Tribute | Pritzker Prize winning architect Balkrishna Doshi in Ahmedabad

Doshi and Le Corbusier at Le Corbusier's Shodhan House. (Image via architectural-review.com/ Wikimedia Commons)

The 20th century masters had been invited to Ahmedabad by the city’s textile barons who were not only immensely wealthy but also unusually clued into global cultural trends. Gira Sarabhai, whose family owned the thriving Calico Mill and who founded the National Institute of Design had studied under Lloyd Wright, for instance.

The city’s mahajans were also public-minded. “They thought of themselves as ‘citizens of a place’ and wanted to spread the benefits of whatever they did to the community, the city and beyond, till everybody got a share of the pie,” Doshi observed.

Their progressiveness enabled Doshi to start the School of Architecture in 1966, which metamorphosed into the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology. “I just had to mention it to Kasturbhai Lalbhai (a prominent Ahmedabad-based industrialist and head of the Ahmedabad Education Society) and funds were made available.” And once an idea was backed, “there was no interference”. Doshi felt the approach was intrinsic to Ahmedabad’s entrepreneurial culture: “look around the city, at transactions in shops, everywhere, all hinge on trust, it was the same here.”

Doshi’s response to my question about violence and change in Ahmedabad was mixed. He believed that globalization had added a new layer to his familiar city which he both liked and disliked; the solution to social divides according to him lay in economic betterment. At the time of the 2002 communal disturbance in Gujarat, he said he had mulled the possibility of relocating and rejected it because he felt Ahmedabad offered an openness to ideas and he found even its pragmatic nonchalance challenging. “They have a saying here,” he said, “which goes: 'anyone can wield the sambelu (a pounding stick); play it (like a flute) then we might say you have done something worth talking about!'”