ABSTRACT
That modern architecture in South Asia almost always denotes a handful of canonical buildings, most designed by foreign architects, and typically erected between 1950 and 1970, says as much about modern architecture as it does about the subcontinent, where in fact modern architecture and design have flourished because of enthusiastic local patronage since the 1930s, and continue to do so today. Modernism in architecture typically entails the pairing of an abstract, often industrial aesthetic, with construction in new building materials, especially iron or steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. Although its European instigators insisted during the 1920s that it arose directly out of industrialization, its popularity in South Asia proved that it could flourish independently of substantial technological innovation. Modern architecture proved popular in the region because it was inexpensive, easy to construct, and communicated an optimistic sense of progress that broke free of the substantial use that British colonizers had made of precedents established by the Mughal emperors who controlled most of the region from the second quarter of the sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries and the Rajput potentates who at times numbered among their most important vassals and at other times operated independently.
