Across two days the past fortnight, one of Mumbai’s, in fact India’s, best-known architects was celebrated through a recollection of his work — Charles M Correa. The setting in the serene NCPA precinct offered scope for recall and reflection of the impressive oeuvre of work he has left behind. Speaker after speaker heaped lavish praise on the architect — and the man — that Correa was, how he had responded to the impetus of his time when architecture was aligned with the Nehruvian purpose of nation-building, and how he had shown the nerve to take on the iconic Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect and urban planner, considered a pioneer of modern architecture, over his plan for Chandigarh.
Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, and Gandhinagar are widely recognised as the first three planned and designed cities of independent India. Le Corbusier’s influence on India’s terrain, of course, went far beyond the then nascent city of Chandigarh. Correa, from what we know, joined issue with the master’s plan for the city, critically examining it and pointing out lacunae. Years later, he was to collaborate with civil engineer Shirish Patel and architect Pravina Mehta to develop a plan for a new city across the Mumbai harbour — today’s Navi Mumbai. Bhubaneswar carried the stamp of the German architect Otto Konigsberger, less known than Le Corbusier, and Gandhinagar did not get made till decades later.
Correa, though, developed a relationship with Gujarat with Ahmedabad carrying many of his plans-designs from his early years of work, as one of the sessions in the conference detailed out. The one that ranks high among these was Correa’s plan for the Gandhi Smarak or memorial in the Sabarmati Ashram — the latter now under the lens of redesign. Correa was barely 28 years old when he took on the assignment to design the memorial for Mahatma Gandhi barely 15 years after the icon had been assassinated. Gandhi had lived in the Sabarmati from 1917 to 1930 but had never returned to spend long days there, as political scientist and Gandhian scholar Tridip Suhrud reminded those gathered at the NCPA.
Those of us who have been to the Gandhi Smarak — modular units that flow into each other, modest scale, local materials, open and covered spaces around a water body, all of this allowing a subtle play of light and visual porousness — have soaked it all in. It continues to draw awe from planners and architects around the world, and has stood the test of time, so far. Suhrud consciously refrained from examining Correa’s design but dwelt at length on Gandhi’s philosophy to ask the question: does the man need a memorial at all? He argued that Gandhi had gradually shed every possession of his and lived like a peripatetic ascetic; a physical memorial, therefore, militates against this.
It was a most reflective thought and an important question as hundreds of crores are allocated to build grand memorials to more and more public figures, mainly politicians, across India. Do we really need memorials? If so, what should the memorials be, what should they offer visitors? I can imagine Ambedkarite scholars arguing the opposite of what Suhrud laid out — that the icon needs a physical place. The family and the large legion of followers of Bal Thackeray too would argue on similar lines.
Incidentally, memorials to both the leaders — vastly different in their ideology, social emphasis, and approach to religion — are being built opposite Mumbai’s most familiar ground, Shivaji Park, along its long stretch. The memorial to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, icon of Hindutva, has stood tall and imposing for the past few years. A grand memorial to Chhatrapati Shivaji, off the island city in the Arabian Sea, has been in the works for more than a decade now. Smaller memorials or monuments dot Mumbai, mostly in its south and central areas.
Memorials, unlike routine architecture, are not meant to offer shelter to the living but are specifically planned to remember the dead, deliberately designed spaces to recall icons or victims of historical events that bring people there in a collective way to honour their memories. Memorials are, to put it succinctly, a form of making memories or emotions material and tangible through the creation of space. To remember the dead, especially victims of horrific events, befits a memorial as the 9/11 one in New York does, among many such memorials around the world.
But how do we reflect upon the lives and work of men who were icons of some kind? And why are there not many memorials to women? The rush of emotions and reflections are markedly different, I find, at Mani Bhavan on Mumbai’s Laburnum Road where Gandhi spent long years and is a living memorial to him compared to Rajgriha, in Dadar, where Ambedkar lived and has a dedicated space with rare photographs among other memorabilia. The Gandhi Smarak at Sabarmati evokes a different set of inner responses than Mani Bhavan does. Chaityabhoomi, also in Dadar but along the seafront, which draws lakhs of Dalits every year, inspires differently from Rajgriha. How will the upcoming Ambedkar memorial add to the memorialising space?
Gandhi Smarak, Mani Bhavan, and Rajgriha encourage silence and reflection. These have been the predominant responses in most of the memorials I have visited, including the Hiroshima Peace Centre. An exposed building with its dome intact, it was the only structure that withstood the nuclear explosion on August 6, 1945, and forces reflection. It also gave me the chills somewhat similar to the 9/11 memorial. What would the Thackeray memorial evoke in us who lived through his time and carry distinct memories of meeting him and his impact on the city, I wonder. What would Mumbai’s Muslims, those his Shiv Sena targeted on his command in the 1992-93 riots, feel about the memorialising space?
Correa had lived through those terrible days when Bombay burned, writing and ranting against the violence unleashed, and generally unforgiving of what the leader meant to Bombay/Mumbai. I am tempted to imagine what his memorial to Thackeray might have been — or if he would have even consented to take the assignment. Architects, through their creation of the built environment and space, leave a lasting stamp on cities. Their work is, at once, non-political but deeply political too — and calls for greater reflection than we care to engage in.
Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for her writing in this column