European Architecture in India 1750-1850 Sten Nilsson (Faber 147s)
Vitruvius Indicus
FRANCIS WATSON
European Architecture in India 1750-1850 Sten Nilsson (Faber 147s)
Golden Goa we know, and Pondicherry we know, if only for the brief but perky survival in India of our long-vanquished Portuguese and French competitors. Serampore, near enough to Calcutta to eke out the tourist attrac- tions of the City of Dreadful Night, sidles into the annals of British-Indian culture as having sheltered William Carey's printing press with a Danish tolerance of missionary enter- prise. But who—save some harmless drudge of the Imperial Gazetteer of India--calls readily to mind so nearly fictional a township as Tranquebar, which figures first and in some ways most fully as an exemplar of urban patterns in this expensively illustrated volume? Its memorials and documents lie, for the most part unpublished, in the National Archives and the Royal Library in Copenhagen. A romantic Frenchman, contemplating Tranque- bar by moonlight from the deck of a frigate in the late 1830s, caught fashionably defunc- tive echoes of Pompeii. And here, if anywhere on the coast of Coromandel, the camera, align- ing Tuscan capital and gargoyled architrave with palm and mango along the unregally narrow Kongensgade, overtakes peculiar fancy. Here dance they to the tunes of Handel. Here dwelt the Ongi Bongi Bo.
This is an outrageous way to recommend a serious contribution to architectural scholar- ship, based on lectures delivered to learned societies in several capitals. But the fact to which Sir John Summerson draws attention in his foreword is really rather odd : that, ex- cept for Fergusson's highly individual labours of a century ago, we seem to have left this promising field to its present Scandinavian dis- coverer. Mr Nilsson is a Swede untouched by nostalgia or commitment beyond the special- ised persuasions of a student of the European cultural excursion in the East. What he is observing and reconstructing is neo-classical architecture, secular and Protestant, under variant climatic, social and military conditions: not simply, as we might be tempted to say, Royal Engineer-Georgian, the charm of which is more often acknowledged in its survivals than understood in its original context.
For in the British historical context, 1750- 1850 is the tumultuous century of military activity and political change in which coastal settlements were transformed into an empire stretching to the Indus. And the strange, pseudo-Palladian calm and confidence of its buildings, here accepting and there exerting some minor local influence, seems the more striking for being exhibited as a progress from mercantile 'factory' to substantial waterfront, alike in Tranquebar or Pondicherry as in the other-destined Calcutta of the eighteenth cen- tury. Only the special British development of the cantonment. and the hint, towards the end of the period, of hill-station suburbs, disturb the theme initially stated as `Projections of Greece and Rome.'
Mr Nilsson's selections for individual study include the great beehive famine-granary near Patna—seen, I think, in one of Zoffany's large set-pieces and, remarkably, standing today— which prompts a characteristic note on the architectural projects of the French Revolu- tion; the grandiose Government House in Calcutta, derived so prophetically (since Cur- zon was to be its proudest occupant) from the Kedleston of James Paine, Robert Adam and Charles Wyatt; and also—though rather coldly considered—the extraordinary structure of La Martiniere on the outskirts of. Lucknow, the mysteriously personal memorial of the French- born adventurer General Claude Martin, From its landscaped park, which many must have relished as the opening setting of the film Shakespeare-wallah, one may retreat again from well-presented detail into the fantastic and the elegiac, or cross the city to find in the ruined Residency the evidence, in shattered columns of sun-dried brick stripped of their marmoreal plaster, for a chapter on building materials and an apothegm on the aesthetics of impermanence.
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