Kanvinde and Rahman: India’s early architecture modernists

Students of Gropius, their skills came in handy in ‘building’ the nation

In 1949, a curious structure on the banks of the Ganga near Calcutta awaited Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nod. It had the profile of a temple tower, was topped with an Islamicate dome and a horizontal slab jutted out from its sides, giving it the appearance of a cross. This was the Gandhi Ghat memorial in Barrackpore and the brief for the building had been to evoke Gandhi’s ideals in a modernist way.

“Who is the architect?” asked Nehru. When Habib Rahman stepped up, Nehru asked him to join the Central Public Works Department in Delhi, as architects were needed for the refugee influx after Partition , besides the imperative of literally building the nation.

The Gandhi Ghat was one of the first Bauhaus signatures on India’s official buildings. It became the memorial style for India; the essence of a man’s life captured in a conceptual idea.

Before he arrived in Delhi in 1953, Rahman had completed nearly 80 projects in Bengal.

“Calcutta had been built by British engineers and architects in the neo-classical style. Rahman’s clean lines, the arrangement of windows, the vertical sun shades, show a clear Bauhaus influence,” says photographer Ram Rahman, the late Habib Rahman’s son.

Rahman had gone to the US as a mechanical engineer on a government scholarship; he returned home an architect. He was, in fact, the government architect, designing some of the earliest housing for Delhi’s bureaucrats in the thousands, the General Post Office, the buildings for the Auditor General in Madras and Bombay.

“He believed that it was as a government architect he could have the greatest social and cultural impact and would be able to design on a scale which would be difficult otherwise. He did not opt for private practice,” says Ram.

Achyut Kanvinde, trained by Gropius at Harvard’s architecture school, imbibed the Bauhaus regimen of thinking about design, and saw no reason to tinker with it. For the tomb of Maulana Azad, India’s first education minister, Rahman added a slim jaali to his otherwise modernist structure in Delhi; Kanvinde would always be hesitant to add ‘Indian elements’ to his buildings. In a conversation between fellow architect Narendra Dengle and Kanvinde published in the Marg magazine, the latter had made his position amply clear: “Taking on grandfather’s clothes in the name of culture...that I am not agreeable to. Architecture must have its own clarity and purity.”

But when it came to government commissions, Kanvinde occasionally had to come up against a strong lobby resisting the straightforward adoption of the International Style, as Bauhaus was called in the countries that adopted it. Adding domes, chhatris and jaalis to the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in Delhi, as he had to, when he built it, went against his grain, says his son.

Bauhaus’ heyday in India in official architecture was roughly till about 40-50 years after Independence, but Achyut Kanvinde stuck to the principles of modernism all through his life, says his son, Sanjay, also an architect.

“Both Kanvinde and my father influenced the next generation of architects, so their influence lasted until the ’80s. These were men operating in an age when industrial-scale production of steel had not even begun, no large glass sheets were available, there were few cranes, buildings were built by artisans by hand,” says Ram.

“And they still didn’t use ‘world-class’ or ‘iconic’ on the hoardings next to any building they put up, so common these days when architects draw attention to their own work in the hoardings.”

From Bauhaus, Kanvinde learnt to use space to express human values. “He rejected symmetry at the cost of function. He stayed on the side of modernism even when he built a temple,” says Sanjay Kanvinde.

And it was the same principle he adhered to when he designed the master plan of a city (Dronagiri Node, Navi Mumbai), or built dairies (such as the National Dairy Development Board Campus, Anand), campuses (University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore), a Jesuit school (St Xavier’s, Delhi), a stadium (Sher-e-kashmir, Srinagar), the residence of a textile baron (Balkrishna Harivallabhdas), or his own. What he lived by, he had built.