SPECIAL ARTICLE NOVEMBER 21, 2020 vol lV no 46 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 56 Geoffrey Bawa and Ludic Modernism Anupama Mohan (All figures accompanying this article are available on the EPW website.) Anupama Mohan (amohan@presiuniv.ac.in) teaches English literature at Presidency University, Kolkata and is the author of Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2012). Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003) was Sri Lanka’s most celebrated architect in the 20th century and his half-a-century long career shaped the nation’s visage to the world, even as Bawa’s ludic and polystylistic architectural innovations sat uneasily with Sri Lanka’s majoritarianism grown increasingly strident after independence in 1948. This paper examines Bawa’s architectural sites as “visual texts” that exhibit a fraught, fractious engagement with the dominant nationalism of his times. Given his elite upbringing and upper-class clientele, his unique blend of architectural styles has been read as being elitist and exclusivist, even as a whole other tradition reads him as the pioneer of vernacularism and tropical modernism. How is it possible to obtain such diametrically opposite readings of the same texts/traditions? How are we to understand Bawa’s peculiar reshaping of the metropolitanist desires of newly-independent Sri Lanka? And what are the bigger lessons from his work and philosophy regarding modernity, urban spaces, and cosmopolitanism? I t is 101 years this year to the birth of Geoffrey Manning Bawa in colonial Colombo, Sri Lanka (Figure 1, available on EPW website). One of two sons to affluent parents of Sri Lankan and European, Muslim and Christian heritages, Bawa and his older brother Bevis would both, in time, become re- nowned architects. Bawa died in 2003, having lived out a long career spanning many decades of colonial Ceylon and postco- lonial Sri Lanka, and is among those few titans of the 20th century, who, one might with some admiration say, lived through the heydays of both modernism and postmodernism and the intervening decades of many other isms. Bawa came from a racially and religiously mixed family background: his paternal grandfather was Ahamadu Bawa, a prominent Muslim in Ceylon, who married Georgina Ablett, an Englishwoman who was a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants. In 1908, Bawa’s father, Benjamin, married Bertha Schrader, a Dutch Burgher from Ceylon who claimed descent from a German mercenary and a Sinhalese mother. All this is to say that when you look at a photograph of Bawa, with his strikingly tall six feet plus frame, blond wavy hair, pale European countenance, it is easy to forget this enormously complicated genealogy, which, however, worked its way into Bawa’s work and his lifelong be- lief in what he called “Ceylon architecture.” As he said: I prefer to consider all past good architecture in Ceylon as just that — as good Ceylon architecture, for that is what it is, not Dutch or Por- tuguese or Indian, or early Sinhalese or Kandyan or British colonial, for all examples of these periods have taken Ceylon into first account. (Robson 2002: 41) He remained forever conscious of his awkward looks, his complicated family heritage and history, and a general “out- siderliness” marked his position within many collectivities all through his life. His only sibling, Bevis, older to him by 10 years, was starkly different looking: taller than even Geoffrey in their adult years, Bevis was dark-complexioned and was often taken to be a Moor or “thambi.” The brothers, owing to their age gap, lived out their childhoods rather out of sync, and although Geoffrey always looked up to his dashing elder brother, Bevis was known to be jealous of the attention his younger brother would get from people as well as their mother. Both brothers were gay: Bevis was flamboyant and known for wild parties, and Geoffrey the contemplative sibling, prone to deep friendships and long periods of singlehood. Both became prominent architects in their own rights (Bevis became famous as a landscape architect and aide-de-camp to four British gov- ernors), and it is interesting that their homes-cum-workspaces present to us rivalling sides of architectural modernism. The colourful Bevis designed his home, called Brief Garden, near