Architecture-Culture in Postcolonial India
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE GIFT OF DESIGN: ARCHITECTURE-CULTURE IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jaideep Chatterjee January 2011 © 2011 Jaideep Chatterjee THE GIFT OF DESIGN: ARCHITECTURE-CULTURE IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA Jaideep Chatterjee, Ph.D. Cornell University 2011 This work enquires into the question of the meaning being of architects in postcolonial India. It asks those agents, who claim for themselves the title, “architect” what does it mean to be an architect in postcolonial India. It argues that the meaning of the being of architects emerges in the dialectical and transitory nature of the to be implied in the question. It presents by the way of its argument three “moments” in the question of the meaning of being of architects. The first, the Moment of the Architect, focuses on the Architects Act of 1972, which the work argues is a project, projecting a particular domain in postcolonial India. The essence of this projection lies in the “imagined” figure of the architect, in which the meaning of the architect is, (in) being different from engineers and planners, (as) being rightful claimants of the “Architect” as articulated in Modernism’s discourses of architecture, and (as) being a figure always and already grounded in the postcolonial Indian State’s “project” of nation building. The second, the Moment of Design, focuses on the design jury, and architectural drawings. It shows how drawings and juries produce the meaning of design and the architect in terms of a future that-will-be and as a subject-position endowed with a historical consciousness who projects and creates this future that-will-be. It also demonstrates how this meaning of design and the architect weaves itself with the domain “projected” by the Act whose essence, beforehand, is this figure of the architect. The third, the Moment of Jugar, pursues (an)other sign to which architects in India lay a claim, and through which they articulate themselves, their expertise and their field: jugar. As this moment shows, the claims to jugar and being jugaru reveal completely different imaginations of selfhood and of expertise of those who also claim that they are architects. This moment, I argue presents, as it were, a limit to the meaning of “architecture and architects” that the two earlier moments attempt to continually (re)produce. Yet this limit is not an “outside” but rather a liminal “interiority.” BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jaideep Chatterjee was born in New Delhi in 1974 and attended the Scindia School, Gwalior and The Delhi Public School, Mathura Road, New Delhi. He received a Diploma in Architecture (equivalent to a Bachelor of Architecture) from the D. C. Patel School of Architecture, Institute of Environmental Design (IED) Vallabh Vidya Nagar, Gujarat in 1998. Jaideep then worked as an architect at M/s Architects & Associates. In 1999 Jaideep continued to the School of Architecture and Interior Design (SAID) at the University of Cincinnati, earning a Master of Science in Architecture in 2001. He completed his graduate thesis entitled, Purdahnashin: On the Interrelatedness between Space and Sexuality of Women With(in) the Havelis of 18th and 19th centuries in Lucknow, India, under the supervision of Dr. Patrick Snadon. In fall of 2001, Jaideep began his doctoral studies at the history of Architecture and Urbanism Program at the School of Architecture, Art and Planning, Cornell University, under Dr. Mary Woods. In 2003 Jaideep also enrolled into the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University as a doctoral student under Dr. Dominic Boyer. From 2009 Jaideep has been teaching at the School of Architecture and Interior Design (SAID) at the University of Cincinnati as an adjunct faculty. Jaideep has presented his research at numerous conferences and symposia in Istanbul, Ithaca, New York, Albuquerque, Washington, and New Delhi. His most recent article ““The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men: Modernity and Architectural Design(s) in Postcolonial India,” is to be published in Modern Makeovers: The Oxford Handbook of Modernity in South Asia, edited by Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee- Dube; Oxford University Press, New Delhi, as part of a collection of essays from emerging scholars of South Asia. iii Ma aar baba’r jonne iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work owes much to many people over two countries and myriad academic disciplines without whose support it would have not been possible. Foremost are the four outstanding members of my doctoral committee: Mary Woods, Dominic Boyer, Salah Hassan and Terence Turner. They permitted me considerable latitude to not only explore my ideas but also offered sound counsel when it came time to bring those ideas together. To Mary Woods, my committee chair, I am immensely grateful for her nurturing attitude, her unflinching faith in my work, and our many lively and intense discussions about our common area of interest, the histories of architecture and architects all over the world, especially India. To Dominic Boyer, who was my co- chair while he was at Cornell, I owe especial thanks for cultivating my anthropological inclinations, for our conversations on expertise and identity, and suggesting that I undertake a dual major in anthropology and architecture. Salah Hassan’s timely comments and insights regarding questions of postcoloniality and modernity within African and Asian nations have always spurred me on towards refining the arguments and questions that this work tackles. I thank Terence Turner for introducing me to the subtleties of anthropological and social theory, especially the Marxian corpus. I must also thank Sudipta Sen at the Department of History, Syracuse University, for the wonderful guidance that I received in an independent study course on Modern Indian history. Indeed, this is true for all my teachers at Cornell in varied departments of English, Government Studies, German Studies, and History in whose classes various aspects of this work gained degrees of concretion. I also cannot forget Elleh Nnamdi, at the Department of Architecture, University of Cincinnati for his great support and help in the final stages of writing of this dissertation. v This dissertation was written with the financial support of a Sage Graduate Fellowship, as well as teaching assistantships in the Department of History of Architecture and Urbanism, and Department of Anthropology. Additional support in form of conference, travel and research grants came from the Cornell Graduate School and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. I was particularly honored to receive the A. Henry Detweiler Fund Traveling Fellowship in 2004 which allowed me to undertake significant preliminary research in India. I am also immensely thankful for the Research Associateship at the TVB School of Habitat Studies during 2005-6 which permitted me to spend fifteen months conducting interviews and researching their archives. I am also thankful to the Department of Architecture, University of Cincinnati for presenting me with an opportunity to teach while I finished writing the dissertation. The personnel at many libraries in the US and India were a tremendous resource for my research. I am especially thankful to the staff at the Fine Arts, Olin and Kroch libraries at Cornell. I was assisted by the archivists at the Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi, the National Archives, India and the Parliament Library and Reference, Research, Documentation and Information Service (LARRDIS), India who helped me navigate through the immense labyrinth of official document of the Indian Government. I am grateful to Mr. Bholanath Bannerjee for providing me with the access to the Parliamentary Library. I am also thankful to the staff at the Sohrab F. Bharoocha Architectural Library at the Indian Institute of Architects, Mumbai for providing me with such gracious access to the archives of the institute. This research would not have been possible, of course, without the unfailing cooperation of my colleagues/informants/friends: the wonderful architects of India. Not only did they bear all my incessant questionings with good humor but also graciously put me in contact with so many individuals who in turn expanded my social vi network. As I had countless discussions with numerous architects during my fieldwork I cannot mention everyone, but those associated with the TVB School of Habitat Studies deserve a special vote of thanks. They welcomed me into their institute with open arms and made me feel from the first day as one of them. I have only the fondest of memories of the “adda” about architecture and everything else with Tania, Arunavada, Tapanda, Badri, Mark, Naveen, Parul, Bashobidi, and Ruchita over endless streams of cups of tea. These proved to be not only invaluable in terms of my understanding of the central questions guiding this work but also in terms of knowing them as friends and guides to my own growth. I must thank A. G. K. Menon, Ashok Lall, Dr. Nadir, and Ashish “muni” Ganju for not only their dedication to a wonderful institute but also for sharing with me their wealth of stories, struggles, and experiences as architects in India. The staff at TVB, especially, “Jain Saab” in the administrative office, “chotu” at the canteen helped me at each step of my stay at TVB. Special thanks are due to Thiruvengadam R. B. my research assistant and a graduate of TVB. His exemplary skills in collecting sociological data from the students at TVB and collating this information saved the day on many occasions. Then there were the students of TVB, especially the batch of 2007 with whom I relived, as it were, the days of being an undergraduate student of architecture. They involved me in their all night work session, their classes, their group activities as well as their lives outside of the college.