When Less Was More
A NEW BOOK AND A MAJOR EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK EXAMINE ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISM AS AN EXPRESSION OF SOUTH ASIAN DECOLONISATION
One of the real problems of making a book out of an exhibition, and vice versa, is the compromised position of the latter. Which came first—the exhibition or the book? When the primary objective is a museum presentation, the book often reads like a catalogue. When the focus is scholarly and academic, the exhibition suffers from excessive wordiness.
MoMA’s Project of Independence—a book on its present exhibition on Indian Modernism—refuses to fall into either category. It takes Martino Stierli, the primary author, to clearly assess how the goals of the four independent states—
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—were addressed through an architecture that was a visible symbol of decolonisation and what he terms cultural emancipation. The dams and universities, legislative buildings and offices, theatres and shopping centres, along with their architects—Achyut Kanvinde, Raj Rewal, Charles Correa and B.V. Doshi in India, and others like Minnette de Silva in Sri Lanka and Yasmeen Lari in Pakistan—were recognised as founder-members of an elite club that remained active for the first three decades of Independence. The purity of their modernist conceptions is assiduously catalogued under chapters on cities, institutions, infrastructure, industry, craft, planning, housing and the like.
The success of the project relies in part on the subject matter itself: architecture reduced to such barebone austerity, it invites inquiry by its sheer mystical presence. Unlike the exaggerated flash of the subcontinent’s general architecture, modernism was so finely subdued into a grey monotone, it required natural forces to offset its rugged forms. Concrete surfaces lit by accidental clerestories, cavernous space that spoke with eloquent silence, such architecture in fact required new classification. Formalism, Structuralism, Brutalism,
call it by whatever name, the geometric forms of Kanvinde’s Mehsana dairy, the conical skylights of Correa’s Savalcao Church, or the cuboid mass of Doshi’s Indology Institute provoked and upturned conventional architectural characteristics of identity, privacy and intimacy and tested them in new light.
The book’s premise arises predictably from the title itself. Could a culture freed from colonial rule and the oppressive backdrop of Lutyens’s imperious structures forge a new image out of underdevelopment? Was it possible to harness ancient manual techniques into structures that expressed modernist sensibilities? These questions have been asked and answered in confounding pictorial details: Rajasthani women in colourful traditional dress carrying cement up precarious scaffolds; thousands of unskilled labourers on multiple bamboo platforms similarly pouring concrete for a new dam in Telangana. According to Stierli, the difficult bridge between antiquated building practices and modernist approaches defined an ironic hybrid where global and local methods combined to erase national identities and leave each building as a private gift of its own creator.
Even though it developed out of a European vocabulary, the pure form of Indian modernism was short-lived. It spanned the euphoric years of the country’s tryst with hope and destiny that directed the politics of a new nation into the cause of untested architecture, quite the reverse of politics that uses architecture to its own end. It is a matter of scathing irony that the
Hall of Nations in Delhi—a structure designed by Raj Rewal and lauded as “a purposeful union of modern space and the material culture of manual labour” should be razed without so much as a recall to its architectural value.
In the long term, Indian sensibility has refused to accept Modernism as anything but a short-term intrusion into subcontinental culture. Even today, the value of modernism, despite its enormous spread and reach, appears only as an ambivalent apology to architectural history. What remains are the subsequent years of multiple mutations—bus terminals and train stations in small towns, ramshackle office buildings and plastered housing projects (rising to three four storeys). It is they that are the final remnants of the modernist imagination.
The book is a useful record of a lost cause. However, its isolation of India and the subcontinent in the history of modernism is both incomprehensible and incomplete. The necessity of tying the architectural narrative to Independence and development doubtless required a clear descriptive logic, but it gives the art of India’s modernist buildings a less substantive world perspective. What transpired in Brazil, Mexico, France, Switzerland and parts of Africa at the time would—if pieced together—provide a valuable insight on the universality of an idea that spawned multiple expressions. ■
(The Project of Independence is on view at New York’s Museum of Modern
Art until July 2)