By Ritu Jha-
Do Indians really think in a different way that makes them better suited for landscape architecture? Aniket Bhagwat thinks they do. If anyone is in a position to know, it might be Bhagwat.
Among a select group of landscape architects who have earned a global reputation and recognition, Bhagwat heads M/s. Prabhakar B. Bhagwat, India’s leading master planning, landscape design, and architectural firm with offices in Mumbai and Ahmedabad.
The 64-year-old landscaping architect, who hails from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, leads a firm that is among the top 50 landscape design firms in the world. He is one of the ten founding members of the Indian Society of Landscape Architecture (ISOLA), and he recently sat down with indica to reflect on his work.
Question: How did you first become interested in landscape architecture?
Answer: My grandfather Bhalchandra Bhagwat was a superintendent of a botanical garden in Pune during British time in India. My father had a bet with him that if he topped the agriculture exams, he would be allowed to go to Denmark to further his studies. My grandfather never thought he would top the exam, but he did, and the rest is history. My father went to Denmark and was taught by legendary architects like Carl Theodor Sørensen and Brian Hackett. Sørensen is like a God in landscape architecture even today.
Sørensen was a Danish landscape architect, a leader in the first generation of Modernist landscape design. His work is considered to be some of the greatest of the 20th century. Brian Hackett was a Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Department of Town & Country Planning at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Brian Hackett was among a small group of landscape architects who played a significant part in developing the sector since the Second World War. He came back with terrific ideas for the profession and the country. Around the time when I joined the firm, I’d written a small essay. In that essay, I said that I could sense that this country is going to change in ways we could not imagine.
Q: You believe that the evolution of landscape architecture has been empowered by the Indian mindset. Can you elaborate on that? How do you balance natural elements with human-made structures in your projects?
A: Whether in Australia, France, or England, I have witnessed a European or anglicized mindset that wants to play the formal against the informal, wild against the tame. I think the Indian mind is not like that. The Indian mind is very different. The Indian mind can deal with huge complexities in the same space and doesn’t cut it up into bits. You can walk into a temple and there will be a very formal sense of geometry, a very formal sense of order but then you begin to see a grove of trees or you begin to see a flower garden, which is very informal on some levels. I think this perceived dichotomy between formal and informal is at some level artificial. This construct has been taught by the European mindset. the Indian mindset has never believed in it. As a result, I don’t believe in it. And globally, this is one comment I always get, that our work doesn’t seem to be scared of order and disorder.
I don’t think that we see things in isms. Our minds are not binary. Our world is full of greys. And it is that navigation of the gray that is the Indian mind because nothing is one hundred percent right, or wrong. I think the oriental mind – whether it’s the Indian, Japanese, or Chinese mind – can deal with these complexities. Very often, the European mind cannot deal with these complexities, because for them it’s black or white, order or disorder, wild or tame. I think it’s just the way that our mind is made up. In India, the definition does not need to be physical, it can be infinite. What that broadly means is that you don’t need a fence to define the extent of your garden. The far-away mountains can be part of your garden. If you begin to look at Indian gardens from that very unique lens then suddenly, the temple gardens start making sense. The gardens of the stepwell start making. The stepwell itself starts becoming a garden. You start looking at the gardens of Bengal, or the south, where people grow food and flowers and fish and there’s the act of produce that comes into these gardens and you begin to realize that our relation with the garden is very different from other gardeners. There’s an act of ritual attached to what we do in the garden, and that is the Indian garden. It’s not a stylistic reference, it’s a metaphysical reference to the man in which you make connections to your garden.
Q: How have challenges impacted your approach to landscape architecture?
A: I made it a habit to sit down and evaluate the work that I’d done every two years and look at what changes I needed to make in our service delivery. I was constantly telling myself that we have to get better. And there is no competition because around us, nothing was happening. We had to create this competition in our own mind. The client would have been happy with much less because we didn’t know what it could be, but in my head, I had to tell myself that we have to keep turning the screw every day and get better.
Q: How have clients impacted your work?
A: A lot of clients impacted me, they changed my trajectory. I have a lot of big clients, we are an office that does incredibly large work. As a landscape firm, we might be doing more work than a lot of global offices today. But I think it’s really about small lessons that you learn from these clients. We have worked with a lot of big clients, and we’ve learned lessons from all of them. Different kinds of lessons. You observe, you learn, and improve.
I systematically told myself since 1985, and 1987 that I cannot practice the way this profession was practiced in the sixties and seventies. I will have to practice it very differently, and I will have to set my benchmarks, which are not Indian but international benchmarks. I should be better than the guy who’s practicing in France or the USA. I better be the best in the world. I’m sure that’s what happened. The country changed through opportunities that we have never dreamt of, through scale and sizes that we have never dreamt of. And huge work is happening, in India and China, not in Europe, nor the USA. You have to be smart and find out that there are different ways in which you’ll have to respond to the changing scenario. You have to change your skill set every day.
Q: Your self-evolved work rules are quite different. Why did you turn down a proposal to work on the government’s pet project – the Ram Mandir campus in Ayodhya?
A: We were asked to work on it but we couldn’t take it up because of the time factor. I’ve worked with the government and I continue to do a little bit of work even now. The problem is that very few people in the country can deliver the right thing, and everybody is in a hurry. These two things put together means that the end product is always not the right thing.
