The ongoing State of Housing ( SoH ) exhibition on display at the Gallery MMB announces its ambition in its challenging sub-title ‘Aspirations, Imaginaries and Realities in India’. These key words, explored together, chart the pitted course housing in India has taken since Independence. Any production that attempts to unravel this would have to be both granular and multi-focused, and its curators (Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta) have attempted to do that without, very properly, seeking to dot ‘i’s’ and ‘t’s’ and wrap things into neat satisfying bundles. Indeed, the state of housing, 70 years on, is anything but satisfying.
What began as an imperative for a nation overwhelmed by an unprecedented refugee crisis that needed the immediate intervention of a State (that was itself taking baby steps) has gone on to an equally uncertain present where the State makes its most pointed impact by its absence. ‘Despite this clear and present crisis’ write the curators in their note, ‘there is no sustained discussion on housing, whether in the nation’s public life or within the professions of architecture and planning.’
Facts and figures
Organised as a series of concentrics, the exhibition begins with a status report of housing today, recording deficits in both urban and rural housing, most of which affects those at the lowest end of the scale. Take a startling figure: the Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana projects the provision of dwelling units from 2016 to 2022 of 10 million units. So far, around 150,000 units have been built. At this rate it will take 66 years to provide for the projections. On the other hand, there are 10.2 million homes lying vacant in urban India. These present contradictions raise no red flags, neither to institutional ecologies for housing delivery, nor to the various stakeholders who need to figure out how.
What has led to this? The first concentric is a timeline exploring housing in India since nationhood, blocked into periods that mark paradigms. 1947-1965 marks the first departure, when the housing needs were urgent — as relief and rehabilitation for victims of Partition, as well for those displaced by and those labouring on the grand infrastructural gestures in the ‘Nehruvian Republic’. New towns were conceived on tabula rasa sites. After Nehru, through the mid-60s and mid-70s, Housing Corporations (HUDCO) were instituted that, in its initial phases, had some of India’s best architects and planners designing mass housing. At the same time, vast internal displacements led to informal colonies, settled by those moving to urban centres in search of livelihood, a concern that, even today, has not been substantially addressed.
The years between 1975-1977 was the period of the Emergency, where the State’s desire to impose control on what was perceived as internally dysfunctional and anarchic led to large scale demolitions and the uprooting of the most vulnerable. As a pushback, voices by housing activists were raised against extra-constitutional measures like the branding of certain citizens as illegal. Post the Emergency and in the 1980s, activists coalesced into NGOs addressing both rural and urban housing concerns. Mass housing projects by institutions like CIDCO in Navi Mumbai or the Games Village in Delhi provided new models for community living. The liberalisation years of the 1990s resulted in the State divesting itself of the responsibilities of providing housing leaving it in the hands of the private sector. Real estate as a resource of exchange slowly overtook priorities of human habitation that in our current period, roughly from 2005 to the present seems to have become the norm, making the possibility of a viable home a distant dream. The timeline ends, fittingly in a series of imaginaries from popular culture and the media- enticing images that cater to aspirations of perceived safety in gated communities and the luxuries of high-end bespoke homes in tower blocks.
Free India’s architects
The second concentric is a curated collection of ‘chronotopes’ — case studies of housing projects expressed in the language of architecture to be read with local timelines. Of special interest to architects and students these chart the successes and failures of architectural and planning imagination over the decades. Iconic projects like Charles Correa’s Belapur Housing, B.V. Doshi’s Aranya at Indore are seen along with lesser known urban projects like Darshan Apartments by the reclusive Gira Sarabhai. These pull-outs record the development of the dwelling unit from the earliest mass housing prototypes and are compared with the present trope of the 30sqm free housing provided by the Slum Rehabilitation Authority in Mumbai. The innermost concentric is a spatial mock-up of the selfsame 30sqm unit that allows for a phenomenological walk-through into what it means to live in a bare-bones accommodation. Here, housing walks on edge, for between the aspiration and the reality falls the shadowland of state intervention.
Two sets of films are also available; one specially made on the complexities of housing in India today, exploring urban congestion, the consequences of displacement, squatters fashioning homes out of the detritus of the city; with a range of candid voices from homeowners to planners. The other set is a series of short documentaries from the Film Division archives made on housing from the 1960s onwards.
No quick fix
Through these three tracks, the exhibition highlights the main trajectories taken by housing in India as a ‘conspectus’ or a summary of conclusions. In this rounding up, left open-ended, the viewer is called upon to invest attention to its historical layers and derive or modify viewpoints, even worldviews. This calls for slow viewing, and is certain to enrich. Although, whether the viewer will come away gratified may vary from case to case, for the exhibition presents neither ‘a one-point solution’, in the words of curator Kaiwan Mehta, ‘nor a tool-box’ that can be delved into for instant quick fixes. Instead, it is the dilemmas that have been articulated, where no one voice privileges the other.
State of Housing is ongoing at Gallery MMB, Kala Ghoda until March 18
