Chandigarh's shopping mall complex

After Le Corbusier's architecture and Nek Chand's rock garden, Chandigarh's latest showpiece is a 1.15 million square foot shopping mall, three seven-storey business towers and a deluxe 213-room hotel spread out over a 20-acre site near the railway station. Developed by Larsen & Toubro since 2007, Elante is the new happening place. Last weekend the band Parikrama - who promote themselves as the "granddaddies of rock and roll" - were performing in the expanse of its fountain court. The city's gentry flocked to quaff beer in bars, eat tandoori at "Pirates of the Grill" and shop at Hamleys and Hidesign. Its outlet of the designer coffee shop chain, Mocha, is a smart take on Le Corbusier's modernism - bare brick walls, coloured cubes set in teak, and faithful replicas of his signature line in furniture.

But there is more going on. Disparagers of shopping malls as giddy urban shrines to conspicuous consumption might ask: can such places become hubs of education and culture? In Punjab and Haryana's tri-city, comprising Chandigarh-Mohali-Panchkula, the festivities at Elante were funded by the British Council. It has opened a large vividly designed space in the business centre, and the British have further ramped up their presence by posting a full-fledged deputy high commissioner - their sixth in India.

The heyday of the conventional library may be fading, explained Rob Lynes, British Council's India head. "What we want to do is to create interactive, web-intensive, social media platforms that will help our audience access information and content quickly." Almost on cue, the Canadians have opened shop next to the Brits in Chandigarh's mall complex.

This isn't surprising. The two countries are host to Punjab's largest overseas diaspora. There are an estimated 2.3 million Punjabi speakers in Britain - a sizeable number from Indian Punjab - and spoken Punjabi is about as commonplace as chicken tikka masala. When David Lelliott, a career diplomat, saw postings in Chandigarh and Hyderabad advertised on his Foreign Office website, he studied both jobs carefully before opting for Chandigarh. "Many Punjabis are now third-generation British - they're confident, educated and well established in public and political life. They're also investing back in Punjab. The opportunities in trade, industry and education are enormous."

Sunjeev Sahota, the 32-year-old visiting British-Punjabi novelist, was the star of the Chandigarh launch at panel discussions and Q & As. Mr Sahota grew up in Yorkshire, took a degree in mathematics at Imperial College, London, and later worked in a leading insurance company. He'd never read a novel till he picked up Midnight's Children at 18 and began to write after hours. His first novel, Ours Are the Streets (Picador; Rs 350), came out in 2011 to unanimous critical praise; he has just been named in Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists.

His subject matter is bleak: a story not of multicultural assimilation but of deepening alienation and fractured identity. The protagonist, the son of a Pakistani taxi driver in Sheffield, gets his white working-class girlfriend pregnant, marries her and, eventually, becomes radicalised as a jihadi. Ironically, his target as a suicide bomber is one of Britain's biggest shopping malls, Meadowhall, derisively nicknamed "Meadowhell". Mr Sahota's gripping narrative is coloured by a rich mix of Yorkshire and Punjabi-Urdu dialects.

Away from the mall complex, I revisited Chandigarh's famous sites - and was disappointed. Le Corbusier's legislature building is barred for security reasons; access to his monumental "Open Hand" symbolic sculpture is also restricted. It faces the high court where the reflecting pool is empty of water, its façade disfigured by dirty coolers and water tanks. An outraged citizen told me that a judge had ordered a Le Corbusier tapestry to be cut up to install airconditioning.

The imposing museum with its treasures of Gandhara sculpture and Pahari miniatures (lucidly explained in texts by Punjab's remarkable civil servants-turned-art scholars such as M S Randhawa and B N Goswamy) is well maintained. Sadly, however, it seems to evoke little public interest. A friend and I were the sole visitors in the afternoon, surrounded by dozing attendants and reception staff shuffling to sell badly printed catalogues. Chandigarh's shopping mall complex is so acute it seems to overwhelm a richer past.