THIS ESSAY DWELLS ON SOME OF THE MORE OBVIOUS FEATURES of the current moment in Indian architecture and seeks to understand them in the context of the post-independence history of architectural concerns. It also speculates upon the broader significance of some of the more dominant approaches to architecture, particularly among some of its more creative and critical practitioners.

Modernism (with its internal variants) was established as the language of contemporary architecture in India since the 1950s, especially after the work of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and Louis Kahn at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. A quick look reveals that two basic concerns have dominated the practice of architecture as a socially meaningful and creative endeavour since the 1950s in India. Serious architectural reflection (in practice and discourse) since independence has been concerned with the architectural language that modern India uses/strives to use/ought to use to phrase its architecture. The other is the concern with addressing the fact and possibility of local, contingent, situated place, as opposed to high Modernism’s abstract and universalist conception of space. I explore here, in a necessarily synoptic fashion, how these two early concerns illuminate the contemporary situation.

Modern modifications

By the 1970s, the ‘purity’ of Modernist abstraction was being challenged and ‘contaminated’ by architects like Charles Correa, Raj Rewal, Achyut Kanvinde, and Balkrishna Doshi, among many others, who had themselves helped establish it in India. Others like Joseph Allen Stein had already been exploring a more place-conscious language of building from the 1950s. By the 1970s, creative leaders attempted, with mixed success, to acknowledge situational contingency as a central principle in the self-contained abstraction of Modernism. The contingent factors they sought to engage substantively with were local climate, culture, and values embodied in building traditions, and more problematically, traditional myths and symbolisms. As has been pointed out, a significant part of this effort, particularly by the 1980s, appeared to reinforce Orientalist perspectives on the question of what constituted Indianness in Indian architecture. In addition, as A.G. K. Menon has pointed out, there was the ambition of finding one pan-Indian architectural vocabulary, which levelled out the significant regional, situational, and cultural variety of the country.1 At the same time, if we keep aside the loose referentiality of architecture and its accompanying rhetoric, there were genuine advances towards a place-bound architecture. Accompanying the discussion of myth, there was a genuine modification of the basic morphology of the object in a substantive engagement with climate issues and local technological possibilities.

A comparison between the canonical Indian works of the first two decades after independence and those completed in the early1980s reveals a number of things. Broadly, we find that the abstract, self-sufficient, singular built object of the 1950s and 1960s Modernism in India breaks down by the 1980s into a disaggregated morphology of interrelated forms and spaces as a more open and ambiguous relationship between the inside and the outside is acknowledged. Of course, projects like Charles Correa’s Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, built in 1958, before Le Corbusier completed his work in Chandigarh, and Joseph Allen Stein’s India International Centre, New Delhi, built in 1962, show that the search for a particularist language, tied concretely to local place, programme, materials, and tradition, was already underway from very early on. However, it was only by the late 1970s and the early 1980s that, for instance, the open internal courtyard – a central feature of pre-modern traditions across the country – got well established in modern architectural design in India as an organizing principle of the plan as well as of the experience of a building. By the 1980s, we saw a greater commitment to representing the building as a social and constructional object – as in Raj Rewal’s Asian Games Housing in New Delhi – in contrast to the Modernist desire to foreground the enigmatic nature of the architectural object, whether through abstract composition or attenuation of discontinuity in detailing.

Differentiation of languages since the 1980s

After the ’80s, there has been a significant differentiation in architectural languages and value-systems, even as early as the 1970s, when the canonical mainstream tended to integrate different approaches within a broadly similar set of particular approaches. The differences in individual angles of approaching architectural form were significant in the work of practitioners like Doshi, Correa, and Rewal – they never however appeared to completely fall outside the complicated project of developing an ‘Indian’ architectural language rooted in the Modernist legacy.

Over the last thirty years or so, newer languages have been developed and established in opposition to, or through serious critiques of high Modernism, as well as of the mythically inflected Indian version established by the 1980s. Two diametrically opposed critiques of ‘Western’ Modernism as well as consciously ‘Indianised’ Modernism seem to have emerged serially over the 1980s and 1990s.

Modernism appears to be criticized severely, on the one hand, for being too disconnected from the imperatives and possibilities of the real world, including the environmental crisis (and the bad politics of not taking users into confidence) as well as for ignoring the opportunities that non-modernist aesthetics and local materials, climate, history, and traditions offer in place-making. This can be understood as a critique of the disconnections of the architectural language (its constructional and processual choices) and modes of practice (from the particularities of the site as well as of the programme). The architecture of Gerard da Cunha and Dean D’Cruz (both in Goa), the Kanade brothers (Bangalore), Sanjay Prakash (New Delhi), Vasant and Revathi Kamath (New Delhi), among others, is representative of critical alternatives to Modernism that emerged across the country by the late ’70s and early ’80s, especially in small to medium-sized practices.

There is also a new and emerging body of work since the 1990s, which suggests a belief, that Indian Modernism since the 1970s did not fully explore all the possibilities that the Modernist trajectory had to offer. The work of Gurjeet Singh Matharoo (Ahmedabad), and Nisha Mathew and Soumitro Ghosh of MGApl (Mathew Ghosh Architects Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore) is most representative of this critique. Other skilled architects also appear to locate themselves more directly in the recent Western history of operating critically upon (what begins to look like) relatively innocent Modernist form (by subjecting it to various ‘procedures’). The extremely assured work of many such young architects across the country today embodies an impatience with the apparent ‘digression’ of the Modernist tradition into traditional morphologism and symbolism in the 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of the enquiries of Post-Modernism in the West2. This represents a critique of what is believed to be an over-investment in the wrong kind of particularities of place.