Santiniketan architecture in the context of the colonial and the national:
A discussion on few ornamentations

Aparna Roy Baliga

Nationalism in India differed from European nationalism because the former was born out of a struggle with the latter. An external challenge and threat was thus its first defining feature. Its second defining feature being the internal struggle with its, own traditions and social arrangements, there is this search for identity, an urge to define the self, a struggle against deculturation of the colonized by the Britishers. The Indian creative circuit were trying to construct the national ideal. They were incorporating or falling back on the tradition rooted to this Indian soil. Architecture became the vehicle of one such experimentation.