Review: Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi, by Mary N. Woods

Abstract

Mary N. Woods Women Architects in India: Histories of Practice in Mumbai and Delhi London: Routledge, 2017, 236 pp., 115 illus. $155 (cloth), ISBN 9781472475305 In 1936, Perin Jamshetji Mistri (1913–89) was the first woman in India to graduate with a degree in architecture. She went on to work as an architect in her father's office, which, with her inclusion, if not earlier, became a family practice. Eight decades later, female students constitute the majority in many Indian schools of architecture, yet there is still no history of the practice of architecture by women in India. Female Indian architects lack the national and international visibility of their male counterparts, some of whom, such as the eminent architects Charles Correa (1930–2015) and Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (b. 1927), have achieved global prominence. Recently, women architects across the world have begun to receive attention, but only three (two in partnership with male colleagues) have received the Pritzker Prize, the so-called Nobel Prize of Architecture, awarded annually since 1979. With her edited volume Gender and the Built Environment in India , Madhavi Desai has been a pioneer in drawing attention to the role of women architects and builders in India.1 Yet much work remains to be done. It is no coincidence that two books now aim to fill this lacuna in our knowledge: Mary N. Woods's Women Architects in India and Desai's Women Architects and Modernism in India .2 These books are the result of a project originally undertaken jointly by these two scholars. Later, after parting ways, they shared the research they had gathered together. It is Woods's timely book that is the subject of this review, and it constitutes, as she declares, “the first history of how women architects made a modern India” (3). In Women Architects in India , Woods contests the dominant global historical narrative on women architects, patrons, and clients, which privileges European women and women of European descent. Thus, she makes …