Decades before Chandigarh, a European architect and an Indian patron brought modernism to our shores

The exhibition 'Eckart Muthesius and Manik Bagh' highlights the modernist architecture of Indore's Manik Bagh, showcasing the bond between Maharaja Yeshwant and Muthesius.

In 1926, when German architect Walter Gropius built the Dessau campus for his fabled art school, The Bauhaus, it was a steel structure with a glass curtain wall. As a curator recently put it, “It must have been like a spaceship landing in Germany.” Manik Bagh in Indore, built in 1933 for Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar II, might have elicited a similar reaction. A U-shaped stucco mansion with crisp straight lines and clean rectangles, the structure had no surface decoration, domes or ogee-shaped arches. Designed by German architect Eckart Muthesius, the 40 rooms were planned in exhaustive, if minimalistic, detail. Some of its light fixtures, all designed by Muthesius, would be right at home in Apollo 11.

Mumbai, India - April 25, 2025: Curator Raffael Dedo Gadebusch and museum director Tasneem Zakaria Mehta? at ‘Eckart Muthesius and Manik Bagh, at  Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, at Byculla in Mumbai, India, on Friday, April 25, 2025. (Photo by Anshuman Poyrekar/ Hindustan Times) (Hindustan Times)

A travelling photo exhibition, ‘Eckart Muthesius and Manik Bagh: Pioneering Modernism in India’, at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDL), puts a spotlight on this enduring patronage and friendship between a maharaja and a modernist, which only a world war could put to an end.

Rao Holkar and Muthesius met at a garden party in Oxford in the late 1920s. Soon, Muthesius was jetted off to Indore’s tropical terra firma for his first major commission. Raffael Dedo Gadebusch, head of the Asian Art Museum in Berlin, who has curated the show, says, “They were really like soulmates. It must have clicked from the very beginning because they were so passionate about the avant-garde. Because his father (Tukojirao III Holkar) had to abdicate the throne in 1926, Yeshwant had a lot of freedom to make these decisions.”

Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, managing trustee and director, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, adds, “It’s an extraordinary story of these incredibly young individuals who came together to create this amazing, iconic, modernist palace. It required vision, but also a certain youthfulness to be so bold.” Gadebusch continues, “Modernism truly began in India only after WWII. So, Manik Bagh was definitely the earliest modernist building here. Bombay had the art deco movement. But, Manik Bagh was in the spirit of De Stijl (a Dutch art movement) and The Bauhaus. So, it was way ahead of its time.”

Despite not being an alumnus of The Bauhaus, Muthesius carried its tenets of designing for a brave, new world. In ‘The Bauhaus Manifesto’ (1919), Gropius wrote, “Let us will, invent, create together the building of the future, which will embrace architecture, sculpture and painting in one unity like the crystal symbol of a new faith.” Manik Bagh set this principle in stone. In an auction catalogue in 2017, curator Deepika Ahlawat noted, “Manik Bagh had electric fittings, air-conditioning, hydraulic doors in metal frames, serene bathrooms equipped with modern plumbing and lined with opaline tiles, and a kitchen with modern refrigeration. It was the home of tomorrow made yesterday.”

Every chaise lounge, card table, floor lamp, even dinner plate was created or curated especially for the house. The library chairs had built-in lighting. The shelves were lined with distinctive objects, such as night lights and vases, which became objets d’art. The carpets were custom-designed and the silverware monogrammed. With his heart set on industrial materials, Muthesius used paint mixed with glass particles instead of wallpaper, artificial leather for the seating, tubular steel chairs and nickel silver and chrome for the fittings. Masterpieces, including Constantin Brancusi’s sublime ‘Bird in Space’, were everywhere. “The whole of the French and German avant-garde of the 1920s is represented in these photographs,” says Gadebusch. “You name it: Marcel Breuer, Louis Sognot, Charlotte Alix, Eileen Gray, Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier.” Zakaria Mehta adds, “If you truly decode the photographs, you understand the different aspects of this modernist sensibility. Each photograph is a window into a whole world.”

Muthesius’s grand plans also made room for India’s temperament and temperamental weather. Windows were fitted with curved awnings and the flat roof was redone with a pitched roof to account for the rain. Circulatory verandas facing the inner courtyard, symmetrical gardens, water features and a massive banyan tree were given their due space. “Manik Bagh was a political statement, because it was so far removed from the colonial, monumental, decorative style,” says Gadebusch. “Yeshwant didn’t want to continue what his father planned for him and for his generation. Plus, he was very much in favour of Independence. So, it only made sense that he chose a German architect instead of a British one.”

The 1930s were also a time of great political and economic upheaval everywhere. “Everything for the palace — the technical equipment, the floor tiles, the fittings and plumbing — was produced in Berlin and shipped to India via Hamburg,” he continues. “This was amazing because Yeshwant truly supported the German economy at the time of the Depression. This goes against the post-colonial narrative of showing India as a victim country. India was supporting Germany at the time, and that is very interesting.”

‘Eckart Muthesius and Manik Bagh: Pioneering Modernism in India’ will run from April 27 to August 17 at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla.