The Calibration of Singularity

An essay from 2018: Why BV Doshi winning the Pritzker Prize in 2018 is fundamentally problematic for us

The following essay was written in 2018, as a reaction to architect, Balkrishna Doshi, being the first Indian to be named as the recipient of the Pritzker Prize.

History has been created with Balkrishna Doshi being declared the recipient of the Pritzker Prize 2018. The first Indian architect to make the cut, this is nothing short of an epic moment in modern, contemporary India and the Subcontinent. While our community of designers celebrates by flooding cyberspace with Facebook feeds and status messages, congratulatory Tweets and Instagram posts #NobelforArchitecture, it is facile that amidst national discourse over Achche Din, Mr. Macron’s all-important visit to strengthen bilateral ties and continued vandalism of political statues, any description of this landmark event has been carried by less than five leading newspapers so far.

Naturally, after lauding Miss World 2017 Manushi Chhillar for making India proud, I am waiting for our internet-active Prime Minister and other political figures to tweet congratulatory messages declaring Doshi, a pride for the nation. I recently received wishes over email from the PMO, so this is not asking for much, I believe? But as the track record for architects goes, the wait is probably not worth the time. It is perhaps the missing national hashtag #MakeInIndia, that it failed to catch our collective attention. Or maybe as a nation, we have larger headlines to honor our news pages such as “Mrs. Clinton swaps pant suits for Indian kurta, while Karisma-Kareena Kapoor go contemporary” and “Priya Prakash Varrier: The Internet’s New Heartthrob”. Or perhaps modern Indian architects have always been shrouded behind Le Corbusier, the French architect famously invited by former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to build a new city just when we ousted the British. Thereafter, the precedent has been set by foreign standards in popular imagination. But fortunately, as always, the architecture community has kept alive the jubilation and memories over social media, while its own struggle to preserve the spirit of that architecture which is taught at undergraduate school, continues.

The architectural tradition of India, especially in the post-independence Nehruvian era has been a nonlinear force in search of a modern Indian identity with independent worldviews, symbolism and resonance. Owing to our vast repository of diverse histories, this search has perpetually produced strange juxtapositions of styles and identities that have intermittently eluded our attempts to classify the Indian in our architecture. The larger discourse has pertained more to questions of how Indian or Indian enough.vAptly described by William Jr. Curtis, “the development of a modern architectural tradition in India resembles a delta with many streams. Some have dried up, others have been nourished by subterranean springs, others again have moved forward with renewed strength.” In this collection and nexus of streams and deltas, Doshi and his career, cannot be viewed in isolation.

Having learnt under the tutelage of Le Corbusier, whom he referred to, as his Guru and dedicated the award, and Louis Kahn, Doshi’s personal style is an extension of his foreign influences along with traditional Indian influences created over a generation of contemporaries, most notably Achyut Kanvinde, Charles Correa, Geoffrey Bawa, Joseph Allen Stein and Raj Rewal among others. And this development occurred through a period of practice spanning over fifty-five years, from Post-Partition to a neo-liberal India. One can relate to his architecture across generations and geographies, precisely because it was never a product of his individual uniqueness, but a resultant of the explorations of an entire generation of stalwarts behind and alongside him, of whom he is indisputably, an integral part. Consequently, to recognize Doshi, one must first recognize the ocean of contribution of the Indian modernists who played pivotal roles in creating the dialogue over Modernity and Identity, which he furthered and furnished. His earliest buildings markedly bore the stamp of his Guru, (especially the Atira Low Cost Housing and the Institute of Indology), fused with Indian elements of traditional chhajjas (ledges) and jharokhas (overhanging balconies). His later buildings such as Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Aranya Low-Cost Housing, developed over these influences, which is where one can view Doshi singularly. Plainly, among his contemporaries, he is not one with the most unique and polished language. However, as per the Pritzker Committee’s citation, his style certainly cannot be classified as flashy and non-serious, and perhaps is moderately, not a follower of trends. The latter part of the citation is more worrisome – that his works bear “a deep sense of responsibility and a desire to contribute to his country and its people through high-quality, authentic architecture”.

One is left wondering what could possibly have caused the blindness towards the entire gamut of our nationally and internationally acclaimed stalwarts such as Charles Correa and Achyut Kanvinde, to name a few. Educated in the West, they returned to India only to search and successfully define unique languages, deeply embedded in traditional and modern ethos, which can be read independently; and arguably, as schools of thought in themselves. It is then perhaps understandable that Doshi has been awarded only now, as probably the only Indian modernist and legend alive, much after the death of almost all his contemporaries. This simultaneously makes it petty and abominable. The approximate age of the thirty-nine previous Pritzker Award winners has been anywhere between fifty-five and seventy-five and the Award has served to cement and further their practice. To then award a ninety-year-old stalwart, whose life has been dedicated to nation building and developing sensitivity around architecture as a professional and academic discipline, across the most diversified and fastest urbanizing social, economic and political conditions and with a repertoire of work that intersperses scale of entire cities, townships, academic campuses and individual buildings, unlike almost any of the previous winners, feels just awkward, to put it mildly.

In the context of the Indian Subcontinent, it is easy to miss the woods for the trees. Oftentimes we fail to recognize the fundamentals and endorse alien systems of evaluation, where winning is a mere validation of the system itself. Inevitably, not only does the art lose significance, so does the artist! While it may be a visibly quantifiable approach, a creative profession in fluctuating and complex conditions like India, needs to recognize myriad parameters of evaluation, which are more sensitive to its nuances.

Furthermore, in recent years, after multiple allegations, the Pritzker Committee has been frantically trying to broaden its narrative and call upon #Diversity and #Inclusion by awarding architects outside Europe. Australia, Japan, Chile (read: South America Represent) and China have been tick-marked already. Last year, Martha Thorne, Executive Director of the Pritzker, stated, “the awards reflect time and place”. It is no surprise that the White West is looking towards India now with increasing foreign construction and investments. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imagine the subsequent Pritzker winners from Africa or the Middle East. For the White world, the non-whites have typically somehow taken longer to reflect “time and place”. If hushed rumours within the community are to be believed, a team from the Pritzker Committee toured India extensive across India in 2011-2012 to “assess” Doshi’s architectural contribution. The assessment and its sheer generics are now out for us to see – that Doshi’s work is “serious, non-flashy and not a follower of trends”. Thank you! As an eternal student of architecture, I am simply bemused at what could possibly have taken any half-intelligent individual, years to conclude this sentence about an architect, known to lead by example in his country!

At this point, one cannot but help point out that the Pritzker Prize dates back to 1979. BV Doshi has been practicing since the late 1940s and some of his seminal works occurred between 1975 and 1995, including his own studio, Sangath. It is bizarre that it took over forty years for the Pritzker Committee to open its eyes and senses towards the Indian Subcontinent. I am led to imagine, that despite the presence of foreign architects such as Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier, the Middle East, Near East, Far East and all else that appears East to the average Westerner, is still too far to reach a tad bit earlier. While fifty-something Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas were easily identifiable, as were forty-something Wang Shu and Alejandro Aravena, it took a five-thousand-year old civilization known for architectural excellence since ancient times, a lifetime of contribution by an entire generation of modernist stalwarts to get the Committee to identify in 2018 and in only Doshi’s works - “a deep sense of responsibility and a desire to contribute to his country and its people through high quality, authentic architecture”. No wonder, as a community of Indian architects, we are not surprised at the citation. It is a reinforcement of what is obvious to every first-year student. My own Professor from undergraduate school simply noted on Facebook – “Loooong Overdue!”

This is not the first time that the Western world has lauded, on its own abstruse terms, something that is already conspicuous and extoled. The closest metaphor from recent memory is the Academy Award bestowed on A.R.Rahman for, of all his stellar work, Slumdog Millionaire! To hear the obvious, has become routine for us over the years. It is still not very clear to the rest of the world, that in our country, stalwarts are beyond awards, and not one over the other. But because we take immense pride in even the smallest of the accomplishments, we celebrated Rahman. And wherefore, we celebrate Doshi now.

Nonetheless, this long-deserved Pritzker serves as an urgent and needful reminder to our rapidly urbanizing cities, of the value and richness of our architectural heritage, irrespective of dates and time. Gurugram, the emergent concrete glass-capital Millenium City is by far, the glossiest example of all that is monstrously wrong. Doshi summed it up as “pure imitation, mechanical, commercial; quickly produced and sold to people who are dumb, deaf and almost dead”. Even more appalling was the recent shameless and clandestine demolition of the iconic Hall of Nations and Nehru Pavilion to usher in the development of an Integrated Exhibition and Convention Centre (IECC). Not too long before, the exemplary Chanakya Cinema suffered the same fate to make way for a commercial multiplex. As the damage begins to worsen, the authorities and bureaucracy of broken attitudes, displaying minimal regard towards our cities or monetary shrewdness, may wish to rethink with wisdom before subsuming heritage under the garb of urban development and what they often-times fatuously fantasize over billboards as “world class, iconic, state of the art with latest modern architectural design”. Perhaps, Comprehensive Redevelopment Plans can be relooked and revised with renewed acuity. Doshi reaffirmed (to Oscar Holland, CNN) saying "I think it is very, very significant that this award has come to India -- of course to me, but to India," he said. "The government, officials, those who take decisions, cities -- everyone will start thinking that there is something called 'good architecture' (and that) lasting things can happen. (Only) then can we start talking about urbanization and urban design."

So, all is not lost, but we must question what we have gained. This significant moment appropriates a minute of introspection as custodians of the future of architecture and the nation, while we stand at the doorway of modernity, ushering a generation of new architects who confront, not only the forces of history, heritage and traditional ethos, but also media, technology and unimaginably altering state of affairs. For this emerging generation, the Pritzker comes as reinstatement and reconfirmation of the values of what was, and inspires it with the ideal, which it deserves. Like the work of Balkrishna Doshi himself, defining an Indian identity calling on the International modern, over slabs of traditional, vernacular realities.