An exhibition on South Asia’s ‘architectures of decolonisation’ struggles under its own weight

Throwing open a challenge to architects in independent India, former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1958 called for them “not to be tied down or coerced by tradition, but to develop free minds”. Summing up the promise of modern architecture for the postcolonial period, Nehru said at the Lalit Kala Akademi that “the buildings they put up should fit in with the work and functions of today”.

In Nehru’s understanding, the challenge to contemporary architecture in India was no different to that faced by the nation itself. The “static conditions” of Indian architecture in the preceding 200 years “really reflected the static state of the Indian mind at the time”.

The challenge to young architects, the prime minister reasoned, was to make a clean break with this past and give visual and material interpretation to the ideals that secured independence from social stagnation and colonial rule.

How far did the subcontinent’s architects go in living up to Nehru’s expectations? That subject is exhaustively explored by the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonisation in South Asia, 1947-1985, currently on view in New York City.

Casting its eye toward dozens of signature designs and structures across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka during the period in question, the exhibition, curated by Martino Stierli, Anoma Pieris and Sean Anderson, aims to single out those works that served as “tool[s] for social progress” while leaving colonial idioms and ideas behind.

Testament to Nehru’s expectations, most of the works in question are those of local architects committed to their respective projects of national development across South Asia in the first four decades after colonial rule.

Rather than the better-known monumental designs flown into the region by peripatetic western starchitects such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, it is instead the work of Charles Correa, BV Doshi, Geoffrey Bawa, Minette de Silva, Muzharul Islam, Yasmeen Lari and others that takes centre-stage.

In one respect, such curatorial interventions cannot come soon enough. The legacy of the region’s built modernist experiments today rests on fragile foundations. In India, pronounced revulsion toward the ideas and aesthetic sensibilities of the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years has lent itself to a crisis of heritage conservation, with notable modernist structures torn down without wide public consultation.

Chief among these is Raj Rewal’s Hall of Nations complex at Pragati Maidan in Delhi, demolished in 2017 on the orders of the Central government. A few kilometres away, a number of ministerial offices designed during Nehru’s time are also slated for demolition under the proposed Central Vista Redevelopment project.

In Sri Lanka, others have noted, what largely remains of de Silva works are 2D approximations of what once stood. In an era in which the architecture of religious reaction rather than secular learning or cosmopolitan living is at the receiving end of state patronage, turning back to the aesthetic hallmarks of a more socially inclusive vision of design and community is as necessary as it is refreshing.

Visitors to the exhibition are treated to a raft of building models, photographs, floor and urban plans, not least of which is a painstaking wooden reconstruction of Rewal’s former complex at Pragati Maidan by graduate students at New York’s Cooper Union.

Beginning with the design for Chandigarh, Corbusier’s concrete capital for Punjab, which served a paedagogic function for regional architects early in the Independence period, the visual material presented stretches across the subcontinent. Visitors to the exhibition are pivoted in and out of Islamabad, Chittagong, Colombo, Bangalore, New Bombay, Pondicherry, and small-town Gujarat, among others.

Such locales featured new universities, workspaces, public buildings and urban plans that the exhibition’s curators identify as forming part of a typology of self-determination in the region.

Certainly, newly constructed university spaces such as Muzharul Islam’s exposed brick complex in Chittagong, highlighted in the exhibition, served as forums for impassioned debate on the future of postcolonial independence among idealistic students.

But self-determination in a region as diverse as South Asia was no simple matter. One constituency’s conception of the term often came into conflict with another’s continuing struggle for independence, as Pakistan was to learn in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh.

If the ideological link between architect Anwar Said’s designs for sleek mosques in Islamabad and Islam’s learning spaces in Dhaka and Chittagong seems unclear, it is because there isn’t one. Theirs were conflicting projects, the former centred around Muslim modernism, the latter explicitly around secular regionalism, a commonality of visual mannerisms notwithstanding.

Indeed, at times, the exhibition’s ambitions appear to struggle under their own weight in trying to tie together such conflicting priorities. What ends up is a crowded miscellany of projects rather than a precise, intellectual focus. Sure enough, the limits of such efforts are clear, for example, in the exhibition catalogue, which inaccurately clubs Pakistan among the region’s “predominantly secular nation-states”.

The search for a remote unity of purpose across such political divides also lends itself to a lack of engagement with the keywords that the exhibition is organised around. The words “independence”, “modernity”, “decolonisation” and “self-determination” are used interchangeably without seriously considering whether such ambitions conflicted with and undercut one another in the pursuit of new built environments.

Rather than self-determination, in Pakistan, built modernity after 1947 was embedded into the itineraries of American power. Take Korangi, the Karachi township designed to house post-Partition refugees, strongly highlighted in the exhibition. Historian Markus Daechsel reminds us that US State Department and USAID deputies lent a helping hand in seeing through the township’s development in order to demonstrate the value and social significance of American foreign aid.

That the project was enthusiastically promoted as a matter of public relations spectacle but ultimately left unfinished spoke to the Ayub Khan regime’s reluctance in promoting new forms of living, mobility and circulation in Karachi. Daechsel reminds us that the reality of such circulation threatened to promote autonomy rather than dependence on the state on the part of new citizen-refugees.

Ayub’s regime eventually backtracked on the project and left many of Korangi’s plots unfinished. They were cut off from Karachi’s public utilities and transport networks, leaving refugees in the lurch.

In India, the promise and impress of exposed concrete came up against climate considerations and labour regimes to produce buildings sharply alienated from the surrounding landscape. Building upon Corbusier’s efforts in Chandigarh, local architects such as Rewal, Correa, Achyut Kanvinde, and others kept up the French master’s preference for exposed concrete even when the material’s heat-trapping properties militated against generous use in tropical and subtropical settings.

In this respect, such efforts mirrored the Nehru government’s developmental sensibilities, erecting massive concrete dams, rendered as independent India’s “new temples”, in an effort to fast-forward economic growth. This was even as the environmental and social displacement costs of such efforts mounted. Almost 20 years after Chandigarh’s construction, Correa publicly disavowed Corbusier’s contributions, promising a more ecologically sensitive approach in their wake.

In the meantime, the preference for concrete sidelined labour-intensive industries long present in South Asian construction, namely brickmaking. Brick was rendered unfashionable even as its use promised to include a greater share of local labour and better integrate new constructions into the climatic demands of the region.

Unlike their western starchitect and Indian counterparts, Islam and Lari’s designs in Bangladesh and Pakistan stand out for their deliberate use of bricks drawn from local kilns and serve a more diversified social base than their counterparts’ works across the border.

Rather than “static conditions” in the Nehruvian understanding, the persistence of local building traditions utilising brick amid the frenzy for all-around concretised industrial modernity spoke to a degree of climatic common sense that went unnoticed by leading Indian architects for far too long.

Trying as it does to compress such a broad range of aesthetic conceptions and practices across South Asia into a neat narrative of postcolonial eminence, the MoMA’s exhibition ultimately leaves us with more variety than clarity. Worse, it threatens to water down and flatten competing convictions of the designers it honours by lumping them together under an unwieldy umbrella. Left open to question, then, is whether the exhibition’s presentation is as persuasive as it is diverse.

Harshavardan Raghunandhan is a graduate student in history at Yale University.