Modernism as Postnationalist Politics:Muzharul Islam’s Faculty of Fine Arts (1953–56)

adnan morshedThe Catholic University of America

After completing his bachelor of architecture degreeat the University of Oregon in June 1952, MuzharulIslam (1923–2012) returned home to a postcolonial

Pakistan embroiled in acrimonious politics of national iden-tity (Figure 1).1 The fragility of the pan-Islamic polity thatsought to consolidate the impossible geography of Pakistanwas evident. The religion-based division of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan was intended to create sep-arate domains for Hindus and Muslims, respectively.2 YetMuslim Pakistan was already in trouble soon after the 1947Partition. The newly minted country’s two regions—Eastand West Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles of Indian terri-tory—clashed over their asymmetrical power relationship,their different languages, and, most of all, their conflictingattitudes regarding the intersection of their divergent ethnic-ities and Islamic nationalism (Figure 2).3 The country’s polit-ical power was centered in West Pakistan, and this lopsidedpower structure was further exacerbated by ideological differ-ences. The ruling elites of West Pakistan embraced a brandof political Islam that they believed would not only work as anideological buffer against the perceived threat of Hindu-majority India but also unify the different ethnic groups ofPakistan with an overarching Islamist spirit. This state policyalienated many secular-minded leaders, intellectuals, andprofessionals in East Pakistan, who were drawn more to amediating relationship between humanist Bengali traditionand faith than to greater Pakistan’s Islamic nationalism.4

On 21 February 1952, less than a year before MuzharulIslam arrived home from the United States, the policeopened fire on Bengali East Pakistanis protesting on thestreets of Dhaka. The people of East Pakistan demandedthe right to speak their own language, Bangla, not Urdu—thelanguage of the ruling elite in West Pakistan—which WestPakistanis had proposed as the national language of Pakistan.Some of the Bengalis, including students, were killed duringthe political demonstration in Dhaka and were lionized inEast Pakistan (now Bangladesh) as martyrs of the languagemovement.

Muzharul Islam interpreted the prevailing political condi-tions in his homeland as a fateful conflict between the secularhumanist ethos of Bengal and an alien Islamist identity im-posed by the Urdu-speaking ruling class in West Pakistan.The turbulent politics in which he found himself influencedhis worldview as well as his fledgling professional career.5

The young architect began his design career in a context ofbitterly divided notions of national origin and destiny, andhis architectural work reflected this political debate. Manysecular-minded Bengalis felt the need to articulate theirnational identity on ethnocultural grounds, rather than onthe supra-religious foundation championed byWest Pakistanipower wielders. Islam’s Faculty of Fine Arts (1953–56),built in the Shahbagh section of Dhaka, embodied thesebeliefs (Figure 3).6

The literature on South Asian modern architecture usu-ally identifies the Faculty of Fine Arts as the harbinger of aBengali modernism, synthesizing a modern architecturalvocabulary with climate-responsive and site-conscious designprograms.7What has not been examined is how Islam’s iconicbuilding also provides a window into the ways his architec-tural experiments with modernist aesthetics were part ofhis inquiries into the ongoing politics of Bengali nationalist

532

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 4 (December 2017),532–549, ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2017 by the Societyof Architectural Historians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests forpermission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University ofCalifornia Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints, or via email: jpermissions@ucpress.edu. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.4.532.

activism. Given its aesthetic novelty and the political settingof its creation, the Faculty of Fine Arts raises a simple but en-during art historical question: How does one reconcile theautonomy of a work of art with ideas external to it? I addressthis question with the analytical methodology of whatMichael Podro calls a “critical historian,” one who diminishesneither the formality of art nor its context, but rather bringsthese elements into a self-critical but mutually beneficialdialogue.8

With his iconoclastic building, Islam sought to achievetwo distinctive goals. First, the building introduced the aes-thetic tenets of modern architecture to East Pakistan. Formany, its design signaled a radical break from the country’sprevailing architectural language for civic buildings. Thesebuildings were designed either in a style that was an architec-tural hybrid of Mughal and British colonial traditions,

popularly known as Indo-Saracenic, or as utilitarian corridor-and-room building boxes, delivered by the provincial gov-ernment’s Department of Communications, Buildings, andIrrigation (CBI). The Faculty of Fine Arts was an unam-biguous departure from the colonial-era Curzon Hall(1904–8) at Dhaka University, within walking distance ofIslam’s building, and the Holy Family Hospital (1953; nowHoly Family Red Crescent Medical College Hospital)(Figures 4 and 5).9

Second, the Faculty of Fine Arts, with its modernistminimalism—rejecting all ornamental references to Mughaland Indo-Saracenic architecture—was a conscious critiqueof the politicized version of Islam that had become a stateapparatus for fashioning a particular religion-based image ofpostcolonial Pakistan. By abstracting his design through amodernist visual expression, Muzharul Islam sought to purge

Figure 1 Muzharul Islam during his tenure as a

member of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture

Master Jury, 1978–80 (Zainab F. Ali and Fuad H.

Mallick, eds., Muzharul Islam, Architect [Dhaka:

BRACUniversity Press, 2011]; photo copyright Aga

Khan Award for Architecture).

Figure 2 Maps of the Indian subcontinent before

and after Partition in 1947 (Yasmin Khan, The Great

Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan [New

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007]).

MODERN I SM AS POSTNAT IONAL I S T PO L I T I CS 533

architecture of what he viewed as the political associationsof instrumental religion. In 1960, while pursuing a master’sdegree in architecture at Yale University, Islam met StanleyTigerman, with whom he formed a design partnership towork in East Pakistan (Figure 6).10 Tigerman later claimedthat Islam’s architecture was part of the same search for aBengali identity that helped define the secular ideologicalfoundation on which the new nation of Bangladesh was even-tually built.11 The Faculty’s modernism hinges on Islam’sdual commitment to a secular Bengali character and universalhumanity, a postnationalist worldview rooted in the enlight-enment ideals of the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore(1861–1941) as well as in Islam’s own education in both theEast and theWest. A lifelong student of Tagore, Islam refusedto see any ideological conflict between Bengali mythos andmodern notions of progress and rationality.

In this article, I oppose the idea that during the post-Partition battle of identity politics that engulfed Pakistan,politics and architectural practices in East and West Pakistanwere neatly aligned with secular and Islamist orientations,respectively.12 Muzharul Islam struggled to find a modernist

architectural language that would resist religious nationalism,as did many first-generation West Pakistani architects. Themembers of this generation were caught up in uneasy debatesconcerning modernity and tradition, Anglo-American influ-ence and Islamic heritage, and how these constructs inter-sected with their idea of Pakistan.13 Yet what makes Islam’swork particularly important is that his architectural searchwas triggered by a peculiar political predicament resultingfrom the inversion of the very pan-Islamic argument thatwas used in the creation of Pakistan. As I will demonstrate,his search needed to engage the realpolitik of the languagemovement and the Bengali soul-searching that marked thesocial climate in East Pakistan in the early 1950s, when hereturned from the United States.

Muzharul Islam’s Modernism

At first encounter, the Faculty of Fine Arts presents the imageof an International Style building, with a quiet and dignifiedattention to the architectural demands of tropical Bengal(see Figure 3). Closer inspection, however, hinders the

Figure 3 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts, Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56 (photo by A. Q. M. Abdullah, 2004; Zainab F. Ali and Fuad H. Mallick, eds.,

Muzharul Islam, Architect [Dhaka: BRAC University Press, 2011]).

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Eurocentric tendency to measure the building’s “modernity”exclusively through a “Western” lens.14 A host of nuancedarchitectural modulations and environmental adaptationsreveal how Islam’s work cross-pollinates a humanizing, mod-ernist architectural language with conscious considerations ofclimatic needs and local building materials. Rather than aribbon-windowed white box, as in Le Corbusier’s VillaSavoye, for example, pilotis in the Faculty of Fine Arts lift upan open gallery—a modernist abstraction of Mughal pavi-lions (Figure 7). Located on the south side of the building,the gallery is formed by two sleek, flat slabs that are con-nected by vertical wooden louvers. These louvers temper thefierce tropical sun in the afternoon and channel the southernbreeze, creating a gallery space, or a tropical piano nobile,overlooking the busy street to the east and green space inother directions (Figure 8). Islam’s use of reinforced concretecolumns to support flat plates was a pioneering approach inEast Pakistan’s building industry.

Figure 5 Ronald McConnel, Holy Family Hospital,

Dhaka, 1953 (photo by Alex Langmuir).

Figure 4 Curzon Hall, University of Dhaka, Dhaka,

1904–8 (photo by Turjoy Chowdhury, 2015).

Figure 6 Muzharul Islam (right) with Stanley Tigerman in Chicago, 2006

(photo by Dalia Nausheen; Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, ed., An Architect in

Bangladesh: ConversationswithMuzharul Islam [Dhaka: LokaPress, 2014]).

MODERN I SM AS POSTNAT IONAL I S T PO L I T I CS 535

The ground-floor entry—flanked on one side by two cir-cular exhibition spaces encased in a kidney-shaped volume—is an open floor plan under the gallery pavilion. The dynamiccombination of a rectangular plinth and the carved mass pro-vides a fluid gateway to an oasis-like urban complex, a rarityin a populous city with an acute shortage of open spaces(Figure 9). The entrance itself was a radical departure fromthe highly controlled building access typical of East Pakistaniinstitutional buildings of the era. Overlooking a courtyard, afreestanding staircase gently curves upward to connect theentry plaza with the second-floor pavilion that houses facultyoffices and common rooms (Figure 10).

Beyond the entry block, visitors discover a remarkable setof sprawling buildings—comprising administrative offices,

faculty rooms, classrooms, and student common rooms—thewhole ensemble nestled in a calm, verdant urban meadow(Figure 11). The classrooms, in both the linear block and thecurved wing, enjoy ample cross-ventilation and light fromthe north (see Figure 9). The curved wing was designed tooverlook a 75-foot-radius circular pond (subsequently notdeveloped, the space remaining an empty cavity to date),an architectural reminiscence of the pukur (pond) that char-acterizes the typical pastoral household in rural Bengal(Figure 12).15 Exposed brick in the Faculty of Fine Arts hasa textured and sensory quality that changes character assunlight varies along the diurnal path. A fluid relationshipbetween indoor and outdoor spaces creates an academicambiance conducive to studying the arts (Figure 13).

Figure 7 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts,

Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56, entry pavilion viewed

from the south (author’s photo, 2012).

Figure 8 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts,

Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56, wooden louvers

viewed from the interior of the pavilion (photo by

Turjoy Chowdhury, 2015).

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Figure 9 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts,

Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56, site plan (Muzharul

Islam archive, University of Asia Pacific, Dhaka,

http://www.muzharulislam.com).

Figure 10 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts,

Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56, small courtyard (photo

by Turjoy Chowdhury, 2015).

Figure 11 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts, Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56, elevation (Zainab F. Ali and Fuad H. Mallick, eds.,Muzharul Islam, Architect

[Dhaka: BRAC University Press, 2011]).

Figure 12 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts, Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56, woodenmodel showing a circular pond (photo byWahiduzzamanRatul, 2016).

Islam had an accurate surveymapmade specifically for siteplanning purposes. He incorporated into his design existingvegetation on the site and local landscape elements, recallingLe Corbusier’s “building in the park” approach. Islam stated:“The site had a park-like character, and I wanted to keep thatcharacter intact as much as possible and blend the buildingwith it.”16 Very few of the original trees on the site were cutdown. Islam adopted a similar “ecological” approach to theUniversity of Dhaka Library, a building within walking dis-tance of the Faculty of Fine Arts that he designed at the sametime (Figure 14). The Faculty offers a spatial experiencerooted in Dhaka’s Shahbagh district (the name of whichtranslates as “royal garden”). Yet the building also exudes anaura of cosmopolitan modernity that appears to present noconflict with the designer’s concept of being a local and aBengali.17

Islam’s peripatetic upbringing, secularhousehold, andmulti-disciplinary education provide insight into his conception ofwhat it meant to be a Bengali. He was born in 1923, during theheyday of the movement against British rule in colonial India,in a village called Shundorpur in the Murshidabad district ofWest Bengal (Figure 15).18 The son of an itinerant andenlightened math professor, Islam was educated in both Westand East Bengal, which made up what became East Pakistanafter Partition. He spent his childhood in his maternal grand-father’s two-story colonial-style bungalow in Murshidabad.As a child, he used to circle the bungalow and its courtyard,examining the thick walls, deep-set windows, and woodenstairs, as he developed a particular empathy for buildings andtheir materiality.

Islam completed his middle and high school studies onthe other side of the Ganges, in the Rajshahi district ofEast Bengal, where his father took up a teaching position

at Rajshahi Government College in 1932. He returned toWest Bengal in 1940 and attended Calcutta University,where he received his bachelor of science degree. After-ward, he went to Bengal Engineering College in Shibpur(1943–46), within Calcutta University, and was awarded abachelor of civil engineering degree in 1946. Living inWest Bengal during the ideologically tempestuous decadeof the 1940s, Islam became interested in leftist student pol-itics and the writings of Marx and Lenin, particularly inideas of social justice.19

In 1950, having received a postwar development scholar-ship from the provincial government of East Pakistan, Islamembarked on a long journey to the United States to studyarchitecture in the five-year professional undergraduateprogram at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Because hehad already earned a civil engineering degree, he receivedcredit for previous coursework and completed his bachelorof architecture degree in two years.20

The architecture program at the University of Oregonwas known for its independence from dogma and any kindof fixed allegiance to a style-based architectural pedagogy.21

In fact, it was a pioneering program in architectural educa-tion in the United States, since most American architecturalschools in the early twentieth century followed the histori-cist curriculum of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design—anorganization created in 1894 by Paris-trained U.S. archi-tects to advance the design methods of the École desBeaux-Arts in Paris.22 This American counterpart of theÉcole des Beaux-Arts organized design competitions, mod-eled on the Paris Prize competition, in which students wereexpected to participate in order for their schools to gainaccreditation. In 1922, the University of Oregon was thefirst U.S. architecture school to reject the Beaux-Arts

Figure 13 Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts,

Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56, courtyard (Zainab F.

Ali and Fuad H. Mallick, eds., Muzharul Islam,

Architect [Dhaka: BRAC University Press, 2011]).

MODERN I SM AS POSTNAT IONAL I S T PO L I T I CS 539

tradition, embracing instead the modernist design educationpromoted by Eliel Saarinen at the Cranbrook Academy ofArt.23 It distanced itself from stylistic creeds and establisheda Bauhaus-style design culture that championed experimen-tation, openness, and collaboration. This academic programinfluenced Muzharul Islam and spurred him to adopt archi-tectural modernism.24

Renowned Bangladeshi architect and educator ShamsulWares has claimed that in Oregon, Islam transformed slowlyfrom a career-minded civil engineer to a perceptive and cul-turally sensitive architect.25 According toWares, Islam beganto appreciate the simple act of seeing everyday objects aroundhim as part of a broader cognitive process, in which discovery,inquiry, and analysis occurred simultaneously. Observingboth the outside manifestation and the inside essence ofthings became Islam’s lifelong mental habit, as many of hisformer students have recalled.26

At the University of Oregon, two professors in particularleft enduring impressions on Islam: Wallace Stanford Hayden(1905–94) and Marion Dean Ross (1913–91).27 Hayden, whojoined the university’s School of Architecture and Allied Artsin 1930, was a practicing architect with a specialty in residen-tial architecture as well as a studio instructor. He championeda holistic design pedagogy in which design concept, programdevelopment, site analysis, climatic adaptation, and buildingmaterial selection occurred simultaneously. Only a disciplinedand harmonious synthesis of all of these design considerations,Hayden instructed, would create site-responsive buildings.Through Hayden’s influence, Islam internalized a nonform-alist, place-based attitude toward the design process.28

Ross, on the other hand, was an architectural history pro-fessor and one of the founding members of the Society ofArchitectural Historians (Figure 16).29 He taught art and

Figure 14 Muzharul Islam, University of Dhaka

Library, Dhaka, 1953 (photo by A. Q. M. Abdullah,

2004; Zainab F. Ali and Fuad H. Mallick, eds.,

Muzharul Islam, Architect [Dhaka: BRACUniversity

Press, 2011]).

Figure 15 Map of Greater Bengal, comprising West Bengal and East

Bengal (now Bangladesh) (Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making

of India and Pakistan [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007]).

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architectural history at the university in Eugene for morethan three decades, until his retirement in 1978. Islam fre-quently referred to Ross as the teacher who had inspiredhim to view architectural history as a dynamic repository ofknowledge.30

Ross received his master of architecture degree underWalter Gropius at Harvard, “learning modernism at its verysource.”31 Thus, Islam himself learned about European mas-ters from a “primary source,” and he developed a lifelongadmiration for Gropius, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van derRohe, and Alvar Aalto. Islam later played an important rolein encouraging the government of East Pakistan to considerLe Corbusier and Aalto for the design of the NationalAssembly building, a project that ultimately went to LouisKahn. Ross was part of the generation of American architectswho valued European modernism as a catalyst for the shiftfrom historicist to modern architecture in the United States.Yet he viewed this shift with a twist. Leland Roth, Ross’s long-time colleague at the University of Oregon, argues: “Most

modernist architects of that time thought of architecturalhistory as bunk. Marion Dean Ross, however, was partof a small but intrepid and independent group ofscholars during those years—along with Nikolaus Pevsner,Erwin Panofsky, Rudolph Wittkower and Henry-RussellHitchcock—who . . . ‘rebelled against the rebellion’ andnever faltered in their appreciation of and study of architec-tural history.”32

Islam inherited his mentor’s view of a mutually inclusiverelationship between modernism and architectural history.The year Islam arrived in Oregon, 1950, Ross published anarticle titled “Ten Books on Architecture” in the Journal of theAmerican Institute of Architects (Figure 17).33 In this article,Ross reflected on a personal list of seminal books on archi-tecture by such authors as Geoffrey Scott, Le Corbusier,Sacheverell Sitwell, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, NikolausPevsner, Lewis Mumford, John Summerson, and SigfriedGiedion. Years later, Muzharul Islam built his own personallibrary in East Pakistan on similar lines.34 From Scott’s TheArchitecture of Humanism (1914) to Le Corbusier’s Towards aNew Architecture (1927) to Giedion’s Mechanization TakesCommand (1948), Islam followed Ross’s list closely and em-braced his modernist view of architecture.

For Islam, however, this modernist view went beyondarchitecture. Upon his return to East Pakistan—where hefound himself in the midst of a tempestuous political environ-ment—he interpreted modernity as a collectively discursivepractice, engaging architecture, society, and politics. IfCalcutta University during World War II introduced him tosocialist student politics, the University of Oregon trans-formed him into a cosmopolitan thinker, able to recalibratearchitecture for the political exigencies of his postcolonialcountry, particularly the contested role of religion in identitypolitics.

The Politics of Religion in East Pakistan

Understanding the political setting of Islam’s Faculty of FineArts—particularly in view of my proposition that it coalescesmodernist design intentions and secular values—requires anexamination of the role of religion in East Bengal/EastPakistan before and after the 1947 Partition.35 Even thoughhistorical accounts of this period are complex and oftentinged with nationalist biases, there seems to be a consensusthat the pre-Partition pan-Islamic orientation of Muslims inEast Bengal changed to secular Bengali nationalism afterPartition. This political transformation informed the waysMuzharul Islam sought to address questions of national iden-tity in his design. In British India, colonial subjects, bothHindus and Muslims, fought a common foe: British colonialpower. Yet, since the nineteenth century, Indian Hindus andMuslims differed significantly in political and social status.36

Figure 16 Marion Dean Ross, professor of architectural history,

University of Oregon, ca. 1980s (University of Oregon Archive).

MODERN I SM AS POSTNAT IONAL I S T PO L I T I CS 541

Within the colonial bureaucracy, the Hindus were in a muchmore advantageous position than the Muslims. Among otherreasons for the decline of Muslim status in colonial India werethe repressive agrarian systems that had been in place since thePermanent Settlement of 1793, which negatively affectedMuslim petty landowners and peasants, and the replacementof Persian with English as the court language in 1837.37 TheMuslims either shunned or were slow to embrace the new sys-tem of education, while the Hindus zealously learned English,solidifying their position within the colonial administration.

The immediate outcome of these differing paths was the“monopolization of new employment opportunities” by theHindus, while the Muslims lagged far behind.38 In the con-text of theHindus’ growingmaterial success, theMuslims be-came self-conscious of their backwardness and, consequently,began to emphasize the separateness of their economic andpolitical interests. A schism between Hindus and Muslimsbegan to calcify in the mid-nineteenth century. The brewingantagonism between the two groups eventually created theideological foundation for the Partition of 1947 (Figure 18).39

After Partition, however, the political mood changedrapidly in East Pakistan, with the focus shifting from Islamicnationalism to secular Bengali nationalism: “Whereas thepre-1947 nationalism was cloaked under the religious and/orcommunal surplice, the post-1947 nationalism was entirelysecular.”40 Disillusionment with the idea of Pakistan as a coun-try in which all Muslims—irrespective of their ethnicities—would enjoy equal access to political power and economicopportunities gradually set in. Despite representing 54 percentof Pakistan’s total population, the Bengalis of East Pakistanhad very little influence on the political decision-makingprocess. As Peter Bertocci has noted, “Differences of languageand culture between the Bengalis and the ethnic groups ofWest Pakistan became accentuated in the context of the

growing regional inequities characteristic of Pakistan’s politi-cal economy.”41

The language difference drove a wedge between the Ben-galis and the ruling class ofWest Pakistan.While the vast ma-jority of East Pakistanis spoke Bengali, and only a fraction ofWest Pakistanis spoke Urdu, the Urdu-speaking political oli-garchy of West Pakistan dominated Pakistani politics.42

While addressing the University of Dhaka Special Convoca-tion on 24 March 1948, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founderand governor-general of Pakistan, announced: “There can beonly one state language. If the component parts of this stateare tomarch forward in unison, that language, in my opinion,can only be Urdu.”43 This denial of the complexity ofPakistan’s intricate ethnic and linguistic composition ignitednationalist passion among the Bengalis. Realizing that theprevailing economic and political disparities between the twowings of Pakistan would not go away, many secular-mindedBengalis, including Muzharul Islam, questioned the reli-gion-based political vision that drove the creation of Pakistan.Many felt compelled to search for the cultural, social, andlinguistic roots that made them Bengali. By 1952, when thepolice opened fire on Bengali East Pakistanis protesting onthe streets of Dhaka, the schism had become more explicit.

At the first Bengali literary conference of East Bengal,held in Dhaka on 31 December 1948, acclaimed Bengalieducator and philologist Muhammad Shahidullah sought tocelebrate his concept of “Bengaliness”: “It is true that thereare Hindus and Muslims. But what is transcending is thatthey are in essence Bengali. This is a reality. Nature with herown hand has stamped the indelible mark of Bengali in such amanner on our appearance and language that it is no longerpossible to conceal it.”44 Bengali activist-historian BadruddinUmar called the prevailing Bengali sentiment a “homecom-ing of Bengali Muslims.”45 What Umar meant was that

Figure 17 Opening pages of Marion Dean Ross’s

1950 article in the Journal of the American Institute

of Architects (Marion Dean Ross, “Ten Books on

Architecture,” Journal of the American Institute of

Architects 14 [Nov.–Dec. 1950], 210–11).

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Bengali Muslims finally realized the political folly of creatinga pan-Muslim country, which ignored the robust complexityof the roles of religion, culture, tradition, and language informing ethnic identities.

When Muzharul Islam returned home from the UnitedStates, the language movement had already sown the seeds ofwider Bengali agitation for political and economic emancipa-tion.46 Like many other Bengali intellectuals, he questionedthe framework of political Islam that had created Pakistan inthe first place. He found it particularly problematic since hehad valued the cultural unity of Greater Bengal, seeing lan-guage and other cultural traits as more valuable than thepolitically convenient, supra-religious narrative that had beenemployed to establish Pakistan. Given his own upbringing inWest Bengal, it is not surprising that Islam developed a polit-ical fascination with the indivisibility of Bengal.47

What did the debates over Bengali identity mean for theFaculty of Fine Arts? In the politically charged time of theearly 1950s, Islam considered being a Bengali more impor-tant than being a Muslim, even though culturally these labelsmight at times be inseparable. He also believed that in hisarchitectural work he could search for Bengali roots throughaesthetic experimentation, without having to resort to narrowdebates about nationalist identity. Years later, he provided in-sights into how he endeavored to define himself as a Bengali:

There might be 2%Chinese in my blood, 3% Portuguese, 5%Black, 6% Madrasi, 7% this-or-that, I don’t care, I don’t give adamn. The fact is I am a Bengali. I am a Bengali with all these. Idon’t have to have a pure blood. I am, in fact, enriched because

I possess in me all these. I am a Bengali because of this enrich-ment, and because of that whatever is in my past is mine. Thatis why I claim the Buddhist math (abode) as mine, as I do theHindu temple, the Christian church, and the mosque. I see nodistinction. If a Muslim building is beautiful, I say so, and thesame with a Hindu building if it is so.48

Islam made this statement during the waning years of his life,providing a window into the making of an activist architect.He refused to fall into the trap of viewing Bengali as a calci-fied ethnic type. In a similar vein, the design impetus thatpropelled the Faculty of Fine Arts cannot be explained withany fixed definitions of tropical design or any static notion ofWestern modernity.

Muzharul Islam’s Architectural Activism

After leaving Eugene for East Pakistan, Islam joined theDepartment of Communications, Buildings, and Irrigation in1953 as an assistant engineer, because no official post for anarchitect existed in East Pakistan’s government.49 There wasno professional school of architecture in East Pakistan, norwere there any professional native architects.50 Buildingpractice in the country was highly bureaucratic in its organi-zation, controlled by CBI surveyors, draftsmen, and diplomaengineers typically trained at the J. J. School of Art in Bom-bay and other vocational institutes in Calcutta. Two Britisharchitects, Edward Hicks and Ronald McConnel, joined theCBI in 1948. These two expatriates were responsible for anumber of city planning projects, including large-scale build-ings in Dhaka.51 Muzharul Islam considered their archi-tectural utilitarianism “soulless,” contending that thesebuildings hardly captured the new nation’s cultural and socialaspirations (see Figure 5).52

The need to establish an art institute in East Pakistan wasstrongly felt in the wake of Partition, particularly in the contextof growing debates about the role of aesthetics in the develop-ment of a national identity. Before Partition, Dhaka’s art scenewas nonexistent, and no formal education in the arts was avail-able.53 The intellectual hub of artistic innovation in colonialIndia was Calcutta (now Kolkata), where the rise of the avant-garde began in December 1922 with an influential Bauhausexhibition featuring theworks of PaulKlee,WassilyKandinsky,Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, and other artists.54 Initiatedby the world-renowned Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore,who visited Weimar in 1921, the Bauhaus exhibition was aradical undertaking in a South Asian colonial city far awayfrom that Western metropolis.55 As Partha Mitter demon-strates, Calcutta became a thriving center not only of artsbut also of art criticism.56

While Calcutta was the site of much artistic vibrancyduring the 1920s and 1930s, Dhaka was a quiet outpost. East

Figure 18 Louis Mountbatten, viceroy of British India, reveals Britain’s

plan for the Partition of India in New Delhi, 7 June 1947. Left to right:

Jawaharlal Nehru, Hastings Ismay (adviser to Mountbatten),

Mountbatten, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Penderel Moon, Divide and

Quit: An Eyewitness Account of the Partition of India [Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1998], figure 7).

MODERN I SM AS POSTNAT IONAL I S T PO L I T I CS 543

Bengali artists who were interested in pursuing careers inthe arts typically went to Calcutta. Among them was theacclaimed East Bengali artist Zainul Abedin (1914–76), whodrew much local and international attention with his searingsketches of famine in Bengal in 1943. Abedin had been teach-ing at the prestigious Government College of Art and Craft(established in 1854) in Calcutta since 1939. Relocating toDhaka in 1948 after Partition, Abedin helped bring togethera group of East Pakistani artists, poets, and intellectuals, andconvinced the provincial government to create the country’sfirst art institute in Dhaka.57 He became its director inMarch1949. The College of Arts and Crafts, as the Faculty of FineArts was then called, started formal arts education first in theNationalMedical College building and then at a rented prop-erty in Dhaka’s Shegunbagicha area.58

Once the government allotted a parcel of land for the col-lege in the city’s Shahbagh area, the Ministry of Educationsolicited design concepts from the CBI in 1950. However,the work did not gain any momentum until 1953, whenMcConnel asked Muzharul Islam to design the Faculty ofFine Arts building. Collaborating with Abedin and anotherfamed artist, Quamrul Hassan, Islam worked on developinga design concept for the Faculty from June to December1953.59 On 5 February 1954, the foundation stone of theFaculty was laid. Abedin took personal interest in, and super-vised, the construction of the college for nearly two years.60

The college began formal operation in October 1956.The Faculty of Fine Arts was an opportune project for

Islam, who used it to introduce modernist aesthetics to EastPakistan. His work was part of a broader post-Partition trend.Rachel Lee and Kathleen James-Chakraborty have analyzedhow avant-garde proponents defended modern architectureas “the only appropriate style for an independent India” andprovided “enthusiastic support of modern European andAmerican architecture,” noting that “urban postcolonialintellectuals supported modern architecture in order to dis-tinguish themselves from the former colonial power.”61 Inpost-Partition India, a generation of architects grappled, intheir disparate ways, with questions of modernity, tradition,and national identity. Among them, Achyut Purushottam

Kanvinde (1916–2002), Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (1927–),Anant Raje (1929–2009), Charles Correa (1930–2015), andRaj Rewal (1934–) created vibrant architectural practices.62

Some first-generation West Pakistani architects had beentrained at the J. J. School of Art in Bombay before 1947, andsome had studied abroad. Architects with both types of train-ing actively promoted modernism.63 Most prominent amongthem was Mehdi Ali Mirza (1910–61), who was instrumentalin establishing the profession of architecture inWest Pakistanafter Partition and became the first president of the Instituteof Architects Pakistan.64 Influenced by the work of FrankLloydWright, Mirza’s designs, mainly his residential projectsin Lahore and Karachi, made a strong case for modern ar-chitecture as an alternative to pastiche and officially man-dated “Islamic-looking” buildings (Figure 19). Yet “Islamicvisuality” remained a potent political force in West Pakistan,at least through the 1960s. When a parliament house forPakistan’s new capital of Islamabad was proposed in 1962,the official directive required that “Islamic features be in-corporated in the form of some arches in the cylinder, adome above the cylinder, or some additions to the fore-courtyard.”65 Designs for the parliament house by Danisharchitect Arne Jacobsen and American architect Louis Kahnwere dismissed for failing to provide an “Islamic” building.According to Sten ÅkeNilsson, “The reason for the rejectionof Professor Kahn’s design is believed to be the inability tomodify the design so as to reflect Pakistan’s desire to intro-duce Islamic architecture in Islamabad’s public buildings.”66

Muzharul Islam was uneasy with this use of received sym-bols, particularly those with overt religious reference. Theplain walls and interlocking nonhierarchical spaces at theFaculty of Fine Arts consciously avoid Islamic visual symbol-ism, while the building’s kinetic blending of inside and out-side and its aesthetic minimalism inspire introspection. Theabstractive quality of modern architecture afforded Islam themeans to examine what being a secular Bengali entailed. Onvarious occasions, he claimed to have been influenced by thelegacy of the “Bengal Renaissance,” a reform-minded intel-lectual awakening that took place in Bengal in the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries.67 Proponents of the reform

Figure 19 Mehdi Ali Mirza, Babar Ali residence,

Karachi, ca. 1950s (Kamil KhanMumtaz,Modernity

and Tradition: Contemporary Architecture in

Pakistan [Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999]).

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movement believed that the convergence of English andIndian ways of life had produced a dynamic environment con-ducive to socioreligious reform and enlightenment of Indiansociety.68 The intellectuals of the Bengal Renaissance—fromRam Mohan Roy to Rabindranath Tagore—promoted theidea that the confrontation of cultures was not necessarilya negative condition; rather, it could become a catalyst forIndia’s transition into the world of modernity and intellec-tual awakening.

RabindranathTagore exhibited deep discomfort with how,during the heyday of anticolonial agitation of the 1920s and1930s, Indian nationalists sought to glorify a nativist India.69

Tagore was India’s most iconic, towering figure in literature;in 1913, he became the first non-European and first Asian toreceive the Nobel Prize in Literature.70 An ardent student ofTagore throughout his life, Muzharul Islam had a number ofbooks by Tagore in his personal library, including Gitanjali(published in Bengali in 1910; translated into English in1912).71 When Tagore died in his ancestral mansion inCalcutta in 1941, Islam was attending Calcutta University.The mammoth mourning procession that escorted the bodyof the poet through the streets of Calcutta must have left anenduring impression on Islam’s worldview. All his life, Islamremained unabashed about his intellectual indebtedness toTagore. When asked about the acclaimed poet’s influence onhim, he responded, “Which Bengali does not have the influ-ence of Rabindranath?”72 He concluded a 2002 opinion piecetitled “The State of Architecture and Architectural Educationin Our Society” with a reference to a celebrated Tagorepoem, in which the poet reflects on the irony of his seeing theworld while not truly knowing his own country.73

In his acclaimed novel The Home and the World (publishedin Bengali in 1915 and first translated into English in 1919)Tagore sought to expose how nationalism and ethnocentrismcoalesce to eventually undermine the very values that coherein the idea of a nation.74 In this book, Tagore tells us that toreject the outside or foreign as impurity is to fortify the insidewith misguided nativism and false hubris. The Tagoriancritique proposes that nationalism, as it developed in theform of the swadeshi movement in colonial India, was tragicbecause it failed to distinguish between colonialism and uni-versal humanity. It was tragic because the popular mass senti-ment that incited nationalism in colonial India associatedWestern notions of universality with the perpetration of colo-nial violence by the British. Therefore, both needed to be re-jected for a “pure” native culture to be recaptured. Ratherthan resort to a reactive pursuit of identity—something thatoften derives from a glorified precolonial past—Tagoreargued, one could strengthen the premise of identity by tran-scending its very political necessity.

Tagore’s attitude toward nationalism helps explainMuzharul Islam’s position on the question of identity. Islam

argued that to be a Bengali, “one needs to be a worldman. Youhave to be a world man and a Bengali. It’s impossible other-wise.”75 Rich with Tagorian residues, Islam’s aesthetic moder-nity took shape, on the one hand, with the claim that “thehome and the world” are always in a fluid interrelationship, tothe point that their purported dichotomy appears false, and,on the other hand, with the rejection of all closed boundariesand the instrumental epistemologies that frame them. I wouldmaintain that while Islam yearned to return, in a Tagoriansense, to a Bengali home, he followed Tagore in denying thatthere remains an unchanging and unchangeable home towhich to return.76

Islam did not envision the modernity of the Faculty ofFine Arts as a showcase for the architecture of modern mas-ters such as Le Corbusier—whose Chandigarh was beingbuilt in northern India contemporaneously with Islam’s edi-fice in Dhaka. Rather, he reinvested the influence of thosemasters in the spatial and political challenges of his time andplace. At another level, Islam recast the conventional opposi-tion of local and global (or East and West) by denying thepresumed dichotomy and repositioning them to form adynamic relationship. As Wares has suggested, Islam “waskeen to find a middle ground where the global and the localcan fruitfully and meaningfully intermesh.”77 What I wouldcall a phenomenology of Bengali consciousness permeatesthe spatial experience of the Faculty of Fine Arts, but ulti-mately, I see the edifice as less concerned with capturing“Bengaliness” than with transcending it. It is less about thecomfort of being a secular Bengali at home and more aboutthe humanity of the building’s universality. Thus, as KaziKhaleed Ashraf suggests, Muzharul Islam’s architecture oper-ates in the same way that Tagore’s narration of a local experi-ence “would make a W. B. Yeats quiver on a Londonomnibus, or a Victoria Ocampo weep in distant Argentina.”78

In other words, a local South Asian experience could have aglobal resonance in such a way that the meanings of local andglobal are explained less by their temporality and spatialitythan by their shared humanity.

The irreducibility of the effects of cultural interactionprovides a useful framework for analyzing Muzharul Islam’sbuilding at Shahbagh. Islam inquired into an identity forBengal by rejecting its exclusivity. He simultaneously deniedthe conceptual autonomy of Bengal and the otherness ofWestern modernity. This is consistent with Tigerman’s state-ment that Islam’s architecture participated in the search forthe secular Bengali identity on which the new nation of Ban-gladesh was eventually built.79 Muzharul Islam’s architecturalresistance of political Islam refused to become the ruse of apuritanical view of “Bengaliness,” celebrating instead what Isee as an aesthetic chemical reaction that dissolves the com-partmentalized historiographies of such constructs as Bengaland Islam, East and West, local and global, and Western and

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non-Western. The “levitating” entryway, the organic indoor–outdoor relationship of classrooms, the absence of ornamen-tation, and the nature-hugging morphology of the Faculty ofFine Arts might be the visual expression of an architecturalresistance to the domination of instrumental religion or asymbolic response to the deterritorialized abstraction ofmodernity (Figure 20).

Inspired by a complex amalgamation of European archi-tectural modernism and the tropical conditions of the Bengaldelta, the minimalist modernism of the Faculty of Fine Arts,with its ossature independente and plan libre, was cleansed ofIslamo-historical or Indo-Saracenic motifs that would havebuttressed the premise of political Islam undergirding thecreation of Pakistan or recalled the colonial ghost. MuzharulIslam’s spartan modernism purified architecture’s body politicof aesthetic fallacies that would have blemished what heviewed as the necessary secularism and humanism of theBengali narrative.

After the Faculty of Fine Arts, Islam designed a host ofother buildings and went on to become the most celebratedarchitect in East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in1971 after a bloody civil war. During the 1960s, he played acentral role in bringing Louis Kahn to Dhaka to design a

building for the National Assembly and in recruiting PaulRudolph to create the master plan for an agricultural univer-sity in Mymensingh, a city north of Dhaka. Although he en-joyed a devoted following throughout his later career, Islambecame somewhat alienated from the official architecturalcircuits of the country due to his strong political views con-cerning, first, architecture’s role in creating a just and egali-tarian society and, second, the importance of architecture aspart of a humanist, liberal arts education.

Muzharul Islam, an intellectual heir to the romantic mod-ernist legacy, rearticulated architectural lightness as a plausi-ble narrative of Bengali mythos: a hope unencumbered bythe weight of history masquerading as the piety of statehood.Italo Calvino theorizes the question of lightness in modernityas a release from stifling historical affiliations and, broadly,conformism.80 The floating quality of the entry pavilion atthe Faculty of Fine Arts may symbolize Muzharul Islam’sdefiance of both political Islam and self-centered nationalism(see Figure 7). Although his architecture remains investedin both heroic modernist ambitions and critiques of thereligion-based founding myth of his country, it ultimatelyrejects the exclusionary idea that modernity or nationalistidentity is an end in itself. In a Tagorian disposition, his

Figure 20 Bengali New Year festivities at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Shahbagh, Dhaka, in April 2004 (photo by A. Q. M. Abdullah).

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building reminds us that an aesthetic search can be an open-ended, inclusive process.

Postscript

In Dhaka, the celebration of Boishakhi Mela, a cultural eventmarking the first day of Boishakh, the first month of the Ben-gali calendar, includes a procession that starts from the greenopen space on the south of the linear classroom block of theFaculty of Fine Arts, linking the Faculty with the BengaliNew Year (Figure 21). Art students at the Faculty create giantpapier-mâché masks, birds, animals, and fish, which are be-lieved to symbolize Bengal’s agro-pastoral heritage. Thesemascots are carried in the parade that traverses the citystreets. Through such celebrations, the building has becomedeeply connected to the twentieth-century events related toBengali national consciousness.

Adnan Morshed, author of Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers,Flight, and the Master Builder (2015), received his PhD fromMIT. He has served on the Board of Directors of the SAH andon a jury for NEH grants. He has been a recipient of the WyethFellowship at CASVA, National Gallery of Art; a GrahamFoundation publication grant; and MIT’s Lawrence B. AndersonAward. morshed@cua.edu

Notes1. I presented a shorter version of this article at the annual meetings of theSociety of Architectural Historians and the International Association for theStudy of Traditional Environments, where I received much useful feedback.I am grateful to Professors Howard Davis and Leland Roth of the School ofArchitecture and Allied Arts, University of Oregon, for providing me withmany invaluable suggestions that sharpened the focus of this article. KarenJ. Johnson helped me find Muzharul Islam’s records in the university’sarchive. I am indebted to Muzharul Islam’s wife and son for their reflectionon the architect’s life and for offering me access to his photos, library, and

other materials. Professors Shamsul Wares and Kazi Khaleed Ashraf sharedtheir knowledge of Islam’s life and work.

After completing his studies at the University of Oregon, Islam traveledin the United States for some time before returning to East Pakistan. See hisinterview in Rabiul Hussain, “The Wholesomeness of Muzharul Islam,” Kalio Kolom, Sept. 2012, 50–51. (Kali o Kolom [Ink and pen] is a monthly Bengalimagazine devoted to culture and literature.)2. For histories of the 1947 Indian Partition, see Yasmin Khan, The GreatPartition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-sity Press, 2007); S. L. Sharma and T. K. Oommen, eds., Nation and NationalIdentity in South Asia (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2000); Stephen PhilipCohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,2004). For a thoughtful analysis of recent writings on the Partition, seeWilliam Dalrymple, “The Great Divide: The Violent Legacy of IndianPartition,” New Yorker, 29 June 2015.3. See A. R. Mallick and Syed Anwar Husain, “Bengali Nationalism and theEmergence of Bangladesh,” in Bangladesh National Culture and Heritage: AnIntroductory Reader, ed. A. F. Salauddin Ahmed and Bazlul Mobin Chowdhury(Dhaka: Independent University, Bangladesh, 2004); Zillur R. Khan, “Islamand Bengali Nationalism,” Asian Survey 25, no. 8 (Aug. 1985); Nasir Islam,“Islam andNational Identity: The Case of Pakistan and Bangladesh,” Interna-tional Journal ofMiddle East Studies 13, no. 1 (Feb. 1981), 55–72; Ved P.Nanda,“Self-Determination in International Law: The Tragic Tale of Two Cities—Islamabad (West Pakistan) and Dacca (East Pakistan),” American Journal ofInternational Law 66, no. 2 (Apr. 1972), 321–36.4. Khan, “Islam and Bengali Nationalism.”5. Muzharul Islam’s wife, Husne Ara Islam, and son, Rafique Muzhar Islam,interview by author, 21 Dec. 2014.6. I would like to note that archival materials on Muzharul Islam’s work aremeager, consisting of a small collection of some of his drawings and somematerials available online through a small archive hosted by the University ofAsia Pacific in Dhaka (http://www.muzharulislam.com). There are no well-documented biographies of the architect. I had to rely on personal recollec-tions of his students and colleagues, interviews with him, memoirs of peoplewho knew him, and anecdotal histories, as well as my own conversations withIslam and his family over the years. For political histories of the period, Idepend mostly on secondary sources, since barely any archive exists that hassystematically catalogued materials from the post-Partition period in EastPakistan. Due to the politically sensitive nature of the topic of nationalism, thefew resources that do exist are rarely available for scholarly examination.

Figure 21 Boishakhi Mela procession beginning at

the Faculty of Fine Arts, Shahbagh, Dhaka, in 2015

(photo by Turjoy Chowdhury).

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7. See Rahul Mehrotra, ed., South Asia, vol. 8 ofWorld Architecture: A CriticalMosaic, 1900–2000, ed. Kenneth Frampton (New York: Springer, 2000). Partof a series on world architecture, this volume focuses comprehensively onSouth Asia.8. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, Conn.: YaleUniversity Press, 1982), xx–xxi.9.The hospital was designed by a British architect named RonaldMcConnel,as there were no professional local architects in the country.10. Islam and Tigerman became lifelong friends. As late as 2006, Islam visitedTigerman in Chicago. After Yale, Islam invited Tigerman to East Pakistan tocollaborate with him in designing five polytechnic institutes there during the1960s. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, ed., An Architect in Bangladesh: Conversations withMuzharul Islam (Dhaka: Loka Press, 2014).11. Stanley Tigerman, “Foreword: An Opinionated Recluse,” in MuzharulIslam, Architect, ed. Zainab F. Ali and FuadH.Mallick (Dhaka: BRACUniver-sity Press, 2011), 8–10.12. The decades following the creation of Pakistan were characterized byanimated debates among civil societies focused on finding a suitable frame-work for unifying a country with disparate regions. Even Muhammad AliJinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who conceived of it as a homeland for IndianMuslims, made an about-face, invoking secularism and common citizenshipas guiding principles of the state. See Tanveer Fazal, “Religion and Languagein the Formation of Nationhood in Pakistan and Bangladesh,” SociologicalBulletin 48, nos. 1–2 (1999), 175–99.13. Kamil Khan Mumtaz, Modernity and Tradition: Contemporary Architecturein Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Kamil Khan Mumtaz,Architecture in Pakistan (Singapore: Concept Media, 1985).14. My understanding of “modernity” has been influenced by various schol-ars, among them Partha Chatterjee, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Marshall Berman,and Matei Calinescu.15. According to one observer, digging for the pond was started before aproper geological survey and assessment could be carried out. This problemled to the subsequent abandonment of the pond idea. See Nazrul Islam,“Three-Dimensional Environmental Thinker,” Kali o Kolom, Sept. 2012, 34.16. Muzharul Islam, quoted in Zainab F. Ali and Fuad H. Mallick, “Instituteof Fine Arts, Dhaka University,” in Ali andMallick,Muzharul Islam, Architect,32. Institute of Fine Arts was the original name of the building now known asthe Faculty of Fine Arts.17.Muzharul Islam, “The State of Architecture and Architectural Educationin Our Society,” in Ali and Mallick, Muzharul Islam, Architect, 23–28.18. The only information available about Muzharul Islam’s life comes fromanecdotal recollections by his colleagues and students, as well as interviewswith him. I myself spoke with him on various occasions. For Islam’s biograph-ical details, see Shamsul Wares, “Creation and Creator: Bangladesh’s FirstModern Architecture,” Kali o Kolom, Sept. 2012, 39; Meer Mobashsher Ali,“Memory Forever,” Kali o Kolom, Sept. 2012, 16–17; Ali and Mallick,Muzharul Islam, Architect; Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and James Belluardo, eds., AnArchitecture of Independence: The Making of Modern South Asia (exhibitioncatalogue) (New York: Architectural League of New York, 1998); Mehrotra,South Asia.19. Wares, “Creation and Creator,” 39.20. Ibid., 38.21. Leland Roth and Amanda C. Roth Clark,American Architecture: A History,2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2016), 422.22. For an exploration of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, see JoanDraper,“The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Architectural Profession in the UnitedStates: The Case of John Galen Howard,” in The Architect: Chapters in theHistory of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (1977; repr., Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2000).23. Roth and Roth Clark, American Architecture, 422.

24. I thank Howard Davis for this insight. Howard Davis, email correspon-dence with author, 20–22 May 2016.25. Wares, “Creation and Creator,” 38.26. Ibid., 38–39.27. Ibid., 38. Biographical details on these two professors are available inRichard Ellison Ritz, Architects of Oregon: A Biographical Dictionary of ArchitectsDeceased—19th and 20th Centuries (Portland, Ore.: Lair Hill, 2002).28. Wares, “Creation and Creator,” 38.29. For an insightful analysis of Ross’s career as a teacher and historian, seeLeland Roth, “Marion Dean Ross (1913–1991): A Man Who Left a Hole inthe Water” (Marion Dean Ross Lecture, University of Oregon, Eugene,28 Oct. 2012).30. Wares, “Creation and Creator,” 38.31. Roth, “Marion Dean Ross,” 7. Ross studied at Harvard from 1940 to1942.32. Ibid., 23.33.Marion Dean Ross, “Ten Books on Architecture,” Journal of the AmericanInstitute of Architects 14 (Nov.–Dec. 1950), 210–18, 280.34. Islam shared this list with me in 1987.35. An understanding of the role of religion is crucial for contextualizingMuzharul Islam’s architecture. It is central to my argument that Islam’s workembraced modernism as a way to disavow instrumental religion as a stateapparatus. During a later interview, he lamented his absence from EastPakistan during the peak period of the language movement in the early1950s. The political history of the transformation of religious sentiment inpost-Partition East Pakistan is complex, and viewpoints vary depending onthe nationalist stances of the authors. In short, histories of the period remainhighly divisive. Yet there seems to be a consensus among some historians ofthe period concerning how secular Bengali nationalism replaced pan-Islamicsentiment in East Pakistan. See Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 107–15; Mallick andHusain, “Bengali Nationalism”; Fazal, “Religion and Language in the Forma-tion of Nationhood”; Khan, “Islam and Bengali Nationalism.”36. Amalendu De, Roots of Separatism in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Calcutta:Ratna Prakasan, 1974).37. Mallick and Husain, “Bengali Nationalism,” 188.38. Ibid, 187–89.39. Khan, The Great Partition. Also see Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: TheDeadly Legacy of India’s Partition (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,2015).40. Mallick and Husain, “Bengali Nationalism,” 186.41. Peter J. Bertocci, “Bangladesh: Composite Cultural Identity andModern-ization in a Muslim-Majority State,” in Change and the Muslim World, ed.Philip H. Stoddard, David C. Cuthell, and Margaret W. Sullivan (Syracuse,N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981), 77.42.The state language of Pakistan, Urdu, is a member of the Indo-Europeanfamily of languages. It is closely related to Hindi, a language that originatedand developed in the Indian subcontinent. Hindi and Urdu share the sameIndic base and are similar in phonology and grammar. However, they haveborrowed extensively from different sources—Urdu fromArabic and Persian,Hindi from Sanskrit—and they differ when it comes to writing: Urdu uses amodified form of Perso-Arabic script, while Hindi uses Devanagari. Bengaliis also a member of the Indo-European language family, but it is derived,according to some Bengali linguists, fromMagahi Prakrit (a spoken language)through Magahi Apabhramsha (its written counterpart).43. Quoted in Rafiqul Islam, “The Bengali Language Movement and theEmergence of Bangladesh,” in Language and Civilization Change in South Asia,ed. ClarenceMaloney, vol. 11 ofContributions to Asian Studies, ed. K. Ishwaran(Leiden: Brill, 1978), 144.44. Quoted in ibid, 145.

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45. Badruddin Umar, Sanskritic Samprodyeekota [Cultural communalism](Dhaka, 1960), 203.46. According to Shamsul Wares, Islam returned home in 1953, after travel-ing to various U.S. states. Wares, “Creation and Creator,” 38.47. Bangladeshi journalist Motiur Rahman has discussed Islam’s interest inpolitical activism from the 1950s onward, and how his home became a meet-ing place for leftist politicians in the 1960s. Motiur Rahman, “OurMojubhai,a Great Man,” Kali o Kolom, Sept. 2012, 95–98.48. Muzharul Islam, “An Architect in Bangladesh,” in Ashraf, An Architect inBangladesh, 33.49. There is no researched biographical account of Islam’s early career, onlyanecdotal histories recounted by his colleagues. His colleague SheikhMuhammad Shahidullah, an engineer, has written an informative essay on thearchitect that provides helpful details of his early life. Sheikh MuhammadShahidullah, “A Colleague’s Experience of Working with a Great Architect,”Kali o Kolom, Sept. 2012, 8–9.50. At the time of Partition, there were only three schools of architecture inIndia and one in West Pakistan. India witnessed the creation of its first five-year program in architecture in 1945; in Pakistan, the first such program wasestablished in 1958. Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) saw its first architectureprogram in 1962, Sri Lanka in 1965, and Nepal in 1992. Because the newlyfounded architecture programs were modeled on those in Britain and theUnited States, theymade little attempt to deviate from colonial-era, Eurocen-tric pedagogical frameworks, and materials that might foster an appreciationof local culture and architectural traditions were rarely included. See JyotiHosagrahar, “South Asia: Looking Back, Moving Ahead—History and Mod-ernization,” JSAH 61, no. 3 (Sept. 2002), 355–69.51.Hicks authored key land-use planning in Dhaka: Motijheel as a commer-cial area, Nawabpur (present Bangabandhu Avenue) as a shopping area, andAzimpur and Dhanmondi as residential areas. He also designed severallarge-scale projects, including Hotel Shahbagh (now Bangabandhu SheikhMujib Medical University), New Market, Azimpur Housing Estate, andRajarbagh Police Barrack. McConnel designed Holy Family Hospital,Vikarunnesa Girls School, and the Secretariat Building. Shahidullah,“A Colleague’s Experience,” 8–9.52. Ibid.53. Bijon Chowdhury, “Amar dekha Zainul Abedin” [The Zainul Abedin Iknew], Kali o Kolom, Dec. 2014, 22–23.54. See Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg, eds., The Bauhaus in Calcutta:An Encounter of Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes (exhibition catalogue) (Ostfildern,Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2013); Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism:India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion Books,2007), 15–17.55.The exhibition offered Calcutta-centric artists avant-garde alternatives totwo prevalent local artistic currents. The first was academic naturalism, whichdrew inspiration from Western traditions, and the second was an inward-looking nationalist art movement known as the Bengal school. Perhapsbecause of the market-driven British Orientalist patronage of the former andthe nativist value of the latter during the anticolonial agitation, the Bauhausexhibition failed to exert any enduring influence on the Calcutta art scene.Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 68; Chowdhury, “Amar dekha ZainulAbedin,” 22–23.56. Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, 15–27.57.Chowdhury, “Amar dekha Zainul Abedin,” 22–23. The group, which metat the University of Dhaka campus, included painters Quamrul Hassan andSafiuddin Ahmed and poets Farrukh Ahmad and Abdul Latif. The members’dynamic conversation revolved a great deal around creating a center for artseducation in East Pakistan.58. SaifulHaque, “Towards a Regional Identity: The Evolution of Contempo-rary Architecture in Bangladesh,” Architecture + Design 4, no. 4 (1988), 26–27.

59. Hussain, “The Wholesomeness of Muzharul Islam.”60. Wares, “Creation and Creator,” 40.61. Rachel Lee and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Marg Magazine: A Trystwith Architectural Modernity,” ABE Journal 1 (2012), abstract, https://abe.revues.org/623 (accessed 6 July 2017).62.Mehrotra, South Asia; Ashraf and Belluardo,AnArchitecture of Independence.63. Mumtaz, Modernity and Tradition.64. Mumtaz, Architecture in Pakistan, 164–68.65. Quoted in ibid., 187.66. Sten Åke Nilsson, Islamabad: The Quest for a National Identity—First Report(Lund: Lund University, 1978), quoted in Mumtaz, Architecture in Pakistan,187. Kahn experienced a different kind of reception in East Pakistan. In fact,Muzharul Islam was instrumental in inviting Kahn (whom he met while hewas a graduate student at Yale), on behalf of the government of Pakistan, todesign the building for the National Assembly (also known as the ParliamentBuilding) in Dhaka.67. Islam discussed his indebtedness to the Bengal Renaissance with ShamsulWares and Kazi Khaleed Ashraf. See Wares, “Creation and Creator”; Ashraf,AnArchitect in Bangladesh. For a range of interpretations of the Bengal Renais-sance, see David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: TheDynamics of Indian Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press,1969); David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern IndianMind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Percival Griffiths,The British Impact on India (New York: Macmillan, 1953); Arabinda Poddar,Renaissance in Bengal: Quests and Confrontations, 1800–1860 (Simla: Indian In-stitute of Advanced Study, 1970); Subrata Dasgupta, The Bengal Renaissance:Identity and Creativity from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore (NewDelhi:Orient Longman, 2007).68. Among the other stalwarts of the Bengal Renaissance were Deben-dranath Tagore, Akhshay Kumar Dutt, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar,Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. Somerecent revisionist historians have questioned the conventional venerationof the Bengal Renaissance, alleging that it was an elitist enterprise ofupper-crust Hindus. See, for example, Pulak Narayan Dhar, “BengalRenaissance: A Study in Social Contradictions,” Social Scientist 15, no. 1( Jan. 1987), 26–45.69. Mohammad A. Quayum, “Tagore and Nationalism,” Journal of Common-wealth Literature 39, no. 2 (2004), 1–6.70. See Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: TheMyriad-Minded Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Mitter, TheTriumph of Modernism, 65–68.71. I have examined Islam’s library and found the diversity of titles fascinating.According to his daughter, he loved to collect books and read them whenevertime permitted.72. Muzharul Islam, “Marx and Rabindranath,” in Ashraf, An Architect inBangladesh, 95.73. Islam, “The State of Architecture,” 28.74. Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. SurendranathTagore, in Rabindranath Tagore Omnibus III (New Delhi: Rupa, 2005). Alsosee Satish C. Aikant, “Reading Tagore: Seductions and Perils of National-ism,” Asiatic 4, no. 1 (June 2010), 61–63.75.Muzharul Islam, “A Bengali and aWorld Man,” in Ashraf, An Architect inBangladesh, 55.76. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Muzharul Islam’s Modernity and the Idea ofReturn Home,” in Ali and Mallick, Muzharul Islam, Architect, 11–22.77. Shamsul Wares, preface to Ashraf, An Architect in Bangladesh, 9.78. Ashraf, “Muzharul Islam’s Modernity,” 16.79. Tigerman, “Foreword.”80. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (New York: Vintage,1993).

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