Built Environment in South Asia

South Asian Architecture


In our close reconsideration of architectural history in the south Asian subcontinent, we have come to identify a huge lacuna in the availability of coherent content on the built environment in south Asia. Such an issue got articulated through multiple vectors. There is abundant scholarship on the built environment in Europe and Americas that facilitates discourse and dissemination of these landscapes and often becomes easily subsumed into pedagogical processes not only just in the above continents, but also all across the world. To be sure, architecture history students in the remaining part of the world have grown up to be architects only studying content that talks of buildings in other contexts that:

1. Defines the notion of what is “architecture” - in a certain way
2. Instills a certain value system through which built environment is appreciated
3. Desire for transforming their own, immediate landscapes to suit inherited frameworks
4. Aspiration to fit into the dominant discourse of architectural theory, seeking legitimization

Following similar parameters and methods, a number of surveys and books have been produced, often by non-native scholars, for the South Asian sub-continent. While the distance from a certain culture under observation offers critical objectivity, the material output invariably caters to an audience outside its own context and content. Such knowledge also has an alienating tendency for the natives in its consumption, because one is channeled to think through a methodology that may not be one’s own way of reading and understanding one’s context. In the lack of or absence of articulation of one’s own “method” – an epistemological notion that is deeply embedded in tenets of modern scholarship – often these ways of seeing are accepted as default. Nevertheless, my intent is not to devalue such ways of assimilating and making sense of the information around us. Rather, it is important to think, if there indeed is a way outside the ‘rational’ framework of legitimizing the knowledge that rests in different cultures.

Cultural interpretations of built environment and space in different contexts call for a nuanced translation, which in turn necessitate the mobilization of a specific kind of infrastructure. Given their unconsolidated political landscapes, many of the regions have not been able to realize the value in documentation of their architectural pasts, for that matter, in many cases, the preservation of many such places also remain vulnerable. Which aspects of built environment then, do people come to value and how? What aspects of “architecture” in this manner are regarded to be worthy of preservation in different cultures? What does it speak of these societies and their attitude to the material world? And lastly, are these attitudes evident in the architectural remains that are available today, and can they be read and studied?

How does one formulate sensitive methods in order to decipher these traits and attitudes? Where does one begin? How deep in history to go, how do we situate ourselves vis-à-vis history? How do we make sense of something that we haven’t experienced, or isn’t a part of our cultural ethos? How do you locate such a context, historically and geographically? And besides, how does this history inform the contemporary ways in which we assess architecture in different places?

drawing by Priyanshi Bagadia, SEA student