Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism

Challenging conventional and Western approaches to urbanism, this book examines the case of Delhi and how it has evolved from "traditional" to "modern", whilst asking what these terms truly mean in the context of the built environment. This book examines the ways in which a historic, and so-called ‘traditional’ city quietly mutated into one that was modern in its own terms not only in form but also in its use and meaning. Through a study of Delhi, the author challenges some prevalent dichotomies and myths in architecture and urbanism and identifies an interpretation of modernism that expands upon conventional understandings of it. Conventional discourse in the West defines modern as the antithesis of that which is ‘not-modern’ or is ‘traditional.’ Many scholars have debated the significance of the words and most agree that the very word ‘tradition’ was a modernist creation that variously implied backwardness, threatened by change, resistance to innovation. The first part of this book reflects on the transformations and discontinuities in built form and spatial culture and calls into question accepted notions of the static nature of what is normally referred to as ‘traditional’ and ‘non-Western’ architecture. The second part is a critical discussion of Delhi in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.;It expands upon conventional understandings of modernity in a way that wrenches free the city’s architecture and the society from the objectified realm of the exotic while also acknowledging cultural conditions of modernity and modern architecture outside the West. Stepping outside Western canons, this project looks at late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture to include them in a conversation on architecture that has typically focused on Western Europe and North America. Finally, the author seeks out the ‘indigenous modernities’: the irregular, the uneven, and the unexpected in what uncritical observers might label a perfectly coherent ‘traditional’ built environment; or in the influence of local society and institutions on forms that appear modern by conventional standards in the West.