My work did not pretend to be scholarly

Professor David Robson responds to Shanti Jayewardene’s article titled “Can Robson be Bawa’s sole defender?” published in The Sunday Times Plus, on March 2.

I would be grateful if you would allow me space to respond to the comments which you published on 2 March by Shanti Jayewardene relating to my book ‘Beyond Bawa’.

In 1986 the work of Geoffrey Bawa was the subject both of an internationally published book and a major retrospective exhibition in London. So far as I know he was the first South Asian architect to be so honoured. The book was an immediate success in Southeast Asia though neither book nor exhibition attracted very much attention in Britain, receiving only two reviews. One of these which appeared in ‘Building Design’ (BD), a popular weekly professional newspaper, was by Jayawardene and took the form of a ‘background’ study. She was invited to write this, no doubt, because she was Sri Lankan and because, two years previously, she had written an M.Sc. dissertation about Bawa when a student at University College London.

Instead of reviewing either the book or the exhibition she chose to launch into a somewhat tangential polemic, based, apparently, on her dissertation. While this might have been acceptable in a scholarly journal it hardly seemed appropriate in a popular weekly newspaper. Even more strange was the fact that, instead of celebrating the unique achievement of a fellow countryman, she chose to question it with oblique and unsubstantiated criticisms, as if she were scoring points in some arcane game of academic tennis. In short, her BD article was more a review of her own dissertation than of Bawa’s book and exhibition, more a promotion of her own thesis than a response to his achievement. This all seemed at odds with the fact that she had earlier chosen to write a dissertation about Bawa and, at the time, struck many people as being less than generous. Your readers should understand that, when reviewing the published literature on Bawa in my book ‘Beyond Bawa’, it was the BD article which I chose to take issue with and not her M.Sc. Dissertation. The following paragraph will help your readers to appreciate its prevailing tone:

The accusation that (Bawa’s work) has remained eclectic and revivalist is not easy to challenge because his appreciation of tradition has remained an individual and peripheral exercise without sustained scientific enquiry and thus holds limited potential for future use. More importantly, Bawa’s work has avoided any confrontation with urgent issues of urban and rural planning, mass housing and the large-scale resettlement programmes in rural Sri Lanka. In the same vein it may be argued that his work has not really advanced our understanding of traditional technology and construction because the traditional content in his work is specious.

Jayewardene is clearly not impressed with my books ‘Bawa: The Complete Works’ and ‘Beyond Bawa’, though she doesn’t offer any specific criticism of their contents. She contends simply that, unlike her, I am not a ‘scholar’ and that my writing fails to adopt the conventions of the methodology which she purports to utilise, that it doesn’t conform to the rules of the game.

Geoffrey Bawa first suggested that I might help him write a monograph on his work in 1995, though we didn’t start on the project until late 1997. Sadly, our collaboration was nipped in the bud by his illness and, with the agreement of the Lunuganga Trust, I later went on to complete the book without him. In so far that the book was initiated by Bawa and was born out of my admiration for him, it is inevitably ‘biased’, though this bias is made quite apparent to the reader. It does not pretend to be a scholarly or scientific work, in that it does not proceed from a hypothesis towards a conclusion by way of dissertation, nor does it attempt to make any theoretical propositions in relation to future practice. The book was descriptive rather than analytical. However, it was based on exhaustive research of primary and secondary data and I went to some lengths to identify my sources and to provide a comprehensive bibliography. I am aware that I had access to material which has since disappeared: people have died, buildings have been altered or destroyed, drawings have been lost or damaged. Over a period of four years I visited all of Bawa’s surviving buildings, with one exception, and spoke with a large number of the people who were associated with him at various times of his life – friends, clients, collaborators. I have tried to preserve as much of the primary material that I generated as possible - photographs, letters and recorded interviews - and I hope one day to be able to place this in a reputable archive, if possible in Sri Lanka.

Jayewardene makes much of the fact that there are small overlaps between my book and her M.Sc. dissertation. This is hardly surprising since we were writing about the same subject and using the same sources. I, like her, was helped by C. Anjalendran and it was he who drew my attention to the importance of Andrew Boyd’s work and Bawa’s connections with Senake Bandaranayake. Her dissertation has not been published and, as it is not accessible in the library of University College London, I have only enjoyed limited access to parts of it. It is far from being, as she now suggests, the only academic exploration of the subject to date.

Jayewardene questions my status as a self-styled ‘authority on Geoffrey Bawa’ and expert on the architecture of Monsoon Asia, and I have to agree that I do seem to have been guilty of unpardonable hubris. All I can say in my defence is that I am a victim of the blurb which publishers add to the dust jackets of books. Even the titles of my books cause me to squirm in embarrassment: the sub-titles “Complete Works” and “Masterworks of Monsoon Asia” were added without my approval.

In her Sunday Times article she refers to the fact that in the post-independence era the architectural profession and first school of architecture were affiliated to British establishments and is implicitly critical of my role as a ‘novice graduate’ teacher in the Colombo School of Architecture in the early 1970s. She then goes on to question my qualifications as a non-Sri Lankan to write about a Sri Lankan architect and seeks to discourage me from writing further books. This is not the first time that I have had to field such criticisms though I find it sad when they emanate from a fellow academic, particularly a Sri Lankan who has chosen to live in Britain and has studied in British institutions. I wonder how she would react if, in similar vein, I were to question her qualification to publish her recent study of the British-period architecture of South India? Of course it is important that anyone reading my books should be aware of my background and should take that into account: what I have written reflects who I am, and any other writer would have written it differently. In writing the Bawa book I did something which nobody else, including her, seemed interested or willing to do at the time, but my book in no way precludes other writers from tackling the subject.

If nothing else, my book will hopefully serve as a source for future writers whose ambition is to write in more scholarly and discursive fashion. Jayewardene now hints that she is planning to write a critical appraisal of Bawa’s work. Ten years have passed since he suffered the final stroke which ended his career and five years since he died: this would be a good time for such an undertaking and I wish her well with it. Indeed C. Anjalendran and I would be very happy to put our not inconsiderable archives at her disposal and help her in any way we can.