Vaissnavi Shukl
As the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh descended on a ranch in Oregon to build a city called Rajneeshpuram. They ran into serious trouble with the law enforcement agencies, the immigration services and eventually the FBI. If you have seen the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country you probably know why modern city planning calls for the separation of church and state and it’s designed Law and Public Policy. However, it does discount the fact that most ancient mediaeval and pre-modern cities around the world were set up in strong religious cores often with a church, mosque or temple forming the city centre, especially evident in a country like India.

Over the years though, religious and political movements or political movements motivated by religion have influenced not only the way Indian cities are planned, but also the way people live in a city. Having had intense conversations on these phenomena way too often, Karan and I decided to teach a Winter School course called, ‘Reincarnating Cities’, at my alma mater, CEPT University a couple of weeks ago.

In the course we took a deep dive into the changing architectural articulations of heritage nationalism and religiosity in the contemporary Indian urban space. From ancient temple towns such as Varanasi to riot-charged cities of Delhi and Ahmedabad and the latest government experiment of creating a hyper modern city Amravati with linkages to traditional design principles of Vastu Shastra. We went all in. So let’s get started.

My name is Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off- Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design practices and research projects that reflect the emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture of Center features conversations with exceptionally creative individuals who have extrapolated the traditional fields of Art, Architecture, Planning, landscape, and urban design.

To get us started, I’m going to ask you to tell me, how did you get into this religious political thing? I know your thesis focused on Conservation, but I’m trying to go back in time and figure out how we found this to be a mutual interest.

Karan Saharya
So yeah, my thesis was about conservation and I was doing critical conservation at the GSD. So that was the most sort of direct academic, most direct academic manifestation of it. But, uh, I think so basically why I’m interested in this is because I realized that it kind of combines many of my interests, which go beyond just architecture or whatever urban design that we’ve studied in school, which is very sort of technical, very formal, very vocational practice-based.

Since I was a kid, I’ve been very interested in it. Oh, all kinds of things. I was very interested in my theology. I used to, as a kid growing up, like I used to sit with my grandparents and listen to stories about, you know, how something happened and they do have all these like mythical beings and all that stuff. So I was, I grew to be very interested in two logical or metalogical ideas.

And I was also very interested in history. I knew that maybe I didn’t want to pursue history as a formal practice or get advanced degrees in it. But I think I was very fascinated by, you know, trying to imagine how people lived at a particular point of time and how, what they did or the decisions that those people took , you know, long back, influenced the way that we live now. And this is something which is very kind of embedded into our psyche. Especially growing up in India, you, you go, you, you see traditions and you see almost this ritualistic sense, you know, this kind of lifestyle that we all grew up in. So I think there were a bunch of things that influenced it.

And then obviously when I, when I realized I wanted to do architecture, when I got into architecture school, this is what I was gravitating towards. Even in architecture school, like the case studies that I used to take up all the urban design projects that I wanted to, you know, during the studio. And even then finally, my dissertation and thesis were all about how cities and buildings themselves have evolved. You know, and the, and the way we think about them, the way people inhabit them, the way people conceptualize them, it has a lot to do with these stories that I was told as a kid, get all of these people from history. Yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So picking up from mythology, I also know you as somebody who has really strong political views and, and there’s also a like deeply intrigued by political movements and political ideologies. So, we’ll get to it. Cause I, I know you spoke about a part of it, which deals with the history and mythology, but there’s also a huge part of you, which is so driven by, by politics and let’s, let’s get to it. So we finished teaching a class a couple of weeks ago and. I think they’re going to teach it again because we enjoyed it so much, but we titled it, ‘Reincarnating cities: tracing religion, political influences on Indian architecture and planning’.

And we both really racked our brains, trying to come up with the right objective to go to the word ‘cities’. I think some of the words that we were circling around were ‘revitalizing’, ‘reimagining’, ‘reinvigorating’, and I remember I was, I was walking in, beginning was talking to him like, “Oh my God, you have to call it something of a, like, let’s call it. Reincarnating.” I want to dwell on this choice of word for a bit and know your thoughts on why this particular word isn’t just a simplistic choice. But instead as you went into the rabbit hole and discovered has biblical origins.

Karan Saharya
Yeah. In fact, I think we made a very interesting choice in calling it reincarnating. I think there’s something very intriguing about, you know, the prospect of thinking of a city as something that grows and evolves and reincarnates you’re right.
That obviously the word itself has biblical origins because, well, literally it comes from a Latin word, which, you know, literally it just means to be made into flesh, but, but other than the biblical aspect of it, I think there’s something very Indian about it, which is that there is this very Indian or Indic philosophy idea that, which kind of defines, uh, which has this almost foundational framework, which you know, a lot of people I’ve been trying to grasp through different ways.

But architecturally speaking the cities that we live in, they have, they have origins in, you reach a point where, you know, you’re trying to trace the original facility, let’s say, right. And some of the case studies that we did during our project during the course of the class were about these and we, and we went over, you know, which city can we talk about? How are these defined? And we realized that at one point you reach this sort of. Historical dead-end and then beyond that, and then beyond that, there’s all this like mythology associated with, especially when murder city like Barra on the scene. Right. So when did it even begin? Who was to say it now? All of these, all these like creation myths that are associated with cities, the way creation myths are also associated with society’s on other things. Yeah. But there’s a lot of stuff which is sort of all these layers that exist within the built fabric. Now it’s very easy to kind of just see a city in its physical manifestation as it’s in its physical form.

But then on all these like subterranean layers that you need, the city, what it is, you know, it makes something habitable and something not. And, people have very strong reactions to these things. And I think reincarnating for us kind of embodies all of those factors, the fact that something is more bound than something, it leaves a life and then dies, but it does not die forever. It doesn’t vanish. It remains there, but its soul changes and therefore this philosophical idea, which at least I think. It really made us both inquisitive to learn more about as architects. So I think it was an interesting lens to view a much larger concept.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think it’s very interesting when you say, when you, when you trace the origins of a city back and you reach a dead end. Right? So we were talking about four cities and I was looking at the mothers, one of the cities. Of course a popular story is that I’m, the bath was set up by King and you know, that’s where the name, but now again, within the political framework, there’s a moment to advocate for a name change, which goes back to the abortion that was before I’m the boss, which was carnality, which, you know, the people who inhabited the place before that, we’re living there and you go back and you’re almost in a Western sense, looking at these people as natives, but it fizzles out and you never really know how a city was set up.
Like, you don’t know the origin story, but from the moment that history started recording it, you, you know, who came and lived there and who left the city and then who came back in again.

So even in that sense, Well, we’re, reincarnating you look at the soul of it, traveling and entering another body in this sense. It’s also like the body is the same, but the soul keeps changing. You know, there’s like a different essence to the place and the city has its life with a different soul. And it’s almost like sometimes, you know, the soul doesn’t even leave. Like it’s there there’s, there’s remnants of a soul. And then another current comes in another. Exogenous factors that come in and change. It changes the soul and modifies it. And then you have a whole new moment. So, okay. Let’s, let’s go into like the, the, the depth of the class. So we were looking at four cities, right? We were looking at the Varanasi deli and the bar, the number gravity kind of falling, and a chronological timeline of the origins.

Our argument, however, was that the evolution of cities is barely ever linear and gradual. It follows an almost cyclical pattern of development that is highly influenced by political and religious currents. And in the course of, you know, our RG search, we found things that we didn’t know about our own cities. And that was, that was quite a journey. But what was the most fascinating or bizarre incident that you thought influenced the planning of the city? I don’t know if you want to talk about Banaras, or if you want to talk about Delhi.

Karan Saharya
I think there’s so much to it. And, and what you just said is so, right, because, if you, if you think about it, I mean, before I directly answer your question, I think your earlier point about, you know, the idea of calling it a dream connecting cities in retrospect. Now, when I think about it, if you, as architects and our planners, especially as people who are kind of, you know, who go through a formal education, be we conceptualize cities as something very formal, something which is in opposition to let’s say the urban is in conflict with the rule. Like we consider these things as binary, as we say, this is developed, and this is not developed.

We say, this as a city is formal. A city is created as opposed to something that is informal or something that just kind of evolves organically, but from what we all understand, and through our own lived experiences, we know that a city is a combination of many, many different things. And in that sense, reincarnation…

Vaissnavi Shukl
I’m going to interrupt you here and ask you to talk about the core visual goals that you use for, for the so..

Karan Saharya
Well, yeah, I mean, I think in our introduction lecture, we were talking about how as sort of this big Fountainhead of modernism and this figurehead that we, that most architects, at least of the previous generation in India, you have this bizarre reverence for it, which frankly, I don’t fully understand, but, but it is, I think it is obvious that and all the great modernists of his age, Had have had a lasting impact on the way we think of cities as something which is formal as something which is, , created through particular shapes and forms.

And it is the most correct way of doing something. And I think that is kind of how people like, uh, define cities, and there are many different versions of this legacy. I mean, today we talk about master planning processes, which define, functions and, and, you know, allocate one particular system from a, from a bird’s eye point of view.

And they use cartography and the mechanisms of bureaucracy find it in existence. Exactly. And the grid and the, and, and we realize that once you zoom in, once you start seeing things from a human eye level The way we people use space is often very different from how. Uh, it is conceptualized when you see it from a bird’s eye point of view and in India, most of the cities quote, unquote, that we live in, uh, there is a very unclear definition of where Rudel begins and where it ends or where, what really urban is or what is developed and what is not developed.

You know, oftentimes you would see, uh, the idea of a Madaan as something which has an open space, which might be, you know, formal. Uh, from a bird’s eye point of view, but has a variety of existences, simultaneously, I mean, it could be, it could be for a fortnight and then it would become something else entirely, you know, cricket ground by day. So, so then I, all of these things, at both the micro and the macro level, so I think when. So I think we, uh, now in retrospect, when I’m thinking about the idea of reincarnating cities, there’s almost like this little mischief in the title that we have. We known that that would be using a word, which has been given to us

Vaissnavi Shukl
Maybe in the future it will be misleading, but that’s okay. I can live with it but..

Karan Saharya
But that’s the whole point. I think we want it to be, uh, we wanted to make it provocative. And we wanted to make it political and we wanted to see how people themselves understand it rather than, you know, impose our own, in the class, directly to your question directly about the most interesting or the most bizarre thing that has influenced us.

It’s so hard to say, because as we were reading about this, there’s so many interesting facets and so many interesting historical milestones that we kind of came across. And then I think I personally was very startled by how one man, and invariably, there is some man with a fragile ego in history, who took some kind of a decision.

And, then obviously this person died. Right. But, what he did just reverberated throughout history and we still live with the effects of it. I mean, One interesting thing. For example, when I was reading, when I was doing the, just before the presentation on Delhi and as we know, the deli was built and rebuilt many, many, many times they say they call it the seven cities of Delhi, but one can argue they’re probably nine cities. You know, if you count what happened,even, well, yeah, even after Latvians, I mean, you know, the 16th Commonwealth in Delhi. So one of the things for instance, I think. One of the earliest cities of Delhi. There’s a place called, which is in Delhi. And it’s basically now it’s almost as ruinous for, there’s very little habitation,within it and around it and it’s, and it’s very interesting to know this, how, you know, this place got abandoned. There’re so many other places which exist in Delhi, which are all these ancient cities that made all these cities happen. Now, all of these places. I still inhabit, you know, the people who live there, their demographics and all may have changed, but talking about the first instance is like a dead deserted place.

And what is weird is that in the early 14th century, I think somewhere around the 1320s or so the ruler at the time, he has been told, like he created this magnificent city because he wanted to, you know, get, celebrate the triumph over the Mongols and all that stuff. But, but he, at this time was, What sort of in this, Well, conflict is a, perhaps an overstatement, but he was in this sort of tussle politically with, uh, the most important Sophie Saint of his who wasn’t, as I’m looking and Alia who was in the other part of deli by the Yamana and then there’s Amadine.

Okay. And there’s this whole legend about, you know, this apocryphal legend about, you know, There was a curse and there was all this like other stuff. And this is again what we were discussing, you know, the influence of mine. Autology mixed with history mixed with all of these things, influencing the built architecture of a place.
Yeah. So apparently there was a curse and that curse was never lifted. And then he asked to be perished in a battle and then the city was just sort of left even though most of it was complete. And then his, uh, suck and then his, his descendants, I mean, including mom had mental Gluck. He decided to move his capital because he was aware of this curse.

So he was kind of, you know, put off by it. So he went to the deck and then he came back to Delhi But then when he came back to Delhi, he didn’t want to go back to yes. Within the city, because he was still scared by the cause. So he created yet another city. And just, just because of this bizarre incident that happened 1320s till today, the place is this ruined his forward.

You know, and it’s, it’s strange how all of these things happen. Obviously there’s a sort of a small story, but then there are obviously seminal, uh, political events that have been driven by communalism or political rhetoric that has influenced the city. I mean, when we were talking about, for instance, both and Delhi both of these cities have seen very violent communal clashes and as a result of those events there has been so much, sorting on the ground in terms of how people have segregated themselves like a de facto segregation has taken place and, and it’s just so happened that, you know, and, and obviously this influences people’s access to resources. What kind of neighborhoods kids grow up in and what kind of schools they go to? What kind of roads they encounter, all of that stuff. So there’s so many, I mean, deli for instance, in 1984, there was the ballroom that happened.
And then again post 1992, there was so much sorting that happened in communication and ghettoization of particularly Muslims over here. So they’re all these events that keep happening and they just change, uh, the fabric of a city and, and it’s, it’s very. It seems to me that all of these things are quite bizarre.
When you think about the fact that, you know, nobody in 1962, when the first master plan was being made, could have imagined that the city of Delhi would change this way in exactly 30 years. But it did happen in 1992. So people do make decisions. Sometimes they top down, but sometimes they’re also sorting, uh, on the ground. And the soul, as we said, keeps changing. Uh, but the body keeps all doing form simultaneously.

Vaissnavi Shukl
What is, I mean, I think this is again, part of the argument of those classes. Why, while we see cities growing on their periphery, kind of gradually, you know, you don’t see buildings come up in a day, but these, these events, which are often. Motivated by either, , religious or political ambitions are so pivotal in the way, uh, people end up living in certain parts of that. I mean, look at, look at the case and the budget, right. There have been major riots literally every decade, since the 60 sixties, seventies, you know, since, Was it the novena Vermont underline where, you know, they, they overthrew the chief minister. And I mean, so there was a student moment, but since the seventies, eighties, of course, you know, when we have this is completely different, but you see how these movements aggregate and marginalize a community. Uh, not only in terms of the way a word bank in a city is structured, but also in the way physically where, where people live and.

These things are seldom part of a grid which is such a Western concept. When you’re looking at planning the city and, you know, you, you invite a foreign form like a renowned architect to the complaint, a new city, like gravity, for example, and the person kind of comes up with this grid. The grid does not talk about issues that are underlying. A certain community or a certain region. I mean, the grid does not talk about informal settlements that as we all know, become a huge part of the city. I mean, that’s literally like the nerves and blood of the city and that’s, that’s what keeps the city going. But you barely ever see your master plan talking about, you know, having, having that, you know, lung capacity to expand and contract and allow for all these others. Unplanned things to happen. I mean, somebody more radical might argue that they should never happen. And you know, so you don’t plan for them, but people lay claim to land and people, you know, set up, but it’s, it’s, it’s tricky. It’s tricky in the way that we look at these things. And I know both of us, you know what, partially also scared bringing up these topics in that class. Cause you don’t know are. Where things are, you know, how people, how sensitive people can get to, uh, talking about religion or politics and look at it. But I mean, I think, I think we tried our best and were objective. But another thing I think that, that came up in class apart from, you know, the, uh, segregation and kind of religious marginalization in cities is, is also the question of conservation and tourism.

And that really fascinated me because we were seeing a movement not only, uh, in the country at a micro scale where cities are fighting to get the UNESCO world heritage status, but also at a. Oh, micro-scale. I mean, I, we were talking as an, the, we are all seeing a huge, huge push back against the demolition of the Louis Kahn dormitory.

So, there’s something with conservation and it’s definitely come to the forefront. Now, after the buildings have lived a certain life and. Needs certain TLC, but also how conservation just becomes such an important part of tourism. I’m, I’m specifically thinking about Banaras and you’re talking about hotel salvation and how the Banaras master plan also, in some sense, does not allow for that or gani. Feeling of the place to thrive as it was, but yet the master plan is trying to accommodate all the facilities and all the infrastructure that a modern-day city would need to handle that kind of tourism. I don’t know if it’s tricky, but I thought your reading of Banaras was pretty stellar in it, especially in its relationship with tourism.

Karan Saharya
So many points to kind of take from what you just said. So I think conceptually, when we were also beginning the class and in our very first lecture, we, we talked about this idea that there is a linear, uh, formulation of history and of a city and it kind of plays out, , you know, in various capacities, the linear being that we, that we go from one place to the other, and that we go from, you know, something.
To the promised land. And then that is the idea that you go from something that you, that you’re developing. And then eventually you reach this developed status. There’s always this lenient, uh, linearity to our taught and, and, and you realize when you go back and diamond and you read about how this is almost like this colonial legacy of dealing with. Not just land and space. And, and of course, as architects, we are so obsessed with land and space, but, but, but with everything, you know, even the way we are taught basic concepts, uh, we are taught to think in terms of binary, is we, we, we ask what is good, what is bad, but, but then when you actually sit back and you think about all of this stuff, I think this is something that both that resonated with the both of us, which is that there is so much subjectivity in all of this stuff.

And there is the question of agency. There’s the question of agency makes all of these things, not a straight line, but almost like this circle, or I would say almost like a spiral, like a, like an extended spiral, like a, like a spring where things go and they go through all of these ebbs and flows and something happens that dramatically all does its course, but then right. The cycle keeps continuing so, so, and the idea of subjectivity obviously is so obvious over here. I mean, we can go back to philosophy and, and deal with this also from an academic viewpoint where , you know, that is the, the full Codian idea of who is controlling the power and who has the knowledge to do that.

Who defines even what knowledge is, and you get into all of these epistemological questions and all that stuff. Now that is an item on a very abstract level, but on a more direct level, which you bring up, which I found interesting in what you just said, the second point, which is that the most, there is an architectural manifestation of this as well, right?
The idea that, again, the conflict between linearity and the cycle, which is that if in a place like, let’s say Banaras or any other city, right in India, that has been all of these cycles and ebbs and flows. And there is a cycle of birth and rebirth then. But does conservation on a very fundamental philosophy level, freeze time and space, you were saying that something is put into action. And again, you assume these processes to be technical and apolitical, you know, which is a very modernist way of conceptualizing it. But again, there are human beings who are sitting at a table and making these decisions for you. Therefore, the idea of agency and accountability. Right. But those people kind of just fade away into the background and you just left with these bunch of laws and policies that are telling you to freeze space in a particular way.

Now it’s interesting also that you bring up the idea of Louis Kahn and the dormitories. , and there have been other moments also, I mean, in Delhi, the Roger Val building, which wasn’t privately Medan the hall of the mothers. And again, there was the idea that, well, you know, what do you do with it? All of these stunning examples of modern architecture or Indian modernist architecture. But the, when people are saying that we must conserve these things, I am almost in two minds about it at one level, as an architect, I understand the significance and I understand the beauty and I understand that these are all engineering models, but on the other hand, must we be freezing space just because.

They happened to be the works of some, you know, big modernist figurehead. The other point over here, which is interesting is the idea of the literal literally the space time crunch. Yeah. So earlier when conservation really began and then one can go back in history and, you know, go back to, John Ruskin and William models and all the debates they had with Villa Duke and all that stuff. Now, again, that is, this. Almost French Anglo legacy of conservation, because that’s where all of this branch of intellectual ism was growing. And then it was kind of just an exporter to the rest of the world. And the colonies, particularly India, became like a really great place to test out these theories. Of course I had it, it was a lab because, because in Europe they couldn’t find it, or at least in England and France, they could not find those kinds of places to test this out.

But when they were doing it, Archeological excavations and, you know, Epic graphical surveys. They realized that, I mean, history over here goes back 3000 years, maybe 4,000, maybe five, who is to even say so over here? It became interesting because the first wave of conservation of quote unquote freezing space in a particular moment of time. Well, it started off with something which was deemed to be ancient. Right. And then slowly, the second wave began to be dealing with things which were more medieval. And then within the medieval, also, there was this whole argument. You know, especially if you read what people like James Ferguson, Alexander Cunningham, who founded ASI, weirdly enough, all of these people were writing about, they were saying that one kind of architecture is more important than the other.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s basically privileges like one over the other. Right. I mean, it’s also important to kind of note that eats, eats again, a very Western colonial concept in the sense that the archeological survey of India was. Set up, uh, during the colonial period. Right? So,

Karan Saharya
Yes, exactly. And, and by and by a person who had very little experience in South Asia who came over here and then, you know, started doing all of these surveys and stuff like that. But at the same time, there was also a very. White supremacist ideas in his mind, all of these people considered, uh, that, you know, very paternalistically that we must teach people in the colony how to live because they are not, you know, smart enough to figure out what to do with their own buildings. Right. And that we must teach them something. And we must tell them to do with the past that we must conceptualize the past for them. It’s a very supremacist idea. And, its architectural manifestation is the conservation movement that in its third phase started crunching the time, even more so from ancient mon ents, we went to medieval mon ent conservation, and then we started conservation, you know, things which are, let’s say 40 years old.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. One strange thing. And that has now happened is that when you’re talking about the dormitories of Canada, when you’re talking about sector one Chandigarh by caboose here for that matter, I mean, Roger Wells hall of nations, these things they haven’t very recently. These are all recent examples and it’s quite ironic at the same time that, when he was writing, he was very critical of things that existed because he wanted to break away from the past, right?
This obsession with modernity, the obsession of creating a brand new plan on a brand new kind of form formalism. That he, in fact, was the guy who wanted to get rid of most of Paris and he wanted to build a radiant city over there. And it’s ironic that today we are preserving his buildings. Well, in that sense, there’s almost like this identity crisis that I see personally, , the expense of being provocative.
I think this is what really baffles me because these things are so embedded and practice through law. Yeah. You know, they’re operationalized by bureaucratic agents who sit somewhere in Delhi and are defining policy, you know, one size fits all kind of blanket policy for all of the nation. Like, you know, Uh, but, but I think that we, as architects need to reconcile with the subjectivity of it and stop thinking in binaries.
And now when you’re talking about amorality, it’s, there’s almost this threat of, well, if the city does get built that will they be conserving as they’re building? Yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Oh my God. I should link that that we are given in class was that that’s exactly what it’s talking about. I just like. What exactly do you conserve and how do cities grow if you’re basically conserving everything?

Karan Saharya
Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. Exactly. And when you were talking about the UNESCO, , thing, at least, I mean all over the board, I would say this is not just about India and I, I don’t want to come across as overtly critical it, but. It has, I do understand the lore of it. I understand the idea of tourism. , an anthropologist might disagree with me because they might think that, you know, tourism is some kind of pandering to a capital, but, but in a place like India, uh, I see the medic offered as an industry.
I understand why one needs to develop tourism also when it’s not. Uh, and I’m seeing all of this stuff against conservation, but at the same time, it’s not that I would not want to conserve things. Yeah. I love historical mon ents just as much as any other person. , but, but I just think that as architects, our responsibility, at least in practice, is to get into the idea of agency and try to look at context, try to understand how is one building situated within a habitat.
How will. How was it that people are conceptualizing the place around it? Is it causing more detriment than it is? Uh, you know?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. , I mean, you mentioned bro at the end, you know, that’s kind of like my literally kind of obsession, so I’d be, well, I’m going to say the word damn, but I don’t know if I’ll have to Mark this episode as, , Oh the next up.
But anyways, that to me was, I mean, I kept on reading and I kept on finding stuff. I’d been following the project since, since a while. But you know, thinking about that as literally something that we, we saw going from point a to point B to not existing at all, it’s like, I keep comparing it to that Netflix doc entary C series called, , that.
The fire festival. I, I forgot the name, but it’s about this, this music festival that was supposed to happen, but it never happened, but it created all the hype about it. Now with, with brella D what was fascinating to see was multiple things, but one being just the, the obsession with WASU and how, why Stu has become something that has shifted from.
Uh, personal faith to communal belief to now state sponsored competitions to the exec, to the extent that, you know, foster and partners who are finally declared winners after de declaring Marcie and associates, but their website, if you go to their website, it says, , the plan for Robert, you know, follows the traditional Vastu principles with the ministers, , entrance from the East and this, because it’s suspicious and. The the whole, I don’t know if it has to do with, , creating a certain national identity. I mean, we can go all into central wisdom, but even in case of, from gravity, , you know, involving , who’s a director of to be a part of the team or be, be a critique in terms of shortlisting designs, because so. Well, because as chief minister thought that the city of came closest to his vision for him, Robert Norman Foster’s design does not look anything like it, but, but even the thought that of political whims, for example, can shape entire cities or if not cities, at least part of cities that. Represent that kind of become the main identity. It just, it was mind blowing. I mean, I went down the rabbit hole, of course. And then, you know, you, you see this, , mass housing, the RDV project in Poona, which also claims to follow rules of and I’m not being, I mean, I’m not biased to be honest, I’ve, I’ve read my, at them, like in Sanskrit, I’ve read the vast two cheetah and it, it talks nothing about mass housing projects or. , secretary it’s an Parliament’s. I mean, it started as a cheetah, as I was literally looking at two building types. It was looking at the house and the temple, and then, you know, post-independence with, with liberalization, there was a certain need to go back to what were the more Indian roots cause we’d been colonized for awhile.
And so among the rise of yoga and I will be there in astrology whilst it comes to come. Makes it come back and suddenly you start seeing the two building types, kind of the rules being extrapolated. And now we have our still four factories and now we have our still four offices. And now you have, uh, the truly vast two for every building type, including office buildings, like the secretary and the ministries.
I mean, The peep about, okay. Part of me also wants to argue that well, but who said it’s, it has anything to do with religion, but even if you go back and look at the cheetah, as it was written in Sanskrit and the time that it was written in Sanskrit, you know, for a fact that it was only the Brahmans who could read and write in Sanskrits, it was written for a certain section of the society, kind of making it more exclusive.
It, every single billing process was closely related to. Different ceremonies that would worship certain goals or would make sacrifices to certain gods. So definitely I would say it had religious origin, but how that body of knowledge has evolved over time and has now become a deciding factor in state-sponsored competition.
So it was, Oh, I still consultant in the jury for , gravity, you know, who bind on which design goes through, which doesn’t go through. , I mean, we, we don’t look at architecture or cities from this perspective often, and that’s what got me so excited, you know? So while we were just chatting and I’m like, damn, you know, we, we, we wish we had this critical eye to really look at things in our surroundings, kind of peel back the layers and really.
Think about all these events, all these phenomenons or these actors, or these networks of power that we would never ass e exercise, uh, influence or the built environment, but they, but they do. So it was kind of like a long blabber, but I said,

Karan Saharya
but you’re right. I think, I think you’re raising a couple of very important points and now obviously we’re not social scientists.
Uh, but, but from what I understand is that, , what it’s hinting at is. Firstly, this large-scale branding exercise almost right now. And it is very reflective of the changes that we are seeing politically, , across national politics and all that, that there is this, , posted live liberalization. You’re absolutely right after 1991, there was this strange kind of, uh, middle-class aspiration almost, uh, which was that we want to, that we want to, uh, Not we aspire to be.
World-class like, we want the glass and steel and we want the, the cement and the Norman fosters and the marquees and the MBR DVS. But at the same time, we also want it to be traditional in some sense. And traditional I’m using very loosely as a world over here. , the idea, at least to me now, I, while I don’t know much about Vastu personally, I think, , It’s it’s, it seems almost a very surface level, very superficial that, that, you know, somebody considers themselves to be like some kind of vascular expert and they’re defining what architecture should look like.
And it’s, it’s almost a very superficial quality and it kind of, uh, what it does is it, it doesn’t go into the. A real understanding of why these things were created to begin with, , in whatever ancient history, right? Like they were reflective of a particular time and place. They were reflective of a society that for better or worse existed at one point, , in, in the world and whatever quote unquote Indian society, but perhaps they don’t even.
Match all the needs of what is there today. Now a lot of people might consider this superstition. A lot of people might consider this communalism of space. But to me, it is a very superficial understanding of this, uh, almost like this identity crisis. Well, do we want to be, , you know, we want to be, uh, doing all the things that we see in the West.
Uh, but at the same time, we want to go back to some pre-colonial understanding of what space was. Right. And we are caught in these two minds. , and I think that to me, at least, and this is something that I was hinting at it, even the h an and the master’s thesis. That to me, this is the post postcolonial, right?
Like this is the break from. The post-colonial where we were defined by colonization and by the scars of it and the mental ravages that had happened. And now we are like, okay, enough is enough. Now two generations have passed and, uh, we need to move beyond this. And, and, and I’m almost afraid that in our need to, uh, you know, In all our yearning, are we going to create some kind of a superficial semblance of what was there, uh, in history and also, you know, be being, be stuck neither here nor there.
, it’s a very strange to me and I think we are living in a very interesting time. Uh, actually I think as architects, we, we also need to understand. That, , well, you know, the world is moving and people’s aspirations have changed. , yeah,

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think it was very important, important to underscore on the line, the freeze superficial understanding, because my beef, at least with Vastu isn’t, isn’t its content, but it’s reading because it does have some. Scientific understanding, right. It literally talks about the basics of a design, which is you should look at when relation, you know, based, based on the location of the Indian sub-continent broadly or not, you know, what are the good, why winded actions, you know, how do you plan for, , arranging your building program, , with the movement of the sun, because you know, certain functions required. The lights often don’t require daylight, you know, just, just stuff like that. I mean, it, it does have a scientific side, but what it’s come down to when, I mean, when you look at these mass housing, mass housing projects, that claim to be falling last too, is is you see that it’s a very superficial meaning of the whole, , text.
Do you know? It’s it? I don’t know.

Karan Saharya
But this is also reflective of the largest societal change, which is happening. The idea of, uh, you know, creating, , this political identity in the name of religion to, to go, to create a kind of majority in Islam, uh, that is, uh, you know, in, in trying to be aggressive in its aspiration.
Materially is almost. , creating this exclusionary agenda at the same time.

Vaissnavi Shukl
, cause you can’t do one without doing the other,

Karan Saharya
but that shouldn’t be the case in anything like why must, why must we need to create an other, , Oak capital in order to justify our own existence? Absolutely. , I think the, the idea of superficial understanding of a space, what you just said is.
Exactly embodies this, uh, and this kind of weird moment that we live in. I bet that we want to paint a kind of particular picture of the past, uh, you know, where everything, where there’s almost this weird, false sense of nostalgia. And it’s so strange that any time one is to even talking about the past, we talking about, you know, figures that may or may not have existed.
, and sometimes, you know, historical figures or whatever, like. We always tend to view these things. Uh, nostalgically, I think conservation also in some sense is isn’t, that is a form of nostalgia, nostalgia. , and the idea of heritage itself keeps changing the idea of heritage. Uh, is so imbued in conservation in a strange that, that heritage itself, if you think about it, I mean, the fact that, of course it’s derived from the word for it, it’s associated with the narrative and something like that is passed on.
It almost has this allusion to private property and tradition and, you know, inheritance and all that stuff. But, but, but who is to define this? Like who is to say that this is worthy and this is not worthy, , And, and now while we want to mimic the past, in some sense, superficially, , we also want to go forward and now we just stuck into minds.
And what you’re talking about with and what you’re talking about with, you know, even the central Western, all of these things, what we’ve seen with what has happening with also it’s again, the same conflict. , this is also, I guess, Uh, part of the cycle of reincarnation

Vaissnavi Shukl
back to the beginning, that it’s is that we’re stuck in that lean in, in, in, in also like a linear progression where we’re either traditional or we’re modern. And when we try to mix the two, it’s just, it’s, it’s not as gray space, but it’s just literally like a weird mashup. Uh, that, that, that brings me to our point. So we’ve been, so we’ve taught the class, , it’s been a couple of weeks and we’ve had some time to reflect on. How we can take this forward. So what’s, what’s next for you and what’s next for reincarnating cities?

Karan Saharya
What’s next for me is a million dollar question. I don’t know, but of course I, uh, I think this is obviously something that we, we tried out as sort of an academic experiment. We, we both wanted to be associated with academia after having completed a master’s. We both want to be at that intersection where we are practicing, learning new things, uh, practically, uh, you know, growing as designers and architects or whatever professions we are in, but at the same time being associated with theoretical frameworks, , that, that make us curious that we gravitate towards intellectually.
And I think reincarnating cities was, , sort of this, uh, little green shoot, which was like a result of it. , so, so I, I, I, well, first of all, I really think that this is something waiting to be written. I think that it’s so much, there’s so much out debt. I think there’s so much that we can grapple with in terms of themes.
, and of course, uh, seen through the lens of architects, the screens are the lenses, architects of your architecture and planning and all of these things that we studied as designers. , there is a very interesting, , this is a very interesting and almost a novel way of looking at things which are usually relegated to quote unquote, the social sciences.
Uh, that, that there’s almost this kind of expunging of, uh, politics and religion that has happened, , that had been happening for a very long time, , in academia and in practice. And now we’re trying to say that, you know, all of these things are absolutely cannot be divorced from each other, , that, that the idea of religion and politics and society, that the idea of myths and heritage.
The idea of, , nationalism is so suffused in everything that we see around ourselves and the spaces that we inhabit. , and that is perhaps for me, the biggest takeaway from this whole exercise that we did. Yeah. I think it’s important that we take this last forward and also, yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Hey, you know, what, if it, if it all goes down the drain, you know, if you write something and people absolutely just like, throw it out the window, we’re young and this is when we make mistakes.
So, you know, we always have. Have that as a shield, you know, just being young and being able to explore stuff. So Karan, thank you so much. This was fun. I, I hope we do like a Worshan 2.01 to teaching this again at some point, but thank you so much for being here today.

Karan Saharya
Thank you so much. This was really good.
Fun. And, , I can’t wait for this. All CDs to go live. I’m I’m really, really curious. , and congratulations, you finally put it together. I’m so happy.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah. You know what? I’m going to edit out like the last two lines, right.

Karan Saharya
Really happy for you. And I’m really proud of you because like you’d mentioned this like a few months back and now you, you, you’re doing it and you’re doing it all by yourself and kudos to you.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.