In 1950 Le Corbusier was invited to develop this new capital city and prefecture for the Indian Punjab at the request of India's first Prime Minister Nehru, after India gained independence in 1947. Within the Indian Independence Act, the partition into India and Pakistan (West and East) was executed with the idea of separating Muslims from Hindus and Sikhs and vice versa. Punjab was divided between Pakistan and India, and Lahore, the capital, was given to Pakistan. Immediately after the new lines were established, about 15 million people crossed the borders. The government had to deal with a huge migration movement, and a massive amount of violence occurred on both sides of the border. Estimates of the number of deaths range around 500,000 or even more.
The reasons why Chandigarh was built are varied: to build a new capital for Punjab; to resettle people, to attract capital, to rebuild an economy; a symbol of India’s independence and military and strategic security against the neighboring hostile state of Pakistan; a new bureaucratic center, as Shimla, which was the temporary capital, couldn’t accommodate the full government machinery; a strategy to deal with the material and psychological loss of Lahore and to build an opposite of it, and also that city life had begun to appeal to the ordinary middle class or lower middle class Indian.
The site in Punjab for Chandigarh was selected in early 1948. For Nehru the site that was chosen was free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and traditions. As Norman Evenson quotes P.L.Varma, chief engineer of Punjab, and P.N. Thapar, a member of the Indian civil service, who became administrative head of the Capital Project in 1949, they were in search of “…a good modern architect who was not severely bound by an established style and who would be capable of developing a new conception originating from the exigencies of the project itself and suited to the Indian climate, available materials and the functions of the new capital.” (Evenson 1966: 25) Chandigarh was first planned by Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki in the shape of a leaf and connected to ideas of the garden city, then after Nowicki’s death, continued by Le Corbusier and his team Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew, and Maxwell Fry from 1951-1965. The shape of the city was remodeled from a leaf to a human body and continued the organic form language.
The city was divided by the European modern city planning principles of CIAM. Chandigarh is based on the Modulor, a measurement plan that relates to the human figure of a 1.83 m tall British man and which transfers an organic functionalism to urban space. The city appears as life itself, working through its own symbolic functionalism it reflects its power on the body and life of the subjects therein. The economic Chandigarh was to be an administrative city; it is the capital of the states of Haryana and Punjab. The Capitol Complex planned by Le Corbusier is next to the High Court and the Assembly Hall, lined by the massive office building. The sectors were linked to each other by a road and path network developed along the line of the 7 Vs, or a hierarchy of seven types of circulation patterns. The city plan is laid down in a grid pattern. The whole city has been divided into rectangular patterns, forming identical looking sectors; each sector measures 800 m by 1200 m. The sectors were to act as self-sufficient neighborhoods, each with its own market, places of worship, schools, and colleges. The assembly, the secretariat, and the high court, all located in sector 1, are the three monumental buildings designed by Le Corbusier. The city was to be surrounded by a 16-kilometer wide greenbelt that was to ensure that no development could take place in the immediate vicinity of the town, thus preventing suburbs and urban sprawl. In colonial settlement planning the green belt had an important impact as the distinction between town and country, described as uncivilized and civilized. When Chandigarh was built in the fifties, it was first planned for 150,000 people, later expanded to 500,000.
The city was considered the symbol of India’s independence and an entrance fee into the newly constructed era of post-colonialism. Marked by the main features of western modernity and symbols of ancient India, Chandigarh afforded the possibility to stand through and with these two references against colonialism. Chandigarh was the official city planning project of Indian post-colonialism and within this undertaking, it had the mission to make the assumed break between colonialism and post-colonialism visible and transfer the old agricultural India in a new state of industrialization. In addition to this, it should show a second break, the one between Pakistan and India, which manifested in the aesthetic difference to Lahore and its old Mogul architecture. Chandigarh was meant to foster the establishment of a new national confidence. In connection with this, Chandigarh was also granted a special role in learning. On one hand, it served as an educational institution for local architects regarding modern building. On the other hand, a structure of life was created which attempted to architecturally reinforce a new democratic system that was to be installed.
The term “City Beautiful” is still applied to Chandigarh today; thus the city established itself as a popular holiday and living area for the well-to-do. The connection between the City Beautiful Movement and the term City Beautiful is not clear. Le Corbusier planned Chandigarh in close relation to New Delhi, which was built by Edwin Lutyens in the beginning of the 20th century as an imperial city structure inspired by the style of beaux-arts. As Chandigarh calls itself a modernist city, the relation to an imperialist power structure within the city is still obvious. Albert Mayer, who is much more connected to the ideas of Critical Regionalism than the City Beautiful Movement, sees a lack in not connecting it with functionalism, as quoted by Ravia Kalia: “We want to create a beautiful city.... Since the City Beautiful concept was thrown out fifty years ago, and the functionalists and the sociologists took over, the concept of a large and compelling and beautiful unity has not been enriched by these important later additional and integral concepts, but has rather been replaced.... We have creatively fused them but we are unabashedly seeking beauty....” (Kalia 2000: 54) Nevertheless, there were about 7 million refugees coming from the other side of the border. Modernism was also appealing in that it provided housing for the masses. To look at Chandigarh, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry developed low-cost housing for Chandigarh and participated in the UN seminar on Housing and Community Planning in New Delhi in 1954 representing CIAM with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, where one event was to visit the construction site of Chandigarh.
Chandigarh was an important issue in its time. In the CIAM debates, Chandigarh and Brasilia were discussed, and examples of modern town planning were compared. Within the discussion of Habitat, Giedeon sees Chandigarh as an example of cultural empathy for the inhabitants. Contrary to this, Balkrishna Doshi comments in 1986, “I think that 20 years hence Chandigarh may not even be considered an Indian city because it gives us Le Corbusier’s sense of the future but not of Indian life. Indian communities live in groups, mohallas, there’s a mixing of families income-wise. There are a lot more social interactions. Indians like to live outdoors and indoors, and they like many more trees and shaded areas. This socio-economic interdependence of Indian communities was never considered Chandigarh. So you have streets, open spaces, houses – but you have no life!” (Kling 1997: 85) (1)
Chandigarh is often used to argue the failure or the functioning of modern architecture. However, this failure or functioning has to be analyzed by its governmental impact, as a city that was built in the era of decolonization and nation building. Chandigarh was not just meant to be a laboratory, it was meant to be a school, not just to learn modern architecture but to learn modern living. If architecture is the colonial activity par excellence, housing the population might be the postcolonial one. (MH)

(1) Quoted by John Meunier from an interview with Doshi conducted in 1986 by Carmen Kagal and published by the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, Ahmedabad


Sources:
Evenson, Norma (1966): Chandigarh. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gast, Klaus-Peter (2000): Le Corbusier, Paris-Chandigarh. Basel, Boston: Birkheauser
Kalia, Ravi (2000): Chandigarh: the making of an Indian. Dehli: Oxford University Press.
Kling, Blair B. (1997): "Shaping the Modern Worker through Architecture and Urban Planning: The Case of Jamshedpur." In: Prakash, Vikramaditya (Ed.) (1997): Theatres of Decolonization. Seattle: University of Washington.
Prakash, Vikramaditya (Ed.) (1997): Proceeding of Theatres of Decolonization. Seattle: University of Washington.
Prakash, Vikramaditya (2002): Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: the struggle for modernity in postcolonial India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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