Manu Mahajan is Head of the Urban Design Program at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), New Delhi. He studied urban economic development from Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment, University College London, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. He received a Commonwealth Split-site Scholarship to pursue part of his PhD research at the University of Leeds in 2019-20.
About the Artwork:
Landscapes of Raj
The on-site sketching documents the late 19th and early 20th Centuries when new institutional geography was laid across the Indian subcontinent. It could be a clock tower representing the glory of these new inventions, post offices, district headquarters, new gateways, or memorials for the King and Queen. Mumford (1955) records the history of technological innovations since the 10th century, and the colonial landscapes represent the height of these technological innovations in the form of unique structures. The exhibition covers colonial landscapes spread across five cities in India, along with the locus of this spread, the city of London.