Revisiting India’s Architectural History:
Tracing the Women Practitioners of 20th Century India

Abstract

The popular narrative of India’s twentieth century architectural history is largely articulated around the contributions of male architects and engineers. There is very little documentation and dissemination about the contributions made by first-generation women architects or other female practitioners of the country. Existing narratives about Indian architectural history are also influenced by geographical and socio-political boundaries. This project traces the journeys of women practitioners from twentieth century India and maps their architectural contributions as significant landmarks in the larger narrative of India’s architectural history. Using oral history recordings, visual documentation, and storytelling tools, this project creates an open access archive, and contributes to the discourse about the relationships between gender and the built environment in India. Newly created records, existing archival materials, and publications will also be interpreted and cross-referenced for designing various micro-outputs for public engagement.

Introduction

In the ongoing research project, Revisiting India’s Architectural History: Tracing the Women Practitioners of Twentieth Century India, the intent has been to converse with a wide-range of women practitioners in the architecture and built environment industry, map their journeys using oral history recordings and arrive at an alternate narrative of Indian architectural history post-independence. The initial focus of the research was to look for stories of first generation women architects namely, Eulie Choudhary, Perin Mistry, Hema Sankalia, Didi Contractor, and Rosemary Sachdev among others. Due to lack of information and accessibility to the practices from those times, the scope of the project expanded to collect stories of second or even third generation women practitioners. In fact, the concept of a ‘generation’ has become a point of inquiry and will be better understood when further investigation is carried out. Similarly, a conscious attempt was made to expand the understanding of the term ‘practitioners’ by considering all forms of practice in architecture as important as that of making and constructing. So we have been recording and synthesizing the stories of women practitioners from across different time periods, as many different geographies in India and panning across different forms of practices in architecture and the built environment - inclusive of educators, conservationists, builders, planners, researchers, interior designers and architects.

In the first phase of the project, oral histories are being recorded using audio formats primarily over online platforms or in person (depending on the situation of the pandemic). Some of the women practitioners who have participated in this project so far are Veena Garella, Renu Saigal, Gita Balakrishnan, Chitra Vishwanath, Balvinder Saini, Sheila Sri Prakash, Nalini Thakur, Gauri Virdi, Parul Zaveri, Punita Mehta, Nina Chandavarkar, Madhavi Desai, Falguni Desai, Madhu Sarin, Leena Kumar and Minakshi Jain. The scope of the project has also expanded in terms of collecting peripheral voices from people associated with women practitioners who are not around anymore. Interviews are being conducted with clients, family, and friends of late architect Hema Sankalia, Tara Chandavarkar and Revathi Kamath. 

Process

All these recordings are being made with an intention to present a first person (of the woman practitioner or their associate) perspective to the readers and researchers. Hence, the data is only being edited for basic sound cleaning and redaction of sensitive information. The different oral history sessions are not being re-stitched or shuffled in any way so that the original context, experience and the flow of memory of the conversations are not lost. 

Finally, the project is focused on making a web-based archive of these narratives for people from all walks of life for research and interpretation. In this process, two important tools have been mapping and summarizing each session. The transcribed summaries will enhance the accessibility of the content on the web, whereas the mapping of keywords and metadata will aid a search based platform; and the users will be able to look for narratives based on specific aspects or subject matter. 

Presentations

Simultaneously, we have also been creating ways to disseminate this content and visualise it for easy access on different platforms:

• We presented at the 7th OHAI Conference 2022 on "Oral History in the Digital World" and as a part of the three project panel titled, Curating oral history projects for public engagement on 4th - th March 2022. (See the video above)

• Following that, we also presented a poster titled, "Negotiating Between the Personal and Professional" at the Feminist Collective in Architecture conference on 26th-27th March 2022 in Ahmedabad at Mill Owner's Association. (Poster is being edited for corrections)

• Video teasers are also being uploaded intermittently on our Instagram account.