Architexturez South Asia
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Papered spaces: clerical practices, materialities, and spatial cultures of provincial governance in Bengal, Colonial India, 1820s–1860s
No full textBritish colonial governance in India was built upon global technologies of writing produced through European mercantile colonialism; the extraction of the embodied Mughal administrative knowledge from a Persianette (or Tamil-proficient, as in Southern India) Indian clerical class, and its materialisation into official paper-based forms, as shown by Christopher Bayly; and a scribal-clerical ‘habitus’ as described by Bhavani Raman. This research focuses on the architecture, spaces and material culture associated with the paper-bureaucracy of the colonial government of Bengal that Jon Wilson calls one of the world’s earliest modern states. It argues that this paper-/ writing-oriented habitus also mandated a chain of materialities and spatialities (paper-records, furniture, spaces, and architectures of colonial governance). Focusing on the colonial cutcherry (office), the nerve-centre of Bengal’s zilla sadar (provincial administrative) towns, I analyse such ‘papered spaces’ as record rooms and clerical offices. The work is conceptualised around paper as a key agent of colonial governance, including the expanding spheres of its logic, which profoundly permeated the cutcherry’s material-spatial culture and experiential ‘lifeworld’. I also reflect on how colonial paper-practices intersected with other more immaterial and mobile circuits of knowledge and information spread over the town and country, and how such paper-governance was fed, for example, by spatial geographies of paper supply and printing. For the research, I combined extensive on-ground documentations of the material fabric of the buildings with archival research (governmental papers, period literature and art) in India, Bangladesh and Britain.</p
Colonial Architecture in Lahore: J. L. Kipling and the ‘Indo-saracenic’ Styles
No full textThis article provides a concise introduction to a group of British colonial buildings in Lahore that can be associated with John Lockwood Kipling (1875–93). It argues for their international recognition and protection. Kipling’s contribution to the architecture of Lahore as a teacher, curator, journalist and conservationist is summarised, along with his work as a designer of buildings, several of which have been described in recent literature as by his pupil, Bhai Ram Singh and by the civil engineers Ganga Ram and Rai Bahadur Kanhaiya Lal. While concern spreads at the threat posed by new public transport infrastructure to Lahore’s Mughal shrines, temples and gardens this article encourages appreciation of its Victorian and Edwardian buildings, in terms of their innovative design, historic associations, rarity, settings and coherency as a group.</p
Religion as Conceptual Scaffolding for Architecture
No full textReligion and Architecture have a long and intimately intertwined relationship in virtually all cultural histories. Through a wide-ranging discussion centring on India and its global diaspora, this chapter considers some of the many ways in which religion continues to be invested in architecture in the world today, and vice versa, broadening and deepening understanding of how religion is literally ‘placed’ in contemporary life. Architecture, we conclude, sustains at least a part of the project that religion pursued more dominantly and directly, with the aid of architecture, in other times; it constructs and articulates space, both physical and social, as a medium in which individuals and collectives may engage and cohere, and through which the self and its relationship to greater wholes or entities may be defined and realised.</p
As world weighs lives against economy in face of coronavirus crisis, possible scenarios for the future that awaits us
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Photo Essay
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Excavated from the earth – hidden and formed over millennia under the soil through its slow cooling and underground turmoil – in this ancient processes of temperature, pressure, and upheaval of the ground the granite were formed.
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Inclusive participation, self-governance, and sustainability: Current challenges and opportunities for women in leadership of communal irrigation systems
No full textGenuine inclusive participation in the self-governance of communal irrigation systems remains a challenge. This article analyses the mechanisms of participation in irrigation water users’ associations (WUAs) with focus on women as leaders of those organizations by drawing on cases from a comparative, multicase mixed-method study in Ethiopia and Argentina. After having being a topic for decades in gender and development debates, in many irrigated areas of the world, WUAs continue to be male dominated at all levels, especially in influential positions. Findings in this article suggest that despite large socio-economic and cultural differences, the current water management systems in both research locations reinforce problems of unequal gender participation; women have more obstacles and constraints in establishing equal access in membership, participation, and decision making in irrigation management. The lack of inclusive participation and the low representation of women in leadership roles lead to WUAs being poorly rooted in their community of users. Incomplete social rootedness of WUAs jeopardizes their effectiveness and equality in water management and, as a result, affects long-term sustainability. Through analysis of empirical data of communal small-scale irrigation systems in both countries, the article discusses who participates, how and why they participate, and the reasons for low numbers of women in leadership roles within the WUAs. Finally, the article reflects on possible enabling conditions that could foster inclusive participation, increase the quantity and capacity of women in management and leadership roles, and the benefits this may bring to sustainable irrigation systems.</p
Remembering genocide in the diaspora: Place and materiality in the commemoration of atrocities in Rwanda and Sri Lanka
No full textThe pain of war and genocide is often very physical and place-based. At the same time, displacement compels many of those who lost their loved ones to remember them and their homeland’s violent past from afar. This article explores the territoriality and materiality of diaspora remembrance by looking at diaspora initiatives to remember victims of genocide and war in Rwanda and Sri Lanka. In Brussels, a memory conflict between supporters and critics of the Rwandan government is played out around a small monument. In rural United Kingdom, an envisioned memorial park to Tamils martyred in the struggle for independence illustrates how memorial spaces in the diaspora challenge official homeland state narratives of the past and carry meaning as a symbolic land for Tamils. Initiatives to plant trees, name streets and throw flowers on a river provide additional examples of how diaspora actors strive to anchor memory of atrocities physically and territorially. The article suggests that materiality and spatiality of memorialization takes on different meanings in a diasporic context, as initially ‘meaningless’ places are turned into self-referential sites for remembrance, and the establishment of more permanent memorial structures can form part of home-making processes in the country of settlement.</p
Epic and vernacular production in Tomar Gwalior in the fifteenth century
No full textThe development of literature in the vernacular in fifteenth-century Gwalior has been attributed to its local rulers’ intentionality at that time. The patronage of the Tomars, a Rajput dynasty, for retellings of the epics in Classical Hindi has been ascribed to a reaction to ‘Muslim’ sovereignty and to a desire to ascertain their ‘son of the soil’ credentials. This paper complicates this commonplace reduction of the motives of patronage, and opens up the study of the complex contemporaneous environment, where other forms of literature were being produced as well. To better situate the emergence of Classical Hindi, this paper presents a contextualized overview of the literary production of two other prominent communities, besides the Hindu Tomar court, namely that of the Jain merchants, and of the Sufis catering to the military garrison. The study of these multiple patrons and audiences suggests that the impetus of vernacularization is not to be reduced to a single court, but emerged from complex interactions between different milieus and extended networks of circulation.</p
Improved indoor environment through optimised ventilator and furniture positioning: A case of slum rehabilitation housing, Mumbai, India
No full textThis study optimized the ventilator and furniture location of a tenement unit in a low-income urban habitat to obtain maximum experiential indoor environmental quality (e-IEQ) over the breathing zone. Hypothetical interior layouts using a combination of the two design parameters of ventilator location and bed position were generated for optimizing the design layout. This layout could promote maximum indoor airflow and minimum indoor air temperature and contaminant concentration. In this study, an improved indoor environment is hypothesized to be attainable through improved natural ventilation and thermal performance in the occupied zones. A sequential methodology involving “parametric design modeling–computational simulation–multiobjective optimization–multicriteria decision making”-based framework was selected. Results exhibited that the currently designed tenement unit had a poor indoor environment, whereas the hypothesized iterated layout “optimized design layout, scenario 3 (ODL 3)” derived from the optimization and decision-making algorithm performed effectively in providing e-IEQ. An increase in experiential indoor air velocity by 0.2 m/s and a decrease in temperature by 2 °C were observed over the monitoring point in the ODL 3 considering the existing scenario. Therefore, this study can find a way toward the development of sustainable habitat design guidelines under upcoming slum redevelopment policies across the nation.</p