Reconstructing the context

1916-1935

Kanvinde was born in 1916 in a small village on the Konkan coast. His mother passed away when he was two, and he was raised by his large extended family in the seclusion of the village, his father being away in Bombay where he was an art teacher in schools. Kanvinde had the calling of a painter and did enrol in an art school but the family decided that architecture would be a better profession for him, a living could be earned more easily. So he entered the Architecture Department at Sir J.J. School of Art in 1935, the first of the three existing architecture programs in the country then. It was then headed by Claude Batley, who was also the premier architect of the country.

Indian/Colonial

Architectural tradition in Indian subcontinent in its documented history stretches back to 2500 BC; in this vast history (time) and in its many regions and empires (space), a myriad pattern of diverse architectural developments and expressions evolved. By the beginning of 11^th century, an increasing pattern of gradual political hegemony, first under Afghan and Turkish Sultanates, then in 16^th–17^th century under the Great Mughals started to germinate an ‘Indian’ polity and an elusive ‘Indian’ identity. The attibutes of ‘diversity’ of regional cultural expressions and ‘harmony’ of inter-/intra- and –religious/–social constituents become the important parameters of this national identity. When the British political structure appropriated this hegemonistic space in 18^th century, the inevitable result was a centralised order and under the ideology and the sanctions of the empire, all differences were subsumed to become the ‘other’, the ‘Indian’. For the first time, an ‘Indian Architecture’ in the garb of Indo-Saracenic Architecture evolved under the sanction of the ‘benevolent’ empire. Indian features, motifs, expressivity and materials ‘fused’ with Western classical order, planning, programme and conception. From this very stage, what the colonized could claim was more ‘recognition’ of its marginality. When revisionists E.B.Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy opposed the colonial claim of Indian Architecture being plastic, ornamental, sculptural rather than tectonic and put forward their case of equivalent philosophical foundations underlying Indian art and architecture with the concepts of manifest/non-manifest, they responded against Western aesthetic superiority. These ‘enlightened’ colonists took upon themselves the task of an appropriate architecture for India. Strongly influenced as they were by Arts and Crafts Movement and its fetishized memory of a lost medieval crafts tradition, what they considered "truly Indian" was what was in that same spirit, not excessively ornamental and lastly, not influenced by European architecture. So by projecting unto the native craftsman their own fantasy of a lost origin they produced a pure identity as "other" of the "other"(the pure European or Westerner). With this being the battle pitch between different groups of thought during that period was to appropriate more and more territory from the margin, the establishment’s work as exemplified by Lutyen’s creation of "Indian" architecture of New Delhi was vilified by the revisionist as superficial and inauthentic.

Claude Batley

Batley in his teaching and his active practice maintained this new ideal of Architecture: it was a universal craft tailored rationally to regional parameters. In 1934, he published a volume of measured drawings of traditional ‘Indian’ building and in his lectures he tried for an informed appreciation of the similarities and differences of Indian and European classical buildings. Indian architecture,"…its origins, developments and decadence had followed the perfectly normal course of all the other world architectures and was inevitably based on the exigencies of local climate, building materials and social conditions". In his practice he avoided the loud, revolutionary eclat of the machine-age imagery popular in the west in favour of an archeologically literate fusion of Western classical order with Indian building traditions and coupled with sound climatological principles. His works and his thinking were obvious models for his students. Kanvinde remembers him as "a very important man in shaping the outlook of many architects of my generation, also of the earlier generation"

Indian Republic/National Agenda

Kanvinde graduated with distinction in 1941, but with the tumults of the World War and the rapidly spreading national struggle for independence, didn’t get a steady job till 1943 when he joined the newly formed CSIR as an architect.

Starting from 1930s Indian pioneers anticipating the inevitable independent Indian Republic, were planning an ambitious series of Scientific and Technical institutions. This culminated in CSIR being formed in 1942. Plans were made to have the trained persons to translate these dreams to reality; technical education having been kept under much control in the colonial state in contrast with scientific or humanistic education, there were no Indian architects and engineers qualified to take these roles. Hence from CSIR, Kanvinde was chosen to do studies in planning and design of laboratory buildings and Kulwant Rai to study Construction Management as the first group of people under the Government of India fellowship. Kanvinde joined Harvard Master’s programme of Architecture program in 1945 which was then being much acclaimed for its new fountainhead of functional and social promise of Modern Architecture under its émigré director Walter Gropius (Fig.1).

‘Bauhaus’ Influence

Kanvinde was initially unprepared for the space concepts taught in Gropius’s school. Having studied under Batley, he was not conversant with the progressive imagery and techniques of the International style. But progreassively what he was much affected by was the social order and the optimism implied by the Modernist paradigm. Gropius’s insistence for using space as a tool for expressing universal human values was what left most lasting influence on his mind. He graduated with a thesis on science laboratories, on which he had worked for most of his two years of study and as planned, returned to India in 1947 and was appointed as the Chief Architect of CSIR. Kulwant Rai was appointed the Chief Engineer.

Jawaharlal Nehru

India attained independence on August15, 1947 with the new Prime Minister thundering from the constituent assembly session the new national agenda "to create a new nation…unfettered by the traditions of the past…"