Introduction: Architecture as a Form of Knowledge

Drawing from histories of art, urbanism, landscape, infrastructure, and media, this themed section pushes architecture beyond its aesthetics and the technologies that constitute it and underlines its revelatory agency: its capacity to draw arrows to the past and, from there, the future.¹ The essays collected here conceptualize "South Asia" and "architecture" broadly and inclusively, using modern histories and perspectives from the subcontinent to interrogate architecture as a form of knowledge. For these articles, architecture is an analytic that can formulate understanding and meaning by helping capture and narrate conditions of the past. Through readings of the designed, the built, the structured, the preserved, the human, and the nonhuman, they articulate and redefine the primary source. They are inspired by various disciplines but do not fully embrace them; they draw from a wide range of discourses, events, and things. They understand architecture as more than bundles of authorial intent or technical complexity, as more than artifact or instrument. Instead, they take the architectural as a central concept and as a subject of historiography and methodology.

These investigations underscore problems of heritage and memory bound up with the architectural. As a consequence, their stakes lie in part in the inclusions, exclusions, and forms of significance experienced by scholars situated externally yet moving within and across South Asia's normative conceptual and material borders. The authors marshal concerns with authenticity and authority related to history and heritage—as enacted, regulated, or represented not by states but, rather, through architectural interventions or interpretations. These provincialize the nation-state as an epistemic framework. They eschew the normalization of capitalistic, colonial, militaristic, and patriarchal practices embedded in conventional global practice—especially in the professional, technical, and commercial spaces that drive inquiry into architecture as a source of knowledge and meaning. Most urgently, they capture and preserve an architectural archive from multiple perspectives, even as they analyze it. While the asymmetries and lacunae of the colonial documentary archive have been at the center of scholarly debate and produced foundational discourses on histories and anthropologies of modern South Asia, the authors in these pages argue that the architectural subject has something urgent to add, as it forges a path for histories of the subcontinent otherwise untellable and expands approaches to the study of the region.

Allowing the shared histories of this region to provide the foil, the poignancy of this collection lies in a bordered world in which South Asia has been further fractured immeasurably and irrevocably in ways we cannot yet say by the emergency response to COVID-19 and its ramifications in governments, universities, and public and cultural lives. One view on regional scholarship and its local networks of support is that scholars in the North must not only support "scholars in these other places," but also put serious effort into documenting the pressures faced by "our colleagues from universities or research institutions in these regions."² These politics are worth renewed focus, and the articles in this themed section foreground them by attempting to capture narratives of modern heritage and architectural memory, even as cultural workers on the ground fight to preserve and keep from crumbling many environments, works, and spatial practices under siege by forces of erasure—from urbanization to war to targeted destruction by authorities—often representing new forms of colonization.

These politics, across the nations, the diaspora, and the imaginaries of South Asia, comport with the material fabric of a space that has been ever urbanizing, whose built world has been chronologically and iconographically layered, creating a modernity of spatially and temporally hybrid environments. To think with that materiality, what it holds and erases, is to see histories shared across geopolitical borders and to understand that the nation-state, like the colony, is the anomaly, the intruder. Drawing knowledge from the architectural in this way poses the stakes of these shared histories in terms of collectivity and solidarity. In concert with one of the articles, which argues that South Asia is "a collective that, although heterodox in terms of traditions, languages and religions, is connected through shared histories of trade, empire, and colonialism," the articles together supersede...