At the midnight hour on the night of 14-15 August, India became an independent nation after about 200 years of colonial rule. This was accompanied by a turbulent period that resulted in political changes arising from the partition, to form a new Islamic state. 88 million people were affected, as the new maps for were being drawn. The aftermath of the bloody and tumultuous partition left the government to deal with urban congestion as a result of millions of refugees and in Punjab, the absence of an administrative center and capital city. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru called for ‘a modern India’ that would ‘step out from the old to the new’.

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For Punjab, the most cost-effective solution would have been to adopt an existing city as the new capital; advice against the immense financial capital required to build a new city notwithstanding, in March 1948, the government of Punjab decided to build a new capital from scratch. This move, backed by Nehru, was symbolic for a nation in pursuit of defining its identity, more so against the West. For Nehru, it was the perfect exercise to push India towards modernization – according to him; rigid traditions shackled progress and progressive thought. During the inaugural ceremony of Chandigarh he famously announced, ‘Let this be a new city, unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future.’

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The call to modernization saw the coming up of large hydroelectric dams, iron and steel plants, airlines and new cities. It was the educated, westernized elite that ushered in the task of building the ‘temples of modern India’, in Nehru’s words. It would inspire a liberated outlook in the citizens and bring an end to the ethnic violence.

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At a seminar on architecture Nehru said:’…without being very accurate or precise, architecturally considered, for the last few hundred years, India was static and the great buildings we admire really date back to a considerable time. Even before the British came, we had become static. In fact, the British came because we are static. A society, which ceases to change, ceases to go ahead, necessarily becomes weak and it is an extraordinary thing how that weakness comes out in all forms of creative activity.’

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To implement the grand plans for Chandigarh, American architects Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki were called in. The brief stated the Garden City Movement as the fundamental ideal for the city. The sudden death of the architects made way for Le Corbusier and his team of architects. Corbusier was the idolized figure of modern architecture. He designed the Master Plan, the Capitol Complex, the city museum and school of art and prepared the guidelines for the commercial center. The Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew, assisted by a team of nine Indian architects and planners, designed a majority of buildings within the city. The “style of architecture” was made critical-it could not look colonial, or India, but had to look modern.

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Corbusier’s idea of modern life was derived from the image of a noble savage-in a world that was free from corruption and the aim of architecture being the machine for the generation of aesthetic and poetic forms necessary for the liberation and deliverance of this modern man. He recorded his thoughts on India as a ‘humane and profound civilisation…poor but proportioned.’ Nehru, although, didn’t share his counterpart’s fascination of India, with its villages-according to him, it was a regressive and backward way of life. Both professed their faith in modernity, although, for Nehru it was a vision of material and technological change, and for Corbusier, it was a yearning of returning to the primitive.

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Thus, India’s brush with modernity was replete with dichotomy. The city of Chandigarh is thus a result of the coalition of two different ideas, where their confirmation of each other was misguided. It is interesting to note that in India, too, there was contradiction of ideas. While both Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi agreed that colonisation lead to disruption of indigenous industries and livelihoods, their ideas for the future of the country were paradoxical. Gandhi believed in a self-sustaining village to become a model for the economic and social development. Nehru, on the other hand, believed in the synthesis of the United States and Soviet Union models.

After Gandhi’s death in 1948, Nehru’s principles prevailed and he set up huge mining and manufacturing public sector undertakings, and implemented five-year national development plans.

 

Education was always seen as a tool of liberation, even during the British regime. When Lord Macaulay proclaimed that, ‘I have never found one amongst them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,’ he was sending out a message that English imbibed universality and in order to study the subjects like history, science and technology it was essential to learn English; that Sanskrit and Arabic were wholly inadequate.

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Colonisation, under the colonial rule, was justified as the ‘white man’s burden’ to spread the universal principles of liberty, equality, democracy, science, etc. Nehru’s ideology was similar in nature. He developed a series of scientific, educational and cultural institutions. It was similar in spirit as that of colony but different in its form. It ‘was the reciprocal response of the colonised, the self-empowering act of dissolving contradiction by simultaneously rejecting and appropriating the unsolicited gift of colonisation,’ as Vikramaditya Prakash writes in his book ‘Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier’.

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This, in turn, lead to imported modernity, and us playing catch up with the West. The buildings built by Corbusier were often criticised for the same. They were regarded as foreign, disconnected and “unIndian” in some sense. William J.R. Curtis, in his book ‘Modern Architecture since 1900’s lauded Le Corbusier’s designs as a fine synthesis of different sources:

 

‘Indeed, the genesis of [Le Corbusier’s] monumental vocabulary [in Chandigarh] seems to have involved a prodigious feat of a abstraction in which devices from the Classical tradition – the grand order, the portico-were fused with Le Corbusier’s generic system of forms in concrete (the “five points”, the brise soleil, etc.) and in turn cross-bred with Indian devices like the ‘chattri’, the trabeated terraces, balconies, and loggias of Fatehpur Sikri.’

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Charles Correa writes in ‘Chandigarh: The View from Benaras’:

 

‘India is an ancient land. Over the centuries there have been other new cities like Chandigarh and other prophets like Le Corbusier, Fatehpur Sikri, Patrick Geddes, Edwin Lutyens, Golconda, Mandu. Today many of them are not perceived as foreign elements but as integral parts of the Indian landscape…India as a blotting paper. Who knows? A hundred years from now, perhaps Chandigarh will also fit seamlessly into the Punjabi ethos; perhaps it will be perceived as a famous old Indian town, and Le Corbusier will be acknowledged…as the greatest Indian architect of them all?‘

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Nehru and Corbusier’s grand plan to make Chandigarh a city that would eventually serve as a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future, did not bode well for its citizens and also didn’t inspire the modern movement.

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If Modernism in India failed, the failure cannot be attributed to it being Western or because it implemented universal ideals. People accept the foreign quite easily as their own if it is useful and beneficial to them; modernism came top-down and the citizens, in whose name it was being exercised, were not properly represented. Also, beyond the master plan, the city’s claim to modernity was settled through appearances-the city could not look colonial, or Indian, but had to look modern. This question of the style of architecture was made critical. These symbols and plans didn’t elevate Indians from poverty and reduce the economic gap, if anything, the gap widened. The architecture, on one hand was born from a complex idea, in case of the Capitol Complex, and it might not have translated itself well to the people. On the other hand, it was so driven by industrialisation and aping the West in its aim to ‘inspire’ the populace, that it might not have rendered the idea of development too one-dimensional.

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In today’s scenario, too, the word ‘development’ gets thrown around in speeches and debates that discuss the vision for the future of the country and the world at large. In India, the model seems to be centered on trade and being business-friendly at the cost of providing cheap labour and sops. What it fails to consider is the fact that development and measuring and justifying it, like the GDP, are one-dimensional and take into account only physical ‘growth’. These are symbolic of a certain kind of development, but are too one-dimensional to define the spirit of modernity or a ‘a modern’ period in time. The question prevails: are we truly modern?