Figure 1: Architect U.M. Apte (top left) on the building site of Western India House, headquarters of the former Western India Life Insurance Comp any, Lakshmi Road, Pune, early 1950s.

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Source: private collection of Kiran Apte.

2Such a cultural approach to the historiography of twentieth-century architecture in India is only just emerging, most notably in the work of Nikhil Rao, Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, Farhan Karim, and Thomas Oommen. Conventional architectural histories of this period either discuss a series of canonical projects in an attempt to identify nationwide architectural trends, or are monographs focused on the intentions and virtuosity of individual architects. In contrast, this dissertation highlights how, as the country moved out of the colonial twilight to become a global economic player in its own right, its architecture was shaped by intense processes of social and political change. Concomitant with the democratization of education, the informalization of the building bureaucracy, and the rise of a new urban middle class, self-perceptions of Indian architects not only rapidly transformed, they also co-existed in multiple and at times conflicting forms. The aim of this dissertation is thus not to define what constituted “the Indian architect” or “Indian architecture,” but to interrogate the variety and specificity of professional identities in relation to the architecture(s) they produced. Given that debates on architecture in India continue to be governed by long-standing perceptions of deficit (of professional integrity and architectural quality), such an endeavor seemed particularly timely.

3The dissertation is constituted of two distinct parts. The first and major part delves into the daily workworld of self-employed architects active in the regional city of Pune (formerly Poona) between 1930 and 1992. Consisting of three chronological chapters (1930-1960, 1960-1975, and 1970-1992), it presents the findings of empirical research. The most important primary sources identified are the previously undisclosed office archives of Architects United (est. 1961), architect V.V. Badawe (est. 1963), and Space Designers’ Syndicate (est. 1980), along with collections of photographs, drawings, and correspondence by architect U.M. Apte (1913-1977) and architect U.V. Dongre (1915-1999). More than thirty interviews conducted over a period of six years with the architects themselves, their descendants, their (former) collaborators, consultants, and clients provided substantial complementary information and a sounding board for the initial interpretations. In addition, field visits to buildings in the city were undertaken, as well as a review of the local building regulations and contemporary printed sources such as trade directories and building manuals. The wealth of primary material unearthed, most of it notoriously absent in institutional archives, has been photographed to illustrate the dissertation and in an attempt to preserve it and enable easier access for future scholars. Of possible use for further comparative research as well are the syncretic timelines accompanying each chapter, marking important dates with regard to building actors, evolutions in knowledge and education, networking platforms, finance, government, and legislation.

4Within Part I, each chapter begins by locating certain critical socio-political and economic developments that impacted the local building culture. As such, Chapter 1 opens by describing the cultural and economic renaissance of Pune’s regional elite under late colonialism. The first section of Chapter 2 discusses how, in the first decades after Independence, positivist ideas of modernity informed the establishment of industrial zones, a legal and financial framework for co-operative housing and the first urban master plans for Pune. Chapter 3 starts off with describing how, after the faith in modernity’s capacity to bring progress for all had faded by the 1970s, a surge in identity politics overturned the legislative and bureaucratic modalities of building. Thereafter, the three chapters turn to the social profile, educational trajectory and professional networks of the architect protagonists studied for the period. These sections reveal how, after the 1970s, the profession’s intertwining with the higher echelons of society, earlier exemplified through the protagonists’ involvement with Masonic lodges and organizations such as the Rotary and Lions Clubs or through the opportunities they had to train and work abroad, dissolved as architectural education in India democratized and spread. In the following sections, each chapter throws light upon the day-to-day preoccupations and encumbrances of architects by analyzing the design and construction processes of a series of (mostly residential) buildings. These sections reveal that while Pune architects initially espoused “universal” ideas of architectural knowledge and practice – they sought to portray themselves as gentlemen-aesthetes or technocrats concerned with architecture’s social intent – such ideas were continuously challenged by conditions on the ground. They were hard to maintain, for instance, because architects tended to operate as a formal arm of the government bureaucracy (approving subsidized loans, attesting building progress, and certifying amounts of market-regulated building materials required) and because of the demands of new clienteles such as middle-class patrons and turnkey contractors. By the 1970s, some architects more openly reconstructed their professional identity in light of their experiences and emphasized their procedural and bureaucratic competences. Finally, each chapter ends with a close examination of the architect’s “tools of practice” to determine why architects abandoned or adopted specific tools (such as rendered drawings, building specifications, or powers of attorney) and strategically modified the material qualities of others (for instance by making building permit and working drawings increasingly open-ended). Here, tools of practice are interpreted as both reflective and constitutive of professional identities. They come to the fore as key to understanding how occupational identities become “embodied.”

5The second part of the dissertation (Chapter 4) is more compact; reflective rather than empirical. It adopts the extensive case study of Pune that constitutes the dissertation’s first part as an interpretive lens that, in a novel way, sheds light on contemporaneous discussions about the architectural profession that took place at the national level during the negotiation and implementation of India’s Architects Act (1972). Ever since the passing of the Architects (Registration) Acts in the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, some of the most socially privileged Indian architects campaigned for legislation in (British) India that would enable a monopoly on practice, despite the profession’s marginal numbers. The key issue in getting the Act through Parliament and agreeing on the demarcation of its applicability hinged on the definition of “architect.” The discourse of the lobbying architects, retrieved from professional journals and transcripts of parliamentary debates, reveals that they substantially drew upon their global professional network (initially the Royal Institute of British Architects and, after Independence, the Union Internationale des Architectes and Commonwealth Association of Architects) to propagate technocratic and developmental notions of the profession. Such an identity was not only challenged in Parliament, particularly by representatives of engineers, but was also, as Part 1 reveals, out of tune with architectural practices developing on the ground. After long negotiations and considerable concessions, Indian Parliament passed the Act in 1972, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that its institutional set-up (the Council of Architecture and their working instruments) became fully ratified. Once the profession was associated with a governmental organization in which non-architects and government appointees were strongly represented, what had been an attempt to consolidate an elitist professional identity in fact achieved quite the opposite.

6The various self-perceptions of architects are tied together through a heterogeneous conceptual framework that is informed by the empirical findings but has the ambition to contribute to broader issues of disciplinary concern. This framework builds upon Pierre Bourdieu’s principles of cultural production and “habitus” to develop a social critique of the disciplinary understandings of architectural value. It also draws upon ^⁠the more recent concept of “identity work” emerging in organizational and identity studies to highlight how a professional identity is the object of a continual process of negotiation and transformation. However, what distinguishes this work from most sociological studies of the profession, and firmly anchors it within architectural scholarship, is that it treats the architect’s identity work as material as well as discursive. The dissertation connects wider societal change with the material realm of design and construction practices and with evolutions in architectural form. This approach and the dissertation’s focus on agents and buildings in the margins of historiography revealed that Indian architects derived meaning from their professional activities in far more heterogeneous ways than what published discourse suggests. By interweaving personal histories with the political, regulatory, and societal changes of twentieth-century India, the work presents a nuanced picture of the broader context of twentieth-century architectural production in India. Such a picture invites us to question conventional ideas of architectural value and opens up possibilities of understanding the profession and its future relevance on more pluralist lines.