Their fears seem well founded when the politics turns violent and the politicians look away. Mrs Gandhi’s ill-judged decision in 1984 to storm the Golden Temple in Amritsar—then occupied by Sikh separatists—led to her assassination in the grounds of her residence at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards. This act in turn provoked anti-Sikh riots in the streets and suburbs of Delhi, which leading politicians, if they did not actually orchestrate, took insufficient action to prevent. Mrs Gandhi’s replacement as prime minister by her elder son Rajiv—an airline pilot by chosen profession and a political innocent with boyish good looks—briefly ignited a flicker of hope, as his approach to governance was technocratic and apparently without guile. But that hope was extinguished when Rajiv Gandhi was in turn assassinated by Sri Lankan Tamil separatists while campaigning in Tamil Nadu in 1991.
Strangely, despite the dismal outlook politically and economically, the 1980s and early 1990s were a time of cultural revival in Delhi, with new ideas in fashion and design and new approaches to heritage. The changing architecture of the city provides the largest, and most solid and enduring sign of all this. To explain the emergence of the new mood we must first backtrack a little.
In the decade after Independence, Delhi’s architects seemed content to look back to Lutyens for inspiration, as in the Supreme Court which was designed by G.B. Deolalikar in 1955. And there were some other touches of historicism, as in E.B. Doctor’s Ashoka Hotel of 1956, where Mughal-style ornamental stonework seems to evoke the manner of the Indo-Saracenic movement of fifty years before. Sacred architecture in the city kept to its own track, updated in terms of materials but rigidly archaic in its imagery, as in the Lakshminarayan (or ‘Birla’) temple of 1956.
Akbar Hotel in Chanakyapuri, designed by Shiv Nath Prasad in 1965; photograph by the author, 1987
And then came Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh and everything changed. To be fair, the impact of Chandigarh is sometimes overstated. The International Modern Movement had made some earlier forays into India—most notably in Bombay—for example, in the work of Claude Batley (slightly surprisingly in view of his more historical approach in his teaching). There is also the justly famous Golconde by Antonin Raymond in Pondicherry (1936) and some other scattered examples, such as the Manik Bagh in Indore by Eckart Muthesius (1933). But the building of Chandigarh in the 1950s marked a change because of its scale. The practice on Indian soil of Le Corbusier, the modern movement’s leading and most charismatic exponent, had a profound impact on a generation of Indian architects: it made them look at architecture in new ways. In Delhi, one might cite as examples that are particularly close to the master’s aesthetic some works by Shiv Nath Prasad, such as Akbar Hotel (1965) in Chanakyapuri, the Shri Ram Arts Centre (1966) at Mandi House, and Tibet House (1974) on Lodi Road. Among other successful examples, one might cite the Intercontinental (now Oberoi) hotel by Durga Bajpai and Piloo Mody (1958) and the New Delhi Municipal Council (the old Civic Centre) by Kuldip Singh (1965); and the (less successful) Inter State Bus Terminus by Rajinder Kumar (1969) and Nehru Place by Ratan Singh (as late as 1980).
Le Corbusier was not alone. The work of the American architect Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad had a comparable impact. The extension to Modern School by Jasbir and Rosemary Sachdev (1975) has been hailed as a skilful reworking of Walter George’s original idiom, but one could be forgiven for mistaking a view of the building for a picture of Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (1962–70), with its scooped-out circles and exposed brickwork.
Brick is an old and respectable material. It is not in itself modernist. But in the Indian context brick had not hitherto been seen as elite. When used in great public buildings in the past, brick was usually concealed behind a facing of another material such as dressed stone. Louis Kahn showed how it could be used for prestigious buildings. Architects in Delhi took his cue, applying it in all sorts of educational and institutional buildings as well as private homes. Among the best known examples are the student hostels at Jawaharlal Nehru University by C.P. Kukreja (1970–76) and the Belgian Embassy by Satish Gujral (1983).
By the early 1980s, some architects were beginning to question the hitherto unquestioned imitation of the masters of the International Modern Movement. They woke up to the point that their imitation of major works by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn was largely a matter of appearances—of copying or adapting their manner—rather than fully assimilating the logic and philosophy of modern design. To be sure, some had adopted the excruciating rhetoric of modernism in their writings too, but in their designs the adherence to modernism was sometimes forced or superficial. The previously proclaimed universal applicability of modernism was being questioned even in the West, which had nurtured it. How much more urgent it now seemed to challenge this in a country like India which had a different developmental path.
The India International Centre, designed by Joseph Allen Stein in 1959; photograph by the author, 1991
The question that became so pressing in the 1980s and early 1990s was how to move Indian architecture ahead, keeping a hold on the technological and other material benefits of the International Modern Movement, while at the same time trying to restore something of the broken thread of a distinctively Indian tradition. Restoring the thread was not about archaism or atavism. The new quest was not a leap backwards into the past. It was about trying to find a way to be both recognizably Indian and modern at once.
But who were the exemplars who could show the way down that difficult track? Was there anyone after Independence who had accomplished—or even attempted—such a task before? Well, in Delhi there was Joseph Allen Stein, an architect of Californian origin, who had long been settled in India, quietly pursuing his own distinctive and highly individual approach. His prominent successes in the city include the arts centre known as Triveni Kala Sangam (1957), the India International Centre (1959) and the Ford Foundation (1966). The use of stone, of coloured tiles, and of cooling devices such as the jali, and the integration of gardens and buildings all point to his sensitive reading and reinterpretation of aspects of the Indian tradition. But these buildings are far from historical pastiche: their visual idiom is also modern. His some-time partner on these projects, Habib Rahman, produced comparable works independently, such as Rabindra Bhavan (1959).
Highly regarded—as well as personally liked—within the profession, Stein and Rahman showed a way, and soon every architect and critic was talking about the Indian identity and the historical thread. Eminent historians like Romila Thapar were sought out and asked to give their endorsements, certificates on the authenticity of the traditional qualities of contemporary designs. Heady days, indeed.
One of the most articulate voices on this topic was that of Charles Correa. Although his practice was based in Bombay (now Mumbai), he left his mark on Delhi, and deserves mention here. Correa’s engagement with Delhi is, in truth, a bit of a puzzling mixture. He was responsible for the planning of the Crafts Museum at Pragati Maidan (1975), a project that put him in touch with India’s unblemished rural traditions.
However, it did not appear to have had much impact on him when he designed the Life Insurance Corporation building in Connaught Place (built in the mid-1980s). With its cascades of mirror glass and suspended space frame, it apes the fashionable gimmicks of contemporary architecture in the West. It was greeted with dismay by students of Delhi’s architecture schools who felt let down by this maestro who spoke so eloquently of India’s proud traditions. Correa helped orchestrate exhibitions like Vistara (1986) which presented Indian architecture as a seamless and distinctive whole; in which images of stepwells and wall tiles and row houses were juxtaposed with drawings of mandalas and mazes, irrespective of date and place, to present a seemingly cohesive, timeless and potent whoosh of Indian identity. Young architects were terribly excited by the potential of it all. So when the LIC building went up, they gazed in horror and demanded, ‘Where’s the whoosh?’ The eminent critic Hasan-Uddin Khan tried to redeem it by describing
the building’s two main blocks as forming a giant ‘darwaza’ or gateway linking Connaught Place to the rest of Delhi. Nobody believed him—least of all the armed guard who prevents members of the public from using the building as a route. Hasan-Uddin’s comment, written in 1987, is chiefly significant as an indication of how desperate everyone had become to find a historical antecedent for each and every design.
Correa fared much better with his building for the British Council (1992). No doubt the cutaway façade still retains a Le Corbusian feel, if softened by the mural of a banyan tree by the British artist Howard Hodgkin. But the courtyard at the rear is a more satisfying reworking of Indian spaces and motifs, with a particularly pleasing play of light. The warm red sandstone cladding—despite the baldness of the unmoulded openings—stakes a claim of lineage through Lutyens to the Mughals.
The other non-Delhiite genius of that generation, B.V. Doshi, has also left his mark on Delhi, though thankfully not through his earliest projects. Having worked in Le Corbusier’s office in Paris as a young man, Doshi contracted a particularly virulent strain of Corbusitis, and as a result the graceful city of Ahmedabad is sadly disfigured by some monstrous exercises in the brutalist style. In 1965, Doshi described architecture as ‘an art which organises, co-ordinates and orders life by its function of providing enclosure so that human beings may lead a wholesome existence’—a spine-chilling example of the moralizing and social determinism of the modern movement. Nobody today wants to be taught how to live by their built environment.
Certainly not the students of the National Institute of Fashion Technology. Luckily, by the time Doshi came to Delhi to design their campus in 1994, his obsession with the shibboleths and forms of modernism was beginning to subside. The building is marked by an interest in a variety of surface textures (no longer just rough concrete), and centres on a sunken garden that is made in the form of an ancient stepwell. It is a shame that this space is not more popular with the students. Fearful of falling and breaking their ankles, they prefer to congregate on the institute’s front steps on the main road. But this neglected garden is a genuine gesture of respect for a past that Doshi was once so eager to escape.
Meanwhile, Delhi’s resident architects were pursuing similar lines. Achyut Kanvinde’s National Science Centre (1985) has chhatri-like turrets and a Steinian approach to integrating plants. C.P. Kukreja put away his stack of Kahnian bricks and reminded us—in a commercial office tower called Amba Deep (1990)—that it is possible to cover the exterior of a building in coloured mosaic tiles and geometric patterns. It is a spectacular building, not least because it marks a complete volte-face from all the modernist rhetoric about the iniquity of ornament. It is a sort of sultanate tower for our times. Romi Khosla, in his graceful design for a school for the Spastics Society (1993), seems to be reaching even further back, playing with the lines of ancient rock-cut chaitya halls.
The most overt use of a culturally rooted visual imagery is in the Baha’i House of Worship, popularly called the Lotus Temple, designed by the Iranian architect Fariborz Sahba in the early 1980s. As is well known, Baha’i is a syncretic faith that draws on a broad range of different religious traditions. But if its ideas are inclusive, its iconography is not. There is a marked reluctance to include in its temples any forms or symbols that are specific to another religion. Thus no idols are permitted, no paintings, no music and no architectural ornament that refers to sacred traditions of the past. The only specific positive requirement is that the building must have nine sides, to reflect the pluralism of the faith’s sources.
All of this presents a bit of a challenge to an architect. The temple must have nine sides and must obviously appear suitably sacred but must not resemble any specific religious prototype. Fariborz Sahba’s solution was to select a form—that of the lotus flower—that is at once natural and redolent of India’s ancient culture. The lotus is employed in the art of several of India’s religious traditions, making its sacred associations generic rather than specific. Sahba’s giant lotus building is composed of twenty-seven interlocking marble-clad petals, surrounded by pools, with almost no other embellishment. It appears both ancient and modern, a Taj Mahal revisited. The coincidental slight resemblance to the Sydney Opera House may be unfortunate but is perhaps more apparent to foreign than to local eyes. Since it was inaugurated in 1986, the Lotus Temple has been visited by over 100 million people from all over the world. On average it receives up to 10,000 visitors per day. Many are tourists, curious to see a famous modern monument; but from the spike in numbers on Hindu festival days we may infer that—despite the lack of imagery—many more see it as another prominent sacred shrine in the vast bowl-like arena of Delhi. It is a building which settles comfortably into and reflects Delhi’s historical and cultural layers, on account of its own layered and segmented structure, and because its starkly modern aesthetic presents to our gaze a form that has been plucked from India’s ancient past.
The city’s most prestigious architectural practice is that of Raj Rewal. One of his best known early projects is the Asian Games Village (1982) inside Siri Fort. The yellow reconstituted stone cladding, the complex rectilinear geometry and the close-knit, pedestrianized planning all consciously evoke the pattern of traditional Rajasthani towns like Jaisalmer. Of course it is partly a matter of perception. A decade after the Asian Games Village was completed, its residents were interviewed and asked for their views on its use of traditional Indian planning principles. ‘Nonsense,’ they retorted, ‘it’s not Indian, it’s modern. For one thing, it’s tidy. If you want to see what a traditional Indian town is like you have to go to Old Delhi.’ You can’t please everyone. But the historians and critics were persuaded that this project heralded a genuine Indian revival.
If there was any note of doubt, it was only about the relevance of Jaisalmer as a model for Delhi. In subsequent projects, Rewal tackled this head on. In place of the yellow reconstituted stone cladding, he used red and buff panels, to imitate the Dholpur sandstone that had been used by Lutyens and Baker and, before them, by the Mughals, in such conspicuous Delhi landmarks as Humayun’s tomb. Buildings such as the Indian Institute of Immunology (1983) and the SCOPE office complex (completed 1989) attribute and affirm a two-tone colour coding for the city. The SCOPE complex seems to proclaim its descent from Humayun’s tomb, not just through its colour but by its scale, its use of the octagon in planning and the domed chhatris. Lutyens too—despite his protest—had used chhatris, and Rewal’s repetition of the gesture establishes their place in the permanent lexicon of Delhi.
Of the very many projects that Rewal has completed since—large and small, in Delhi and elsewhere including abroad—one more merits special mention: the office for the World Bank in Lodi Estate (1996), because here too he clearly turned to the city’s Mughal architecture for inspiration, but this time on a different scale. The articulation of the façades around the central courtyard and the detailing of their stonework with overhanging jharokhas, evoke less the grand imperial gesture of a mausoleum and more the domestic scale and intimacy of a Shahjahanabad haveli.
In pursuing this mediation between tradition and modernity, architects were attempting to define a new Indian identity. And in this pursuit, architecture did not stand alone but expressed a wider spirit of the times. The 1980s was also the era of the Festivals of India when art and crafts enthusiasts joined hands with museum curators to reconsider how India should depict itself in exhibitions held in Britain, France, Russia and America. It was also the era of ‘ethnic chic’ when leading experts on India’s regional textile traditions would turn up at Delhi parties wearing ghaghras, or peasant skirts. In many domains, folk design was seized on as a source of inspiration because it was seen as authentic: Indian and yet alive, not hauled from the obscurity of a museum store.
These matters were debated at length with great passion. Today, people in Delhi seem less anxious about what constitutes Indian identity. This is not because the debate was concluded and the answers
agreed, but because they are more preoccupied with other things, and especially with the scope and speed of changes brought on by the liberalization of the Indian economy, a process that began in 1991.
SCOPE office complex, designed by Raj Rewal, completed in 1989; photograph by the author, 1992
The State Trading Corporation building, designed by Raj Rewal in 1989; photographed by Madan Mahatta
The decades of liberalization have transformed Delhi (and other Indian cities) socially and culturally in a variety of ways, some of which are profound and some are trivial but a part of everyday life. Before liberalization, for example, the only way of getting a telephone connection was through the state-owned company, and the waiting time for most people was twenty-five years. Even if you bribed your way up the queue, your children would have grown up and migrated without ever having phoned home. If you wanted to speak to someone abroad, you had to visit the Central Telegraph Office to book an ISTD call. Nowadays every farmer in the hinterland has a mobile phone and can call to check prices to decide whether it is worthwhile coming to market.
Back in the 1970s, there were not too many cars on Delhi’s streets, and those that were there were mostly of the same model: the stately if curvy Ambassador, a revamped Morris Oxford, as everyone knows, made by Hindustan Motors. Owning one was a tremendous status symbol, and even today there remain a few politicians and senior bureaucrats who use one as a badge of pride. The breakthrough for normal folk came with the launch of the Maruti 800. Light and inexpensive, it enabled many more drivers to take to the roads. Now there is a wide array of different models, both Indian and foreign, and a vast increase in number—around a million cars at present with a similar number of other vehicles. As a result, many arterial roads are in a state of permanent gridlock. People prefer to use the rapidly expanding Metro rail system that rests on vast pylons rising above the roads.
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