Internationalism and architecture in India after Nehru

Abstract

India was one of many new ‘developing’ nations emerging from colonial pasts in the second half of the twentieth century in which the ideals and forms of an ostensibly universally applicable modern architecture were initially embraced with conviction and relative success. But the direct and particularly fertile engagement of several celebrated masters of modern architecture in new India was to secure, for this most populous of the post-colonial world’s fledgling democracies, a conspicuously significant role in the canonical narrative of the internationalisation of architectural modernism. Regionalist and neo-traditional digressions in the works of some of India’s own most-esteemed modernist architects were to be accorded comparably exemplary status in the critical estimation of late twentieth century commentators, who recognised these as architectural expressions of a putatively authentic resistance, from a position of geographical and cultural autonomy, to the received norms and forms of what had come to be regarded as the Eurocentric hegemony of modernism. Somewhat ironically, it was this same renewed sense of cultural pride and potency that was to underpin the aggressive opening-up of India’s previously insular developing economy, beginning in the late 1980s. But globalisation would also serve, paradoxically, to compound and confuse the once confident and distinctive architectural signature of modern India through possibilities for international bricolage in the contemporary global culture of consumption, for which India’s IT industry - among its most influential architectural patrons in the early twenty-first century - had become a prime-mover.