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Shaping the Modern. Architectural Cultures and Critique in Late-colonial India (1913-c.1948)

PhD Dissertation, supervised by Dr. Tania Sengupta and Prof. Edward Denison, University College London, July 2022
Saptarshi Sanyal

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Index géographique :

Inde

Index chronologique :

XXe siècle
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  • 1 These global shifts from a South Asian perspective, in part, are discussed in the works of Dipesh C (...)

1The years leading to the end of colonial rule in India (1910s-40s) present a staggering array of building practices for historians of modern architecture to investigate. This period includes the two world wars and their intervening years that bore witness to major shifts in power across the globe. In these decades, western civilizational and cultural paradigms of modernity that legitimized imperial expansion were progressively being cast into doubt. A disjuncture developed between the official apparatus of colonial governments and dissidents within a metropolitan population critical of the very idea of colonial domination, in both its authoritarian and “benevolent” forms.1 Alongside, new solidarities and interpersonal networks developed between specific individuals and groups across the territories of colonial India and beyond it, both in the west and east. Located in the historically contingent conditions of such a milieu, the dissertation Shaping the Modern: Architectural Cultures and Critique in Late-colonial India (1913-c.48) uncovers a plural, heterogenous experience of modernity by examining architectural and spatial practices within the emerging social and cultural formations in the Indian subcontinent.

  • 2 Swati Chattopadhyay's Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2023 (...)
  • 3 This research conceptually draws from and adapts the approach of ‘‘connected histories’’ from Sanja (...)

2This study centres the process of architectural and spatial production at multiple scales, across varied projects that developed in the decades under consideration.2 Despite their diversity, these projects shared certain characteristics that inform the scope of study. Their sites were mostly located outside major imperial or urban centres. They developed without the colonial establishment’s patronage or intent, nor did they employ its official or professional agents. Such projects ranged from the schools at Santiniketan, Rishi Valley and Rajghat, to institutes for the arts, rural reconstruction and scientific research, like Kala Bhavan and Sriniketan, the Bose Institute in Calcutta or the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. They also included residences for elite Indians like the Manik Bagh Palace in the Princely State of Indore or the Sarabhais’ Retreat in Ahmedabad, and sites of spiritual communities such as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, Gandhi’s ashrams in Ahmedabad and Sevagram, Wardha, and the monastic order Ramakrishna Mission, in Belur. The dissertation argues that, collectively, these highly experimental initiatives represent exemplary critiques of imperialism, its social outlook and cultural ambitions. Yet, it resists the urge to think of such critiques and their spatial or architectural dimensions as evidence of merely anticolonial nationalism or international modernism—a binary often apparent in canonical, and largely formalist, histories of modern architecture. Additionally, rather than view these projects as a result of forces operating within the bounds of the Indian subcontinent, the study adopts an approach of connected histories and records their underlying human contacts and affective, interpersonal relationships. In this manner, the dissertation weaves a narrative of experimentation with both modernity and architecture within a field of transcultural and intercontinental exchanges.3

  • 4 Two key architectural surveys that cover this period in the Indian context include: Peter Scriver a (...)
  • 5 Key works include: Tania Sengupta, “Papered spaces: clerical practices, materialities, and spatial (...)
  • 6 Selected significant examples of research on Indian colonial cities from the past two decades inclu (...)

3The research sets forth by interrogating taxonomies that influential texts on modern architecture use. It reveals how certain classification systems prove inadequate to explain many of architecture’s processual complexities as they privilege either built artefacts and/or the figure of the professional architect from a Euro-American perspective. Premised on how more nuanced alternatives to such established narratives can emerge by expanding their field and archive, this study parses through records that are not strictly architectural in nature—many beyond the English language—held in institutions and personal collections, and employs fieldwork where key information gaps exist. It combines methods of archival research, including critical analyses of non-textual media and historical publications, with the use of architectural drawing to address archival silences and, in part, harnesses digital tools to reveal a spatial and temporal simultaneity in historical phenomena by mapping interpersonal connections. The research therefore builds upon recent studies that query the nature of architectural modernity through its various cultural, social and technological dimensions. Where South Asia is concerned, it addresses three kinds of gaps in scholarship. First, without taking recourse to an architectural survey, the dissertation examines varied cases widely dispersed across the Indian subcontinent in a relatively under-researched period of its colonial experience.4 Second, it shifts the perspective from official, institutional or administrative frameworks of the colonial state, and advances how Indian protagonists and their global collaborators in this period re-imagined and fashioned paradigms of modernity that both translated into and drew from architectural and spatial practices.5 Third, the study moves beyond a single city or settlement’s urban history, or a focus on one kind of agent or building typology. These aspects have also received substantive critical scholarly attention in recent decades.6

4Taking both a broad view of historical phenomena in the temporal and spatial scope of study and undertaking detailed analyses of specific sites and projects, the dissertation is developed in two parts. The first part, “Connected Milieus,” uncovers certain conditions in early twentieth-century colonial India that provided affordances to question the social and cultural legitimacy of colonial rule. Some of these affordances related to historical timing. The First World War and the interwar period ushered in widespread uncertainty about the West being a paragon of modern civilization, accompanied by changing attitudes and perceptions about India and Indians globally. The other kind of affordance was geographical. Despite the shorthand “British India,” in reality, the vast subcontinent comprised a spatial patchwork of nearly 600 political and/or administrative territories ranging from directly governed (by the British government) Major and Minor Provinces, Princely States, and at least five key European (non-British) outposts or regions. The degree of control from a centralised colonial administration varied greatly across these territories. The new spatial and building practices the study examines often emerged in locations where its influence or surveillance were limited. The two chapters in this part of the dissertation map how these practices inhered in various social and cultural spheres, animated by multiple figures and processes not limited to architects and architecture. They reveal how such projects pursued novel paradigms of education, science or even domesticity, rather than taking recourse to an overt nationalistic resistance. These chapters also make visible the intricate collaborations in these projects amongst several Indian and global thinkers and intellectuals, including their friends and followers, and the movement of ideas, expertise, funds and people.

  • 7 Distinct strands of this examination have been developed further and published as: Saptarshi Sanyal(...)

5The second part of the dissertation, ‘‘Shaping the Modern,’’ uncovers the underlying modes and outcomes of such critiques by closely examining the architectural and spatial processes immanent to them. Over three chapters, this component of the research triangulates distinct historical vantages: the site of an educational institution, a building project, and an architectural figure. The first of these chapters explores how, from c. 1918 to the late 1940s, the inventive spatial cultures of Visva-Bharati, an experimental educational project, produced the atmosphere and environment of its site in Santiniketan, an outlying rural settlement in eastern India. The examination of Santiniketan uncovers close connections of spatial production to language and art practices, building production to pedagogic strategies (fig. 1), and also a questioning of boundaries between domestic and public space. The next chapter focuses on the experience of constructing Golconde, a dormitory building located in a French-governed enclave on India’s south-eastern coast, Pondicherry. Golconde, as a finished artefact, is rather well-known in canonical architectural histories as an exemplar of modernism in the Indian subcontinent. Yet, unravelling this project’s protracted construction process from 1935 to c.1948 through the lens of its underlying spiritual ethic brings forth a significantly different historical reading that centres the material operations of its construction and the unusual social experiences of its workforce.7 The third core chapter of the dissertation focuses on the architectural oeuvre of the reticent artist and self-taught architect Surendranath Kar from the late 1910s to the 1940s. This component of the study navigates the formidable archival silence about this figure, by reading through discontinuous fragments of information: voices of those touched by Kar’s role as an artist-educator, even testimonials from inhabitants of spaces he created. Through such an investigation, Kar’s “architectural” process emerges in a shared field spanning art pedagogy, re-purposing existing structures, the design of theatre sets, and developing landscaped spaces. Additionally, analysing particular projects Kar designed and executed in various parts of the Indian subcontinent reveals his nuanced spatial and formal thinking in a more autonomous sense.

6Together, these analyses serve to weave a plural and inclusive historical narrative about the intersections of modernity and architecture. Such a narrative, inhabited by writers, educators, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, princely rulers, spiritual leaders and seekers, workers, and of course specific architects and their patrons, reinforces the notion of architecture as a collaborative act. It uncovers how modern architecture’s authorship, rather than being singular or limited to building professionals, was shared among a rich variety of agents that shaped both its thinking and production in multiple ways. The research draws connections between the multifaceted act of building, and the material, immaterial and social experiences of space. It also illuminates the non-binary and mutable nature of such experimental spaces—whether public or domestic, for work, learning, leisure or even spiritual pursuit. Crucially, it unveils nuanced epistemes and languages inextricable from particular forms of spatial imagination and practice. In addition, the research proposes how building or design processes, and the lived experiences they contained, might have been slowed down to subvert the imposed regimes of modern time.

7As a whole, the dissertation argues how a critique of imperialism, nationalism or even the formal tenets of modernism, was profoundly generative in myriad ways within the late-colonial milieu in India. It invites us to think afresh about the multifaceted, value-loaded nature of the modern, a process of becoming that, as a conceptual category, emerges as highly porous and heterogeneous rather than robust or universal. Through its contents and methodological approach, this research contributes to the ongoing expansion and diversification of architectural history beyond its formerly well-protected disciplinary boundaries within the architectural profession. By elucidating how architectural cultures—conceived inclusively as the practices and processes underlying the production of sites, landscapes, buildings, objects or dwellings—shaped plural meanings and experiences of modernity, it seeks to insert a critical understanding of space and architecture into social and cultural histories of modern India. Concurrently, the dissertation decentres exclusive concerns with ideology, form, aesthetics and materiality within historical narratives of modern architecture. By moving away from a perceived fixity of social identities and geographical spaces, it animates such narratives with the affective dimensions of building and spatial processes, wrought in multifarious connections between people, cultures and fields of human endeavour.

Figure 1: Kalo Bari (black house) under construction, c. 1936, in Santiniketan, Bengal, where art pedagogy was realised through the building project.

Figure 1: Kalo Bari (black house) under construction, c. 1936, in Santiniketan, Bengal, where art pedagogy was realised through the building project.

Source: Rabindra Bhavan. Photo Archives, Santiniketan, ref. no.14867H.

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Notes

1 These global shifts from a South Asian perspective, in part, are discussed in the works of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “From civilization to globalization: the ‘West’ as a shifting signifier in Indian modernity,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2012, p. 138-152. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2012.636877; and Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006 (Politics, History, and Culture: a series from the International Institute at University of Michigan).

2 Swati Chattopadhyay's Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2023 is an important recent work that advances a critique of bigness in architectural imagination and scholarship and centres the aspect of scale to frame marginal spaces and labour in architecture.

3 This research conceptually draws from and adapts the approach of ‘‘connected histories’’ from Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 1997, p. 735-762. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00017133 and affective orientations and the ‘stickiness’ of human relationships from Sara Ahmed, The promise of happiness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, to examine the empirical field and archives based in South Asia.

4 Two key architectural surveys that cover this period in the Indian context include: Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, India, London: Reaktion, 2015 (Modern architectures in history), and Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai, Architecture and independence : the search for identity - India 1880 to 1980, Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1997; the latter publication has appeared in a revised edition in 2022, with a few incremental changes, but largely follows the original survey’s framework and structure.

5 Key works include: Tania Sengupta, “Papered spaces: clerical practices, materialities, and spatial cultures of provincial governance in Bengal, Colonial India, 1820s-1860s,” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 25, no. 2, 2020, p. 111-137. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2020.1733861, Arindam Dutta, The bureaucracy of beauty: design in the age of its global reproducibility, New York, NY: Routledge, 2007, and Peter Scriver, “Empire-building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India,” in Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (eds.), Colonial modernities: building, dwelling and architecture in British India and Ceylon, London; New York : Routledge, 2007 (The Architext series), p. 69-92, among others.

6 Selected significant examples of research on Indian colonial cities from the past two decades include: Preeti Chopra, A joint enterprise: Indian elites and the making of British Bombay, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816670369.001.0001, Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, Malden, MA; Oxford : Blackwell, 2007. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/605760, William J. Glover, Making Lahore modern: constructing and imagining a colonial city, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: modernity, nationalism and the colonial uncanny, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2005 (Asia’s Transformations), Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous modernities: negotiating architecture and urbanism, London ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2005 (The Architext series), whereas a focus on the role of architects as agents in modern housing production, both the colonial and early post-colonial period, appear valuably in the recent work of: Sarah Melsens, Architect, Engineer or Builder? A history of professional demarcation through practice and discourse, Pune (India) 1930-1992, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, 2020, and Farhan S. Karim, Of greater dignity than riches: austerity & housing design in India, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019 (Culture, Politics and the Built Environment).

7 Distinct strands of this examination have been developed further and published as: Saptarshi Sanyal, “Narrating Architecture as a Process: Two Histories of ‘Self-building’ Golconde,” Architecture Beyond Europe, vol. 20, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.13638, and Idem, “Labor or Work? Remembering operations in the construction of the Golconde dormitory, Pondicherry (1935-c.48),” in Stefan Holzer, Silke Langenberg, Clemens Knobling and Orkun Kasap (eds.), Construction Matters: Proceedings of the 8th International Congress on Construction History, Zürich: vdf Hochschulverlag AG, 2024, p. 308-315.

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Titre Figure 1: Kalo Bari (black house) under construction, c. 1936, in Santiniketan, Bengal, where art pedagogy was realised through the building project.
Crédits Source: Rabindra Bhavan. Photo Archives, Santiniketan, ref. no.14867H.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16698/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 129k
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Saptarshi Sanyal, « Shaping the Modern. Architectural Cultures and Critique in Late-colonial India (1913-c.1948) »ABE Journal [En ligne], 24 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16698 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13938

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Saptarshi Sanyal

Assistant Professor, School of Planning and Architecture New Delhi, India ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9430-0885

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