The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. 

The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, 

it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. 

Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship.” ¹

Mohandas Karamchand (M. K.) Gandhi

“The function of dissent has to be understood 

as what was inherently a moral force that gave people 

the strength to assert their humanity.” ²

Romila Thapar

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s engagement with intentional living began in South Africa with the establishment of Phoenix Farm (1904) and Tolstoy Farm (1910), early experiments in communal living and self-sustenance. Upon returning to India, he founded the Kochrab Ashram (1915) in Ahmedabad before relocating to Sabarmati Ashram (1917) seeking more space for his experiments with communal living and agriculture (Figs. 1, 2). Sabarmati Ashram became a center for India’s independence movement and a living model of everyday resistance, championing labor, self-sustenance, swadeshi (localness), vegetarianism, and literacy – manifesting Gandhi’s interest in ethics through everyday practice. Its architecture, known for simplicity, was later expanded by Charles Correa with the Gandhi Memorial Museum (1963). From Sabarmati, Gandhi launched the famous Dandi March (1930), a pivotal act of civil disobedience in the Indian freedom struggle. Later, he founded Sevagram Ashram (1936) as a hub for rural experiments. As Karline McLain and others have argued, “Gandhi’s ashrams were more than simply the places where Gandhi thought through or enacted his philosophy; these intentional communities were the necessary conditions for his experiments with and articulation of that philosophy.” ³ 

Drawing upon an advanced architecture design studio I taught at Carnegie Mellon University, this essay presents speculative futures for democratic space – what a memorial to Gandhi might look like if it were to foreground anarchic and/or everyday praxis through a close reading of the ashram’s programs and local histories. If, for Gandhi, the ashram embodied experiments in communal living and satyagraha – nonviolent resistance rooted in truth and moral force – the studio asks: what if the ashram’s sites were reimagined as pluriversal spaces for everyday resistance? Instead of proposing an alternative master plan these projects seen collectively enable and stage bottom up anarchistic practices that expand and give form to the everyday democratic life. 

This essay does not claim to uncover singular truths about Gandhi’s philosophy or life, nor to trace a genealogy of his ideas as translated into politics or state formation.⁴ Instead, it reclaims a radical ground of Gandhi’s praxis – his disdain of the state and contemporary civilizational structure, and his insistence on an unalienated, ethical life. Using this framework, it critiques the current Sabarmati Ashram Precinct Development and Memorial Masterplan and imagines how alternative (counter) monuments might conceived if they were to engage everyday praxis, through a study of the site’s extant microhistories. This approach raises broader questions about the role of participatory (counter)monuments and memory-making, advocating for a radical interpretation of Gandhi’s Non-Western, anti-colonial, and praxis-oriented methods for shaping collective memory and democratic space in contemporary India, in lieu of “world-class” stereotypes.

Given the radicalism inherent in Gandhian thought, how has Gandhi been remembered, and by extension, how are memorials to him conceived, funded and built in contemporary India? In his essay, “Gandhi After Gandhi,” Ashis Nandy posits four surviving caricatures of Gandhi that must be considered as “Weberian ideal types,” analytical tools that offer insight into Gandhi’s varied legacies.¹⁶ Nandy argues that, “contemporary politics is not about ‘truths’ of history; it is about remembered pasts and problems of fashioning a future based on collective memories.” ¹⁷ If politics is indeed about constructed or remembered pasts, it becomes evident that architecture and its patronage, assume an enlarged role in shaping and sustaining collective memory.

The first caricature is the Gandhi of the Indian State – a stoic, sanitized “father of the nation” who is valorized for the nonviolent struggle against colonialists, yet whose radical critique of state power, “the strong anarchist strand in his ideology,” has been thoroughly erased.¹⁸ The proposed master plan for the Sabarmati Ashram completes this governmentalization of Gandhi, a process that began soon after his assassination, when his body, draped in the Indian flag, was carried on an army truck while air force planes overhead dropped flowers. The Nehruvian state enshrined Gandhi as a heroic freedom fighter while rejecting his radical critiques of state power, unwavering commitment to nonviolence, and opposition to industrial modernity. This state-sponsored caricature of Gandhi remains the dominant propaganda through which public opinion of Gandhi has been shaped. It is now all the more alarming when the present-day government – a plutocratic regime that promotes Hindu nationalism – further distorts and shapes Gandhi’s legacy through grandiose architecture. 

Situated across the Gujarat State Legislature, the Mahatma Mandir Convention and Exhibition Centre is a particularly perverse example. Funded by the Gujarat government the project and managed by the Leela Group of luxury hotels, the project conflates a glitzy museum with a state-of-the-art convention center that accommodates 15,000 delegates, and a 318-room hotel.¹⁹ Designed by the global architecture conglomerate ARCOP during Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister, it displaced 356 families but resembles a giant charkha.²⁰ Host to the Vibrant Gujarat Global Investor Summit, it exemplifies Modi’s “Gujarat Model” of governance, marked by high-visibility capital-intensive projects that give corporations free land and cheap electricity with little heed to environmental audits or public scrutiny. Despite Gujarat’s poor human development indices, this “Gandhian” veneer serves a market-driven, neoliberal agenda of the state.

The second caricature is the Gandhi of the Gandhians, the self-appointed heirs to his legacy. Nandy dismisses this figure as “a crushing bore” who avoids politics. ²¹ His preachings seem stripped of the radical underpinnings of his political movements. If spinning the charkha symbolized political resistance through the boycott of British cloth, today the Gandhian’s nostalgia for khadi is devoid of its political agency. The architecture of the ashram hut, or kuti, might seem similarly nostalgic. However, the kuti served as model and inspiration for the austere architecture of Charles Correa’s Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya also situated on the grounds of the Gandhi Ashram.

The building’s spatial simplicity, open-endedness, and porosity remain poetic expressions of a home-grown modern architecture that was inspired by Gandhian ideas. Similarly, Laurie Baker’s affordable housing, also built on Gandhian ideals and advances localism and sustainability in contrast to steel-and-concrete modernism.²² In Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing (2021), Venugopal Madipatti recasts the Gandhian kuti, not as a mere nostalgic relic, but as a powerful symbol of resistance, self-sufficiency, and egalitarianism.²³ He argues that Gandhi’s vision for low-cost housing was a radical act of dissent against industrial modernity, inspiring successive generations to adapt this architecture of resourceful simplicity.²⁴ 

The third and fourth caricatures of Gandhi embody dissent, that remains buried from public memory, and hence in constant need of reification and praxis. They inspire the “memorials of everyday praxis” that are described later in this essay. The third Gandhi, “of the ragamuffins, eccentrics and the unpredictable,” critiques the global hegemony of capitalism, neoliberalism, and anthropocentrism—roots of which lie in Western modernity. Nandy associates this Gandhi with figures like Vandana Shiva, who resisted the patenting of neem, or Medha Patkar, who opposed the Narmada Dam, or Shivram Karanth, who challenged India’s nuclear establishment.²⁵ The fourth Gandhi, “usually not read… only heard,” is primarily a mythic Gandhi. “Unlike in real life, he conforms fully to his own tenets – at least according to his admirers in the environmental, antinuclear and feminist movements. For, the ‘realities’ of his life are derived from the principles of Gandhism as they have spread throughout the world as a new legend or epic.” ²⁶

Romila Thapar in Voices of Dissent (2020) notes that the most pervasive forms of public dissent in India were the Non-cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements that were led by Gandhi. Thapar underscores that, “in democratic societies this (dissent) is a legitimate form of protest...” ²⁷ that is neither aimed at overthrowing governments, nor driven by terrorism. Instead, it serves as “a moral force that gave people the strength to assert their humanity,” – an ethical code shared by the governed and governing.²⁸ This “assertion of humanity” is visible in a handful of contemporary practices of memorializing, such as, Ahmedabad’s Conflictorium, which serves as a space for conflict transformation and critical art practices. Its mission is to “collaborate with all actors to reduce violent tension and to find creative community-led solutions to conflict.” ²⁹ In so doing it also “contemporises the discourse on conflict by promoting acceptance of conflict as necessary to human refinement.” ³⁰

A 1949 aerial photograph of Ahmedabad serves as the basis to determine which buildings to preserve or demolish.³⁶ The understated design of the proposed architecture – rectilinear buildings with pitched roofs – presumably akin to Gandhi’s ashrams – conceals the monumental scope of the site’s restructuring, and the totalitarian methods driving the project. Areas marked as greenery on the master plan are home to communities, many of them dalits who have lived on the site since Gandhi’s time.³⁷ Through architecture and planning the state not only seizes control of the physical artifacts of this legacy but reshapes the narrative and memory of a figure like Gandhi. The masterplan disregards the city as a palimpsest with temporal registers, where urban space is composed of multiple layers of meaning and collective memory that are accrued over time. Instead, it seeks a return to an “original” idealized past, a trope that has heavily influenced the grand imaginings of the majoritarian right in recent decades. 

When the project was announced in 2021, over 130 eminent personalities signed a public letter admonishing the project calling it at best “a Gandhi theme park” and at worst “a second assassination.” ³⁸ They described a disturbing trend in the government’s strategy “to appropriate and commercialise all Gandhian institutions...” ³⁹ and warned that, “the most frightening aspect is government control over all Gandhian archives. As Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by elements whose ideology still inspires some of those in power in India, this danger cannot be overlooked.” ⁴⁰ As Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi noted, “The new bodies constituted by the government effectively prevail over the authority of the existing autonomous trusts…No prior government has intervened in the workings of the ashram, let alone taken as drastic a step as to reconfigure the establishment altogether.” ⁴¹ While disputes have emerged among the six trusts managing the ashram, these bodies have historically functioned as semi-autonomous entities. Journalist Parni Ray’s investigation into the project further highlights its troubling execution:

The first tender for the ashram project was floated by the Amdavad Municipal Corporation in September 2021, a month before the project was announced by the chief minister’s office. The tender document noted that the project would not require an environmental clearance since it was classified as “infrastructure development’ under Gujarat’s ‘town planning scheme.”… In December, the contract, amounting to Rs 235.17 crore, was awarded to a joint commission. Demolitions began within days.⁴²

The Gandhi Ashram Redevelopment mirrors other capital-intensive, national projects, like the Central Vista – an initiative to revamp India’s central administrative area in New Delhi, which includes a new Parliament building, government offices, and public spaces – and the Kashi Vishwanath Dham Temple Corridor, a redevelopment project in Modi’s electoral constituency of Varanasi that enhances access to the historic Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Branded as “PM Modi’s projects,” these initiatives use the master plan as means of imposing legitimacy through spatial and territorial order over large territories at scale and speed. Doing so obliterates the nuanced and lived realities of people on the land by imposing a singular state-mandated view, first through litigious court battles, followed quickly by violent demolitions. For most of PM Modi’s flagship projects, including the Ashram Redevelopment, the architect of choice is Bimal Patel of HCP Design, Planning and Management – a relationship forged during Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat, on the Sabarmati Riverfront, where some of these tactics were initially tested and deployed.

The Central Vista Project involves demolishing twelve national heritage buildings, including the including the National Museum, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), and the National Archives Annex​ displacing government employees, informal businesses, and cutting over 2,000 trees.⁴³ Public protest has focused on the lack of consultation, environmental clearances, and the loss of over 80 acres [32 ha] of accessible democratic space, converted into restricted government zones. Similarly, the plan for the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor project involves demolishing nearly 300 properties including homes, shops, and small businesses. Here too the state has evicted 1,400 residents, some of whom have lived in the area for generations, to erase the palimpsestic quality of the site. Compensation for displaced residents has been inconsistent, with many claiming inadequate settlements or prolonged delays​.⁴⁴ 

Projects that produce, modify or uphold public memory must undertake extensive public process and scrutiny, to ensure that stakeholders and the wider public are included. Such a process would involve several rounds of public consultations, deliberations, surveys leading to a clear “design brief.” It should also disclose the criteria for selecting architects, findings from heritage audits, and mechanisms for public participation and transparency. Democratic space cannot be realized without a deeply democratic structure for its creation. This unifying of means and ends, is itself a work of design, and also a core Gandhian value. Instead, the development plans for the ashram – a project of national if not international stature – have been enshrined in secrecy and opacity, and now executed through speed and violent demolitions. 

Food and diet were subjects of constant personal experimentation in Gandhi’s life that informed his ethics and politics. Food connected his preoccupation with the agrarian landscape and village economy to his experiments in diet and the bodily. In his study Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet (2019),Nico Slate suggests that, “Gandhi developed an ecological diet that respected the many connections between his food and his physical, social and political environments,” and that, “his life story reveals the power of food as a catalyst of personal and political transformation.” ⁴⁷ Gandhi’s first major application of civil disobedience in India was during the Champaran Satyagraha, where he joined farmers protesting against the tinkathia system, a colonial policy that forced them to grow indigo on a significant portion of their land and sell it at artificially low prices to British planters, leading to severe economic hardship and poverty. Today farmers in India continue to protest agricultural laws that favor large corporations over small farmers. 

With depleting water resources and degraded land, small farmers are among India’s most precarious workers, scarcely visible to the urban middle class. Inspired by the Seva Cafe, a volunteer-organized and -run cafe in Ahmedabad, this project proposes a Seva Kitchen which would connect struggling peri-urban farms to food markets in the city. It would also serve as a demonstration kitchen making visible the various processes of sorting, processing, and cooking that culminate in communal eating. Instead of a front and back-of-house, the Seva Kitchen is all public facing. Designed as a large bamboo tent that sits on a set of rammed earth walls, the kitchen accommodates built-in furniture, and equipment directly into its plinths, obviating the need for loose furniture (Fig. 7). The large plinths produce a temporal flexibility that provides farmers a platform to share stories, struggles, and expertise, directly confronting the distance – both physical and psychological – that often separates rural producers from urban consumers. 

Ahmedabad history of communal riots dates back to the colonial era, with significant riots in 1941 and 1947 during the partition, that intensified Hindu-Muslim antagonisms. Subsequent episodes in 1969, 1985, and the devastating Gujarat riots of 2002 reflected a pattern of cyclical violence, driven by political opportunism, the manipulation of communal identities, and economic disparities. These divides have only deepened post-2002, leaving poor Muslim residents confined to marginalized neighborhoods and treated as second-class citizens, while middle-class communities lead a vastly different existence. Directly across from the Sabarmati Ashram stands Imam Manzil, once home to Abdul Kadir Bawazeer (Imam Saheb), a close companion of Mahatma Gandhi until Bawazeer’s death in 1931.⁴⁹ In his book Agnipariksha (2018), Hamid Kureshi, the grandson of Imam Saheb recounts the violent attack on Imam Manzil during the communal riots in Ahmedabad in September 1969.⁵⁰ The residence was targeted precisely because it represented Gandhi’s ideals of communal harmony. 

While communal riots have left deep scars on the city’s social fabric, not a single public memorial exists to mourn the victims of these riots. What if Imam Manzil was reimagined as a transitional justice memorial, that became an active center for reconciliation? The building might house or be constructed using the remnants of buildings destroyed. Thus conceived, its architecture would mark a literal and material vigilantism against communal violence (Fig 9).

This essay builds upon several well-established critiques of traditional, public museums and memorials as structures of hegemonic power, as state-sponsored acts of memorializing, that either distort history toward political gain, or in time become passive registers of historical events.⁵² This is particularly relevant in the case of the Sabarmati Ashram where the state has actively undermined democratic processes and sought to recreate a singular grand narrative based on memorializing a state-sponsored idea of Gandhi. Grandiose in its scale and violent in its methods, the government project recreates the ashram as a static monument and denies any radical or reflective engagements that construct meaning for the present. The proposal and the methods of its realization erase the palimpsestic nature of the site as living history, and diminish the value of Gandhian thought in the contemporary cultural and political landscape. 

Gandhi believed the ashram at Sabarmati was his most precious creation, as he said it in so many words, “It is my best and only creation. The world will judge me by its results.” ⁵³ If memorializing Gandhi is to have meaning and relevance to contemporary times, the architecture it inspires must actively participate in the creation and negotiation of public memory through anarchistic and plural means. Democratic space thus construed would be separate from the state, and designed to provoke thought and self-critique – in the spirit of Nandy’s third and fourth Gandhis, who embody dissent, critique, and dare radical reimaginations – not through revolutions, but everyday practice. Such memorials would be social practices that question comfortable or “non-negotiable” assumptions within contemporary society. They would constitute a pluriverse of ideas that use the ashram’s sites as microhistories through which a host of questions might be considered. While grand narratives erode the nuanced histories of a site such an approach would allow for the lesser known aspects of the site to bear meaning and relevance. The student projects presented here offer a glimpse into the potential for such dynamic memorialization, but they also serve as an open, pluriversal call – to imagine, dream, and design ever more liberatory futures.