Made in India

Made in India Guest-edited by Kazi K Ashraf The architectural and urban landscape of India is being remade in unexpected and exuberant ways. New economic growth, the infiltration of global media and technologies, and the transnational reach of the diasporic Indian have unleashed a new cultural and social dynamic. While the dynamic is most explicit and visible in the context of the Indian city, a different set of transformations is taking place in the rural milieu. Yet, as the political writer Sunil Khilnani notes, the world's sense of India, of what it stands for and what it wishes to become, seems as confused and divided today as is India's own sense of itself. It is a challenge, in these conditions, to explore how the deeply entrenched histories and traditions of India are being reimagined, and how questions of the extraordinary diversity of India are being reinterpreted in its architectural and urban landscape. AD traces this compelling story through the writings of Prem Chandavarkar, Sunil Khilnani, Anupama Kundoo, Reinhold Martin, Michael Sorkin, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, and others, as well as through the work of some 25 practices currently producing work on the Indian subcontinent.

Kazi K Ashraf teaches at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture. He studied at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. He writes on phenomenological issues of architecture and landscape, and contemporary South Asia. He co-edited the publication An Architecture of Independence: The Making of Modern South Asia (Architectural League of New York, 1997), and has curated exhibitions on Modern architecture in South Asia, Louis Kahn’s Capital Complex, and architecture in Bangladesh. He is currently working on a new book, The Last Hut: Dwelling in the Ascetic Imagination.