‘Patriarchitecture’: Indian architecture’s erasure of women who build – past and present

Last month, the firm Zaha Hadid founded in 1979 and led until her death in 2016 quietly dropped her name. Zaha Hadid Architects became ZHA, in what her successor Patrik Schumacher called a natural brand evolution. What that framing left out was the decade-long legal fight behind it: A licensing agreement under which the firm paid Hadid’s foundation a share of its revenue to keep her name on the door, and a court ruling this year that freed Schumacher from that obligation.

He chose to stop paying, and to stop being Zaha Hadid Architects, a decade after the one person who might have objected was no longer alive to do so. Frank Gehry’s name has stayed on his firm’s door for nearly 70 years without a court ever getting involved. Hadid — Iraqi-born, the only woman to win the Pritzker Prize alone in the award’s history — didn’t get that same courtesy from the field she spent her career proving wrong.

It is tempting to file that story under “architecture‘s problem with women,” as though the problem were somehow contained to one London firm and one unusually famous case. It isn’t. The same instinct — celebrate a woman as an exception, then quietly withdraw the recognition once it stops being convenient — runs through India’s own architectural institutions, just without the international press coverage.

In 2023, an architect named Vandana Sehgal came closer than any woman ever has to leading India’s Council of Architecture. She lost the presidential election by a single vote — 15 to 14, to Abhay Purohit. It was the nearest the country’s statutory architecture regulator has come, in more than fifty years of existence, to putting a woman at its head. It has never actually done so. Not once, since the Architects Act created the Council in 1972, has a woman held its top job. The closest formal foothold any woman has had is the Vice-Presidency, first won by architect Sapna in a term that ended the same year Sehgal lost by one vote.

The Indian Institute of Architects, the older and more storied of the profession’s two national bodies, does slightly better — but only slightly, and only recently. Founded in 1917, the IIA went 98 years before electing a woman, Divya Kush, as its President in 2015. She served until 2020. Before her and after her, the list of names running back through a century of the Institute’s history is a wall of men: Batley, Ditchburn, Kapadia, Dallas, Bhalla, Deshpande, Raju, Avachat. One woman, one five-year term, in over 100 years.

This is not a coincidence of who happened to run in which year. It is what happens when institutions built by men, for men, in a profession that has always treated women as guests rather than as owners of the house, are asked to share power. They will let a woman in — eventually, symbolically, once — and then close the door again, the way they always have.

The pattern is old, and it has a name

India’s architectural establishment likes to imagine that its exclusions belong to a colonial past it has since outgrown. It has not.

Consider Perin Jamsetjee Mistri, who in 1936 became the first woman in India — and reportedly in Asia — to qualify as an architect. She was, for a time, the only woman in her class at the J J School of Art and the only woman in the IIA’s membership rolls. She went on to run her father’s firm for half a century, designing everything from Art Deco bungalows to Salvation Army hospitals across two continents. Ninety years later, her name is barely known outside a handful of heritage researchers and a Wikipedia page, while the male contemporaries she trained alongside are still cited as the architects of modern Bombay.

Or consider Urmila “Eulie” Chowdhury, the only Indian woman on Le Corbusier’s team that designed Chandigarh in the 1950s. Chowdhury was not a peripheral figure. She was the crucial link between Corbusier, his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and the Indian planners and ministers on the ground, fluent enough in French to translate Corbusier’s writing and trusted enough to be handed sole charge of major buildings, including the Government Home Science College and the Women’s Polytechnic. She also helped design the furniture that made Chandigarh internationally famous — the chair that today sells for tens of thousands of dollars at European auction houses. It is called, almost everywhere it is sold, the “Jeanneret chair.” The Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the few institutions that has bothered to correct the record, has noted that Chowdhury’s role in that design is usually left out of the story entirely. A 2019 exhibition on Chandigarh at New York’s Museum of Modern Art reportedly did not mention her at all, even while celebrating the men she worked beside.

This is what disregard looks like when it isn’t hostile — it’s simply quiet. Nobody expelled Chowdhury from history. They just didn’t think to write her name down.

The usual defence of institutions like IIA and COA is that history is history, and the present generation is different — that once enough women graduate, representation will follow on its own. The numbers say otherwise. A 2023 exhibition at the Delhi Architecture Biennale found that roughly 60 per cent of India’s architecture students today are women, while only around 20 per cent of practicing, registered architects are. Somewhere between the classroom and the profession, most women in Indian architecture disappear from view — not because they stop being capable, but because a field that trains them in equal numbers still doesn’t build the career ladders, firm partnerships, or institutional leadership to keep them.

That gap is not an accident of individual choices, repeated tens of thousands of times over. It’s what a profession looks like when its two governing bodies — one with 30,000-plus members, one with statutory power over every architect’s license in the country — have between them managed exactly one woman president in over a century of combined existence, and zero at the body that actually regulates who gets to call themselves an architect.

What ‘one vote’ actually means

There is a temptation to read Vandana Sehgal’s 2023 loss as a hopeful sign — proof that change is close, that a woman almost got there. It’s worth resisting that reading. “Almost” is not a threshold institutions cross by accident; it is a threshold they cross when they decide to. COA’s president is chosen by its own sitting members, in a small internal election, not by a public vote of India’s tens of thousands of registered architects. A one-vote margin does not mean the institution is one election away from equity. It means the institution came within reach of a different outcome and chose, by the narrowest possible margin, the outcome that kept its record unbroken.

Perin Mistri broke down a door in 1936 that the profession barely remembers her opening. Eulie Chowdhury built a capital city that still can’t spell her name into its own furniture. Ninety years on, the two bodies meant to represent every architect in India have offered women a grand total of one national presidency between them, and a razor-thin loss at the other. That is not a profession in transition. That is a profession that has learned, precisely, how far it can let a woman go — and where, every time, to stop her.

The writer is a Dubai-based architect