Architecture & Politics

A few months ago, a friend shared with me the announcement of a conference themed "Architecture and Emotions" that called for an investigation into how politics and governance come to frame the intellectual mood of any State and harness architecture a vehicle to translate such emotion in its physical environment. I keenly submitted my abstract since the topic interested me a lot, although, my paper wasn't selected. ‘The State of Architecture’ (SOA) exhibition that opened almost subsequently seemed to look at some linkages in how architecture was inscribed within the political developments of the country over the last 65 years. After some study and pondering although, I felt that SOA was quite unsuccessful in drawing attention to architecture as a function of politics through its recycled rhetorics. In addition, some of the political events like the Emergency of 1975, that the curators chose as marker of the exhibition, did not seem to integrally influence architecture within the country at all.

Thinking of a more nuanced analysis on politics, architecture and identity, I am reminded of Arindam Dutta, now the director of the PhD program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, who in his undergraduate thesis at CEPT culls out much more than what the exhibition could put together on the walls of NGMA. Dutta’s thesis charts how the idea of India was defined post independence by Government’s conscious and regular initiation of several cultural institutions that became the medium of infusing ideological and political thought within the intellectual sphere of the country. The interaction between art and architecture, and the role of political ideology in translating the ethos of the times into physical environment emerges softly in Dutta’s thesis. On the other hand, the material showcased at The State of Architecture exhibition made me wonder if contemporary architects in India, are in any way even able to grasp the political situation of their State, and able to find a language / method to translate the political impulses into their built works? Do architects realise the potential of architecture to be an object for cultural and political interrogation and investigation?

Right around the time of the exhibition planning, the Indian State had imposed several restrictions - including beef ban, pornography, and so on. Many such decisions have deeply affected human and spatial dynamics especially in the networked society of today. (Think of housing societies that do not allow muslims or non vegetarians, gated communities, ban on public display of affection, policing of public spaces, etc.) Without getting into details of how, (which would call for another long blogpost), I would like to mention that it was an excellent opportunity for the curators to play on the idea of “state” - 

a. as an integrated political community, 

b. as the architectural  condition with regard to its internal structure and its role to report, or 

c. to express something clearly and afresh.

I felt the pun on the word “State” was hardly emphasised in the execution. In fact, ignoring the questions of communal disturbances caused by some recent decision of the new BJP government in India that were still fresh during the inauguration of SOA, the curators inaugurated the SOA by the lighting of a lamp - a predominantly Hindu symbolic practice.

The end of this exhibition was seen by a yet another political upheaval. Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of Student Union at JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) raised questions on the idea of nationalism, the issue of curtailed scholarships for students of the reserved category studying at government institutions in India. Kanhaiya Kumar’s episode was a snowballing of several other politically charged events within the country. Primarily, this event was only followed by the suicide of Rohit Vemula, a dalit student pursuing his PhD, whose stipend was stopped after he was found to be raising social issues under Ambedkar Students' Association on his campus at the Hyderabad university. Not to forget the award-returning by several intellectuals and prominent cultural figures in India also took place in protest of the government's moral and cultural policing.

Realised during such charged political and intellectual mood within the country, the SOA exhibition almost seemed to look away from questions of secularism, nationalism, casteism, free speech, constitution and many such cultural issues were raised by several intellectuals. SOA's curatorial endavour did not address or provoke the architects in responding to these charged political events within the country - those which shape our ideals, ideas and thereby our institutions in their intellectual and physical spirit. (I understand that it would have called for reorientation of some of their planning - but there was no attempt to even add a lecture in discussing these issues that frame the political mood in which cultural production of architecture is imagined).

How does architecture - one may ask - play a role in provoking political questions? What within the scope of architectural production, allows to stage and perform such inquiries? And how can architects participate actively in shaping the society?

A friend once aptly summarised: "Architecture is the manner in which politics takes form." To be sure, it is architecture through which questions of identity and memory take shape in the built form. It is only architecture that is able to preserve the ethos of a society in its material and spatial structure for the longest. It is through architecture that the political structuring of a society is often understood, interpreted and analysed. The Greek Forums, Roman Republics or German Reischtag - all buildings talk of the power dynamics of their times. Artists like Michelangelo or Ledoux (and so many others) have demonstrated how political situations of the time can be encoded into the built form of architecture.

The designed buildings in our surroundings today merely reflect their submissive tendencies to capital and the forces of market, eventually becoming more and more vulgar day by day. There is hardly any conscious attempt by architects to translate political ideas of their context within their built works. What we are left unfortunately with, however, are just ideas for building Shivaji and Ambedkar memorials. No one is even interested in debating what it would mean to build such monuments in the age of so much political disparity and technological advancement. If these expectations seem too idealised for architecture to address, the temporal nature of an exhibition can experiment them within its schema. Politics, after all, is performed (and constituted) through the institutionalised body - the everyday actions and gestures, the structure of language we use to communicate and the space that emerges through these. The modes of seeing, engaging, interacting, positioning, framing, displaying, revealing - essentially all architectural tactics - can be employed in the temporal space of an exhibition to provoke the user to challenge and question the existing power structures. In reworking these spatial gestures, the exhibition can destabilise the normative to pose fresh questions in thinking about space, body and politics.

Just a few days ago, filmmaker Madhusree Dutta quipped quite an important point. Quoting the example of her father, she went on to demonstrate how our everyday thoughts are completely governed by the political ideology of the State. Madhu’s story, the specifics of which I now forget, demonstrated how her father who never was extremely patriotic became extremely nationalistic towards the end of his life essentially because of the political mood created during that time by the Government. The fact shows how our moral values, codes of conduct, ethical principles, world view - everything is contained in the educative machinery put into action by the State. Change of such political ideology, resulting due to several reasons like change in leader, change in governing party, etc also has an effect on the individual’s imagination of immediate space and the world at large.

State Governments, in the policies they frame and execute, instill or deprive its people of certain sense of confidence with which they perform (in) and take decisions, in other words, think their everyday lives. Average people, who do not necessarily have the critical skills to question such policies quietly accept and establish such beliefs as normal. It is here that Madhusree added another important corollary. In the given societal structure that we live - namely that of the joint family or the nuclear family - a person is forever a constituent of the family - a small part of a large institutionalised machinery. How can the ‘individual’ survive in the (non-liberal) family?

Self criticality, a value that is often a function of independent liberal thought, can only be nurtured in self-questioning. Such inquiry of the self is not possible unless one is allowed enough space to experiment and test one’s own thought. The institution of the family works against any construction of the idea of the ‘self’ or the ‘individual’.  Individualistic endeavours within the family may be seen as disrespectful, or even selfish. In such a scenario, how do we expect the majority of a population to be self-critical, if the idea of the self, or the confidence in one’s individuality itself is absent? It is in these ways that the political mood of the country works itself out - an intricate mesh of macro and micro conditions.

Architecture in the country gets produced through such macro and micro conditions. Our architects lack individuality - and this is not to gesture that building styles don’t bear signature styles of architects. I mean to hint at individuality in terms of self-criticality that one ought to develop within this overwhelming political mood that the State creates for the average countrymen. Only when architects are able to rise above this political bubble, will they be able to create buildings that catalyse political action, as well as serve the society at large in the capacity of being public intellectuals.