MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND INDIAN TRADITION The history and criticism of modern architecture continue to reflect a Western bias, so vast areas of the developing world remain uncharted. When a more balanced version is eventually written, India will deserve a special place in it. A body of work has now been produced there which deals with rapid change yet touches roots in tradition. What began 30 years ago as a tributary of the modern movement has since become a stream with its own momentum: one more case, perhaps, of the absorption of foreign influences by deep Indian currents.1 Balkrishna Doshi has been a key person in this development from the beginning. Born in 1927, he belongs to that generation which came of age just after Independence, and which was confronted with the massive tasks of constructing a new nation. Nehru’s vision of an industrial future combining liberal democracy and technological progress was conducive to modern architecture. But freedom from colonial rule also provided a chance to reflect upon the meaning of the country’s past. The imaginative task for many Indian artists has been to find the right balance between old and new. Architects in particular have been drawn to Gandhi’s notion of the village as a repository of basic values. Doshi has tried to define a mutually useful and enriching balance between industrial town and rural base. Doshi’s architecture embodies a vision of man in harmony with the natural order. It is an ideal which combines the reformist ethos of the modern movement with a far more ancient spiritual
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tradition. Beyond climatic design, Doshi explores the mythical and poetic dimensions of nature — the flow of breeze and water, the contrast of light and shade, the relationship between ground and sky. At a time of drastic urbanisation and deracination, he returns to the wisdom of the vernacular, with its timeless solutions for dealing with social space, climate, materials and human scale. India has no room for the effete revivalism that afflicts the consumer societies of the West. Change is too pressing to admit nostalgia, and tradition is too vital to permit academicism. Rituals, crafts, clothing, even the way people carry water or use space, reflect long-standing patterns. India is a place of contrasts: between rich and poor, urban and rural, secular and religious. The artist grapples with these and draws a strong poetry from them. Doshi sees no distinction between architecture and urbanism. The individual house is a hypothesis for a better kind of city; room, terrace, court, street and communal space are all related. Doshi’s researches have defined a set of types for the dwelling covering a wide range from industrial townships, to the socalled “informal sector” — a euphemism for squatter settlements. The architect is committed to visual quality at all social levels. He does not reduce human needs to the merely utilitarian but rather sees them in cultural terms. According to him, the architect must give symbolic shape to institutions as it is these that provide social life with coherence and continuity. Even a humble tap on a corner becomes an “institution” of a kind.2
Sangath, the architect’s studio, Ahmedabad, 1979-81 Doshi, sketch section through Sangath
