"Modern architecture was of ‘enormous importance’ in Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision for the development of postcolonial India. As he saw it, ‘…it hits you on the head, and makes you think!’ Though rarely invoked with such a critical and cognitive purpose, architecture has entered in and out of political consciousness over the course of India’s long march from colonial to global modernity, with its potential both to project change and to drive economic investment on the one hand, or to recruit symbolic resistance to it. But Architecture, in the broader sense of the everyday built environment, is also a ubiquitous spatial and conceptual system in which social structures and cultural identities are continuously being framed or reproduced."
Featuring Peter Scriver - The University of Adelaide - Faculty of the Professions
Research 21: Building Modern India (Image © Peter Scriver)