India And The Life Of An Architect

A review of the recently published book on a key figure in Modern architecture in India, A.P Kanvinde, dwells upon what we can learn about architecture and India through the biography of an architect.

- Kaiwan Mehta

The book AKAR documents and records the work and life of Achyut Kanvinde. a key figure in India’s history as a modern nation and society. The book, through elaborate visuals, sketches, archival photographs, drawings, and analyses, brings into public space the work of a prolific and important architect. This is accompanied by a series of interesting and perceptive essays by a range of scholars and thinkers and some who had the chance to closely observe him or be around him. Finally the book also contains some writing by Kanvinde himself. What the book would have surely, and further benefitted from, is an overarching set of themes or ideas that would have contextualised the man and his work in a much broader cultural framework than simply the historical moment of India’s modernity and experiments in nation-building. What does a life such as this help us reflect upon — vis-a-vis architecture, or India, in general? Biographies such as this one are special moments where the book has to engage with much broader questions than the documentation of a life in all its multifarious forms and experiences.