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Architecture
Post Colonial India and its Architecture - III
An Architecture for a Socialist State
by Ashish Nangia
The Architecture of Socialism
With a few brief exceptions, post-independence Indian politics till the 1990s
was dominated largely by the Congress party, each time with a representative of
the Nehru-Gandhi family at the helm, who alone seemed to be able to guarantee a
certain unity.
Principally backed by Nehru and his coterie of advisers, India with its
five-year plans embarked on a socialist model of development that featured a
top-heavy State with minimal delegation of power to the regions or to
district-level representative bodies. This socialist-industrial model called
for massive State-controlled investment in heavy industry and associated
activities.
While this model of governance may possibly have been the only viable solution
in a time when India was struggling to become a cohesive political unit, it was
also subsequently criticized for encouraging and entrenching endemic corruption
and propagating a multi-layered bureaucracy that continues to this day. The
State, as the biggest actor in the country, controlled almost everything –
including information flow, social development, and most importantly for our
purposes, became also the biggest client for architectural and urban development
projects. It is not surprising then that most significant large-scale
construction from this era has been either directly sponsored by the government
or by public corporations.
The Search
for an Aesthetic
 The
Asian Games in 1982 provided a massive fillip to construction, especially in
Delhi. The Pragati Maidan complex, built on the eve of the Games,
provided a space for many innovative architectural experiments and cemented the
careers of a whole generation of professionals. Built as an exhibition and
entertainment space, Pragati Maidan continues to be one of the stellar
attractions in Delhi. Within it, the Hall of Nations
by Raj Rewal is a large column-free space that is characterized by its use of
reinforced concrete in a structure that would normally be constructed of steel
trusses, a decision influenced by the lack of expertise in steel construction as
well as the prohibitive cost of steel at the time. While the use of concrete
results in a massive structure that does have some brutal appeal, the quality of
construction leaves something to be desired. For all that the building is one
of the most imposing in Pragati Maidan and continues to host many high-quality
exhibitions, both domestic and international.
 Also
constructed for the Games are a series of stadia, the most prominent being the
Indraprastha Indoor Stadium by Sharat Das and the Talkatora stadium by Satish
Grover. The Indraprastha Stadium is an imposing structure with bearing walls of
concrete and roofing of steel trusses, marked by its rapid construction with
movable shuttering on the bearing columns ensuring continuous activity on the
site. It unfortunately suffers from a lack of maintenance, and the use of
plastic covering on its roof on rainy days is sometimes visible.
For athletes visiting the capital, large-scale temporary housing was required.
Raj Rewal designed for this purpose the
Asiad Games Village,
a cluster of interlocking housing units that takes its formal inspiration from
the streetscape and scale of towns in Rajasthan, particularly Jaisalmer. Rewal
claims to have used these spatial references to create a series of courts and
‘streets’ through the complex and even to use finishes and material that
correspond to their original inspiration.
Asiad Village, New Delhi, Cluster Plan
Today the Games Village, or Khelgaon
as it also called, houses commercial and office space, exhibition areas, as well
as nightspots that are known as much for their fine cuisine as for their
easygoing urban setting.
 This
experiment with ‘vernacular’ material and scales is continued elsewhere, in the
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
by Stein, Doshi and Bhalla, several buildings in Rajasthan (including the
University of Jodhpur - Image below) by Uttam C. Jain, as well as a neo-Corbusian
aesthetic in the Shriram Center and Akbar Hotel, both at Delhi, by Shivnath
Prasad.
Conclusion
To sum up, most of the architectural production of any significance till the
1990s is marked by a certain commonality of factors: firstly sponsored or
commissioned by the State and its organs, and secondly the search for an
appropriate aesthetic fluctuates between two extremes – that of a completely
‘international’ vocabulary of Modernism (such as Prasad’s Akbar Hotel) and an
attempt to reinterpret the vernacular on the other (exemplified by Correa’s
Crafts Village).
Jodhpur University. Notice use of local material
for finishes.
However, most architectural production is a balancing act between these two
poles – a form dictated by the exigencies of universal standards of space (stadia,
exhibition spaces, and convention centers) and construction and aesthetics
influenced by what is actually possible on the site.
These mixes, when juggled elegantly and with flair, has resulted in elegant or
in horribly clunky structures that have only got worse with time. It is perhaps
best here not to point out examples – suffice it to say that many of the larger
cities in India are littered with architectural horrors from this period that
are a blot on the cityscape and serve to efface the many fine and sensitive
examples time that co-exist side by side.
It is ironic that the same State that professed a social agenda has been
responsible, in many cases, for an urban landscape that has done little to help
minimize the inequality that vowed to eradicate. Fortunately this is an issue
that is increasingly being debated in the work of younger professionals today.
April 9, 2006
Images from Bhatt, Vikram and Peter Scriver.
Contemporary Indian Architecture: After the Masters. Ahmedabad: Mapin
Publishing: 1990.
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