IIndigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism (review)

During Europe's colonial expansion, modernity, connoting progress, was the self-defined condition of Western societies positioned in contrast to non Western societies cast as "traditional" and circumscribed, conversely, as unchanging and decaying. Underscoring the culturally constructed nature of this oversimplified binary, Jyoti Hosagrahar looks at its instrumental use by the British to justify their expansion and subjugation in the Indian subcontinent as cultural and technological reforms. In this study, the author attempts to break the hierarchy implied in such a conceptual framework by redefining modernity in terms of the global processes of its implementation and reception during colonial expansion, whereby all modernities, West and East, are equally valid as "indigenous" interpretations of a particular cultural ideal. Her text focuses on -Delhi's extensive urban changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when its landscape, as a former Islamic stronghold, was consciously modified to fit a new role as the capital city of British imperial rule in India.

Hosagrahar's study emerges out of a school of writing on postcolonial architecture that questions the teleological narrative framework, set in place by colonial authors, which traces a linear trajectory of change from precolonial and so-called traditional forms to "modern" colonial solutions. In this framework, change and advancement in non-Western societies may only be identified in the mimicry of Western forms and technology, which, as Hosagrahar states, restricts those built environments to a permanent condition of being inadequately modern. Her book demonstrates that colonial development projects in Delhi did not trigger an overall formal and spatial transformation, but caused incomplete, uneven, and unintended changes in the urban spaces and society.

Delhi provides a strong case for Hosagrahar's study of colonial modernity, as it had fit European perceptions of a "picturesque" oriental city and was then meticulously altered under British rule toward their ideals of progress. The five chapters that follow the introduction take up public reforms in city planning, sanitation, and housing introduced between the 1857 mutiny, which saw the beginnings of British imperial rule, and 1947, when India gained its independence. The first of these chapters, chapter 2, focuses on the impact of colonial patronage in the built environment of haveli (elite mansions in pre-colonial times), and the next four chapters engage with different public projects highlighting the intersection among the planned ideals of the new ruling power, their uneven implementation, and everyday negotiations in Delhi's streets and bazaars.

In the chapter on haveli, Hosagrahar highlights the spatial transformations in these upper-class dwellings in a society of changing meanings, with new social hierarchies reflecting British loyalties and elite living defined by Western standards. Precolonial haveli symbolized nodes of aristocratic power in the city's landscape where individual noblemen controlled vast self-sufficient domestic spaces like small territories. The form, spatial organization, and uses of haveli were determined by contemporary notions of upper-class living and other socioeconomic and gendered hierarchies, which were disrupted, but not completely transformed, as Hosagrahar reports, with British interventions in the city. Her use of historic travelogues, maps, and plans visually translate the spatial transformations that took place with the gradual relocation of power from within the walled city (which was the urban core during Mogul rule) to its outskirts and with the emergence of a new indigenous elite whose life-styles aspired toward European ways. She uses contemporary Urdu literature to discuss the impact of these changes from the viewpoint of haveli residents and demonstrates how, with the new elite living in bungalows, haveli became unsustainable by a now powerless aristocratic class, resulting in their fragmentation into warehouses, squatter settlements, and compact houses.

Hosagrahar's methodology opens up studies in Indian architecture to interesting directions in urban consumption and uses of built spaces. Her text reveals complex negotiations, diverse attitudes, and multiple aspirations in Delhi's urban population and underscores the nonpassivity of colonized societies. The arguments that she poses in the haveli chapter successfully interrogate the fundamental traditional/modern binary that sits at the core of...