Reconstructing the building of an empire

It was a clash of more than cultures. Picture the scene: The South Indian princely states like Travancore, Baroda, Hyderabad, all extremely powerful and extremely wealthy, building in a mixed Indo- European style through their contacts with Europe, long before the British arrived.

“They (the Indian ruling elite) had a rich and dynamic Indo-European architecture. The British came from a small country with only military engineers untrained in these designs. They were in India on the ostensible platform that they were superior and much more civilised. From now on they were going to be the rulers. What to do about these fabulous buildings they were seeing around them? They couldn’t destroy them. In the end, a century later, the Indian-led Indo-European architecture was completely homegrown, it was not something that the British did.”

Such are the complexities of the Imperial British response to Indian architecture that architect and historian Shanti Jayewardene-Pillai explores in her book ‘Imperial Conversations – Indo-Britons and the Architecture of South India’.They (the British in India) admired, destroyed, censured, conserved, drew, studied, classified, theorised, wrote about, photographed, regulated, imitated and experimented… It was an intimate engagement that offered a peculiar and contradictory delight, she says.

Trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and the UK, Shanti Jayewardene-Pillai did her research for her Masters in architectural history at University College, London on the work of Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. When it came to her doctoral studies at Oxford, however, she chose to look further afield to neighbouring India where the ‘strange cultural maze’ as she calls it, of buildings in hybrid style, constructed by the British colonial rulers both intrigued and piqued her curiosity.

“Why were landmark official British buildings built in an Islamic style, set adjacent to an Indian palace in the heart of Hindu South India?” How were they built? Why were they commissioned, are some of the questions she set out to answer and her 300-page volume blends history, architecture and the socio-political milieu of the times with felicitous ease, though as the author admits, she was, reluctantly, albeit inexorably, drawn into a minefield of imperial history.

Released late last year under the Yoda Press, Imperial Conversations takes us to India of the 19th Century when the British colonial rulers were intent on stamping their footprint on the areas under their dominion. Up against a vast and intimidating architectural tradition, the British response was at best, ambivalent.

“Even as they assumed political and cultural overlordship, the British elite knew they lacked the resources to match modern Indian architecture,” she writes. “As the soldier engineers demolished the fabled buildings of Lucknow, less philistine Britons were beginning to seek control of Indo-European architecture. They were realizing that to hold India something more than force was required.”

In Colombo recently, the author who now lives in Oxfordshire, explains that the narrative is set between 1800 and 1880 - the historical gap in which a colonial state appeared in India and Indian architects disappeared from British view. It was a fascinating period of social interaction, she felt, one little analysed by historians, who tended to overlook the cultural sharing that took place between the British soldier engineers tasked with constructing the official buildings and the Indian architects and builders who would actually do the construction, but whose contribution is little recognised.

Most writers tend to draw a veil on the Indian involvement in British architecture and opted to “portray Indian architecture as something that happened without Indians”. It was a view Shanti was not content to accept. Nor was she inclined to agree with the popular view that the British were responsible for a revival of Indian architecture, for as she states, for there to have been a revival, there had to have been a decline. “Did it die”, “why was it dying”, she asks.

Theories of decline, adopted by many writers, she says, were integral to British political discourse and deeply embedded in the material reality of the political and military power that was being established in India.“Though the dominant view is that the knowledge exchange came from West to East, certainly in architecture in the aesthetics, obviously European style is very clearly European style, but in the building techniques, it is not that clear..particularly in the use of materials etc. There are one or two scholars who are now saying that the exchange probably went the other way. But if we take a middle ground, and keep an open mind, it is much more enjoyable to read these exchanges as partly pleasure, partly as equal,” she says.

“My editors told me it was like a detective story, because I took out bit by bit and eventually I look at buildings, how they were built, all the materials used, try to look at who designed them, how did an English architect aged about 21 come and win a competition and design in an Indian style etc. The fledgling RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) was set up in the 1820s and India and Indian architecture was clearly very much on their agenda because it was by now part of the Empire. As the RIBA progressed they began to understand that British engineers had made a niche for themselves in India designing in Indian style. How did they know how to design in Indian style? Obviously they made use of their Indian assistants.”

It was a complex situation, Shanti feels. There was partly imposition, there was partly sharing and much of it was immensely pleasurable. The British architects, engineers, intellectuals, most of them lonely, away from home, enjoyed this mutual exchange of architectural design and construction knowledge. A lot of them had local associates, although one will not find this is in the history books or in the British records, she adds.

And indeed Imperial Conversations delights in probing this exchange. Describing the pluralist society that existed in Madras in Chapter 1, Shanti draws a fascinating picture of Madras at the beginning of the 19th century..of salubrious neighbourhoods, a large walled settlement known as the Black Town and the garrisoned Fort St. George (FSG) south of which was Chepauk Palace, home to the House of Carnatic- the premier Royal House in South India.

Vividly and colourfully written, yet always maintaining its factual detail, the reader is drawn into this world where so many cultures co-existed, then skilfully led through the violent birth of the Madras Presidency and the emergence of the Indo-British elite; the nattars – the high-caste Vellalars or brahmins who served on the Madras Council that governed the city. These cultured nattars had country estates and enjoyed, what she terms a sumptuous lifestyle. “For this cosmopolitan consummately sophisticated privileged class, the pursuit of European friendships, science and culture may have been as intellectually stimulating as it was politically expedient,” she writes, adding that it is unfortunate that we will never know the true extent of friendship between members of the Indo-British elite.

She does, however, give accounts by the likes of Bishop Heber and Maria Graham, names that will undoubtedly be familiar to local readers. Through it all, the reader gets a clear understanding of how the cultural sharing came to be, giving rise to a hybrid imperial architectural style.

Stories behind many of the landmark buildings in Madras are also uncovered such as the Presbyterian church St. Andrew’s Kirk commissioned by the East India Company and designed by Thomas Fiott de Havilland, who incidentally also served in Ceylon. St. Andrew’s Kirk was based on the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford and the design for the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London which was never built. De Havilland, an ambitious military engineer wanted the Kirk to have a grand dome and Shanti argues that he acquired his formidable knowledge as an apprentice, through private learning and actual building with Indians, who had a vast tradition of dome building.

“Techniques of dome building became a very important point of discussion in the RIBA later on. If this technical knowledge was available in India, that knowledge was accumulated by these architects and engineers and passed into a body of international knowledge as ‘British knowledge’. That this is all rather controversial, she is well aware. “Several other scholars have written about it, when it comes to science and medicine etc. It’s up for grabs for historians to take their points of view,” she says.

“Although Indo-Britons might have conversed as technical equals in terms of knowledge and practical skill on building sites; their multi-lingual conversations entered British records in English as those conducted between superior and inferior. Indians were denied personal names and no named Indian, equal to a British engineer, appears in colonial records. Most Britons were unwilling to admit engineering and scientific knowledge–sharing with Indian intellectuals. They pretended that knowledge only passed from West to East,” she writes.

She also looks at other significant buildings in Madras such as the Pachaiyappa School, built in classical Greek style and the Senate House, which combines general European and Islamic design tradition. The latter was by Robert Chisholm, an engineer of the Public Works Department (which also merits a chapter in the book) who signed his designs with the Hexalpha inscribed in a circle, a Freemason symbol. Chisholm achieved great prominence by freely making use of Indian design traditions and building techniques.

Unearthing this vast store of information was a ‘tough haul’ that necessitated Shanti making many visits to Chennai and spending all of five months in the Tamil Nadu State Archives. Not having access to the local languages (Tamil, Telugu, Marati and Kannada) was a limiting factor, she found. “ Ideally I would have had to work with a team of scholars translating… a multi-disciplinary team. Most of the literature is probably going to be in poetry not in definite building records. But I was working as a historian and an architect.. not as a linguist and a poet. I am glad I was able to get this much out,” she says.

Written in Shanti’s fluent and immensely readable style, Imperial Conversations is a scholarly book yet one that seamlessly weaves history, socio-politics and architecture in an absorbing account of those days of Empire. “When I began I hoped I would be able to write a popular book, not an academic one,” she says candidly. “All the references are there at one level but if you want to ignore them and read a story, there are people and their lives….. it’s also about people and pleasure.” Whoever the reader - architect, historian or layman, Imperial Conversations will get you thinking afresh on the colonial exchange that so influenced our part of the world.