Corridors of Time

Even as governments of developing South Asian nations continue to pour funds into redevelopment projects and infrastructural reorganisation, an ongoing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art encourages us to preserve the past through a look at the modernist India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka post-independence, says SADAF SHAIKH

- SADAF SHAIKH

HOW DOES A country reclaim its identity after being colonised for close to two centuries? For India, as well as other emancipated South Asian nations that won independence from the Britis‹h Raj between 1947 and 1971, the principal solution lay in reinventing the infrastructure, a stark reminder of the hegemonic institutions that had ruled them with an iron fist for so long. The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, an assiduously curated collection of about 200 archival and commissioned works by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, spotlights the firm mood of nation-building that gripped the countries emerging from a protracted imperialist regime.