Sanyal, Saptarshi; (2022) Shaping the Modern: Architectural Cultures and Critique in Late-colonial India (1913—c.1948). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL(University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis focuses on particular architectural and spatial practices that experimented with alternative forms of modernity in the last decades of colonial India (c.1910s–40s). It argues that such practices, in effect, expressed a critique of the prevailing, dominant paradigms of modernity spanning social, educational, scientific and cultural spheres, and constituted a field animated by myriad figures and processes including but not limited to architecture. The research questions certain canonical, often formalist, historical narratives on modern architecture. It shifts the emphasis from artefacts or ideology to human contacts, relationships and processes within the material and immaterial dimensions of these myriad practices, rediscovering them as architectural cultures. Using an approach of connected histories, undergirded by notions of critique and affects, the thesis is developed in two parts. It firstly traces the historical milieu through intercultural linkages and relationships both within India and beyond to reveal how they fostered shared forms of critical or creative thought, flows of ideas, knowledge, finance and labour. The second part of the thesis is developed through three detailed investigations. Each privileges a distinct historical perspective; collectively, they represent multiple, mobile scales of analysis. The first study focuses on the settlement of an experimental educational institution in eastern India, Visva-Bharati. The second examines a building project, Golconde, in southern India. The third explores the practice of a self-taught architect, Surendranath Kar. By viewing these figures, projects and processes within a wider endeavour of alternative ways to shape modernity in late-colonial India, this study seeks to insert a critical understanding of space and architecture into social and cultural histories of modern India. Concurrently, it foregrounds a consciousness of the human and affective dimensions within building and spatial processes, thereby decentring overarching and exclusive concerns with ideology, form, aesthetics or materiality in histories of modern architecture.

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