Charles Correa’s oeuvre and life work was about giving expression to his idea of India – an imagination he constructed at the offset of his practice. This was an idea of India molded by both his aesthetic and visual sensibility as well as his understanding of the cultural, political, social and economic realities of India. It was an understanding of India that was influenced by the ideas, visions and insights of Nehru, Gandhi, Satyajit Ray, Isamu Noguchi, Ray and Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier and a multiplicity of intellectuals and artists he encountered before and during his practice. Charles Correa’s India was one in which these multiple imaginations and the rich pluralism that defined the new nation were made simultaneously valid and thrived. Correa’s aspiration was to build for this new nation; India, that was being imagined and remade in its post independence avatar. For the world, his articulating a position for Asia in the global architectural debate as a counterpoint to the hegemony of the west will be in the future seen as one of his most significant contributions. History will tell us that he was the first modern Asian Architect...