ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that it is difficult to approach a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude as a historical entity, or as an entity that exists outside of peoples’ propensity to view it as a part of their own present. The chapter foregrounds the event of the making of a life-size replica of one of Gandhi’s huts in Segaon, at an international low-cost housing exhibition in Delhi in 1954. Through a commentary on the exhibition brochure of that low-cost housing exhibition, the chapter shows how the organizers of the exhibition were already predisposed towards viewing their own present, which comprised the emergence of urban exigencies and housing contingencies in the context of the arrival of post-partition refugees from Pakistan, as the present time of a secular, low-cost Gandhian architecture. The chapter dwells on the emergence of impersonality as a salient theme in the exhibition. The chapter also compares the plan of Gandhi’s hut in Segaon with the plans of some of the houses constructed for didactic purposes at the exhibition. The manner in which the plan of Gandhi’s hut was displayed in the exhibition brochure demonstrates how emerging discourses of self-evident construction logic and also emerging self-evident measures related to Statist notions of general responsibility in India were embedded as events in a Gandhian time of limits and finitude. The time of the low-cost housing exhibition in Delhi was, strictly speaking, coeval with Gandhi’s own time of limits and finitude in Segaon in the mid nineteen thirties.
