Mark of a modernist architect

Mustansir Dalvi's monograph offers a comprehensive biography of Charles Correa, highlighting his creative journey as a celebrated architect and urban planner who shaped modern Indian architecture with a distinctive post-Independence vision. Excerpts:

- Mustansir Dalvi's

In 1948, when Charles Correa left for the US, India, newly independent, was still reeling from the trauma of the Partition and the assassination of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi. When he returned to Bombay in 1956, the country had consolidated into a republic with a new constitution, the first General Election had been held in 1951, and the new institutions of an independent state were steadily being established.

The image of the nation state was, very substantially, being crafted by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister. His vision for the modern nation was pitted against the baggage of the past, both colonial and precolonial, and the burdens of tradition, ritual, and belief.

To his credit, he approached this dilemma with resolution, but without underplaying its challenges. India was a conundrum, and, as he had earlier written in Discovery of India, like some ancient palimpsest: 'on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously'. This pragmatic realisation that the past exists with us, freed him, but never made him want to jettison it completely. He could now concentrate on bringing the country shoulder to shoulder with the modern world, and in this he was ably assisted by a group of intellectual behemoths like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Sarojini Naidu, and Babasaheb Ambedkar. It was as if the progress of the past two centuries, since the industrial revolution, had to be compressed and realised in a decade or two.