ABSTRACT
The notion that architecture is a bridge between disciplines – a conjunction and synthesis of knowledges rather than an autonomous category unto itself – has wide if not universally accepted currency in current architectural discourse.1 Certainly, for those of us who examine colonial architectures and their associated cultural spaces, this fuzzy and inclusive notion of the topic can be particularly useful. By contrast, however, comparatively firm and particular premises about the material and symbolic status of architecture have shaped much of the previous literature on the exemplary case of architecture in colonial India. As Stephen Cairns elucidates in the next chapter, a paradigmatic notion of buildings as a form of materialized representation or “stone book” has been profoundly influential in focusing and delimiting this particular discourse. Especially problematic is a categorical distinction that this notion has served to reinforce between “Indian” architecture and “Modern” or “European” architecture in India. On the one hand the putatively “essential” principles, and hence “timeless” characteristics, of India’s building forms and traditions have typically been examined within an ethnographic framework. On the other hand, colonial European building efforts in the Indian subcontinent have tended to be assessed historically, as case histories of the reception and diffusion of metropolitan architectural styles and debates in the imperial periphery.
