Beauty is the politics we do not yet have language for

Walk into the courtyard of Jama Masjid at dawn and stand below the Chandigarh Capitol Complex at dusk, and you will have been taught something about equality that no statute can quite reach. The American philosopher Elaine Scarry argued in On Beauty and Being Just (1999) that beauty trains the eye for fairness, because both share the demand of symmetry, proportion and a kind of attentive regard for what lies before the gaze. The proposition is unsettling because it suggests that aesthetics is not the aftermath of politics but its silent grammar — the structure of feeling that decides what counts as a public good before the legislature even sits. Beauty, in this sense, is the politics we do not yet have the legal language for: an unwritten constitution that decides who feels at home in a country and who is asked, by sheer institutional ugliness, to feel unwelcome.

Begin with the civic right to dignified surroundings. The Supreme Court in Subhash Kumar v State of Bihar (1991) read the environment into Article 21, holding that life means more than animal existence — it means quality, and quality means surroundings that do not insult. Beauty, in this reading, is a fundamental right with a different vocabulary. Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, designed between 1951 and 1965 in partnership with Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, refused the colonial assumption that a new Indian city should imitate Lutyens; it gave the displaced Punjabi farmer monumental civic space, the High Court, the Assembly and the Secretariat as a single open hand. Laurie Baker’s low-cost architecture in Kerala — the Centre for Development Studies, the Mitraniketan campus, hundreds of houses for tsunami-displaced families — demonstrated that even a rupee-thin budget can deliver dignity through curved walls and brick jaalis. Charles Correa’s Belapur housing in Navi Mumbai of 1983-86 gave each family its own threshold even within high-density layouts. Each rejected the slum as fate.

Beauty is also cultural sovereignty. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed Santiniketan and the Hoysala temples at Belur, Halebidu and Somanathapura in 2023 — not for tourist revenue but for the global validation of an aesthetic that British colonial dismissals could not silence. India’s textile traditions — Banarasi brocade, Kanjivaram silk, Pochampally ikat, Bagru block-print, Maheshwari weaving, Kullu shawls, Phulkari needlework — are repositories of mathematical genius hidden in cloth. The geometry of a single Patola fabric encodes computational complexity that took the Hewlett-Packard pattern team six months to digitise. To preserve these traditions is to fund the mathematicians of cloth, the chemists of natural dye, the engineers of the handloom. The original Constitution of India, hand-illustrated by Nandalal Bose’s atelier at Santiniketan, opened with motifs from Mohenjo-daro because the founders understood that a republic begins with the way it pictures itself, and the cost of getting that picture wrong is felt for generations.

The same instinct governs justice. Justice V R Krishna Iyer wrote bail orders that read as prose poetry, because he understood that the citizen must hear, not just receive, judgment. His opening in Moti Ram v State of MP (1978) — ‘the bail system is a defective system’ — carries more reform weight than the operative paragraph. The PESA Act of 1996 codified the aesthetic of consensus in Fifth Schedule areas; the gram sabha’s ritual unanimity is not procedural inefficiency, it is the form by which a tribal polity recognises itself. The Forest Rights Act of 2006, by mapping community claims rather than only individual ones, restored to Adivasi communities a way of seeing land that the colonial revenue map had erased. Beauty, here, is a way of making law congruent with how a people already think and remember; an ugly law cannot be obeyed for long because it does not fit the body that must wear it.

The counter-argument is real and must be honoured. Beauty can be a smokescreen. The palace of Versailles stood beside French famine; Lutyens’ Delhi rose on the surveyed graves of seven previous cities; the Berlin Olympic Stadium of 1936 weaponised the sublime; Albert Speer’s architectural drawings for a thousand-year Reich were technically dazzling. Walter Benjamin’s warning in 1936 that fascism aestheticises politics while communism politicises art remains the deepest caution in the literature. Modern Indian smart-city projects that beautify a riverfront while displacing the vendors who animated it, that install steel benches in plazas designed to deter sleeping bodies, that demolish the wholesale market and replace it with a boutique mall — each commits the same fallacy. Beauty divorced from justice is the loveliest form of cruelty, and the most expensive.

There is also a developmental dimension. The economist Mariana Mazzucato has argued in The Value of Everything (2018) that public-sector investment in beauty — from medieval cathedrals to Stockholm metro stations — produces civic returns that markets cannot price. India’s Delhi Metro under E Sreedharan from 1995 onward was an early Indian instance: stations designed for dignity, signage in three languages, accessible by design. The Mumbai Coastal Road, the Eastern Peripheral Expressway, the redeveloped Central Vista Avenue all carry the question of whether public infrastructure carries aesthetic ambition or merely engineering competence. The smartest budgets reserve a small percentage explicitly for civic art — the ‘one per cent for art’ rule in cities from San Francisco to Stockholm produces measurable improvements in citizen attachment, which translates into lower vandalism, higher voluntary maintenance and greater civic participation.

The synthesis is therefore one of discipline rather than abandonment. A republic must measure beauty by who is included in it. The Tagore experiment at Santiniketan made the open-air classroom inseparable from the curriculum; the dignity of the mid-day-meal hall in a Tamil Nadu primary school, the architectural quality of a panchayat building in Mehsana, the calligraphy on a court summons in Tezpur, the seating density on a Vande Bharat coach — each is a small daily lobbying for the constitutional promise. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot (1869) that beauty will save the world. He did not mean ornament; he meant the moral economy of attention, the discipline of regarding the public realm as worth the dignity of design. The Tagore school at Santiniketan held its classes under trees because the founder believed an ugly school produces minds that accept ugliness elsewhere; the Bauhaus believed the same about furniture; the Indian temple-architecture tradition coded the same intuition into stone. Beauty is impoverished when our courts are ugly, our slums hidden and our public spaces privatised for the convenience of those who can afford private substitutes. The struggle to name beauty as a right is the politics we are still learning to speak — and to speak it well, to legislate for it carefully, and to defend it against both the philistine and the gentrifier is to deepen the republic itself.