The Gift Of Design: Architecture-Culture In Postcolonial India

Abstract

This work enquires into the question of the meaning being of architects in postcolonial India. It asks those agents, who claim for themselves the title, "architect" what does it mean to be an architect in postcolonial India. It argues that the meaning of the being of architects emerges in the dialectical and transitory nature of the to be implied in the question. It presents by the way of its argument three "moments" in the question of the meaning of being of architects. The first, the Moment of the Architect, focuses on the Architects Act of 1972, which the work argues is a project, projecting a particular domain in postcolonial India. The essence of this projection lies in the "imagined" figure of the architect, in which the meaning of the architect is, (in) being different from engineers and planners, (as) being rightful claimants of the "Architect" as articulated in Modernism's discourses of architecture, and (as) being a figure always and already grounded in the postcolonial Indian State's "project" of nation building. The second, the Moment of Design, focuses on the design jury, and architectural drawings. It shows how drawings and juries produce the meaning of design and the architect in terms of a future that-will-be and as a subject-position endowed with a historical consciousness who projects and creates this future that-will-be. It also demonstrates how this meaning of design and the architect weaves itself with the domain "projected" by the Act whose essence, beforehand, is this figure of the architect. The third, the Moment of Jugar, pursues (an)other sign to which architects in India lay a claim, and through which they articulate themselves, their expertise and their field: jugar. As this moment shows, the claims to jugar and being jugaru reveal completely different imaginations of selfhood and of expertise of those who also claim that they are architects. This moment, I argue presents, as it were, a limit to the meaning of "architecture and architects" that the two earlier moments attempt to continually (re)produce. Yet this limit is not an "outside" but rather a liminal "interiority."