VILLA SHODHAN
Abhay Narasimhan | June 2025
This drawing - a map even - attempts (and cannot possibly succeed) in representing the Villa Shodhan as a series of rhythms lived through the lens of the subordinate who is afforded nothing more than a tiny cell, far removed from the main building. Nonetheless, I feel that an attempt must be made.
The Villa itself is a synecdoche, a piece representing Le Corbusier’s grander ambitions to rationalise the ‘Orient’.
Ravi Kallia (2006, p.141) writes -
“Nehru, who worried so much that the nation’s inexcusable religious anachronism might ruin the world’s greatest experiment in democracy and secularism…He was even prepared to allow excesses to the architectural demigod Le Corbusier in the hope that modernism would modernize India. ‘Le Corbusier may produce extravagances occasionally,’ Nehru would say in justification, ‘but it is better to be extravagant than to be a person with no mind at all’. “He then goes on to say that “Modernist masters were not so much reinventing the wheel; rather, with modern materials and manufacturing methods, they were reinterpreting it” (Kallia, 2006, p.141)
Thus, armed by the allure of ‘Beton Brut,’ Corbusier, through the Villa Shodhan, reinterprets and aims to reconcile with deeply embedded caste practices. He performs a rationalising act - one that comfortably situates and legitimises the caste dynamic in the modern age.
Villa Shodhan is likely one of many blueprints that contemporary bourgeois Indian homes use to produce a ‘servant’s quarter.’ The Villa echoes caste dynamics and passes along with it a guidebook of instructions on how to sanitise these dynamics.
My grandmother’s apartment, in the urban outskirts of Bengaluru, is designed similarly. Such a space in most bourgeois homes can be characterised as a cramped rectangular cell cluttered by waste bins and utility pipes. These spaces are presented as extensions of the kitchen, and are where the ‘housemaid’ squats or even sits on a short stool, remaining unseen by the occupants of the house.
Conventional technical drawings of the Villa Shodhan relay the modernist mantra of “and/or, both/and, either/or” (Wood and Harrison, 2003, Prakash et al., 2022), which lays the groundwork for a binary differentiation. Elevation drawings, out of the need to describe the “main” building facade’s extravagance, tend to forego descriptions of the service wing. It is almost as if the service wing is “blocking” the view of the main structure.
The campus can then be perceived as a simple power dynamic: a master and his slave, a subject and its extension, the mill-owner (Surottam Hutheesing, for whom it was designed) and his workers.
Unavoidably, then, we notice the stark difference in stature of the two entities.
Instead, dialectically, this drawing hopes to expose the machinery, viewing the service wing as a person’s primary living space and the “main” house as a place of work.
We are then pushed to move past the binary opposition of Master and Slave, and describe spaces in their simultaneity.
References:
1. Harrison, C., & Wood, P. (2003). Art in theory, 1900-2000 : an anthology of changing ideas (2nd ed.). Blackwell Pub.
2. Prakash, V., Casciato, M., Coslett, D. E., & Coslett, D. E. (2022). Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003120209
3. Kalia, R. (2006). Modernism, modernization and post‑colonial India: A reflective essay. Planning Perspectives, 21(2), 133–156.
4. Beattie, M. (2011). Uneven modernities: Rabindranath Tagore and the Bauhaus. In P. Brooker, P. Bru, A. Gualtieri, & J. Thacker (Eds.), The Oxford critical and cultural history of modernist magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880–1940