Chandigarh

We were a little reluctant to leave Jodhpur as we knew we had a tedious day’s traveling to Chardigarh via Delhi ahead of us. Largely uneventful and frustrating, it was at least briefly enlivened by some impromptu calisthenics at Jodhpur airport. Following an announcement in Hindi, a group of about 30 older people suddenly got up, walked over to a clear space in the lounge and started performing simple exercises, directed by an airport security guard. It was like a geriatric flashmob. Some almost fell over when the routine involved standing on one leg and waving, so we were relieved when it finished.

We’d decided ages ago to pop into Chandigarh, a city mainly designed and built in the 50’s & 60’s by the renowned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to reflect Prime Minister Nehru’s ideal for a new, post-independent Indian reality. His ethos was to reflect a progressive, ordered, democratically focused society and it became manifest through the creation of a new kind of city, with a strict grid layout, roads with specific purposes (some for slow traffic, some for fast) and a complex of monumental municipal buildings including the Punjabi Secretariat, Legislative Assembly and the state High Courts. In an India where the incongruous is the norm, surely an idealised concept brought into physical reality would work, would it not? In our opinion the jury’s still out on that one.

It’s a strange town to be honest. There’s money here for sure, and at least some of the usual features of Indian life are present (honking, confusion, dirt etc), but it all feels, relatively speaking, somewhat sanitised. SUVs are more common on the multi-laned, tree-lined boulevards than the humble auto-rickshaw. Shops, businesses & hotels all occupy the same regimented spaces in huge identikit concrete units and houses built in the specific ‘Chandigarh style’ have little to distinguish between them. It feels like ‘order’ may well have been constructed, but it appears to have been achieved at the cost of any genuine Indian character. We saw no cows in Chandigarh….

After an evening in a bar (craft beer, London prices) and a local restaurant that would have felt bland even in Britain, we set out next morning to see the famous Le Corbusier structures at the Capitol Complex, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You have to join a tour to see them and security is very strict, in fact no personal items are allowed inside any of the structures you can visit.

Brutalist they were meant to be and brutalist they are, though I must confess, even for someone who’s grown up detesting the 60s tower-block style, we were mightily impressed, if not exactly enamoured by the sheer audacity of it all.

First stop, the Palace of the Assembly where the Pubjabi and Haryana governments both sit. Probably the most recognisable part of the complex, the exterior side-walls are dominated by a series of slanted concrete grids forming shaded rectangles. The length of the building is dominated by a monumental concrete half-pipe which collects rain to feed into tanks and supplies the complex with its water needs. The roof is topped by an array of jarring shapes – a pyramid and a structure resembling a lopped-off cooling tower – the latter with concrete symbols representing seasonal phases of the sun and moon sitting on its slanted roof. The interior is frankly, quite bizarre. A huge space of slender concrete columns with splayed capitals, looking like trees upholding the sky, past a structure resembling a 50s’ B-movie idea of a flying saucer. We were taken to the debating chamber, situated in the space beneath the ‘cooling tower’. Standing beneath you look up to red, yellow, then beige painted rings ascending to the ceiling, decorated with large amorphous blobs that seemingly act as sound proofing. More sound dampening adorns the lower walls, made of jute bags enclosed in metallic squares and painted dirty brown. It felt like stumbling into a 6th-form art project that had lost its way.

The Palace of the Assembly

Interior of the Palace of the Assembly (picture nicked from the internet)

Emerging outside we visited more conceptual, largely experimental structures. The Tower of Shadows – a clever arrangement of concrete curves and struts positioned to never admit sunlight. The Geometric Hill – a large earthen-work wedge, covered in concrete and overgrown turf. The Martyrs Memorial to the Punjabi’s who lost their lives in the Partition of India, a ramp decorated with a huge swastika (which still jars in our European eyes). The Open Hand – a large metallic depiction of a hand / dove mounted on a pole, with a ball-bearing base that it allows it to rotate in the wind. These constructs are situated in a large open & unshaded concrete paved space – originally designed to allow the people to congregate and celebrate their democratic institutions, but one which never allowed for the fact that temperatures here can reach 50 degrees in summer. Brutal architecture combined with brutal weather does not make for an easy experience.

The Tower of Shadows

View of the Capitol Complex from the Martyrs Memorial

The Open Hand

Last stop the High Court, another concrete edifice but with pillars painted in primary colours and colour-coded courtrooms. Like the other buildings in the complex, this one also reflects Le Corbusier’s obsession with keeping his structures cool and controlling the diffusion of light (though now it has air-conditioning, no-one much cares anymore).

The High Courts

Tour over and in complete contrast, we ambled off next door to visit a rock garden built over the course of 50 years by a former municipal worker, Nek Chand, in an attempt to be creative with landfill rubbish. A little like the Forbidden Corner in the Yorkshire Dales, it started as a hobby and became an obsession. There’s about 50 acres of walls & passageways decorated with smashed bathroom ceramics, forests of trees made from mud and mirror shards, models of animals and people, mock temples with flowing waterfalls – quite marvellous, but busy with Indian tourists who seemed more intent on selfies than appreciating the surroundings.

‘People’ from Nek Chand’s Rock Garden (the stuff of nightmares….)

A quick trip back to the Kaptain’s Retreat hotel (in a bizarre coincidence, owned by Kapil Dev!), a lunch in a lovely, but highly generic restaurant (cheered at least by a mega-mix of British mid-80’s classics) before rushing off for the train to Amritsar. The briefest of stops.

Chandigarh was not our favourite place it must be admitted, but at least a fascinating insight into a social experiment. Personally we were not convinced it had worked particularly well. It felt more like an architectural playground, a sandpit for messing around with modernism, as opposed to a genuine attempt to construct a better city that could improve the lives of its inhabitants. A realisation of Le Corbusier’s genius? For us, probably not……….