An Architecture of Borrowed Futures

Postcolonial Indian architecture remains caught between inheritance and aspiration—between what it remembers, what it rejects, and the futures it has learnt to desire.

The Architecture We Inherited

Architecture has an inconvenient relationship with history. Buildings remain long after the political, economic and cultural circumstances that produced them have changed. New societies therefore rarely begin with a clean sheet. They inherit streets, institutions, construction practices, images, prejudices, aspirations and, perhaps most importantly, habits of looking.

Nowhere is this more evident than in postcolonial India, where the built environment continues to negotiate between several different ideas of itself. Colonial institutions remain embedded within cities that have changed almost beyond recognition. Older practices of building survive beside glass towers and gated developments. Modernism, once associated with a newly independent nation’s confidence in technology and progress, now coexists with renewed interest in craft, regional identity and vernacular form.¹

A walk through almost any large Indian city makes these contradictions visible. There are buildings that look towards an international architectural culture for their identity; others reach backwards, sometimes rather self-consciously, towards familiar historical motifs. Between the two lies a much more interesting territory—architecture that borrows, adapts, forgets, remembers and occasionally invents something that belongs fully to neither category.

The problem, therefore, is not simply that contemporary Indian architecture is “Western” or “traditional.” Those categories are already too blunt. The harder question is how a culture builds for a future when so many of its images of that future have arrived from somewhere else.

An Imported Lexicon

Modernism entered independent India carrying extraordinary symbolic power. It offered an architectural vocabulary apparently free of both colonial historicism and the burden of having to represent a singular “Indian” past. Concrete, large institutional forms, new technologies and rational planning could instead speak of science, development and national confidence.²

It is easy to understand the attraction.

A newly independent country did not necessarily want architecture that looked backwards. Nehru’s enthusiasm for Chandigarh belonged to precisely this moment: architecture could become evidence that the country was not merely recovering from colonial rule but constructing an entirely different future.

Yet there is an irony here. The rejection of one imported order was partly articulated through the adoption of another.

Modernism’s claim to universality had itself developed largely within European conditions—through particular climates, industrial capacities, social assumptions and theories of progress. Its architectural vocabulary could travel far more quickly than the circumstances that produced it.

This does not make Indian modernism simply derivative. That would ignore precisely what many Indian architects subsequently did to it. Modernism was altered by climate, craft, material scarcity, social practice and local patterns of occupation. The work of Doshi, Correa and others becomes interesting not because they discovered some pure “Indian” alternative to modernism, but because they refused to treat the imported language as complete.

The borrowed vocabulary had to acquire an accent.

Tradition Is Not an Appearance

Gandhian thought suggested another route into modernity. Self-reliance, restraint, local production and the dignity of labour complicated the assumption that progress must necessarily look industrial or international.³ It offered a conception of modernity that could emerge through local systems of production rather than in opposition to them.

Charles Correa’s Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya in Ahmedabad occupies this territory particularly well.⁴ It is clearly a modern building, but one that works through familiar relationships of court, shade, threshold, scale and movement rather than through the reproduction of historical ornament.

What matters is not that the building looks Indian.

It is that its modernity has been translated.

This distinction becomes important because the attempt to recover cultural identity can produce its own form of imitation. A pitched roof, courtyard, jali, stone wall or deep verandah can easily become an architectural sign of “Indianness,” detached from the climatic, social and constructional relationships that once gave it purpose.

At that point tradition becomes styling.

And we arrive at an odd inversion: the effort to resist imported architecture begins producing copies of our own past.

Context Is More Than Location

Architecture cannot be separated from the political, social and economic conditions within which it is produced. Post-independence India’s architectural experiments were inseparable from the larger project of building institutions, cities and a national identity. Chandigarh remains the most obvious example, not merely because of Le Corbusier’s architecture but because of the ambition invested in the city itself.⁵

It represented a belief that spatial order could participate in the making of a new society.

But architectural order and lived order are not quite the same thing.

Cities accumulate occupation, improvisation, trade, encroachment, ritual, repair and contradiction. The neat geometry of a plan meets the untidiness of people. This is not necessarily evidence that one has defeated the other; it may simply be evidence that architecture becomes something else once it is inhabited.

Context, therefore, cannot be reduced to geography. It includes climate, economics, patterns of labour, social customs, religious practice, caste, memory, available technologies and the accumulated knowledge through which people have learnt to occupy a place.

Some of the richest examples of this can be found in precisely those environments that formal architectural discourse has often treated as disorderly: informal settlements, temporary occupations, streets repeatedly appropriated for trade, ritual or gathering, and urban spaces that alter their function over time.⁶ Their value is not that they are picturesque or “authentic.” It is that they demonstrate how space can coordinate many competing demands without necessarily resolving them into a single clean order.

Perhaps we have sometimes been too quick to mistake visual order for architectural intelligence.

Memory, Myth and the Problem of Identity

Architecture also carries things that cannot be reduced to utility.

Places accumulate memory. Spatial arrangements acquire symbolic associations. Objects and routes become attached to ritual, history and social identity. Mythology, religion and collective memory therefore participate in architecture whether architects consciously invoke them or not.

But here too there is a danger.

Symbolism can survive after the system that gave it meaning has weakened.

A courtyard is not culturally significant merely because courtyards existed in older Indian buildings. Its importance lies in what it once allowed—and may still allow—different forms of gathering, segregation, privacy, ventilation, ritual, work, transition and seasonal occupation.

The same is true of the jali, verandah, plinth or threshold. Once these elements are detached from the relations within which they operated, they become signs available for reuse.

We retain the alphabet and forget the language.

The search for architectural identity then becomes strangely visual. We ask what an Indian building should look like before asking how an Indian building might organise life.⁷

That seems to me the more serious loss.

Learning From the Past Without Copying It

One of the persistent problems of contemporary Indian architecture is not that it refuses to learn from the past, but that it frequently learns from the part of the past that is easiest to photograph.

Form travels easily.

Relationships do not.

B.V. Doshi’s Aranya Low-Cost Housing in Indore offers a useful counter-example. Its significance lies not in reproducing a historical housing type but in accepting incompleteness, incremental growth and the agency of inhabitants as architectural conditions.⁸ The project provides an ordering framework while allowing individual dwellings to change over time.

Architecture here is not understood as an immutable object delivered intact to its occupants. It is capable of being altered, appropriated and completed through inhabitation.

This is a very different way of learning from inherited environments. Instead of asking, What did old buildings look like?, it asks something closer to: What were they capable of doing?

That question opens considerably more territory.

It allows us to learn from climatic adaptation without reproducing a historic façade; from incremental settlement without romanticising poverty; from traditional craft without pretending that contemporary labour structures are unchanged; from collective spatial practices without assuming that every inherited social order deserves preservation.

Inheritance need not imply obedience.

The Colonialism of Aspiration

Colonialism does not disappear when administrative rule ends. Systems of value can persist much longer than governments.⁹

Perhaps this is most visible in aspiration.

The glass office tower in Mumbai, Hyderabad or Gurgaon is not problematic because glass is somehow foreign, nor because tall buildings are inherently un-Indian. That would reduce the argument to precisely the kind of stylistic nationalism it is trying to escape.

The more interesting question is what travels with the image.

A particular kind of building carries assumptions about prestige, work, comfort, technology, energy use, land value and what a successful city is supposed to look like. Global architectural culture allows those images to move with extraordinary speed. Forms can cross continents much faster than climates, infrastructures, labour conditions or social practices.

This creates a peculiar possibility: we can import the visible consequence without importing the conditions that made it coherent.

The result is not always failure. Borrowed forms can be adapted extraordinarily well. Architecture has, after all, always borrowed.

The problem is borrowing without translation.

A foreign architectural idea becomes useful when it is subjected to local conditions strongly enough to change. The test is not whether the result remains recognisably “Indian,” but whether it has genuinely entered into conversation with the place in which it now exists.

Gandhi’s insistence on self-reliance is useful here not as an argument for cultural isolation, but as an argument for agency. To borrow from elsewhere while retaining the ability to judge, alter or reject what has been borrowed is very different from accepting somebody else’s image of progress as one’s own future.

Borrowed Futures

Perhaps this is the actual paradox of postcolonial architecture.

Political independence allows a society to determine its own future, but the images through which that future is imagined may already have been inherited from elsewhere.

We aspire through pictures we did not make.

We measure progress against skylines that appeared somewhere else first.

And then, in response, we sometimes reach back towards an equally simplified image of tradition, searching for reassurance in roofs, courtyards, screens and stone.

Neither response is particularly satisfying.

The alternative is more difficult because it offers no ready-made style. It requires a willingness to inherit selectively, borrow intelligently and change both in the process.

This is why the future of Indian architecture probably lies neither in a wholesale embrace of international modernity nor in a nostalgic return to an imagined architectural past. Both promise certainty where there is none.

Architecture is closer to an ongoing negotiation between inheritance and invention, memory and aspiration, local conditions and ideas that arrive from elsewhere.

Perhaps there is no reason for that negotiation ever to be resolved.

A culture confident in itself should be able to borrow.

The important thing is that, by the time the borrowed future is built here, it has become ours.