106. OCL Part 1: Indian Modernism and the Anxiety of Western Influence with Mark Jarzombek, Anthony Vidler, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani
Original Drawing by Tori Haynes
“Colonialism and Nationalism are closely interwoven and in the early period of the 20th Century, you have this nationalist struggle and continuous interface of colonialism and nationalism...lets take the Nehruvian period...you have Nehru’s dreams of transforming society in India that would be secular and modern and leave all the previous terrible things behind...”
Partha Mitter
In part one of our two-part series One Continuous Line, we sit down with Mark Jarzombek, Anthony Vidler, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani to discuss the relevance of Indian Modernism in terms of its various contemporary postcolonial contexts.
Timestamp Outline
* we return to this conversation now that the book One Continous Line has been released
* you can view the entire panel discussion here
2:40 Introductions of panel contributors: Anthony Vidler, Mark Jarzombek, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani
13:13 Is MidCentury Indian Modernism relevant today? Let’s put a comparison between aesthetic, social, and political effort that can be said to have occurred, not just in India, but around the world, roughly from 1950 to 1970...This is a question of preservation, legacy, and politics: is the modernist moment of any continued relevance today? ” VP
15:20 “Modernism in the 70s was being critiqued by a series of postmodern imperatives: critique of aesthetics and its claim to universality; a critique of sociality of its location; in 2021 there is a different type of critique...What do you think is the difference between the critiques of the 70s moment as compared to what is being critiqued today?” VP
16:30 the critique of modernism immediately after WWII was a critique of technology, the holocaust, the atomic bomb...it was a critiqe that began to evaluate socially the questions of exclusion and zoning built into the CIAM charter; it was a critique that felt that the reductionist aesthetics of the immediate pre-war period, the abstractionist aethetics, were not involved in popular appreciation. This critique was built out of Team X and the Smithsons....so the critiques that you received in India in the 70s had already been well formulated by the 70s and were at the same time being inflected by an aesthetic critique of one form of abstraction or another (whether brutalist abstraction or modernist abstraction), which began to look at the ways architecture could connect more to its own district… Vidler
19:30 There was no real critique of the infrastructural questions that now we talk about; there was no critique of the predominantly western based ideological framing of the practice of architecture; there was almost no critique of the neo-imperialist post-imperial spread of western architecture as a disciplinary apparatus. Vidler
20:25 Historicist postmodernism
21:30 Partha, what is your reading of that critique, what is your reading of midcentury modernism, especially in terms of cosmopolitanism. VP
21:43 Modernism as a discourse that emerged in the late 19th century
22:30 The problem of Art Partha
22:50 Colonialism and Nationalism are closely interwoven and in the early period of the 20th Century, you have this nationalist struggle and continuous interface of colonialism and nationalism...lets take the Nehruvian period...you have Nehru’s dreams of transforming society in India that would be secular and modern and leave all the previous terrible things behind...it links with teleology both in science and art….so ‘47 is an important date as the beginning of the process of decolonization. The 50s and 60s were an optimistic period...anything is possible...the late 70s were a very different period…from ‘47 to the 60s you have critiques of capitalism but these are always within the Western Teleological framework, there is no challenging...but postmodernism began to challenge that. Partha
26:04 In the 50s and 60s, there were a lot of Western critiques of Modernism coming out of the complex experience of WWII, but Modernism, Modern Architecture takes off in Chandigarh, Islamabad, Dhakka….it becomes an important thing in the postcolonial world…
27:14 What is the relationship between all these western critiques and the postcolonial embrace of modernism?
28:27 These critiques immediately following WWII were within the Western Cannon and they follow from the distinction between Modernism and Modernity. There was no question that the Smithsons in their critique of Le Corbusier were not criticising the idea of a modern architecture...they still wanted a modern architecture...Modernity was still there as a flag that would push architecture. Vidler
29:47 Sunil, How do you see from your perspective the issue of midcentury Nationalism and the Postcolonial question and how does it connect to art and architecture? VP
30:05 Perhaps, instead of thinking about moments of critique, one might think about the different valuations of forms of modernism in India and how that’s changed at different moments. The way modernism comes to India is a political and cultural impulse...its not driven by changes in the industrial forms of production (like in the West)...its an elite and estate initiative that brings modernism to india...its the aesthetics and politics that brings it to India. Sunil
31:45 movable architecture (furniture) and its valuation in the global market Sunil
33:02 India as a postcolonial nation....what was its valuation of and its relationship to its intermediate past (Mughal history) and its immediate past (a past that has been dominated by colonialism, by the West)? Sunil
33:40 The anxiety of Western influence Sunil
34:43 What is trash and what is treasure? That becomes, in a sense, the preservation question as indexed to ideological and political questions...The anxiety of influence is politicized in many different ways...So how do you describe the Nehruvian moment’s adoption of modernism as a political thing? VP
35:58 The Nehruvian project was not simply a Modernist one, it was a vastly plural one…both aesthetically and politically Sunil
38:45 “Such negotiations between making things ‘look’ modern and having them ‘be’ modern were not limited to Prakash’s works” p.97 in OCL
39:40 To ‘look’ modern privileges a sense of aestheticality, the opticality, the immediacy of something...even though it requires a certain type of learning...but to ‘be’ modern actually privileges something very different...which has a lot to do with textuality, with writing, with reading and positioning yourself within the textual culture of modern, on the one hand, but also positioning yourself within the ontological culture of the modern… Mark
41:41 There’s the one modern where the Modern moderns wanted the modern to be seen and visible, but there’s this other modern that just has to ‘look’ modern and that’s good enough Mark
43:15 Back to the question of the chairs that Sunil brought up...
47:40 There was not a modern architect who didn’t want to do a chair. It becomes a type of token of a certain type of theoretical performativity that tried to overcome the alienation of modernism by saying, “I can make you comfortable,” that was its outreach to the human that had been put under stress through the modernism itself. Mark
48:40 Modernist making in India was not an industrial process...it was handmade…in India you had to artisinally make your modern world… Sunil
