‘Historicize and Problematize’

The inaugural conference of ‘The State of Architecture’ exhibition (currently on at the NGMA, Mumbai, curated by Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta) called ‘The State of the Profession’ achieved the objective set out by Kaiwan Mehta in his opening remarks: ‘Historicize and Problematize’. In doing so several affirmative readings were possible about the state of architecture in India today. The conference covered the profession, practice, education, criticism and institutions. Here are some larger impressions that remained with me:

The profession of architecture, if seen as a collective set of ideals, is difficult to pin down. At one level this is the consequence of the diversity of practice that is now increasingly prevalent. Yet at another, this difficulty may be attributed to the lack of ‘communities of judgment’, to use an evocative phrase by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who gave the conference’s keynote address, among architects in the country. Looking towards ‘institutional’ definitions does not seem to help, as institutions too, in a sense are ensconced in silos of their own making. 

The choices made by several architects who spoke at the conference present (rather than represent) the ‘problematization’ of the profession and the fuzzy presence of the professional. This conference brought together such professionals whose practices are essentially reflexive, rather than located in the self-confident comfort zone of the mainstream. For what it is worth, this too can be attributed to the impotence of regulatory mechanisms or the community’s own unwillingness to introspect as a collective. Questions were raised, but it will be some time before definite readings are possible.

The practice of architecture in India, since the millennium, seems to have grown richer by moving outside of the mainstream. It is not the diversity of practices that are the most revelatory (although that is important) but the diversity within individual practice. The embracing of multiple disciplines, media, collaborations and muses have resulted in a variety of ‘messy practices’, reflecting the ‘punctuated chaos’ (to quote Bill Gates) that we find ourselves in currently. This can only be a good thing. The feedback loop between thinking and doing gushes like a cataract in some practices. In many cases, these practices cater to the same patrons as that of the mainstream, indicating a more enlightened patronage and a greater sense of collegiality and synthesis. 

On the other hand some practices, co-create with end users, bringing themselves in direct contact with the communities they design for, even searching out communities not catered to by architects so far. Several practices reach out to the marginalized- slum inhabitants, those living in tribal or rural areas located far away from transport streams. These architects subsume their expressions into those of their constituents, and even encourage the users to express themselves in the built form. There is an embedded-ness of the crafts-person in the design process. This does hark back to the pre-modernist practices in the country before technology got valorized at the expense of the indigenous crafts tradition.

The state of architectural education is particularly problematic. It should have been an article of faith that schools of architecture were the laboratories that informed architectural practice. This does not seem to be happening. Education is overwhelmed by numbers. One of the unique features of this exhibition is the location of architecture within the larger eco-system of education, criticism, location and institutions. What emerges is that from 2015 onward, more than 25,000 students will graduate from the 450 odd architecture schools in the country. This is a number greater than the number of practicing architects in the country. This begs the question- who are the teachers, and what is the nature of learning in these many schools? How may quality or innovation or farsightedness be possible in this proliferation? 

Curricula too, are largely prescriptive, where under the rubric of a single university, may cater to the lowest common denominator. The roles of both students and teachers of architecture have to be re-examined in the light of fast and easily available information. The top down didactic and ‘expert’ supervisory approaches seem to have lost their relevance. The teacher has to be reimagined as an ongoing learner and co-create with the student. There are few stand-alone schools in this country who may chart their own course. A clear call was made in the conference for a syllabus that was more flexible and less prescriptive, less of a cookie-cutter, one size fits all templates. Here, the diversity of practices can provide role models, and be muse to architectural education rather than the other way around.

The role of institutions that oversee the profession was perhaps the most problematic. The governing institutions mandated to look after the interest of architects and to regulate practices and provide codes of conduct under which practices could flourish seemed to present a monocular gaze, more at ease with the mainstream sense of the profession. Laboring under self-perpetuating myths of their own presence, they presented a stance of protectionism and definition. The current positions of institutions comes across as largely reactionary- expressing fears of encroachment by ‘others’- by engineers, by ‘non-architects’ of various stripes, by foreign firms, by project managers. In the affirmative universe of collaboration and multi-disciplinarity they seem to write themselves out by focusing too much on who should be an architect and who should not. 

While it was readily accepted in the conference that architects as a whole in the county influence a relatively small amount of actual building, the vast majority of building still happens outside the pale of institutional memberships. The institutions themselves did not seem to accommodate this reality in a worldview largely oriented towards building memberships and corpuses.

In both the exhibition and the conference, the state of criticism in the country was historicized perhaps for the first time . Architectural writing and critical self-examination is only now emerging, and its influence is far from clear. More books on Indian architecture are being written, but not enough on contemporary concerns and challenges. Like reflexive practices, we need more of reflexive criticism whether in books or journals. Journals such as that of the Indian Institute of Architects have excellent archival value, particularly from its early decades, but do not provide critical writing. Other magazines that have emerged since the turn of the century largely valorize and commemorate the boutique practices and showcase architects in their very limited roles as lifestyle designers. 

There is also a dearth of academic writing on architecture because of the absence of peer-reviewed journals on architecture. In the last couple of years some journals have been established but their value shall only be seen in their sustainability.

If one had to rank the various states of architecture in India based on the deliberations and the initial viewing of the exhibition, the practices in constant dialogue with themselves and their larger environment are the most encouraging. The profession is being redefined by these practices and has a potential to influence education and criticism. There have to have a larger presence on the cultural consciousness of the country for lasting value, much beyond the confines of this conference. Architectural journalism still has to take off to meet these practices half-way and become the critical carriers of potential.  Architectural education has to resume its role as producer of ideas and alternatives that can be fructified in practice. The institutions that govern architecture need deep self-examination as to their present and future relevance.

One issue undiscussed in most part was the location of the Indian architect in a stage larger than the local. Perhaps the valedictory conference that focuses on architecture in South Asia will pick up the gauntlet.

Without the benefit of hindsight- In conversation with Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta

First published in Domus India 46 December 2015

Reproduced with kind permission of the editor

Without the benefit of hindsight

In conversation with Rahul Mehrotra, Ranjit Hoskote and Kaiwan Mehta

Mustansir Dalvi

Looking back to the time architectural practices first began to proliferate in India, one sees that they always operated within an ecosystem of practice, academia and association. We can trace this to the 1930’s, when the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA) was set up, which in turn emerged from the alumni of the Bombay School of Art. Teachers at the school were the most prolific practitioners in the country, and students made the easy transition from learning, to apprenticeship, to setting up their own practices. Even patrons, largely non-state (in the penultimate decades before independence) aligned themselves with the architects in a collegial association. The Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects and their annual lectures became the mouthpieces of collective praxis, as the many presidential speeches show. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, knowledge flowed centripetally.

In the years after independence, these bonds became looser as the nation-state became the chief patron. While private wealth and industry provided steady work for architects all over the country, the IIA still continued to remain the platform of discourse and dissemination- an internal professional rumination, largely distanced from changing politics and culture in the country, especially from the seventies onwards. While students of architecture did briefly take political stances during the Emergency, practice remained unaffected.

By the end of the eighties, with the rise of the patron as aspirant or speculator, and, a few years later with the effects of liberalization made flesh, the erstwhile associations started to crumble, the ecosystem became unstable, and in some ways unsustainable. Architectural practices became myriad and diffuse, working centrifugally, aligning into various smaller constellations. The influence of the IIA waned, while the Council of Architecture, mandated to look after the concerns of practice in the early seventies through an Act of Parliament, by and large, came to focus on monitoring architectural education that had, by the turn of the millennium, boomed with colleges springing up in all parts of the country.

Education too, dispersed in the wake of overarching Modernism’s eclipse and the acceptance of pluralism fuelled both by the rise of critical theoretical positions in architecture as well as a dilution of the rigor that functionalism once imposed on its practitioners. Critical discussions on Indian architecture have since been restricted to a few conferences and the odd polemic in architecture magazines (which also proliferated since the eighties, but have mainly been showpieces of architecture for the rich and famous). Books on Indian architecture, when concentrating on the contemporary are in the form of monographs, vanity publications or, when serious, about urban change.  Vistara, the exhibition, in 1984 was comprehensive, but an overview of Indian architecture. Three decades on, there has been no serious review of the state of the architectural profession in India.

That is what the exhibition ‘State of Architecture’ (SOA) seeks to redress. Scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and other associated venues the SOA exhibition will be open to the public for around three months and will take a comprehensive look at our architectural present. The curators of this challenging endeavor are Rahul Mehrotra- architect, academic, author and researcher, professor at Harvard and one of the foremost architectural practitioners (RMA Architects) in the country; Ranjit Hoskote- cultural theorist, art critic, curator and author and Kaiwan Mehta- the editor of these very pages, of Domus India, also an author, academic and urban theorist. As the exhibition reaches its final stages of preparation, the curators had a free-wheeling conversation with Mustansir Dalvi about the exhibition, its objectives and the larger state of architecture; its practice and production, in retrospect and in prognosis; covering many issues from praxis to patronage, from theoretical positions to political stances.

 

DALVI:

Why is this the right time to take stock of the state of architecture in India today?

MEHROTRA:

For several important reasons:

The first is clearly to correct or compensate for the absolute silence in the discussion of architecture in the last decade or two. For good reason, our discussions and our focus have been on urban questions, or at least we have approached our discussion about architecture through the lens of the city.

Further, the architecture that has been celebrated in India since the liberalization of our economy has been the ‘architecture of indulgence’- weekend homes, restaurants, resorts and corporate offices; and, as an extension of this limited spectrum of what is celebrated, the discussion is focused on material, craft, and texture in an almost fetishistic manner. While this is productive in its own way – it removes the perception of the usefulness of architecture away from the public. All such programs that, while they are crucial crucibles for architectural innovation, touch a very small fragment of our population.

Lastly, in India, the State has more or less given up the responsibility of projecting an ‘idea of India’ through the built and physical environment as it had done in the post- independence era when several state capitals, government and educational campuses were built across the country. Today the major state-directed projects are highways, flyovers, airports, telecommunications networks and electricity grids which connect urban centers but don’t contribute to determining or guiding their physical structure. The State is now obsessed with a statistical architecture – GDP, etc. So the idea of this exhibition, through focusing on public architecture is to bring this issue into focus and question the State’s role as patron for architecture, or more broadly the role of the architect in contemporary India society.

DALVI:

Do you project the exhibition as a historical unfolding or a critical deconstruction of Indian architecture?

MEHROTRA:

The exhibition is interestingly both a historic unfolding as well as critical deconstruction - a productive hybrid, which we believe, results from multiple curatorial hands. 

MEHTA:

The exhibition should be imagined as a diagram of the curatorial team’s own experiences as practioners, critics and theorists - at one point it emphasizes memory and history, but on the other it also makes tangible and hopefully discernable the living chaos of the present. We are at the threshold of classifying and clarifying the chaos that maybe accorded to the present state of architectural manifestations and, rather than a rush to classification, it is important to understand what the presence of chaos or multiplicity means. Naturally this creates an ambiguity in terms of our roles and our instrumentality as designers and so this is a condition that’s worth interrogating productively. In that sense the exhibition shuffles between the protocols of established histories and establishing arguments in light of dramatic historical shifts and the need for newer criteria or lenses of analysis.

The architect as a professional figure will also be drawn out in the exhibition and the events that surround the show, as against only talking about architecture and buildings, per se. The architect as individual needs to be recovered, not as a hero or a socialite, but as a technocrat, a social being, a political entity, a professional contributor and a public intellectual.

DALVI:

Could you briefly take us through the three parts of the exhibition you have envisaged- ‘the State of the Profession’, ‘Practices and Processes’ and ‘Projections and Speculations’.

MEHROTRA:

The first section, ‘The State of the Profession’ will present data on the profession all the way from education, to the media’s representation of the profession to issues that face practioners today.

The second section is an historic overview sliced by three milestones: the first- Independence, the second- the Emergency and the third- economic liberalization. We believe these three moments had a fundamental bearings on the DNA of the profession and a clear sway in its agenda, from one of national identity construction to much more of a regional obsession starting in the 1990s.

The third section is focused on the present generation of practioners – broadly under 50 years of age. In this section we have curated approximately 80 projects that we think signal the contemporary issues as well as aspiration of society in India, but more importantly also register the talent of an emerging generation of practioners in India.

DALVI:

What is the more significant, in your opinion- the product or the praxis?

MEHROTRA:

Clearly, what is more critical is the praxis. The modes of engagement and the forms of patronage that support these different models of architectural practice are thus going to be privileged in this exhibition. The three parts we have envisaged will take the viewer through both a historical perspective as well as confront them with the present state of the profession, while in terms of the pure data what the present generations of practioners are producing.

DALVI:

Do think that the architect today has a more muted voice and lesser agency than in the last century? To extend this line of thought- is architecture in the county driven more by the patron than the architect?

MEHROTRA:

Architecture is largely being driven by patrons and the voice of the architect, at least as we see it, is muted – far too muted, sadly so. Since the liberalization of our economy, architects are pandering to Capital in unprecedented ways – creating what we could call the Architecture of Impatient Capital.

Capital on account of its impatience creates architecture that is often whimsical, most often vendor driven, for ease of speed of construction, with new roles emerging for architects who now interface with technology but also exchange and access information in a renewed relationship, sometimes productively and often in a subservient way. This then, by extension, is a critical issue for practioners – the ideological stance of most patrons, which is largely based on and invested in Capitalisms.

DALVI:

Twenty-five years after the processes of liberalization commenced in the country, the State has loosened its stranglehold on the production of infrastructure, preferring to outsource that which it once mandated to the entrepreneur/speculator, transforming, in the process, the consumer from occupant to aspirant.

MEHROTRA:

Interestingly, in today’s world no ideological stance can be singular or clear. Through the last 25 years we have the simultaneous experience of transitioning out of socialism and transitioning, simultaneously into capitalism (or some form of it). Thus there have been other patrons, trusts, faith-based organizations, NGOs and civil society more broadly that has also supported architecture and recognized its role in the well-being of society. We hope we can celebrate this other half of architectural production in India that is, equally or if not in greater measure, altering and making the ‘new landscape’.

If the developer is playing a role in the building of our architectural physical fabric, then we will have to see where and how we can engage with that set of players. Real-estate is as much about planning, policy, and culture as much as it is economic and finance - this reality has to be elaborated, researched and explained, while as a profession we have to negotiate these forces for the larger good of our built and natural environments.

Architectural education has a massive role to play in articulating and negotiating these conditions. Building appropriate capacity and training a generation in the various modes of engagement with practice, etc. But the media more generally must also make this more central to its imagination and agenda. We don’t see enough of this discussion in the mainstream media in these critical terms.

DALVI:

The last significant exhibition on architecture in India took place in 1986. Vistara was part of the Festival of India, and brought new paradigms and a new vocabulary into the architectural mainstream.

MEHTA:

Yes, no doubt Vistara is important - it is a landmark, it is iconic, and the more we view it with historical distance it emerges as a turning point. This event has been visited at least at 3 points in the pages of Domus India. The other exhibition designed and curated for the Festivals of India, curated by Raj Rewal in 1985 called ‘Architecture in India’ was also very important.

DALVI:

Do you think that Vistara has cast a long shadow (particularly on the SOA) or was that exhibition a product of its time?

MEHTA:

We actually think that SOA will compliment what the previous exhibition did in a productive way by actually narrowing the lens to the time since independence where these exhibitions more or less stopped. In fact, Vistara was also trying deal with the confusions of its time, or dealing with the predictions of confusion in the immediate decades to come- it established concepts and narratives as a way of talking about architecture for India. Having recently revisited some archival photographs of the exhibition, it is also clear that Vistara was a manifestation of anxieties and ideas that many architects were concerned with- in some way a community of architects contributed to the exhibition, in spirit. The exhibition was possibly a manifestation of many collectively discussed issues.

MEHROTRA:

Vistara was very much an exhibition of its time. One could say it was the last significant event in the history of architectural discourse in India that attempted, in an extremely successful way, to construct a meta-narrative about and Architecture for India, a pan-Indian identity construction. The State of architecture (SOA) is about Architecture in India not for India as an instrument of national identity construction. SOA, we believe will signal this shift and thus it consciously takes the moment of nation statehood as a starting point but unfolds its narrative to show how these deconstructs over the last few decades.

Of significance is also the fact that Vistara was a state-sponsored show as part of the Government of India’s exhibition for the Festivals of India held between 1983 and 1986.This was a nation attempting to reclaim its glory and traditions after the devastation of its image through the period of the Emergency. These exhibitions intended to show case the deep traditions of India to the world outside and presented a narrative of India’s rich architectural traditions. SOA on the other hand is clearly about internal introspection and reflection. It is a critical stocktaking of the role of the architect and architecture in India from, in a sense, within the profession. We hope it will be the first of a series of events over the next few years to interrogate the State of Architecture and the profession in India.

DALVI:

What is the state of architecture in India today? Does the exhibition offer us tools by which we can appreciate or assess contemporary Indian architecture?

MEHTA:

The precise problem is that architecture is floating in murky waters, that is indeed its 'state'- fluid and ambiguous!

From a point in the early twentieth century when architects fought to stand apart from engineers, and projected themselves as designers and thinkers, participating in the cultural landscape of society, today architecture has slipped into modes of luxury or vanity commodity - pretty houses and rich interiors! Today architects are introduced as lifestyle-producers - handmaidens to a demand for style and fancy living! This condition was the urge behind setting up tents whenever and wherever possible to discuss architecture. Lack of valuable and critical discussions on architecture and the simultaneous pressure on urban development resulted in discussing architecture as an aspect of urban studies or regional/rural studies (often as the counter-story) to perhaps symbolically embrace the social sciences and their humanizing effects.

But then, what does it mean to bring architecture back into focus - and how would we study this object-space which it is, as well as occupies? In framing programming at Arbour: Research Initiatives in Architecture or the editorial intentions within Domus India, one struggled on experiments to develop the tools and system of understanding, analyzing, and discussing architecture, and whenever necessary, to understand architecture in India!

DALVI:

Do these struggles imply that we may be chronologically too close to making useful readings?

MEHTA:

It is now important that we stand within today and talk about today!

We have to discuss our times as our experiences of political realities in everyday life - and here we draw in architecture, as one of the primary modes in which everyday life is lived and experienced. The production and consumption of architecture, as function or symbol, it is an everyday lived reality. The task is then to produce tools that will understand architecture as a material reality as much as it is a cultural topography. So in fact to ask questions of 'today' while we occupy 'today' - may indeed be the important position to adopt - to asses, and make useful readings - and make architecture realize what it is, what it has come to be, what it could potentially be, what it has missed or lost, and where can it (maybe) recover!

MEHROTRA:

Here is a counter question to your question – how do we even decide when is a good time?

We don’t believe any time is right but different distances from the present give you different readings. This is also why we have consciously constructed a curatorial team that brings different pulses to our readings – one of an art critic, architectural critic as well as a practioner. We bring different lenses to view the trajectory of architecture in India and our perspectives will offer different readings of time and distance. Each of these lenses is inherently better equipped for different distances!

Besides this multiplicity of curatorial lenses, we believe the structure of the exhibition move from an objectivity of presentation in the first section to a subjectivities reading or curatorial reading in the third section. The second section is a bridge from where we can look at the past with some distance.

As a generation passes it becomes in some ways easier to read the immediate past, while in other ways harder because even for the immediate past we do not have an adequate culture to archive, capture and reflect on the production of architecture. So the chronological proximity can be used in both ways- to construct robust links and a sense of the continuity with the past but also to interrogate it with the ambiguity that the proximity to reality allows us.

The exhibition will hopefully invite a discussion through provocative questions that will try to clarify the ambiguity that naturally fogs our reading of the contemporary and immediate past. The many events we are organizing around the exhibition are as critical as the exhibition itself – in fact they are intended to deconstruct the artifact of the exhibition so that more nuanced readings emerge for the profession as a whole!

DALVI:

What is the position of contemporary Indian architecture in the larger discourse of nation building? In the first few decades after independence there seemed to be a synchronicity between the aims of the architects and that of the fledgling nation state. Even private patronage seemed to follow a similar mindset. Now in the liberalized present, there seems to be a greater priority on the rights of individuals rather than on collective responsibility especially in the urban environment. How do you assess this transition?

HOSKOTE:

This transition in the nature and role of architecture in India clearly reflects the arc of political change in the country, from the primacy of the State as engine of social, economic and cultural transformation in the early decades after Independence to the gradual withdrawal of the State from this dirigiste position and the emergence of private capital as the source and reference point for the formation of social values, the direction of economic policy and the texture of cultural production.

In the earlier phase, architecture was clearly aligned with the utopian, nation-building ambitions of the postcolonial State, whether the patron was the State or private enterprise. In the current phase, architecture is equally clearly aligned with the aspirations of an emergent class of financiers, speculators and investors, with the State often following this cue in any projects it commissions.

The premise of the earlier phase was the Leviathan-like delegation of decision-making by individuals and communities to the postcolonial State, which would guarantee the greater good. The premise of the current phase is the contrarian equation of individual liberty with private property, and thus with the individual quest for personal happiness, with the greater good falling by the wayside.

MEHROTRA:

There is a difference in the geographies of the location of the new patronage that has emerged. There is an explosive growth of building in the southern states of India. The traditions and cultures of building in these new geographies is very different from the contemporary building culture that had formed in what has been referred to as ' the spine of architectural awareness' stretching from Chandigarh to Goa via Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai, as well as Pondicherry which had, for other reasons, a robust architecture culture developing there even before independence. Interestingly this new form of patronage comes in a post-socialist era where the individual is at the center of the decision-making through an empowerment that is the result of capital accumulation. So this is a new form of patronage but also coming out of specific cultural and physical geographies.

DALVI:

What role does the globalized/liberalized economy play in shaping the localized/socialized urban sphere?

HOSKOTE:

The globalized economy operates through a complex circulation of global goods, services and imaginaries that are threaded through a local set of conditions: the relationship between these is parsed through a variety of modes including translation, mistranslation, reflection and refraction. The urban sphere that is thus produced is characterized by inchoate and often volatile aspirations, a pursuit of images that seem always out of reach, and also a culture that emphasizes the primacy of privatism rather than solidarities of any kind.

MEHTA: 

The last two or three decades have been important times and a period that marks a turning point in not only just the history and politics of India, but the world as well. The fall of the Berlin Wall, demolition of Babri Masjid in India, 9/11 in New York, the liberalization of economic policies in India and the shift from manufacturing to service industry. These decades have also been characterized by shifts in our cultural imaginations, aesthetic decisions, and political choices as is evident in the material world we produce and occupy.

There some wonderful trends within the profession that are becoming evident, a new set of architectural practices have emerged,  and have established a critical body of work that can be evaluated for their different ideas and theoretical perspectives. At the same time, today change occurs at an escalated pace- and to understand the present and future trajectories for the profession we need to build conversations that can facilitate this process.  A nuanced, critical, robust and rigorous discourse within the academy of architecture education and more importantly the profession - we sincerely hope that SOA will be a contribution to this broader aspiration.

DALVI:

Can you take a brief overview on the quality of architectural writing today?

MEHTA:

Writing on architecture is in an abysmal state! But this statement does not take us far. Lack of writing indicates our lack of critical interest in architecture as a professional community, as a culture (national or otherwise).

To theorize a subject for a field is to indeed appreciate its value and existence beyond its mere need-to-be; and the discussions on architecture have happily slipped into rhetorics of regionalism or climate, hate-glass or love-brick and stone, outdated notes on power and architecture - in fact, they seem to be living in a time-warp! The world changed drastically and rapidly in the 1990s - and we could not as an architectural profession keep pace with it - unable to understand what had hit us. Rather than developing newer languages and idioms, and tools to asses and read the new architectural turns, we often resorted to a denial of the shape of things, to a rhetoric of rejection, and misplaced nostalgia.

Politics has become ever more complex, and architects from once being agents of social and aesthetic revolutions, now maintain a technocratic attitude, where you fine-tune your skills, but avoid addressing the very environment (social and cultural) that you ironically depend on for your daily bread and butter! Until we address the conditions of our reality, writing will not be effective or incisive - because the drive to write, argue, shape/unshape will be missing! To write is to create a world that furthers the meaning and role of architecture in a society. It should not be imagined as a skill-task of decoding some hidden meaning in an existing building; it is not supplementary to architecture, or to deliver formulas for a 'better' design - but to enlarge the existing space and terrain of architecture productively.

DALVI:

Are there contemporary texts that can potentially become canonical in the future? Does the SOA exhibition reflect upon architecture as a discourse?

MEHTA:

I am not sure if there are particular iconic essays - if we decide to identify some, I am sure we will find them - but I would prefer to say there is a good enough cluster of texts. One has also in the Domus experience got more interested in exploring the forms of interviews and discussions, parallel to the essay format - as that leads to a nurturing of many voices and many experiences - the practitioner and the theorist both are heard.

The SOA exhibition is an attempt to generate/develop the terrain and landscape to engage with architecture - to produce accounts in a way, even at the cost of repeating descriptions, to address what exists, to generate the network of dots, a set of thought-images which will prepare us for a thesis. The final thesis is the excuse to develop this density of thoughts - finely shaped clusters that will help us understand fragments that shape a history.

MEHROTRA:

Yes, of course, some of the contemporary texts on architecture have the potential to become canonical text. These texts capture the conflicts and conditions of an era today of amazing transformation and reflections of the emergent condition will become the framework for any theoretical discourse in the future. Theory, after all, emanates from insightful reflection of the conditions on the ground.

I think the quality of writing that we see today is extremely good but there is just not enough of it! There is such a dearth of writing that the few pieces being produced today will be precious records of the contemporary condition. Contemporary writing also represent the conflicts and struggles of the first couple of generations of architects in post-colonial India – which itself holds the potential to be a representation of a wider global churning. SOA will capture the state of writing and the broader discourse on architecture. In fact this is one of the core agendas of the show and its related events.

DALVI:

Is the architecture of India today reconciled with its many pasts? As an ideological position, the early Modernists could willfully reject history in the course of charting architectural futures. However, considering that a lot of buildings are part of brownfield developments, often in the heart of some of our ageing cities, what is the possible positions contemporary architecture should take about precedents and contexts?

MEHTA:

Both positions are a problem - excessive sensitivity to a past or a denial/rejection of it - and that somewhere is our situation today, to be oscillating between two positions. Some of the interpretations of the past have also been problematic - where often past is reduced to a monolithic imagination or simply a set of images, to be cut-and-pasted. To the credit of many architects - some in the generation that established studios in the 1970s as well as the younger ones establishing studios between 1980-1990s there has been an expression of this dilemma - where do I address the present time and its own material reality, while also caring about a history and heritage we grow up to respect; at times this has been a dilemma and it has been evident in the architecture, at times it is purposeful expression of that struggle.

The need is to struggle in these times and see what languages of architecture will work for us today, and suit or challenge our political and functional existences. Some of the younger practices are indeed doing that - they may not be able to express that all points in time - but they are intuitively struggling with the present.

There is also the shameless activity of building - which is more the real-estate end of architecture - where you binge on building and construction, where architecture is used to suit greed and some promoted idea of aspirations. Architecture in this realm can only be countered when some well-meaning and ethically-sound architects will enter this sphere of real-estate architecture, and try to push the boundaries from within these specific practices. On the other hand, one will have to work on the idea of public awareness regarding architecture. There is no discussion on architecture in non-professional forums, or the popular media; this is a big lacunae! Architecture is the most public of all arts - it sits in your face - it has a strong public presence in everyday living space - but there is no discussion on architecture in the public sphere.

DALVI:

Is Indian architecture today political? Has it ever been political? Does this exhibition have an ideological standpoint?

HOSKOTE:

Indian architecture certainly articulated a politics of rupture and compelling forward movement in its heroic Modernist phase, when it presented itself as a force that would clear away the residues of tradition and the compromises of the colonial period, and would, both literally and figuratively, build a future for the nation-state that had no precedent in what went before. Even when they used motifs and devices, or redeployed typologies from the legacies of previous times, Habib Rahman, Achyut Kanvinde B V Doshi, Charles Correa and Raj Rewal embodied this spirit in their early work. And when some members of this generation circled back to the retrieval of the embedded wisdom of regional building, architectural and visionary lineages, as they did during the 1980s, that was a political gesture as well– a gesture articulating a politics of critical retrieval.

The State of Architecture exhibition does not proceed from an emphatic ideological premise, but it does bear witness to some of these shifts and transitions. It also, in its choice of contemporary practices and projects, prefers to focus on work that is socially oriented, is informed by the relationship between architecture and other discourses such as conservation and ecological awareness, and in other ways explores manifestations beyond what is possible in a developer-driven domain.

MEHTA:

This is indeed a tricky subject- on the face of it there clearly is a lack of political engagement that contemporary architecture has today. Having said that, in many architectural projects today, one can feel the struggle some architects are going through with this divorce of form, design, and politics.

What we need is not to mourn this divorce but to try and figure out what is the current engagement that form and design have with everyday life- politics and culture. There are many formulaic references established about people and public life, living and working, and often architects are simply reusing them again and again. These are no more than rhetoric. However in some cases there are new adjustments being made, to deal with the political and cultural negotiations of life in India now. It is probably more writing, more studies that will make this new forms of anxiety clear and understandable.

DALVI:

Is it still relevant to believe, as the Modernists once did, that good architecture will inevitably lead to good society?

HOSKOTE:

All the Modernists who believed that good architecture– or noble art– would inevitably lead to a good society have come to grief.

Mondrian believed that his rectilinear, flattened paintings offered cues to the spiritual refinement of life; mass culture has reduced them to shower curtains. Le Corbusier believed that his ideal designs would enable the citizens of tomorrow to lead lives of significance; his work was flawed from the beginning by his desire to subjugate all individual will and desire to the absolutism of the plan. There is no necessary connection between good architecture and a good society– at best, the former can be an image of the latter; it can gesture towards the latter. But the best architecture can be distorted by elites bent on exacerbating the asymmetries in society.

'The State of Architecture: Practices & Processes in India' exhibition 

opens at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai from 6 January - 20 March 2016.

The exhibition will present the nature of contemporary architecture in India within a larger historical overview since Independence. It will not only map emerging practices but also discuss the aspirations they represent and stimulate a conversation on architecture among the architectural fraternity, patrons and public at large. Embodying a spectrum of positions that characterize architectural production in India, the content is intended to be provocative and make explicit the multiple, and often simultaneously valid, streams of architectural thought and engagement that truly represents the pluralism of India.

Central Time- in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote

Portrait by Nancy Adajania, Utrecht, 2013

Central Time: in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote

In his newest book Central Time (2014) Ranjit Hoskote brings together in its one hundred poems his many, many interests and concerns as a poet, translator and cultural theorist; concerns that persist, as after-images into lines and verses of great beauty. I invited him to talk about his book and its many laminae, sediments and grain, to which he responded with cheerful alacrity. What follows is this e-exchange in which Ranjit, in complete generosity muses, informs and explicates the under-layers that led to Central Time. In some detail, he recreates the 'structural' design of this book, the directions his writing has taken since his first book of poems Zones of Assault (1991), and the influences his own life has had on his writings. In a sense, and I am very grateful for this, our e-conversation culminated in a parallel text that can be read alongside the poems themselves, revealing surprises and giving delight, enriching the experience of reading them.

A bird sits on a branch
of the fury tree:
a bird as big as India.
-‘The Burden of History’

DALVI:
Looking outwards (and inwards) from this bird that is India, I am interested in the ways you project history – is your history performative, taking on the role of curating and archiving, preserving memory, freshening it, or do you use history as a way of contesting the past, providing alternate narratives to the present?

HOSKOTE:
For many people, history becomes crystallized in the form of a collective memory, so naturalized and normalized that it serves them as an absolute guarantee of continuity. They regard it as tradition, as the inheritance of glory and injustice, and, above all, as a talisman of collective identity. In actuality, collective memory is a most malleable substance. It is a system of shifting constructs, contested values and rival narratives that changing elites seek to stabilize through ideological mechanisms from time to time. As a result, history is a not wholly reliable record, in which those elements that are sanctified by a dominant ideology are emphasized, while those it wishes to suppress are eclipsed or buried. And it is these eclipsed or buried elements that often form the most vital strands of history. We must address history critically, if we are to gain a sustaining energy from it.

To be productive, our approach to history must be a symptomatic, archaeological, re-constructive one. To engage with the past is to involve oneself in detective work. We discover the most interesting clues in the shadows and the interstices, which authoritarian histories leave disregarded or have suppressed for their potential to destabilize received wisdom. This is why I do not subscribe to the notion of a single ‘past’. Rather, we are all inheritors of multiple ‘pasts’.

DALVI:
I sense that your poetry does take a stand against history’s possible ‘burdens’. In your embracing its multiple inheritances, as you say, you deny these burdens, you shed its deterministic ballast. Like in your book ‘Confluences’, your poems bring out histories (in the plural), both those that are unseen as well as those seen in new and un-obvious ways.

HOSKOTE:
My poetry draws strongly on these lost, potential or concealed pasts – as elements of selfhood to be retrieved from amnesia; as resources for the production of a new and capacious subjectivity that does not proceed from an imagined, primordial and unified sense of itself, but instead, confidently embraces its heterogeneity, engages with difference, and imagines itself into the future. To address history, we must range through the archive of our inheritances in various states of consciousness: not only the waking consciousness conditioned by the world’s assumptions, but also the states of mind of the dreamer, the quixotic explorer, the pilgrim, the sorcerer’s apprentice, the sleepwalker.

To those who believe that tradition is a static, absolute and unchanging lineage, I would say: Tradition is always a special form of modernity. It is a picture of the past that has been created in and for the present. Let me offer just one example of this, in admittedly schematic and summary form. The foundational 18th-century art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, developed an idealized vision of classical Greece that was intended to celebrate Europe’s genesis in a period of elevated thought and aesthetic expression. In actuality, this was a projection of his own desire for a utopian point of reference to set against the disquietude and ferment of his own time. In imagining classical Greece to be the fountainhead of European civilization, ideologues drawing on Winckelmann’s account have ignored or repressed a variety of cultural and political realities that do not accord with this objective. Classical Greek temples were not pristine white; rather, they were adorned in vivid colours. The Greek alphabet drew heavily on the Phoenician, so-called Semitic, model. And Greek philosophy, far from having come down to modern Europe in an unbroken genealogy, was a gift made to Europe – which was trapped in its Dark Ages – by thinkers from the Islamic world, among them Arabs, Persians, Levantines, North Africans and Andalusians, who had embraced, interpreted, annotated and extended Greek thought. Indeed, as Hobsbawm and Ranger pointed out, tradition is continuously (re-)invented for the purposes of the present.

To me, a far more vibrant model of tradition is that of the gharana. In the spirit of the gharanas of Hindustani classical music, themselves invented as provisional group or lineage identities during the new mobilities and moments of self-assertion of the colonial period, I regard tradition as an experimental continuity, one that proceeds by disrupting itself, improvising and performing itself afresh.

DALVI:
Can you trace a trajectory in your poems from Zones of Assault (1991) to Central Time (2014)? I am interested in the themes and ideas that concern you and the forms you choose to express them.

HOSKOTE:
The question of a trajectory is always important, especially when you are committed to several domains – as of course you know, from your own multiple practices as poet, translator, architect and pedagogue. In Zones of Assault (1991), which brought together poems written in the six years preceding, my concern was to create poems that were sharp, provocative linguistic artefacts; poems that recovered resources from the deep strata of the language, the hard consonantal sound patterns of Anglo-Saxon played across the sumptuous softness of Latinate phrasing. Metal was my ideal. I wanted my poems to come across as weapons, breaking through the crust of expectation.

Between Zones and The Cartographer’s Apprentice (2000) and The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001), came my Iowa experience. I was visiting fellow and writer in residence at the celebrated International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in 1995. The roster of IWP alumni reads like a who’s who of world literature, and it is a wonderful tradition to be part of. In our own context, those of Anglophone poetry in India, Dilip Chitre, Adil Jussawalla and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, among others, are all IWP alumni. I was 26 when I arrived in Iowa City, with two books behind me, Zones of Assault and my translation of Vasant Dahake’s poems, A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992). Living in a community where literary writing was not something to be secured against the world’s demands, but was the everyday activity of practically everyone around you, was a liberating, enriching and enchanted experience. I’ve been on a number of residencies afterwards, and enjoyed them greatly and got a lot of work done there, but Iowa will always remain special. It was my first writing residency; I made friends there, gained enormously from the sense of living and working in a community of writers.

The range of writers who came through, giving talks, lectures or readings, launching books or meeting people in informal colloquies, was amazing: Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, David Lodge, Louise Glück, Mark Doty, Daniel Halpern, to name only a few. Iowa City’s key bookstore, Prairie Lights, was a dazzling platform and meeting place. And I discovered one of my favourite used book stores, Murphy Brookfield, with its erudite and always surprising collection, in Iowa City. And, of course, I assembled, re-drafted and wrote The Sleepwalker’s Archive at 833C Mayflower Hall, on my friend, the diasporic Goan intellectual and Iowa academic Peter Nazareth’s electric typewriter.

Many of the poems in The Cartographer’s Apprentice and The Sleepwalker’s Archive were impelled by questions of refining a voice while improvising among voices, of speaking through masks while also unmasking the speaking subject who segues through a sequence of personae and mirrors. By 2003, when I took several bagsful of drafts, fragments and notes to Munich and settled into the Villa Waldberta on the idyllic shores of the Starnberger See for a three-month residency, these preoccupations had taken definite shape. I reconfigured or wrote all of the new poems in Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems, 1985-2005 (2006) at Waldberta. Vanishing Acts also allowed me to deepen my concern with travel, displacement and nomadism, and their relationship with improvised forms of belonging.

In these new poems, I continued to work with ways of being the speaking and experiencing subject in a variety of situations, whether historical predicaments or everyday dilemmas of place and direction. Childhood experiences have formed a pattern within the trajectory through these four books, with the variations of proximity and distance, intimacy and reflective poise, that they offer: being taken to a barber’s for the first time and watching your hair being cut and fall to the floor; reaching out to hold a moth and having it turn into struggling powder in your hands; watching the high, circling flight of birds on thermals. Another pattern has been, of course, my consistent fascination with the inexhaustible power of the visual arts to engage the viewerly imagination. Velasquez, Goya, Magritte, Francis Bacon, Ram Kumar, Mehlli Gobhai, Vivan Sundaram, Raja Deen Dayal, and many other artists have been constant fellow pilgrims on the path.

An intermezzo, at this point-
to this list of books, I would add Pale Ancestors (2008), an artist book on which I collaborated with Atul Dodiya. It took the form of a dialogue between 48 of his watercolours and 48 of my texts. These texts spanned the gamut from poem to prose poem and micro-fiction. A selection of recast, rewired or sometimes substantially reworked pieces from this book has been integrated into ‘The Institute of Silence’, which is the last section of Central Time.

In Jatayu's Forest II, by Atul Dodiya, 2007

Central Time (2014) brings together poems written between 2006 and 2014. In fact, some of the poems in this volume have been in process for as long as 20 years. ‘The Poet in Exile’ is an example. I was helping my parents with some spring cleaning earlier this year, and found, among a mass of papers, a notebook of mine from 1992, in which I found an early avatar of this poem, complete in itself. The poem has travelled with me over two decades, in electronic form, and I have returned to it constantly over this period. Although the file carries the date of the first version, I had not consciously noted the fact that it had been with me for such a long time.

Forests die quietly as the pages catch fire.
The flames play across my chalky walls
and river mist kills my windows.
I wake up wearing a halo of leaves:

my own laureate, my own hangman.
-‘The Poet in Exile’

‘The Poet in Exile’ brings together a cluster of themes that have exercised me greatly. Here, you will find my three key figures, Ovid, Ghalib and Bhartrihari: poetry and power, the poet and the court, centre and periphery, belonging and exile, posterity and extinction, sensuality and renunciation.

As you see, the inner temporality of my writing is not linear, since I range back and forth over drafts, fragments and notes made over three decades – these are my log books, if you will. I also cross over between my various textual practices, or translate material from one form of text to another. For instance, the prose poem, ‘The Last Annal of Alamgir’, as it appears in Vanishing Acts, has gone through several avatars, beginning as a fiction text presented during a workshop with Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee in early 1994 and developed into a prose poem, first published in The Cartographer’s Apprentice (2000), then reworked back into fiction and published in Penguin’s anthology, First Proof #1, in 2005. Eventually, the precipitate of these various acts of tinkering appeared, in a text that shares the qualities of both prose poem and fiction piece, in Vanishing Acts (2006). It was subsequently recrafted for theatrical presentation as a dramatic monologue, directed by Avaan Patel of Stage Two with Tom Alter playing Alamgir (Y B Chavan Centre, Prithvi Theatre and other venues, 2009).

'Forked' by Anju Dodiya, 2006

‘Couple’ is, almost verbatim, a passage from a catalogue essay that I wrote for an exhibition of Anju Dodiya’s paintings at Bose Pacia, New York. That text, in any case, tended deliberately in the direction of literary rather than art-critical tonality, with a ghazal by Ghalib revealing itself line by line in each section of the essay. Some parts of it, such as this passage, were crafted with the cadence of verse. I enjoy the transitions that happen, whether in everyday speech or in literary production, from regular speech through recitative to music.

DALVI:
Perhaps you could talk of your engagement with Ghalib. He makes two appearances in Central Time. You have also written a poem about him ‘Ghalib in the Winter of the Great Revolt’, which is included in Vanishing Acts. You have translated a ghazal from his Diwan in your current book. 

The doors and windows of my shaky house,
says Ghalib, have broken into green tendrils.
Why should I complain,
he draws his shawl closer in the rain,
when spring has visited my house?
- ‘Monsoon Evening, Horniman Circle’

HOSKOTE:
Yes, Ghalib recurs in Central Time, in various guises. As you point out, ‘Monsoon Evening, Horniman Circle’, includes a free translation of a single-couplet ghazal of Ghalib’s:

ug rahaa hai dar-o deevaar se sabzah Ghalib
ham bayaabaan mein hain aur ghar mein bahaar aayi hai

(Green tendrils are sprouting from the doors and walls.
I’m wandering in the wilderness and spring has visited my house.)

The book also includes ‘Night Runner’, which is a translation of the Ghalib ghazal that opens with the couplet:

har qadam doori manzil hai numaayaan mujh se
meri raftar se bhage hai bayaabaan mujh se

Ghalib has long been a very special and important presence for me. I was born in 1969, which marked the centennial of Ghalib’s passing. My mother has always admired Ghalib’s poetry – she studied Shakespeare and Keats formally with Armando Menezes and V N Gokak in the mid-1950s, and read Ghalib by herself – and my father presented her with a number of publications that had appeared during the centennial. From these, she would read to me, as I was growing up.

Growing up, and as I grew more specifically interested in the late Mughal period and the colonial encounter, I found Ghalib a most intriguing and enigmatic figure – poet and courtier, survivor and negotiator, a man nearly executed for his proximity to Bahadur Shah Zafar’s regime during the 1857 Uprising and providentially rescued, a man who then petitioned the British ascendancy and wrote a panegyric celebrating British rule, a poet renowned for his path breaking Urdu poetry, which he personally felt was inferior to his own poems in Persian. For me, Ghalib incarnates the poet in turbulent times, the artist as citizen, confronting the complete range of existential difficulties and defining himself against crises of often epic proportions. A heroic figure, he was fully aware of and attentive to the importance of his contribution, but also capable of self-irony and self-deprecation, and never unaware of the fundamental precariousness of his situation.

DALVI:
You use several forms in your poetry, the Nazm being one, where your lines form distinct couplets. How attuned are you to the musicality of the words as spoken, to rhythms that inhere within them? 

HOSKOTE:
The nazm al-jawahir is a form I am greatly attracted to, the ‘garland of pearls’ that is a legacy of ancient Arabic poetry. It allows for the creation of poetic meaning in multiple ways, with each segment of the poem being complete in itself, while sparking off resonances and assonances with every other segment. It can be read as a sequence, or in parts, and indeed, offers the reader an active role in the production of poetic meaning.

In the context of cadence and musicality, I should perhaps talk about my interest in certain kinds of musical practices, for instance, those of Jan Garbarek and Steve Reich. I am thinking, for instance, of the wind harp and saxophone conversation in Garbarek’s Dis (1976) and the electrifying transitions from wind to cymbals to piano in his I Took Up the Runes (1990). Likewise, I have been endlessly fascinated by the kinetic textures and tempi of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1974-1976), its circling and gathering of sections into wholes and the reverse, the manner in which its pulse structure is based on how long the human breath can carry a tone, whether in voice or clarinet, and how this temporality is brought into a pattern of dynamic adjacency with the insistences of the metallophone, xylophone and marimba, to generate a richly gamelan-like complexity and cascade of music.

In this context, I find extremely interesting, also, Brian Eno’s richly suggestive ideas on ambient music, how everyday acoustic realities come into states of interplay with more formally structured suites of sound, such as music, and his location of ambient music at the ‘cusp between melody and texture’. As ways of structuring time-as-experience and speaking to a plurality of senses and shapes of voice, cadence, melody and utterance, these are compelling models for me.

DALVI:
Is there a scheme, a construct to the organization of the various sections of Central Time? How can a poet write with allusions, as you so profusely do, and still maintain a level of accessibility with the reader?

HOSKOTE:
I had decided, early in the process of preparing this book that it would have a hundred poems. I intended this as an act of homage to the tradition of the centum, or the sataka. Bhartrihari, the great Sanskrit poet with whom we associate the Niti-sataka, the Sringara-sataka and the Vairagya-sataka – and whose work I have been translating for a number of years – was a presence. I was also thinking, in terms of scale, of another favourite collection to which I often return: Kenneth Rexroth’s translation of classical Chinese poetry, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.

The architecture of Central Time is that of a cycle in five phases or sections. Each phase or section has twenty poems, and articulates the mindspace of a particular character, temperament, or season of the spirit. Of course, my process of preparation relied as much on an intuitive formation of links among poems, as on principles of structural design. As I completed work on the book – and this was triggered off by a re-reading of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard – I thought I could detect the presence, in each section, of a dominant element, or combination of elements, which made compelling sense, although retrospectively.

Section 1, ‘Zoetrope’, seems to unfold in the mind of a man with a magic lantern. He twirls his magic lantern every time he wants a fresh relay of images. Many of them have to do with buildings, bridges, houses, cathedrals, plans, earthworks. Earth, with air, is the prevailing element.

Section 2, ‘The Pilot’s Almanac’, is the record of a pilot struggling to keep his calendar in order even as archetypal patterns impose themselves on history, while forward speed is resisted by the drag of memory. Weather and terror explode with equal force. Ether, with water, is a dominant presence.

Section 3, ‘Gravity Leaps to the Eye’, is conveyed in the voice of narrators who struggle between nomadism and place, momentum and gravity. Questions of location, orientation and selfhood operate here. Sight, location, illusion, mirage, occasions missed and potential, self and proxy, inhabit these poems. Air, with earth, is the ruling element.

Section 4, ‘The Existence Certificate’, is a catalogue of feints, sleights, exits, entries, passages between histories and fictions. It explores the museum of discarded identities and superseded affiliations; revisits childhood, intimate memory, and the landscapes of ruin and retrieval. Its key figures are the stranger, the navigator, the secret agent. Fire predominates here, with strong inflections of air, water, earth and ether.

Section 5, ‘The Institute of Silence’, sets up a log of strange and melancholy journeys, cognitions of direction and re-cognitions of self, mappings of relationships to inherited exemplars like the hunter or the saint, engagements with visceral experiences like sleep, diving, swimming, the fear of diving, the incendiary nature of the contemporary. Water, with ether, predominates.

The book acts as a turning kaleidoscope, in effect, with the elements, voices, narratives, constantly achieving new re-alignments. The trope of the kaleidoscope that is always being pieced together from its fragments, of history as narratives that have to be bricolaged together – always with a surplus, an excess, an infinitesimal or maximal quantum of additional/ contextual energy – holds great significance for me. Hence the epigraph to Central Time, which comes from the writings of the brilliant sociologist Richard Sennett:

“The skilled restorer of porcelain will collect not only the visible chips of a broken pot but also the dust on the table where it rested...”

The title of the book, Central Time, has been with me since 1995. It refers, at one level, of course, to Central Standard Time, the time zone in the Midwest, the measure that defines time in Iowa, where I discovered how one could most forthrightly and productively be a poet leading a literary life among poets. Metaphorically, I associate it with a felicitous situation secured, however momentarily, through and against an experience of continuous mobility, displacement, marginalization.

Increasingly, I tend to think that space and spatiality will always be mediated through conflict and inscribed by multiple claims, so that our occupancy of them will always be contested. By contrast, time and temporality retain the potential for privacy, secrecy, security, as though their very disembodiment and elusiveness allow them to offer us a sanctuary inside which we might be inviolate and unclaimable.

The title also makes oblique reference to the notion of a ‘central poetry’ that Wallace Stevens proposes in his 1948 essay, ‘Effects of Analogy’. Stevens discusses the difference between a deliberately “marginal, subliminal” poetry based on a poet’s belief in “the imagination as a power within him not so much to destroy reality at will as to put it to his own uses” and a “central poetry” anchored in a poet’s conviction that the imagination is “a power within him to have such insights into reality as will make it possible for him to be sufficient as a poet in the very centre of consciousness.” I am attracted to this latter proposition, which is both a challenging provocation and a stimulation to renewed poetic exploration, even as we accept, as Stevens does in his meditation on a bowl of carnations, ‘The Poems of Our Climate’, that
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.


DALVI:
Your encounters with various objects and cultures as a theorist do make their way into your poems that then are expressed with a unique phenomenology, quite your own, that stays on the edge of the world as we know it, but glances at the other side, without tipping over. That is why I love to read your poems, you write about things outside of you, but they aren’t really outside, are they? Like the gargoyle at Notre Dame, you are ‘stapled to the view’, unable to flap your webbed forelimbs and escape your perch.

HOSKOTE:
Very true, I am indeed ‘stapled to the view’. Nothing is outside of us, and we are outside of nothing. We make things our own by reaching out to them with our minds and senses, and we create our own sense of the world through these acts of improvisation with varied itineraries and appropriations. We make the world’s predicaments our own. Here, I would draw strongly on the Yogachara Buddhist teaching of chitta-matra, ‘mind-only’, which is sometimes mistaken for a ‘mentalist’ or solipsist position. The Yogacharins acknowledge explicitly that we know all that we know, and experience whatever we experience, because we receive, process and respond to the world through the mind.

To the Yogacharin, the mind must be clarified of its discontents and delusions, if we are to most clearly and gracefully be present in the world and overcome its conditions and conditioning. We must analyze and empty out the alaya-vijnana, the great storehouse of sensations, thoughts, reflections, reflexes, syndromes and psychic habits that lies beneath our waking consciousness. As a poet, I accept this model of the consciousness but would happily hold on to the alaya-vijnana, to see what patterns emerge from it, and how these may be crafted into expression.

He will cross the bridge of the seasons alone,
laughing, sobbing, constant at his post,
too strong for the pilgrim chain-gangs
that strain and push to get past him:

stone wings folded, last angel, he's stapled to the view.
- Gargoyle, Notre Dame

About the precise choice of word here, ‘stapled’, I’ve changed the verb in this line several times during the last many years, before fastening on it. This word suits me best here because, first, it mudges the entire moment of the poem towards a memory mediated through photographs or archival pages. Secondly, I find a vivid visual analogy mixed with paradox when I compare the gargoyle’s wings and the brace of a stapler, the way these bifid objects cleave together and away, effecting in one case, potentially, connection, and in the other case, potentially, flight. And thirdly and in some ways most persuasively – I am obsessed to a degree with etymology – the Old Norse origins of the word ‘staple’ relate it to ‘stopull’, meaning ‘column’ or ‘pillar’, which sets up a mysterious connection between this verb and the Gothic architectural context of the poem. I am sure that, as an architect and architectural historian, you will warm to this last line of reasoning!


DALVI:
The Sennett quote you invoked earlier that leads off your poems brings to mind the Japanese art of kintsukuroi, of repairing broken porcelain with powdered gold embedding the object with its own history- an affirmation that at once shows both strength and the fragility of existence. How fragile, do you think, is our time in this world, and how central is it to us?

HOSKOTE:
It is amazing and telepathic that you should have thought of kintsugi in the context of the passage from Richard Sennett’s Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation that I have taken as the epigraph to Central Time. I have long been fascinated by the concept of shibui, and by the Heian-period aesthetic of mono no aware, an elegiac awareness of the transience of things coupled with a desire to acknowledge what has lived, breathed, accomplished a measure of expression. I find greatly compelling, also, the related concept of wabi sabi. It gestures towards the illuminating potentiality of the world’s dynamic asymmetries, as for instance through the perceived mutually balancing imbalance between the shine of newness and the lustre of patina, the tender freshness of a shoot and the withered toughness of bark, the smooth rim of one bowl and the chipped rim of its twin. As a cultural and aesthetic ideal, wabi sabi invites us to meditate on the transience of the world, the transitoriness of our own existence, and on the cyclical successions of mood, season and phase of existence through which time progresses, while our lives are shaped within it.

My first introduction to these ideas was visceral, through practice, as a child. My mother studied ikebana in the early 1960s with a visiting Japanese artist couple who spent some years in Bombay. The Akinos had rented a studio residence in Kalanagar from the artist Cumi Dallas; they had come to India in the wake of Akino-san’s mother, the celebrated and even revolutionary Japanese artist Fuku Akino, who was visiting professor at Santiniketan at the time. My mother continued to practice this art, for which the English term ‘flower arrangement’ is sadly reductive, for many years. Watching her at work, and receiving instruction from her in it, was an integral part of my childhood, through the 1970s. Ikebana, like most of Japan’s traditional arts of peace and war, profoundly embodies the principles of shibui and wabi sabi, at the heart of which resides the presence of beauty in decline, decay or decadence, and the experience of regarding and recording evanescence.

Our time in this world is, I think, an invitation to create value and embed it back in the ethos that sustained us, where it might perhaps come in handy for others – as pleasure, as instruction, as institution, as epiphany, as folly. I would home in on another splendidly evocative phrase of Sennett’s. In The Craftsman, he writes of the “embrace of the incomplete”, which is crucial to the work of the artist-artisan, and is profoundly available in a haptic as well as conceptual way to those who work directly with their hands in contact with their materials – pen and paper, clay, wood, stone, or musical instrument – and less available to those poring over blueprints, even less so to those whose work is eased yet paradoxically diminished by a reliance on computer-aided design. It is this full-bodied ‘embrace of the incomplete’, with its surprises, disappointments, hits, misses and discoveries that – I suspect – we are invited to undertake when we approach the world and record that encounter in art.

(interview with Mustansir Dalvi, June 2014)

© Mustansir Dalvi, 2014, all rights reserved.