Summary day 24

Monday 10 February

Chandigarh

We arrived early this morning in Chandigarh. It’s beautiful – a lovely city … green, clean, peaceful, with lots of open space, even cycle lanes! Demographically, Chandigarh feels different too – there seem to be more Sikhs here than other places that we’ve visited (although they make up only about 12% of the population).

We’d booked into our hotel last night, so that we could use our room as soon as we arrived this morning. We cleaned up and had breakfast then went off to explore the Rock Garden and some parks and the rose garden. We were intending to visit the Le Corbusier’s state parliament building, courthouse and ‘open hand’ monument, but that was only possible on a guided tour-fortunately, there was a guided tour available at 3 o’clock this afternoon that we could book onto.

Chandigarh has a really interesting history – the state capital of Punjab was historically Lahore, but following the partition of India in 1947 the western, mostly Muslim, part of Punjab was became part of Pakistan while they mostly seek and Hindu east remained in India. Lahore was in the west and so the India Punjab had no state capital. Another city could have been made into the state capital, but the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted a new modernist planned city to be built.

Last year we went to see an exhibition at the V&A called ’Tropical Modernism’, it was fascinating and explored the work of the British modernist architects who found it difficult to gain commissions in the more architecturally conservative UK during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but who were able to adapt European modernist architecture to suit tropical climates, particularly in India and many colonial African countries – big overhangs and deep window recesses to provide shade and lots of ventilation for cooling. The master plan for Chandigarh and some of the important buildings in the city was developed by the Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, but the British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were involved too.

The Rock Garden, is one of the most famous sites in India. The garden was started by the clearly rather eccentric Nek Chand Saini. Visiting it was one of the main reasons that Matthew wanted to come here. Nek Chand was a city engineer who collected materials from demolition sites around the city that he could recycle into a huge enchanted garden in a designated wooded valley that was a conservation zone close to the city centre. The garden is made up of interlocking courtyards and passages richly decorated with stones, concrete designs and stones. The garden was built covertly, unknown to the authorities and completely illegal. When the rich garden was discovered the some in the city wanted to demolish it, but after it became evident that there was huge public support Nek was employed by the city to further develop the garden with 50 staff! Nek Chand Saini died in 2015, but the garden continues to develop and is hugely pop. Matthew will no doubt want to write far more knowledgeably about the garden than I can.

When we’d done and found that we couldn’t just go to the Le Corbusier state buildings we walked back to our hotel through a series of beautiful interlocking parks – beginning with the Chandigarh War Memorial – shocking and tragic how many have died since independence.

Then through Bougainvillier Park (we saw some women rehearse a dance – looked like lots of fun); Leisure Valley ( with a curious miniature leaning Eiffel Tower and some improvised cricket games); then the rose garden (the biggest in Asia).

W didn’t have much time back at the hotel before we had to set off for the tour if the state buildings. That was brilliant – a really good guide and we were joined by a group of architecture students.