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Magazine
Under the weather
RANJIT HOSKOTE
The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai ... linking history and locale.
NOTHING about India seems to have pleased Lord Macaulay. As many of us know, he once claimed that a single shelf of European literature was superior to all the voluminous literatures of India put together. It is possible that his jaundiced views on Indian culture may have been influenced by his deep fear of the Indian climate, which he thought of as an impossibility zone, a maw into which all signs of distinction vanished: by a classic process of inversion, the land and culture being subjected to violent expropriation and transformation became, in the mythology of colonialism, the source of bafflement and terror. Macaulay's letters home to his friends are a series of complaints: books rotted away under the attack of mould, he wrote, and the furniture came apart when you sat on it. The walls were always damp, the floods were an ever-present threat, and nothing could keep the swarms of mosquitoes at bay.
Macaulay's experience of the Bengal delta, where the British inaugurated the imperialist phase of their colonial enterprise in India, is a not unfamiliar one. Of course, if you want to carve out an empire in a place where you don't belong, you have to pay for it somehow; and as a good literary artist, Macaulay certainly laid it on thick when he sang of his sufferings. Not surprisingly, those of us who are born South Asian have long ago figured out ways of dealing with these problems; there is nothing like a monsoon cycle to impart a salutary appreciation of just how ephemeral cultural productions can be, just how endangered the materiality of art-works is.
Unless you leave your manuscript out in the rain (and this is an increasingly remote contingency, in the age of the word processor, when the manuscript is a scatter of scintillations on a screen), a writer can hardly ever claim to have been seriously inconvenienced by climatic factors. Musicians have evolved ways of protecting their voices and their instruments from the inclemencies of air and sun. Painters, sculptors, installators and film-makers know what must be done to save their works from damp, fungus, buckling, cracking and the fluctuations of temperature.
But when you look at many of Bombay's high-rise apartment blocks - intimations of a distant, Manhattan-style immortality (an immortality as subject to sudden extinction as more mortal objects, as we have known for a year now) — it would appear that the urban architect is the one artist in India who has not learnt his climatic lessons. For all their glass and concrete glory, these buildings cave in before the onslaught of the weather. Their facades crack, their metal fittings rust away, and their open balconies can scarcely keep out the monsoon gales that sweep in from the Arabian Sea.
There is a strangely Macaulayan attitude at work in the design of these buildings. Intoxicated by the streamlined beauty of designs originally formulated by Western architects for a temperate environment, many Indian architects quite happily ignore the local, sub-tropical realities in which their own buildings must survive. In the process, they ignore the bodies of knowledge that South Asia's traditional master builders have accumulated: their sensitivity to the weather patterns, the topographical profile and the material constraints of their sites.
Unfortunately for this approach, meteorology is not a democratic science — you cannot dissolve the climate and elect another that is more in tune with your desires. The problem begins in architecture school, to which far too many students bring a self-image drawn from the deplorable writings of Ayn Rand. To Rand, the architect is an epic hero, a Romantic genius, a lonely challenger of history who is equally indifferent to the needs of others and to the currents of the time. This internalised vision soon dissolves when the architect finds himself buffeted about by profitarian developers, archaic bylaws, the whims of private and corporate aspiration, the conservatism of government institutions and India's general confusion over its identity as a civilisation. The consequent disillusionment produces the kind of cynical, mainstream practice that specialises in the production of follies that Gautam Bhatia, architect and critic, satirises under such inventive rubrics as "Punjabi Baroque" — giant Polo-mint cylinders in Bombay's defunct, and now gradually gentrifying, mill district, haciendas in the Konkan, Bavarian castles in the Western Ghats, and more in that vein.
This kind of architecture is not only ridiculous and the essence of kitsch, but it is also profoundly tedious and uninviting. Since the buildings never connect with such incidental factors as the history and nature of the site, are insensitive to the needs of the user community, and reveal no interest in the incorporation of local skills and materials in their form, their creativity quotient is zero. Lord Macaulay might have been pleased to learn that his dim view of India is kept alive by the architects who churn out these monstrosities on their overcrowded drawing boards — Macaulayism lives again in their contempt for the natural and cultural environment in which they operate.
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