The city was built as the new capital of Punjab following partition. Two pioneering American architects were originally assigned the task, Matthew Nowicki and Albert Mayer. They were inspired by the 'romantic picturesque' of Britain's garden city movement. Nowicki did have some reservations, he said 'This dream of some modern planners depends entirely upon ....a way of life alien to that of India'.
When Nowicki died in a plane crash, Mayer resigned and Le Corbusier was recruited to finish the job. The Swiss architect envisaged a modernest utopia where 'arithmetic, texturique and geometrics' would replace the 'oxen, cows and goats driven peasants, crossing the sun-scorched fields'. Chandigarh was always supposed to be a city of people though, more democratic than Delhi and this called for pedestrian piazzas , tree-lined avenues, houses facing traffic quiet roads, public gardens and the artificial Sukha lake.
Le Corbusier's plan was for low-density, low rise housing divided into 1 sq kilometre neighbourhood sectors, each with their own shops, schools and places for worship. Jawaharlal Nehru (independent India's first prime-minister) was pleased with the controversial city . 'It is the biggest example in India of experimental architecture. It hits you on the head, and makes you think. You may squirm at the impact but it has made you think and you imbibe new ideas'.
What really struck us on the rickshaw ride from the train station was how much space there was, and it was genuinely green (well browny-green) with lots of grassy area's and tree's along the streets.
The street layout really was like an Indian Milton Keynes, and there was a glaring problem with that, that we discovered when we found ourselves hurtling towards our first roundabout, nobody ever gives way on Indian roads! Everybody, including us, just pelted it at the roundabout and hoped that all the other buggers were going to get out of the way. I'm guessing that most of the time this somehow works, but it was pretty darn freaky, and due to the grid-like nature of the roads happened just a bit too frequently.
We headed for a hotel what looked like a reasonable hotel in the lonely planet, but it turned out to be extremely grotty. The only room they wanted to offer us had no light, no fan and a broken cistern. We let them know we would try a couple of other places and legged it swiftly.
Eventually we found a place not too far away on the same sector and watched as they appeared to take some other poor bugger's gear out of the room (with him not around) and get it prepared for us. I did ask whether there was a person currently staying there, but the manager assured me it was fine, and that this other person wouldn't mind at all that we had nicked his room while he was out.
After crashing out after a long day we went for a wander the next morning to explore our sector. These guys ran some food stalls that seemed to be dishing out super-cheap eats right through the night, so no wonder they were crashed out in their family hallway by the morning.
Handy gun shop. Never know when you might need one.
Clairy like the fishy detail on the back of this rickshaw.
Clean me in Punjabi no doubt.
Guru Sai Baba! With his enormous afro of spirituality. This restaurant was in some way affiliated with him.
We kept waiting for them to crack out their massive eighties ghetto blasters and bust us some funky moves, but it never happened.
The main reason we has stopped off in Chandigarh on our planned route north to Amritsar was to go and see Nek Chand's Fantasy Rock Garden. The lonely planet had seriously bigged it up as the work of a 'Junk Art Genius' not to be missed on passing through.
Following independence and partition as refugees flooded across the border with Pakistan, one of the newly appointed road-inspectors of Chandigarh was a man named Nek Chand. Struck by the waste generated by the village clearances to make way for the new city, Nek collected and took it back to his jungle home and gave it a second life as sculptural materials.
Eventually he had created tens of thousands of forms , but it wasn't until nearly 15 years later that they were offically discovered. A government survey crew stumbled across them as they were illegally occupying government land and should have offically been demolished. The local council recognised the garden as a cultural asset though and instead gave Chand 50 labourers and a paid salary so that he could devote himself to the project.
We had high hopes for this pretty barking sounding attraction, and headed off to the entrance via rickshaw.
The first thing we noticed was the sheer volume of cement involved. It was definitely more of a cement garden.
It was absolutely rammed with Indian families enjoying the spectacle.
The figures themselves were quite interesting, but there was an absolutely astonishing amount of repetition. Every model had been recreated from maybe ten to a hundred times! Some serious OCD stuff going on we thought.
Most of the sculptures were created from steel, cement and a lot of smashed up tileage.
I liked this effect with the bulbous bagged cement.
There were various phases of the garden that had obviously been opened of a period of time. This final section had some lovely mosaic work particularly on the little amphitheatre, but seemed to lack direction, and felt a bit like a slightly over decorated car-park.
Crazy cat.
Possible over-use of steel rods?
Token poor camel. Fortunately for him the rides seemed to only be about 25 yards and back.
Nice monkey.
I did quite like the stumpy concrete trees.
Odd- and slightly underwhelming.
I think we thought we'd probably seen most of it when we realised we had to go back on ourselves to reach the exit, but in fact we still had loads to go.
There was area after area of very similar, but differently themed sculptures.
By this point...it was starting to break us...and there were so many other people around, we kept getting caught in a queue to depart each section.
Arrrrrgh...get me out of here!
And finally the big back to front question mark...what was it all about. We'd really no idea at all.
Sadly whilst preparing to leave Chandigarh we found out our trip was to be cut short due to circumstances beyond our control. We managed to find an airline booking office (after being driven to at least three that had moved), and booked the flights that would take us back to London.
It was a shocking realisation. Our epic travels would be over in three days time...booooo!
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