“STOP THE CAR, stop the car!” We were now on the mainland, approaching Alibag, when we passed a nomadic settlement, the likes of which one sees all the time in India, a collection of village huts on an arid piece of land. But Jain saw an articulation of what might be his core philosophy when it comes to building: How does one inhabit the earth with the least possible effort? He pointed to the fencing of bramble that formed a perimeter around the settlement the nomads had established, observing the hearth to one side, an ashen circle in the pale earth, and bright-colored clothes hanging from a line on the other. Nothing about this way of living outdoors seems primitive to Jain, nothing about it is to be dismissed: For him, I sensed, this is a real architectural inheritance. “It’s viscerally there in all of us,” he said, speaking of the urge to be in tune with nature. “This is one of those few places where that connection is still very strong.”

Jain has built 10 private houses, as well as studios, a mountain lodge and a reading room, the majority in India, mostly centered around or in Mumbai, but increasingly his projects are located in more international destinations, such as Italy, Spain, France and Japan. He is not romantic — or not excessively so — about the realities of modern living. That this nomadic settlement should exist in India alongside towers of steel and glass seems to strike him as an opportunity. What appears to inspire him most about the country is that it is still a place where one can observe the rudiments of how premodern people developed their earliest notions of shelter. “One cannot become nostalgic,” he said, “and yet one can still recall that experience in a world that is moving at a different speed.” By “that experience” he meant the deep atavisms that yet survive within us. “Because if we lose that spirit,” Jain said, “we lose everything. If it comes to that, we will have to reclassify what human beings are.”

After our visit to Utsav House, we had a lunch of grilled fish and prawn curry at another private residence designed by Jain in Alibag, the House of Nine Rooms, built in 2014. Here again was a central courtyard open to sky, which Eliade likens to the smoke hole in a temple and sees as part of a communication with the transcendent. Here again were bare untiled floors and the constant presence of wind and earth. There was a stillness, a permanent air of afternoon and an interior that was magically cooler and airier than the exterior it felt so much at peace with. The site sloped downward, so the house had been set on many levels. The floors and walls were of a scorched reddish-black brick, the throwaways of the kiln, both sturdier and more attractive than normal bricks. If Jain has learned anything from the artisans of traditional India, with whom he is in daily contact — not instructing but collaborating with — it is the secret of watching them work with their hands, hammering out their creations with the least possible exertion. “Movement is minimal,” Jain said admiringly. My suspicion that doing less — the art of subtraction, predicated on a zeal for leaving things unsaid — mattered deeply to Jain was confirmed when later that afternoon he began to speak rapturously of Masanobu Fukuoka, the author of the 1975 classic “The One-Straw Revolution,” who pioneered the “do-nothing” school of agriculture, eschewing the plow and chemical fertilizers. I suspect Jain dislikes heavy-handedness, not merely on aesthetic grounds but because he sees in it a criminal failure of imagination. To disrespect negative space is, I venture to say, in Jain’s estimation, to lose the right to act.

After lunch, we drove to Jain’s Copper House, built in 2012 in another inland village farther west. The house is a two-tiered structure with a cupric roof enclosing a basalt courtyard that contains an immense boulder, placed asymmetrically to one side, redolent of an Isamu Noguchi sculpture. Japan has clearly entered Jain’s soul, where it has fertilized what feels like the ancient Buddhist-Jain austerity of India. When Jain was younger, his parents had taken him on long drives across the length and breadth of the country, where he had been introduced to Indian antiquity. In 1972, during a car trip north, the family stopped at the newly constructed city of Chandigarh, a triumph of Modernism set against the foothills of the Himalayas. Outside Le Corbusier’s 1953 government building called the Secretariat, the 7-year-old Bijoy refused to get out. “I saw this huge … it was a giant thing. I had to be whisked away. I couldn’t get out of the car. That’s my experience of Chandigarh.” Jain was at pains to say that this was not necessarily a criticism of the city — which the writer V.S. Naipaul described as a place where “India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself” — but I suspect it was. The modern architect whom Jain unreservedly loves is Louis Kahn. Jain said of Kahn’s palatially geometric National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh: “The building itself is an excavation, it’s a subtraction. It’s not a frame structure, not column and beam. It’s like water that carves rock.” It was a supreme compliment.