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Whose history is in India’s
regional capital?
book review of sabine v. fischer
“Chandigarh
was/ is who I am,” writes Vikramaditya Prakash, the author of
Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in
Postcolonial India. “The book, ostensibly and primarily about
the making of Chandigarh, is also about my own making” (1).
Chandigarh’s
Le Corbusier is both a historical and personal account: It
is historical in that it tries to explore the question of identity,
both of the city and its inhabitants, from the materials of architectural
history. The incorporation of personal history makes Chandigarh’s
Le Corbusier different from previous publications that relied
solely on historical documents, regional population statistics
or general aesthetic theories.
Raised and
educated in Chandigarh, the author is currently chair of the department
of architecture at the University of Washington. His father Aditya
Prakash received his architectural training in England and worked
as a junior architect under Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jane
Drew and Maxwell Fry in Chandigarh in the 1950’s. The elder Prakash
then became one of the first inhabitants of the new capital that
he helped to build.
The book is
not merely a personal narrative, however; The biographies of the
father and the son are coupled with the history of the Indian
nation’s new beginning in 1947. After tracing the footsteps of
his father’s career, the author quotes Jawaharlal Nehru’s legendary
speech for the awakening of India to “life and freedom”, held
at midnight of August 14-15 1947 when British Colonial rule came
to an end, after decades of political resistance led by Mahatma
Gandhi. The new prime minister Nehru set out to modernize the
nation of India, now independent, yet separated from Pakistan.
This entailed the construction of a new regional capital, since
Lahore had become part of the later. Chandigarh was to be the
city where independent India could promote the symbols of her
postcolonial identity; though the precise nature and meaning of
these symbols were yet to be discovered, invented and reinvented.
The literature
on and around Chandigarh is extensive. Prakash’s bibliography
lists 109 texts (2). Several books remain indispensable for their
detailed historical accounts. Ravi Kalia’s 1987 book Chandigarh:
In Search of an Identity (3) presents the most comprehensive
description of the historical events, from the choice of site
and the process of establishing the master plan to the subsequent
strategies for organizing the city. In her 1982 book Urban
Planning in the Third World: The Experience of Chandigarh (4),
Madhu Sarin offers a thorough look at the social history and the
evolution of the city’s unplanned sections. Other accounts focus
on the architect’s design intention: Mogens Krustrup opens the
horizons of Le Corbusier’s inventive imagery to readers, meditating
in particular on the symbolic aspects of the enamel doors of the
Capitol (5). Others focus on the evolution of Le Corbusier’s formal
vocabulary with little reference to the political and cultural
context; for example, Klaus-Peter Gast’s Paris – Chandigarh
(6) largely limits itself to proportional analysis.
Prakash’s
book differs from all the above mentioned works. Although he is
interested in questions of aesthetics and form, Prakash is more
concerned with their use as instruments in the search for a new
national identity than as expressions of universal geometry. He
focuses his research on how the Capitol’s forms and symbols reflect
the communication between the planning officials and the architects
in charge, and what they convey to Chandigarh’s inhabitants. One
could wonder why scholars have debated for decades on the origins
of Le Corbusier’s proportions and figuration, yet why they have
asked so little about those for whom the buildings were ostensibly
addressed. For whom are these symbols, commissioned by a state
in search of a new identity, designed by a French modernist?
Chandigarh’s
Le Corbusier is divided into five chapters which revolve around
the aesthetics and politics of Chandigarh’s master plan and Capitol
Complex. Prakash begins the book by describing the paradoxes that
surround the modernism of Chandigarh. He links the personal biographies
of those involved in Chandigarh’s planning with the political
realities of the new nation-state of India, pointing out that
the young country for its postcolonial image relied on western
consultants and the western-derived concept of Modernism. The
“East-West” opposition drives much of the book’s narrative. However,
this opposition is not without complication. For, as Prakash puts
it, the modernism of the postcolonial state embodies a paradox,
“a reciprocal response of the colonized, the self-empowering act
of dissolving contradiction by simultaneously rejecting and appropriating
the unsolicited gift of colonization“ (7). Further, Prakash asserts
that both Nehru and Le Corbusier “considered the question of whether
to make an Indian or a European architecture as obsolete and pointless”.
“To be modern was to be new, and the New and Good, in the Nehruvian
semantics, were synonymous“, writes Prakash (8).
However, the
author goes on to question their “faith in modernity” on two counts
(9). First, he argues that “the modernism that was imported by
Nehru was not the same as the modernism that was exported by Le
Corbusier“(10), and further, that the concept of abstraction,
as William Curtis employed it to explain the historical setting
of Chandigarh, is “Eurocentric” since it does not historicize
abstraction (11). In explicating the role of Modernism in the
construction of a postcolonial identity for India, Prakash realizes
that his book is a “deconstruction of modernism“ (12).
Whose history
is embodied in Chandigarh? Chandigarh is the largest project of
Europe’s best known architect, but first, and more important,
it is a regional Indian capital. In 1953, it was inaugurated as
the capital of the Indian part of Punjab, and since 1966, it has
been the joint capital of the two states of Punjab and Haryana.
Who is writing
history? In most of the available histories, the “orient” is directly
or indirectly described as the “other”. Prakash assesses that
this other is “not the Occident’s Other but the Other within –
a disourse of the Other, by, for, and of the West“ (13). The text
sets two different perspectives in the foreground of the analysis:
the Eastern one of the author’s upbringing and the Western one
of his academic education. What kind of dialogue can the two cultures
produce? This is not a book of newly released facts, but of new
questions; it attempts a critical historiography.
Continuing
the personal tone of the introduction, the author opens each chapter
with a memory from his time as a resident of Chandigarh, from
childhood to college years until the 1999 international architecture
symposium. The following chapters chronologically trace the evolution
of the master plan, the design of the Capitol Complex including
the State High Court, Legislative Assembly, and Secretariat, and
the Open Hand; The last of which was only completed after both
Le Corbusier’s and Nehru’s deaths.
The second
chapter describes the development of the master plan from the
Garden city concept developed under A. L. Fletcher as chief planner,
its revision by his successor P. L. Verma, the first plan of Albert
Mayer and Matthew Nowicki until the re-design under Le Corbusier.
While Ravi Kalia’s book is more helpful to those wishing to learn
all the historical details, Prakash’s account of the evolution
of the city is more concise and exploratory in speculating on
the different notions of ‘modern’ within aesthetics and attitudes.
Yet, already the second chapter ends on a dystopic tone: Chandigarh’s
modernism, according to Vikram Prakash, is not directed forward,
towards the new, but closed off within artificial hills; The Capitol
Complex is a “brief space of idealization“ to overcome the “city
of regrets” (14).
The symbolic
subtext of the Capitol buildings has been subject of speculation
for countless critics. Chapter three deciphers the references
on the enamel door and the expressive forms of the Assembly building.
In the tradition of Mogens Krustrup’s poetic ruminations on the
connotations of the cosmic symbols, landscapes, human figures
and animals, Prakash searches for mythical and biblical sources
of Le Corbusier’s figuration. He reveals that the black and white
photographs published in the Oeuvre Complète (15) depict
migrant and rural workers in the foreground of the buildings,
but not the urban residents and administrators. This depiction
of a rural paradise Prakash also finds in the earlier sketches;
the subsequent choice of such photographs ultimately leads the
author to hypothesize that Le Corbusier tried to reconstruct the
biblical setting of the garden of Eden. Adolf Max Vogt in his
book Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage (16) interpreted Corbusier’s
piloti architecture as deriving from his fascination with the
prehistoric stilt constructions of the Swiss lake regions; Jacques
Gubler advanced a viewpoint similar to Vogt’s. Vikram Prakash
transfers these pastoral readings to the Indian landscape, portraying
Le Corbusier as a Rousseauesque romanticist who wants to see himself
as “one with the savages, in perfect understanding” (17).
In chapter
four, Prakash embarks on a “psycho-analytic reading of the Capitol”.
Contrary to other interpretations, he argues that the buildings
horizontal layout does not integrate them into the landscape,
but renders the complex as self-contained and distant from the
rest of the city, with the landscape serving merely as a backdrop.
Le Corbusier, who had apparently lost his perception for spatial
depth, was restricted to studying spatial relationships on a two-dimensional
surface (18). Both the High Court with its horizontal symmetry
and reflection in the water surface (which render the volume weightless)
and the Assembly with its vertical composition that invoke the
animalistic mass of Le Corbusier’s bull sketches, are portrayed
as uncanny in the Freudian sense. In this reading (evidently informed
by the architecture theory discourse popular in the U.S. during
the 1990’s) Prakash finds the origins of the buildings aesthetic
logic.
The last chapter
focuses on the symbolic element of the “Open Hand”, where aesthetics
and politics finally merge, as Prakash states. The Open Hand is
now “everywhere in Chandigarh“: at the entrance to the city, in
commercial graphics and on the driver’s license. The origin of
the hand is difficult to locate in the design process for Chandigarh.
The recently published biography of Jawaharlal Nehru by Shashi
Tharoor reveals that Nehru had two objects on his desk: a golden
statue of Gandhi, and a bronze cast of Lincoln's hand (19). The
French writer André Malraux, in a letter quoted in Prakash’s book,
describes his memory of a bronze cast of the “hand of peace”,
about 18 inches long (20). Prakash, in an email conversation,
writes: “I don't think there is a relationship between the two
hands... Lincoln's bronze cast is close-fisted, while Le Corbusier's
Open Hand is of course open. Both do however symbolize agency,
the determination of the acting person to do things, to get things
done“.
Prakash’s
book includes some of the correspondence between Le Corbusier
and Nehru, in which the architect expressed his wish to build
the Open Hand. Given Nehru’s many political obligations, it seems
a courtesy that he took the time to respond personally. In the
case of the Hand, the prime minister, for once, dismissed the
wish of the French architect, citing the “difficult financial
position“ (21).
The Open Hand
was finally constructed in 1984, nearly thirty years after the
design. For the second generation of Chandigarh’s inhabitants,
among whom the author counts himself, the completion of Le Corbusier’s
design was considered a step forward in the construction of their
own “postcolonial identity.” At the same time, the era during
the presidency of Indira Gandhi was also marked by political repression
and nationalistic movements which overshadowed the optimism of
the Nehru era.
The reasons
for Nehru’s opposition to the Open Hand remain a question for
further speculation. Looking at recent historiographies, Sunil
Khilnani casts a critical eye on the motivations for the design
of the regional capital (22), while Tharoor’s biography of Nehru
entirely omits the construction of Chandigarh. Possibly, Nehru
did not need another symbolic hand, as he already displayed the
cast of Lincoln’s fist on his desk? Or, a second speculation in
the field of the East-West dialogue that Chandigarh was meant
to be, leads to the architect’s sketches for the Open Hand, of
which Prakash (as many scholars before him) reproduces many. Although
many have searched for the deeper meaning within the lines of
the architect’s drawings, why has no one yet asked what the Indian
partners thought of Le Corbusier’s linking of the fingers of the
Open Hand to the bodies of naked women? Prakash pairing of the
sketch with a drawing of two naked female figures remains an unclear
response to those who wonder.
Nehru attributed
importance to the construction of Chandigarh in the context of
promoting modernization in the newly independent India: Ravi Kalia
in his book quotes Nehru’s speech held on March 17, 1959 in New
Delhi (six years after the inauguration of Chandigarh) where he
stated that “We may not, even if we have the capacity, build a
Taj Mahal. It does not fit in with the society of today” (23).
Many have
asked why the architects for this “society of today” were not
from India. The planners in charge selected Le Corbusier together
with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and the English architects Jane
Drew and Maxwell Fry, after an initially engaging the American
Albert Mayer who had previously served as a planner to the Colonial
state. Prakash describes the selection as a “circumstantial choice,
an unexpected opportunity seized by a team of bureaucrats”. He
then develops his argument around the fascination with the “new.”
“Nehru simply wanted a city characterized by free thinking and
newness“ (24). The new from the West or for the East? One provocation
of the book is that the modernism of Chandigarh is not the same
modernism of Le Corbusier’s European years, but instead is India’s
own “modern”.
In 1995, the
Swiss government issued a new 10 Franc bill featuring the Chandigarh
Capitol: The front of the bill displays Le Corbusier’s portrait,
the back shows the Modulor, two views of the Secretariats’s façade
and an entrance perspective of the High Court. It is an especially
ironic turn of events as Le Corbusier, according to Jane Drew
(25), made great efforts to prove that he was French and not Swiss
after he became a French citizen in 1930. Claiming Chandigarh’s
Capitol as part of the Swiss heritage accentuates the conflict
inherent in the post-colonial import of foreign authorship for
the identity of India’s new nation-state. Should one attribute
the Swiss government with an attempt of latter-day Imperialism
by making an Indian government building a daily feature in the
middle of Europe? Vikramaditya Prakash is “simultaneously pleased
and outraged” (26), as he writes in the after word. “If they [the
Swiss government] could claim the Chandigarh Capitol as their
own, surely I could claim Le Corbusier for India” (27). Others,
like Charles Correa, have mused ironically whether Le Corbusier
should now be considered the “greatest Indian architect” (28).
Prakash might be the first to address this question with rigor
and sincerity.
The design
for the Swiss 10 Francs raises problems of authorship and ownership
which complement the book’s question on national identity. Yet,
it seems an unfortunate choice for the dust jacket of an architectural
history and theory book, giving the architectural study the appearance
of a business report, and subverting the title’s suggestion that
the book is written from an Indian vantage point. The sketch of
the Open Hand, inserted between the title and the representation
of the bill, might be a half-hearted attempt at amelioration.
The photographs included in the book, such as of a woman carrying
plants from the Capitol Complex to her village on a path lined
by abundant vegetation, or of cricket players besides the Open
Hand, might have invoked a wider range of the issues at stake
when discussing authorship, context and the meaning of India’s
national symbols.
Prakash’s
book, in its ambition to find the underlying logic of Chandigarh’s
design intention, is illustrated with many of Le Corbusier’s sketches
and plans, and with a series of black-and-white and color photographs.
The obvious care with which these have been collected and reproduced,
down to the high-quality of the paper on which they are printed,
underlines the importance of the illustrations in this investigation
on symbols, meanings and readings. The visual materials include
not only the obligatory materials, such as Mayer’s and Corbusier’s
1951 plans, placed side-by-side, and views of the Capitol buildings
and the housing. More specific to the investigation of the book
are the images juxtaposing the Red Fort in Delhi with the High
Court in Chandigarh – taken from Curtis (29) – or the pairing
of the 1952 sketch for the Capitol’s intertwined axis with a photo
of Lutyen’s layout for New Delhi’s monumental axis – taken from
von Moos (30). Then a series of photographs, sketches and paintings
trace the evolution of the ‘Open Hand’ design.
These images
are not only documentary materials, they are part of the author’s
search to understand the city as it was interpreted through the
eyes of others, and then serve Prakash’s own critical historiography
of Chandigarh. Le Corbusier’s sketches had absorbed the lines
of the landscape and the figures of animals. Later, image pairings
by Western critics established similarities between the Indian
tradition and Corbusian volumes. Aesthetic readings have de-contextualized
the Chandigarh Capitol: many photographic captures by visitors
are cleaned of its Indian inhabitants. The enthusiasm for including
people with those buildings that were to symbolize democracy has
altogether faded with the political ideals of Nehru’s first years.
In a similar way, the housing sectors are omitted from Prakash’s
research, as they are from many studies: While they may not carry
the obvious monumental power as the Capitol Complex, the residential
areas, landscaped with wide streets, parks and gardens, are where
Chandigarh differs most from other Indian cities.
Vikramaditya
Prakash employs illustrations to reinforce the effects of the
text; together they propel a differentiated reading of Modernism
in the construction of his own and of a nation’s postcolonial
identity. It is rare to read a book simultaneously sincere, theoretical
and original, never abandoning its lyrical undertone. Both text
and images search for similarities in that ambiguous space where
the East and the West facilitate each other. Whether the author’s
descriptions and own photographs suggest a new reading of the
city remains uncertain – it might be that in the end we only can
understand ourselves in the mirror, or in the eyes of others.
Notas
1
PRAKASH, Vikramaditya. Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle
for Modernity in Postcolonial India. Washington, University
of Washington, 2002.
2
A sidenote regarding the bibliography: It includes 19 of Le Corbusier’s
own publication, yet not the 6 volumes of sketchbooks documenting
the ‘Journey to the East’ which Le Corbusier undertook in 1911.
In 1965, a few weeks before his death, he finally edited Voyage
d’Orient for publication. There seems to be no linkage of his
experience as a young man traveling to the Near East to his grand
oeuvre in Chandigarh. One explanation could be that the architect’s
great fascination during the Voyage d’Orient were the mosques,
while India in 1947 was founded as a secular state. Prakash, not
including the Voyage d’Orient in the bibliography, mentions it
when the discusses Corbusier’s travels as an enterprise to “question
the naked man“ in the search of a Rousseauist paradise (p. 93
of Prakash’s book). Le Corbusier’s ‘East’ of 1911 is different
from the ‘East’ of independent India not only geographically,
but also culturally and historically.
3
KALIA, Ravi. Chandigarh, in search of a new identity. Carbondale,
Southern Illinois University, 1987.
4
SARIN, Madhu. Urban Planning in the Third World: the Chandigarh
experience. London, 1982.
5
KRUSTRUP, Mogens. Porte email / The enamel door: Le Corbusier,
Palais de l’Assemblée de Chandigarh. Kobenhaven, 1991.
6
GAST, Klaus-Peter. Le Corbusier: Paris-Chandigarh. Boston,
Birkhäuser, 2000 (reviewed in Neue Züricher Zeitung, 21.03.2001,
page 68, by Sabine von Fischer).
7
PRAKASH, Vikramaditya. Op. cit., p. 11.
8
Idem, ibidem, p. 10.
9
Idem, ibidem, p. 18.
10
Idem, ibidem, p. 21.
11
Idem, ibidem, p. 24.
12
Idem, ibidem, p. 26.
13
Idem, ibidem, p. 25.
14
Idem, ibidem, p. 70.
15
LE CORBUSIER. Oeuvre complete, 1952-57. Boston, Birkhäuser,
1957.
16
VOGT, Adolf Max. Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an
Archeology of Modernism. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992.
17
PRAKASH, Vikramaditya. Op. cit., p. 93.
18
Idem, ibidem, p. 105.
19
THAROOR, Shashi. Nehru: The Invention of India. New York,
Arcade Publishing, 2003, p. 93 ff (the subtitle of the book seems
to be an interpretation of Nehru’s book The Discovery of India
from. 1964).
20
PRAKASH, Vikramaditya. Op. cit., p. 150.
21
Idem, ibidem, p. 125
22
KHILNANI, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York, 1997. Khilnani
criticizes Le Corbusier’s involvement in the creation of Chandigarh’s
symbols with the argument that the later created a museum piece
detached from the real situation to represent the modern nation-state.
A biography on Nehru by the author is forthcoming.
23
KALIA, Ravi. Op. cit., p. 28-29.
24
PRAKASH, Vikramaditya. Op. cit., p. 148.
25
DREW, Jane. “Le Corbusier as I knew him”. In WALDEN, Russell (ed).
The Open Hand: Essays of Le Corbusier. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1977, p. 365.
26
The new 10 Franc bill was released in 1995, as part of a series
that represent outstanding cultural figures from Swiss history.
Other personalities represented include Sophie Täuber-Arp and
Alberto Giacometti. Like Le Corbusier, these two who also lived
for parts of their lives in Paris. The series was designed by
the Swiss graphic designer Jörg Zintzmeyer. The previous series
of bills had featured scientists.
27
PRAKASH, Vikramaditya. Op. cit., p. 146-147.
28
CORREA, Charles. “Chandigarh: View from the Benares. “ In BROOKS,
Allen H (ed). Le Corbusier. Princeton University Press,
1987, p. 197-202.
29
CURTIS, William. Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms. New York,
Rizzoli, 1986.
30
VON MOOS, Stanislaus. “The Politics of the Open Hand: Notes on
Le Corbusier and Nehru at Chandigarh.“ In WALDEN, Russell (ed).
The Open Hand: Essays of Le Corbusier. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1977, p. 412-57.
Many thanks
to Mary McLeod from Columbia University for her support, scholarship
and criticism.
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