Learning to See India with Miki Desai

Ar. Prof. Miki Desai is one of India's most quietly influential architect-scholars — an architect, teacher, researcher and documenter who has spent more than five decades looking closely at the buildings, settlements, crafts and ways of life of the Indian subcontinent. For much of that time, he has travelled, photographed, measured and drawn architecture that was rarely being documented with the same patience and precision. His archive contains nearly 40,000 photographs and around 200 manually drafted measured drawings — an extraordinary record of India's vernacular, colonial and modern architecture. Miki taught at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, from 1981 until his retirement in 2014, and headed the Master's Program in Sustainable Architecture from 2011 to 2014. His research has been supported by the Senior Fulbright Fellowship, Getty Collaborative Grant, Graham Grant and Earthwatch Grant, among others. He has been a visiting studio critic at ETH Zurich, MIT and UC Berkeley, and his work has been exhibited and presented internationally. After more than fifty years of making measured drawings by hand, he still refuses to use an eraser. If a line is wrong, he doesn't correct it. He starts the drawing again. MADHAVI DESAI Madhavi Desai is an architect, researcher, writer, and teacher in her own right, whose work has shaped how gender is understood within Indian architecture and urban space. She taught as adjunct faculty at CEPT University for over three decades, held research fellowships from institutions including MIT's Aga Khan Program and the Getty Foundation, and co-founded both the Women Architects Forum and, more recently, the Feminist Collective in Architecture in India. Her writing and editing have opened up conversations on gender, domestic space, and the Indian city that architectural scholarship in India had largely left unexamined. She and Miki have spent over four decades as full intellectual partners — co-authoring, researching, and documenting together — and by his own account, very little of what he has built would exist in its present form without her judgment, her editing, and her presence as the one person he trusts to challenge his thinking. Archicrafts Their practice, Archicrafts, grew out of this shared commitment to documenting architecture in India. For more than four decades, Archicrafts has researched and documented vernacular, colonial and modern architecture, alongside gender and the built environment — building photographic and drawing archives, publishing research, organising exhibitions and creating educational programmes. Archicrafts: https://archicrafts.com/ Books by Miki Desai: https://archicrafts.com/publications Images & Imprints: https://imagesandimprints.com Heritage Playing Cards: https://archicrafts.com/heritage-play... 📩 Email: [email protected] Guest recommended by: Ar. Girish Dariyav Karnawat Ar. Gurjit Singh Matharoo About this conversation This conversation was never planned the way these things usually are. I came in with questions; within the first hour, I put them aside, because Miki was opening a hard disk that seemed to have no bottom. Every time we reached the end of one story, he'd reach for another photograph, another place, another memory. So I stopped asking, and just listened, and let him keep going. He did — for over ten hours — and I still don't think we reached the end of it. Nothing here was curated. Many of these photographs Miki hadn't looked at himself in years, and watching him rediscover his own archive in real time felt too honest to over-produce. I'm glad this stayed raw. I'm glad I met Miki. And I hope this reaches the next generation of documenters who might carry this kind of work forward. Special Thanks Priyanshi Pathak — Miki's confidante and assistant — for patiently helping us navigate the archive and locate folders and photographs throughout the recording. Royal Lobo — who shot and recorded over ten hours continuously, staying behind the camera throughout the conversation and never losing focus. Thank you both. And thank you for watching. Let’s Connect 📩 Email: [email protected] Instagram:   / clintonbaptist   Twitter: https://x.com/clinton750