The Significance of Brinda Somaya's Work in Post-Independence India

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BRINDA SOMAYA’S WORK IN POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA BY JON LANG In looking at the work of individual architects, it is easy to be entranced by the apparently unique creativity of the buildings they have designed and to write a laudatory essay on their work. In looking at the contribution of Brinda Somaya to architecture, it would be easy to do so. That is not the purpose of this essay. To understand an architect’s contribution to their field and discipline, it is important to place their work in the context of the broader evolution of the ideas of the international and local architectural and socio-cultural realm to which they belong. The goal here is to place Somaya’s work in its rightful place in post- Independence India. To do so involves looking at the long history of architecture in India, how indigenous and exotic ideas about its nature have unselfconsciously and self- consciously evolved. India has seen waves of modern architecture brought into the country by outsiders over the centuries. The residue or aftermath of each wave was a set of building forms that matured into forms unique to the subcontinent. The first modernising architectural ideas came from elsewhere in Asia. The building and landscape forms brought with them by the Mughal conquerors ultimately merged unselfconsciously with indigenous traditions to create a diverse set of regional modern building types, structural configurations and aesthetic attitudes. The neo- classic, still referred to as modern architecture, as late as 1952, and the neo-gothic of the East India Company was an outside intrusion that self-consciously sought an Indian architecture with the development of the Indo-Saracenic. In the early 20th century, individual British architects—such as Claude Batley of Gregson Batley King in Mumbai and Walter Sykes George in Delhi and lesser known firms such as Sudlow, Ballardie and Thompson in Calcutta—broke away from the standard historical products of Briton-headed firms in India to create modern architecture that was a departure from both indigenous and imported building forms in massing and appearance. It was responsive to the Indian climatic and colonial cultural context. They were not radical in the forms they introduced. It was these firms, but even more so their Indian colleagues and competitors, that introduced Art Deco architecture to India. Art Deco buildings, particularly in Mumbai, have stood the test of time. Many are still held in high esteem by architects and laypeople in India today. The building forms of European rationalism, introduced by European architects and Indian architects who studied in Europe and the United States under major continental architects, came as a big shock. Their introduction coincided with Independence. This essay looks at the impact of this modernist work and the efforts of the often unsung second generation of Indian architects, to learn from the impact of that generation of modern Indian masters. It was a hard act to follow, but ultimately, being more empirical in nature, much of the work managed to merge an understanding of human needs with personal expression to form a modern Indian architecture for the ages. The contribution of each of the architects of this second generation may be unique, but some architects have been more influential than others and some should have been more influential. This essay considers the work of Brinda Somaya in this context. THE POST-INDEPENDENCE WORLD Political independence in 1947 brought with it a sense of optimism and the desire to identify an individual sense of place in the global world. It was also accompanied by diverse visions of a future India, which were expressed through architectural form. The two most important were Nehru’s view of a modern, socialist nation and the grass-roots neo-traditional India of Gandhi. The former is manifested in the quick adoption of rationalist modernist architecture, as brought home from their studies abroad by a generation of young Indian architects, exemplified by Habib Rahman, Achyut Kanvinde and B.V. Doshi in the core geographical and professional Mumbai–Ahmedabad–Delhi axis and on the periphery by Bennett Pithavadian in Chennai. The latter was manifested in a great variety of historical revival approaches probably best exemplified on the extreme revivalist side by the modern Indian architectural efforts of Sris Chandra Chatterjee and more modernist in character in the work of Julius Vaz. The work of architects such as Charles Correa and Joseph Allen Stein—both American educated but outside the immediate realm of influence of the continental European masters who had migrated to the United States after the Second World War and were teaching at east coast universities—while rationalist in nature, had strong empirical overtones from the outset of their practices in Mumbai and Delhi respectively. It took a while for the work of Doshi and Kanvinde to become attuned to India; their early designs reflect the ideas of the masters with whom they had studied and/or worked. What was particularly important was that the work, bit-by-bit, followed the process of indigenisation from the 1970s onwards in much the same way that Mughal architecture became absorbed and adapted four hundred year earlier. The later work of Doshi and Kanvinde came to respect the realities of India in dealing with patterns of life and aesthetic qualities. More radical rethinking of modernist architecture paralleled their efforts. The criticism of much modernist architecture and, particularly, urban design, led to the emergence of distinct lines of response to the first generation of Indian modernist architecture. The first two were responses to the weaknesses of modernist thought but failed to recognise its strengths. They made the same error of judgment that the modernists themselves had made, rejecting the past architecture by focusing on its problems rather than looking at what had worked well. One was the modern Indian vernacular architecture; the other was what has been called neo- traditional architecture. The first resulted in more flamboyant exterior architectural forms, the second in a looking back to the past for inspiration. The modern Indian vernacular was an exuberant response to the simple, bold forms of modernist architecture. Two types of displays that appealed to the growing middle class of the country can be identified. They created, perhaps responded, to popular tastes. The first was a melange of past architectural forms of the sub-continent, whether it be Hindu, Islamic or colonial. The second was a parody of the work of the modern masters. It was and is highly popular because it uses elements of past forms that are readily recognised by laypeople mixed with glass and steel to create an architecture of grandeur. It is an architecture of appearance rather than substance, but much that was built following either approach was remarkably well- executed and should not be lightly dismissed. Neo-traditional architecture is a product of idealists looking back at patterns of past forms and reapplying them to create an architecture that is “ours”. At best, it is the principles rather than the forms per se that are applied to form a new architecture. Aping past vernacular forms is insufficient, even though past forms may give visual pleasure. New ways of life, including the use of automobiles and refrigeration have to be catered to and new technologies are available to deal with construction more expediently than past techniques. A more thoughtful response to the way modernist ideas had been interrogated by critics was to recognise what they had to offer to the modern world. Modernist architecture—with its simplicity of forms, structural ingenuity, new materials and relationship of indoor to outdoor space—continued to provide the basis for rethinking the nature of architecture for the burgeoning middle class, their ways of life and the institutions of importance to them. The new designs were a reasoned response to local climatic conditions but also the aspirations of clients and the architects’ desires to express their own identities in architectural form. The last two decades of the 20th century and the first two of the 21st have seen a number of individual architects and architectural firms across India bring fine buildings to fruition. The work of established architects, such as B.V. Doshi, Achyut Kanvinde and Charles Correa, developed from their international modernist roots into work that was attuned both instrumentally and symbolically to the Indian climatic and cultural context. Of particular interest are the second generation of architects—such as Bimal Patel in Ahmedabad and Chandavarker and Thacker in Bengaluru who inherited architectural firms—whose principles produced fine modernist buildings. In addition, new firms emerged on the scene during the 1970s and demonstrated a broad concern not only for designing contemporary buildings but for recognising India’s cultural heritage and the housing and institutional needs of the poor. Somaya and Kalappa in Mumbai is among them and, arguably, the most prominent of them. Many of these firms have shown considerable stamina, paving the way for a new generation of architects emerging in the early 21st century. What these firms have in common is a rejection of many trends of postmodern work, which brought ‘Indianness’ into architecture in a superficial way. In contrast, they sought a modern architecture for a modern world. Somaya and Kalappa, established in 1975, has been a leading multi-focused architectural firm that has spanned the three generations of post-Independence architecture in India. Less well- known outside India than it should be, in the four decades since it was established, the firm, under the direction of Somaya, has taken the modernist design paradigm a step forward. While recognising the superficiality of much of first-generation modernist thinking, the firm did not fall into the trap of simultaneously rejecting what was thoughtful about it.

Load more