In the ’70s, when Punjabi writer and journalist Sidhu Damdami left for Chandigarh from Talwandi Sabo, the dust bowl of southern Punjab, his father told him that the city was not only clean and well-planned but also cold. For those who lived in the sandy plains seared by blazing winds, this was an added allure to the myth of Chandigarh. When the bus reached Kharar, still an hour from the city, Damdami could already feel the chill. “After that, every time I went to Chandigarh I would start shivering at Kharar,” says Damdami, who has now been in the city for more than a decade. Chandigarh, he says, was more in the mind than on the ground. It was the closest India had come to being modern in those times, and imagining it as cold completed the idea of a modernity imported from Europe. Chandigarh, therefore, was an imagined city.
India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had in his manifesto wanted a city “unfettered by the traditions of the past”. At the same time, an architect in France wanted to destroy half of Paris to construct a city from scratch. “In Paris, prophets are kicked in the rear,” Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier had said when his plan was rejected. Providence brought the prophets together. Chandigarh was to be Le Corbusier’s personal vision, unfettered not only by tradition but also from ground reality. He set naked concrete, dour facades and brutal monuments of his grey imagination in a grid-iron pattern of roads cutting at right angles. Places were designated for living, working, playing and shopping. His minimalist architecture was a self-referential play of forms. Crafted with exquisite sun breakers, his buildings played with ample Indian light. To a trained eye, it was a daily drama of light and shade.
A house, Le Corbusier infamously declaimed, was a machine for living in. And a chaise lounge was, well, a machine to relax in. Chandigarh, one could safely infer and Nehru would attest, was a machine to make Indians modern. Since the French were not our colonial masters, we could easily surrender to their modernity, free of guilt. Punjabis, Haryanvis and Himachalis lustily took to being modern in Chandigarh. Marguerite Duras was more popular than Gabriel Garcia Marquez and boys from Bathinda avidly watched Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Daljit Singh, who came to Punjab University from a Ludhiana village, could not resist the French New Wave and became Daljit Ami. He is an angry filmmaker now, widely acclaimed for his powerful documentary on agricultural labour. At Alliance Française, people awaited the next consignment of modernity. But you could not expect proud Punjabis to drift into an Indian creole culture. So more than the Francophilia, in Nehru’s fiat to break free from tradition Chandigarhians found the legitimate route to modernity.
The city was the capital of Punjab and Haryana but speaking Punjabi and Haryanvi would not endear you to people there. As they disowned their roots and tradition, they also acquired a stiff upper lip. At a mushaira in early ’90s, Bashir Badr, the poet who could hypnotise with his lyrical genius, had to plead — with folded hands — with the audience to respond with the customary wah-wah and not clap in appreciation. Wah-wah was deemed to be uncouth behaviour by the city’s elite. Chandigarh came to be known as patthar da shehar (city of stones) inhabited by patthar de lok (people of stone). A furious debate that raged in those times was whether uninspiring Chandigarh could have poets of its own. Kumar Vikal, the wailing poet-laureate of the city, had written that his poems came back limping whenever they went to the elite parlours.
Nirupma Dutt, Chandigarh’s much-loved writer, activist and raconteur, who used to preside over a version of New York’s Algonquin Round Table of writers and actors at the local press club, says that when famous Hindi writer Shivani visited Chandigarh in the late ’70s, she found it odd that there wasn’t a single poster on any wall. The city was too clean, sterile and uninspiring for her, and she remarked, “ Likhne ke liye Lucknow chaahiye (I have to be in Lucknow to write).”
M Rajivlochan came to Chandigarh in the ’80s from the badlands of Damoh in Madhya Pradesh via JNU to teach history at Panjab University. A few years in the socialist utopia of cookie-cutter houses robbed him of his radicalism: he found nothing to protest against. “Social equity was built into the architecture. It forced people to live a non-hierarchical life. For instance, the kitchen in the middle-class 10-marla house was big enough for just one person, making it difficult to have a maid to work with you,” he says. There were no power cuts and little crime. It was a comfortable, laid-back life without pressure or tension. That’s why Chandigarh was called the city of the tired and retired. In a pampered enclave run by the Delhi bureaucracy and protected from the political and social realities of the country, people were largely depoliticised. The Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF), started by Dalit leader Kanshi Ram, was a big hit in north India. But when Rajivlochan set up a local unit, it didn’t take off. “No one opposed it, but no one would turn up for the meetings either,” he recalls. Since Chandigarh offered an egalitarian life, people found little need for traditional social support systems of caste and community. He came from a feudal family that lorded over nine villages in Damoh. Chandigarh gave him a chance to become modern. “I can say, had I lived in Sagar or Bhopal or even Delhi I would have been a slightly bad man,” he says, and smiles.
When Dutt thinks of a modern Chandigarh, she finds a precious vignette from early ’70s still lodged in her memory. “It is of a girl riding a bicycle on a near-empty sector road. Her hair flying in the breeze. And as she pedalled, she whistled with abandon,” she says. The most common standard of modernity has been the status of women and, on that count, Chandigarh was indeed modern. As a young reporter in the ’80s, Dutt too used to cycle around the city. A number of male colleagues, many of whom went on to become top editors, used to ride pillion on her bicycle. After post-liberalisation prosperity, Chandigarh’s women gave up the bicycle for the Kinetic Honda. There were more women riding scooters in Chandigarh than in any other city. Their easy mobility was a measure of their freedom.
Who is watching?
Chandigarh was a puzzling dialectic of freedom and control. Wide and quiet roads, sleepy houses and large roundabouts were made for free spirits but, at the same time, they gave an uneasy feeling of being watched. The alienating, brutal buildings looked down on you and forced you to observe yourself. People tended to conform. The city is a fine example of architectural determinism for Vinay Varma, a Hyderabad-based management consultant who grew up and studied in the city where his father retired as the chief architect at Panjab University. He returned to his father’s State after a few years in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. “We got so used to the geometrical order and discipline that it took us a long time to adjust to the chaos of the metropolis,” he says. Chandigarh was surprisingly neat, clean and green, but it lacked the intimate connect of the Indian shehar . “Giving directions, you could not tell anyone to go straight, turn right at the pond and then left at the mosque. All sectors and houses were numbered. There were no names, no landmarks, no shared past. We had all become the Cartesian subjects,” Varma says, referring to the philosophy known for its mathematical approach to reality.
Le Corbusier’s geometrical fundamentalism shaped the Chadigarhian mind but could not suppress it altogether. Adjacent to the corridor where he built his world-famous High Court, the Secretariat and the Assembly, Chandigarh’s repressed self slowly reared its head. A government employee collected discarded glass and china for years and created a wonderland of beautiful folk figures, gothic labyrinths and waterfalls and mystifying tunnels. Eventually, Chandigarh came to be known more for Nek Chand’s Rock Garden than Le Corbusier’s behemoths. The revenge of the repressed was a logical denouement in the story of Chandigarh, if you believe filmmaker Ami. “You can understand the city’s politics by finding out who is included and who is excluded. It has been too generous to the middle and upper classes by inviting them to the city and offering them land at low rates, but it banishes the poor to the fringes,” he says. A few months ago, the civil society in Chandigarh agitated over the demolition of slums. The administration wants to create a slum-free city and is trying to relocate the slum-dwellers to the villages outside the city where it has constructed special houses for them. Many have been left out. “The administration has put absurd conditions for identification of old residents. When it comes to the poor, they have iron-clad laws. If they can give away prime land to the middle class within the city, why can’t they be a little liberal with the poor too?” Ami asks.
Being a Western implant, Nehru’s modernity was very much colonial. We were independent but still mimicking the masters. Countless seminars, conferences and film festivals celebrated Le Corbusier for decades while Chandigarh’s intellectuals carefully avoided talking about the nameless architect-planner and his team who laid a similar rectangular grid 4,000 years ago in another modern city below present-day Chandigarh. Just miles away at Sanghol languish the relics of the Indus Valley civilisation.
As Chandigarh’s population nearly doubles to around 10 lakh, the protected sarkari utopia has begun to crack. Traffic has reached disruptive proportions. Infrastructure sags because of heavy growth on the fringes. Power cuts have arrived. Roads are no longer quiet. Unable to channel rising traffic, the idyllic roundabouts are giving way to traffic signals.
Chandigarh had the lustre and mystique of an imported good in the pre-globalised economy. The young, post-liberalisation Chandigarhians, who are connected to the world through the internet and foreign education, are certainly not in awe of Le Corbusier. India’s new modernity is reshaping the city. The imported modernism of Chandigarh is unravelling as it contends with global consumerist modernity. Sector 17 Plaza, everyone’s evening haunt just five years ago, now looks forlorn. Blackening, crumbling concrete makes it seem like a war ruin. “Pavements are caving in because rats have hollowed out the ground. And often the basements leak,” says Tribhuvan Chopra of Chopra Pen Centre. Chandigarhians have abandoned their iconic market for Elante Mall in the industrial area on the outskirts. Inside the mall, you are no longer in Chandigarh. It could be Mumbai, Bangalore or Delhi. If it’s any consolation, Cafe Mocha has been themed after Le Corbusier. In the true fashion of postmodern pastiche, the shelves imitate his signature sun-breakers of the High Court building. Here, his modernist forms play not with sun but orange light.
The Dutt Roundtable at the press club, where gossip and poetry flowed as freely as rum and beer, is a rare sight these days. “Slowly people have moved from poetry to property rates,” says Dutt. Chandigarhians were once proud of their understated European modernism, but now the city is yielding to the new brash modernity of a globalised India that is not about high culture but money and technology. In the middle of the Leisure Valley, the cultural centre of the city, a tacky replica of the Eiffel Tower has come up. This brazen specimen of shopping-mall kitsch mocks the elegant museum across the road that Le Corbusier designed. Architect Sangeet Sharma, whose father SD Sharma had worked with the French master on the museum building, says people have grown indifferent and the administration inattentive to aesthetics. New money has brought a desire for ornamentation among the egalitarian middle-class of Rajivlochan’s time. The size of the kitchen remains the same but the facades of houses are being decorated with granite and marble. Lions guard the gates of many houses. The Punjabi Baroque, as architect-writer Gautam Bhatia called it, is taking over the minimalist ‘machines to live in’ that Le Corbusier’s cousin Pierre Jeanneret designed. Sharma, a Le Corbusier evangelist who has written the quaint and delightful book Corb’s Capitol , says there must be an urban arts commission to prevent the Punjabi Baroque from spreading to public buildings. “The Governor’s house already has rang-birangi (multi-coloured) tiles because no one cares anymore,” he says.
You can see Le Corbusier everywhere, even where you least suspect. A temple has a rectangular gopuram , perhaps as a nod to the local demi-god that he had become. You might even find him beneath your feet: his design is embossed on the manhole covers. One such cover came up at Christie’s two years ago and fetched $20,000. In what many call a heritage heist, articles related to him and his cousin Jeanneret are shipped out surreptitiously and emerge suddenly at international auction houses. Most of these articles are chairs and tables mass produced from their designs and junked by city offices after decades of use. In their rush to Elante Mall for consumerist nirvana, Chandigarhians have little time for Le Corbusier or his heritage. It seems Nehru’s city is again unfettering from tradition, the tradition of modernity.
( Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based writer )