Two events, seemingly unrelated, occurred in the past few weeks.
Earlier this month, amidst much fanfare, the Telugu Desam Party won the elections in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Its leader, Chandrababu Naidu, has since been anointed the chief minister of the state. Meanwhile, in distant Japan, veteran architect Fumihiko Maki had expired a week earlier.
A decade before, their paths had crossed. Maki had won an international competition instituted by Naidu to design Amaravati, the new capital for Andhra Pradesh. This was after it was decided that the existing capital city, Hyderabad, would be part of the newly-created state of Telangana. Three architectural firms of repute, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Vastu Shilpa Foundation and Maki and Associates submitted design entries.
Maki and Associates were asked to team up with the Mumbai-based firm, Architect Hafeez Contractor, even as they expressed inclination towards a Delhi-based consultancy. Later, when they complied, Maki and Associates were replaced by Architect Hafeez Contractor, who in turn tied up with the London based Foster + Partners. Neither Contractor nor Foster had submitted design entries in the competition.
Once appointed, their design proposals were not to the satisfaction of Naidu. It was suggested that they draw inspiration from the mythical city of Mahishmati as portrayed in the Telugu film, Baahubali. Furthermore, the director of the movie, S S Rajamouli, was recommended as an advisor to the architects. Sir Norman Foster and his design team must have sat through the screening of Baahubali in their painstaking efforts to tickle the imagination of Chandrababu Naidu.
The equivalent of this episode in another era would have been Jawaharlal Nehru advising Le Corbusier to seek inspiration from the flamboyant movies of the film director V Shantaram for the design of Chandigarh city.
What finally did the trick, though. wasn’t necessarily the grandiose backdrops of Baahubali. The design for the proposed assembly building that ultimately jelled with the administration’s sensibilities seemed inspired by a humble idli-maker. A vertical tower-like element, not unlike the central stem of the idli-maker on which the moulds are stacked, shot up vertically in the proposed structure. The height of this feature was intended to outdo the tallest statue in the world, the Statue of Unity. This penchant for structural rise as an expression of ego, popularised in early 20th century New York City, has now taken root in India.
Just as things finally seemed to be falling in place for Amaravati, the Naidu government lost the state elections in 2019. The new government shelved the plans and three different capital cities were suggested for the varied arms of legislature, judiciary and executive. Foster + Partners, apparently not compensated to their satisfaction, sued the state-run Amaravati Metropolitan Region Development Authority in 2022. Architect Hafeez Contractor slunk away from being a party to that suit.
In the process, almost 30,000 acres of land acquired for the capital from more than 26,000 displaced farmers lay in abeyance.
Public aggrievement has never been voiced vehemently at this increased vulnerability of civic projects to political whimsy, often costing the exchequer thousands of crores of rupees, apart from loss of time, due to fluctuations of policy. This phenomena has afflicted the country through past decades.
The ongoing redevelopment of the Central Vista in New Delhi would have been halted had the ruling NDA government lost at the polls earlier this month. The Opposition had announced their intention to undo whatever the Modi government had implemented in the capital complex in New Delhi.
This project, in turn, required demolition of various public buildings added to the Central Vista over past decades. These included the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, architect Ralph Lerner’s award-winning design selected from amongst 194 entries in India’s first major global design competition held in 1986.
Likewise, in 2011 in Chennai, the AIADMK government relocated the legislative assembly from the new building conceived by the rival DMK government back to its initial premises in Fort St George. The new assembly building, designed by the German firm Gerkan Marg and Partners, built at a cost of over a thousand crore rupees, was subsequently converted into a hospital at further cost to the exchequer. In 2017 in Bhopal, legislators demanded demolition of the assembly building claiming it’s Vastu bode ill luck for the occupants. Ironically, the Charles Correa designed structure had won the Aga Khan Award for excellence in architectural design.
Excesses of this manner derived from a sense of misguided entitlement would make for comic fare if tragically enough, they weren’t at public cost. A developing country like India, staking its rightful place globally, merits greater sensitivity on part of the nation’s ruling elite. The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh has since announced that work on Amaravati shall commence again. The citizens can only wait to know if another movie has since caught the fancy of their elected representatives.
The writer is an architect in independent practice. Having graduated from Columbia University in New York City, he designs, writes and teaches in New Delhi
