April 26, 2018
The Unique Architecture of Jewish India
By Al HymanA new book portrays a community of enduring faith and proudly distinct character dating back to pre-Roman times: a remarkable Jewish path through time.
Last October, Sandeep Chakravorty and Dani Dayan, consuls general in New York of, respectively, India and Israel, introduced the authors of a recently published book about Indian Jewish architecture.
Indian Jewish architecture? The existence of such a thing would surely be as much a surprise to many readers as it clearly was to Consul Chakravorty. But in fact some of the most noteworthy sites in India’s major cities bear Jewish names, and a remarkable collection of historic architecture, built by and for an Indian Jewish community dating from pre-Roman times, still survives.
Kenneth X. Robbins’s and Pushkar Sohoni’s Jewish Heritage of the Deccan, the book being honored last October, offers a survey of one major element of this physical legacy. Its title may be somewhat misleading: Jews did not live throughout the vast Deccan plateau in the southern subcontinent, but were concentrated in and around the region’s urban centers of Mumbai (Bombay) and nearby Pune. (Other sizable populations could be found elsewhere in Kochi, Kolkata, Goa, and Ahmedabad.)