But by then it was too late. Before the capital was completed, India had won its independence. Contacts with Western architecture were maintained, however. Shortly before the Second World War, Le Corbusier was commissioned to design the new capital of Punjab by Prime Minister Nehru and he also designed villas for several industrialists. Chandigarh, as the new capital was known, was a grid-based garden city intended for government officials and now enjoys the protected status of historical monument. In Chandigarh, Le Corbusier anticipated what he later did in Europe. What proved to be largely illusory in Europe, succeeded in India where the warm climate and low cost of security staff made it possible to integrate interior and exterior spaces. Later on, Louis Kahn reinforced ties with the West still further with his university buildings in Ahmedabad.

The architecture of both these architects made a great impression on the young Indian architects of the time. Since then not a line has been drawn without an allusion being made to both masters. The architecture of India thus became associated for good with the colonial past. This was also noticeable in architecture education. Teachers, usually trained in the West, reproduced their Western courses and their students applied themselves to Western books, magazines and heroes. In the absence of computers in the studios, crooked lines and curved surfaces were drawn or copied by hand, but social questions, particularly that of housing, were never raised, nor were they ever treated as an architectural issue. In the 1970s the TU Delft wondered whether it would be a good idea to conduct special courses for students from the Third World. It would be unfortunate if they were to result in the export of useless knowledge and a brain drain. In the end, self-interest (alumni as a future source of commissions) tipped the balance, giving rise to the still extant International Masters Course.

But what is in India’s real interest? Take Mumbai. Half the population lives in slums built from materials scavenged from rubbish dumps. During a guided tour with a community worker, one felt strongly tempted to go along with the assumption that over the course of time a slum could develop into an adequate living arrangement. This would be an alibi for leaving things as they are and forgetting all about planned mass housing. Admittedly there was some talk about ‘building for the poor’ – meaning the provision of a few basic amenities (core houses) that could in principle be extended into real homes by the occupants. In truth it was not much more than an organized slum, but in the meantime it justified the poverty.

And so it comes about that one cannot make any connection between mass housing and the work of two leading Indian architects, Charles Correa and Balkrishna Doshi. Both have in fact been active in the field of housing, designing low-rise, high-density schemes for the middle classes (all planned housing in India is intended for the middle classes). Low-rise, high-density housing, a type inspired by the Arabian Casbah, was explored in Europe after the energy crisis of the 1970s as an alternative to high-rise. Adopted with some hesitation, it soon foundered as an overly expensive, ‘cultural’ approach to mass housing. In the Netherlands it fitted in perfectly with the ideas of Aldo van Eyck, who rejected large-scale housing as inhuman and denied that it had any social value. In that period he also visited universities in India. Did he lead them astray, causing large-scale housing to be rejected as a suitable dwelling type for the poor? For Indian architects, who were not exactly surrounded by clients prepared to tackle the housing issue in a radical manner, the Casbah concept was a welcome alternative, one which also, via Islam, struck a chord with part of their own tradition. After all, the Casbah was a stone-built version of a nomadic encampment. It is extremely doubtful, however, whether it can ever be an adequate model for the problems of India.

The moral of the story is that, thanks to state modernism, many places in the world adopted mass social housing – in both political and cultural senses – as a solution to the housing problem. The populations of China, Europe and Russia owe a great deal to this development. In proportion to the scale of its problem, India’s response was negligible. Architects remained on the sidelines, powerless or maybe even indifferent. The opportunities offered by modernism elsewhere were never exploited in India. The fact that half the urban population lives in slums is a direct result of the caste system. In communist China – a country comparable with India – application of the modernist Russian housing model provided hundreds of millions of people with housing and health and education were also brought under state control. That makes three basic services that the Indian underclass has had to do without and will have to continue to do without for the foreseeable future. Whereas any bilateral discussions with the Chinese must include mention of human rights, and whereas it is ten years since South Africa finally bowed to outside pressure and abolished Apartheid, the Hindu version of apartheid, the caste system, has always been a no-go area for foreigners. In South Africa, Western post-colonial guilt eventually led to the abolition of Apartheid. India, although it too is marked by a colonial past, has always been a remote and exotic continent and as such beyond the reach of Western morality. And it is precisely this moral project – so typical of state modernism – that passed India by, and so the people are now left carrying the can.