110. The Life and Times of Cyrus and Ruth Jhabvala with Firoza Jhabvala

Original Drawing by Tori Haynes

“Things keep on reaching out to us from the past…” 

Firoza Jhabvala

This week, we sit down with Firoza Jhabvala, musician and daughter of Cyrus and Ruth Jhabvala. We talk about growing up with two creative parents, the trans-disciplinarity of Cyrus' Jhabvala’s architecture practice, parallels with Vikram’s own father, Aditya Prakash, and the politics of colonial and post-colonial India.

Timestamp Outline 

3:15    discussion of the parallel careers of Aditya Prakash in Chandigarh and Cyrus Jhabvala in Delhi. Both grew up in Colonial India with nationalist backgrounds, studied abroad, cross-disciplinarity in their practices (educators, artists, architects)

5:12    Arundati Roy: celebrated author and one-time architecture student of Cyrus Jhabvala

5:20    Mention of “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” Screenplay by Arundati Roy

6:50    Delhi Modernism is coming down and changing rapidly

11:32    Discussion of the art and life of Aditya Prakash

13:30    design for storage

14:45    Canadian Centre for Architecture 

15:20    CEPT Archives

19:30    “He [Cyrus] believed in developing a national character of architecture, but he didn’t believe in imitations. They used to work with stones in the Moghul architecture and now they were working in concrete and if your just going to start putting concrete chatris on buildings just for the sake that it’ll look Indian, that’s sham architecture, at least that was his thinking...Nehru did not agree with this at all...so my father didn’t do any government buildings until Nehru died.”    FJ

22:50    Fatehpur Sikri

26:26    Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

31:30    Vikram asks what it was like to grow up in such a creative household

35:40    Cyrus Jhabvala’s series on disappearing New York

39:50    Cyrus Jhabvala memorial lecture series

42:48    Green Revolution - ecological cities

43:32    “The question of the climate crisis...there cannot be a bigger question than that today.”    VP

52:30    Vikram asks: what are your plans to deal with these two huge legacies?

53:24    “Things keep on reaching out to us from the past…”    FJ

53:44    Discussion of Nehru’s conflicting visions for Ashoka hotel and a modern city

57:35    Jali wall