Decolonisation in Chandigarh - Theatres of Decolonization conference in Chandigarh, India

Architectural Review, The, March, 1995 by Raymund Ryan

'M. Le Corbusier...I think of him all the time', witnessed Balkrishna Doshi from under the Open Hand at Chandigarh, 'I accepted him totally as my guru'. Doshi, himself a guru for recent Indian architecture, was in the Punjabi capital for the potently complex conference entitled 'Theatres of Decolonization'. For five days of cool sunshine with an interstitial 24 hours of grey Himalayan downpour, architects, historians, sociologists and layered literary types mingled, provoked and explicated upon the infrastructures and artefacts that have been inherited around the world and the new systems of thought and control becoming manifest. Running through the discussion, as in Doshi's paradigm of village form and quirkily through the colonnades of Le Corbusier's commercial precinct, was the essentiality not of style or dogma but of life itself.

Today, there's a Benetton in Chandigarh's Sector 17 and first thing in the mornings, before listening to papers entitled 'Empowerment: Dong Architecture' (Xing Ruan) or 'The Sur[Inter]Face of Architecture: Tracing Colonial Aesthetics in Morocco' (Jorge Otero Pailos), delegates could channel-surf in their several-star bedrooms to music videos, news reports, and sitcoms beamed in from London or Hong Kong or Bombay. Definitions of Architecture accordingly, but not without precision, varied widely, from the typological implantations of the 'British Indian Public Works Department' (Peter Scriver) to the telegenic simulacra of 'Decolonization: Monday Nights at Ten' (Jane Lomholt). This shift from the visibly imperialistic, the radically exploitative, to the ephemeral homogeneity of economic globalisation was symptomatic of the gathering's spirit. Unsurprisingly, nobody (especially not certain Indians, some erudite Turks and a bunch of feisty Australians) liked colonisation: the conference's forte was to acknowledge the past and wonder whether Decol is just another buzzword or a scary web of control.

Of course, it was easy to spot the architects. They clambered down the looping ramps at The Master's woefully maintained Secretariat; sketched the wonderful plastic soffit of the Law Courts ('originally supposed to be shell structures' - Doshi); mooched around Sector 22 with its rather decorative housing blocks from Fry and Drew, Jeanneret and the gentlemanly, present Aditya Prakesh; and were able to engage over endless cups of tea - the experience and intellect of Doshi, Prakash, Alan Colquhoun and the young practitioners of Chandigarh Architects, co-sponsors of the event with Arizona State University. Days focused on 6pm keynote addresses in the auditorium of Le Corbusier's Museum Courtyard - sandbagged and militarily policed as is the vast, fenced terrain of the Capitol Complex. In that context, Doshi's beautiful synopsis of practice in India ('always remembering meandering streets...folk tunes...complete and incomplete go together - there is no beginning or end') led to somewhat PoMo-looking projects.

The star of 'Theatres of Decolonization' - tough and elegant, profound and thoroughly engaged - was Gayatri Spivak, part-Bengal, part-Manhattan. Spivak appropriately delivered the final keynote speech and proceeded through concentration on the conference's subtitle '[Architecture] Agency [Urbanism]' to pull together the previous days' themes of design and planning, of action and empowerment. Drawing from her own experience of India - from, for example, an early teacher: 'a sweet feminist male, not afraid of either deconstruction or feminism' - and of Algeria with its 'failure of decolonisation', Spivak warned of social redistribution being, post-GATT, 'out the window' and implored students to listen to people. Staging the farewell morning, the ultimate theatre, were the fantastic enclosures of the Rock Garden, an open public venue made from former rubbish dumps between the Capitol and Lake Sukhna. 'Preservation suggests pickling', responded Prakesh to queries on the future state of Le Corbusier's endowment. The discussion had moved beyond the symbolic. 'Always for the preservation of Art', Spivak's concern was for the lack of female and African voices.

A future gathering is planned for Melbourne in 1997.