Colonial history offers multiple advantages for such an examination. Inherent in the production of colonial history are indelible prints of a power struggle that linked the world together and formed the intellectual and social consciousness of the emerging disciplines of the nineteenth century. These power struggles are often more tangled and muted within metropolitan culture, whereas the amplified power differentials in colonial discourse permit a clearer reading of interpretive strategies and illuminate the need to control architectural discussions within prefigured boundaries. ^Ref.1 What connects the metropolitan and colonial contexts are the shared set of cultural assumptions and dichotomies used to differentiate them -- progressive west vs. static east, developed vs. undeveloped, active vs. passive, creative vs. mimetic. Colonial historiography also provides the most obvious position to understand the links between modernism and colonialism, an issue that has received limited attention, despite the profound influences of colonialism in shaping ideas about modernism and modernization. Since the scope of such an investigation is too wide to be encapsulated in a short essay, I will concentrate on a sliver of this debate -- the presentation of India in the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London -- to demonstrate the nature of connections between colonial ideology and the idea of modernity in the context of Indian architectural history.

One of the important monuments of twentieth century modernism, Le Corbusier's 1951 plan of Chandigarh, the capital of the province of Punjab in India, has received its share of criticism for lacking a viable urban scale.^Ref.2 The plan was based on a 1200 m. x 800 m. grid, with the major buildings designed as objects in the vast plain of Punjab. Although well-endowed with green spaces and spacious roads and plazas, obviously missing was a well-articulated continuity between public and private spaces. In such a plan, the streets and plazas become mere diagrams, lacking volume or the capacity to engage multiple uses. Most of the architect's attention was lavished on the architectural scale instead of the urban scale.

So it is not unreasonable to ask why Corbusier did not incorporate the ideas of public space found in contemporary Indian cities in his design. The answer to such a question also seems very simple. As a modernist, he was uncompromisingly opposed to the traditional city in Europe as well as in India. But the significance lies in the premise of his negation of Indian architecture. Corbusier's notion of India was that of a 'peasant culture,' and he filled his notebooks with examples of Indian village life.^Ref.3 He seemed oblivious of any living urban architecture in India. India, he conceded, had great monuments of antiquity, but contemporary Indian cities offered no positive lessons for the twentieth-century urbanist. He believed that India had no modernity, and it was his responsibility, as a representative of the west, to impart to India this modernity. Of course, Indian architects and administrators agreed with Corbusier in believing that India did not have a viable contemporary urban heritage. In expressing his ideas about Indian architecture Corbusier, however, was not being particularly original. He was drawing from a nineteenth-century colonial discourse that conceptualized India as a static, timeless object whose greatness resided in the past, but was now lost. Thus it was the west's civilizing mission to awake India from this stupor.

From the late eighteenth century onwards British scholars and administrators developed a large body of authoritative literature in their attempt to understand the Indian people, their arts, religions, customs and laws, and simultaneously to justify British rule of India. This body of knowledge, constituting the bulwark of British Orientalism primarily addressed a European audience, spoke for the Indian and claimed to represent the authentic India.^Ref.4 It was multi-dimensional and contained various, even conflicting viewpoints regarding the relationship of Britain and India, as it was structured by successive generations of Romantics, Utilitarians, Liberals, and Conservative imperialists. Two enduring assertions, however, emerged from this multi-textured body of knowledge. First was the notion of India peculiarly suited to despotism -- a medieval landscape of feudal chieftains and princes. Second was the idea of India as a conglomeration of villages and village economies governed by a theocracy that had changed little since antiquity. These visions, despite their apparent conflict, were used simultaneously throughout the nineteenth century.

Late eighteenth-century stalwarts of Oriental scholarship such as William Jones sought to place Indian civilization in the world of European antiquity by claiming shared origins and resemblance in mythology and linguistics.^Ref.5 Similarity, however, was always superseded by difference.^Ref.6 For scholars schooled in the Enlightenment principles of eighteenth-century Europe, the idea of 'progress' took on monumental significance and provided the critical point of departure between the contemporary condition of India and Europe. While Europe had progressed through several stages to arrive at its 'modern' state, India had languished behind with little or no change in its religion and culture. Consequently, in India's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century customs and laws one could read the antiquity of Europe. This shared past and subsequent superiority alone could justify British rule of India. Jones, perhaps the most sympathetic of Oriental scholars of India and an admirer of Sanskrit literature, argued that even though India supplied many 'hints' for improvement of European culture, there was no doubt about Europe's superiority in terms of useful knowledge.^Ref.7

This idea of fundamental, natural 'difference' between Europe and India was taken further by the nineteenth-century successors of Jones and was structured ultimately around racial distinctions and an evolutionary paradigm of history, even when their philosophies disavowed any such racial implications. The Utilitarians and Liberal Reformers used 'culture' as the criteria for establishing difference. James Mill, in his History of British India vigorously refuted Jones' suggestion that India had ever achieved a high degree of success in the arts and literature.^Ref.8 Instead, he claimed, utility was the only measure of progress and consequently banished India to the near-bottom rung of civilization, and then sentenced India to British tutelage. Using historical development as the criteria to create an ordered hierarchical world, the British could assure themselves of being in a privileged position in that new order.

Henry Maine, writing in the second-half of the nineteenth century used the idea of the 'village community' as the central explanation of Indian culture. ^Ref.9 In India he saw the earliest stage of the village community, and its ultimate development in nineteenth-century England. In such an explanation he could conveniently tie the idea of civilization, progress and property rights to argue for the superiority of European culture. The lack of India's historical development still had to be justified. Maine was in agreement with William Jones about the ancient similarity between Europe and India and their 'Aryan' beginnings. In India, however, the Aryan civilization had been arrested at an early stage of development having degenerated in contact with the Dravidians and other tribal groups. This theory of Aryan 'purity' which allowed the flourishing of arts and cultures and contamination by cohabitation with inferior cultures resulting in decay prominently appeared in the understanding of Indian arts.^Ref.10

As Victorian scholars set about articulating the essential difference of Britain and India and at the same time assert British right to rule a less civilized culture with which it claimed ancient similarity, they attempted, in Henry Maine's words, to keep their watches set simultaneously to two longitudes. In doing so they resorted to a whole range of explanations and characterizations, shot through with contradictions, but united ultimately by a nineteenth-century historicism that could conveniently address a theory of Indian decline and British progress. As Thomas Metcalf explains: 'the history of India was made to accommodate not just the existence of the Raj, but a course of historical development that made the imposition of British rule its necessary culmination.'^Ref.11

The portrayal of India and Indian architecture within such definitional boundaries of a static culture was most clearly demonstrated in the nineteenth-century international exhibitions, the same ones that gave us such well known modern monuments as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower. What is often forgotten in discussing these modern engineering feats is that their modernity was claimed not only by the technological improvisation involved in their design, but through their juxtaposition against oriental architecture and artifacts that were considered primitive and static.^Ref.12 The 'modern' necessarily requires a 'pre-modern' to construct its own identity. Mobilizing public support for the 1851 Exhibition, Prince Albert noted in his speech at the Mansion House banquet: "the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived."^Ref.13 The Prince Consort's message was not lost on nineteenth-century visitors to these exhibitions.

The main objective of the exhibitions in which India was presented as a British colonial possession was to educate the British public on the merits of empire and to reinforce the idea of a Great Britain inextricably linked with imperial gains. The Royal Commission in charge of colonial exhibitions hoped that pride in empire could be instilled among the common people who came to visit these exhibitions. Pride in empire would also forge national identity; visitors would receive a first hand account of the technological achievement of Great Britain clearly juxtaposed against the technological backwardness of Indian crafts.^Ref.14 The objective was to present a dual picture of technological backwardness on the one hand and the exotic artifacts that titillated the imagination and desire to possess on the other. Such a graphic display of difference, and therefore, Britain's right to dominate as the superior culture, was asserted by incessant repetition of the same themes made credible by the verity of their own repetition.^Ref.15

Many of those in charge of the exhibitions were deeply interested in Indian art and architecture, whether they adored or deprecated such art. But their understanding of Indian art was also inextricably linked to how they perceived their role within British imperialism. They wanted to illustrate that India had a living artistic tradition, although the natives were unaware of it, and they considered it their responsibility as rulers to rescue it from oblivion: "The spirit of fine art is indeed everywhere latent in India, but it has yet to be quickened again into operation. It has slept ever since the Aryan genius of the people would seem to have exhausted itself in the production of the Ramayana and Mahabharata."^Ref.16 In their determined effort to rescue India's artistic past, men like George Birdwood and John Lockwood Kipling began to develop their own standards for judging and categorizing Indian arts and crafts. Collecting art specimens and organizing them according to 'scientific' principles was driven by the nineteenth-century British preoccupation with division and classification, exaggerated in the colonial context by the desire to fathom the diversity of Indian culture. More importantly the classification of arts and crafts were tied directly to economy;^Ref.17 it was supposed to provide a medical, social and economic understanding of native society.^Ref.18 Thus the systematic classification of arts and crafts implied a larger ordering of the landscape according to 'modern' rational principles, a project that Indians because of their lack of objective understanding of the natural world were supposedly incapable of undertaking.^Ref.19 British intervention was necessary to set India on a 'modern' path, and yet these scholars could not embrace the implications of fulfilling their goals. India's modernity had to be perpetually deferred to a distant future.

In their classification process Birdwood and Lockwood Kipling blatantly ignored the Indian view of 'types' of artifacts, and adopted historical evolution as the criteria for classification and regional, even state boundaries, as appropriate lines of division.^Ref.20 Such an exercise produced categories that had little relevance to cultural processes, but they found profitable use in international exhibitions. Although both men made impressive careers from collecting, cataloging, exhibiting, and explicating Indian art, they differed in their understanding of the state of Indian arts and crafts. Lockwood Kipling, like his compatriot, struggled to tease apart the foreign influences in Indian crafts in his search for the 'original.'^Ref.21 Kipling was, however, very critical of labor practices in India, had limited expectations of 'reviving' the craft industry for economic gain, and took pride in the technological changes in nineteenth-century India as long as they did not affect architecture and the crafts. Birdwood, in contrast, had a more idyllic view of Indian crafts which he saw firmly rooted in the Indian village community and the theocratic conception of village life. In explicating the state of Indian art he painted a picture of India as a fantasy land of princely patrons and simple people steeped in tradition, a world in which everybody had a secure and fixed position. The Code of Manu, he suggested with warm approval, was the reason behind the unchanging tradition of Indian art. Birdwood, was however, cautious in his praise of Indian art: 'It is not of course meant to rank the decorative art of India, which is crystallized tradition, although perfect in form, with the fine arts of Europe, wherein the inventive genius of the artist, acting on his own spontaneous inspiration, asserts itself in true creation.'^Ref.22 Change and 'spontaneity' in Indian art had in his view always produced unsatisfactory results, leading to grotesqueness and mongrelization. In this concept of decay Birdwood was echoing his archaeologist/historian compatriot James Fergusson.^Ref.23 Both complied with the Aryan theory to explain the triumph and tragedy of Indian arts. In short, this theory claimed that the superior forms of Indian art were derived from the Greeks and the earliest flowering of Vedic Aryan art.^Ref.24 This early success story was cut short by the influence of the Dravidian and Turanian races, until it was revived again by the Persian invasion. Nothing, however, they claimed had such debilitating effect on Indian art as the influence of European architecture and machines. The nineteenth-century champions of Indian art were unanimous on this account. While much of the adoration of the village community and undesirable effect of machines was implicitly and sometimes explicitly a critique of the effects of the industrial revolution on the crafts industry in nineteenth-century England, it was also a discourse necessary to ensure that 'Indian-ness' could be distinguished from 'British-ness.'