Amita Sinha. Landscapes in India: Forms and Meanings. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. 228 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87081-815-8.

Reviewed by Ravi Kalia (City College, CUNY)
Published on H-Asia (January, 2008)

Indian landscapes are vibrant, textured, and colorful, and encompass the imprint of many a ruler that has invaded and controlled the subcontinent. Through all the invasions of the subcontinent, from the Greeks to the Mughals to the English, Indian civilization and Hindu religion have displayed remarkable adaptability, and it is that adaptability, the ability to assimilate, which has allowed Hinduism to flourish. It is therefore hard to understand why Amita Sinha, in her book, limits herself. She declares that she has "used Hindu and Buddhist examples ... that have had the greatest impact" on the Indian landscape (p. 15). At best, this proposition is suspect; at worst, it repudiates the diversity of other influences, even within broader Hindu tradition. Her explanation for addressing her subject in this arbitrary manner is simple: according to her, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity (albeit the British period) deserve separate book-length treatments. Why then does she call the book Landscapes of India? Sinha evidently failed to notice that such rigid compartmentalization of Indian landscapes, like compartmentalization of Indian history, has been long debunked.

Hindus revere nature; however, they have rarely felt the need to mold nature into a design of their own. Banyan trees are never trimmed or cut down; instead, they are allowed to spread their drooping creepers into the middle of any village square or road. The tree is revered for itself, personifying perfection without human interference. This Hindu reverence for nature also spilled over into architecture, resulting in Hindu towns, palaces, temples, and buildings growing organically, with no geometric discipline. The Islamic tradition, informed by the Greek passion for order and logic, produced gardens and architecture that were guided by regimented lines in order to achieve perfect symmetry.

According to Sinha's scheme, Indian society is driven by religion, and Indian landscapes are formulated by respective religious ideas. This suggestion is problematic, to say the least, because it ignores the syncretic influences of the Bhakti and Sufi traditions that flourished on the subcontinent. Having placed herself outside the historical context, and having locked herself into a compartmentalized landscape, Sinha relies on Jungian archetypes to work her way through the Indian (or Hindu) landscape. This allows her to search for "a common thread" that ties together Hindu "archetypal symbols" with the works of contemporary architects like Charles Correa, B. K. Doshi, Raj Rewal, and others discussed in the latter part of the book. This too is problematic because, locked in the essentialist archetype of her own creation, Sinha ignores the works of the American Louis Kahn, perhaps the most ardent follower of Jungian ideas, who profoundly influenced Doshi and, to a lesser extent, Correa. Sinha provides no space for common cultural understandings that transcend religion; she pays no attention to class, education, or economic factors. While Sinha makes multiple references to changes in urban/rural India, she provides no explanation of these changes or how they have evolved.

Nonetheless, Sinha ably discusses rich Hindu mythological and epic traditions of the subcontinent. Divided into four parts--the introduction, "Natural Archetypes," "Spatial Archetypes," and "Archetypes and Design"--and drawing on the works of earlier scholars, the book explores the ideas that have sustained vaastu purusha mandala, Indian temple architecture, Hindu pilgrim places, and so on. According to Sinha, natural formulations such as mountains, hills, rivers, water tanks, and caves all have influenced the built environment: temples, shrines, pilgrim places.

Sinha falters in her narrative when she does not question her sources. Consequently, her narrative varies in quality, depending on what sources she is consulting. For example, her discussion of Buddhist stories and the importance of the cosmic tree in Buddhist landscapes is excellent, but her treatment of Ayodhya, the site associated with the great god Rama, is problematic because she uncritically accepts nineteenth-century political inventions about that city.

Similarly lacking in historical insight is the debatable claim that the Rajasthani city of Jaipur was planned in accordance with the principles of Vaastu shastras. The Rajput rulers themselves were transplants from Central Asia, and the sixteenth-century city could not have ignored the monumentality of Islamic structures. By compartmentalizing her work, Sinha achieves an intellectual isolation that hinders her investigation. The last section of the book is the strongest. Here she describes her work, as a practicing architect and member of the Department of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in developing plans for the conservation of sacred places in India and exploring low-cost housing for the poor in Navi Mumbai. (Incidentally, Correa was the main force behind the new city, which has developed as a poor cousin of the old city, with acute housing problems, particularly for the poor.) While recognizing the contradiction of "juxtaposition of modernity and tradition" in urban India (p. 3), Sinha seeks to resolve this dilemma by deploying "cosmological and cosmogonic motifs that have consistently appeared in the history of Hindu sacred landscape" (p. 197). Given the multireligious, multicultural population of India, this is problematic. She celebrates Correa's work for drawing on the traditions of each area where he is commissioned to build. His Vidhan Bhavan (State Assembly) in Bhopal (which won the Aga Khan Award) is inspired by a nearby Buddhist stupa; but such pastiche is not new to Indian architecture, which continues to struggle between recovering the great Hindu tradition and inventing the brave and promising future. (Bhopal was once ruled by a Muslim dynasty and has a sizable Muslim population.) In the 1950s, when Le Corbusier was ushering in modernism in the capital city of Chandigarh, Julius Vaz was building the auditorium for the capital city of Bhubaneswar, drawing his inspiration from the nearby Buddhist stupa at Dhauli. The American Albert Mayer's first plans for Chandigarh drew on Indian villages and bazaars, whereas the Frenchman Le Corbusier promised in his plans a design for India's industrial future. In the end, Prime Minister Nehru opted for Le Corbusier's vision. That debate between historicism and modernity remains unresolved in Indian architectural/planning circles. As India industrializes, and as the middle class expands, the demand for resources, both indigenous and imported, will increase, putting even greater pressure on the environment that is already showing signs of fatigue. It remains to be seen whether the new urban environment created from the "natural world" that Sinha calls for will materialize; but she ought to be lauded for drawing attention to an important issue facing Indian architecture and urbanism.

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Citation: Ravi Kalia. Review of Sinha, Amita, Landscapes in India: Forms and Meanings. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. January, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14079

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