In Defence of My City (sort of)

    It was one of those last few dying days of spring in Chandigarh, when the breezyApril gives way to an unforgiving May and walking outdoors becomes synonymous with getting cooked in a furnace..  I wanted to have a haircut, and  as I made my way to a barber’s shop - run by a  gentleman from Western UP - located in a Sikh-majority neighbourhood on the southern fringes of Chandigarh, I was thinking about an unflinchingly critical article (https://scroll.in/magazine/863986/seventy-years-on-chandigarh-hasnt-lived-up-to-corbusiers-expectations-or-nehrus-boasts) about the 70^th anniversary of Chandigarh, published a couple of months ago. As I sipped orange juice at a stall run by a gentleman from Bihar, I read the article once again and felt my annoyance with it grow. On my way back, now feeling much lighter, I picked up chicken momos and headed back to my institute plotting my response to an article that described my city as a “modern-day monumental fossil”!  If a modern-day monumental fossil is a place where a Marathi-speaking person could walk to a Punjabi Sikh-majority neighbourhood, to have his hair cut by a man from UP, sample fruit-juice at a Bihari man’s stall and have his tongue singed by the chilly chutney prepared by a Nepali momo-seller, only to return to an institute, where the single-largest language is Malayalam, then it is a pretty unusual fossil indeed.

    One of my main grievances with Harshawardan Raghunandhan, the author of the article in question (henceforth “the author”), is that he provides very few specifics. He begins the article by giving a glaringly incomplete historical overview of the Chandigarh project, then proceeds to give a horrifyingly ill-informed crash-course on Le Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh. The article ends, quite abruptly, with a handful of loudmouthed judgments about the city with little or no justification provided.

    With that little rant let me state at the outset what I propose to write in the following paragraphs. Am I planning to glorify the city of Chandigarh? Far from it. I am not going to add any new points of my own extolling the virtues of living in Chandigarh.  In fact, I will spend the first few paragraphs helping the author’s case by highlighting some really miserable aspects of life in Chandigarh. I will then try and address (and hopefully debunk!) some specific points raised by the author.

***

    One of the first things I noticed when I first moved to Chandigarh some eight years ago, was the city’s shambolic public transportation system. I remember being stranded on dark streets, having missed my institute’s shuttle, waiting helplessly for a Chandigarh Transport Undertaking (CTU) bus that would take me towards my institute 11 kilometres away from Chandigarh’s city centre. CTU’s connectivity problem is not just limited to the fringes. I recall having spent nearly an hour waiting for a bus at the Sector 43 ISBT, one of Chandigarh’s public transportation nodes. Having spent the first 18 years of my life in Bombay I still find this lack of reliable public transportation and the consequent reliance on auto-rickshaws and app-based cab services strange and a little unsettling. 

    This lack of public transportation doesn’t come as a surprise when viewed in the context of the overall layout of the city. The bottom-line is that the city was planned for the middle classes and above; and in doing so the planners made a fatal error that urban planners have continued to repeat throughout the country. They assumed that urban elites would clean their homes, cook their own food or even be able to sleep peacefully without having a man in a uniform guard their front door. In other words, they  completely failed to accommodate the large floating population of domestic workers, security guards, construction workers etc. This meant that this floating population had to find refuge into rapidly mushrooming shantytowns (which the author mentions in his article) sprawling open spaces in the city, or out into one of the many old villages (for example, Burail)* that weren’t displaced when the city was built. Not unlike in other cities in India, civic authorities in Chandigarh have, in recent years, waged a war against these people, displacing them from the city’s grid to villages on the urban fringe. Sandwiched between the city’s grid and the airport is one such villages called Jagatpura, which I had the good fortune to visit as a part of a course on cities (conducted by Dr. Anu Sabhlok) along with my friends (Arul, Aniket and Prajwal). A tiny fraction of Jagatpura’s population consists of local Punjabi Sikh landlords, who till some of the land there. But a vast majority of the village’s population is made up of daily wage earners from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and in one case, even Nepal. The number of kuchcha hutments that house these people has exponentially increased over the past decade. We discovered over the course of our visits to the place that the reason for this explosion was demolition drives carried out elsewhere in the city. 

    The other problem created by Chandigarh’s American Suburbia-like cityscape is distances. This coupled with the fact that Chandigarh has somehow evolved commercial neighbourhoods that specialize in (and monopolize) specific kind of goods (for example, bathroom related hardware in Sector 22, electrical hardware in Sector 18, surgical equipment in Sector 16, wholesale groceries and vegetables in Sector 26) means one inevitably ends up travelling from one end of the city to another.
    Compare this with my home in the western suburbs of Bombay, where within a radius of 200 metres, one could buy anything from vegetables to train tickets to giant metallic cylindrical things (whose use I haven’t bothered to find out) to fish (both edible and rearable) to laptop computers to – until a few years ago, when the State Government finally decided to shut down the local cattle market – even buffaloes.  

    To summarise, I will, albeit reluctantly, have to agree with the author’s final analysis that seventy years on, the city has failed to live up to expectations of its founders. 

This brings me to the main point of my essay. Although I agree with the author’s overall conclusion, I find his article to be incredibly sloppy. The author is guilty of missing out on important facts, making interpretations that can only be described as shockingly ill-informed and passing baseless, frivolous judgments. Let me try and elaborate.

    I do not know if omission of an important fact is a crime, but in his haste to discredit Corbusier’s city, the author fails to mention that Corbusier wan'ts, in fact,  the first foreign architect appointed to the Chandigarh project. If one visits the City Museum in Sector 10, one can find on display blueprints of a fan-shaped city, completely different from Corbusier’s regimented orthogonal grid. This initial plan for the city was prepared by American architects Albert Meyer and Matthew Nowicki, who were appointed by Nehru in 1949.  When Nowicki died in a tragic plane crash, Meyer resigned and the project was subsequently awarded to Corbusier (along with Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew).

Further light is thrown on the author’s armchair scholarship when he mentions the “square-shaped sectors” of Chandigarh. Anyone who has bothered to look at a map of Chandigarh (a highly recommended activity before writing an article on Chandigarh!), will tell you that the city is made up of rectangular sectors. In fact, each sector is 800 metres by 1200 metres, which results in an area of 960000 square metres, a figure the author quite correctly provides. 

    It is hard to tell if it is a deliberate falsehood or another example of the author’s apparent dislike for facts, but his claim that “[t]here would be no room for industrial or military activity in Chandigarh...” is just laughable. In the version of the author’s article that appears on Scroll.in there is a photograph of Le Corbusier posing next to a picture of his Master Plan. Tucked away in the right hand side of the Master Plan is a region shaded with slanting lines depicting – yes, you guessed it right – the Industrial Area. In fact, Corbusier designed the Industrial Area as an ‘arm’ of a metaphorical person. The Capitol Complex was probably the ’head’. As for the military, Chandigarh and its environs have always been home to numerous wings of the Indian military. The Air Force has its Base Repair Depot here and occupies a significant portion of the city to house its staff. The headquarters of the Western Command of the Army are located at Chandimandir (from where the city derives its name). With staff drawn from all over the country, these institutions (along with large campuses of paramilitary forces such as ITBP and CRPF) have imparted a fairly cosmopolitan flavour to a city that was designed to be a provincial capital.

    The author’s claim that hurt me the most is his fantasy that the city’s plan would prevent anyone from imagining a place for themselves in the city (with the notable exception of career bureaucrats). Other than countless rick-shaw-pullers, auto-drivers, fruit-sellers, barbers, small shop owners who, despite innumerable encumbrances, have found their feet in this city, the one group of people who disprove the author’s assertion are the city’s students. The other ‘arm’ of the Corubusier’s metaphorical person is an institution whose genesis lies in violent displacement from Lahore – the Panjab University. One of the better public universities in India, for students across the region (J & K, Punjab, Himachal, Haryana, Uttarakhand) and even outside the region, the University is a hotly pursued destination. Sector 14, which in its entirety is the University’s campus, and its adjacent areas completely defy the image of a dull, bureaucratic city the author works so hard to create in his article. 

    I wonder what made the author believe that Chandigarh does not hold the popular imagination of India. I would like to claim (although I admit I have no data to back this claim) that Chandigarh is the most sung-about city in the country. Every year countless songs mentioning Chandigarh in some way are released. Apart from uncountably many Punjabi songs (Yaari Chandigarh Waliye, Chandigarh Waliye, Chandigarh Rehn Waliye for some examples), there are Himachali (Hawa Lagi Chandigarh Ri) and even Bollywood songs (Kala Chashma, Kaisi Dhaakad Hai)  that talk of Chandigarh as some fancy, cool place. 

    The author concludes his article by saying, “ In Chandigarh’s case, plan and monument alone could not guarantee a city in full." I couldn’t agree more. No city is perfect; and Chandigarh with its numerous shortcomings falls well short of the image of an ideal city its planner had in mind. But contrary to what the author would have us believe this city is alive and it’s kicking.           

*Google Earth images of the city offer some fascinating views of how these old villages interrupt Chandigarh’s perfect grid.

PS: Here is an interesting read on the architecture of the city: https://www.archdaily.com/806115/ad-classics-master-plan-for-chandigarh-le-corbusier
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dr. Syed Zeeshan Ali for his comments and suggestions and Karan "Bhatti" Bhatt for sharing the Himachali song with me.