Greek in Their Own Way: Writing India and Japan into the World History of Architecture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

At the turn of the twentieth century, two architects—Itō Chūta in Japan and Rajendralal Mitra in Bengal—sought to counter Eurocentric accounts of aesthetic modernity by insisting on the inclusion of Japanese and Indian building traditions in the world history of architecture. In different and indeed opposing ways, they mobilized the idea of classical Greece; while Itō saw ancient Japanese buildings as directly influenced by Greek models, Mitra denied any such connections. Beyond these differences, however, both scholars were aligned in their effort to use references to “Greece” in order to claim equivalence for their native architecture on a world stage. While invoking a Eurocentric standard to battle Eurocentrism may sound paradoxical, this article shows that a confluence of global forces went into the making of this late Victorian moment of imperial universalism. The globality of the standards both actors referred to should not be imagined as the result of a gradual spread and diffusion from a European center. Rather, actors constantly invented and co-produced these standards as they resonated both with global change and with social dynamics locally.