“Unless you ask these questions, you will not realise that it is not history but the perception of history that needs to be revisited.”—Jaimini Mehta

Conventional notions of what constitutes ‘modern’ have been premised on a temporal assumption that traditions belong to the past and pose an obstacle to a society’s march to modernity. Such an assumption, founded on the Euro-centric view that modernity presupposes a radical break from the past, posits traditions against modernity. This cannot be sustained in a society like India where, though some customs are fossilised as orthodoxy, many more have evolved to remain contemporaneous. Traditions are ways of being and doing things that societies have evolved in response to the material as well as the cultural environment. They are the collective memories of the people. Civilisations are built on accumulated memories over generations. As such, they connote the creation and preservation of what is significant in a society’s life at any time in its history and cannot be cast in stone as unalterable edicts. As B. K. Matilal has observed, 

The so-called ‘traditional’ outlook is, in fact, a construction. Indian history shows that the tradition itself was self-conscious and critical of itself, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly. It was never free from internal tensions due to the inequalities that persisted in a hierarchical society, nor was it without confrontation and challenge throughout its history.”¹   

Today, these myriad forms of diversity and hierarchy, contained in our collective memories, characterise India. They have helped maintain the creative tension with which all traditions have been historically challenged and have evolved, casting aside those which have lost their significance and are now fossilised orthodoxy. The culinary and sartorial practices will differ from region to region, from community to community and from time to time. And so will the artefacts and buildings. These are all cultural constructs. While they reflect the ethos, ways, and norms of conducting social activities and expressing the people’s relationship with each other and the society’s relationship with nature, they will, in their expression, reflect the diversity fundamental to the Indian culture. This diversity speaks of not only the differences between landscapes, customs and communities spread over a vast geographical area but also of what unites them, that is, how all communities have brought the past to the present while being different in appearances.

We will have to look elsewhere. An alternative narrative is called for to observe and understand how contemporary Indian architects have negotiated the dialectical paradox of being old and new, traditional and modern, at once. Such a narrative would encompass the non-physical relationship between the chosen architectural elements and the grounds for these choices, i.e., cultural values and beliefs. In other words, their respective sense of history. The poet T.S. Eliot, though writing in the context of literature, has a fascinating observation that applies to all arts.  

“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. 

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”² 

The poet hints at how we ought to approach history. Not as a chronicle of what happened when but as a kaleidoscopic perception of the entire past. “…not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence”. What the poet says about the men of literature, applies to all artists. More so for architects as their work, being public art, is responsible for altering the past by the present as much as directing the present by the past. All architects, then, are historians. 

It would be worthwhile to try and explore the possibility of seeing the works of contemporary architects from the point of view of their respective sense of history as reflected in their architectural choices. Is there a representation, in their work, of the ‘Idea of India’? It would be unfair to expect this as a conscious choice; an architect’s objective is to produce good architecture, first and foremost. Yet, having grown up in the early days of independence, I know that everyone was engulfed by the euphoria of freedom and the possibilities that it entailed. Literature and art reflect this. And I believe architecture does this too at a much deeper level. Can we excavate this? This book is an attempt at such an endeavour.  

This is not the subjectivity of the “I-did-it-because-I-wanted-to-do-it” kind. Nor is it the objectivity of architectural choices being validated by the larger forces and events outside the realm of architecture, such as historical inevitability, environment, technology, social forces, etc. Instead, we enter the realm of the ‘phenomenological intersubjectivity’ expounded by Edmund Husserl, whereby the present-day architect/historian identifies with past architectural events to sense their embedded meanings. This sense of history, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, compels a man to design not merely with his own generation in his bones but with a feeling that the whole of the architecture of his civilisation and, within it, the whole of the architecture of his own generation has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. 

India became a nation on August 15^th 1947. How does a nation, as a social formation, come into existence on a date before which it was not? The sense of history has a lot to do with this question. Once a nation comes into existence, it invariably lays claims to a past; it tells a story about the past history, an origin myth, which validates its existence and infuses it with meaning. The nation is new and modern but claims to have a past that defines the civilisation. Its contours do not always lend themselves to a singular grand narrative to satisfy everyone with a neat and historically inevitable national identity. For a country like India, such a simplification would be fatal at the outset. The study of history is universally accepted as a gateway to the past. As for what constitutes the idea of India, how we access our past will determine the contours of the present idea of India. 

So, how did we Indians access our past? On what past do we define our civilisational self? Presently, there is a myth going around that the true identity of the nation rests in the distant past, before colonialism and the Islamic incursions. Constructing the edifice of new India on the foundation only of the distant and ancient past betrays nostalgia and confusion about the self and the other. The ‘other’ here has two components: one, the fast-modernising West, against which the modernising efforts of the new nation are measured. And two, the last 1000 years beginning with the Ghaznavids (c. 1000). The sub-text is a fixation with two presumptions; one, the colonial past, the imperial power and the nostalgic implication that ancient India was as wise and powerful as the modern West, and two, that the ancient past was pure and innocent and was polluted by Islamic incursions. The former is a reversal of the hierarchy of the binaries of West and East, the imperial power and the colony, and centre and periphery.

The desire to return to the good old days is very powerful and often exploited by politics. This is also precisely what Tagore and Gandhi had warned us against; conceiving our national self in comparison and/or opposition to something or someone. It betrays an absence of self-confidence and a sense of our present self as a result of all that we have gone through, good as well as bad. Besides, defining self against an assumed ‘other’ will never be enduring.  

The latter fixation results from the colonial periodisation of Indian history as ancient, medieval, and modern (note, modern is equated with colonial). There is an interesting parallel background story that concerns the perception of medieval times; Europe’s own medieval age, defined by their own historians as the ‘dark ages’, was marked by religious wars, the Crusades, to retake Jerusalem and the surrounding Holy Land from Muslim control. The European society was also immersed in superstition and blind faith, and the classical learning of the Greeks was suppressed (not by the Muslim rulers but by the Orthodox Church, it must be noted³). It was the order of the day to blame the Muslims – the non-Christian ‘other’ – for all the darkness in Europe, conveniently forgetting that the Crusaders were equally brutal and bloodthirsty and that the Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula, known as the Moors, created a society so rich and powerful, and cities like Granada, Sevilla and Cordoba as centres of culture and learning, that it was the envy of the known world, and were home to Arab scholars Ibn Rushd (Averroës ) and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) whose translations of the classic Greek knowledge paved the way for Renaissance. And yet, it was the barbarity with which Muslims were identified. The idea was to manufacture a sense of self of the Europeans as an enlightened civilization in comparison with Islam. 

With the projection of the European medieval experiences, when Muslims were perceived (erroneously) as villains, it must not have been that difficult for colonial historians to draw parallels and make connections between India’s medieval age and Muslim rule. The colonial historiography, thus, paints the medieval period in Indian history only with battles, conquests and destruction mirroring what was perceived to have happened in Europe. We can argue about the virtues, or otherwise, of the colonial rule, but how can we compare the servitude we suffered under this rule with the period beginning with the Ghaznavids and up to the end of the Mugul empire, marked not only by wars and bloodshed but also by glorious achievements in arts, literature and music by a syncretic Indo-Islamic society?  

This part of the colonial historiography has now been ingrained in the Indian historical consciousness so effectively that we do not realise that it contradicts our memories. Memories of medieval European society have been implanted in the Indian psyche with devastating consequences. This periodisation, ancient, medieval, and modern (colonial), whatever its motives, has now been internalised by Indian scholars. It has become an epistemological obstacle, making it difficult for us to see our history in totality. 

It was Max Muller who introduced ancient India to the West. Born as a German, he emigrated to England in 1850, where he became one of the founders of the Western academic disciplines of Indian studies, known as Indology. Muller translated into English, several Vedic literatures. His German idealism, English romanticism and astonishment at the richness of Sanskrit and the Vedas prompted him to assert that ancient India, unlike the present, was as good as the Enlightenment West and that Indians should aspire to regain this glorious past.  

The 19^th century witnessed the expansion of the European imperial power coupled with an equal expansion of the European historical consciousness. The role of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is significant in this context. In a series of lectures on the history of philosophy⁴, Hegel distinguished between the universality of concept and subjective idealism of representation. He advanced the proposition that such universal conceptualisation – theory – does not exist outside Greco-Roman philosophical traditions. The sub-text of this assumption is the centralisation of Europe (Euro-centricity) at the cost of all other civilisations, especially India: according to Hegel, India had no philosophy; only religion, and certainly, no sense of history as the evidence-based narration of the past ‘facts’. 

In the 19^th century, the history of architecture in Europe also went beyond describing what happened when and actively engaged in interpreting the past (Eugine Viollet-le-Duc and Auguste Choisy). History came to be regarded as a form of knowledge intertwined with imperial power. This was the epistemic intention behind the explorations of the history of Indian architecture by James Ferguson, Sir Banister Fletcher and Percy Brown, who followed him. History now involves interpreting the colonial past and finding meanings that may validate the present, the ‘present’ being the prevalent view of imperial Europe as the repository of universal memories and truth. However, such historical endeavours are rarely innocent and motivated purely by lofty academic interests. All historical narratives of the past are subject to the narrator’s (historian’s) intellectual position at the time the story is constructed. Historians live and work at the intersection of two axes: the temporal axis connecting the past, present, and future, and the knowledge axis of the relative significance of historical events. The truth and integrity of any history, then, must depend upon our reading it from the perspective of this intersection. 

Colonial historiography, thus, should be read from such a perspective. The first such effort was made by James Ferguson (1808-1886) in a two-volume book, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, published in 1876. Ferguson had the daunting task of making sense of the vast and incredibly diverse architecture he encountered in the vast sub-continent. That he failed is borne out by how he has organised the book’s material—the narrative structure. The book has nine chapters. The first two chapters address Buddhist and Jain architecture, respectively, indicating that he believes religion to be the prime determinant of architectural choices. However, the third chapter is devoted to architecture in the Himalayas, a distinct geographical region. On the other hand, chapters four, five and six speak about formal styles (Dravidian, Chalukyan and Indo-Aryan, respectively). Such thematic inconsistencies reveal confusion of purpose: he was not sure if there was any single universal determining factor or idea that informed architecture and yet maintained diversity. 

To the earlier Orientalist and Eurocentric narratives of history, Fletcher added the then-nascent historical consciousness of modernism, the proposition that the modern (read, European) is an inevitable and profound rupture in history and that references to the past will dilute the purities of the modern movement⁵. Looking at Indian architecture, or any other pre-modern non-European style for that matter, for any formative ideas that can illuminate the nature of architecture is inconsequential and futile. The theory of architecture centres around solving constructive problems, which have been “resolutely met and overcome” in Europe. In other words, memories of the past are inconsequential in constructing the idea of modernity and ‘modernism’ is an ahistorical state of being. By divorcing history from memories, Hegel and Fletcher had turned history into abstract storytelling unanchored to the daily experience and the memories of people. 

Hegel, the philosopher and Fletcher, the historian, had, thus, made the task easy for Percy Brown. He saw no need to search for a theoretical/intellectual stratum beneath the ontological presence of Indian architecture. He saw religion as the prime factor that shaped Indian architecture. His two-volume survey of sub-continental architecture (he included Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand as ‘Greater India’) is structured by religious classification and not by temporal periodicity; the Buddhist and Hindu Period, and the Islamic Period. He begins with an erroneous assumption that the Islamic invasion ended the Hindu civilisation; “With the advent of the Mohammedans in India, an era ends – the old order passes.”⁶ He imagines the relationship between the Hindu and Islamic civilisations as sequential and not concurrent, thus the periodicity. His rationale for this belief is that the two religions are fundamentally opposed and incapable of co-existence.  

He could not have been more wrong, not about the difference between the two civilisations, but about the possibilities of a syncretic outcome, for he contradicts himself immediately.  

“Yet in spite of these inconsistencies, in the course of time, a method of approach became manifest, and ground common to both was gradually formed. In the sphere of the building art, specifically, some communion of ideas was generated, as architecture…Moreover, the production of any monumental building provides a matter of general interest; it deflects man’s mind from the internal to the external, in which religious and other barriers are broken down, all differences become merged in a unified effort of craftsmanship so that humanity becomes one.”⁷ (Italics added).  

I find this observation of Brown very significant. As a historian, he observes a perplexing contradiction represented by the architecture he sees. His present predicament is how to reconcile this contradiction. This was an opportunity for historical reflection; to ask questions to history, to both Indian and Islamic architecture, questions that we have never asked before, i.e., to revisit history from the perspective of the present to make the present more understandable. Fusing the memories of two diverse communities embodied by art, architecture, poetry and music has made us what we are today. There is a hint of such a possibility in the last sentence of the above quote, “so that humanity becomes one”. A look at pre-colonial Lucknow, Old Delhi or the walled city of Ahmedabad would have presented cultural permeability, tolerance, and everyday interaction crosscutting religious communities – including a shared interest in the Arts (literature, architecture, music, dance). Traditional Muslim houses in these cities show hardly any difference in their spatial configuration, though these are significantly different from houses in Baghdad or Cairo. Islamic culture in India has a distinct ‘Indianness’ about it and cannot be seen independent of its syncretic relationship with Hindu culture. Tragically, this is not followed up by Percy Brown. Hindu and Islamic arts are seen as two banks of a river, destined never to meet and fertilise each other. And the opportunity is lost. 

One unhappy consequence accrues from this: the history of Indian architecture, as presented by Fergusson, Fletcher, and Brown, got embedded in the architectural knowledge system that was imported from England in 1913, when a formal diploma course was established in Mumbai, and became the received wisdom for architects in pre- and post-independence India. Even today, many schools of architecture teach history, structured on religious lines, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, and Jain architecture. Once you accept this received wisdom uncritically, you are unequipped to ask the right questions of history. Unless you ask these questions, you will not realise that it is not history but the perception of history that needs to be revisited. The secularisation of the history of architecture is critically needed. What is also needed is to understand what is meant by the historical consciousness in the Indian civilizational ethos. 

India’s relationship with ‘history’, as we know it today, has been complex; Indians have been largely indifferent to formal historiography. Our ‘historical’ consciousness and memories of past events revolved around epics, folktales, legends, foibles and mythology, not unlike that of ancient Greece. These substantiated our memories and infused them with moral and ethical values. History as a chronicle of verifiable facts was non-existent in ancient India. Suffice it to say that this has to do with the civilisational attitude about the concept of time and the sense of history. How the relationship between the present and the past is interpreted can vary. In Europe, too, even though Herodotus and Thucydides of ancient Greece are considered the earliest historians, the modern critical consciousness of history arose in Germany only during the Enlightenment. This sense of history was founded on the notion of time as a linear progression from past to future in which the past was supposed to be a set of evidence-based facts that can be verified. We have now accepted this view of history as normative and universal. However, the historical ‘facts’ themselves suggest that this sense of history arrived in India only during the so-called Middle Ages. Before that, we Indians were rather indifferent to history as we understand it in its current form. As the historian Vinay Lal has observed,   

“The first significant dent in the wilful amnesia of an entire civilisation appeared with the establishment of the Islamic faith on Indian soil. The incursions into India by the Muslims brought with them a strong monotheistic faith. The sense of history also appears to have been first installed in some meaningful way among Indians with the coming of Islam; or, to advance a less daring claim, the advent of Islam in India and the emergence of historical writing display a certain simultaneity that cannot pass without observation.”⁸ 

However, modern historiography has now been embedded in our consciousness as a continuous narrative from the past to the present. It is predicated on the concept of the “arrow of time”, which presupposes an origine, has causality as its engine of change, and evolution and progress as its ultimate objectives. This historical consciousness originated in early 19^th century Germany, and contrary to its present universalisation, it differs substantially from the Indian historical consciousness. The Western conception of history sees man moving towards a greater good and a perfect state of existence, from the original sin to the final redemption: the present is always an improvement over the past, which must be discarded and can be accessed only in libraries and museums. History is the story of the ascent of man.  

In Hindu thought, time is cyclical, and the “cycle of time” is mythical and not historical. Each cycle consists of four yugas (epochs, chatur yuga), beginning with the first yuga, Satya-yuga, characterised by unadulterated truth. Truth and goodness decrease progressively in the following two yugas, Treta and Dwapara. And finally, in the present age of Kali-yuga, falsehood and wickedness predominate. Thus, far from being the story of the ascent of man, history is a story of continuing degeneration. However, it is the sheer scale of this temporal imagination (our entire known history would fall under the last epoch, Kali-yuga (3,102 BCE – 4,28,899 CE), that has led many Western scholars to hold the long-held view concerning the absence of a historical understanding in traditional India. 

The Sanskrit term for history is itihasa. I shall dwell more elaborately later on the difference between history and itihasa, but suffice it to say that Indian civilisation is far more comfortable accessing the past through customary practices, folklore, epic literature, and Puranas. Conveying moral and ethical values through allegorical tales is more critical than rational historical information of origins, provenance, and progression. History is formed by our cumulative civilisational memories, and not by verifiable historical ‘facts’ of events and people. These memories are embedded in people’s art; their stories, songs, paintings and the way they dwell on this earth. But we must be careful when we speak about memories. One is reminded of the words of poet Rainer Maria Rilke,  

“And having memories is still not enough. If there are a great many, one must be able to forget them, and one must have the patience to wait until they return. For the memories are not what’s essential. It’s only when they become blood within us, become our nameless looks and signs that are no longer distinguishable from ourselves—not until then does it happen that, in a very rare moment, the first word of a verse rises in their midst and goes forth from among them.”⁹

We are all aware of thousands of enchanting stories that children have learned from their parents. These do not refer to any historical facts, dates or events; these are memories that have returned after being internalised the way Rilke describes above. Similarly, the mud huts of the Rajasthan desert, the Dhajji Dewari houses of Kashmir, the Nālukettus of Kerala, The Hawelis of Gujarat and Rajasthan and the Chetinad houses of Tamil Nadu are the architectural counterparts of songs, stories and folktales, and have embodied the centuries-old memories of protected domestic tranquillity.

This pre-colonial historical consciousness differs from the post-colonial consciousness of history founded on the concept of time as an arrow moving in a single direction from the past to the present. This historiography has a compulsive need to look for the origin as validation for the present. Itihasa, on the other hand, does not seek origin: there is an implied continuity in the stories, songs, tales, and epics, Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Puranas, no different than the Greek tales, Iliad and Odyssey, conveyed the kernel of moral and ethical conduct through examples (udaharana) of exemplary lives, events and occurrences of the past. The Ramayana shows Shri Ram’s equanimity and grace through good and terrible times. Sita’s devotion to her husband and Lakshman and Hanuman’s fierce loyalty stand as ideals for us to follow. Arjuna’s ethical dilemma in the battle is often cited today as a perpetual example, relevant even in modern times. These events are represented not only in literary forms of stories, songs and poetry but also in visual forms such as paintings, sculptures and dramatic performances; jatra in Bengal, tamasha in Maharashtra and Bhawai in Gujarat.  

There are three ways to access the past: history, itihasa and myth. Itihasa is a non-historical, non-chronological mode for accessing the past and can and must coexist with history. Itihasa defines civilisation, while history is the tool to define our citizenship in the nation-state. Myth is a much-misunderstood word, and its use here calls for clarification. In anthropology, myth is defined as a well-known story that explains primary principles, beliefs, and values outside of chronological time. Elements of a myth may or may not be historically accurate. Its veracity is not what matters; it is essential for what it teaches. This makes myth a part of itihasa. However, I have used this word here to describe the historicisation of itihasa, i.e. when itihasa is conflated with history. When the characters and the events of itihasa are taken as real and as historical ‘facts’, and when their time and place become the terrain of contestation in the wars of culture, myths are born as lethal weapons. Today, India is experiencing a profound confusion about history, itihasa and myths. The founders, too, had woven together a complex but singular story infusing both history and itihasa.¹⁰ The founders had imagined a story wherein all the diversity and plurality of India were accounted for. However, it is in the nature of such narratives to be selective, and some events or personalities had to be left out, making them susceptible to contestation. So, there were other counterstories, too. 

One such story going around among nations that have emerged from the imperial past or those with a history of considerable immigrant populations, such as India or the United States, tend to imagine a distant past of ‘innocence’ and how that innocence was lost during the relatively recent history either with colonisation or immigration. The story, which really is a myth, is meant to validate the present political position promising to resurrect the imagined innocent and righteous past. The recent campaign in the US to “Make America Great Again” is an example of this phenomenon. In India, too, it is felt that both the Arab invasion and European colonisation had suppressed the ancient classical past, which needs to be resurrected. This rich and glorious past, we are told, should be the fountainhead of our new national identity. 

The book, “Sense of Itihasa: Architecture and History in Modern India” analyses the works of several contemporary, post-independence Indian architects to demonstrate that memories, dormant for centuries or brought to the present as folk architecture, have resurfaced and found new forms in their works. Indian architecture, far from being theory-dead, always had a theoretical bedrock in the form of its itihasa.

1. Bimal Krishna Matilal, Mind, Language and World, ed. Jonardon Ganeri, Oxford India paperback, 2015, pp. 403-404. ↩︎
2.  T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919). Emphasis mine ↩︎
3. I refer the reader to Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, Harcourt Publishing, Boston, 1983  ↩︎
4. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures in the History of Philosophy, translated by E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson, London, Bison Books, 1896.
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5. Post-modern architecture, with its pastiche references to historical past, has been a reaction to this. ↩︎
6. Percy Brown, Indian Architecture (Islamic Period), D.B. Taraporevala & Sons Pvt. Ltd., Bombay, 1942. p. 1 ↩︎
7. Percy Brown, Op. cit.  ↩︎
8. Vinay Lal, The History of Ahistoricity; The Indian Tradition, Colonialism, and the Advent of Historical Thinking, Chapter 1 in The History of History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003, p. 59.  ↩︎
9. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Trans.  William Needham. Wolf Pup Books, 2013. P. 7.  ↩︎
10. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India, Penguin India, 2008.  ↩︎

Note:

This is the first of a three-part series of preview essays for Jaimini Mehta’s forthcoming book, Sense of Itihasa; Architecture and History in Modern India. The book is in two parts;

• Theoria, exploring the representation of Indian architecture in colonial historiography, and
• Praxis, analysing the work of several contemporary, post-independence, architects from the perspective and insights so gained in the first part.  

These three essays include excerpts from the first part. The book, published by CEPT University Press, is expected to be available by the end of 2024 or early 2025. 

Read other parts here: