This Fellow Fridays, Asia Society India Centre spoke with Martand Khosla—artist, architect, and Asia 21 Next Generation Fellow, Class of 2009. Based in New Delhi, Martand’s dual practice spans award-winning architecture and a deeply research-driven art practice that probes the politics of space, systems of urban transformation, and the lived experiences of migration and labour.

Martand's work operates across time and geography, questioning how cities are built, imagined, and inhabited. In this interview, he reflects on the slow endurance of good leadership, architecture’s complicity in power, and what it means to envision a more functional, inclusive city.

Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your practice, what led to your practice? How does it relate to your work as an architect? In your words, what do you feel are the most important parts of that journey?

I would best describe myself as an artist and an architect. I wear two hats. While they are two very distinct practices, I think that intellectually they try and probe the same questions in different ways while addressing the city.

I practice architecture in Delhi. I set up a studio here towards the end of 2001. For about a decade, I was practicing architecture, in a conventional sense of the understanding of the practice, which is essentially designing buildings and, occasionally some interior projects. But I think what happened after a decade of practice was that I reached a point in my career where I was feeling that we (within the architectural community) were not really discussing the larger question. As India has liberalized, as we have grown as an economy and as a nation, we have urbanized at a very fast pace – which raises questions that go beyond the design of individual buildings.

I found (and I can probably speak for many of my contemporaries) that for me, the conversations were limited to singular projects, whereas the city was evolving in a completely different way from the architecture that I was practicing.

When we were in college, we would talk about architecture at the level of the city, and community. Architecture as being political and broad based, and as a result, encompassing various aspects of life that went beyond just the singular act of designing and constructing a building.

For me, for instance, there were a lot of questions that were being raised in terms of the nature of how our cities are built and how migrant labor was coming to the cities,   When we zoom out to look at our cities, we find that more than half of the urban areas in the cities have either semi-legal or no legal status at all.  These in Delhi are referred to as JJ clusters (Jhuggi Jhopdi clusters, which are informal settlements), and several aspects of the masterplan don’t apply to what are called the Lal Dora areas (the semi-urban areas which were formerly villages and are now surrounded by the city). None of this urban complexity was being addressed through my architectural practice. I wanted to be involved in these conversations at an Urban scale.

For me, it became about searching for means and tools that help us to make sense of this urban condition. That is what so much of my search continues to be about. Reading was an important part of this as was walking across the city and studying maps. The journey for me first began by trying to write some pieces on the city, on migrant labor, on the varied forms of expansion, where we as a city were going where we were likely to reach, and what the implications of these expansions would be for various groups of citizens in terms of climate, transport, and rights, such as the right to life.

While I tried my hand at writing, I think it wasn't for me. I tried teaching as well, which was wonderful in that the lesson preparation allowed me to learn a lot. But I was not satisfied. writing and teaching were not helping me resolve things in my own mind. So, fairly organically, I arrived at making works on paper.

I started initially with ink drawings about labour and rights. This was probably around the time the Commonwealth Games were happening and there were several accidental fires across slum clusters in Delhi. Seven or eight, in fact, over a short span of four or five weeks at one point. There was anger, there was frustration, and some of those moments in time were the initial seeds for works for me.

I began to enjoy that process of expressing myself, but also exploring ideas around the city through research and art. That was about twelve years ago -- the beginning of an art practice rooted in cities. For the last twelve years, both practices have run in parallel. The art practice has evolved and so has the architectural practice. The art practice has grown in ways where I'm dealing with more abstract ideas about urbanism and about urban futures. 

With the art practice, I feel that I have this privilege of a sliding timescale where I can jump backward and forward in time and then jump geographically to another place. And at the same time, I've been very conscious about keeping an active architectural practice because I think that allows me to engage with the city in a different way.  When you're practicing as an architect, the engagement with the city is one where you start to change the city.  Even in an infinitesimally small way.  Whereas the art practice allows me to think about it, comment on it and explore it and push and prod it. Both those engagements with the city are very important to me because I feel that the more ways I can engage with it, the better my understanding of it, of what our cities and our urban futures are going to be like. But you also realize that the more you engage with it, the less you know. The more you search for answers, the more questions come up answer. That's really how the two practices work.

People are hungry for future-focused thinking in India, because there are so many problems that are often just patched over. But these problems need a lot of long-term thinking, a lot of long-term investment and different kinds of thinking as well.  When you say questions around the future, what are the things that occupy you in your practice right now?

There's so much labor now within our cities living on the site on which they're building the buildings. I was looking at ideas of nostalgia, of displacement, of migration, of rights, in the early part of the practice. It was very interesting because it allowed me to look at cities through a variety of different lenses such as through a legal lens, or a more sociological lens. How is it that our societies respond to labor and those who build our cities?

I think it's important to have a sense of anger around the injustice.  But while it remains very unjust in many ways and the conditions for work remain poor, what has happened over time is that more nuanced readings of the city have emerged as well.  Cities, the state and citizens negotiate with each other in much more complex ways at a granular level than just one where one exploits the other or one dominates. Which at a macro scale may well be true.

But there are ways in which people slide and bend; particularly in a place like India, there's always that space where you have wiggle room in negotiating cities. Over the years, I'm thinking about cities more as systems, more as spaces that occupy the cracks between institutional structures and how cities evolve as systems and how people navigate these complex systems. My thinking has moved from the individual to larger systems.

At the macro level, a five-year election cycle becomes quite insignificant.  When I read a book from the West in the nineteenth century, I could well be reading a book about what's happening in parts Delhi or in the slums of Bombay.  I see several parallels in contemporary timelines within the global south, from cities such as Dhaka, Caracas or perhaps even Karachi.

But if you move back and forward in time, then you find the city echoing very much with histories of the economically more developed countries of the north. You see that these processes are moments in a journey of a city's life cycle, and it is often very violent. And yet they define very much what comes next, what possible futures hold.

These trajectories don't fundamentally change significantly with changes in the government.  At some level, our cities have become so massive, we shouldn’t read them anymore as singular entities. when we talk about planning from a political sense. Delhi NCR is so massive that this idea that there is going to be singular policy that's going to work for the entire zone is odd;  it will not.  What's interesting and has been successful for a number of cities is the need to keep breaking down the administrative structures into smaller and smaller groups, where you start to empower smaller communities within a city to be able to take decisions about their own futures.   

The fundamental problem lies in the search for this great, shiny glass, Singapore-like, New York-like city.  Our imaginations of the future always lead in that direction.  I don't think it's about the shiny city. It's just about a city that is functional and a city that enables people to be able to have a shot at reaching whatever their aims are. That's what makes for a great city, not necessarily what it looks like, but what it functions like. We get trapped in these ideas of city planning, this faulty image of the future.

I think that's an excellent point, actually, to want something to be true rather than to appear to be true or beautiful. That actually leads me into another question, which is basically considering the intricacies of South Asian culture and experience, it can be a challenge to kind of adapt these conventional ideas or images of the future to work through situations that need culturally specific solutions. So what's been your experience with addressing such complications and kind of bringing the specifics of life in South Asia into your work, in architecture or as an artist?

For me at least, this is a more an architectural question. And if you think about it, the first ideas of post-independence futures for our country were modernist ideas, right? So Nehru brings in Corbusier or Bhubaneswar gets designed by Otto Konigsberger. This idea of the factories, universities, dams and the modern city influenced by modernist ideals came to us from Europe; their form came from there; materiality came from there. But besides what they look like, I think what was underlying in this imagination through the modernist movement was an idea of an India that had a great sense of equality.  Modernism is very much tied to ideas of egalitarianism; Corbusier's entire thesis is about that. The constructivists influenced and predated the Bauhaus movement, and they in turn, the Modernist movement. All of these people are talking about Utopian societies which were non-stratified. So I can see why it was appealing for a post-colonial world to say that, look, we are now independent and we have this chance to create a new society. And this new society may be an urban society and it's about an egalitarian society, and these are reflected in the architecture.

Over the years, of course, the dream and the reality are often different. There's a lot of criticism of this idea of the modernist movement coming to Africa and South Asia.  I don't think now is necessarily the time to kind of go into that. But essentially, climatic relevance has been questioned.   That type of architecture was alien to our societies, and did not have theoretical roots within our society.

Most ironically, modernist architecture does quite the opposite of its egalitarian roots. It alienates citizens. You find that an ordinary citizen of the country is actually very afraid of engaging with architecture of the state, whether it's a courthouse or a hospital or government offices, for instance. They are intimidating spaces if you're coming from a village or you have travelled three days in a bus and a train seeking medical treatment, or you're seeking justice, or documents that you may need. And I think that in that sense, architecture needs to really be rethought, depending on what sort the imagined futures for our country are. What is the role of the citizens within these conversations on architecture, and their participation within the power structures and what their rights are?

I was designing a polyclinic for patients with HIV and TB in Old Delhi. And this is one of the things that I was consciously trying to overcome: how do we make a hospice that is welcoming?  How do we make a space that is not intimidating, a space where people feel that they have the right to be able to come in and demand medical assistance or medicine? Climatically also, we're not a country that can necessarily be air-conditioning these spaces. So what I find is that from the drawing board to the construction, spaces don't necessarily address climatic issue and eventually end up and become very oppressive built environments to inhabit.

That's a very interesting point. I'm wondering what it is about this this quality of a government building that it somehow seeps into things -- maybe it's just a perspective.

It's also exertion of power. It's also about that relationship between the official and the citizen. We probably carried it forward from colonial times. It plays out in so many aspects of our society. You can look at our caste system, which reinforces stratification. It's not that I'm saying that those interactions are necessarily reflective of caste, but this idea of a hierarchical society are there in our structures, culturally. And they get reinforced repeatedly, consciously and subconsciously.

Here architecture can play a very important role. I wouldn't go so far as to be deluded to think that it breaks down these hierarchies but there are ways in which architecture could quite successfully break or chip away at them. I am very hopeful.   To the point that I made earlier, about making smaller groups who are in control of their destinies: people take decisions, they feel empowered to do so, and those decisions are immediate to the changes that they desire. The further you remove the decision-maker from the people, the more inappropriate the development of the cities.  We need to think about the city as an organism. You start seeing it as a series of little clusters that co-exist next to each other.

Since this is this is a group that recognizes innovation and entrepreneurship. In your experience, what are the qualities that make good leaders?

I've been to the Asia 21 (Summit) and I've met fantastic people there. I can only speak to you with any sort of confidence about art and architecture. My sense would be that in this age, where everything has this fifteen-minute, twenty-minute, how many likes, how many followers type of environment. There is a lots of noise!

And perhaps eventually it's what stays for a hundred years is what makes for significant art and good architecture—and that’s leadership. Perhaps as people age, they also gain perspective. As they get older, if they have an integrity of practice, and they have thoughtfulness and an idea that they have stood by in their practice, their work hopefully inspires others. For me, leadership is about that slowness.

I think that's a very nice way to put it, that it's about slowness and endurance. Of any of the Asia 21ers that you've met from your cohort or otherwise, is there anyone that really interests you, inspires you or spikes your curiosity?

I went to Kuala Lumpur and I met incredible people at the Asia 21 Summit.  I continue to be very impressed with Anand (Sunderraman, Asia 21 Class of 2009), who runs Navayana. I had a moment where I read one book that he brought out, followed by several others -  and I realized I had been living in great ignorance. Others who inspire are Priti Radhakrishnan, an access to medicines activist (Asia 21 Class of 2009) and Wes Moore (Asia 21 Class of 2009), who is now Governor of Maryland.   And of course, my wife (Sapna Desai, Asia 21 Class of 2012). In fact, you can title this whole interview “Sapna Desai and her influence on my life.”

Rafay Alam (Asia 21 Class of 2012) from Lahore, who is doing fantastic work on climate. And an old, dear friend. There are just so many fantastic people in this network. I had amazing conversations at Asia 21 events. I wasn't the forthcoming sort, but I really enjoyed the side conversations. For me, they were the meaningful takeaways; I'm about the slow and the steady and quiet engagements.

Mentorship is a huge part of leadership. Can you tell us about a mentor or mentors who kind of shaped who you are today?

I wouldn't say mentors; I would say I've had fantastic teachers. I don't think they've looked at me as mentors. And we've gone on to become great friends. I had some of the most incredible teachers through college, when I was studying architecture. And the greatest thing that I learned from them, was this ability to be able to learn for the rest of my life. Because – and as trite as it may sound -- I found that to be the most incredible set of skills which have allowed me to redefine myself and to find new avenues of expression in my mid to late 30s.

Shin Egashira, Richard Wentworth and Mark Prizeman were great professors with whom I learned heavy stuff through light interactions. I'm now at a point where I try and have those conversations with people who work in my art studio, or those who work in the architectural studio. I think that that's a really nice way to be. I don't like the hierarchical nature of the mentor and the mentee.

It's much more about how you probe a question and you go off and you figure certain things out. That's what worked well for me.  There have been guardian angels every now and then who have created opportunities for expression for which I am always grateful. Eventually it is about a solitary practice and how you develop intellectually or creatively. That's the space I want to occupy.

Thank you so much for making time for this!