February 03, 2020
Architecture is an art form; art on a structure. As art styles evolve over time, influenced by social trends and the political environment, so too does architecture. It tells stories; narratives about a city and country, its people, politics and government and its history.
Seeing the Asian City through Literature is one of the panel discussions at this years’ NUS Arts Festival Critical Conversations series. This panel discussion draws reference from Arundhati Roy’s novel Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
We spent some time with one of the panel speakers, Professor Patke, Humanities Division Director and Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, and had him share, expand and explore how the depiction of architecture in Asian cities is captured in contemporary literature.
Which Asian city captures your attention the most in light of this topic and why?
There are many cities that have captured the imagination of artists and writers. Speaking purely for myself, I would identify Istanbul as the city that fascinates me most; but if we are to focus on writers like Arundhati Roy, then the cities in Asia – apart from Singapore – that are compelling for the interaction between architecture, history and writing would be Mumbai and Old Delhi. (If I knew more about writing from the Peoples Republic of China, I would also add to that the city of Shanghai). I would add others like Calcutta/Kolkata. As for Singapore, I would link that to Philip Jeyaretnam’s Abraham’s Promise (1995).
Why do cities need iconic buildings? What does this symbolise or represent for the city / government / people?
Cities get iconic buildings as part of the accumulations of history: successive rulers and administrations create public buildings ostensibly for purposes of governance but also as symbolic artifacts that put their own distinctive stamp on their sense of themselves and their contribution to urban culture.
However, a city and its culture are not defined only by impressive public buildings; its humbler abodes play a huge part in creating an ethos and identity that links peoples to a place and its history.
If you had to recommend one book which best represents how the socio/political environment has influenced the arts – both in the literary and in the architectural disciplines, which book would it be and why?
It is difficult to pick a single book, as any choice is purely subjective. Therefore, I’d actually prefer to identify a handful; each uniquely reflective of some aspect of a particular city’s architecture, and its cultural and political history. They would be:
a. Istanbul: Ahmet Hamdi Tanipar: A Mind at Peace (1949); Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul (2003)
b. Bombay/Mumbai: Anita Desai: Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988); Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (2002)
c. The ultimate novel about a city, any city (in this case Dublin), is, of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920).
The theme for the NUS Arts Festival 2020 is ‘Ways of Seeing’; an encouragement to be g open to the multiplicity of perspectives. How do you impart this to your students?
What you notice depends on what your eyes are habituated or trained to see. My preference is for the kind of getting lost in a city practiced and recommended in the 1920s and 1930s by Walter Benjamin about Berlin and Paris, or by the bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar about Bombay during the 1960s and 1970s: both were flâneurs of urbanism, who consumed with their eyes the entire range of chaos to grandeur, and pathos to profound empathy that is the experience of the modern metropolis.
Professor Patke will be part of Critical Conversations: Seeing the Asian City through Literature at the NUS Arts Festival. The event will be held on 19 February, 7.30pm at NUS Museum. The event is free with registration.