Ateya Khorakiwala

Ateya Khorakiwala is a historian of modernity in its colonial and postcolonial guises in South Asia; she researched the ways that colonial epistemologies have shaped postcolonial architectural thought. She writes about architecture’s place within the “technocratic assemblage” of architects, engineers, and scientists who shaped India’s postindependence development and planning landscapes, underscoring the political and cultural tensions at play between Cold War technopolitical interests and Indian political elite. Khorakiwala received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, her MS in Architecture Studies from MIT, and was trained as an architect at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies in Mumbai, India.

Her book project, Famine Architecture: Forms of Hunger in Colonial and Postcolonial India, is a history of the architectural and infrastructural forms that aimed to manage food through technological, administrative, and quantitative means rather than addressing the structural conditions of poverty that created food insecure families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book analyzes a utilitarian “gray” architecture of silos, warehouses, and plinths, that was called in to manage and protect the value of commodities, mainly cereals and foodgrains. Developing new methodologies to understand the built environment, the book shows how the field of postwar design was produced in the scalar tension between the intimate realm of the hungry body and the national imaginary of a well-fed body politic. Thus, hunger, the book argues, undergirds India’s modernity, and postcolonial modernism reflects the enduring threat of the specter of famine to the material and social body of the postcolonial state.

Khorakiwala has received grants and fellowships from the MacDowell Foundation and the American Institute of India Studies. A newer research project, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, Making Land in the Age of Urbanization (with co-researchers Alla Vronskaya and Megan Eardley), aims to undertake a comparative history of socialist theories of land and the design of agriculture, rurality, and labor across Mozambique, India, and Central Asia.

Her recent articles include “Granularities: Concrete and the “Gray Architecture” of Grain Storage in India, 1960s-70s” in After Concrete: Rethinking the Dynamics of a Material (ed. Allais, Meggers, and Faciejew, Birkhäuser 2026) and “Famine Tracts” in GTA Papers 11: Macroeconomics. Other essays and articles have appeared in e-flux Architecture: Overgrowth, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Grey Room, and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). She has coedited the Aggregate volume Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022) (ed. Dutta, Khorakiwala, Levin, Lopez-Duran, Muzaffar); she serves on the board of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative.