When Less Was More

A NEW BOOK AND A MAJOR EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK EXAMINE ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISM AS AN EXPRESSION OF SOUTH ASIAN DECOLONISATION

One of the real problems of making a book out of an exhibition, and vice versa, is the compromised position of the latter. Which came first—the exhibition or the book? When the primary objective is a museum presentation, the book often reads like a catalogue. When the focus is scholarly and academic, the exhibition suffers from excessive wordiness.

MoMA’s Project of Independence—a book on its present exhibition on Indian Modernism—refuses to fall into either category. It takes Martino Stierli, the primary author, to clearly assess how the goals of the four independent states—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—were addressed through an architecture that was a visible symbol of decolonisation and what he terms cultural emancipation. The dams and universities, legislative buildings and offices, theatres and shopping centres, along with their architects—Achyut Kanvinde, Raj Rewal, Charles Correa and B.V. Doshi in India, and others like Minnette de Silva in Sri Lanka and Yasmeen Lari in Pakistan—were recognised as founder-members of an elite club that remained active for the first three decades of Independence. The purity of their modernist conceptions is assiduously catalogued under chapters on cities, institutions, infrastructure, industry, craft, planning, housing and the like.