To some souls, beauty is a trusted intoxicant. They would happily give up their lives for it. Vikram Lall was one such, an eternally journeying rasik in the untranslatable sense of the term. He made his life and livelihood as an architect, the Buddha Smriti Park in his hometown, Patna, probably being his finest work. He also had a significant role in the design of the Akshardham temple in Delhi. He spoke of how much he learned in the process from traditional vastukars , of how different it was to work on this project where chaos reigned in the meetings, but there was always order in practice, as opposed to his work on the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, whose orderly meetings had little to do with the chaos at the building site!
We shared a Patna childhood in the 1970s. From the time we were boys, Vikram had a very swift and steady hand at drawing. He could stand before a river or at a street-corner, take in the whole view, and sketch what lay before him very quickly. He had a honed, sensitive eye for detail, without ever losing the larger perspective.
More than an architect
He had to know everything about the context before imagining and designing a building. His enormous admiration for, as well as diverging views from, the architect of Chandigarh, Le Corbusier, might have been rooted in this all-too-forgotten Indian respect for context. As a result, he became much more than an architect. He pored over books of art, history, poetry, philosophy and religion to enrich his understanding. We would have endless conversations about the world’s vanishing heritage, about metropolitan expansion, and the enormity of challenges that aggressive modernity posed to culture and civilisation everywhere.
Vikram spent over two patient, often lonesome, decades doing extensive field studies of Buddhist monuments, travelling for long periods to more than 20 countries with his team of photographers. He can be said to have pioneered the study of Buddhism from an architectural perspective. Nobody anywhere had attempted this before him, as the Dalai Lama also noted. He intended to write a series of six illustrated volumes, but only the first could appear before his death.
Magnificently produced, The Golden Lands is a story told beautifully in vivid images, drawings and words. Traversing more than two millennia, it offers a clear, comprehensive account of the Buddhist architecture of Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia. The book is full of insights such as the homology the author illustrates between the cardinal Buddhist notions of Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha on the one hand, and their architectural expressions in the Stupa, Caitya-Griha , and Vihara, respectively, on the other.
Music was Vikram’s other lifelong companion. He was a most perceptive and knowledgeable critic of Hindustani classical music, with enormous patience for it. I recall a day when all he played for me the entire afternoon were recordings of Ustad Faiyyaz Khan of the Agra Gharana — till my slow head understood what a bol taan was! Close to many classical musicians, Vikram hosted a series of Doordarshan Baithaks a few years ago. Whenever he was alone, he had a guitar nearby to restore himself at night from an exhausting day’s labours, singing (sentimentally) some forgotten composition of genius from Madan Mohan or Naushad. His knowledge of the history of Mumbai film music was encyclopaedic and Vikram was a popular lecturer, not just on architecture but also on music.
Humble patron
A mark of Vikram’s character was his humility. He was president of the Oxbridge Society of India, but used his honorary position to support little-known folk or classical musicians, often organising open-house baithaks for them at his Delhi home. His warm, cheerful disposition struck everyone who met him.
Photography was another of Vikram’s interests, and his vast archive spilled over with breathtaking images from around India and the world.
Our last conversation was less than a month ago, when Vikram was in Delhi to attend to his ailing father and had come home for a meal. After a Bihari dinner of methi parathas and panch-phoren ka rasa, we found ourselves, strangely, contemplating death, especially one’s own, and about how much more mysterious than death is life itself. He spoke for a long time about detachment. Little did I know then, though perhaps he knew…
Perhaps true to poetry, Vikram breathed his last on Ghalib’s birth anniversary. Over the years, we had spent hours talking about Urdu poetry. Subah hoti hai, sham hoti hai, yun hi zindagi tamaam hoti hai . Every now and then these lines of Mir, so poignantly true of the lives of millions today, cruelly broken by the world, were on his lips.
Vikram’s life and work are proof that under all the cowardly barbarism and horror of our times, beauty perennially abides. You lived well, dear friend, and you leave your child-like, disarming smile in many sad hearts. In the lap of the goddess now, you must be in bliss.
The writer is one of the authors of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India . He teaches ecosophy at Ashoka University.
