If New Delhi belongs in an imperial portfolio of Durbars and Imperial Progresses, Chandigarh belongs in a nationalist album, with the Constitution and the five-year plans. Building it was one of the foundational gestures through which India oriented and located itself in the modern world: it exemplified at its purest one impulse in the nationalist imagination of the city. Although a provincial capital, Chandigarh from its inception had the status of a national project "" Nehru took a personal interest in it, and it was generously funded by the national government. The site was desolate but spectacular: 400 kms north of New Delhi, on a plain that sloped slowly, beneath wide blue skies, towards the Himalayan foothills.
'The site chosen,' Nehru explained, 'is free from existing encumbrances of old towns', which could make the new city symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by traditions of the past... an expression of the nation's faith in the future.' But Chandigarh was also, and ultimately most decisively, the fantasy of its architect.
Twice in the twentieth century India has been visited by architectural megalomaniacs: Le Corbusier began work on Chandigarh barely twenty years after imperial New Delhi had been completed to Lutyen's plans.
When two Indian civil servants arrived at his Paris apartment in the winter
of 1950 and invited him to design the proposed city, he was privately ecstatic. 'It is,' he noted in his diary, 'the hour that I have been waiting for "" India, that humane and profound civilisation', which hadn't 'yet created an architecture for modern civilisation' had now turned to him.
In his design, Le Corbusier remained blithely unencumbered by any understanding of the world he was building for. His role was that of the prophetic artist, and he played it to perfection. The initial plan was outlined after a bare glimpse of the site, a few days after his arrival in India and with Lutyens' redstone megaliths lodged firmly in his mind (he had come via New Delhi).
Maxwell Fry, a collaborator on the project, remembered the moment: 'Corbusier held the crayon in his hand and was in his element. 'Voila la gare,' he said, 'et voici la rue commerciale,' and he drew the first road on the new plan of Chandigarh. 'Voici la tete, he went on... 'Et voila l'estomac, le cite-centre.' Devoted to authority, Corbusier saw himself as a modern-day Colbert, and in Nehru he believed he had found his very own Sun King. Whenever he stumbled across some local obstacles to his ideas, the regular refrain in Corbusier's notebooks was a simple injunction: 'Write to Nehru'.
Engaged in what he saw as a pharaonic project (working in India seemed to teach him 'the advantages of slavery in high and noble works of architecture'), he preened himself for the role: 'Be implacable, whole, haughty, in charge. Make demands.'
Le Corbusier was, to be sure, an odd choice as democratic India's first architect. But the sheer audacity of his conception, and of Nehru's commitment to it, is revealing. The design of Chandigarh expressed one idea of Nehru's idea of a modern India: the sense that India must free itself of both the contradictory modernity of the Raj and nostalgia for its indigenous past. It had to move forward by one decisive act that broke both with its ancient and its more recent history.
The rationalist, modernist strain in Nehru's thinking here obliterated the attachment to the heritage of an Indianness rooted in the past. Chandigarh boldly divested itself of history, rejecting both colonial imagery and nationalist sentimentalism or ornament. The literal, utilitarian names of its axial avenues (Madhya Marg, Uttar Marg "" Central Avenue, North Avenue) recount no nationalist history (no ubiquitous MG Road here). It has no nationalist monuments, because Le Corbusier specifically banned them. The city's radical meaning lay in its cultural unfamiliarity, its proposal for the new. It refused to concede anything to its location, and acted as a kind of shock to India's built environment. In celebrating a wholly alien form, style and material, it aspired to a neutrality, a zero degree condition that would make it equally relevant to the claims upon it of any and all cultural or religious groups. Just as the English language placed all Indians, at least in principle, at a disadvantage of equal unfamiliarity, so, too Chandigarh could not be seized and possessed by any one group. Even those familiar with colonial architectural idioms, the bungalow and compound, could not immediately usurp this brave new reinforced concrete world.
Chandigarh cheerfully ignored a topic that had troubled both nationalists and some of the British: the idea of an Indian 'national style', endlessly debated in the early decades of the twentieth century by men like E B Havell, Ananda Coomaraswamy and the Tagores, Rabindranath and Abanindranath.
Chandigarh's evasion of historical tradition generated its own stories, that struggled to give the place cultural resonance. Hence the forced claims of architects and architectural historians that its designs had originated in the figure of the primeval man (Purusha), or was based on the principle of Vastushastra, the ancient Indian science of architectural construction; or that its buildings refer to the Dewan-e-Khas at Fatehpur Sikri, or to Hindu temple complexes.
These attempts to make it recognisable, to locate it in India, all miss the
point. Chandigarh's deliberate renunciation of a national style was itself a gesture of acknowledgment that political authority in India now had to face outwards too, that its sovereignty had to be internationally recognisable: its purpose was to place India in the world. In contrast to New Delhi and colonial architecture, built to force effects upon Indians, Chandigarh was intended to produce an international impact. Like that original monument to modern republican power, Washington DC, Chandigarh chose to speak a certain nationalist poetry in the best cosmopolitan accent it knew.
Yet if Chandigarh echoed anything on the Indian landscape, it was New Delhi. It reproduced the same fetishism of the capitol. Every Chandigarh address encoded fairly precise information about its owner's standing in the bureaucratic and economic hierarchy.
Extracted from The Idea of India, published by Hamish Hamilton, distributed by Penguin Books India Ltd, Rs 595, 263 pages
