| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Ravi Kalia. Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 165. $29.95.
Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat in western India, is a planned city, as are two earlier state capitals likewise conceived after independence in 1947. The pioneer was Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier. He had the enthusiastic support of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who understood that locating the new nation within the best world architectural praxis could contribute to his general objective of bringing modernity to India. The next state complex, at Bhubaneshwar in Orissa, was built under the guidance of Otto Koenigsberger, who was heavily influenced by Le Corbusier. When, a generation later, the decision was taken to build Gandhinagar, the first flush of independence had faded and the context had altered. The city was not completed until 1982. Different imperatives affected how it was conceived, planned, and executed.	1
Ravi Kalia's monograph explores those imperatives, using the two city's predecessors for comparison as well as, sotto voce, that earlier imperial enterprise in urban grandeur, New Delhi. Their presence looms large in this detailed and illuminating monograph, which builds on the author's preceding two volumes but stands on its own. Every point here is pushed back to distant origins. Thus the achievement of statehood for Gujarat in 1960 and the perception of a need for a new, custom-built capital distinct from yet near the thriving old city of Ahmedabad is traced through the region's periods of Islamic and British rule into independence and thereafter. In a similar fashion, the book traverses architectural debates in the United States and provides details of university training to explain the antecedents of architects, both Indian and foreign, involved in the project. Kalia provides all the information possibly needed to understand the issues involved in choosing the city site, its design, and the architects responsible. This is an interesting, if densely textured, account.	. . .

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