The Many Lives of Gandhi's Hut

Abstract

The abstract, material, and technological reincarnations of Gandhi’s hut, spanning the sociopolitical vicissitudes of Indian history, are chronicled in Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1859–1948)—known as Mahatma Gandhi and Bapu (father), a sobriquet that refers to his status as father of the Indian nation—led nonviolent resistance movements against British colonial rule in India. Discourses on peace and developmental studies dominate Gandhian studies, the field of intellectual inquiry that investigates Gandhi’s political activism, his philosophy, and his critique of industrial colonial capitalism. Venugopal Maddipati’s Gandhi and Architecture is a much-needed book that fills a lacuna in the scholarship at the intersection of Gandhian thought and architectural discourses. The material genesis of Gandhian architecture in colonial India in the 1930s was Gandhi’s hut known as Adi Niwas, which the British spiritualist Madeliene Slade (1892– 1982) constructed in Segaon, a village in the Wardha district in the present-day state of Maharashtra in western India. Using Adi Niwas as a starting point, Maddipati investigates the subsequent cultural, ideological, ecological, and technological appropriations of Gandhi’s hut, both as an abstract idea and as a material artifact in the arena of low-cost housing. The artifactual manifestations of Gandhi’s hut covered in the book are the following: Adi Niwas (occupied by Gandhi in 1936) and Bapu Kuti, both in Segaon village in British India; the replica of Bapu Kuti in the International Exhibition on Low-Cost Housing in New Delhi, in independent India in 1954; Charles Correa’s generative modular housing framework at the Artistes’ Village in Belapur (1983–86), Navi Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra; architectural prototypes (1978–98) by the Centre of Science for Villages (CSV) in Wardha City, Wardha District, Maharashtra; and finally, CSV’s forty houses built in the Wagdara village for the Kolam Samaj, an Adivasi (Aborigine) community in Wardha district. A first glance at the table of contents suggests that these five architectural registers may present a chronological narrative of the legacy of the Gandhian hut, but on closer reading it is obvious that Maddipati has carefully chosen these reimaginations of Gandhi’s hut at specific moments of crises and transition in Indian and world histories. These five architectural events are not presented in a linear narrative. Beginning in the 1930s, the book covers a time period of seventy-seven years, encompassing turning points not only in India’s history but also geopolitically transformative events. These critical moments include Indian independence and the partition of the Indian subcontinent into the nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947; Gandhi’s assassination in 1948; India’s adoption of secularism, socialism, and Soviet-style modernization; the OPEC oil crises in 1973; and India’s transformation from a Nehruvian socialist state to a liberalized economy in the 1990s. Despite these seismic geopolitical and ideological shifts, the Gandhian hut has had an enduring legacy in the field of low-cost housing in India. Maddipati investigates the how and why of the resilience of Gandhi’s hut as a discursive and material object that continues to inform the practice of and discourses on low-cost housing. The theoretical framework of the book is compelling in its presentation of four episodes in the afterlife of the 1930s Gandhian hut that function as four chronotopes. These episodes investigate the appropriation of Gandhi’s hut at the intersection of local, regional, national, and global discourses on low-cost housing. After the introductory chapter, which lays out the plan of the book, the first chapter, “An Architecture of Finitude: Segaon, 1936–1937,” narrates the history of the building of two structures, Adi Niwas and Bapu Kuti. Madeleine Slade, an acolyte of Gandhi who changed her name to Mirabehn, built both the cottages. Maddipati analyzes the Adi Niwas (1936–37) through Gandhian religiosity and “exclusionary Varnashramadharma (system of social stratification in South Asia)” as the “practice of adhering to finitude” (31). Gandhi laid down a strict budget of Rs. 100 (equal to a current value of 1.25 USD) for the Adi Niwas. Slade constructed the hut using mud walls and a thatched roof that was tiled with half-cylindrical conical tiles. Gandhi’s hut, like Khadi, was embedded in the ideology of anti-colonialism and served as a material manifestation of the Gandhian ideals of self-