Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India

The culmination of Ravi Kalia's trilogy on the formation of capital cities in postcolonial India, Gandhinagar joins the historian's other two volumes, on Chandigarh and Bhubaneswar, in tracing India's efforts to establish its twentieth-century architectural identity. In following the development of these cities, Kalia recounts India's progression through precolonial, British, modern, and postmodern theory and practice, particularly the architectural ideology propagated by Western a rchitects Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. Kalia explains that Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat in western India, became a battleground for the competing ideals that had surfaced during the building of Chandigarh and Bhubaneswar. The mill owners of the neighboring city of Ahmedabad, backed by Indian architect and planner Balkrishna Doshi, wanted the American Louis Kahn to build Gandhinagar as a worthy rival to Le Corbusier's Chandigarh. There was, however, tremendous political pressure to make Gandhinagar a purely Indian enterprise, partly because the state of Gujarat was the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi. Kalia illumines Kahn's early influence in the city and his replacement by Doshi and then by American-