Chapter 7 - Le Corbusier’s Impassive Partition Monument

Summary

My final chapter looks to a post-Independence text and reads India’s first Partition memorial that was designed by modernist architect and iconoclast Le Corbusier at Nehru’s invitation. I provide the background to Le Corbusier’s surprising contribution to Indian modernism and read the monument’s passive resistance as it presents its visitor with two modes of interpretation. The outside offers representational language promoting a nationalist reading of the monument, while the inside offers only empty space. The exterior elevation with its symbolic iconography operates in stark contrast to the shadowy interior that resists the realm of knowing and the division on which identity is based. Through the absence at its center, the "Martyr’s Memorial" monumentalizes doing nothing, demanding nothing, even forgetting the events it is meant to commemorate. The monument stands as a marker of lost ground, the ground lost to violent divisions founded upon identity, and contemplates the costs through its modernist lines.