16 Editorial
Architecture in contemporary India has not
established a dynamic and argumentative
relationship with politics of time and culture
in a robust way yet. This is not to say architecture
and the many studios of design practice in a
vacuum of time and space — they do not. There
is a substantial number of studios and designers
that build in various proportions in India today,
that are very sharply aware of the context they
live and work in, and at times consciously, and
sometimes subconsciously, respond to a politics
of place and people. And in the large quantum
of built environment that is being churned out
in India, if there is a small but critical mass of
studios and practices that engage with the
politics of people and place, and times around
them, it is enough for a field to keep a sensible
discourse between poetics and politics going.
However, what is missing is a robust public
sphere of discourse around architecture and
the built environment. In the 1990s, which many
of us have now established as the decade of
drastic change and turmoil for contemporary
India and its people, and the way they shape
their worldview today — saw a rich, even if small,
public sphere of discourse, shaping in its days
the discussion of the way we shape our buildings,
to urban development, conservation, and issues
of legislation, public life, and so forth. Something
like the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai
emerges from that history. Some key books on
cities in India — Bombay/Mumbai, Bangalore/
Bengaluru, Delhi, Ahmedabad, emerge during
this decade and the one after. Focussed
discussions on architecture per se do take a
backseat soon, and architectural conversations
are subsumed in discussions on cities, history,
and environment. This was an important
development for that time; however, we lost
out on debating architecture on its own terms.
Discussing architecture on its own terms, and
also not seeing a binary between contemporary
ideas and approaches to historical references,
was very important. So was talking of cities or
history or the environment through the object-
subject of architectural practice and the
architectural framework (material and ideas).
Romi Khosla’s The Loneliness of a Long
Distant Future (Tulika Books, 2002) and
Gautam Bhatia’s Punjabi Baroque (Penguin
Books, 1994) are two important books
from this period, which have received much
less attention than they should have. They
brought the architectural object to the centre,
discussing it within the absurdities of time
(in the case of Bhatia), or the tensed nature
of world politics and cultural conflicts (in the
case of Khosla). But in 2011 two developments
bring the architectural object back to a centre
and struggle to develop a language of discourse
around architecture, through which to view
the world and its politics as well as history,
conflict and culture — Rahul Mehrotra’s book
Architecture in India since 1990 (Pictor
Publishing Pvt. Ltd, 2011) and the coming
of DOMUS magazine to India. The fruitful
conversations between and around these two,
as well asthe debates emerging from these
lead to the framing and making of the exhibition
State of Architecture: Practices and
Processes in India (UDRI and NGMA, 2016)
co-curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote,
and Kaiwan Mehta. The period following soon
thereafterhas been marked by an upsurge
of very important books by Peter Scriver
and Amit Srivastava, Mary Woods, Madhavi
Desai, and a range of books on works of
senior architects such as I M Kadri,
Hasmukh Patel, Christopher Benninger,
A P Kanvinde, Mahendra Raj, and recently,
Brinda Somaya.
This environment has encouraged some
others to once again feel comfortable about
or easy about producing public engagements
with architecture — such as exhibitions,
conferences, discussions, and so on — and one
could say that is good, but one also regrets the
uninformed approach very often in shaping