Review: Ramu Katakam’s Memoir Is an Ode to Building a Life in Architecture

Ramu Katakam is a well-regarded architect and, to his friends, a bon vivant. Both these characteristics are abundantly evident in his beautifully crafted memoir, Spaces in Time: A Life in Architecture. It attempts, in his words, “a kind of summing up of the interesting seventy-plus years of India’s independence and the way I look at buildings that have featured in my life.” His narrative dwells as much on the buildings he has designed as on the life he has lived because, in his life, the two are closely intertwined. But what makes it more remarkable is that he presents the story of his life, both the successes and failures, personal and professional, in an honest and  engaging manner, without the baggage of artifice or angst.

Katakam was born in 1944, “at the cusp of the end of British rule and India’s independence [and so] the influence of colonial thinking and ways of life has been dominating”. His father was a government bureaucrat and the story of his family, childhood, schools and friends provides an interesting glimpse of the newly independent society establishing its roots. His father went on to become an influential bureaucrat, and the lifestyle of privileges that accrued from his job and the postings to Beijing, Cairo and European capitals, and the network of his parents’ influential friends and associates both national and international, helped open doors to ease Katakam’s path at critical points in his life. It mediated his evolution as an architect and a cultured personality and he describes these fortuitous circumstances transparently, without fear of judgement.

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He studied architecture at Cambridge University in the 1960s. His engagement with important architects who were his tutors and experiencing the ‘swinging’ social life of the country marked his rites of passage, both as a reflexive architect and a confident individual. Thereafter, he returned to establish his professional practice in India. He found it difficult to sustain the practice and left to seek lucrative employment as a site architect for a British firm building a major building complex in Saudi Arabia. He returned to resume his practice from Delhi and Bangalore with varied success. His career has spanned four decades and many of the projects he designed are discussed in the book, along with the stories and personalities associated with them.

In the small social circle of government bureaucracy living in Delhi after Independence, Rajiv Gandhi was an early school mate and Katakam’s family interacted with the Nehrus until Indira Gandhi’s duties as a politician distanced them. One of the interesting architectural projects he describes is the weekend retreat outside Delhi, that he was asked to design and get built, by his father’s colleague R. N. Kao, who was the National Security Advisor, without anyone else knowing about it. The project was at the stage of being inaugurated by Indira Gandhi on her birthday, November 19, 1984, when she was assassinated on October 31, 1984. Though devastated by the turn of events, professionally he had been very satisfied with what he had accomplished, but he could not persuade Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother as prime minister, to make use of it for its intended purpose; and before long he too was assassinated.

He has designed a variety of large projects, but the leitmotif of his body of works is domestic architecture, in which his training in Modernism in Cambridge is clearly manifest. His affinity for designing houses becomes evident early in his memoir because he begins his remanences with the sketch of the house his grandfather built in Madras around 1920 and where he spent several summer holidays in the 1950s. He describes other homes he has lived in or experienced, from the tent his family occupied when they first moved to Delhi, to Teen Murti Bhavan, where Jawaharlal Nehru lived as prime minister, where he spent weekends at the invitation of his school mate, Rajiv Gandhi. He was also influenced by the hutongs of Beijing he saw when his father was posted there. His architecture is therefore able to negotiate unselfconsciously between the influences of the East and the West.

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But the contingent realities of trying to sustain his professional practice in Delhi led him to change his life dramatically in 1991 when he moved to Goa, where he built or restored several villas. He ends by describing his dream house which would be “a completely sculptural house in white among roses in shades of one colour and set it close to the sea”. The architectural and spatial sophistication of its design shows how much he has evolved from the Modernism he imbibed at Cambridge.

Katakam also weaves into his narrative his engagement with many well-known architects, artists and writers he has known over the years whose works and thoughts he valued. Other sections of the book describe the places and buildings he has visited that have inspired him, which resulted in two books he has written: Glimpses of Architecture in Kerala and Cosmic Dance in Stone. His love for cars and motorcycles and his consummate interest in playing golf are also recounted, though with rueful conclusions, such as, “I spent a disproportionate part of my income on restoring and buying unique cars”, and, “my practice definitely suffered due to the long afternoons spent playing golf”.

Architecture and architectural practice has evolved dramatically during the period Katakam covers in his memoir and the charm of the book is that it sensitively evokes a time past. As the writer Colm Toibin once put it in the context of another memoir, it is “a form of reparation, a way of reconnecting the self to a more simple time, a way of hearing an old tune before it became textured with orchestration”.

A.G. Krishna Menon is an architect and urban planner working in Delhi who has engaged critically with professional issues.