ARCHITECTURE AND ANXIETY:

THE PROBLEM OF PASTICHE IN RECENT INDIAN DESIGN

G. H. R. Tillotson

Uses and the invention of tradition are ubiquitous themes in contemporary

cultural theory and practice; and they often focus on a quest for authenticity.
This brief paper traces this issue in the context of a recent development in
Indian architectural design. Over the last thirty years or so, in a process
which is frequently observed and commented upon, some Indian and other
South Asian architects have been attempting in their work to re-establish a
regional identity within the framework of Modernism. This attempt
involves the combining of certain elements especially the technological
-

benefits of the International Modem Movement, with elements of a

-

revived Indian tradition: ’revived’ because that tradition is perceived as having

been submerged under the impact of forces such as colonialism and the
international aspect of Modernism, forces which tended to promote
convergence rather than the expression of local identities.
The process has been entirely conscious amongst the architects most
closely involved, and this characterisation of it follows the terms of their
own. For example, as early as the 1960s, B. V. Doshi was observing how:

Rapid technological and scientific developments have led to a total

rejection of age-old ways, substituting in their place a rootless
expression of mere industrial functionalism. This has given us an
art and architecture that is more or less uniform throughout the
world. Non-affective and materialist expression over the last few
decades has awakened many people who feel uprooted; they are now
trying to understand the cause and reason for abandoning the ideas
of the past,

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The true Indian architecture that is to be bom will have its norms as
an art of utility through its function and as an art of beauty through
its appeal to the inherited aesthetic sensibility of an Indian. 1

More recently, Charles Correa has spoken of ’the necessity to

simultaneously both rediscover India’s past and invent its future’.2 And Raj
Rewal has noted a similar double element in his own approach and in that of
his contemporaries:

I have looked at the traditional architecture of north India... to

explore the underlying principles that could have relevance for our
time. I
have, nevertheless, leaned on the modem architectural
movement for structural logic, vigour and versatility.

Our generation has been trying to discover the common thread with
which the fabric of Indian architecture has been woven in the past
and its significance for our times.3

The projects of these and other architects involved in the movement

vary considerably in type and scale. They include office blocks
and government buildings, research institutes and museums, and domestic
architecture from private houses to large housing schemes and new towns.
The present paper will not attempt to describe any of these projects very
fully, since many are well documented elsewhere,4 but rather to explore a
theoretical issue which frequently forms part of discussion of them, namely
the problem of pastiche. For the projects are varied not only in scale and
type but also in the method which the architect has adopted to establish an

1 Doshi
(1960, 1965) quoted in William J. R. Curtis, 1988, Balkrishna Doshi: An
Architecture for India, Ahmedabad, pp. 159-60, 158.
2
Correa, quoted in Sarayu Ahuja, 1987, ’Le Corbusier’s Legacy: An Interview with
Charles Correa’, Indian Architect and Builder, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 15.
3 Rewal,
quoted in Brian Brace Taylor, 1992, Raj Rewal, London, p. 26; Raj Rewal
et al. (eds.), 1985, Architecture in India, Paris, p. 12.
4
Apart from Rewal, 1985; Curtis, 1988; and Taylor, 1992 (cited above), see
especially: Hasan Uddin Khan, 1987, Charles Correa: Architect in India, 2nd ed.,
London; Brian Brace Taylor, 1986, Geoffrey Bawa: Architect in Sri Lanka, London;
Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver, 1990, After the Masters: Contemporary Indian
, Ahmedabad.
Architecture

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Indian identity. There have been differences in the identification of what

constitutes the ’common thread’ of Indian architecture, and different views
about the uses to which it can be put.
Mention of a few projects may give some impression of the variety of
means by which architects have sought to establish a distinctively Indian

quality in design. In some cases, a reference to Indian sources is made in

aspects of the plan. The Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya in Ahmedabad, a
museum devoted to Gandhi and especially to the ashram on whose site it
stands, is an early work by Charles Correa (c. 1960, Fig. 1). Here, the
disaggregation of the parts of the structure in linked units around a central
courtyard, was intended to evoke a common feature in the planning of
village dwellings.5 Each part is devoted to a specific function and they are
infonnally though tightly grouped. The reference to vernacular prototypes

1. Charles Correa, Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, Ahmedabad, 1960.

5 Cf. Hasan-Uddin
Khan, 1987, p. 20.

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2. Raj Rewal, Asian Games Village, New Delhi, 1980.

might be read as an appropriately Gandhian gesture, and it is reinforced by

the modest scale and the simplicity of the forms and the materials. In
another museum building designed somewhat later, the same architect has
recalled a different kind of Indian model and has extended to three dimensions
the indigenisation of the treatment of space: the Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal
(late 1970s) includes interconnecting terraces at various levels, and creates a
flow of space and a sense of guided progression which recall the sixteenth-
century Mughal imperial complex at Fatehpur Sikri.
The integration of interior and exterior space is often sought, as for
example in numerous private houses designed by Geoffrey Bawa in Sri
Lanka. Forsaking the colonial bungalow plan usually a block within a
-

plot -
Bawa reverts to an older, local model, using internal courtyards, and
allowing the penetration of the garden into the house. This approach has
been taken much further in some large housing schemes by Raj Rewal, such
as the Asian Games Village in Delhi (1980, Fig. 2): the dense packing of

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3. Raj Rewal, SCOPE Office Complex, New Delhi, 1980.

houses in clusters around chowks, the pedestrianised access, and the use of
roof terraces, all intentionally recall the fabric of pre-modem Indian towns
such as Jaisalmer. A similar approach was adopted at about the same time
by Charles Correa in the Malabar Cements Township in Kerala (1978-82),
where the raised section over the entrance to each cluster recalls the gate or
pol of a conventional mohalla, and where again the density and rhythm of
the grouping follow local rather than colonial patterns.
In some cases such as these, the revival is not merely a matter of form
(though it includes formal and even decorative elements); it is also a
response to surviving social practices. The return to local patterns is often
based on the view that these are better adapted to the way in which the
intended inhabitants actually live their lives though whether this view is
-

always sound may be questionable.6 In other cases, the revival is frankly

more superficial. Raj Rewal, for example, has employed red and buff

6 Cf.
Philly Desai in this volume.

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reconstituted sandstone slabs on the exterior of major buildings, such as the

State Trading Corporation (designed 1976) and the National Institute of
Immunology (from 1983), both in Delhi, in order to recall the characteristic
colour scheme of that city’s great Mughal monuments. In one of his recent
projects SCOPE, a govemment industries office complex (from 1980) -
-

he has made the reference yet more overt, through using octagon-based
planning and gazebos which echo Mughal roof-top chattrls (Fig. 3).
B. V. Doshi has similarly redeployed historical motifs: his own office
building, Sangath, and the Gandhi Labour Institute (both in Ahmedabad,
c. 1980) sport features such as Mughal gardens and vaulted roofs derived
from ancient rock-cut temples. Most boldly literal of all is Correa’s repeated
use of the marndala plan, as in yet another museum, this one in Jaipur: the
Jawahar Kala Kendra (1986, Fig. 4). In this instance, Correa took his cue

4. Charles Correa, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, 1986.

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from the planners of the eighteenth-century city near which his building is
located, even to the detail of the detachment of one of the mandala’s squares
-
amodification forced in the original context by the exigencies of
topography; here, by those of topicality.
Such literal uses of the past the revival of identifiable historical
-

forms have often given rise to anxieties about pastiche. There is a

-

widely shared supposition that there are some kinds of reference to old
buildings which are viable or permissible, and others which are not, and that
it is important to draw the line between them. These anxieties have been
most eloquently and urgently expressed by the architects themselves. To
give a few examples, Doshi has explained:

We needn’t copy motifs, we must try to integrate the spirit.

Today’s designs are like fake pearls and we don’t know how to get
real ones.

Correa has famously distinguished ’transformation’ from mere ’transfers’; and

Rewal insists that he does not ’embellish the designs with false &dquo;oriental&dquo;
arches, domes or carvings’? Critics have shared the architects’ concerns.
William Curtis, for example, writing about Doshi, insists that ’there is more
to a tradition than the superficialities of style’, and that consequently whilst
reviving the Indian tradition one must be careful to avoid ’bogus orientalist
imagery’. Brian Brace Taylor, writing about Rewal, wams of the snares of
’superficial language’, and the historian Romila Thapar (in the same context)
speaks of the need to avoid ’pastiche’ though both seem inclined to-

exonerate Rewal on this point. Hasan Uddin-Khan was similarly relieved to

be able to declare that Correa’s sense of history ’goes beyond mere image-
making’. Elsewhere, though, he wonders whether a use of the past can ever
be ’authentic’. In 1991 he explored the theme in an article in Mimar - a
(now regrettably defunct) journal which was largely devoted to publicising
revivalist architectural movements in India and elsewhere in the developing

7
Doshi, in Curtis, 1988, p. 162; Correa, in Khan, 1987, p. 166; Rewal, in Taylor,
1992, p. 33.

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world. A note of almost frantic fear bursts out as he considers whether it

isn’t all ’just architectural image-making°.s
In the depressingly unvaried vocabulary of such discussion, the most
persistently recurring terms are ’pastiche’, ’superficial’ and ’image-maklng’.
Sometimes targeted at specific designs, they are more usually tolled as a
general, ominous warning against excess, and as points of distinction from
the more deadly serious-sounding ’authentic’.
The concerns which underlie this vocabulary are more widespread and
run deeper than can be demonstrated with a few quotations. They are

perhaps better illustrated by the rationale and critical reception of two

specific projects. Describing his design philosophy, the architect Uttam
Jain admits to having a sense of history whilst stoutly insisting that
’pastiche has no room in my belief. The critic Richard Scherr has acclaimed
Jain’s Jodhpur University Lecture Theatres (1972) as skilfully integrated
into the fabric of Jodhpur city’s traditional architecture, chiefly on the
ground that they are built of a local stone. The stone is indeed local, but the
treatment of it, and especially the response to light, are entirely different:
Jain’s boldly contrasting planes set up sharp shadows, while in his alleged
model light is gently filtered through jalis The brilliance of Jain’s design
lies more in innovation than in integration. Satish Gujral, by contrast, first
and foremost a painter rather than an architect, describes his design process
as the creation of form, a process which begins with a ’feeling’. His famous

Belgian Embassy in Delhi (1983) recaptures something of the plasticity and

energy of medieval temple architecture, and has been heckled by critics as
’theatrical orientalism close to caricature’. 9 Gujral’s work is deemed to be on
the wrong side of the line which separates authentic Indian design from
image-making and pastiche.
In this situation, one might reasonably ask where that line is drawn.
Indeed, it is not even self-evident why such a line must be supposed to exist
at all. Where has all this nervousness about pastiche come from? What is
the theoretical basis for the anxiety?

8
Curtis, 1988, pp. 171, 94; Taylor and Thapar, in Taylor, 1992, pp. 18, 20; Khan,
1987, p. 80; Hasan-Uddin Khan, 1991, ’Houses: A Synthesis of Tradition and
, Vol. 39, pp. 26-33.
Modernity’, Mimar
9 Richard
Scherr, 1987, ’Uttam Jain: A Modernist Rooted in Tradition’, Indian
Architect and Builder, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 6-21; The Architectural Review, Vol. 182,
No. 1086, August 1987, pp. 37, 52.

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Presently, I shall propose an answer to those questions, but I wish to

leave them hanging for a moment: the answer requires a little historical
perspective. For, the use of historical forms in a new architecture the -

attempt to combine up-to-date technology with a recognisably Indian

identity is a phenomenon which had been seen before in India. Notably,
-

this had been the ambition of the so-called ’Indo-Saracenic’ movement: the
attempt, by British architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, to develop a new architectural language for the buildings of the
British Raj. Among the more distinguished proponents of this movement
were the pioneering R. F. Chisholm, who rebuilt the Chepauk Palace and

designed the University Senate House in Madras in the 1870s, and Henry
Irwin, who designed the Amba Vilas in Mysore (1900) and the Art Gallery
in Madras (1907, Fig. 5).
Details of the history of this movement and varying analyses have been
amply presented elsewhere,10 and need not be rehearsed here: the present
discussion requires only a few observations. First, in so far as it aimed to
combine an historical, regional identity with a modem technology, the Indo-
Saracenic movement prefigured current concerns by a century. Secondly,
this connection between the late colonial and the post-colonial periods is not
immediately apparent, and may be overlooked because of a change in view
about how the aim might be achieved; in particular, the British architects of
the late Raj made very arnple use of specific and easily identifiable historical
motifs.
For example, the roof of the Napier Museum in Trivandrum, designed
by Chisholm in 1872, is a close imitation of roof forms of the local,
Keralan, temple architecture, with its steep pitch, red tiles and many
elaborate gables. There have been changes in scale and in function, but the
source of inspiration is unmistakable. Similarly, Mayo College in Ajmer,

designed by Charles Mant (1875-85), is encrusted with domes and chattris,

loudly echoing those of local, Rajasthani palaces. Perhaps the most famous
building of the movement is also the closest in its imitation of the past:
George Wittet’s Gateway of India in Bombay (1911) takes its materials, its

10 Cf.
Philip Davies, 1985, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India 1660
to , London, Chapter 8; Thomas R. Metcalf, 1989, An Imperial Vision: Indian
1947
Architecture and Britain’s Raj, London, Chapters 3 and 4; G. H. R. Tillotson, 1989,
The Tradition of Indian Architectrue, London, pp. 46-102.

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5. Henry Irwin, Art Gallery, Madras, 1907.

----

6. George Wittet, Gateway of India, Bombay, 1911.

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40

7. Le Corbusier, Secretariat and Palace of Assembly, Chandigarh, 1951-8.

8. Louis Kahn, Indian Institute of Management, eda.b~d9 1962-72.

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massing and its decoration from locals in this case Gujarati mosques -

(Fig. 6). At first glance it looks like the Jami Masjid of Cambay set down in
the wrong port.
In such works, the of the past is literal, almost archaeological; the
use
historical forms are scrupulously copied, and then breezily relocated in new
contexts. The writings of the architects involved, and of their
contemporary critics, discuss many aspects of the movement and debate its
merits, but they contain no expressions of anxiety about pastiche, they
make no apologies for ’image-making’. It would be surprising if they did in
this period: for the Indo-Saracenic architects’ confident reuse of faithfully
imitated particular motifs is entirely consistent with the historicist approach
prevailing in European architecture in general at the time. Back in Britain,
the source used might have been ’Venetian Gothic’ or ’French Renaissance’;
here it was ’Indo-Saracenic’: the movement merely transferred to Indian
material a method which was taken for granted and understood, and
therefore needed no apology or explanation.
What happened between their period and our own to change attitudes so
profoundly? Obviously, what intervened in the history of architecture was
the advent of the Modem Movement. The introduction of the Modem
Movement into India was effected substantially through the agency of two
of its leading practitioners: Le Corbusier in his designs for the city and
capitol buildings of Chandigarh in the 1950s and his concurrent work in
Ahmedabad, and Louis Kahn in his designs for Dacca and perhaps more -

important for India’s architects his Indian Institute of Management in

-

Ahmedabad in the 1960s (Figs. 7, 8). In spite of the efforts of some

architectural historians to give these works a place in a consistent,
unfolding history of Indian architecture, the Indian work of Le Corbusier
and Louis Kahn represent not a sensitive reuse of the past but a clean break
with it: they consciously offered India a new architecture, unfettered by
tradition. 11 l
As if this were not enough in itself, what came too, as a
generous
bonus, was a new rhetoric, ideology of architecture: the Modernist
a new

manifesto, which sought (among many other aims) to identify an essence of

architecture and to locate that essence outside matters of imagery and style.

11Cf.
Tillotson, 1989, pp. 130-2.

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Ironically, these great works present very emphatic imageries or styles:

there is no mistaking the visual idiosyncrasies of buildings by Le Corbusier
or Louis Kahn. Whatever else they may achieve, their buildings present

powerful appearances. Furthermore, Indian architects picked up on this.

Some of the early works of the Indian architects mentioned above indicate a
response to Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn precisely at the level of the visual.
Charles Correa, for example, in the Vallabh Vidyanagar University in Anand
(1958) imitated Le Corbusier’s habits of creating and disrupting a rhythm of
units across a facade, and placing gratuitous sculptural forms on the roof.
B. V. Doshi worked closely with Le Corbusier both before and during the
Chandigarh project, and in his own Tagore Hall in Ahmedabad (1962) he
captured the energised plasticity which Le Corbusier had shown concrete
could achieve. Shiv Nath Prasad’s imitations of the master’s visual
mannerisms approach parody. In projects such as the Akbar Hotel and Sri
Ram Arts Centre in New Delhi (late 1960s), we see the whole repertoire:
the disrupted rhythm in facades, masses placed asymmetrically on the roof,
and great curved walls setting off the main planes (Fig. 9). Louis Kahn’s
splendid abstract brick sculpture in Ahmedabad similarly had its admirers and
imitators, including C. P. Kukreja, in his design for a hostel at Jawaharlal
Nehru University (1970), and Jasbir Sachdev, in his extension to the
Modem School, also in Delhi (1975, Fig. 10).
What these architects were responding to and adopting as their own was
not such much - or at least not only the programme or rationale of
-

Modernism; they were reproducing the visual imagery of two of its leading
proponents who worked amongst them. And this is ironic since a part of
that rationale is precisely to depreciate the importance of imagery. On the
other hand, the Modernist programme also had a profound impact on their
rhetoric: a generation of Indian architects bom in the 1920s and ’30s, and
-

trained mostly in Britain and America in the ’50s learned to speak the-

values of Modernism, to venerate functionalism and to deplore historicism.

The ideas and the vocabulary of the Modem Movement became the standard
currency for the discussion of architecture, old as well as new. Le
Corbusier’s writings especially were echoed in Indian manifestos as, for -

example, in Doshi’s chilling observation of 1965 that

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9. Shiv Nath Prasad, Sri Ram Arts Centre, New Delhi, 1966.

architecture is an art which organises, co-ordinates and orders life

by its function of providing enclosure so that human beings may
lead a wholesome existence

So it is their training and the immediately post-Independence experience

of architecture in India, which are the sources of the anxieties about
pastiche. From the terms of their own discussions, it emerges that their
concern is that the use of the past (which they now wish to resume) must
not be a return to a carefree nineteenth-century mannerism, must not be
’pastiche’; rather, it must be ’authentic’ in a way which even a Modernist
could respect. Modernism placed style and imagery on the index, so these
must still be avoided, and some other means must be found to express the
Indian identity.

12
Doshi, in Curtis, 1988, p. 158.

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44

10. Jasbir Sachdev, Modem School extension. New Delhi, 1975.

The problem is that the nature of the anxiety renders the task
impossible. Because, what the architects’ practical responses to the Modem
Movement revealed what is demonstrated by their designs of the late ’50s
-

and ’60s, like those just mentioned is that imagery is inescapable.

-

However much one insists that architecture is really about something else,
buildings have appearances, they make visual references to their
antecedents, and so create images. However much one might rationalise the
projects of the mid-century as fulfilments of a Modernist programme, it
remains undeniable that they also look like designs by Le Corbusier or Louis
Kahn. And from the inescapability of the visual element, it follows that
anxieties about ’image-making’ are misplaced. Such anxieties are the
reflection of an ideology which, for much of the present century, has held
great authority; but it was an ideology which, in denying the communicative
importance of style, was not true even of those buildings most closely
associated with it.

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The distinction so often drawn between authenticity and image-making

in architecture is a false one. Theoretically, Man’s first habitations, or the
constructions of a wholly isolated community, might embody what could be
termed a ’vemacular mode’: a way of building which meets practical needs
without a consciousness of appearances. But as soon as we emerge from
our rude, remote huts and see alternative ways of building, we are engaged
in making choices, and those include choices about what buildings look like:
the adoption of certain appearances is one means by which architects
express a chosen identity.
This process of choice is a universal phenomenon, but there are
moments when it is particularly marked, and after which there can be no
returns to innocence. One such moment in European history occurred when
architects of the Renaissance such as A.Iberti redeployed the forms of a
classical ancestry to make visible assertions about the values of their own
civilization. In India, such a moment occurred when Qutb-ud-din Aibak
ordered the construction of the arched screen of the Quwwat-uI-Islam which

21. C. P. Kukreja, Amba Deep, New Delhi, 1990.

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(even in the context of a very Indianized building) looked to a Seljuq

inheritance and so proclaimed a distinct identity for the mosque. In such
contexts, the Modem Movement was a hiatus, an attempt to persuade us of
the need to escape the past; but not even the Modem Movement could
escape the intrusion of history, the inevitability of the made image, and the
power of the chosen style. Pastiche is the condition of architecture.
As the current Indian revival continues, there are some indications of an
awareness of that condition not in the rhetoric but in the practice: in
-

projects of recent years, architects have been bolder in their use of

identifiable, historical motifs. Achyut Kanvinde, for example, in the
National Science Centre (1991) captures the stance and the chattris of a
Mughal forl C. P. Kukreja has emerged from the monochrome shadows of
Kahn to cover his Amba Deep office block (1992) with brilliant coloured
tiles, making it reminiscent of the rnadrasa at Bidar (Fig. 11). Dulal
~ukher~ec, in his design for the Deputy British High Commission in
Calcutta (1992), has deployed gavakshas over the windows. And most

12. Fariburz Sahba, Bahai House of Worship, New Delhi, 1980s.

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arrestingly of all, perhaps, Fariburz Sahba has integrated two potent Indian
images the form of the lotus and the material of the Taj Mahal into
- -

the Bahai House of Worship in New Delhi (1980s, Fig. 12). In this last
case especially, the new faith requires a new architecture; but the faith has
ancient roots, and these too must find their expression, and so require an
architectural imagery which is not afraid of resonance.

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