IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

Madan Mahatta Archives, Randhir Singh
IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

exhibited at Photoink, Delhi

Jan-Feb 2020

This photographic exhibition brings together a contemporary study of the campus of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi - designed by architect J K Chowdhary and engineer Gulzar Singh. IITs were the key spaces to produce engineers for building modern India. These were state education campuses of science that got built during the period of Nehru government during the 1960s when the spirit of scientific temper was fresh and the mood for a modernizing nation. The exhibition "IIT Delhi - A Modernist Case Study" brings together photographs by Madan Mahatta and Randhir Singh in a dialogue with each other. 

Mahatta's photographs are mostly black and white, taken during the time the campus was freshly inaugurated. The photographs take us back to a time period when it was till not fully inhabited, the trees wait to grow, and signs of life wait to adapt to a modern institutional space. Randhir Singh's photographs, mostly in colour bring to us the life of the campus in its humanised reality today. In Mahatta's photographic documentation, the campus emerges as an edifice of scientific ambition and achievement - architectonically as well as spatially. Here we see the emphasis on its stark forms, empty corridors with sharp shadows or the craft of be-jeweling the architectural object. Singh's photographs bring to us a softened landscape of the campus, in its diffusions produced by humans, greenery or even light forms. 

Looking at the photographers who document the same space through eyes distanced by more than 60 years, one is constantly caught up in the then & now of both, the life of the campus, as well as the way in which one would like to make sense of its historical projection. What does one make of an institution today? How secular does the space remain? What political forces lie embedded in the disposition of this space? These are question, I am certain, the contemporary artist grapples with while framing the building for the present generation. Where does one place the values through which the campus was once conceived, and how does it become a photographic inquiry? Randhir Singh's photographs balance the dilemmas of modernism today quite artfully. 

The strategic display of photographs within the gallery space work with the sharp sightlines that the campus's modern vocabulary embues. Viewers are forced to readjust perspectives while aligning their sights within the gallery space. The curation constantly creates different levels of intimacy through the sizing and placement of the photographs on the wall. The couplings of photographs are not literal (before after), rather, each try to extend their time into one another, producing an intermediate haze / blur within which the question of then and now doesnot resolve into a moral position, rather offers a considered empathy. Thus, changes, adaptations or appropriations of the campus as sometimes seen in Singh's photographs donot necessarily put us in comparison, rather, bring us in a continuum.

It is this aspect, that was finely achieved in the photographic case study of the IIT Delhi.

Dreaming

On what we call "classical"

Its wonderful to open a day with some beautiful music. The last month has been has been heated up on the debate of nepotism after the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput - a young Indian actor with a short career in the Hindi film industry. Subsequently, the entire film industry has begun to reflect, reorient and rethink their relationship and terms of engagement with the industry as well as its production and consumption. One of the most interesting moves I observed was by a very young Delhi-based vocalist Maithili Thakur who runs a YouTube channel of her own, where she sings for her audiences rendering classical, folk and sometimes Bollywood song covers. In support of the debate, she announced on her channel her decision to not sing any Bollywood songs henceforth. Her action was soft, generous and compelling, giving way to so much folk, and classical music that often doesnot reach the audiences in the opacity of Bollywood. Moreso, Bollywood has begun to claim its territory in laying claim to their production and disallowing people to make it their own by any means of reproducing and making their own versions. Such acts infringe, today, copyright laws and are subject to legal action. Smaller, competent artists who often draw ideas from these large institutions (like music companies and production houses) for their everyday survival feel threatened today. Maithili - the young singer (who has earlier participated in a TV singing show) found her way out taking pleasure and solace in limiting her self to classical and folk songs from around. It is here that I began to think of the how a classic liberates itself from authorship and gets assimilated within the everyday.

There are clearly two attitudes to the "classical". The first always tries to fight the classical, which has consolidated itself into a tradition, and becomes the benchmark and yardstick for evaluating aesthetic taste within a culture. Newer productions are often judged in the background of these, and often such basis of comparisons are dismissed and denied in order to make place for the "new". The second attitude is to reach towards this classical, to become as perfect as the work of art that has been set in history. To be sure, the "classic" here is a certain state of pleasure that everyone ought to become sensitive to, or rather experience. It is a function of high taste, and connoisseurship to be able to even appreciate and enjoy these forms. Two problems arise here. First, the presumed intellectual inaccess to this "craft" and second, its association subsequently with "class" (hence classic) that becomes an easy critique of the classical. In any civilization, the "classical" work of art is assumed to have been produced through a an act of patronage by the upper class - one that also enjoys its own place in history because of its economic privilege and the one that sustains culture through economic support. The "classical" is assumed to be desirable for it could become a symbolic means for appropriation of class through adoption of taste. However, when seen as a pursuit of the individual who want to transcend the earlier boundaries of any craft, the dimension of class doesnot necessarily stand legitimate. What I mean to say is that a fine artist would still produce something far more sophisticated even if the patronage was not available. Ghalib, the poet, who for a very long time did not receive any audience because of the profound intellectual depth and craft of his work. (One could still say that the institutionalization of their histories do bring them cultural privilege through discourse, which works towards their validation). But in addition, since these works require a heightened engagement of the intellect - those which may be enjoyed in the luxury of absence of survival exigencies - they are often relegated from direct assimilation in everyday life, and distanced from the popular or folk. In other words, to understand these would require some effort to get into the knack of the artistic innovation in them. This is necessarily a disciplinary aspect. The everyday consumers, whom we often call the "laymen" find themselves drifting faraway from the classic because they often do not have the same luxuries to afford the investment in these arts. Often thus, they turn to create something of another order for pleasure in their cultural life.

The bigger point however regarding any "classic" is the fact that it now belongs to no one. Classical songs, for example do not necessarily claim any territory through copyright laws. Classics attain the status of a theorem in a society, available to all. Most classic songs emerge from folk traditions - which have been sustained through patronage. Would this not be important to recognize before labelling them to belong to a class. What I am essentially proposing is this: that classics do not necessarily belong to a class, but must also be considered i within the private domain of its creators, where they are building up a way of appreciation irrespective of class patronage. Such a personal engagement makes us realise the unique potential of art that takes shape through the medium of the artist. Much of these classics were produced in an environment of healthy exchange of cultural ideas, where the notion of authorship was submitted towards pushing the limits of craft itself. However, in the absence of the modern day legal framework, these never bounded themselves to be not reproduced. Today, as Maithili decided only to sing classical tunes from the past, there is no way she can reproduce the original, rather, render in her own way. The classical, thus reduced to certain principles, becomes a much sustainable framework. This dissolution of authorship in the formulation of the classical must be recognized. On the other hand, in order for something to become classic, its access must not be limited, rather widened. In our cultural practice, the generosity of exchange and reproduction must be valued. Modern modes of art making privilege the rejection of the past, and avoid reproduction. The act of copying is considered profane.

In eastern cultures, for example, copying and reproduction has remained the principal way of passing knowledge. We can not say these have not evolved, or have not been critical. Rather, the evolution of these crafts have been so subtle that it becomes extremely difficult to trace the moment of shift. Chinese paintings, for example are taught through the tenet of rigorous reproduction. Indian miniatures were a well oiled guild system where there were specialists to make each stage of painting. Similarly, Hindustani and Carnatic classical music depended on a tradition of riyaz, where repetition was a means for sustained meditation - a process through which one could forget, and even forego authorship to the discipline itself. These aspects of one's engagement with one's art are often completely overshadowed in their evaluation as feudal. The modern society dubs these practices of the past as those that are patriarchal, shaping under a clear hierarchy of the master. What was relevant however, in this hierarchy was the privileging of the craft rather than its consumption. To be sure, have hierarchies not existed even today, those which have merely translated into the economic order? To critique the past in this light of its feudal hierarchies seems shallow. Yet, this is not to say that access to the guru, and therefore the art was not an issue. (It certainly ways, seen in the fables of Eklavya or even the recent filmic adaptation of Katyar Kaljyat Ghusli.) However, what these tales tell us, essentially, is that perhaps that unacknowledged learning was a threat, for the guru may not be aware of the critical orientation of the silent learner. The criticality of passing of art was embedded in the practice of copying itself - one that needs to be recognized and unpacked. Copying, in the logic of capitalism has reduced itself merely to reproduce pleasure at first sight, whereas, perhaps, in the past, the mode of copying carried with it, its own critical component, enmeshed in the diversified instructions and observations of the teacher.

The pressure of the original and anxiety of reproduction in the cultural sphere has kept me disturbed for a very long time. The poet and literary critic Harold Bloom has a sharp analysis called 'The Anxiety of Influence' that articulates these ideas within the context of some renaissance works of literature. It opens up a discussion on the moral foundations of cultural production, and makes worthwhile arguments. It is only imperative that we do not outrightly reject "classics" as productions of class societies, rather acknowledge their cultural values. However, there may be several more dimension to the production of value towards the making of a classic that must be investigated with more time and patience. What I do appreciate is the ease with which classics are able to lend us the means for contemporary cultural production. And for now, I will leave it at that. 

In Praise of Copying

From: In praise of Copying, by Marcus Boon

Balconies

The other morning I was thinking of the cultural and social role of balconies in urban space, especially in these times of the COVID pandemic, when most of us are quarantined within our homes. In such a confined situation, the balcony has been the closest release into the "outside". In its ambiguously integrated physical character, the balcony appears to be a wart-like extension from the primary body of the building. Physically suspended in space from all other dimensions except its connection to the building, the balcony occupies the liminal space between the interior and the exterior.  The balcony must have been a soft replacement for the tropical inhabitant's seamless weave into the outdoor of the ancestral horizontally laid out home, that is now hewn into the vertical assemblage of the urban apartments. However, in the urban space, the balcony assumes many more meanings than just remaining a place to linger, loiter or merely gaze into the happening or nothingness of life. In the limited carpet areas of urban living, the balcony extends the house into a spectrum of activities.

Within the scheme of the home, the balcony could be an architectural metaphor for alienation. It is the anonymous, unclaimed, "public" counterpart of the demarcated, claimed "private" interior of an apartment in a multi-storied construction. The larger inner livable domestic space scaling down its containment to allow often, merely a single body perhaps prefaces its association with a sense of solitude. In addition, balconies are a release from the often cacophonous constrained interiority of the home. Sometimes, on the other hand, the loneliness and silence of the home is erased by melting into the bustle of the street, or even the busy road. The balcony allows one to be semi-anonymous to the world through its part hiding architecture. When in the balcony, we are semi exposed - partly in partly out, neither grounded nor absolutely floating. This in-between-ness lends the body and the mind a distinct disposition to float itself into the space of dream and desire. The balcony thus remains to be read phenomenologically in its lived reality.

If window is the two dimensional invisible screen that connects the inside and outside within a house, the balcony is the volumetric space of the window that can be inhabited by the body. It projects the body into a panoramic view of the outside that the window merely peeks into. Figuratively and metaphorically, the balcony more often that not, has been imagined as space of escape. To be sure, in several modern vertical buildings where safety norms have necessitated for the construction of exclusive emergency exits, the balconies are often strung into such open fire escape staircases. In older structures, such escape infrastructures are added as step-child extensions separately, also evident in their distinctly different construction systems. Social and moral ambiguities that cannot be contained within the domesticity of the home, tend to leak into such spaces. Acts of stolen love, self-pleasure, assumed socially immoral indulgence have often been staged in this space. Balconies thus become a site of behavioural and moral transgression.

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo

In its outstretched disposition, a semiotic reading of the balcony alludes to Michelangelo's 'The Creation of Adam' where God's arm is outstretched from the body in order to impart a spark of life into the man (Adam, who is imagined in the image of God himself). Much as Adam compliments the figure of God in the artist's rendering, the cantilevered fragment of the balcony reaches out into the space, off a building probably to reflect upon its own inner incompleteness. Is the physically incomplete balcony the mirror of the fractured space of home - one that attempts to dissolve the individual it contains within the outer world? Such tendencies become vivid as we begin to consider various works of art across histories and cultures that feed into the imagination of the balcony as a site of union and the expression of love. Many popular adaptations of folk tales by Disney have consolidated the balcony into such a trope. The most impressionistic one is demonstrated in the animated Arabic fable of Aladdin, where his lover Jasmine is often found lost in longing and hope leaning against the parapet of her palace's balcony. In the absence of one's partner, balconies are seen as an outwardly setting to depict the inner solitariness.

Jasmine in the adaptation of Aladdin animation by Disney

The gendering of the balcony is a unique phenomenon. In urban multi-storied apartments, the balcony appears to be the primary domain of the female - one who is associated primarily with shaping domestic life. In many instances, the balcony is gendered as the space of female hope. The balcony is the social and environmental laboratory of the home that holds extra-domestic conversations, activities. It is a space of care and concern, a place where the body expectantly relaxes and retires. For the male, it could quickly become a space of performance, a space where the body asserts and stages itself firmly. The balcony's transparency may be quickly hijacked by the assertion of the male body. Whereas, ironically for the female, the balcony is often a space to disappear into. Its seeming queer existence in the architectural  scheme of the building (one that is liminal, in-between and purposely incomplete) immediately crushes it under the patriarchal hegemony. In such a reading the balcony's character is most productively exploited by the queer body. The tectonics of gender as explained above may be elaborated through the consideration of three artworks, primarily considered from India.

Snapshots from a Family Album by Sudhir Patwardhan

Artist Sudhir Patwardhan’s distinct representations of people in the space of the balcony set the home and the city in a unique contemplative relationship. In his collection Snapshots from a family album, a painting uses the site of the balcony to position the viewer on multiple thresholds at once: the home and the city, the inside and outside, the covered and uncovered, the private and the public. What holds our eyes in this painting are the figures of two women, probably related to each other as mother and daughter. The manner in which the women occupy the space is rather submissive, finding comfort within each other, as much as the release into the outside.  The mother holds her daughter in a manner of restraining her, at the same time drawing support. The daughter on the other hand is fairly poised, and confrontational. The view on the right is that of a city under development. What does the juxtaposition of the figures with an incomplete city under construction mean? Could the parapet of the balcony be that invisible mirror which reflects the inner landscape of the women contained within its semi naked space? In their reliance and incompleteness, the two bodies begin to dialogue in themselves a soft tale of patriarchy. In the semi lit space of the half-covered balcony, their inner beings begin to resonate. For the women, the balcony is a site to enjoy their reluctant freedoms.

Sudhir Patwardhan

In contrast to being inside the threshold, in another of his earlier works, Patwardhan posits the viewer outside the space of the balcony. The foreground of the painting, blinded by a stone wall and a city bus, immediately draw the viewer's attention to the space of the common corridor: the elevated balcony of the chawl across the street. A middle aged man and a woman are seen to be leaning along the wooden railing, perhaps at the end of the day. The busy street being overlooked is left behind in time in the eyes of the man whereas the woman besides the post seems to rather pick on the energy of the chawl and the city. Both the bodies draw very different energies at the same time. The balcony ties the entire chawl together stringing together the different rooms as well as the social lives of the people. In the ecosystem of the chawl, the balcony is a diurnal map – with traces of laundry, water storage, shoe racks and flower pots that become infrastructures of communication in this conduit of  multidimensional exchange.

You Can't Please All, by Bhupen Khakkar

Indian visual artist Bhupen Khakkar’s body in the balcony stands in a distinct ambiguity in his seminal work You Can’t Please All (1981), that begins to explore his own gay sexuality. A Tate entry on the painting reads:

You Can’t Please All (1981) was named Khakhar’s ‘coming out painting’, by his contemporary Timothy Hyman. The painting depicts Khakkar on his balcony, naked, watching an ancient fable be re-enacted before his eyes. The fable tells of a father and son taking their donkey to market. As they take turns riding the donkey, passers by comment on who is riding. ‘The father is old so he should ride’, say some, whilst others complain the father is heavy and will overload the donkey. The story is concluded with the fathers refrain “Please all, and you will please none!” For Khakkar this tale reflected his own desire to accept his identity.

It is clear that unlike the realism of Patwardhan's city outside the balcony, Khakkar's sight from the balcony is an imagined one. It is a place from where he is able to introspect into the personal dilemmas of his sexual identity and future. As apparent in the painting, the balcony is also the bedroom, the world outside is the playground of desire. The viewer situates oneself somewhere between the pink and blue grounds of the balcony and the outside respectively, flowing into each other. The fully naked body of the artist is only visible to the viewer, securely hidden from the outside by the semi-wall of the parapet. The balcony thus demonstrates the dualities of identity, hiding and concealment, private and public, in other words - it becomes a queer space for life to unfold itself. At once, the balcony's own existence echoes in the desires of the portrayed body, here, of the artist himself.

In the above instances, the balcony is literally the space from where the inner lives and landscapes of bodies get lived. The balcony view is indeed theatrical, and no longer appears metaphorical within the scheme of the architectural vocabulary of the cinema hall. It is indeed the space from where the the physical launches into the virtual. But in real life too, balconies are spaces where humans willingly wait to interact with other species. They feed the birds, hop with the butterflies, and ofcourse, nurture a garden of their own. The balcony is one's own tamed wilderness, a forest of one's own. It is a space where one steps into the other-world of nature. The plants bring insects, flowers, fruits - thus they add new colour and demonstrate the transitory nature of life. Through its delicate structure of grills and bars, the balconies allow plants to creep, dissolving the hard boundaries of building structure. The balcony is a space of effervescence, and offers the infrastructure of dissolution.

Balconies thus support and allow the flourishing of a parallel life-cycle. In capitalistic societies where every inch of an owned urban property must be put into use, such aspects are often exploited towards maximising utility. In its semi-occupancy dimension, the balcony space could dubbed as an essential unproductive space of the house. The balcony - often excused as the lesser space of the home, and assumes a hierarchy. Therefore in the urban vein, it is constantly attempted to be co-opted into the productive logic of the home. Through physical or infrastructural extensions, the scope of a balcony space is extended beyond its limits. With homes that have permanent maids or servants, the balcony is transformed into their make-shift room/home. In small houses with kids, the balconies in their detachment offer the silence and isolation for study, and manifest as reading and learning coves. In other instances, limitations of living space compel inhabitants to use their balconies as a space to store infrequent goods. Balconies are often installed with lofts and hanging closets that can double them up as stores as well as spaces of recluse. Other adaptations convert balconies into laundry spaces or puja rooms; for they are enabled with its own source of inlet as well as outlet for water.

Only until a few years ago, urban building bye-laws in a city like Mumbai allowed the free construction of 10% of the built up space of apartments as balconies. Over time, shrinking floor spaces of apartments, extending families and the desire for larger apartments led to the perverse practices of subsuming balconies into the "carpet" space of the house. The addition of a projecting grill, installation of fans or lights, creation of decks or closing off with sliding windows are all means through which the balcony is  brought into the productive ambit of the home. The introduction of the sliding window changed the character of the balcony and made it feel more a part of the room instead of it being separate from the room. Due to this, it began to be made into a part of the room. It was also installed for having privacy, reducing sound decibels and avoiding dust within the house. Introduction of air-conditioning necessitated sealed interior spaces to avoid leakage of cooled air. It is thence that people also started closing off the balconies and amalgamating them within their rooms. All in all, the semi-open balcony was now completely interiorised. The recognition of such practices has led the planning commission to dissolve the balcony as free space in building codes.

Finally, Aditya Potluri, Saurabh Vaidya and Ranjit Kandalgaonkar's "Boy in a Balcony" ties together the poetry and politics of being suspended in a balcony. Vaidya, perhaps aptly calls it a "no man's land", showing a view that is neither framed from the street, nor the interior of the home. Several perspectives merge into the frame together and hit the eye simultaneously. Surrounded by a range of realities and imaginations, desires and negotiations, claims and contestations, the balcony becomes a safe haven to perform and peek privately into the everyday - of the other and the self. In this in between ness, the balcony finds and becomes a whole world of its own. No longer does it need its host, it assumes the character of the flying carpet that floats into, across and away into the pasts, presents and futures simultaneously. It could be a site of unison - seen even in the recent chauvinistic thali-banging acts orchestrated across several countries in the spectacular appreciation of the "COVID warriors" that brings these separate pixelated pocket-volumes together; but at the same time, becomes the perfect place to hide, or even contemplate into the future that we wait to enter and inhabit.

Boy in the Balcony by Aditya Potluri, Saurabh Vaidya and Ranjit Kandalgaonkar

Teaching Online During Covid

This morning, I was thinking what would have really happened, after all, if we stopped teaching for 6 months given the impositions of lock down and house confinements to abate COVID-pandemic. How would life change in the larger scheme of things and events at all if education just stopped for a bit? Why have educators been desperate to find modes and means of transitioning their instructions into some or the other way of online teaching? What was so urgent? Would the world doom if growing minds did not study for 6 months, or even one year? Indeed, one could argue that education, of all other things, is one sector that could most easily operate online. But what view and biases do we hold of education when we do make that statement? Do we mean to say that education is merely a passive from of passing or receiving information that has nothing to do with the presence of two bodies in any physical space? Do we mean to say that classroom is simply a transaction of information that can happen anywhere, anytime? Do we mean to say that it is nothing but pure administration - in both, bureaucratic and institutional terms - that schools are merely institutional mechanisms for delivering potions of lessons, dosages to those involved in the process of learning? In sum, what is teaching and learning, and how does one reduce it to an online interface with such forceful and quick ways into the mode of online medium?

On the one hand there is huge amount of debate all across the world on pedagogical methods that have become outdated - those that donot deliver students relevant skills for the exponentially changing world. Companies like google and facebook seemingly no longer recognize degrees of institutional training while seeking candidates. Students learn on the go, in many cases become autodidacts by consuming the already available content or by engaging not just online, but also in their own areas of practice. Indeed there is a huge disparity in terms of awareness and guidance. But even for that scenario, I am forced to think, what would have one year of delay cost in educating oneself? I am finding hard to reconcile how, where on one hand, there are debates to skip out of the rut of teaching in the typical modalities of sessions and lectures, whereas on the other hand, much if it succumbs to the unsaid pressure of continuing to carry out the same ways of educating online, in the most chauvinistic manner. In other instances, we are often advised to look at the world in the larger scheme of things, to think of time in a larger scale of the universe - and suddenly, all that is crushed and crashed into the medium of web-space. What essentially is going on? Why such a desperation?

We are certainly held in a double bind. The only rationalising theory that seems to drive our actions is the compulsion of living in a capitalist society. Engines of education have to keep themselves running so as to assure the flow of economy, in the macro as well as micro dimensions. At both the scales, the only dimension I can think of is the drive to maintain regular flow of money. All decisions are hurried and hushed to get to online track so as to maintain the rhythm and rhyme of regular payments. The narrative of "life must go on" seems merely a cover up. Life would have went on even if students were not studying under their so called teachers. Just that the kinds of the learners of any age would have found other things to engage in - online or otherwise. They would have found some ways to escape or engage with life. At home, they would have learnt gardening or cooking, or even cleaning. If allowed out, they would perhaps simply stroll, or observe - and I wonder how would these activities productively contribute to the lessons in class that sooner or later, everyone would come back to. And at this point, it is interesting to also consider the other way round - how is this phase of online learning going to impact physical learning when we do get back to it? Are we going to be chauvinistically celebrate the maintaining of the institutional continuum? Are we going to thump our chests for saving the six months of the magnanimous project called life? I have been disturbed with all these thoughts over some time now - this whole hurry and insecurity to push life into the computer space. Indeed, this is not to say that for many this is an escape from their troubled domesticities - but should we be addressing the escape, or finding alternative escapes for our lives? We need to think more rationally.

Arriving at the Terminus

published in "Treasure at the Terminus: Stories in Wood and Stone", Public Relations Department, Central Railway, India. 2019

courtesy: The People Place Project

Arriving at the Terminus

Anuj Daga



Many of us who have grown up in Mumbai have ritualistically crossed through the halls of CST to reach our place of work, meet a friend, extend it as a landmark to a stranger or simply board from its premises an outstation train. In our constant hurried passing, we may have missed observing this magnificent building so as to consider it closely. It merely takes a delayed train to slow you down in this rushed city, and draw your gaze into the building’s intricate, layered details that transcend you into its hidden, forgotten worlds. It is here that the building begins to unfold the myriad stories that take us back in time – allowing us to live an alternative urban reality. CST intersects with our lives at a range of scales and informs our identity(-ies) at several registers. One may be able to excavate within its artifice, several histories as well as the way we come to address the contemporary landscape. Ideas of colonialism, urbanity, modernity, mobility and everyday are intrinsically tied within the object of the CST.

As we begin to travel these time-lines, we encounter multiple revelations about the way in which our own lives are intertwined into this grand urban artifact. Recounting some such journeys through CST may bring value to its presence, but more importantly to discover paths we may take to confound into ourselves. Being the first railway station built in South Asia more than 130 years ago, announced as a World Heritage Site in the early second millennium, what does it mean to arrive at CST today? How does it become a visual metaphor that indexes values of enterprise, promise and hope for a city like Mumbai? What future does it behold for its public and how does it find place within our everyday? These are questions I would like to explore by discussing the project in five scalar modes of arrival.


1. The arrival of the British

The presence of the British colony in South Asia can only be felt as it comes to engage as well as create a new public sphere for the natives through its modern institutional apparatus. The introduction of the railways in this light, has been fundamental to the endavours of the British for establishing connectivity between the different regions of India to aid purposes of trade, communication and defense. The machinery of postal system, policing and many others principally depended on the development of railways as the mass mobility system. Such institutions were eventually opened for use to the natives, who subconsciously imbued modern sensibilities within themselves in attuning to new ways of movement, gathering and communication. In opening up all these new ways of connecting and communicating, the railways restructured a medieval life into modern, it stitched the pastoral into the industrial. Being the first railway station, CST marks the onset of such institutional shifts, in essence, the arrival of the British colony on south Asian land.

While introduction of new means and methods reoriented native life, the British too were rapidly learning the new territories they came to claim. The representation of oriental nature and culture within the British palette can be studied amply in the architectural details of CST. Tropical flora and fauna intricately sculpted into various parts of the building indicate the wonderment of British in the Oriental land. Crawling reptiles and jumping monkeys on column capitals, leopard and crocodile gargoyles, lush leaves and peacocks spanning arch windows of CST amply speak of the curiosity of the new landscape that the British colony came to occupy. It was precisely the resource laden South Asian territory that attracted the British. Instead of exploit, today, the CST building might as well be celebrated as an emblem representing such bountiful landscape.

Architecturally, ideas of structuring and organizing large scale public and office space are best demonstrated in the planning of the Victoria Terminus. The meticulous attention towards management of multiple traffic flows – vehicular and pedestrian - can be studied in the archival correspondences and annals of British record. The lofty free flowing spaces thereby designed towards ordering effective public and private movement within the building calls for appreciation of architectural foresight. The design of CST lends organizational principles for public transport buildings that are worth considering for layouts until the present day. The conjoining of the long industrial platform shed to house the trains with the ornately crafted bureaucratic headquarters is synthesized uniquely through the introduction of intermediate public spaces within the scheme. On the other hand, in its C-shaped courtyard type building form, buffered with semi open verandahs folding around a covered driveway, the building marks the arrival of the public institution that mediates in its form, the relationship between the Colony and its subjects.


2. The arrival of the locomotive

Large groups of people gathered all along the two sides of the railway track from Bori Bunder to Thane on the inaugural day to witness the spectacle of the engine driven locomotive for the first time in their city. For the natives, it was unbelievable to imagine a carriage running without harnessing animal or human energy. The railway engine alluded to a mysterious black creature spewing out smoke, magically escaping space and time – a device almost straight out of the mythical texts! The collapse of myth into the modern machine marks the arrival of the locomotive within the native peoples’ lives. With time, the technology of the steam operated machines was understood and put to wide scientific use in setting up industries or looms, or even the early cars that reshaped Mumbai’s physical and cultural geography.

The railways drastically changed the experience of space and time within the Indian subcontinent. Firstly, with the coming of locomotives, the travel time between places reduced drastically. Distances that took three days to traverse now could be covered in a matter of few hours. A post which earlier took ten days to deliver could now be sent in a day. Evidently, the railways gave a tough competition to the existing animal-driven modes of transport both, in speed and carrying capacity. Secondly, it allowed wide panoramic views of the Indian landscape in a quick passing of forests, fields and mountains extending new ways of appreciating the territory the natives themselves inhabited. Lastly, moving on its dedicated levelled tracks, the train was much more comfortable than the bumpy rides of the horse or bullock driven carts, uninterrupted by externalities of extreme weather.

More important than any other, the arrival of the locomotive, for the first time, produced the notion of a moving public. Forging new relationships while traveling with large groups of strangers underpins the social agency that the railways opened up. To be sure, the initial overwhelm, hesitation, unfamiliarity, wonder and surprise towards the new mass-moving machine must have bonded people over and along the train journeys. The CST has historically been thus the house of new friendships within the emerging city. Although the strong hierarchies of class within bogies have loosely remained as a colonial hangover until today, in being chained to each other held on the common track, the introduction of the train gave a secular direction to a composite society held together in its contradictions.


3. The arrival of the migrant

Mumbai has largely remained an aspirational city due to its primary anchor in trade and entertainment industry. Historically, as the birth place of the cotton mill as well as cinema in India, Mumbai has territorially as well as visually reached out to the masses across the country drawing them in for labour and leisure. The CST has remained a significant physical and symbolic medium for such travel of people and ideas. In Hindi cinema, an exterior longshot image of CST building announcing the opening of a film, is synonymous to the idea of Mumbai: it maps the entry into the world of work and enterprise and the dreams and promise of the land. It’s quite tautological to think that for those who travel to the city through popular cinema or in real, the first sight of Mumbai has often been the monumental Victoria Terminus.

CST has forever remained an important sight seeing landmark for the tourist circuit in Mumbai. A newly built viewing deck at the crossroads in front of the building allows travelers and enthusiasts to enjoy a prolonged uninterrupted gaze of the city icon. In consuming visually, the building brings up simultaneous emotions of being and outsider and insider within the city. The onlooker is compelled to contemplate upon one’s changing social proximity with the city while held in its embrace. These thoughts bridge the initial awe of the migrant to routine everyday of the city dweller, allowing to trace one’s past to the present. It is in this way, that we meaningfully fold in our “outsider” migrant identities towards that of belonging and claim.

Undoubtedly then, CST stands today between a circle of markets represented by various communities who came to Mumbai and settled over the eventual years for purposes of trade and business. Simultaneously, a large population of labour serving the textile mills came to offer Mumbai the distinct chawl type which supported a unique density of urban life and culture. While the railways went on to connect these neighbourhoods over time, the terminus became the official terrestrial gateway for the population traveling from inner peninsula to the peripheral city of Mumbai. In doing so, the CST marks the arrival of the migrant that gives the city its cosmopolitan character and a thriving cultural diversity.


4. The arrival of Mumbai

With the settling of the newly built terminus and the smooth functioning of the trains, a large number of wealthy and prominent citizens came to invest in the expansion of railway lines to the extents of residential towns in the north. These are the philanthropists to whom we owe the infrastructural development and image of Mumbai. Further, realizing the potential of the new mass transit system, surrounding areas began to flourish. The C-shaped typology of the building was steadily assimilated into the bureaucratizing built environment of Mumbai. Many key buildings of Mumbai were commissioned to be built adapting the motifs and manners of the Victoria Terminus. The Taj Mahal hotel by Jamshetji Tata is one such example that asserts its power using the architectural language experimented in VT. Subsequently built public institutions, gymkhanas, bungalows or even chawls in the city are modest typological expressions of the terminus building.

Over the years, the local trains have come to be understood as the ‘lifeline’ of Mumbai - those that collect and redistribute people in the city. The railway is the primary mode of transport that people use to commute in Mumbai. Of the three prime lines that broadly run north-south along the entire city, two culminate into CST. To arrive at “Mumbai” essentially means to arrive at CST – it is the historical demarcation of Fort (precinct) whose ramparts were brought down to release and reclaim land for the construction of the terminus so that the city could extend further. Until today, coming to CST is coming to the Town – not just the colonial town, but also a place that embodies the urban essence of Mumbai – a city known for its work culture disciplined fundamentally to the timetable of the railways. Until today, local trains in Mumbai are identified in their time-stamps.

As the representative image of Mumbai, the CST has been constantly restored and retrofitted with new technologies, amendments and extensions. The electrification of the steam engine during the 1930s, the conversion of bogies from DC to AC, the constant upgradation of railway compartments towards creating comfortable environment within the trains, the appreciation of concourse lengths and heights - all remind us of the historical shifts that the building, its patrons and the public have laboured together over time. The addition of underground subways, new discreet outlets for the public have all been designed respecting the original vision of the place, however debatable. The recent colourful lighting of CST’s exterior invited ample criticism from conservation architects and the public, which only indicates concern over how people see the building as a reflection of the city. In keeping pace with time, a public building like CST ceases to become outdated and validates Mumbai’s contemporariness.


5. The arrival of ‘everyday’

Over the latter part of 20th century, while the suburbia in the north sprawled as the place of residence, the downtown in south remained the principal place of work: the commercial district where most Mumbaikars travelled ritualistically to spend much of their productive time. A life of commute, commotion and care that culminated in the environment of VT lent Mumbai its ‘everyday’ identity. To enter into the numerous bodies with an estranged feeling of belonging to the city is what the terminus accommodated and mediated generously. It announced the feeling of fruition of the everyday that one desires for. It became a social shelter outside of home where one is able to meet a city of one’s own under one single roof. In bringing together people to consume a life of possibilities and promise, the terminus defines a distinct realm of the everyday.

Over the years, CST has multiplied its institutional role to transform itself into a shelter, refuge, home, museum, a stage for performance or has even served as a symbolic backdrop for protests. It is needless to mention that for the enormous staff that controls the operations of Mumbai railways from CST, the building is nothing less than home. Besides, for the public, the terminus has always been the place of refuge during heavy rains or other man made accidents. In several instances in the past, the transactional spaces like corridors or passageways have been lent for hosting mini public exhibitions informing the commuters about their city in small ways. Performers have used its hallways to stage street plays or flash mobs in order to engage or educate the diverse population of the city. CST introduces us to these multiple facets that constitute our everyday life and make it meaningful. It is an everyday that makes a million dreams real. It brought, and still continues to bring the same people regularly at a place and setting up a rhythm, a routine through which they enter into their “everyday”.

Over the last 20 years, the station has undergone several transformations – physical and cultural. In the spirit of overcoming colonial hegemony and bringing the building’s identity to terms with the contemporary times, the station's name was changed from Victoria Terminus to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in March 1996 in honour of Emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji, founder of the Maratha Empire. In 2017, the station was again renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. In 2004, CST was awarded the World heritage status, which has focused plans on the conservation of its premises. In 2008, the station bore brutal terrorist attacks, after which it was installed with a serious layer of security in the form of metal detectors and CCTV cameras. This has seriously affected its publicness. My essay has struggled between calling this piece of architecture as VT, CST or CSTM, precisely because of the mixed and layered relationship it has built within us with the city of Mumbai, that indexes its history. Although the city keeps sprawling farther into the northern suburbs, once in a while, we all crave to visit the station in order to remind ourselves of the identity we hold as Mumbaikars. The CST is now an object of longing to fulfil the dream of what it means to be in Mumbai. It is an icon that defines Mumbaihood, in which we begin to seed the dreams of a larger future.

Life in Lockdown

Life in Lockdown

I took this picture yesterday and have been thinking about it since. In many ways it became quite allegorical of so many aspects that have become central during this period of lock down during COVID 19. An old USB extension chord I purchased about three years ago was "brought back to life" since my new laptop has only two USB sockets. The extension is designed to look like a man whose limbs taken on the extra USB extensions, was my rescue for multitasking and connecting more than two devices to my laptop.In the picture, this USB human looks particularly distressed, entangled into the wires. At the same time, s/he is sitting within the black space (of the speckled table) which almost makes him appear suspended in a starry abysmal hollow space. The "power" light in red harks a kind of fatality in correspondence to the gently bent neck and leg that gives the overall posture of its body a sombre depressed demeanour. To a large extent, it talks to the people stuck at home feeling low in these times of the pandemic.But that is just one part of the story. The other whole parallel narrative that this image opens up is the pushing of the limits of electronic and web connectivity that everyone is largely reliant on during these days. "WFH" has become a new acronym for everyone (which stands for Work From Home). Social media is overflowing with webinars and online talks open to public. Several people have jokingly called it as a pandemic of webinars! Amidst all this, the human body is literally suspended in the e-space while physically immobile. Energized through new channels, such extensions are keeping us afloat, and mentally alive - allowing a new kind of normalcy. The colourful speckles in the dark vacuum together make up for a dual reading. I felt that the image brings out poignantly a range of emotions - the corporeal and technological reality of a large section of human lives during these gloomy times of the pandemic. The seeming ascent of the floating body here, suggests the hope of escape from these troubling atmospheres.

Ratheesh T at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

published in Art India
in Vol. 22, Issue 3



The Artist and his Backyard 

Ratheesh T’s detailed works capture the political intimacies with a small-town life in Kerala, notes Anuj Daga. 

Ratheesh T.’s oils on canvas at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, from the 5th of September to the 20th of November, 2018, seem to defiantly guard aspects of life that come to constitute meaning and identity within his immediate community. The nonchalant naked artist standing in the centre of the room in I Am (Cleaning Pond) greets the viewer rather defensively. The ripped wall of the house exposes us to the nullah over which it is probably built. The clothes scattered all over the furniture create an uninviting environment. Any attempt by the viewer to know more about this mess is repelled/rejected? by the artist’s smirk and assertively shielded by his bare body. 

In How Are You, Who Are You?, the semi-naked artist, now wrapped in his lungi, is busy with the ritualistic preparation of puttu in the kitchen – with grated coconut kept on a table and the pressure-cooker on the counter alongside. As he fills up the puttu vessel with rice flour and coconut, he alerts himself, yet allows the pigeons who appear to be regular visitors to the kitchen, free play of the room. Showing his back, the artist seems too engrossed in his domestic chores to engage with the viewers. 

Kiss (Clear Pond) presents a daughter and father sharing an intimate moment at the edge of a lake. Filling up the background, the lake with floating flowers, reflecting skies and buildings frame and isolate the two from the rest of the world. In I See You, the protagonist is seen teaching his partner to fend off a boar that has possibly strayed into their backyard. His warm closeness to the woman in the dark, whose eyes he covers to mask fear and the torchbeam with which he stuns the beast, creates an aura of private trust around them. Being witness to this moment makes the viewer feel like an intruder. 

The artist’s rootedness in his village and community life and his autobiographical explorations allow us entry into his world while maintaining a measured distance. While on the one hand, these scenes from his daily life strongly assert his Malayali identity, the viewer is strategically othered through moments that might embarrass or induce disengagement. The characters in the paintings do not always lend themselves readily to the viewer. Ratheesh’s works thus often turn the anthropological gaze in and leave the viewer feeling estranged about his status as an observer. 

Two paintings lay out details of everyday public life. In one work, the viewer is led into an overlooked backyard with dense trees where we see a dilapidated toilet block, with a broken vent pipe, built away from the main house. Amidst discarded household junk, rotting coconut shells, bottles, banners and the national flag is the toilet wall scribbled with everyday gibberish and political opinions within which the life of the community unfolds. The life of this community is detailed in another painting where interdependencies and close knit relationships among its people become visible. In the foreground, you see three young men carrying a large cutout of the hammer and the sickle, cutting their way across an everyday scene within his village gently lamenting on the state of communism. 

Saami presents the artist as a protagonist wearing a t-shirt and jeans to whom the villagers approach with wonder, mischief and merriment. The women washing themselves by the stream and the dark men cleaning their teeth with datoon laugh at what appears to be a new avatar of the artist. An old friend plays funny tricks with a cigarette lighter – he playfully threatens to set the artist’s beard on fire. The artist stands un-defiantly, lost in thought, a benign smile on his lips. The artist is now an outsider. 

Home during COVID

One of the many ways in which the understanding of the home may be approached is the fact that the home is able to offer us an environment where we may perform our most intimate acts. We feel we are at home when the apparent distinction between the inside and outside of the body resonates in a way that both mirror each other almost perfectly. The physical manifest of the home is then able to echo and reflect desires that are felt inside, and eventually be shared with a common world outside. In reality however, the walled units that we come to inhabit are hardly a representation of ourselves. We occupy conflicted territories with overlapping desires, varied ideologies, different practices and our own personal schedules. These several-ities are hardly recognized with the singular space of the physical shelter. The rooms we come to occupy as houses allow us to live merely a fragment of our own selves. Where do the other selves get lived then? How do they manifest otherwise? What is the locus of the home if lived in mere fragments? How do we assemble them and attempt a picture of the home?

The Covid 19 lockdown has impressed upon us the above questions more sharply, for it has taken up the privacies that were not necessarily lived within the outline of our apartments, rather scattered into the recycle bin of the city space. In lending anonymity, invisibility and blurring of the body, the city extended to us latent personalities that could thrive through alienation. It would contain a thousand alter-egos which could emerge and disappear, be constructed and forgotten, could be recreated and rejected, reinvented and re-lived. In doing so, unknown pockets of urban space become meaningful in the register of a provisional home. In constraining people within their apartment boundaries, Covid has partly taken up the agencies over our parallel selves – those that were hidden into the vast alternate world that vectored our home. The restraints of home boundedness have resulted in an implosion of these multitude of dimensions within our personalities that were indexed into a different geography. Where do these lives get lived in the imposed self-quarantine? What new personalities emerge within the clash of dissonant selves, and spaces within the sphere of the geometric home?

While for some, living outside the outline of the house may be a metaphorical idea of the home, for many in the city, it is the hard reality. This only becomes more apparent when we consider the population living in squatter settlements, or denser low income areas. Here, members of a family consciously choose to step out or remain outside the home to allow space for the other, or escape the limiting shell of their shelter. Intermingling with the community outside one’s physical domesticities offers security to the home-makers. For the old people, it would be a way to find their own breed, but more importantly unburdening their families off their distinct social lives. Staying outside the home is thus also a mechanism through which the tension of social space is released into the excess of the city. Covid has confiscated the tool of disappearance which sustained the home, for people living in dense, small settlements.

We no longer can be naked – in a way of performing a self that could afford for itself unfiltered pleasure. Within our geographies of quarantine, we must wear a social garment. On portals of virtual communication, we must screen bodies through the interfacing windows. And more literally, we may not touch, or be touched by people we encounter outside our zones of captivity. If nakedness also is indexed in our personalities, then the masks Covid has forcefully made us wear index the various layers of social, physical and personal insecurities that it has exposed us to. The multitude of homes that otherwise bubble and burst amidst the exchanges within these domains have flattened into thin air. As of today, we live in atmospheres of division – red, orange, green, regulated through several mediated machineries. These divisions are here to stay for long – as ghosts of the pandemic that will hallucinate and erupt during forthcoming times of crisis. How do we foresee the new differences that have already begun to surface (on) the human body? What will be the revised geography of shelter for these newly differentiated bodies – through caste, class, religion and contagion? How will these bodies be (re)covered? And how can they remain naked?

The Covid lockdown has sensitised us to the overlapping time schedules, and programmatic conflicts that arise out of the different ways in which humans bundle up forms of work and leisure. The home is a place where ways in which its inhabitants carve or forge their protocols of work and leisure in the axis of time - those that may produce inherent conflicts. Cooking while listening to the radio is an essential everyday practice through which a mother may inhabit her home. The music and chatter on the radio is an essential ingredient for her work, through which she is able to access a world that she remains disconnected with due to her domestic moral obligations of feeding her family. However, the leakage of radio sound into the space of another person, now in the home, but used to the insulated and neutralised environment of an office may render him/her unproductive. Such an overlap may be addressed by occupying isolated spaces within a large house, but in smaller apartment setups, employing ways of personal isolation may indicate unanticipated social and moral signals. Timetables of domestic chores and individual official work get intrinsically entangled with each other within families living jointly. Spaces of the home are engendered across time in different ways. The resolution of these schedules may mean the bulldozing of one home over another. How do these work-live relationships, those that combine with different degrees come to cohabit within a singular space? Who is to compromise - and what inherent ideologies and power structures get exercised in such assertions? What are the protocols for allowing liberal environments to flourish within the home? The lockdown introduces us to ways in which people prepare unique programmes and design their everyday, as well as make it livable. However, negotiations within such a space may present us with solutions that look in very different directions.

Living through the pandemic has led to the discovery of new walls within the domestic space, and the dismantling of invisible divisions between the selves. Relationships and responsibilities rearticulate themselves within the ritual of the family. We all make a home in different time cycles - those that have coalesced into a new hybrid that standardizes in a way that produces micro displeasures. The accruement of such feelings result in unknown repressions that leak out in undesired situations. Such interactions hint at deviations in mental health that cause ruptures in social relationships. Although human beings contain these changes within their empathetic selves, the world perhaps will have to face the pent up rage in different irrational forms - a mediation over which may be necessary and crucial towards abating physical and psychological damage of the world. What infrastructures do we have for such mediation?

Covid regulations have restricted immediate and direct access to our “home” – that which we make in tracing the city at our own terms. It prevents the inhabitation of fragments that enliven our latent selves. The sheer immobility within our domestic spaces has compelled us to resign from our ability to think actively. In the new static floor, the mapping of change is limited. The pandemic has stunted our means to chart new material and intellectual geographies. Many have lost their intellectual stimulus to immobility. Some have realized the centrality of movement for escaping into one’s everyday. Although, this is an opportunity to defamiliarize oneself to one’s unembraced domesticity. Corona is the new Big Boss, and we are its (un)willing Trumans. It has brought so many strangers together within a small area. It has forced us to forge new equations to live together, find new solidarities and assemble a complete picture even in the evident fractures of existence. It is this reconciliation that perhaps indicates the terms at which we may re-enter one’s homes again as we step outside.