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ESSAYS
Gandhi’s Buildings and the Search

for a Spiritual Modernity
By Riyaz Tayyibji Posted on January 9, 2019
Riyaz Tayyibji considers the little-known architectural collaborations of Mahatma

Gandhi, charismatic leader of the Indian freedom movement, in light of discourses of
modern architecture. Weaving in discussions of phenomenology, material, and a
discipline of privacy, the essay explores aspects of Gandhi's philosophical and
political thinking that propose a notion of the modern with an ethical and spiritual
underpinning for 20th century architectural practice.
Gandhi in London 1909. Courtesy Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad
https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1234-gandhi-s-building…IwAR1zHUeMekxxcjm6xK6dBO_tN6TV2oX14cRGgcbLrqcEfAAcevihLlcpLG0 Page 1 of 33
Gandhi with Members of the Vegetarian Society, London 1890. Courtesy Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and
Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad
There are many things that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), the
“Mahatma” or more fondly “Bapu,” is known for, but architecture is not part of the
standard mythos. Gandhi, however, did consider building to be an extension of his
engagement with different materials, which he began at an early age. His first
experiments were with food, and later, he taught himself carpentry and to work with
leather. He was particularly interested in materiality, the relationship between
material, its processing and production with labor and the human body. He taught
himself to spin cotton, an activity that he personally undertook daily, and then
promoted societally, which had large economic and political implications during the
Indian independence movement. Gandhi sitting at his spinning wheel is an iconic
portrait. His engagement with materials and how they are processed was not a
casual one.1 He mastered leatherwork and carpentry and even made highly
technical innovations to the spinning wheel.2 One should expect, then, an equally
careful examination of architectural praxes in his experiments with built forms.
Though Gandhi is unequivocally among the greatest modern thinkers, his buildings
have largely been looked upon as conservative, rural, and vernacular. Ironically, it is
their materiality that has perpetuated this reading.3 Given Gandhi’s criticism of
industrial production processes, modern materials such as concrete and steel are,
not surprisingly, absent from his architecture. With his economic and political
thinking centered on the village and rural agricultural environments, the idea of the
modern city was immaterial.4 Gandhi’s buildings lie outside the matrix of material
technology and urbanity that defines modern Euro-American architecture. And yet
they are considerable departures from the traditional structures they appear to
resemble. This break is rooted in the ideas that shaped Indian modernity in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that matured through Gandhi’s
experimentations. These ideas relate to individuality, hygiene, movement, locality,
and, among other things, a reconfiguration of the domestic that constitutes an
“opening up.”5 Given the inherent contradiction in architectural discourse between
the categories of “vernacular” and “modern,” particularly in political and economic
terms, it becomes important to observe Gandhi’s as an architecture that is
simultaneously both. It follows to inquire about the implications of his architecture
and the nature of its modernity.
Gandhi proposed a modernity premised on inward inquiry, or a form of inquiry

directed toward the self, rather than the outward-looking trajectory of phenomenal
observation that so fueled the Enlightenment project.6 Such a modernity, Gandhi
believed, could only come from scrutinizing one’s own experiences, the
particularities of one’s own circumstances, and their reality as lived experience with
a significant openness between one’s private and public selves.7 In his
autobiography, he provides a careful account of his youth, namely of the people
and events that were the substance on which his physical, intellectual,
philosophical, and spiritual development is based.8 For Gandhi, this development is
driven by the internal conversation one has with oneself. To have this conversation,
one must first be able to listen to the “small, still voice” within.9 Indeed, it is the
ability to hear this voice, to have this conversation, that allows one to emerge as an
individual—and thus to be modern. Gandhi understood the purpose of this internal
conversation to be the search for integrity and truth, for self-knowledge and self-
awareness. Self-recognition, for him, is the basis of self-control. As the cultural
historian and Gandhian scholar Tridip Suhrud writes, “His [Gandhi’s] idea of
civilization is based on this possibility of rule over the self.”10 Open dialogue first
with oneself and then with the other is the keystone of his praxis of nonviolence, or
ahimsa. For to Gandhi, a disintegrated self is amoral and unethical and leads to
ignorance of the self, which in turn paves the way to violence. This is also Gandhi’s
most scathing critique of the Western secular-scientific worldview, which he
believed led directly to violence through a consciousness that isolates cognition

from feelings and ethics, and partitions man from the subjects of inquiry
emotionally.11 This is the state of the technologist, whose individuality is robbed of
the possibility of salvation through personal searching. For Gandhi, a modernity
without the possibility of transcendence is an amoral modernity. The possibility of
transcendence is embedded in the correct enactment of daily practices toward
spiritual liberation and not in a longed-for utopia. 12
Gandhi with Hermann Kallenbach and his secretary Sonia Schlesin, Johannesburg. Courtesy Sabarmati
Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad
Gandhiji and Kasturba with fellow settlers at Phoenix Settlement, Natal, 1906. Courtesy Sabarmati Ashram
Preservation and Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad
Gandhi’s first experience of working with building materials was in South Africa,
where he constructed the shed to house the printing press for the Indian Opinion at
Phoenix settlement.13 A few years later, Gandhi moved into “The Kraal,” a house
designed and built by his lifelong friend, ”soulmate,” and patron, the architect
Hermann Kallenbach.14 This house had a thatched roof and was based on a
configuration of vernacular African building elements. It was unusual for a
European to live in such a house at the time.15 Gandhi and Kallenbach lived
together for five years: first at The Kraal, then in canvas tents at Fairview, and
finally at Tolstoy Farm, where once again Gandhi was involved in building.16 Given
his own experimentation with materials and the pair’s close friendship, Gandhi
likely picked up a great deal about construction from the architect. Kallenbach was
a partner in a successful Johannesburg practice and designed sophisticated
buildings across the town.17 Nonetheless, Gandhi did not find it difficult to
convince the tall, sports-loving, hedonistic Lithuanian to give himself over to a life
of simplicity. The buildings at Tolstoy Farm consisted of three simple sheds: two
about fifty-three feet in length and a third larger one, which, close to seventy-seven
feet, housed a school. Each shed had a veranda running along its length, with the
interior spaces enclosed by donated corrugated sheets of iron.18 At both the
Phoenix settlement and Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi had wanted to build with mud and
thatch. However, resistance from other community members prevented him from
doing so.19 As Millie Polak recalled, “His bent was naturally towards the ascetic
and not towards the aesthetic.”20
The Kraal, where Hermann Kallenbach and Gandhi lived together. Note the particular use of stylized African
vernacular building elements. Courtesy
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Satyagraha_House_2.jpg
Gandhi’s ideas with respect to building materials would find fruition upon his return
to India in the construction of his ashrams. The buildings of the Sabarmati Ashram
in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, a state in western India, were made from burnt brick, sawn
timber, and handmade country tiles, and are referred to, in local terminology, as
pucca, or proper/permanent buildings.21 However, Gandhi found Hriday Kunj, his
own house at the ashram, excessive. He thought it too big and unnecessarily
complex. At his second ashram, Sevagram Ashram at Wardha, near Nagpur in
central India, the buildings are much simpler and made from materials found within
a fifty-mile radius. Consequently, the buildings there have stone plinths, and the
walls are made of a local mud called “garhi mitti” mixed with water, cow dung,
wheat husk, and hay, the latter serving as a binder and insulation. Columns of un-
sawn sagwan wood hold up the roof structure, which is covered with bamboo
matting and clay country tiles. These buildings were self-built—unlike the pucca
buildings at the Sabarmati Ashram—and are, in contrast, considered kachcha, or
raw.
Plan and sections, Hriday Kunj, Gandhi’s house at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. Courtesy anthill design,
Ahmedabad, 2009
Axonometric drawing of the room configuration, Hriday Kunj, Gandhi’s house at Sabarmati Ashram,
Ahmedabad. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2009
Axonometric drawing, Hriday Kunj, Gandhi’s house at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. Courtesy anthill
design, Ahmedabad, 2009
Gandhi’s inclination to move from the pucca to the kachcha (in both diet and in the
construction of buildings), is rooted in the idea of health and what it means to live
healthily. Gandhi clearly saw that the uncontrolled use of material and energy
(particularly mechanical energy) that had so enthralled the last decade of the
nineteenth century as well as the twentieth would lead to imbalances in both the
internal and external environments of the human body. One might be tempted to
consider this as a return to the primitive—certainly an image of Gandhi (read as the
“half-naked fakir”22) would not be contradictory—however, the manner in which
Gandhi constructed himself, i.e., his body, and the space around it, could not have
occurred in any other time. To understand the nature of his modernity, we need to
visit the spaces of his youth.
Hriday Kunj, Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. The porosity from the veranda (osri) into the courtyard. Courtesy
anthill design, Ahmedabad , 2009
Hriday Kunj, Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. The porosity from the courtyard toward the veranda (osri).
Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2009
Bapu Kutir, Gandhi’s house at Sewagram Ashram, Wardha. View from the northwest. Courtesy anthill design,
https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1234-gandhi-s-buildin…wAR1zHUeMekxxcjm6xK6dBO_tN6TV2oX14cRGgcbLrqcEfAAcevihLlcpLG0 Page 10 of 33
Ahmedabad, 2016
Bapu Kutir, Gandhi’s house at Sewagram Ashram, Wardha. View from the northeast. Courtesy anthill design,
Ahmedabad, 2016
Gandhi was born in the town of Porbandar, where his father occupied the ground
floor of a three-story town house. The families of his elder uncles lived on the upper
two floors, which enjoyed more natural light and better ventilation. The ground-floor
rooms, or ordo as they are known locally, were poorly lit from a veranda, or osri,
that overlooked a courtyard and lent the house some sense of openness. As
Narayan Desai, Gandhi’s personal secretary, described, “Gandhiji was born in a
dark room in that house.”23 When he was seven, the family moved with his
grandfather to the city of Rajkot under unusual circumstances. Here, they occupied
a more elaborate house. Porbandar and Rajkot are situated in a region in western
India known as Saurashtra. The type of house germane to Saurashtra grew out of
an archetypal relationship between the closed ordo, the semi-open osri, and the
open courtyard.24 In denser, more urban areas such as Porbandar, the
configuration of the house would be linear, with the open space constricted to a
vertically oriented, shaded courtyard called a chowk. In the squarer, more spread-
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out agrarian configuration, the courtyard is larger and accommodates both animals
and agricultural activities such as drying and threshing. Here, the courtyard is
called a delo. Gandhi’s father’s house, where he lived until the age of nineteen, is of
this delo type. Known as “Kaba Gandhi no Delo,” or “Kaba Gandhi's House,” it still
stands today.
The diagrammatic relationship between the ordo and the osri. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2018
The development of the urban house type of Saurashtra. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2018
Gandhi’s childhood house in Porbandar. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2018, redrawn from Gandhi
Heritage Sites Mission (GHSM), Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad. See Gandhi
Heritage Portal,
https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/datalink/files/gandhiheritagesite/KirtiMandirPorbandar.pdf
Gandhi’s father’s house in Rajkot, where Gandhi lived until he was nineteen. Courtesy anthill design,
Ahmedabad, 2018, redrawn from Gandhi Heritage Sites Mission (GHSM), Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and
Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad. See Gandhi Heritage Portal,
https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/datalink/files/gandhiheritagesite/KabaGandhiNoDelo.pdf
Hriday Kunj, Gandhi’s house at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2009
Bapu Kutir, Gandhi’s house at Sewagram Ashram, Ahmedabad. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2016
The osri and the ordo are the main components of this type of house, the stature of
which is determined by the number of its constituent ordos: the greater the
number, the greater its complexity and functional or formal differentiation of its
spaces. Likewise, the osris on each ordo vary depending on orientation and use.
The osri is the most active, lived-in space of the house, where collective social
activities are held and where family members spend the bulk of their time. The
kitchen, or rasodu, is a partially enclosed area within the osri and associated with
meals and water. Traditionally, the ordo is used for storage, and when inhabited,
given over to the aged, the sick, or the pregnant, as well as to married couples for
sexual intercourse; on rare occasions, it is also used for bathing and grooming. In
short, the ordo is a closed space for private activities related to the body, keeping
them hidden from social witness.
The House at Porbandar, Saurashtra, where Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869. Courtesy Gandhi Heritage
Portal
The room where Gandhi was born; the swastika marks the exact spot. Courtesy Gandhi Heritage Portal
These communal houses were largely extended-family homes, in which the idea of
individual privacy was subordinate to the acts of collective living. It was only when
Gandhi left Rajkot and began living in London that he developed a taste for a life
attuned to the individual, where a room (ordo) is one’s private domain. By 1910, at
Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi had a room to himself and maintained a certain distance from
the community. However, communal living post-1913 tempered his need for
individuality; and by 1918, at Hriday Kunj in Ahmedabad, the ordos were not
placed along the osri, closing its long face, but instead perpendicular to it, opening
up the courtyard and the veranda through and through. Gandhi configured his
study as a partially enclosed area within the veranda. The courtyard “loosens” the
sense of an enclosure, while the veranda gains a porosity unseen in its traditional
iteration. The configuration of the house as a whole is opened up. Whereas the
definition of the traditional house is based on the ordo and its sense of enclosure,
Gandhi’s abode is defined by the continuity of its open and semi-open spaces, or
osris.
Gandhi’s study in Hriday Kunj, Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2014
Gandhi’s study in Hriday Kunj, Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2014
Gandhi’s study in Bapu Kutir, Sewagram Ashram, Wardha. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2016
In 1933, in Bapu Kutir, Gandhi’s house in his final ashram at Sevagram, the
dissolution of the ordo is subtler and more complex. Even the bathroom, now
accessible, ceased to be an ordo—it is well-known that anyone in need of an
urgent discussion could walk in while Gandhi was bathing, and that often, in order
to save time, he dictated letters of importance to his secretary, who sat across from
him by the window, while he was defecating.25 Just as important is the bathroom’s
articulation as a sensuous space, with a library connecting to a massage room and
sick bay, that collectively reflect an unprecedented ease with the body. This ease
had developed over the previous twenty-five years, from 1906 when Gandhi took a
vow of celibacy, that final affirmation on the path to brahmacharya (activity in
search of Brahma or soul).26 With its purificatory control of the body, brahmacharya
diminishes the need and significance of the closed ordo in the scheme of
dwelling.27 The form of dwelling for this new body found its fruition at Bapu Kutir at
Wardha. The gradual dissolution of the “closed room,” the opening up of the
private space of the body as an expression of a new, modern relationship between
body and dwelling, is one of the most important and consistent themes across
Gandhi’s buildings beginning at Tolstoy Farm. For Gandhi, this opening up had
deep spiritual implications. Homologous processes of opening up could be seen in
his other praxes—for example, in the manner in which he opened up the insular
literary form of the modern autobiography.  
In December 1925, Gandhi began writing An Autobiography or the Story of My

Experiments with Truth from Sabarmati Ashram. In this serial exercise, spread over
166 installments published weekly in the Navjivan (Young India), the Indian Opinion
(Johannesburg), and the American journal Unity, Gandhi invited readers to respond
to current installments while he worked on those to follow. These writings, he said,
were driven by the “dweller-within,” rather than by an overall plan to present the
reader with a “book.”28 In his approach, Gandhi opened up the insular writing
process of the modern literary autobiographical form to the possibility of
dialogue.29 The idea of dialogue is fundamental to much of India’s modernist
thinking and forms one of the most important precepts of Gandhi’s ideas outlining
an alternative modernity—one that includes a sharp critique of the Eurocentric
secular and scientific modernity. So hegemonic was the European voice, so
unanimously accepted at the time as derived from a superior fact-based, historical,
objective, empirical, and literary culture, that an older more intimate, oral, mythic,
and liturgical order was like the proverbial baby being thrown out with the scientific
bathwater. It was this assumption of unquestionable superiority that Gandhi most
opposed and felt compelled to push back against through ”civilizational dialogue,”
a process in which reconciliation of differences depends on the ability to look at
difference as a form of criticism, which he believed one should apply toward
oneself for ”internal use.”30 He held that dialogue, by definition, must become a
two-way process, as much as it was a two-part process, i.e., first involving an
internal conversation that is then followed by an external one. The ease with which
Gandhi brings into close proximity the modern and the vernacular (though he
himself would not have made this particular distinction) is the first step toward the
possibility of dialogue and a subsequent inquiry into the shared ground between
two seemingly opposed categories.    
Axonometric drawing, Bapu Kutir, Sewagram Ashram, Wardha. Courtesy Madhu Malukani, anthill design,
Ahmedabad, 2018
Axonometric drawing, Gandhi’s Study, Bapu Kutir. Courtesy Madhu Malukani, anthill design, Ahmedabad,
2018
As much as Gandhi was critical of the European Enlightenment, he was equally

critical of India’s bigoted, caste-ridden, and striated society, in which archaic social
norms prevent individuation and consequently eliminate the possibility of an inner
dialogue. For him, the possibility of a modern India was premised on the
eradication of untouchability and other practices, such as sati. He believed these
closed, dark spaces perpetuated by superstition needed to be opened up. Having
dismissed the trajectory of the Enlightenment, in which the external light of science
and rationality eradicates obscurity, Gandhi centered this idea of ”opening up” on
the continuation of a spiritual tradition drawn from his reading of the Bhagavad
Gita, and further inflected by the Bible. Such amalgamations were implicit to his
formative education, specifically via his mother Putlibai, who belonged to an
eclectic religious tradition known as ”Pranami Sampradaya,” which “seeks to
combine the finest elements of Hinduism and Islam.” 
Like many spiritual traditions of the Indian subcontinent, the Vaishnava tradition,
with which Gandhi experimented, looks at the relationship between the body and
mind as the site for self-realization. It is widely accepted that the free play of the
senses is a distraction, and does not allow one to heed one’s inner voice. Gandhi
first experimented with his diet and its relationship to the palate while still a student
in Rajkot and then in London. He noted with great care how the changes in his diet
affected his body, his behavior, and particularly the workings of his mind. Gandhi
was fastidious about personal hygiene, and in caring for his body, and he allowed
this to play a key role in his writings on social reform. The upliftment of the manual
scavenging caste, composed of those who made a living by cleaning up the
excrement of the higher castes, the most abject position in Indian society, was one
of his most strident agendas, as was the healing of those affected with leprosy. He
also realized that it was not possible to be completely committed to social service
without having complete control over one’s own inner body.
It should be noted that though Gandhi considered the body to be an impediment in

the search for the self, he also saw it as an essential instrument in one’s healthy
and appropriate engagement with the material world. Gandhi borrowed from
Tolstoy the idea of bread labor. He believed that if everyone made with their own
hands one essential item necessary for their existence, they would realize in a
bodily sense, from their own labor, the right proportion of resource and the energy
required toward their living. Gandhi, as mentioned earlier, had taught himself
carpentry, to work with leather, and to weave and spin. He explored organic
material and production processes through direct involvement in both agriculture
and dairy. During his days in London and in South Africa, he transformed his body
from the inert construct of a traditional Indian bania to one of a modern individual
at ease with its labor. Gandhi’s later twin concepts of nonpossession and non-
stealing have deep ecological implication, preparing one to give up all possessions
including the body. For Gandhi, then, the body is not for individual self-gratification
and pleasure, but rather an instrument with which to measure the limits of one’s
engagement in the substantial world. The body is a social instrument he considers
to be part of the “commons.”
Spatial porosity: Looking across the veranda (osri) and open spaces of Sewagram Ashram, Wardha. Courtesy
anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2016
If a new relationship to the body is one sign of the modern in the buildings of
Gandhi’s ashrams, which manifests in an opening up, in an increased spatial
porosity, then the other is the care taken in the articulation of the place for the
individual, who for Gandhi is at the very root of being modern. For Gandhi, the
study, a place for contemplation, reading, and writing, is the site of the inner
conversation that defines the individual. It bears noting that his “study” is distinct
from his daftar, or office, for which a separate building was built. It was at Hriday
Kunj in Ahmedabad that the study emerged as a partitioned space within the osri
and, like the kitchen in his Rajkot house, was the domain of an individual
simultaneously connected to the social realm of the house. It was the archetype of
the rasodu, or kitchen, that Gandhi appropriated for the development of the study.
Fifteen years later, at Bapu Kutir, in 1933, the study, scaled down by a bamboo loft,
became a far more intimate space. Gandhi now inhabited the very wall that
separates the osri from the inner space of the house: a carved-out space, delicate
in its articulation and tactility. Apart from limiting the cost of its construction to Rs.
500, Gandhi had one other expectation from the building: he wanted to be able to
see the sky from any place within it. It is from the study of the kutir that this is
possible. The study at Wardha is thus a space where one is simultaneously held
and released.
The prayer ground at Sewagram Ashram, Wardha, is the clearing, open to sky, in an otherwise heavily treed
precinct. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2016
A note on spatiality of porosity: porosity must be distinguished from the

transparent that is so valorized by European modern architecture. I have argued
elsewhere that this porosity arises from an attitude of agrarian frugality rather than
of mechanical efficiencies. This opening up distinguishes itself from the Wrightian
corner window or the Corbusian plan libre (both contemporaneous with the
architecture under discussion) as the mechanisms facilitating this openness are not
dependent on technological articulations of material and structure, or for that

matter, a mechanized production process. This openness is the direct result of the
control over oneself, over one’s behavior, and the ability to transform the activities
that underpin function with this changed behavior. If one of the credos of modern
architecture is that form follows function, Gandhi would extend this inward ad
infinitum: form follows function, which follows activity, which follows behavior,
which follows resolve, which in turn is a function of discipline, which is a direct
result of control over the self, which is necessary for an inquiry of truth, which is
based on being able to hear and have a conversation with the “small, still voice”
within, which in turn defines the modern individual. If our cumulative behavior
aggregates into what we now call “lifestyle,” and we have a choice of lifestyle, then
it follows that this choice also determines the material, technological, and formal
choices that are ethically open to us. Gandhi’s visionary architecture demonstrated
this long before it became an environmentalist credo that the future of the planet
may well depend on the manner in which each of us chooses to live. As Gandhi
often said, the purity of the means results in the purity of the ends. Form then has
ethical and moral underpinnings. The choice of form must necessarily emerge from
careful experimentation through a sequence that leads from a relationship to one’s
inner self.
Another way to look at this would be to say that Gandhi believed that the
specificity and differentiation of architectural form was simply excessive—
unnecessary even. He noted that there is a striking similarity between the spatial
structure of the Saurashtra house and that of a Hindu temple. The ordo
corresponds to the closed garbhagriha, or sanctum, whereas the osri corresponds
to the mandapa, a hypostyle hall, or social, sometimes congregational space. In
Gandhi’s mind, the categories of house and temple are never very far from each
other. As was common practice in the area, his mother, who was a pious woman,
visited a neighborhood haveli, or temple that exists within a large house. Gandhi,
always sensitive to the possibilities of universal relationships, realized that the
relationship between the osri and the ordo of the house parallels that between the
hypostyle and the sanctum of a temple. The difference then lies not in the form but
rather in the manner in which the spaces are ritualized, or the ways in which
activities and material cohere in a recurrent manner. By changing the mode of
ritualization, one could easily turn a house into a shrine, or for that matter the cell
of a prison into the cella, or inner chamber, of a temple. This is precisely what
Gandhi did when he was imprisoned in Yerawada Central Jail in Pune: he
recognized the prison cell and the corridor in archetypal terms, and referred to the
prison as ”Yerawada” mandir, or temple. It was the manner in which he inhabited

the prison that denied his imprisonment.
The development of the Hindu temple. Note the diagrammatic similarity to the Saurashtra house type.
Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2018, redrawn from Christopher Tadgell, The History of Architecture in
India: From the Dawn of Civilization to the End of the Raj (London: Phaidon Press, 1990)
Gandhi realized that the power of changing one’s relationship to physical space,
and by extension the meaning of buildings, derived from controlling one’s thinking
and activity, and not merely by radicalizing the design of a space for its own sake.
In this approach, he began with the presumption that the human body is more
adaptive and responsive than inanimate matter. He found it contradictory that for
inanimate matter to become responsive, adaptive, or flexible, it needed to be
shaped using vast amounts of energy. In contrast, human beings could do so
naturally, because we are naturally so. He demonstrated that in shaping one’s
behavior, one does not need to shape form, the ecological implications of which
cannot be overstated. Consequently, his ashrams consist of a distributed and
continuous field of osris, where the dwelling is all verandas, some built and the rest
the result of heavily foliaged trees. Immersed in this porous plenum, bodies both
individual and societal are shaped into a variety of institutional relationships
through disciplined activities and/or practices. This discipline is internal and, in
turn, defines the ashram as the place and operation of a collective of co-
experimenters, all in search of self-knowledge and truth. This is the Gandhian
space for a spiritual modern.
Site Plan of Sewagram Ashram, Wardha. Courtesy anthill design, Ahmedabad, 2016. Measure-drawn for the
Gandhi Heritage Sites Mission (GHSM), Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust, Ahmedabad
1. Gandhi referred to all his praxes as “experiments.” The English title of his autobiography, An Autobiography or
The Story of My Experiments with Truth, gives insight into the depth and breadth of the manner in which he
considered these engagements. Though sceptical of the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment for
separating the subjective and the objective, he nevertheless borrowed from this paradigm, appropriating the
method of the experiment and following it meticulously: setting up hypotheses, undertaking experiments, and
searching for verification. Gandhi carried out experiments in his inner world (in his search for truth) and in the
outer world (through his engagement with material). For him, the human body is the instrument that mediates
between these two worlds, allowing for the inner to be verified by the outer, and vice versa. For this
epistemological machine to work, Gandhi knew that a complete transparency between one’s inner and the outer
worlds was necessary. M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans.
Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press), https://gandhiheritageportal.org/mahatma-gandhi-books/the-
story-of-my-experiments-with-truth#page/1/mode/2up).
2. Gandhi developed a twelve-spindle charkha (spinning wheel), and a portable “Yerawada” charkha that allowed
him to spin while traveling. He also made changes to improve the aerodynamics of the wheel.
3. The manner in which the discourse on modern architecture itself has been historically constructed foregrounds
material technology and its production (industry). Given that more than 80 percent of India was rural and
agricultural at the time, Gandhi saw no virtue in premising modern interventions into these contexts on such
ideas. He did, however, see value in the ideas of the individual, health and hygiene, education, and dialogue.
Gandhi, though critical of the European secular, scientific Enlightenment as a whole, felt no hesitation in
borrowing ideas and practices from it that he thought were useful—or in discarding those that he considered
destructive. He, in fact, categorically states that nothing he has thought or done is original, and he is completely
transparent in crediting antecedents. M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with
Truth, trans. Mahadev Desai (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, https://gandhiheritageportal.org/mahatma-gandhi-
books/the-story-of-my-experiments-with-truth#page/1/mode/2up). A Gandhian modernity encourages a mix
and match of ideas, on the assumption that these ideas arise in response to an internal inquiry and
conversation with oneself. He then vehemently opposes the notion that any one fixed set of ideas (i.e., ideology)
is inherently superior to any other. Gandhi’s buildings then question the hegemony of the idea of material
technology in determining modern architecture. Quite simply, Gandhi’s buildings are modern in spite of the
materials from which they are made, though the nature of their modernity may not be obvious.
4. For Gandhi, the city is a place of violence. He proposed the “ashram” as a form of settlement pattern. This is
not the ashram of antiquity but rather a community of satyagrahis, or searchers of truth, living together and
“experimenting” toward a nonviolent existence. This form of ashram consists of a residential area, a communal
kitchen and dining hall, an open-to-sky prayer space, along with an institutional area housing schools and other
training sites. Areas are demarcated for agriculture, animal husbandry, dairy, and food processing. A separate
area is allotted for international ashramites, volunteers, and visiting guests.
5. In this essay, I use the term “opening up” to describe both an internal, mental, and psychological
reconfiguration arising from systematic inquiry, experimentation, and verification, and a material one—referring
to the increased porosity of an architectural configuration. Buildings using mud and masonry are load bearing
by nature, where the configuration of the walls defines the structure. These are unlike the frame structures built
with modern materials, such as reinforced cement concrete (RCC) and steel, which free the walls from the logic
of gravity and, therefore, allow for “free” compositioning. Compositioning allows for transparency, whereas
configurations of load-bearing walls allow for varying porosity. I have called an increase in porosity an “opening
up.” For Gandhi, this external, material opening up can only follow an internal one. A societal opening up would
follow the same logic: A society can only move away from dogmatisms and the darkness of a blind following of
unverified ritual and habit through a wilful internal transformation within each individual member of that society.
For it to happen any other way would involve the false or the violent, both of which Gandhi considered immoral.
In this essay, I concentrate on the implications of opening up and the idea of the individual particular to
Gandhi’s thinking. Considering the scope of this essay, other ideas, including those surrounding hygiene,
domesticity, and movement are referred to in passing, however, they are not discussed in detail.
6. By 'modernity', I mean the conditions and qualities necessary for being modern. Gandhi refuted the possibility
that a universal set of conditions could be considered modern. He felt that the European conditions of being
modern had limited significance in the Indian cultural context. Others, most notably Ashis Nandy, have
attempted to construct the outlines of what a Gandhian modernity could be.
7. Gandhi seems to have recognized that, in a world where there are no existential boundaries, the only reality that
one can consider “firm” is that which is closest to us, i.e., that which is experienced directly. In this world of an
atomized, individuated society, the onus to find an ethical and moral framework lies with the individual, and thus
one must find this for oneself in the scientific manner of inquiry, i.e., through “experiments.”
8. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 11–51.
9. For a discussion of Gandhi’s relationship with his “small, still voice,” see Tridip Suhrud, introduction to An
Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: Critical Edition, by M. K. Gandhi, trans. Mahadev
Desai (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2018), 1–35, esp. 16, 22.
10. Ibid., 6.
11. Ashis Nandy, “From Outside the Imperium: Gandhi’s Cultural Critique of the West,” in Traditions, Tyranny and
Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 130–31.
12. Gandhi’s daily practices included eating, bathing, reading, writing, spinning, visiting the sick (those stricken with
leprosy), and praying. He thought carefully about these activities, and sought the spiritual possibilities within
each one. With this understanding, he elevated everyday activities to the level of rituals that would aid him along
his path to moksha, or self-realization. He did not feel the need for any extraneous activity. See Mahadev Desai,
“A Morning with Gandhiji,” November 13, 1924, in Young India, 1924–1926, by Mahatma Gandhi (Madras: S.
Ganesan, 1927), 1025: “There are two aspects of things,—the outward and the inward. It is purely a matter of
emphasis with me. The outward has no meaning except in so far as it helps the inward.” Gandhi argued that
there are moments, however rare, when one’s communion with oneself is so complete that one feels no need
for any outward expression, including art. Tridip Suhrud, “Towards a Gandhian Aesthetics: The Poetics of
Surrender and the Art of Brahmacharya,” in The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the
Philosophy of Art, ed. Arindam Chakrabarti (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 374. It follows that Gandhi considers
inner transformation at the individual scale as the engine for political revolution at the societal scale.
13. By 1903, a core group of people of varied races and religious dispositions rallied around Gandhi, supporting
him in his agitations against racial discrimination in South Africa. This led to the founding of the Natal Indian
Congress, which Gandhi would soon lead. In the same year, he started the Indian Opinion, the journal that
became the voice of the Indian community in South Africa. Gandhi had been thinking about communal living for
several years up to then. In 1904, with the journal’s financial struggles and his serendipitous reading of John
Ruskin’s Unto This Last, he was inspired to act on his thoughts of communal living and to buy a farm near the
station of Phoenix, on the north coastline fourteen miles from Johannesburg. Both the printing press and
operating staff were housed on the farm, “where the workers could live a more simple and natural life and the
ideas of Ruskin and Tolstoy combined with strict business principles.” Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India
(New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2013), 175. Needless to say, the production costs of the journal were
reduced considerably. In addition, Gandhi would use the farm to articulate and sharpen his ideas about
communal living, and satyagraha. It was at Phoenix settlement in 1906 that Gandhi would take his pledge of
brahmacharya, or voluntary celibacy. The inhabitants of the settlement had built their own houses, and though
Gandhi only moved there in 1913, his family lived there and he visited them regularly.
14. See Shimon Lev, Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach (New Delhi: Orient Black
Swan, 2012), which discusses the relationship between Gandhi and Kallenbach in detail.
15. Before living with Kallenbach, Gandhi and his wife had lived with Millie and Henry Polak. It was unusual for
mixed-race couples to live together in a city such as London in any case; however, in South Africa, it was
downright revolutionary. Moreover, for two men to live together could not have been looked upon as anything
but heretical. As the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha writes, “For Gandhi to befriend Polak, Kallenbach,
West and company was an act of bravery; for them to befriend Gandhi was an act of defiance.” Guha, Gandhi
Before India, 188.
16. Gandhi was involved in both the conceptualization and the construction of the buildings at Tolstoy Farm. His
direct involvement in the construction was reduced after his time in South Africa. The buildings of the ashrams
in India were built by important people at each ashram. Gandhi directed them by setting material and budget
constraints, and the buildings were constructed under his supervision. His house Bapu Kutir at the Sevagram
Ashram at Wardha was built by the British-born activist Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade) originally for herself.
However, Gandhi did insist that it cost no more than Rs. 500 to build and that the sky be visible from within.
17. Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945) was an architect who studied in both Stuttgart and Munich. He was a master
craftsman, having trained and practiced as a carpenter. He arrived in South Africa at the behest of his uncles,
who were in the construction industry. Initially, he formed a practice with A. Stanley Reynolds (1911–1971), with
whom he built The Kraal. He then set up the firm Kallenbach, Kennedy & Furner, which was enormously
influential in the development of Johannesburg up to 1945. He has been described by the South African
architectural researcher Kathy Munro as a “property tycoon. See Kathy Munro, “Review of ‘Soulmates—The
Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach,’” Heritage Portal, July 3, 2017,
http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/review/review-soulmates-story-mahatma-gandhi-and-hermann-kallenbach.
He generously used his wealth to finance Gandhi’s antiracism activities, which resonated with him, most notably
donating more than a thousand acres of land for Tolstoy Farm. After Gandhi’s departure from South Africa,
Kallenbach was involved in supporting the Zionist movement.
18. Tolstoy Farm was established in 1910, when Hermann Kallenbach acquired a farm at Lawley near
Johannesburg and donated it to the satyagraha movement, then in its final stage. It was Kallenbach who named
the farm after Leo Tolstoy. Gandhi wrote in a letter to Tolstoy, dated August 15, 1910, “No writings have so
deeply touched Mr. Kallenbach as yours and, as a spur to further effort in living up to the ideals held before the
world by you, he has taken the liberty, after consultation with me, of naming his farm after you.” M. K. Gandhi to
Count Leo Tolstoy, 15 August 1910, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 10, November 1909–March
1911 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India), 306–7,
https://gandhiheritageportal.org/cwmg_volume_thumbview/MTA=#page/346/mode/2up. See also Eric Itzkin,
Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha, Frank Connock Publication no. 4 (Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), 78. The farm was 1100 acres. It was covered with 1000 fruit trees and
included two wells and a small spring. At its height, the farm supported a community of eighty people: fifty
adults as well as thirty children, who studied at its school. The farm, as Gandhi would write in 1914, was of
great use in the training of the thousands of passive resisters who participated in the last phase of the struggle.
Shriman Narayan, ed., Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 3, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad:
Navajivan Publishing House, 1968), 352. See also https://www.mkgandhi.org/museum/phoenix-settlement-
tolstoy-farm.html.
19. Though by 1904 Gandhi was a successful lawyer able to donate £3500 to the running of his press and Tolstoy
Farm, he himself lived a frugal life and expected those associated with him to do the same. He was hardest on
the people closest to him, particularly his family. The Polaks, with whom he stayed, were also subject to his
austerity. Millie Polak wanted to make the bare little house they shared a home by giving it a touch of warmth
with the use of carpets and curtains. Gandhi was unconvinced of such expenditure, which he felt would be
better focused on the cause they were fighting for. Once when she suggested that a painting might do well to
hide the ugliness of the yellow washed walls, he suggested she look out of the window at the sunset, which is
more beautiful than anything that could be drawn by the hand of man. Guha, Gandhi Before India, 199–200. See
also Itzkin, Gandhi’s Johannesburg, 69. Though he did give in to Millie Polak on this occasion, such differences
about comfort were constant between Gandhi and those working with him at both the Phoenix settlement and
Tolstoy Farm. At both places, Gandhi had wanted the residential buildings to be Spartan, made of the most
rudimentary and basic materials, which the other community members refused to do. They finally built their
homes in a more modern and comfortable manner, using commonly available timber frames.
20. Millie Graham Polak, Mr. Gandhi: The Man (Bombay: Vora & Co., 1949), 67.
21. Gandhi established his first ashram in Ahmedabad at Kochrab using an existing building and property gifted to
him by his close friend, the barrister Jivanlal Desai. However, the need for more space to accommodate all of
the agricultural activities of the ashram pushed Gandhi to relocate. This time, he chose a place on the banks of
the Sabarmati River, from which the second ashram gets its name (it was originally called the Satyagraha
Ashram). Gandhi stayed at the Sabarmati Ashram from 1917 to 1930, when it was one of the main centers of
the independence movement. It was from there that he set out on his famous Salt March to Dandi and vowed
not to return till India had gained its independence. The terms pucca and kachcha originally related to food.
Cooked food is considered pucca, while that which is eaten raw—such as a fruit—or a vegetable that hasn’t
matured is considered kachcha. It is common parlance to apply these words beyond the realm of food,
however. For example, an asphalt road is considered pucca while an unpaved country track would be called
kachcha. Pucca implies the application of artificial energy to process material, i.e., the more pucca or
permanent, the more energy has been used for the material’s stability and durability and hence perceived
permanence. It is interesting to note here that in Gandhi’s experiments with his diet, he had moved to a diet of
largely kachcha food. According to Indian historian Ramachandra Guha, “One of his [Gandhi’s] favorite authors,
the anti-vivisectionist doctor Anna Kingsford, claimed that a fruit-based diet was man’s genetic inheritance.”
Guha, Gandhi Before India, 189–90.
22. R. R. James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, vol. 5, 1928–1935 (New York,
Chelsea House, 1974), 4985: “It is [ . . . ] alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle
temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the
Vice-regal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley
on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” For a discussion on the politics of his dress, see
Nandy, “From Outside the Imperium,” 144–45.
23. Narayan Desai, My Life Is My Message, vol. 1, Sadhana, trans. Tridip Suhrud (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan,
2009), 2.
24. The diagram of this relationship would equate to that of the megaron, a Greek archetype that defines the basic
relationship between closed, semi-open, and open space, symbolically read as inner world, outer world, and the
transitional domain where the two overlap. Given the climatic conditions of the subcontinent, it is this overlap
that is inhabited by teeming life.
25. Gandhi often responded to more than a hundred letters a day. This was in addition to the writing he did for his
press.
26. The vow of brahmacharya taken by Gandhi in 1906 has a much wider significance than simply abstinence from
sexual intercourse. Gandhi writes, “Brahmacharya literally means that mode of life which leads to the realization
of God. That realization is impossible without practicing self-restraint. Self-restraint means restraint of all the
senses. But ordinarily brahmacharya is understood to mean control over the sexual organs and prevention of
seminal discharge through complete control over the sexual instinct and the sexual organs.” The Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 77, December 17, 1942–July 31, 1944 (New Delhi: Publications Division,
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1979), 19. He continues, “Only he who has
burnt away sexual desire in its entirety may be said to have complete control over his sexual organs.”; “There is
something very striking about a full-fledged Brahmachari. His speech, his thought and his actions all bespeak
possession of a vital force.” In several religious traditions in the subcontinent, celibacy has always occupied a
venerable position.
27. Since the ordo was traditionally the closed room that hid the activities of the body from social witness, it follows
that behavioral control over one’s body, i.e., changing or eradicating the need for certain activities, would
change or eradicate the need for the ordo itself. By taking a vow of brahmacharya, Gandhi not only transformed
his body to be asexual but also redefined the relationship between man and woman in the house. His ideas
about hygiene and ablution allowed the body to be far more relaxed and open.
28. See Suhrud, introduction, 17.
29. In some ways, Gandhi’s process of writing his autobiography resembles the contemporary practice of blogging,
in that he was using the social-media technology of his day, which was print. Writing weekly, Gandhi received
responses that were often critical. He published these responses with the installments that followed.
30. For Gandhi, every civilization is based on a primary set of ideas. He denied that any one set of ideas could claim
superiority over any other. He himself borrowed ideas and methods from across cultures to further articulate
and sharpen his own. He believed that the differences in ideas offered the potential for dialogue from the
personal to the civilizational levels. However, such dialogue could only take place with an inner openness and
self-confidence that accepts difference as a form of criticism for internal use. According to Ashish Nandy, when,
“Catherine Mayo wrote her savagely anti-Indian and pro-imperialist treatise, Mother India, Gandhi called the
book a ‘drain-inspectors report’ but added that every Indian should read it. While Mayo’s critique of Indian
culture was blatantly prejudiced, he seemed to imply, Indian culture should have the self-confidence to put the
criticism to internal use.” Frederick Buell. National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1994), 245–46. Gandhi understood that ideas that claim superiority are not ready for this
dialogue. His criticism of the Western secular, scientific paradigm should be seen as an initiation of such a
civilizational dialogue.

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Gandhiʼs Buildings and the Search for a Spiritual Modernity | post 03/05/19, 1)35 PM

Gandhi’s Buildings and the Search

Riyaz Tayyibji considers the little-known architectural collaborations of Mahatma

Gandhi proposed a modernity premised on inward inquiry, or a form of inquiry

believed led directly to violence through a consciousness that isolates cognition

In December 1925, Gandhi began writing An Autobiography or the Story of My

As much as Gandhi was critical of the European Enlightenment, he was equally

It should be noted that though Gandhi considered the body to be an impediment in

A note on spatiality of porosity: porosity must be distinguished from the

dependent on technological articulations of material and structure, or for that

prison as ”Yerawada” mandir, or temple. It was the manner in which he inhabited

8. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 11–51.

28. See Suhrud, introduction, 17.

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