For whom are we arranging this education?” thundered parliamentarian Bhupesh Gupta in the Rajya Sabha in 1965, when the Bill to establish Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was tabled. “Let us not have Cambridge and Oxford and Princetons and Harvards here; let us create universities and colleges that our people need, that our development needs, for the remaking of our material and cultural being,” Gupta argued passionately that JNU must be “a university to which the sons of the working people, the worker, the peasants and the middle classes do have the doors thrown wide open…”
For a newly independent nation, building JNU was not limited to an academic exercise. It was a bold social and political project that had to grapple with questions of accessibility, democracy, and intellectual freedom, with highly subsidised education, new faculties devoted to scientific thinking and socialism, and complete autonomy from bureaucratic control.
When JNU finally came into existence, its radical spirit was etched not only into its statutes but also into its very soil. In the early 1970s, architect CP Kukreja won the national competition to design the campus. On 6 September, CP Kukreja Architects revisited this legacy with ‘The Masterplan’ exhibition, opening their New Delhi office to students and professionals for dialogue and reflection. The travelling exhibition, after its 2024 debut at the India Art Fair and a showing at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, highlights how JNU’s architecture remains a model environment for progressive thinking.
Laying the ground
The rediscovery of Kukreja’s original drawings during the pandemic spurred the idea of the exhibition. The first object encountered in the CP Kukreja Architects’ archive was the 1,000-acre hand-drawn JNU Masterplan. The planning of JNU was carried out in phases, each deeply responsive to the terrain. To strike even a single line on the ground that would materialise into a solid demanded a study of its topography. A water reservoir, for instance, was planned not just for the campus but for the surrounding area as well. The academic nucleus naturally emerged on a central plateau, approached through a route flanked by a green belt and designed to unfold with intrigue and suspense. Frugality was the order of the day; brick was chosen instinctively, as it was economical, climate-appropriate, and rooted in the scale of Indian domestic architecture.
Spaces between the bricks
Out of rocky outcrops and the red Aravalli soil, red-brick edifices grew, carved along principles rooted in vernacular traditions. “This aspect of making a very sparsely populated campus was a very deliberate decision,” recalls Dikshu Kukreja. His father believed education should happen as much in classrooms as in “having tea, seated on the rocks, with your professor and her family, and learning about life”.
Landmarks carried meaning. As Arunima Kukreja, director of the CP Kukreja Foundation for Design Excellence, remarks, the Computer Sciences building, one of India’s earliest, was designed with overhangs and protrusions to protect its machines during long power cuts. The library, “the tallest part of the university… a beacon of knowledge”, became both a guide to navigate the wilderness and a symbolic gesture. The liminal spatial elements, such as the towering staircase of the administration block, also called Freedom Square, became emblems of student resistance and solidarity. In contrast to the Corbusian concrete vocabulary shaping the IITs, JNU’s architecture chose a more elementary register for both habitat and learning.
Drawing democracy
The making of Jawaharlal Nehru University was also the making of a new kind of architect-state relationship. Once the JNU Act of 1966 enshrined the vision of such an institution, the university launched India’s first national-level architectural competition for a campus of this scale. Among the many entrants were Balkrishna Doshi, Raj Rewal, Ram Sharma, Jasbir Soni, and Achyut Kanvinde, among others. The winning proposal, chosen in 1969 by an esteemed jury, came from the 32-year-old CP Kukreja, a decision that spoke as much of his talent as of the discernment of the jury and the intellectual maturity of the client body.
The competition brief itself was representative of a university that already understood itself as an autonomous and democratic space, prioritising flexibility, exploration, and social interaction as the foundations of academic life. The subsequent Masterplan embodied these aspirations on multiple registers, the role of the state in supporting higher education, the architect’s responsibility in shaping spaces of dialogue, and the site’s ecological rhythms. In truth, before JNU’s masterplan was ever drawn, a larger ideological discourse was already laying the foundation, enabling a young democracy, and a young architect, to imagine intellectual and cultural forms where society can meet itself anew.
At the end of the guided tour through the exhibition, Dikshu reminded architecture students of the urgency of our times. “We have lost the art to question anything,” he said. “Today, it is about how many square feet you will build, how tall you will build, what shiny features it will have. But nobody thinks about how sensitively you are building to nature and societal needs. That sensitivity is what we must recover.”