British architect Claude Batley’s work occupies a tense space between preservation and power. As a British architect and educator in early 20th-century India, he helped standardize the documentation, teaching, and institutionalization of Indian architecture. His detailed drawings and surveys captured invaluable knowledge, even as they embedded India’s built heritage within a Western colonial perspective. As India advances toward a disruptive form of “decolonisation”, Batley’s archive raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to inherit a colonial way of seeing critically?
British architect Claude Batley arrived in India in 1913, at a time when architecture was fast becoming one of the British Empire’s most powerful tools of projecting colonial power and remaking India in the Empire’s image. Over the next four decades, his work would significantly shape how India’s architectural past was documented, taught, and ultimately institutionalised. Batley is often remembered as a benevolent educator or a careful scholar of Indian architecture. Yet his legacy is more complicated — and more instructive — than either praise or dismissal can accommodate.
As a founding figure of the Sir J.J. School of Architecture, Batley helped formalise architectural education in India along lines that still structure the discipline today. His emphasis on measured drawings, typological surveys, and systematic documentation represented a decisive shift away from apprenticeship-based learning towards an academic, formal model. Batley was obsessed with breaking down, cataloguing, and rendering Indian architecture legible to Western academia through plans, sections, and elevations.
Under Batley’s guidance, students were sent across the Indian subcontinent to record temples, mosques, stepwells, and palaces, producing an extraordinary archive of architectural knowledge that was later published in his book ‘The Design Development of Indian Architecture’ (1954). These exercises trained generations of future Indian architects to see their own built environment through a particular lens: one that was analytical, comparative, and historical. In this sense, Batley’s contribution was not only architectural but also epistemological. He helped define what counted as “heritage”, how it should be studied, and who was authorised to interpret it.
Batley’s work cannot be disentangled from the colonial machinery that enabled it. The same surveys that recorded India’s architectural heritage also served imperial interests, folding India’s vast and heterogeneous building traditions into a system that could be managed, taught, and — ultimately — controlled. Classification, after all, is never neutral. To map is also to fix; to document is to decide what is worthy of attention — and therefore preservation — and what can be discarded. Batley straddled this contradiction uneasily. His writings reveal genuine admiration for Indian architecture, even as his methods translated it into a form legible to colonial institutions.
Today, as India debates “decolonisation” through the renaming, demolition, or radical remaking of historic structures, Batley’s archive sits at an uncomfortable crossroads. On one hand, his works exhibit a colonial gaze — one that framed Indian architecture through Western academic conventions. On the other hand, it preserves knowledge of India’s built heritage that is now endangered or already lost. To reject Batley outright because of his colonial background is to risk discarding the very instruments that allow us to argue for preservation in the first place.
What does it mean, then, to critically inherit Batley’s archive? Perhaps it requires resisting the false binary between reverence and erasure. Batley’s legacy demands reading against the grain: acknowledging the colonial, extractive power structures that shaped his work while recognising its necessity in the first place and enduring usefulness today. His drawings and pedagogical frameworks can be recontextualised, not as monuments to colonial authority, but as starting points for new, more pluralistic histories of Indian architecture.
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