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This work enquires into the question of the meaning being of architects in postcolonial India. It asks those agents, who claim for themselves the title, "architect" what does it mean to be an architect in postcolonial India. It argues that the meaning of the being of architects emerges in the dialectical and transitory nature of the to be implied in the question. It presents by the way of its argument three "moments" in the question of the meaning of being of architects. The first, the Moment of the Architect, focuses on the Architects Act of 1972, which the work argues is a project, projecting a particular domain in postcolonial India. The essence of this projection lies in the "imagined" figure of the architect, in which the meaning of the architect is, (in) being different from engineers and planners, (as) being rightful claimants of the "Architect" as articulated in Modernism's discourses of architecture, and (as) being a figure always and already grounded in the postcolonial Indian State's "project" of nation building. The second, the Moment of Design, focuses on the design jury, and architectural drawings. It shows how drawings and juries produce the meaning of design and the architect in terms of a future that-will-be and as a subject-position endowed with a historical consciousness who projects and creates this future that-will-be. It also demonstrates how this meaning of design and the architect weaves itself with the domain "projected" by the Act whose essence, beforehand, is this figure of the architect. The third, the Moment of Jugar, pursues (an)other sign to which architects in India lay a claim, and through which they articulate themselves, their expertise and their field: jugar. As this moment shows, the claims to jugar and being jugaru reveal completely different imaginations of selfhood and of expertise of those who also claim that they are architects. This moment, I argue presents, as it were, a limit to the meaning of "architecture and architects" that the two earlier moments attempt to continually (re)produce. Yet this limit is not an "outside" but rather a liminal "interiority."

This study brings a synthesis of contemporary architectural, feminist and literary analysis to the havelis of the 18th and 19th centuries in the city of Lucknow, India to illuminate the complex construction of woman's identity. Navigating the real spaces of the havelis and textual spaces of the few surviving period writings, it addresses the dialogical relation between the spatiality of the haveli and the identity of these women. The first part argues that British impressions about the Indian residence were heavily prejudiced by logic of visualization, and their writings were based on Cartesian categories of res cogito and res extensa that gave primacy to the visual and masculine realm. Hence, their analyses about the spatiality of the havelis, made the "error" of "reading" a space that was produced to be "lived" rather than deciphered through a mere presentation of visual clues. The second part presents a corporeal experience of the haveli, the city of Lucknow and its singular place in the urban landscape of India. It shows how the distinctive spatiality of the haveli subverts notions of dominant visuality. Additionally, it clarifies how a presentation of space through corporeality is imbibed with insights into the formulation of the feminine subject? The third part of the thesis, through a reading of two period writings, Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva's Umrao Jan Ada and Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column, explores three central issues that emphasize the interrelatedness between space and sexuality. They are, firstly, what was the role of space, if at all, in structuring the woman's world? Secondly, how is the female body circumscribed within this space? Finally what is the mode of negotiation of women's identity that exists within this socio-spatial matrix? Summarily, the investigation argues that a nebulous understanding of categories/ spaces was deeply embedded in the everyday of the women and provided the women, through a process of "negotiation" at every level, a platform for an expression of their "subjectivity".