Hardeep Singh Puri & Bimal Patel, “Central Vista Curtain Raiser: Unveiling Democracy's New Face (lecture, India Today Conclave, October 9, 2021), ➝.
Central Public Works department, “Notice Inviting Bids from National/International Design & Planning Firms for Consultancy Services for comprehensive Architectural & Engineering planning for the ‘Development/Redevelopment of Parliament Building, Common Central Secretariat and Central Vista at New Delhi’,” (September 2, 2019), ➝.
Gloria Methri, “PM Modi Pays Unannounced Visit to Central Vista Project Site; Takes Stock of Work Underway,” Republic World, September 27, 2021, ➝.
It remains to be seen how and to what extent this will change following the 2024 general elections. The BJP’s single-party rule has been replaced with a multiparty coalition, in which the BJP remains the dominant party, though with a diminished mandate.
For an analysis of the BJP’s tendencies in this direction in an earlier formative moment, in the late 1980s, see Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
One of the most persistent—and important—strains of criticism against the redevelopment argues that it is a monument not only to Modi but also to Hindutva. Atul Dev, “Modi’s Folly,” New York Review of Books (blog), May 10, 2021, ➝; See also A. G. Krishna Menon, “Behind Modi’s Plans to Redevelop the Central Vista Is a Covert Political Agenda,” The Wire, May 23, 2020, ➝. Critics of the project have also attacked it on other fronts: on account of the number of trees that will be uprooted, for not following zoning regulations, and because the construction was designated “essential” and continued at full pace during the height of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. For a summary of these criticisms see Thomas Oommen and Nipesh Palat Narayanan, “Democracy, Development and Identity: Notes on the Central Vista Project,”Architexturez South Asia, 2020, ➝.
The longer history of the redevelopment, dating to 2002, is animated by Vaastu—or Hindu architectural—concerns that are foundational to the current regime. Kay Benedict, “Is Bad Vaastu Behind Move To Construct A New Parliament Building?,” The Quint, December 31, 2015, ➝.
Seema Sreedharan, “The Master Urbanist,” Architecture + Design, October 1, 2021.
Here, I am drawing on and modifying political theorist Niraja Gopal Jayal’s suggestion that Hindutva and vikas, or progress, are the two major components of Modi’s rule. Niraja Gopal Jayal, “Introduction” in Re-Forming India: The Nation Today, ed. Niraja Gopal Jayal (Gurgaon: Penguin, 2019).
The temple is currently being built on the ruins of a fifteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, which was violently destroyed by a right-wing mob in 1992 in one of the foundational moments of Hindutva’s ascent to power. The construction of a temple on the site, putatively the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, is being portrayed as a major victory of Modi’s government and as a recovery of damaged Hindu pride. Though it is not officially state architecture—having been constructed by an independent trust—the involvement of the courts, Parliament, and top politicians mean that the Ram Mandir should effectively be considered state architecture.
This “New India” is contrasted with an apparently corrupt, inefficient old India. According to Puri, previous governments have been aware, for example, that the existing parliament building was not earthquake-safe and that it didn’t have enough seating for all the members of parliament. In his slideshows, Patel regularly shows images of dilapidated interiors and poorly touched-up facades to argue for the new constructions. According to them, on account of bureaucratic sluggishness, corruption, a lack of imagination or an outright absence of concern for citizens, the previous Indian National Congress party government ignored this task.
Such figures, like Bimal Patel himself, may even be personally ambivalent about Hindutva.
Team NL, “Government Responds to Newslaundry Article on Central Vista,” Newslaundry, June 2, 2021, ➝.
“The Central Vista” is the name that was given to this axis by its architect, Edwin Lutyens. Once built, it was referred to as “Kingsway.” In 1955, it was renamed “Rajpath,” meaning “royal way.” In 2022, as part of the redevelopment, it was renamed once more to “Kartavya Path, translating to “path of duty.” For more on this history, see Narayani Gupta, “From Kingsway to Rajpath: The Democratization of Lutyens’ Central Vista,” in Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past, ed. Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Though latest reports suggest that the museum’s move may be on hold. See Parvez Sultan, “No ‘storage place’, shifting of National Museum deferred,” New Indian Express, January 19, 2024, ➝.
A good summary of the main “technocratic and processual” critiques from the architecture community—as well as an excellent architectural critique—can be found in Oommen and Narayanan, “Democracy, Development and Identity.”
Bimal Patel, “Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi” (lecture, CEPT University, January 24, 2020), ➝.
Patel, “Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi.” By comparison, the world’s largest single office building, the Pentagon, has a floor area of around 600,000 square meters. These are not small buildings!
Patel, “Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi.”
Francis Duffy, The New Office (London: Conran, 1997), 58.
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).
Kuldeep Mathur, Recasting Public Administration in India: Reform, Rhetoric, and Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Gupta, “From Kingsway to Rajpath,” 263.
Patel, “Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi.”
This is a marked departure from the glossy tech campuses of Bangalore, the very image of placeless globalization, which is the archetype of the architecture of technology in India. The borrowed colonial façade here reterritorializes efficiency and modernity.
Patel, “Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi.”
Charles Correa, “A Place in the Sun,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 131, no. 5322 (1983): 330.
John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Patel, “Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi.”
Harwood, The Interface, 13.
Harwood, 99.
For a provocative theorization of the way in which Digital India is transforming the fundamental categories of the postcolonial state, see Nishant Shah, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Nafis Aziz Hasan, and Chinmayi Arun, Overload, Creep, Excess: An Internet from India (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2023).
Navdeep Mathur, “On the Sabarmati Riverfront: Urban Planning as Totalitarian Governance in Ahmedabad,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, nos. 47-48 (2012): 64-75
Patel, “Transforming Central Vista, New Delhi.”
My reading of the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, and of the complex relations between religion and infrastructure, is inspired by the methodology and critique in Kajri Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
The mahant, or chief priest of the Vishwanath temple himself opposed the corridor, claiming that Modi has destroyed more temples than the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. See Ajaz Ashraf, “Modi Has Destroyed More Temples than Aurangzeb: Vishwanath Temple Mahant,” NewsClick, September 28, 2022, ➝.
Piyush Srivastava, “From Kashi to Kedar, Divine Intervention,” Telegraph India, March 8, 2019, ➝.
Nitin Kumar Bharti et al., “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj,” Working Paper No. 2024/09 (World Inequaltiy Lab, March 2024), ➝.
On the appeal of the “world-class” in contemporary India, see D. Asher Ghertner, Rule By Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). On branding India as a global investment destination, see Ravinder Kaur, Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First Century India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).
Sushil Kumar, “How Modi’s Kashi Vishwanath Corridor Is Laying the Ground for Another Babri Incident,” The Caravan, April 27, 2019, ➝.
Helen Regan and Rhea Mogul, “Modi hails a new ‘divine India’ as he inaugurates controversial Hindu temple ahead of nationwide elections,” CNN World, January 22, 2024, ➝.
It is for this reason that most critiques of the Central Vista project, including this one, have had to approach it in a roundabout fashion. Some paranoid critiques border on the absurd, like an article by well-known architect A. G. Krishna Menon, who argues that the project has a “covert political agenda” because its construction will be completed in 2024, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s ideological parent organization. See Krishna Menon, “Behind Modi’s Plans to Redevelop the Central Vista Is a Covert Political Agenda” and Oommen and Narayanan, “Democracy, Development and Identity.”
Thank you to Aman Roy, Katheeja Talha, Maya Palit, and Senjuti Mukherjee for detailed feedback during various stages of the writing of this essay; Kajri Jain, Navdeep Mathur, and Sarover Zaidi for conversations in which I tested out several half-formed ideas; my peers at Yale Architecture—Alex Kim, Brunno Douat, George Papam, and Juliana Biancardine—who saw this project through many iterations and with whom I started learning to think infrastructurally; and Keller Easterling, for her advice and mentorship.