administrative parts of the city.
• The ‘body’ housed the university and residential complexes in the heart of
the city.
• The ‘feet’ consisted of industrial sectors and the railway station. Apart
from the initial layout of the city, Corbusier also designed several
buildings in Chandigarh.
Taking inspiration from Le Corbusier’s creativity, a young Indian architect
D.V. Joshi designed the Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad.
Charles Mark Correa, Doshi’s contemporary, designed the Hindustan
Lever pavilion for the India International Trade Fair in 1961. The pavilion
was an exposed concrete structure resembling a crumpled packing case
made of concrete with a zigzag ramp to walk along. Correa also designed
the Gandhi Sanghralaya in Ahmedabad as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi.
MODERN INDIAN PAINTING
Bengal School
The first notable movement in modern Indian painting was initiated by the
well known ‘Bengal School’ of Abanindranath Tagore.
The body of work generated by him and others – Gaganendranath Tagore,
Nandalal Bose, Benodebehari Mookherjee, Mukul Dey and Asit Haldar –
had an enduring impact on the Indian art scene.
With its centers in Calcutta and Shantiniketan, this movement exerted a
huge influence on the art schools of the subcontinent.
Triggered by nationalism and the search for an Indian identity, the Bengal
School tried to revive India’s traditional art within a nationalistic format.
Yet to dismiss its artists as mere ‘revivalists’, and its art as wishy washy
overly sentimental ‘romantic naturalism’ would be doing injustice to
their real contribution to ‘modernism’ in Indian art.
Its greatest exponents did not believe in art ‘manners’ or conformity to
any system—traditional or foreign. They stressed personal search and
sensitivity to the impulses of a living environment.
Each, searched and experimented with different expressive modalities –
Persian, Japanese, Chinese and, in the case of Gaganendranath even
Cubism – to find their appropriate form of expression.