INTROSPECTION

This is an article about introspection - about the changes taking place in the built environment around us and the changes taking place within us – as people, culture and Nation.

Introspection about the origins of thought leading up to the contemporary global culture is required to come to grips with how our perceptions are changing and what is the relation of the context on us. I believe, such an exercise will assist us in understanding what universal human values should be relevant when it comes to the nature of thought itself and what values ought to be discarded if found to be superfluous. The nature of thought influences the creation and sustenance of built environment and the built environment in turn affects our perceptions. Therefore, the most fundamental thing for designers is to be aware of the nature of thought and how it affects us and what quality of built environment a thought generates. The article is not intended to give any answers or reveal any truths or directions. It would be too naive on my part to claim so! Nevertheless, introspection must continue on matters of existence and where we seem to be heading. This quality of introspection, I believe, is going to raise our bar of consciousness towards the built environment we create and experience.

I begin with introspecting how does a culture like ours evolve, how does it develop and where it seems to be going. How an ‘enriching’ experience is created and what seems to be the nature of thought in contemporary times? This is a critical issue according to me, and I will try to put matters in perspective, so people should build on this introspection exercise. The task required for us is to look back at history; for it is there that we can begin to get some hint about the nature of the contemporary world (and thought). My observations are general - they encompass most of the cultures and sometimes, they may be specific to the Indian context. This is just one narrative that has evolved and covers only a limited dimension. The nature of mind is complex and it is impossible to illustrate the effects of all factors that shape human perception. But, we should begin somewhere.

The role of spirituality:

Let’s start by introspecting how did thought generate and evolve? We are now speaking of a context prior to the advent of agriculture and a few centuries after it, where human life was completely at the mercy of Nature. The fundamental origin of thought may have been shaped through our most primitive experiences about Nature. Unpredictable and ferocious events such as forest fires, droughts, floods, torrential rains, storms, heat and cold must have generated feelings of fear and reverence about Nature in our mind – feelings born out of complete dependence towards Nature. Every sight, every smell, every sound, texture or colour, temperature and humidity, every other creature would have been felt with a very raw intensity of our senses. Everything around us would have been seen as a threat to confront and control. How does the human mind respond to such a context, when everything is new, unpredictable and threatening? What does he think, when he sees the ferocity of the fire engulf his livestock and the forests, the bitterness of cold and the torrential rains that may give abundant water supply or can also cause devastation? How does he control his thoughts on this unpredictable scenario? I believe some form of worship must have been man’s earliest attempts to control his existential anxiety towards Nature. Worship, as we now intellectually define it, must have been that raw expression of understanding (and perhaps attempting to communicate with) the forces of Nature. It is not by accident that all cultures worship some of the basic elements of Nature such as fire, wind, water, earth and space. The Vedas lay much emphasis on these natural elements and subsequent centuries have elevated these elements to the status of God. The concept of God (or idol worship) is our attempt to express certain intuitively felt aspect or a principle of Nature that governs us. Thus, depending on local topography and the local situation throughout Indian subcontinent, different Gods were invented as man’s expression of the immediate Nature that he experienced. Other religions of those times have also shown similar evolution, meaning that the nature of experiences was universal across different populations spread across the globe.

In our Indian history, there has been an extensive record and evolution of these spiritual thoughts from Vedas, Brahmanak, Upanishads, Mahakavya, Puranas and Shastras. This constitutes the entire bulk of ancient Indian literature and it throws substantial light on the nature of thought and the environment we have experienced in those times. Fundamental in this belief system is the assumption that Nature’s role is all encompassing – architecture is not separate but an expression of cosmos itself. This got symbolised into a diagram of Vastu Purusha Mandal in subsequent centuries. By following the diagram, it was believed that the cosmic order was also recreated in the piece of architecture. Did it really create that order? I think, that is a matter of faith and can’t be analyzed through contemporary thought process. In other words, the mental processes of experiencing architecture and creating a built environment were different from contemporary scenario. Therefore the two approaches can’t be compared and definitely the traditional approach just cannot be copied or recreated today, because we have changed.

Similarly, the same mind of the context of those times has created folk tales, myths, legends. It is a way of conceiving and expressing our relation to the reality. Symbolism is also an aspect of the same mind which has found its way in our customs, food, rituals, and the built environment (especially temples). Symbolism is one dimension of the mind. What does it illustrate? It illustrates the awareness of the concept of Unknown through perceivable forms. What is required to understand through symbolism is not the form itself, but the message conveyed behind it. Thus, the architectural language is implicit (and not explicit as in our times). It also means that the value system displayed through symbolism, folk tales, myths, legends may generally have been accepted and shared across a community. It may have been accepted by the masses. Why can’t we imagine myths or folk tales in this period? Why can’t we invent symbols to be understood by all? Because our mind has changed to an extent that it speaks and understands a different language, far removed from those times. Today’s language is of individual expression and everything is open (and challenged) to interpretation. Values have become individual specific, everything needs to be verbalized and therefore, there is no place for symbolism.

The above talk highlighted the fundamental aspect of our minds – recognition of the role of Nature on our survival and the spiritual dimension of the mind to express Nature. The essential qualities of thought can be stated as expressing respect, awe and fear towards Nature. Architecture of those times is completely inspired through Nature. What are other fundamental experiences that mind has expressed in the Indian subcontinent and by which factors?

The role of climate:

We come to the role of the Indian climate. The Indian climate and the natural resources found here have created one of the most favourable conditions for human settlement, its rapid proliferation of human beings and generation of ‘cultures’ (a certain way of behaving and understanding the world) out of economic necessity. One is forced to respond to climatic challenges because one can’t afford to do things otherwise. This fundamental truth is also a statement of economic sustenance that huge population of India has had to bear over the centuries. Climate has dictated conception of built forms that provide protection from it and at the same time optimum benefit. Emphasis was on the use of local materials and that too necessitated the hand based skills required to mould these materials to satisfy practical requirements of safety and security. Building a piece of architecture was labour intensive and required communal effort. The response has been much localized and every change in the climatic pattern within the Indian subcontinent expresses a variation in a localized response to the built environment. Over the centuries that led to variations in ways of doing things based on local conditions and therefore we see cultural variations in India. How does climate and economic necessity generate a culture? For one, economic challenges compel us to stay together, build things together, maintain things together and share resources wherever possible. Further, it also involves reuse of and recycling of materials. It also means that most spaces are designed to be multi functional and communal, since creating and maintaining private spaces is a costly affair. It also leads to certain character of settlements such as common walls, internal courts to draw in light and ventilation and generate multiuse spaces, transitional spaces such as verandahs, narrow street patterns (or should we say optimally designed street for a human scale?) communal chowks, maidans and so on. It also necessitates favourable walking distances between places of work, leisure and entertainment. And it also forces a mixed typology of development with commercial activities abutting streets and private ones behind or at upper levels. How is life experienced in such a way of living? The strongest experience is communal. Perhaps almost everything may have been done together or as a team. Necessity to think of your family, relatives and the extended communal hold was also important, since every resource had to be shared for survival of all. Necessity to consider the traditional ways of doing things or using materials, or applying skills was required for continuous sustenance. What does all this say about people? It says that people were completely rooted to their places, except if forced by wars or famines to be located somewhere else. The response to the creation of built environment has been place specific, not by comparing multiple choices of doing things and applying deductive logic, but out of sheer necessity to survive and sustain. Thus, the rate of technological progress may appear nil across time. This throws a question regarding should we change if something appears to work well forever? This should be thought over by each of us. In another article (Garde, 2014), I have mentioned the link of such sustainable approach on the aspect of creation of memory and how it leads to a sense of feeling an experience (good or bad) and a general respect for history. In short, sustainable living has an opportunity to build an emotional bond for mankind, history and Nature since most responses have to take these parameters into account. It teaches the value of interdependence. It makes our response to the built environment contextual. It nourishes us emotionally. Living in such a built environment means to experience such spaces emotionally. A wall is not just a wall, but displays the story of the entire family who worked together laboriously to get it done. Similarly, the verandah is not just a personal place to view some remote mountain or a waterfall – it was a place where one could connect with people throughout the day. The concept of individuality took a backseat against the demands of communal living. I wonder if people might have even questioned the possibility to spend time only for themselves. Time is for doing things for others, not me alone. The concept of time and space therefore seems to have been communal and not individualized. Finally, one should introspect on how is experience generated? The nature of experience in those times was not exclusively intellectual (or analytical), but contained several dimensions born through social interactions. Experience was deeply felt, it was emotive. If one planned to build a wall, one could visualize the effort required to put to bring people together, transport the materials themselves, bear the heat or the rain and sit back in the evening for sharing some light moments. The social connection was there, in each one’s mind. Can this experience be reproduced or even remotely visualized while doing an autocad drawing?

So how have we changed in urban India? How do we think now? What is the nature of our thoughts in contemporary times? And how does that affect us and the environment around us?

Contemporary times:

The rate of change seems to be accelerating. More and more traditional skill sets are getting replaced by automation and as digital solutions change, techniques keep on changing at a rapid rate. At a fundamental level that means continuity of doing things in a certain way is disrupted. This means, experiences born out of association with people, objects, places, materials, and hand skills cannot be formed. There remains no room for this kind of experience. Therefore, attachment to places and people is declining, since everything becomes automated and a building can be supposed to be conceived by sitting thousands of miles away in some different continent. It is build by a person not from the same place, it is build by using techniques and skills that have got nothing to do with the context and technology has made it possible to negate the impact of local climate altogether. How will the building be ever contextual? And if it is not contextual, how can it ever generate any emotional feelings towards it? It does not stir you emotionally. In other words, no experience is rooted to a place. If one encounters this environment continuously, one may develop less emotional quotient.  One is forgetting that the nature of our emotional experience is place specific – experience itself is contextual. If automation is leading to global uniformity of lifestyle and built environment, the biggest danger we face as a global society is the “flattening” of all different experiences into a single mould – only one way to perceive a world. One should travel the continent of North America to feel this deadening of emotional experience – monotony in lifestyle and built environment across thousands of miles across USA and Canada. Believed to be the biggest generator of digital technology and technologically advanced Nation, what USA endorses on us is the poorest kind of built environment with absolute disregard for contextual thinking leading ultimately to emotional distress. America forces an image of uniformity of world view. There is another thing that happens in such developed Nations where one’s entire actions are dictated by digital technology – one’s actions become predictable. One can also plan things well in advance and derive 100% efficiency in output. One can rarely be disappointed since one plans everything for oneself alone without having the need to consider the ‘interference’ of other people. So, one’s experiences become individualized and have got nothing to do with the other (other can be any human being or Nature). One becomes totally disconnected with the environment and that leads to boredom, distress, anxiety, loneliness, arrogance and disrespect for all, disrespect for history, culture, climate. And consequently a human being becomes a machine. USA and Canada can be said to be a machine for living – the matrix movie executed successfully. The biggest challenge Canadians face is that they do not know how to ‘connect’ with one another! If one does not see any other person for several months, what kind of experience it creates? Not many people in India know that Canada is notorious for highest cases of depressions.

Now urban India seems to be following those erroneous footsteps by blindly aping the West. As we become more digitally interconnected with USA, Canada and all other aspects they entrust on us, we seem to be loosening our mental ability and sensitivity of responding to our own context. An Indian mind is capable of extremely refined and higher levels of thinking than any technologically advanced Nation. Why is this so? It is because of our experiences formed by responding to our context. But not for long. Our experiences are now becoming to be dictated and formed in the same way that Americans experience their life. The danger is, culturally, we are getting flattened into a uniform mould disconnected by the richness of India’s contextual reality. Younger generations born and brought up on digital media have completely different values nurtured through global ideas or belief systems. Where is the consideration of local context in this thinking? Or should it be chunked altogether? Should history, culture, social aspects, climate be made obsolete? Should we consider ourselves ‘advanced’ or ‘progressive’ when we disrespect what our context offers us? Never before is our mind getting colonized to such as extent as now. Previously it was stated that Indians disrespected their historical monuments – they don’t conserve them. However the argument was that Indians practiced history in their thoughts – through values, customs, rituals, beliefs, context and so on. But an even greater danger awaits us – removing history from our thoughts completely and this is where I think, we should seriously introspect and respond appropriately.

I feel diversity is essential to survive – it is a natural response of Nature. The biggest strength of India is Her ability to offer opportunities for creating such rooted experiences. Diversity of contexts in India is a representation of diversity of world views. Something creative can happen here because people conceive and experience built environments in different ways and in the most appropriate ways that may not be even taught in the costliest universities of America. At what cost should we accept digital impact, go forward for ‘Smart Cities’, automate everything, jeopardize human contact are some questions we need to think about hard. I don’t think that the clock can stop or can be reversed. A mental and cultural transition is inevitable which will have an impact on the quality of architecture we produce, we endorse and which we are bound to reject or discard. It is upto each one of us to keep on questioning and introspecting about what values are essential to cherish in today’s interconnected world. Introspection is the only weapon available to counter attack the force of uniformity that seems to loom large on us.

Ar. Niranjan Garde

 Also published in A+D; March issue

Bibliography

Garde, N. (2014). Sustainability and Memory. Architecture + Design, 31(10), 62-64.

Mitchell, G. (1977). The Hindu Temple: An introduction to its Meaning and Forms.

Rao, R. S. (1997). The Indian Temple: It's Meaning. Bengaluru: Kalpataru Research Academy Publications.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.