Unwelcoming Spaces: How the Architectural Vision for Bhubaneswar Has Blurred Over 75 Years
In the 1940s, a cosmopolitan, democratic, and egalitarian vision created a state capital in eastern India. As it turns 75 years old, Bhubaneswar today has drifted away from that dream.
Thirty-three massive Gothic pillars and a giant dome adorn a building that provides a workspace for high-ranking police personnel in Odisha’s capital city Bhubaneswar. A giant clock, reportedly bought from Switzerland and installed on the façade, adds to the theatricality of the architecture. While this Police Commissionerate Building that caters to just two cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack spreads over 1.2 lakh square feet, the comparatively austere New Scotland Yard Building in London, headquarters of the second largest police force in the world, is contained within 93,550 square feet.
A city’s architecture offers clues to its personality and the state of mind it embodies. Writing about the “fractured and paranoid urban landscape” in Lahore, the historian Chris Moffat noted the city’s “security checks and gated passages, tall walls and barbed wire, closed-circuit cameras and concrete barriers”. These features – argued Moffat – were “not simply a response to risk – violent attacks in the city are rare – but an assertion of control: regulating access, demonstrating ownership, and segregating by privilege and permission”.
As Bhubaneswar turns 75 years old this year, the city’s palace-like police building is not exceptional to its landscape. Arguably, nothing tells Bhubaneswar’s story better than its most imposing buildings, which house either a department or an affiliate of the state government.
For example, Bhubaneswar’s Unnati Bhawan, which houses the wings of the Odisha government’s Department of Urban Development, flaunts soaring Tuscan pillars. These are spaces where the bureaucracy mingles with the consultant class from the private sector – two forward castes from the secular world that together govern the city. The architecture of the buildings makes the visitor feel like a supplicant seeking a favour instead of a citizen exercising his rights.
Another landmark building in Bhubaneswar is the Krushi Bhawan that serves as the workplace for the Odisha government’s Department of Agriculture. This building, professing to be dedicated to farmers and artisans in the state, is a study in superfluous accoutrements. Khondalite lattices, colonnades, ponds, brick facades copying designs from Odisha’s handlooms mark its 1.3 lakh square foot area. Krushi Bhawan was apparently designed as a tribute to the vision of Bhubaneswar’s architect, Otto Koenisberger. But does this express Koenisberger’s vision when he designed one of the new state capitals of a newly independent India?
Koenisberger’s philosophy of architecture and town planning was shaped both by his personal life and professional training under the great masters of his time. A Jew by birth, he had to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. Two years later, he was stripped off his German citizenship. He was offered Indian citizenship at the suggestion of Lord Mountbatten. Though Koenisberger settled in England in 1951, he clung to his Indian citizenship for another 40 years. He was compelled to give up his citizenship when the British Conservative government’s anti-immigration rhetoric grew shriller.
Faced with the opportunity to design Bhubaneswar from scratch, Koenisberger looked beyond submitting a master plan for a merely administrative capital. Acutely aware that he was working in a caste-ridden society, Koenisberger wished to prevent secular iterations of prevalent social practices.
In his book on Bhubaneswar, the historian Ravi Kalia wrote Koenisberger feared that an exclusively administrative capital would give rise to a dominant “administrative caste… one as harmful to the country as the old castes we are trying to abolish”. The architect was inspired to create a city that would eventually cater to a population burdened with historical inequality. He proposed that Bhubaneswar be designed in a way that it emerges as a “nerve centre of provincial activities where workers and their representatives, manufacturers, businessmen, scientists, officials and last but not the least politicians meet and collaborate”.
The vision was bold for its time. In the 1940s, Bhubaneswar had devolved into an obscure centre of pilgrimage – a few devotees used to visit the Lingaraj Temple. Bhubaneswar had a rich history dating back to the Kalinga War of 261 BC and bore the imprints of flourishing Jain and Buddhist culture. The German historian Herman Kulke had baptized Bhubaneswar as “the oldest Indian capital with the longest uninterrupted history.”
But when the British occupied Orissa in 1803, Cuttack, the capital of the state from medieval times, and Puri, the holiest town in eastern India, were the two centres of attraction and political importance. The Independence movement in Odisha hardly touched Bhubaneswar, whereas important meetings were held in Cuttack, Puri, Balasore, Berhampur, and Sambalpur. Before Independence, Bhubaneswar was known for its tigers, snake charmers, a few beautiful temples of old, dacoit infested forests, and a sanatorium that sheltered tuberculosis patients from Bengal.
Bhubaneswar was first identified as a viable place for a new state capital by Maharashtrian B.K. Gokhale, special advisor to Orissa governor Hawthorne Lewis, Kalia’s research states. Gokhale convinced Harekrushna Mahtab, who, as premier and then as the first chief minister of Orissa, ensured that Bhubaneswar was finally chosen as the new capital, amidst pressure from the residents of Cuttack, Puri, and other towns. Mahtab, himself a scholarly historian who had also founded the iconic Odia paper Prajatantra in Cuttack, was able to cast off the weight of tradition and lent enthusiastic support to Bhubaneswar. Prime Minister Nehru laid the foundation stone in April 1948.
Mahtab’s persistent efforts to hire Koenisberger to plan for a new capital bears testimony to the visionary leadership of those times. It was a progressive and creative choice for a leader like Mahtab, who had risen from the ranks in India’s anti-colonial movement, to engage a European architect to plan a post-Independence city. It is evident Mahtab regarded Koenisberger, a white European, simply as an expert in the field of architecture. This incident indicates the cosmopolitan nationalism of that era, which is in stark contrast to contemporary India’s ethnonationalism.
Having fled from the Nazis in Germany, Koenisberger was understandably wary of the state determining the direction of society. He was not ready to trust the state to design spaces for its citizens. This is perhaps why Koenisberger had suggested that his Master Plan for Bhubaneswar be published “with an appeal for constructive criticism and practical collaboration… to gain the support of all citizens who are genuinely interested in the welfare of Orissa”. Kalia, who cited this excerpt from Koenisberger’s Master Plan, wrote that the Orissa government disregarded this advice. Instead, it debated the plan behind closed doors and with officials, who had little knowledge of urban planning and aesthetics.
The suggestion to democratise architectural planning was perhaps not just moral grandstanding. Some architects from the West, through the course of their work in India, realised the practical value of vernacular architecture. Gautam Bhatia’s book on Laurie Baker cites the Britain-born architect, who was deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, arguing that vernacular architecture was based on hundreds of years of “building research” and “coping… with the local environment”.
The years Baker spent in the Himalayan town of Pithoragarh taught him how well the locals built against the possibility of landslides and on steep slopes. Ignoring this kind of knowledge, he had argued, was “modern conceit”. Last but not the least, architecture, Baker posited, should not be appraised as works of individual genius. Good architecture is founded on the local community’s knowledge, and therein lay the value of Koenisberger’s suggestions to democratise the planning for Bhubaneswar.
The art historian R.W. Liscombe had once stated that Koenisberger preferred an “ahistorical architectural vocabulary”, perhaps in consideration of the cultural churning in India after the exit of the British. Koenisberger resisted suggestions by the politicians to design Bhubaneswar’s buildings featuring styles from its ancient temples.
As refugees poured into the country, Koenisberger, in 1948, started formulating his Master Plan for Bhubaneswar. Though Odisha was largely unaffected by Partition, its new capital, he realised, would attract economic refugees from impoverished rural parts of the state. Koenisberger seemed to be aware that Bhubaneswar would be viewed and experienced differently by different communities settling in the city. Would ‘untouchables’ feel like equal citizens of a modern nation-state in a government building that looks like a temple that was a forbidden space for them? Would the priestly class be able to discard notions of superiority in the same space?
While Bhubaneswar’s imposing contemporary government buildings are not borrowing from its temple architecture, they are nevertheless using design to establish a modern and secular hierarchy. The solicitude that marked Koenisberger’s architectural philosophy has left little or no trace in buildings such as Krushi Bhawan and the Police Commissionerate Building. The concern for building egalitarian spaces is missing. As Bhubaneswar’s government buildings grow grander and more intimidating with the passing years, the architectural vision, on which the city itself was designed, keeps getting narrower.
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