of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The architect‐planner Le Corbusier, together with Nehru, provided the new planning model and architectural design that would overshadow imperial New Delhi. Chandigarh was to serve as a training school for Indian planners, who could then duplicate their experience in other cities to improve urban India, and also influence rural India.

The story of Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar and Gandhinagar is not one of success or failure or even of comparative satisfaction with the quality of life in a new city. It is, rather, a chronicle of a period during which India made a bold attempt to make a break with her past within the confines of a socio‐urban experiment that included, along with an innovative master plan, modernist buildings, new land‐use patterns, provisions for education, recreation, medical and social services, the careful and deliberate inclusion of ideas that had their origin in a culture far removed from her own. Between the ideas of the planners and hopes of the government officials there lies a narrative of planned cities and the people who inhabit them, and the influence of modernism on India generally. This paper reflects on the impact of modernist architecture on India.

Notes

1. For a full discussion of the Indian government’s plans to build 300 new cities, see N. S. Lamba, Emerging Capitals and New Towns. Journal of the Institute of Town Planners 63 (June 1971) 65.

2. For a full discussion of Chandigarh, see R. Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City, second edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

3. R. Kalia, Bhubaneswar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.

4. R. Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building national identity in postcolonial India. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

5. Balakrishna V. Doshi, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn: The Acrobat and the Yogi of Architecture (Interviews). Ahmedabad: Vastu Shipa Foundation and Research in Environment Design, 1986–1992. These are in‐house interviews produced by Doshi’s studio in Ahmedabad, in which he acknowledges his debt to the two masters.

6. From the record of the meeting between Le Corbusier, Max Fry, and Jane drew, 6 December 1950. Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

7. Le Corbusier, Letter to Fry, 12 December 1951.

8. Government of India, Ministry of Publication and Broadcasting, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches: 1963–64. Vol. 5, New Delhi, 1968, p. 100.

9. D. D’Souza, Two Cheers for Colonialism. The Chronicle of Higher Education Review (May 10, 2002) B7–B9.

10. R. G. Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981, p. 88.

11. Sir Harcourt Butler, cited in R. G. Irving, ibid., p. 89.

12. Nehru, Letter to Premier of East Punjab, 7 December 1949.

13. Both traditional and Western influences have shaped intellectual thought in modern India, and both traditional and modern Indias have demonstrated their abilities to assimilate contradictory influences in their effort to forge ahead. Marxists, Freudians, Mcluhanites, Subalternists, Saidians, all have their labels for the stage India is in, according to their scheme of evolution; but the notion of tribal India, i.e. India of many tribes, languages, religions and so on, which was popularized by imperial historians and later by several American historians, sensitive to their own regional differences, ignores the unifying, vis‐à‐vis assimilating, force of the Indian civilization. Clearly, there are regional differences in India. But post‐independence India (the focus of this paper) must also acknowledge nation‐building efforts of the Indian leadership by devising a unifying identity, particularly in architecture, which was as much the concern of the British while building New Delhi as it was the concern of Indians while building Chandigarh and Bhubaneswar and Gandhinagar. And if it can be said there are many Indians, the fact remains that there is also one India. This is to say, it is possible to trace throughout the country a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern – a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and association of ideas, which, if it is not common strictly to every group or class or caste of Indian people, is still common in one appreciable measure or another, and in some part or another, to all but relatively negligible ones. To clarify, the reference to ‘two different cultures’ here is intended to draw distinction between village India that Gandhi celebrated and urban India that Nehru desired.

14. Cited in R.G. Irving, op. cit. [10], p. 90.

15. Hindustan Times, New Delhi (July 8, 1950); see also L. R. Nair (ed.), Why Chandigarh? Simla: Publicity Department, Punjab Government, 1950, p. 4.

16. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, letter to Sardar Gurbachan Singh, 27 April 1954.

17. Time (June 19, 1950).

18. Hindustan Standard, Calcutta (April 14, 1948). For a full account of the planning of the city, see R. Kalia, op. cit. [3].

19. Julius Vaz’s talk on All India Radio, Cuttack, 13 April, 1954, published as Architecture of Bhubaneswar, New Capital, Orissa. Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects 20, 2 (April–June 1954) 3–4.

20. For different views on Roy, see B. M. Sankhdher (ed.), Rammohan Roy: the apostle of Indian awakening: some contemporary estimates. New Delhi: Navarang, 1989.

21. R.G. Irving, op. cit. [10], p. 88.

22. William Henry Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore (MD): Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

23. For a good biography on Sullivan, see Robert C. Twombly. Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

24. Notwithstanding his extremely busy life, Nehru was very prolific. It is therefore important for anyone wanting to understand the man that he read his voluminous works, including Autobiography , first published in 1936 by John Lane, London, and re‐published in updated edition as Toward Freedom, in 1941, by John Day, New York. S. Gopal, Nehru’s official biographer, has completed his three volumes Jawaharlal Nehru between 1975 and 1983, published in London by Jonathan Cape: the same work was also reproduced by Harvard University Press, between 1976 and 1984. Gopal is also the editor of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru in thirty‐one volumes. Two additional works may be mentioned here: Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1959; and Stanley Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

25. Government of India, Ministry of Publication and Broadcasting, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches: September 1957–April 1963. Vol. 4, New Delhi: Government of India, Ministry of Publication and Broadcasting, 1964, pp. 175–6.

26. For a good and enduring comparative study of Howard, Wright and Le Corbusier, see R. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999.

27. R. Kalia, op. cit. [2] for a full discussion on Le Corbusier’s work in India.

28. R. Fishman, op. cit. [26], p. 158.

29. The Times, London (October 19, 1898).

30. E. Howard, Garden Cities of To‐morrow. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1902; London: Faber and Faber, 1946, p. 112.

31. Government of India, op. cit. [8], p. 100.

32. Mayer’s address to the Convention Symposium I, ‘Urban and Regional Planning’, Washington DC, 10 May 1950, reprinted in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects (October 1950) 171–3.

33. Mayer, quoted in the National Herald, Lucknow (June 5, 1950).

34. Mayer, letter to Nehru, 17 June 1946, cited in A. Mayer, Pilot Project, India: The Story of Rural Development in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958, pp. 7–8.

35. See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; William Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900. Englewood (NJ): Prentice Hall, 1983; and Diane Ghirardo, Architecture after Modernism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.

36. Mulk Raj Anand, The Concept of a Humanistic Architecture. The Indian Architect (January 1962).

37. Government of India, op. cit. [25], pp. 175–6.

38. Original photograph and picture on display in the Chandigarh Museum, Chandigarh; copy reproduced here by permission. Le Corbusier’s quote is imprinted on the photograph.

39. W. J. R. Curtis, Modernism and the Search for Indian Identity. The Architectural Review 182 (August 1987) 33.

40. The Louis Kahn Collection is housed in the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania; also, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, maintains a collection of Kahn’s work in India, working closely with the University of Pennsylvania. Architect Anant Raje, who worked with Kahn in Ahmedabad, is the curator of the Kahn Collection in Ahmedabad.

41. W. J. R. Curtis, op. cit. [39], p. 33.

42. Ibid., p. 34.

43. Vernon Z. Newcombe, Gandhinagar: A New Capital City For the State of Gujarat, New York: UN Commissioner for Technical Cooperation, Dept. of Economic and Social Affairs, February 8, 1968. A copy is also available with the Capital City Office, General Administration, Gujarat Government, Gandhinagar.

44. B. V. Doshi and C. Alexander, The Concept of Main Structure, in John Donat (ed.), World Architecture. London: Studio Vista, 1966, pp. 11–12.

45. C. Correa, Gun House, Ahmedabad, in B. V. Doshi and C. Alexander (eds), ibid., p. 25.

46. K. Frampton, Towards a Critical Regionalism, Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance, in H. Foster (ed.) The Anti‐Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983.

47. G. Bhatia, Punjab Baroque: And Other Memories of Architecture. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1994, p. 32.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ravi Kalia

*Ravi Kalia is a Professor of History at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He was educated at Hindu College, Delhi University and University of California, Los Angeles. His writings include three major books on the creation and design of each of India’s new post‐independence state capitals: Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City, (2nd edn, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Bhubaneswar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press/New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). He has also published widely in journals, including Journal of Urban History, Habitat International and Technology and Science Journal