The India Project

The India Project While pockets of India are now approaching the living standards of Switzerland, other regions are debilitated by a level of poverty that is akin to that of Zimbabwe. Sunil Khilnani asks what remains of the universalist project of India’s political founders. Has architecture, in the rush for market and economic success, lost its self-understanding? A landscape of frenetic changes. 12 The realm of private capital: self-generated, controlled and insulated. The Indian economy is shuddering into life with extraordinarily visible as well as variable effects: parts of India’s vast landscape are being roiled in turbulent wind tunnels of frenetic change, others are trapped in still, doldrum air. In the richest parts of the country – the three states of Punjab, Haryana and Maharashtra (whose populations at respectively 24, 21 and 96 million add up to around 140 million Indians) – people enjoy per capita incomes three and a half times or more, and have ten times as many vehicles, as their poorest compatriots in the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh (whose combined population is 300 million). If such patterns of uneven growth continue, in coming decades the Indian Union will increasingly resemble one of those ‘exquisite corpses’ children like to draw – disparate bits, dreamed up by different imaginations and endowed with quite different abilities, whose principle of connection will be hard to discern or justify. As some commentators have pointed out, it will be a country in which parts will approach the living standards of Switzerland, while others will be like Zimbabwe. Can one, in such a territory of fragmented success, speak of a common political project, let alone a continuous architectural imagination which might express and help to constitute this? And why should one even try? What is striking about India’s upswing – wherever it is happening – is its indifference to politics: markets continue to boom, regardless of terrorist attacks, venal politicians and a regional neighbourhood of profound instability. In a little triumph of the theory of capital, the economic seems to have insulated itself from the political, just as the successful in India have seceded from the unsuccessful, retreating to their walled gardens and apartment buildings. It is this economic success, abstracted from political context, that Indian elites today seek to project. It has caught the attention of the world – and has even come to be seen by the West as threatening. There is an easy, universal comprehensibility about economic success and failure – its measurement is standard and has a global currency. Yet what is distinctive to India has been, and still is, its political ambition and achievement: the creation, out of material unparalleled both in its diversity and its entrenched hierarchy, of an open society committed to democratic politics, to a pluralism of human life, and to a project of common development. This was the founding idea of India, the unlikely project that men like Nehru embarked the country on at the midpoint of the 20th century. One must recall some of the most radical aspects of this idea of India, sometimes forgotten in an age when our options seem to have narrowed either to an acceptance of homogenising globalisation, or to a violent rejection of this. Although this vision of India emerged out of, and was shaped by, its antagonistic relationship to colonial power, it never sought refuge in safe harbours of nativism, in a culturalist rejection of the colonial inheritance. It was a profoundly universalist project, an alternative universalism based not on a deluded sense of Indian self-sufficiency, but one which was ready to argue with the West, as well as with itself. It was prepared to deploy critical reason, in deciding what to adopt Nehru’s project of alternative universalism: ‘It hits you on the head and makes you think.’ Le Corbusier’s Assembly Building, Chandigarh, 1963. 13 and to dispense with from both its own traditions and from the West. It was, as articulated by men like Nehru, a critical Modernism, distinctive in its ambition to structure diversity into a common national project seeing, in defiance of classical Western theories of nationalism, diversity as a source of strength rather than weakness. It was distinctive, too, in the forms of activist resistance through which India projected itself in the world. India took a position between the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor, and between contending ideological groups, the West and the socialist world. It sought autonomy in the international domain by refusing to participate in alignments, in treaties and in markets, all of which it viewed as skewed in favour of the more powerful. This was an extension into the international domain of the Gandhian strategy of boycotts and fasts. As Nehru put it in the mid-1950s: ‘Asian strength exists in the negative sense of resisting.’1 This resistance was double in its senses: a resistance to the sirens of global power, but equally a resistance to the pulls of narrow and exclusive definitions of culture and tradition. This founding project, based on India’s diversity, its desire to find its own terms on which to engage with the world, and on a belief in a benevolent state, was given form in policies, institutions and choices. But it also elaborated itself in a rhetoric of performance. From the carefully calibrated cabinet ministries (making sure they included some members from each of the country’s minorities and regions), to such events as the well-orchestrated 26 January Republic Day parades (when a well-marshalled microcosm of the country processed down Lutyens’ spinal boulevard), and the creation of industrial towns, and from steel plants like Bhilai (designed as melting pots of caste hierarchy and religious difference where the new secular, productive, Indian citizen would be created), onwards to Nehru’s commissioning of Le Corbusier to build Chandigarh: such ploys and ventures expressed a will to create a public realm through a kind of architecture of emblems that would represent Indian autonomy as well as its interrelatedness. Market forces today: haphazard, dynamic and experimental. ‘It hits you on the head and makes you think,’ Nehru said of Corbusier’s Chandigarh, ‘and the one thing which India requires is being hit on the head so that it may think.’2 The design of Chandigarh manifested an important strain in Nehru’s complex idea of modern India: the sense that India had to cut loose from the contradictory modernity introduced by the British Raj – a modernity deformed by the weight of colonialism – just as it had also to free itself from a disabling nostalgia for a (selectively remembered) indigenous past. India had to move forward by one decisive act that broke with both its ancient and its colonial history. Chandigarh divested itself of history of any sort, rejecting both colonial pageantry and nationalist sentimentalism or ornament. It lacks the obligatory nationalist statuary and road-sign nomenclatura that pervades every other Indian city – Le Corbusier specifically banned all of this. The city’s radical meaning lay in its cultural and physical unfamiliarity, its brazen assertion of the new and other. It conceded nothing to location or to surrounding culture. Instead it chose to celebrate a wholly alien form, style and material, and in doing so strove for a zero-degree condition that would make it equally unclaimable by any and every cultural or religious group. Just as the English language placed all Indians – at least in principle – at a disadvantage of equal unfamiliarity, so too Chandigarh did not lend itself to easy seizure or possession by any one group. Even those Indian elites who were familiar with colonial building idioms, with the bungalow and the verandah, were going to have to learn from scratch how to find their way around this brave new world of brise-soleils and reinforced concrete. Such projections of the Indian idea emerged out of conversations between a no doubt restricted nationalist elite and currents of international Modernism: part of its purpose was to create a rhetorical pedagogy for society at large. It prompted a range of debates: for example, the protracted, sometimes self-indulgent but also fruitful argument about an ‘Indian architecture’, about the purpose, role, ambitions of building in and for India, the relation between past and present. In surveying today’s scene, one ready conclusion is to see a shift from an essentially state-defined vision, as set out in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, to one defined by the market and capitalist forces today – inevitably more haphazard, but also more dynamic and experimental. Yet there are reasons to be sceptical about these latter qualities. Today, it seems, there are two striking developments in the architectural realm that relate to the role of the state and of private capital. First, the national state has pulled back from projecting an idea of India through the built and physical environment. The major state-directed building projects, such as they are, are no longer destinations, but routes of approach: highways, flyovers, airports, telecommunications networks, electricity grids – the infrastructure. The way the state now represents itself is not through monumental edifices, but through its ability to steward statistics such as growth rates and social indicators: a new statistical architecture of state, through which it seeks to legitimate itself. 14 Approach routes are now the major statedirected building projects. Second, private capital now chooses to build its own, selfgenerated and controlled habitats: their value lies precisely in the extent to which they are insulated from their surrounding environment. The information technology campus (ironically, itself created by the Nehruvian project) is the paradigm of this, existing as a parallel world. Yet unlike the steel cities of the 1950s and 1960s such as Bhilai, the denizens of such campuses are not involved in citizen-making. Rather, they take pride in the fact that they exist in international time zones, in an orbital relation to their immediate physical neighbours and surrounds. These are zones where the ‘NonResident Indian’ and the ‘Resident Non-Indian’ come together to converse in a bleached cosmopolitanism. The retreat of the state as public builder, and the withdrawal of private capital into its protected, walled spaces, has meant the abdication of urban space as a site on which to debate and project conceptions of India. Has any of this provoked any sort of debate or discussion about architecture in India? Not really. It is considered a brave and radical thing to suggest that the corporate world commission one of the usual architectural suspects to build in India: ‘One can now afford to bring in a Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier or even IM Pei,’ writes a commentator in one of India’s leading weeklies,3 and no doubt soon enough someone will fly in one of the world’s pomp-architects to construct a building, an offcut from a project destined for another global site. This is fine: but it is unlikely to make Indians think about their projects in the way Nehru had wished. Astonishingly, there has been virtually no architectural debate around the two politically electric subjects, directly related to the built environment, that over the past 15 years or so have figured most vividly in the popular imagination. The first is the eruption of public statuary across the poor, Hindi-speaking states of north India, of thousands of renderings of Dr BR Ambedkar, the leader of India’s Dalits (‘untouchables’). Erected at public expense, they seek to give public recognition and visibility to many millions of Indians who historically were kept invisible – even to themselves – by the caste system. The political currents pushing this represent a ‘silent revolution’ in India’s democracy, and bring into the public realm meanings, dreams and energies that are already writing themselves into public space. The second is the rubble of the 16th-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, pickaxed in 1992 by Hindu activists supported by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, which now hopes to build a temple on this site. The Ayodhya wreckage represents the most serious challenge to the founding Indian project. The demand to build a temple there is couched in a language of continuity and tradition: in fact, it marks a rupture with India’s past, an attempt at erasing centuries of history and cultural creation. It threatens a more profound break with the past than any seen in India’s history. The future is creeping up on Indian architecture, even as the past still grasps it. Architecture as a mediation of, meditation upon, time – past, present and future – has in India lost this self-understanding and has excused itself from some of the most important arguments about what ‘project India’ might choose for itself. 4 Notes 1. Tibor Mende, Conversations with Mr. Nehru, Secker & Warburg (London), 1956, p 63. 2. ‘Speech at the seminar and exhibition on Architecture’ New Delhi, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, 1957–1963, vol 4, Ministry of Information (New Delhi), 1964, p 176. 3. Gurcharan Das, ‘Arise from the Clay Earth’, Outlook magazine, 21 August 2006. Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 12, 13(t), 14 © Kazi Ashraf; p 13(b) © Reinhold Martin; p 15 © Ramesh Biswas 15