Core Committee: Himanshu Burte, Malini Krishnakutty, Anuradha Parikh

December 10 to 12, 1997
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Nineteen-Ninety-Seven marks the 50th anniversary of the end of colonial rule in India and the nation’s birth as an independent democracy. The Mohile Parikh Centre for the Visual Arts – Architecture Forum, sees this occasion as an opportunity to review and reassess the body of thought and work achieved in Indian architecture.

To initiate this dialogue, the Architecture Forum will be hosting a conference, `DisContinuous Threads – Memory, Freedom and Architecture in Contemporary India’. This conference offers an opportunity for Indian architects to critique their own post-independence efforts at evolving an architecture relevant to their time, place and identity. Over the course of three days, there will be a number of presentations of selected papers dealing with various issues related to the past of Indian architecture, and with its future.

A series of evening lectures will discuss the parallel histories of contemporary architecture in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh respectively. Kamil Khan Mumtaz from Lahore, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf of the University of Pennsylvania and C. Anjalendran of Colombo, will be covering the architecture of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka respectively. These evening lectures will provide a regional perspective for South Asian Architecture that is not tied down to national boundaries and will be open to the public.

It would be appropriate, as India steps into her sixth decade as a free nation, to examine what independence has meant for Indian architecture, how we have dealt with achieving and maintaining a national identity and how we have attempted to address the two-faced riddle that looks outward onto freedom and inward into memory.