The Usual Suspects

India Today, December 21, 1998
Dec 28, 1998

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Slums of Modern India

The fact is colonial architecture was infinitely superior.

Swapan Dasgupta

In times like these, it is the little things that make all the difference. First, we ought to be grateful to the proprietors of Delhi's Imperial Hotel for not succumbing to the renaming disease and calling their establishment by some suitably inappropriate indigenous name. Second, we should be doubly grateful that instead of replacing one of the capital's most authentic art deco buildings with another sandstone monstrosity, they hired experts from Hong Kong to effect a genuine restoration. Like Calcutta's Town Hall, Mumbai's Tata Palace and Amarchand Mansion, and The Cecil in Shimla, yet another piece of architectural heritage has been rescued from the vandalism of the modernists who combine dubious tastes with a disdain for anything "colonial".

It was a deliverance waiting to happen. For nearly 40 years, we have been silent victims of a determined body of architectural iconoclasts bent on dumbing down our sense of aesthetics. With astonishing arrogance that stemmed from a combination of naked greed and unrivalled state patronage, the modernisers have transformed our urban landscape into monuments of ugliness. All that was gracious, grand, ornate and had a whiff of classicism was sought to be bulldozed and replaced with steel and concrete stumps. The builders of colonial rule wanted to make statements that would endure for centuries; our post-Independence creators merely looked to the next contract. Just compare Lutyens' North and South Blocks with Shastri Bhavan and Bloomfield's Imperial Hotel with the adjoining ITDC Janpath Hotel. Just compare the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo with the adjoining Indian High Commission designed by our very own architects. One has grace and serenity, the other resembles a railway ticket office in Tundla.

It is easy to locate where we went wrong. More complex is the question why we went wrong. With his baggage of English radicalism, Jawaharlal Nehru imagined that a new aesthetics could be manufactured by discarding grandeur and classicism, both eastern and western. It was a failed experiment. The modernist Le Corbusier's Chandigarh didn't succeed in triggering a new wave of creativity. It merely spawned the grim architecture of the Delhi Development Authority. These temples of the socialist raj now threaten to become the slums of the market economy. As for being functional, the dingy squalor of the government office has left its mark on the self-esteem of the babus. An environment that can't inspire doesn't foster productivity. Or good taste.

At the heart of the problem is the spurious belief that Indians are temperamentally austere. They may be in their personal lives but when it comes to authority, the expectation is one of grandeur and ceremony. The Raj flowered in the Victorian and Edwardian era because it was accompanied by decisive imperial statements, particularly in architecture. From the liveried orderlies in the lower courts to the imposing structures on Raisina Hill, the Raj oozed authority. The people may not have loved it, but they certainly admired it. It will take more than the self-indulgent juxtaposition of a cheap, red, plastic chair with the imperial throne by Shaft activists in Calcutta's Victoria Memorial -- Lord Curzon's grand monument to British rule -- to obliterate this reality. Before we speak of "our" architecture and aesthetics, let's digest "their" achievements.

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