Dreaming through Marg

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

In 1946, the arts and culture journal Marg was founded under the editorial leadership of writer, arts patron, and cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004). Dedicated to the promotion and analysis of the arts, Marg featured modernist practices and heritage forms from around the world and from a diverse range of periods in illustrative displays, scholarly essays, and editorial content. Multiple discourses were brought into conversation with each other through a type of visual pedagogy. From architectural modernism to art history to practices in picture framing, it interpreted and taught a new modernist historical arc of arts in a decolonizing India.

Connected to the newly expanding movements of literary and artistic cultures of the post-war era, and what Justin Quinn has termed “new cultural conversations,” the periodical straddles genre, form, and purposive frame.[1] Marg sits adjacent to the Indian phenomenon of magazine literary activism and its mid-century project of nation building, and it echoes the ambitions of modernist architectural publications. Yet, not far afield of the relatively new genre of the “timepass” magazine (which burgeoned in mid-century India), Marg speaks to the formation of English-language periodical platforms appealing to a new bourgeois public in India.[2] Established in advance of nationalized institutions for the modern arts, it promised a prime new platform for education and idea exchange. Furthermore, its journal format could reach far flung readerships and audiences. Annapurna Garimella observed, on Marg’s unique role in arts and cultural education promotion, “Early Marg volumes are remarkable for their interventionary voice. Various issues nimbly jump from the discussion of arts education policy to the future of urban planning to the history of Orissa architecture to contemporary American glass.”[3] 

Opening the pages of the first issue of Marg (October 1946), an advertisement for the Cement Marketing Company of India, Inc. (founded 1927), asks its readers “ (Are you) Planning your new home?” (fig. 1). A young, presumably Hindu and upper middle class and married couple envision their new home together. The husband looks at the plans for his future home, as the wife gazes lovingly at husband. The couple and the dream are nested in the cover of a publication. The publication’s pages with edges curling open for the Marg reader, reveal schematic floor plans for other desirable houses, which are realized atop the plans. In a metatextual play, publication advertisements are lodged in publication advertisements, calling upon the Marg reader to look at multiple visualizations of housing, from architectural plans to a picture of a picture of a house to a picture of a realized house. Doubling down on its call to visuality, the advertisement invites the reader to view the wife view the husband view site plans, in the presence of a house that we can all gaze upon. Multiple visual literacies are made manifest as desirable, from the capacity to envision the home to the (not at all commonplace) capacity to read floor plans. Visuality is embraced as a seductive device, and visual literacy—the cultivation of ways of deciphering the image—is incited. The advertisement and the dream are polychromatic, semi-narrative, and imply multiple dimensions. But, of course, it is the capacity to view as a practice of dreaming, implied as a gendered given for the citizen of the modern future, that is enshrined here, and in the initial pages of Marg.

From advertisements (that open and close each issue) to editorial content, Marg provided a type of visual pedagogy—an invitation to dream development in a new India. In its active promotion of new types of visual literacy, the periodical provides unique insight into progressive cosmopolitan, political, and commercial ambitions for development in mid-century India.

This research in part responds to the questions produced by Marg’s archive (or lack thereof). Subscriptions, invoices, and paperwork from its early years are missing if not wholly inaccessible. However, one might still ask productive questions in absence of such things, to pry apart the social worlds within which the magazine participated—how Marg imagined its futurity.[4] The pages of the periodical themselves aesthetically figure Marg’s archival imagination of a new India and its readership. Essays on cement housing and sanitation infrastructures in villages aimed to educate its select urban readerly public of the need for development and identified the nation as a shifting and problematized entity (and often in the form of the urban and rural poor). Contemplating the good of the nation on the cusp of independence, the editorial content located its readership as distinct from the greater Indian public on whom the strategies of development were to be enacted. Its advertisement archive also develops the visual character of the shared field of communication, linking new conceptions of private consumption and individual taste to this emergent middle class. Studied not as a set of editorial decisions but as a readerly experience, the periodical’s cultural encoding historicizes a key moment in the signification of planning and national development as a bourgeois aesthetic experience in early mid-century India.[5]

A growing body of scholarship chronicles the ways that modern arts and architecture were brought to broader publics through technologies of communication, including publications and photographic practices in mid-century India, from which this draws.[6] In her analysis of Indian governmental filmic promotions of road construction as developmental infrastructure in postcolonial 1960s India, Ateya Khorakiwala binds the cinematically rendered roads and the disparate locales they connected to the national imagination of a (naturally) contiguous India. She views technologies of communication as aesthetic figurations that trace the archive of the developmental state. In so doing, Khorakiwala analyzes the production of publics, and the cognitive work of reimagining the built environment and one’s relation to it. Focusing on the Films Division of India documentary short, Border Roads (ca. 1965), she asked “What new ideologies of infrastructure, connectivity and communication was (its director) Pendharkar mobilizing by representing the city and mountain as contiguous developmental space?”  [7] Marg, albeit distinct from governmental endeavors, nonetheless participated in connected discourses and sought to appeal to its audience to reimagine the role of the built environment in post-Independence India.

Douglas Haynes, Abigail McGowan, and Arvind Rajagopal provide insight on Indian colonial and postcolonial subjectivity formation against shifting matrices of commercial production, private consumption, and the advertisements that reflected and produced new conceptions of the consumer.[8] As Judith Williamson has observed, the audience creates meaning in advertising by drawing from their cultural knowledge, and is thus interpellated through the advertisement.[9] Rather than performing extraneously, advertisements drew from and extended the symbolic field within which the periodical participated. Against the backdrop of periodical studies, that allow the analysis of advertisements in the study of print and mass culture, their scholarship advances the readerly experience in the historicization of journals and the publics they imagine.[10] While I do not take up Marg’s audiences solely as consumers, nor its project as commercially nor governmentally instrumental, I look at the complex position in cultural, administrative, and commercial networks that Marg occupied—thus as a social artifact.[11]

Atreyee Gupta’s interdisciplinary study of post-partition aesthetics in India bifocally locates Marg’s photographic representations of modern architecture and sculpture against the backdrop of its photographic layout and selection decisions, among a broader set of concerns. Her calling of attention to the visuality of architecture in publications—in this case, architecture and urban planning from the iconic city of Chandigarh—permits a glimpse of the integrality of architecture and architectural publications to the project of recasting India under a modern star. Entangling the massive project of Chandigarh and its representation in Marg in an emergent aesthetic matrix, Gupta observed “Repeatedly captured in photography, the cognitive affect of these structures far exceeded their architectural potential.” [12]

While industry periodicals (est. 1930s) such as the Journal of the Indian Association of Architects were instrumental in this project, the decided focus on architecture in the early Marg issues capitalized on the flexibility and capaciousness of discourses of modern architecture to accommodate interdisciplinary and transhistorical conversations on arts and culture. Paradoxically, the site of both concerns in urban and cultural development and yet the subject of formal artistic expression and practice, architectural discourses accommodated an unusually expansive array of subjects and fields of discussion in the broader international modernist project.

Marg provided an interlocutive platform for a changing cosmopolitan elite and an aspirational proxy for a broader developing India, albeit appealing to a presumably small and elite set at four rupees and eight annas per its initial issue. In the skillful hands of Marg’s initial editorial teams, the issues participated in a liberal humanist discourse coalescing—to borrow Ajantha Subramanian’s observations on the ascent of technical education in the colonial and post-colonial state—“as a necessary solution for perceived social ills of economic underdevelopment and social inequality.”[13]

Planning

Founded by the advocates for modern architecture of the Modern Architectural Research Group, the acronym of Marg is the Sanskritic Hindi for “pathway.”[14] The journal sutured progressive visions for the nation to its mandate to discuss beauty in the arts. Implicitly, social pedagogy of and through the visual arts is written into its stated mandate.

We consider Architecture, of course, as the mother art. And, therefore, we shall naturally include within our orbit of discussion all the arts which help us to live and move in the houses and workshops we build. And the criterion which we shall bring to bear on these arts will be the simple one of Beauty, a term which may be defined here to cover the formal materials of a work of art as well as its subject matter and the function it fulfils in society.[15]

It counted among its members Anil de Silva (Assistant Editor), a founding member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association. Initial contributors included de Silva’s sister and prominent architect Minette de Silva, art historian and eventual National Gallery of Museum Director Hermann Goetz, art critic and patron Rudy von Leyden, and the architect Otto Koenigsberger, formerly the state of Mysore’s chief architect in the 1940s, and head of the 1944 Jamshedpur Development Plan for the Tata Company. The company, featured regularly in Marg’s advertisements and in the editorial content of its launch issue, sponsored the fledgling publication and provided it with its first office spaces. The research group, connected to the Modern Architecture Research Groups (MARS) founded twelve years prior, prioritized architecture in its early issues and defined the philosophical purview of its objects of interest in international modernist terms, to the exclusion of certain kinds of historicism in architectural practice.[16]

Guided by Anand’s vision, at stake for Marg was the articulation of an identity for the incipient nation through material cultural expression—art and architecture for a country that was “situated between two worlds, one not yet dead, the other refusing to be born.”[17] Anand neither romanticized an imagined pristine Indian past nor shunned the emancipatory project of the European enlightenment. Rather, within the crucible of modern state formation, art, in his estimation, had the unique capacity to express local sociologies of knowledge and universalist aspirations. The project of Marg rejected practices in architectural and artistic revivalism, though it still mined the vitality of the nation’s non-industrial cultures. For example, tracing the role of Mughal arts in Marg publications, Devika Singh observed that the courtly arts provided precedent for Marg’s modern secular and internationalist project, but not for a viable vision of India’s artistic and architectural future.[18] Singh provides a critical example of Marg’s exorcisms and resurrections of history, aimed at providing exemplary ethos and spirit, if not—at all times—exemplary forms. 

Such reconciliations of modern developmental visions with earlier and existing Indian cultural forms did the cognitive work of reimagining a selected set of built environments as

a contiguous architectural heritage and were often achieved through a graphic re-inscription of meaning onto form. Indian form was invested with a universalizing secular developmental purpose in its initial issue. Following Anand’s opening editorial on a vision for a new India and the unique need for architecture in its manifestation, tellingly entitled “Planning and Dreaming,” is a manifesto of sorts entitled “Architecture and You.” This essay, in Nancy Adajania’s words, “ an actual and extraordinary 10-page manifesto of intent and historical purpose shaped in the finest spirit of the avant-garde,” provides a succession of narratives that foreground a particular performance of visual pedagogy in this re-inscription of meaning.[19] Beginning with reproductions of ink outline drawings of ancient architecture from around the world (fig. 2, 3), the essay graduated to reproductions of photographs (fig. 4) of India’s ancient architectural offerings.[20] Each print, like the preceding drawings, is tightly cropped to foreground the pictured structure’s integration of interior and exterior. Accordingly, accompanying captions draw the reader’s eye to the integration. Accompanying Ellora’s Kailasa Temple, the caption reads, “A structure having organic simplicity, coalescing with the background.” A complex calculus manifests through images and their captions.

Below the caption mentioned above, a central caption noted: “Hindu Temple Sculpture: Religion and Mythology; the woof and warp of the life of the people, depicted with exuberance, force, and vitality. A sculpture possessing plastic qualities” he history and particulars of the actual sites have been subordinated to a narrative of formal success (Marg 1.1 [October 1946]). This maneuver was invoked later in the same issue in an essay on the archaeological site of Mohenjo-daro in Sind, “Good design may be discovered among the ruins of Mohenjodaro as in the streets of New York”(68). Here, illustrations and illustrative graphics identified formal similarities across time and space, and chronology was somewhat dispensed with as a method of constructing affinity between structures and objects, resignifying a variety of architectural expressions of pre-colonial India as an archive for design strategies.

Offering a meaningful point of comparison, the magazine Design was launched January 1957 under the editorship of the advocate of architecture and the arts, Patwant Singh, who had earlier launched The Indian builder (1953).[21] In many ways, the journal provided a comparable platform for an eagle-eye analysis of arts and culture, and it overlapped members of its staff, advertisers and its elite consumer appeals, albeit eleven years after Marg’s arrival.[22] In fact, Dolly Sahiar, long time designer of Marg participated in the production of some of Design’s early layouts.[23]However, in contrast to Marg’s pedagogical appeal, Design’s early issues responded to and developed an already existent conversation on the role of architecture and Modern arts in India among its readership. For example, critiquing major architectural plans in its early issues, it neither sought to convince nor educate its readership on the need for architectural and design literacy.[24] The publication often accompanied its critiques with detailed schematic floor and site plans and specialized analysis of construction methods and materials. For example, on the proposed building for the Bank of India in Ahmedabad, Design provided limited captions beyond the label indicating the nature of the plan, presuming not only a high level of visual literacy in deciphering architectural schematics, but also a developed readerly critical apparatus (“Editorial: A House,” 6, 7).[25] Singh retrospectively delivered criticism of an “architectural wasteland” while arguing for Design’s vision for a new architectural future.[26] Whether discussing the contributions of Pierre Jeanneret, Nehru’s planned post-independence city of Chandigarh, or the painterly interventions of contemporary artists, Design’s criticisms reflected a trained focus on the contemporary moment and the urban as the generative archive for India’s national future.[27]  In contrast, Marg also developed an archive of historical sites prefigured as the Indian national through its illustrations and photographic reproductions, inscribing the past and present into a critical and situated contemporaneity.[28] This it did, in fact, responding to Nehru’s personal request to Anand to create a platform for heritage discourse.

The architect and the plan

While underpinned by a Nehruvian faith in good design in architecture and urban planning as a means of progressing society, the journal’s initial CIAM-inflected formalist advocacy of architecture did not wholesale reflect its members’ viewpoints.[29] Perhaps more a pedagogical maneuver, the pointed advocacy did, however, present architecture as a viable, desirable, and necessary profession in India, which was made explicit in its early issues (Zurich, line 84). At the time of the establishment of the journal, the few architectural firms in practice were largely Anglo-Indian and run by a coterie of British-trained architects and select British-trained Indian architects.[30] Training was largely limited to professional certificates in India, and architecture was neither well recognized as a field nor as a profession for India’s growing middle class until mid-century. As a chapter of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (hereon CIAM), and a proponent of an architectural functionalism reflective of the organization’s unshakeable faith in planning, Marg similarly centered the “role of the modern architect in shaping the society of the future and cities that were capable of functioning.”[31]

Socially bound and ethically invested, modern architecture required its communication to a broader public—the pedagogical project was one of social as well as aesthetic literacy.[32] The journal’s re-inscription of meanings onto historical and contemporary forms pressed for the relearning of the built environment as a set of symptoms and consequences. This temporal arc called for planning and its architects, providing the impetus for its brand of visual pedagogy—writing with an eye for the future.

Text-image relationships in early issues constructed a dialectic of energy and form consonant with CIAM’s philosophies of architecture as a social form that, paradoxically, necessitated extraction from certain kinds of history. [33] The words of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school whose words are featured in the pages of Marg, inflect Marg’s initial philosophical disposition: “Our ultimate goal, therefore, was the complete and inseparable work of art, the great building, in which the old dividing line between the monumental and decorative elements would have disappeared forever."[34] Construed as the purpose (the end game) of good architectural practice, abstraction, or the dissolution of figure and ground, promised a vital look forward—a year one—for the architectural landscape of India.

Following the photographs and executed in basic outlines, pen-and ink outline illustrations lay the groundwork for a simple and digestible structuralist reading of form in modern architecture (fig. 5).

What is CHARACTER in a building?

is organic and has its roots in: Appropriateness to purpose;

Neighborliness to and harmonizing with the region

The nature and relationship of the materials employed;

Organic relationship of all the elements;

Each part must be integral to the whole

Their accompanying text asks “This was built for this man . . . so why this for this man?” Neither intended for historical information nor specificity, the pictures tell us of old and new types of people, whose lives require different accommodations. Presumably intended for a non-specialist audience, the article’s succession of simple visual metaphors alongside schematic plan renderings, and photographic reprints didn’t call upon its readership for historical learning and placed a considerable weight on captions for messaging. Pedagogically prioritizing messaging over close visual analysis, and abstraction over concrete historical knowledge, the journal’s launch issue aimed to convince its public of the need for planning at the same time that it aimed to inform it.

Representational economies

By the late 1930s and under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, planning took on a life as a procedural and political disposition, conceptually emergent as a potentially scalable and universalizable set of policies capable of directing the course of the new nation. Locatable within broader mid-century conversations on cultural and economic uplift, the modality of planning figured the nation as a futurity achieved through land and built-environment organization, imagined and articulated through multiple media and on varying scales.[35] 

At bird’s eye view, Nehru’s 5-year plans variously sought to formulate the nation through bureaucratic strategy aimed at economic empowerment through industry. Efforts at creating civic planning procedure began as early as 1938 and the formation of the National Planning Committee, which sought to address national issues from poverty to defense through a long term strategy of industrialization. [36] However, implementation of a centralized “Master Plan” of urban planning would only develop after 1959, which aimed to codify procedures for land acquisition and development, spatially reconceptualizing Delhi as a coherent totality of industry and habitation connected through infrastructure. Interventionist, the Master Plan set the government and an elite constituency as the constituters of a path, a regimen set at odds with the perceived volatility of a private market economy.

Here, I take civic planning as sets of operations taking place within representations of space, per Henri Lefebvre. Premised on the conceptualization of land as commensurable units voided of prior social and lived values, civic and urban planning abstracted social spaces into symbolic forms encoded by a dominant social order, mappable onto a grid of abstract space. Shelter, which was subject to the hand of the architect under the rubric of architecture, and land, subject to the hand of the urban planner under the rubric of zones, could be analyzed in representation. Conceptual and potentially immaterial, the plan emerged mid-century as a floating signifier capable of making meanings across varying contexts.[37]

Marg’s pages participated in this conversation, inviting its readers to view civic planning across discursive fields, and signifying its representations as both a logic of nation and the activity of its leading classes. Situated in the architectural hub of Bombay, Marg was not far from the Indian Institute of Architects and Sir JJ School’s department of architecture. It was connected to a small architectural publications industry that promoted new design by the 1930s, which produced a veritable library of designs and templates.[38] This included the main publication of the Indian Institute of Architects, Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects (JIIA) and the pamphlets and periodicals of the Cement Marketing Company of India, which circulated new plans and philosophies of domestic architecture.[39] The Cement Marketing Company’s “The Modern House in India” (1943) provided an easily circulatable, lushly visual and uniform set of plans that promised to surmount regional styles and differences, as implied by the title’s reference to the nation.[40] In fact, the advertisement placed in Marg’s inaugural issue featured the cover of the Company’s “60 Designs for your New Home,” in the lower left corner (fig. 1).[41]

National in stylistic vision, such publications as CMI prefigured Marg’s appeal to a national public and its focus on architecture in civic planning. They activated the plan as an abstracted signifier within what Arvind Rajagopal has termed the “symbolic repertoire of the urban consumer,” on a cosmopolitan readerly scale.[42] Furthermore, moving across advertising and editorial arenas, the graphic plan as signifier animated linkages between civic culture and domestic consumption mid-century.

This concludes with a look at the ways that architecture’s representations were written into the pages of Marg through advertising content. Advertising bookends Marg’s editorial content (at roughly 14/100 pages in the initial issues).  One must pass through them to read and complete an issue. In order to consider Marg in its distinct formal elements at the intersection of discursive arcs that are often retrospectively treated as discrete, including those of modern art and architecture, and advertisement and periodical studies, it is necessary to read the journal as a form with a character of its own—a totality bound by its covers—rather than as a vehicle for articles.[43] If the advertisements are reinserted into the interpretation of Marg, we run the possibility of tracing the early readerly visual experience, prior to disciplinary separations.[44]

In their rhetorical maneuvers, text-picture relations, and placement in the publication, Marg’s advertisements articulated new relationships between the state, private industry, and the reader-consumer, formed at the cusp of independence. Placed by private companies as well as departments of the Indian government that supported the production of the magazine, the advertisements contour the semantic fields on which advertising parties made and could make their claims to Marg’s readership. Performing in the future tense, advertisements pictorially presented new possibilities of consumption and human-object relations. The Cement Marketing Company of India, Inc., the advertisement for which opens Marg and this essay, summoned a range of new gendered, familial, and affective relations through its words and pictures. By interpellating the new reader through the reading experience, the ads also historicized the reader-as-subject in this transformative publication. As Rajagopal has argued, advertisements are historical artifacts insofar as they “perform the labour of articulating culture and economy, thereby allowing us to track historically specific subject forms and the mentalities they give rise to” (Rajagopal, “Advertising in India,” 220-221). Furthermore, in instances in Marg, advertisement and editorial content were connected through shared interests and players. Whether Koenigsberger’s article on Tata’s ambitious industrial township of Jamshedpur for the initial issue, or Marg’s contributors’ participation in governmental agencies advertising in the journal, the initial issues provide archival traces of overlaps and disjunctures between industrial, private, and governmental concerns.[45]

Roughly, the advertisements in the early issues can be separated into three categories. First, some articulated the house as the site of modern subject formation, tying individual taste to culture. Advertisements by larger national corporations such as Godrej featured alongside smaller local firms in providing “Designs for Modern Living”—décor, private home construction, and products intended to enhance, create, or express modern living. Confounding clear separations of the genre of the editorial and the advertisement, the pioneering arts patron, gallerist, and frames salesperson Kekoo Gandhy advised in an editorial in the initial issue on the need and use of frames for artworks as vehicles for cultural display in the home.[46] Explicitly locating cultural interest within domestic consumption in this instance, the editorial placed the burden of culture on the domestic consumer-subject, thus centering the frame as a desirable societal and domestic good.[47] Second, the publication featured advertisements for large-scale industrial machinery, factories, industrial cleaning and chemical products, possibly making its appeal to readerships across categories, beyond those directly linked to industry.[48] Through the promotion of brand names, these promoted a familiarity with a relatively new system of goods production among a new class of consumers, a readership bonded by a shared interest in an industrializing vision of the nation. Lastly, advertisements included featured high-end private consumer goods. From watches to airline travel packages, this category made appeals to personal desire and aspirational consumption.

While information on the readership is difficult to obtain, it may be gleaned from the content of the journal that its intended readership, to which advertised products were to appeal, were construed as a civil society distinct from the urban poor and rural populations, who formed a national imaginary to the subject-reader (“Notes on the Advertisement,” 27).[49] As image-based systems of distinction, advertisement branding thus extended the domestic to the local, to national systems of exchange, producing new possibilities for mystification in circulation, and symbolic systems through which the subject-citizen might by imagined as citizen, planner, aesthete, consumer, and developer.

In an advertisement for Tata steel in the second issue of Marg, two men burn the midnight oil, poring over blueprint plans laid before them on a desk (fig. 6). Cropped and obliquely angled, the slope of the desk provides a bird’s eye view of the plans and invites the viewer to actively scan the length of the plan and participate in architectural creation. The image-text relationship solicits a particular way of seeing from the Marg reader. It does not require a visual literacy of plans, but the capacity to see the importance of plans as a means of fulfilling the developmental mandate. The advertisement reads:

It is in the blue-print that the dream of the engineer, the vision of the architect, first take shape. But blue-prints have to be translated into tower and trestle, girder and cross-beam, and here it is that steel plays its vital part.

There is no plan which can be accomplished without the use of this metal of strength. Without steel dreams would be unrealized, great plans unfulfilled.

While not claiming novelty for the advertisement’s calls to visuality—after all, journal advertisements must rely on text or illustrations for the conveyance of meaning—there is a novel instrumentalization of the translative and communicative power of graphic plans to create metaphorical conceptions of the architect as an architect of the nation, clearly articulated in this and a small set of like-minded mid-century journal publications.  The advertisement’s accompanying text places emphatic weight on the determinative power of blueprints as opposed to steel, which is the subject of this advertisement. The advertisement positioned the graphic plan, the blueprint, as the means of promise fulfillment, preparing a template for the consumer’s self-identification with both the expert and his expert intervention.[50]

Not confined to India, blueprint house plans as well as drawn renderings entered the lexicon of advertisements in architecture publications in other countries including the United States, as suburban housing took on increased semantic value as markers of middle-class mobility.[51] However, tied to post-war cults of domesticity and suburbanism, blueprint plans in product promotion in the States followed a markedly different trajectory. Advertisements bore a different semantic burden in India. Good design through architecture had the unique capacity to reforge the relationship of the citizen to the state. Discussed in scholarship on articulations of swadeshi in pre-colonial India, architecture—and specifically the domestic space—took on new socio-cultural valences as sites of articulations of citizenship in the 1930s and 1940s.[52] Under Nehru, good design became a charge for re-invigorating the home, the family, and the nation. This sparked new practices of domestic consumption, and conditionally mobilized modern taste and connoisseurship as potent private vehicles of secular national identification, and design and architectural leadership as signs of modern and urban civic stewardship.[53] Featured in the pages of Marg, such an advertisement provisionally linked domestic consumption and technical knowledge to national progress under the company’s aegis, investing graphic plans with meanings for the state, for architects as leaders, and for the modern family.

Marg continues as an important site of cultural inquiry and analysis to this day. Recent articles in Marg reflect on its path, providing a meaningful historiography and also an index of its relation to the national project. However, when entered into as readerly objects instead of as sets of articles, early issues offer something else. They offer a glimpse of the complex cultural fields that Marg occupied, which sit in the blind spots of contemporary visual cultural discourses. Marg’s archival imagination of India’s future was figured through architecture and comes into relief as a visual technology of aspiration, between and beyond binary and moralizing glosses of instrumentality or idealism. The ontology of development as advanced by Marg was encoded in visual and textual signifiers that demonstrate concerns of the state, desires of industry, and an envisioning of the nation and its developers. Such an observation does not propose an overdetermination of the relation of capital to the state, or to the precise role imagined of the citizen-reader in the pages of Marg. To the contrary, the cover-to-cover readerly experience presents the negotiations—plannings—of such relations as experienced by Marg’s readerly class. This is even as it acknowledges that the social mobilization of India could be imagined by its readers with varying degrees of independence from or collusion with capital.