Through most of the 20th century in fact, until the reform of the Indian economy in 1991 and the

liberalisation of trade in materials, equipment and services architects in India were forced to negotiate between the attractions of contemporary architectural theories from abroad and the limitations of the local building industry, in the 1950s, the contrast between the global standards and the state of the construction technology in India was so stark that it prompted the French Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887 1966), the most famous in a long tradition of foreign architects in India, to boast to his European friends that the construction of the grand monuments in Chandigarh had been executed using pack animals. Construction technology had seldom been a stumbling block for architects in India, who relied on inventive details and formal compositions to fashion a unique and appropriate aesthetic. Indeed, in addition to having sustained centuries of building activity on the Indian subcontinent, these seemingly primitive techniques were able to deliver both the reactionary neo classical edifices of early 19th century, pre colonial Calcutta, which were brick and stucco renditions of designs plagiarised from European models, as well as the refined neo classicism of the end of Empire, most famously the Victoria Memorial (1921) in Calcutta and the monuments of New Delhi (1912 1929) by Edwin Lutyens (1869 1944) and Herbert Baker (1862 1946). During the first half of the 20th century, and quite apart from the artificial hiatus of New Delhi, two distinct continuities were visible in Indian architecture, distinguished by their tectonic qualities. One was the ornamented brick and stone masonry tradition that extended the principles of the Gothic Revival in European architecture. The second was use of the reinforced concrete frame (invented in France in 1898) combined with masonry infill walls, a technique that enabled the compositional flourishes of Art Deco style apartment blocks, residences and cinema halls all over the country, and found a truly indigenised manifestation in the works of Claude Batley (1879 1956) in Bombay. Due to their education and experiences, the first generation of Indian architects the First moderns were exposed to the vibrant legacies of modern architecture and were alive to the possibilities these created for their practice. The most visible characteristic of their work was a sensitivity to labour and materials and their application, and dexterity in handling building and landscape. There was a clear thrust on the physical fact of the building and the potentials of space and form to meet the functional and economic needs of a newly democratised society, while ensuring a studied absence of allusion, revival and nostalgia. Rather than the blind application of received traditions, the First Moderns innovated the traditions; their originality was visible, for example, in a way they incorporated the decorative arts in their works, a travesty for dogmatic modernism but an organic outcome of the persistence of craft in the labour intensive building industry, with the play of textured surfaces a tribute to the beauty of the tropical sun. Their inventiveness was evident in the way they used minimalism in the application of formal typologies like courtyards and shaded corridors. The first moderns presented continuities with a formidable bank of ideas that influenced equally, the modern architectural culture of India and abroad. Through item, students of Indian architecture have received an authentic, although filtered, version of canonical modernism: the works and philosophies of Buckminster Fuller (Correa), Le Corbusier (Doshi), Walter Gropius and Alison & Peter Smithson (Kanvinde), Richard Neutra (Stein), and structural functionalism and Metabolism (Rewal). Through the prodigious but separate efforts of these architects, and without an overt agenda, modernism found a firm footing in India, with a richness of expressions befitting a style whose antecedents were over a century old, having traversed the stylistic evolution of the 19th century Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and the early 20th century Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Rationalism, to name the most prominent. The works of the First Moderns dot the Indian landscape today, an Indian architecture that is contemporary and rooted in its place.