Architect Channa Daswatte on how to avoid an urban apocalypse in India

Daswatte tells it is time to radically rethink zoning laws and heighten protection for water bodies to save our cities

Leading a large group through the late Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa’s country home in Lunuganga, Channa Daswatte, who worked closely with Bawa, makes references to Bawa’s affection for Indian design. He draws our attention to a wall hanging by Riten Mazumdar that looks like a Raza painting in its dramatic black and white and red design. Nearby are cushion covers that were designed for Bawa’s home by the wife of the late Charles Correa, Monika Correa. The exhibition, part of a celebration of the centennial of Bawa’s birth that started last month threw a pointillist’s spotlight on Bawa’s furniture and lamps, a little known aspect of Bawa’s talent for creating a tropical modernism in private and public architecture that ranges from some of the most elegant hotels in Asia to Sri Lanka’s parliament to a Buddhist temple that seems like a Japanese scroll on a lake in Colombo. 

Soon we are crowded around what looks as if it were a sleek leather chair imported from Italy. It is in fact, Bawa’s take on the Roorkee chair, used in the British Raj. There is another Mazumdar masterpiece on Bawa’s bed, which has the word ‘Ram’ written repeatedly in Devanagari script as if it were a geometric pattern. If Fabindia were to recreate it, it would be a runaway best-seller.

When I meet Daswatte a few days later at a client’s home that he designed in Bengaluru, it is almost as if we have been transported by a machine that freezes time and space. In a modern bungalow that seems a country estate even in Hebbal, the throttled bottleneck on the way to Bengaluru airport, Daswatte picks up where he left off. The tiles on the terraces of the home are from Athangudi in Tamil Nadu, made by the master craftsmen whose work adorns many a Chettinad mansion. But the tiles’ design, which marries Italy with southern India, is by the Sri Lankan artist Laki Senanayake. Daswatte suggested these to the owner of the house, Bimal Desai, one of the country’s largest beedi producers now better known as a leading proponent of mini urban forests in Bengaluru and public interest petitioner to protect the city’s Cubbon Park. “We have taken something traditional like the Athangudi tile and made it contemporary,” says Daswatte. I sit under a large line drawing by Senanayake that is so vivid that I feel as I should lean forward to avoid brushing against the tree’s branches, but the subject that hangs over our conversation is the savaging of subcontinental cities by real estate moguls and brutalist public works department babus who show little respect for the local climate or the need for the conservation of water bodies and trees. 

Daswatte’s work as a founder of the architectural firm MICD Associates brings him to India often as he completes work for the Taj group in Sikkim, a restoration project in Odisha, but the return to the Desais’ home makes him recall that he travelled as a young architect to the city with Bawa 25 years ago to look at the restoration of a fort at the request of Bimal Poddar. “What a beautiful city it was,” he exclaims, as he describes driving down roads lined with tamarind and mango trees. Today, the structure has literally been cut in half to make way for a highway. 

Daswatte is a pragmatist who quickly points out that the city is still ‘very green’ and ‘very civilised.’ Unprompted, he moves the discussion instead to real estate development without regard to the need to preserve wetlands — the subject of an exhibition in Bengaluru earlier this month — that lead to recurrent floods as extreme weather events come bunched together in ever shorter cycles. In Colombo, he says, it took three floods before the government addressed the issue head-on. At a parliamentary inquiry a few years ago, Daswatte was grilled, not least because some committee rooms had been flooded and “chairs were floating in two-and a half feet of water”. Daswatte replied that the plans for Sri Lanka’s parliament, which Bawa designed, had recommended the dredging of land to allow for water to be diverted during monsoonal downpours. In an echo of Krupa Ge’s harrowing book on the Chennai floods, Rivers Remember, he says that “water doesn’t recognise boundaries”. It is also time for a fundamental rethink on zoning: “The zoning laws lead to a huge sprawl of the city.” 

Daswatte recounts how, even in suburban and rural Sri Lanka, the profusion of individual tubewells has led to water stress. This is a recurrent theme in India, where a Mint feature last Saturday put Bengaluru first on the list of cities likely to run out of groundwater, perhaps as early as next year. A Sri Lankan minister has called for rural housing to be more densely clustered to make delivering and conserving water and constructing sewage facilities easier. Daswatte exclaims in horror at reports of “water trains” transporting water from villages to Chennai.

We are interrupted from this vision of urban collapse by lunch. Veena Desai comes out with a plate of delicate Gujarati kacchoris in her hand. Before us is a south Indian vegetable kurma, green beans and a Mangalorean fish curry in coconut milk sent over from her mother’s home. The family are eating inside to leave us to the interview but we are joined by the family’s adopted stray dogs, whose molten, pedigreed eyes glow like jewels as the food moves from the serving bowls to our plates. 

I ask him why so little public and private architecture in India’s cities is rooted in the tropics, by contrast to many Sri Lankan hotels and homes. It is a question he was asked a fortnight earlier at an Architectural Digest talk in New Delhi. With an impish grin, Daswatte reports that he “blamed it on Nehru, which is fashionable to do these days”. Then he turns serious and observes that India’s modernism was a conscious break with the colonial past. “We had a more gentle path to independence. We had the privilege of not having the burden of over-population.” Instead of a focus on public spaces such as Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh or New Delhi's Pragati Maidan, he observes that in Sri Lanka, modernism came via homes, iconically designed by Minnette de Silva. She placed a premium, as Bawa and his successors would do, on ensuring that buildings had ample airflow and did not require air-conditioning. This was combined with a spare aesthetic that celebrated local craft. 

Can Bawa be described as Asia’s best architect? Daswatte reframes my crude listicle-styled question and makes the case that Bawa, who died in 2003, could be Asia’s most influential. Avoiding comparisons of Bawa vs Correa (the two were close friends) or Bawa vs the Japanese, he makes the point that everyone from the often insular Japanese to architects in Southeast Asia and south India lay claim to Bawa. Daswatte recounts that when he was asked to talk about Bawa in Tokyo some years ago, he called someone he knew in the city because he was sure the event would be poorly attended. The hall was packed. 

On my way out, Desai shows me his densely packed Japanese tree-planting technique that he is recreating near one of the city’s railway stations. A taxi then takes me to a shopping district at the centre of the city. The brutalist metro station looks like a factory grafted onto a carpark and flipped over. Water-tankers prowl the streets like rogue elephants, with their trunkS stuck on the back. The posh optician’s toilet I duck into ran out of water hours earlier. It is a reminder that urban apocalypse in India is nearer than we think.