by Jerry Pinto
Most of new Bhopal consisted of people who had come from outside. They had shifted there when Bhopal became the capital of Madhya Pradesh. The majority were government servants who had come from Mahakoshal, Chhattisgarh, Nagpur, Rewa, Gwalior etc. They carried with them new convictions and conventions of work culture, codes of conduct that regulated the different layers of the bureaucratic hierarchy. They also brought with them dialects of Hindi and Marathi. The notion that they belonged to a new state called Madhya Pradesh took time to sink in: for long, they continued to belong to their erstwhile states and held on to their cultural roots. This made Bhopal unwittingly cosmopolitan and diverse. The establishment of a huge BHEL plant also brought in technological culture and its own brand of modernism.
The most exciting part of someone living in Bhopal, from the 1970s to the end of 1980s, was to be witness to the ultimate integration of all these diverse trends into a liberal, modern and forward-looking culture. The Bharat Bhavan, a multi-arts complex nestling on the banks of the big lake, promoted abstract art, classical music, complex poetry, innovative ideas and fresh interpretations, experimental theatre and dance. Bhopal’s National Museum of Man attempts to depict the evolution of Homo sapiens across millennia and its State Museum of Archaeology displays priceless riches of antiquity.
In 1984, Bhopal suffered one of the worst industrial tragedies ever. The Bhopal Gas Tragedy killed thousands and affected lakhs of people. The city endured the damage, the loss, the hurt with fortitude and patience and was up on its feet while the dead were still being cremated or buried. Bhopal, therefore, is also a name of a warning as to what man can do to man.
Bhopal is a buzzing crowded capital but still very green, expanding but retaining its urban memories, cosmopolitan but caring for roots. Apart from being a centre of culture and innovation, Bhopal is close to three magnificent monuments: the primitive Bhimbetka caves, the incomplete massive Shiva temple of Bhojpur and the tranquil stupas of Sanchi. Taj-ul Masjid in Bhopal’s old city is epical in dimension. Bhopal nurtures a lyrical impulse, and an imagination that creates an ennobling vision.
Chandigarh
An experiment in modern living
Chandigarh is the one Indian city that was quite literally built from scratch. It is a carefully planned habitat full of straight, tree-lined roads and evenly divided sectors housing elegant townships and colonies. It consciously expresses Jawaharlal Nehru’s dream of a modern India, which he wished to be less of a medieval mess and more of a manageable, functional, even idyllic place.
The city was grafted on to a site that was once a vast stretch of fields dotted with villages. A temple in the area dedicated to a mother goddess called Chandi—an avatar of Shakti—gave the city its name.
The villages and fields on which the city was built had many layers of history hidden underneath. During excavations in the 1950s and 1960s, as Chandigarh’s foundations were being laid, the remains of a 3000-year-old Harappan civilization were revealed. Potsherds, stone implements, ornaments and copper arrowheads emerged regularly. One imagines that the ghost of that ordered ancient civilization would have smiled to see the lost art of planned cities return to India after nearly three millennia.
Chandigarh was designed and constructed primarily as the new capital of the state of Punjab. However, it also had another objective: to rehabilitate refugees from Pakistan and make up for the deep loss of Lahore, a city dear to Punjabis everywhere and one, which to the dismay of Indians, was lost to them after Partition.
On the day India became independent, the state of Punjab was also divided into two. Lahore, the state capital, located in west Punjab, went to Pakistan. The eastern part of the region that remained in India became a new state, without a capital. The inhabitants of the region, particularly the refugees from Pakistan, sorely missed Lahore, a beautiful city that was central to local legends. The hill city of Shimla was made the acting capital. It was a pretty but provincial town that could not fill the cultural and emotional gap left by the loss of Lahore. What could balance the loss of Lahore was only a truly spectacular city—a new city. This is what makes Chandigarh so interesting. Most other cities are spontaneously generated. A small settlement emerges. It grows into a village by virtue of what it has to offer. More and more people are attracted and slowly it becomes a town. Eventually after millions of people accumulate and the government is systematized into a municipal corporation, the residents can say that they live in a city. In Chandigarh’s case, the government of Punjab willed a city into being. It was a huge experiment, but in the 1950s and 1960s many such experiments were taking place across the world.
The government of Punjab selected a young engineer, P.L. Verma, to find the most appropriate site for a city that would become the permanent capital of the state. Verma and his team of engineers favoured the concept of a large independent town. However, most of the bureaucrats and politicians felt that a small settlement should be attached to an already existing town. They felt this would be cheaper, especially since the state had a small budget. On the other hand, each politician was eager that the capital be built in his area and tried to influence Verma’s choice of location.
But Verma was not a man to be influenced nor was he a man who could be discouraged. It was essentially due to his dedicated and relentless efforts that the government of Punjab finally accepted the idea of an independent township. After investigating a number of sites, his team selected the existing site of Chandigarh, which met almost all the requirements for a new city. It was a flat, gently sloping plain of agricultural land dotted with groves of mango trees, and marked the sites of twenty-four villages or hamlets. To the northeast were the foothills of the Himalayas, the Shivalik Range, rising abruptly to 1524 metres. They acted as a dramatic natural backdrop. There was one seasonal stream, Patiali ki Rao, on the west of the city and another, the Sukhna Choe, on the east. A third, smaller seasonal stream flowed through the very centre of Chandigarh. Today, the area along this stream has been turned into a series of public gardens called the Leisure Valley.
In March 1948, the government of Punjab, in consultation with the government of India, approved 114.59 sq km of land at the foot of the Shivalik Hills in Ropar district as the site of the new capital.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, was intimately involved with the Chandigarh project and finalized the decision at once. On his visit to the project site on 2 April 1952, he announced, ‘The site chosen is free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and old traditions. Let it be the first expression of our creative genius flowering on our newly earned freedom. Let it be a new town symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past, and an expression of the nation’s faith in the future. The new capital of Punjab will be christened as Chandigarh—a name symbolic of the valiant spirit of the Punjabis. Chandigarh is rightly associated with the name of Goddess Chandi—Shakti, or power.’
In the late 1940s, very few Indian architects were professionally trained in town planning, so it was necessary to look abroad for a man to carry out the Chandigarh scheme. The search led to America and a renowned planner, Albert Mayer. He was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the large architectural firm of Mayer, Whittlesey and Glass in New York.
Soon after his appointment in 1950, Mayer wrote to Nehru: ‘I feel in all solemnity that this will be a source of great stimulation to city building and planning in India—it will be the synthesis and integration in the world to date of all that has been learned and talked of in planning over the past thirty years. Yet, I feel we have been able to make it strongly Indian in feeling and function, as well as modern.’
His brief was to prepare a master plan for a city of half a million people. It must show the location of major roads and areas for residences, businesses, industries and recreation. He was also to make detailed building plans for the Capitol Complex, the City Centre, and important government facilities.
Although Mayer’s c
ontract did not insist on detailed architectural schemes, he felt that one should not isolate planning from architecture. Consequently, his talented younger partner, Albert Nowicki, sketched conceptual schemes for the image of the city in detail.
The master plan that they conceived had a fan-shaped outline filling the site between the two seasonal river beds. They located the Capitol Complex against the background of the Shivalik Hills, at the northern edge of the city. The City Centre was marked in the middle. Two linear parklands ran from the northeast to the southwest. Mayer wanted to create a self-sufficient city, not too large and one that would be surrounded by green belts. Areas for business, industry and cultural activities were clearly demarcated.
What would Mayer’s Chandigarh have looked like? We will never know. In August 1950, Nowicki died in a plane crash. Mayer was devastated and withdrew from the project altogether. Their vision of Chandigarh, contained in the many conceptual maps on the drawing board, had to be translated into reality under an able leader. Thus eminent French architect and urban theorist, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le Corbusier was invited to carry these plans through.
He chose to retain many of their ideas such as the basic framework of the master plan and its components; the Capitol Complex, City Centre, besides the university, industrial area and linear parkland. Even the neighbourhood unit they envisaged was retained. However, their curving outlines were redesigned into a more functional vision, one that was based on the shape of a rectangle. Le Corbusier felt that the buildings ought to reveal ‘honesty of materials’. This roughly translated into exposed and rough brick and boulder stone masonry. These unfinished concrete surfaces in geometrical structures became the signature form of the city, softened by landscaped gardens and parks.
Le Corbusier saw the master plan of Chandigarh as analogous to a living organism. According to the city’s historians, he saw a clearly defined head (the Capitol Complex, Sector 1), heart (the City Centre, Sector 17), lungs (the Leisure Valley, innumerable open spaces and a green sector), the intellect (the cultural and educational institutions), the circulatory system (the network of roads), and the viscera (the industrial area). His concept of the city was based on four major functions: living, working, care of the body and spirit, and circulation. A walk through the city of Chandigarh shows you the elegance of his vision.
The Capitol Complex has three architectural masterpieces: the Secretariat, the High Court and the Legislative Assembly. In its centre stands the giant metallic sculpture ‘The Open Hand’. This is the official emblem of Chandigarh, and symbolizes the city’s willingness to be ‘open to give and open to receive’.
The city serves as the capital of two states: Punjab and Haryana. However, administratively, it is not under the jurisdiction of either state, and is controlled by the Centre and is classified as a union territory. The governor of Punjab is the administrator of Chandigarh.
It has two satellite townships—Panchkula and Mohali—and the triangle of these three urban habitats is collectively called Chandigarh Tricity. When the city was initially built, there was considerable scepticism. It did not seem as if it belonged to the Indian urban world characterized by crowds, colour and noise. The streets looked large and empty and the public spaces seemed oversized and disproportionate. However, over time, Chandigarh has come into its own. As new generations of citizens inhabited it, they infused it with a throbbing and youthful spirit. The famous Rock Garden created by road inspector Nek Chand out of urban waste materials is an internationally famous example of the city’s inventive spirit. It is now seen as an example of a new category of art works called Outsider Art.
Today one can see two forces trying to ‘unplan’ the planned city. One is through the spontaneous way in which new citizens takeover streets and shopfronts and build homes on available land to create a bustling lively city. This often works quite well with the old structure and only makes the city more dynamic and energetic. The other is the intense way of real estate developers who love re-shaping the city for their own profit. It will be interesting to see what happens to Chandigarh in the coming decades.
A city of the mind
Nayantara Sahgal
India is so old that sometimes we forget how young its youngest city is and why there is a city by the name of Chandigarh at all.
Years before any such place had even been thought of, India had been torn apart by the shock called Partition. We know the facts—that Bengal and Punjab were divided to make a new nation, Pakistan, but it is hard, so long after the event, to recall the suffering that both Indians and Pakistanis went through at that time. Millions of them were uprooted from their homes, with nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to. The terrifying sights they had seen and the dangers they had faced during the Partition riots must have haunted many of them.
Nayantara Sahgal is the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and Sinclair Fiction Prize. She is a political commentator and novelist.
The slice of Punjab that was in India needed a capital because the old capital, Lahore, was now in Pakistan. A new one needed to be constructed. And it would have to be built from scratch. A city would have to come up out of nothing, in the same way that a story is constructed, or a poem, when you take a blank sheet of paper, let your imagination go to work, and start putting words upon the page. Constructing anything starts in the mind, whether it is a bridge you are building, or a skyscraper, or a sonnet. It starts like an itch in your mind—some would call it inspiration—and makes you get down to the hard labour of bringing that itch of an idea to life.
Chandigarh, too, started as an idea and those who were imagining it knew it was going to be different from any city in India because it would be brand new. This would set it apart from the rest of India’s towns and cities, most of them full of historic landmarks, from ancient monuments to ancient trees, and other reminders of their long histories. But what would make it truly different would be the new beginning this city would symbolize for a province whose people had lost their homes and livelihoods, and hopes and dreams of the future. Bricks and mortar can’t make up for the loss of a whole past—all the sights, sounds, surroundings and memories that add up to what we think of as ‘home’—but the solid business of construction, of laying brick upon brick, can hold out the promise that life does go on after death and destruction, and that there is always a future for people who are brave enough to build one. That was the kind of promise Chandigarh was meant to be.
World famous French architect, Le Corbusier, was chosen to convert this dream into reality. He had a team of Indian and European architects working under him and it soon became clear that Chandigarh was going to have a look and feel and personality all its own.
When I first saw Chandigarh in 1960, it had been mathematically laid out with broad avenues and city centres. It had a rose garden, a rock garden, and a lake, and nature had gifted it with a range of lovely low hills. Le Corbusier’s High Court building reminded me of pictures I had seen of massive antique Egyptian temples. His legislative assembly building, where Punjab’s elected politicians would meet to make laws, did not look like any state parliament I had ever seen. This was startling architecture and it made for a lot of discussion and debate. Some people liked it, some did not, but everybody argued about it. It made the people take a fresh look at the city coming up around them and it shook them loose from their old set-and-fixed ideas about how buildings should look and how they should be furnished. When private homes came to be built, some owners became adventurous enough to use bold bright colours for interior and outer decoration, which had been used only in village homes before. Whether they realized it or not, citizens were being inspired by the architecture around them, which is exactly what art and music and architecture, or a novel, should do for people: give them new ways of looking at things.
In time, the people who settled in Chandigarh began to think of themselves as rather special, and not only because of its originality. In the pro
cess of living there, they had become what most Indians are not—civic-minded. They cared enough about their city to observe its laws and keep it clean. It is true that other cities have long proud histories, but Chandigarh must be the only city in India whose citizens are proud enough of it to keep it clean!
Chandigarh became a personal experience for me when my husband built a house in Sector 5 on the boulevard facing the lakes, designed by one of Le Corbusier’s team. Pierre Jeanneret was a genius and geniuses have some strange ideas. The house he built had a huge ramp instead of a staircase. I wanted a staircase. We quarrelled, he in half-French, half-English. ‘Le ramp est magnifique. Le ramp is the signature of the house. It stays.’ I am glad I lost the argument and the ramp stayed. It gives the house its unique ‘Chandigarh’ look, and is probably the reason why Jawaharlal Nehru named it ‘Anokha’.
Chennai/Madras
We have culture
The coast of present-day Tamil Nadu buzzed with local markets, international trade and political intrigue from as early as the first century AD. The production and sale of calico cloth and the spice trade brought money into the area. The region had extensive trade links with southeast Asia and China on one side and the Gulf and west Asia—via Sri Lanka and the west coast—on the other. The ancient kingdom of Tondaimandalam had its military headquarters situated at Puzhal, at the northwest frontiers of modern-day Chennai, and was an integral part of these trade routes. On the hinterland, these networks spread their tentacles all over the Deccan, connecting with the many dynasties that rose and fell there.
