[edit]
A map of the Punjab Province in colonial India (1909). During the Partition of India along the Radcliffe Line, the capital of the Punjab Province, Lahore, fell into West Punjab, Pakistan. The necessity to have a new capital for East Punjab in India then, led to the development of Chandigarh.
Indus valley artefacts excavated from Sector 17, Chandigarh
Partition and independence[edit]
The establishment of the city of Chandigarh was the result of the crises and chaos in northwestern India in the aftermath of its independence from British colonial rule. During the partition of India in 1947, the province of Punjab was divided into two: the majority Hindu and Sikh eastern portion that remained in India and the majority Muslim western portion that became part of Pakistan. Lahore, the provincial capital of undivided Punjab, though fiercely contested during partition, was eventually ceded to Pakistan. The provincial government of independent India’s East Punjab state was left without an administrative center or capital.
The loss of Lahore, the need for the rehabilitation of refugees from West Pakistan and a mounting exodus of business communities from the state created a sense of urgency. Shimla, the former summer capital of both British India and the Punjab province, partially housed the government of East Punjab state. Shimla’s inability to fully contain the administrative machinery resulted in government offices to be scattered at several places across the state, imposing difficulties and costs on the public as well as the government.
Conception and initial planning[edit]
It was decided by representatives of the government of India and of the state of East Punjab to build a new capital for the state, because attaching capital functions to an existing city—all of which were considered inadequate and had swollen in size due to migration of refugees from West Pakistan—was considered as costly as building a new city.
The new capital needed to have enough space for government machinery, for resettlement of refugees and their businesses, for expansion, and adequate rail, road and air connectivity; it also had to assuage the psychological loss of partition, its construction supposed to stimulate the state's devastated economy, as well as being a 'symbolic gesture' of unity, stability, and an assertion of India’s newfound sovereignty. India’s erstwhile Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru personally endorsed the project, remarking: "Let this be a new town, symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past … an expression of the nation’s faith in the future." The capital was to be located in the most populous part of the state, between the Doaba and Ambala districts, and projected to hold about 500,000 people. Several existing cities and towns across the state were considered for the possible development of the new capital, but all rejected for different reasons. Political lobbying also made the selection of an existing city as the new capital difficult. The absence of political consensus on the location of the new capital and the large costs involved threatened the project.
In 1948, three possible sites were settled upon, one lying in the Ambala district, one in Ludhiana, and one, the most preferred of the three, being partially in Ambala and Patiala state (which was then not part of the East Punjab state). The first site, in Ambala district’s Kharar tehsil, was ultimately selected to be the location of the new capital after aerial reconnaissance by Parmeshwari Lal Varma and Prem Nath Thapar. The name of the new city derived from a temple dedicated to Hindu goddess Chandi present in one of these villages. The location was praised by the later team of the city's architects for being beautiful and practical.
Agricultural lands, including large mango groves, of fifty-eight villages with a population of 21,000 people were to be affected by the construction of the city, involving the displacement of many of them. The affected villagers, encouraged and supported by political parties (such as the Socialist Party and Akali Dal), began agitating against the project. Political opposition to the project also stemmed from a desire for relocation of the new capital to sites favourable to the opponents. The government reached an agreement with the affected villagers in October 1950, and established a local committee to advise on rehabilitation of displaced people, thus ending the agitation.
Masterplan[edit]
Mayer plan[edit]
It was decided by the state government that a town planner for Chandigarh would be selected after interviewing several of them in England. However, Nehru suggested that a town planner already present in India and familiar with it be hired instead, and recommended two such people. One of them—Albert Mayer, an American town planner—was selected in December 1949 to design the master plan of Chandigarh. Mayer’s recruitment received extensive international media attention. Mayer enlisted several experts from the US to aid him in preparing the masterplan of Chandigarh, including Matthew Nowicki, a US-based Polish architect, who was to work on the city’s architectural design.
Mayer produced a fan-shaped plan, spreading southward between the Patiala-ki-rao and Sukhna Cho streams, with the capitol located on a promontory in Sukhna's fork at the upper margin, a university at the very north, a railway station to the east, an industrial area to the southeast and a commercial block in the center. The city was to be made up of several neighbourhood units, or superblocks, arranged in districts of various shapes roughly one-by-half kilometre in size, each containing residences, bazaar, schools, parks, health centres, theatres and meeting halls. The superblocks were to be arranged in a curvilinear street layout with adequate road space for future motor traffic. Mayer’s plan was based on the ideals of the Garden City movement and the Radburn idea.
While Mayer provided a masterplan and Nowicki gave a detailed draft for one neighbourhood unit, Chandigarh also required an architect to develop the architectural design of the city and its structures. Nowicki had also prepared a preliminary design for the capitol complex, and had agreed to join the city's architectural development independently of Mayer. In August 1950, Nowicki died in a plane crash, and Mayer was unlikely to be able to execute the masterplan without his assistance. This, coupled with Mayer's extended leaves from the state and mounting expenses due to adverse USD exchange rates, resulted in Mayer—who was still keen on continuing the project—being dropped from the plan.
Corbusier plan[edit]
Between November and December 1950, Thapar and Varma travelled to Europe to find replacements and recruited a four-member team headed by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, also including English couple-duo Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, and Corbusier’s cousin Pierre Jeanneret. Fry, Drew and Jeanneret were to work at Chandigarh for three years, while Corbusier would make two visits every year, each lasting one month. The association of the city with Corbusier catapulted it into global limelight. Corbusier came to India in February 1951, and joined Fry and Jeanneret who had arrived earlier. They were joined by Indian staff in Shimla, including a team of young Indian architects and town-planners who were to learn from them as much as assist them.
Although told to adhere to Mayer’s masterplan, the new team considered it inadequate and made significant modifications, much to Mayer's dismay as he tried in vain to retain it. Corbusier assumed control of the masterplan and designed buildings of the capitol complex, while the rest of the team directed construction work and designed other buildings of the city. Key components of the previous plan were incorporated into the new one—the positions of the central commercial block, the railway station, the industrial area, and the capitol complex remained roughly similar; the university was moved to the west, the superblocks were retained, but expanded, standardised and named 'sectors'. The overall density was increased by 20%. The earlier curvilinear street plan was replaced with a rectilinear grid plan, with a seven-tiered road system consisting the highway, the central axes, arterial roads, market roads, sector circulation roads, residential streets and pedestrian walkways. The new plan was quickly accepted by officials.
The capitol complex was designed to contain four main buildings: the Palace of Assembly, the High Court of Justice, the Secretariat, and a fourth structure—earlier the Governor’s Palace and later Museum of Knowledge—whose construction was deferred. Also included in it were several monuments, notably the Monument of the Open Hand. Initial plan envisioned the capitol complex to dominate the city, but in later plans artificial hills were used to visually separate the two. It was to be independent India's 'answer' to the British built complex in New Delhi. The city centre was designed by Corbusier to contain commercial and administrative buildings with a central pedestrian plaza.
Construction[edit]
A schedule for construction was prepared soon after the takeover of the project by Corbusier’s team. The first structures to be built were temporary quarters for the engineers and architects. 30 sectors were to be constructed in the first phase, and another 17 in the second phase. Several laws were passed 1952 onwards to regulate development within the city and in its 5-mile radius (expanded later to 10), and to preserve the city’s planned character. By September 1953, all state government departments and staff had been shifted from Shimla to Chandigarh. The city was built to be the state’s capital all year round, abandoning the British practice of moving the provincial government to Shimla during the summer. On 7 October 1953, the capital was officially inaugurated in a ceremony presided over by President Rajendra Prasad. The construction was done on a tight budget, primarily using locally available materials, extensive manual labour and minimal machinery.
A committee was set up under Mohinder Singh Randhawa for landscaping of the city, and an elaborate landscaping plan was devised. In 1954, the Panjab University, which had been functioning in a widely scattered area until then, purchased over 300 acres of land in sector 14 where a self-contained permanent campus was built for it in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The 1956 merger of PEPSU with the Punjab state shot up construction costs due to requirements of extra offices and housing in the city, and caused revisions in the assembly building’s design. In the 1960s, a medical research center and college of engineering were established in sector 12, two government colleges, one for men and one for women, were built in sector 11, and a polytechnic institute was created in sector 26. The Chandi Mandir military cantonment and an industrial township in Pinjore were built to the northeast of the city, despite objections from Corbusier. During excavations for the city’s construction in the 1950s and 60s, artefacts, a cemetery and a settlement belonging to the Indus Valley civilisation were discovered around present-day sector 17.
Sector 22 was the first sector to be developed. The large population of construction workers that came to build the city lived in self-built small mud or brick shacks during this period. 13 types of government housing, from the Chief Minister’s to those for low income employees, were developed by Fry, Drew and Jeanneret. Following the departure of Fry and Drew, some house types were also developed by Jeet Malhotra, Manmohan Nath Sharma, Aditya Prakash and Eulie Chowdhury. Jeanneret, Chowdhury and others also designed several types of furniture influenced by local craftsmanship for use in the city’s public buildings, which were manufactured from local hardwood by carpenters across northern India. Jeanneret was appointed chief architect and town planner for Chandigarh and lived in the city until 1965.
The Secretariat was the first of the capitol complex buildings to be completed. The High Court became functional in March 1955, although modifications and additions to it continued till later. The Assembly building containing two legislative chambers enclosed within a square exterior—a hyperbolic assembly chamber and a pyramid-topped council chamber—was completed in 1962. A ceremonial door hand painted by Corbusier was installed at the Assembly Building in 1964. Work on foundations of the fourth building set against the hills to complete the architectural composition of the complex, initially designed to be the governor’s residence (which was disapproved by Nehru for being 'undemocratic') and changed later to a museum, was begun in the 1960s but the structure was never built.
Two of the six monuments planned in the Capitol Complex remain incomplete. These include Geometric Hill and Martyrs Memorial. Drawings were made, and they were begun in 1956, but they were never completed. Corbusier remained committed to Chandigarh’s development until his death in 1965.
Reorganisation and afterwards[edit]
In 1966, after a long drawn movement by factions of the Akali Dal for an exclusively Punjabi state—and counter demands by Haryanvi and Himachali leaders—the former bilingual state was divided along linguistic lines: the northwestern areas became Punjab, the southeastern ones Haryana, and the northeastern hilly areas were transferred to Himachal Pradesh. Chandigarh was originally allotted to Haryana based on its Hindi-speaking majority per the 1961 census, but was later converted into a union territory instead, owing to apprehensions of Sikh disaffection with the city going to Haryana. It became the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, both of which were quick to extend their claims over it. In 1970, after deliberations about possible resolutions including a division of the city, prime minister Indira Gandhi assigned it to Punjab with Haryana to be given the Fazilka tehsil and granted funds for a new capital as compensation.
The administration of the union territory, which also included 34 villages adjacent to the city, came under the direct control of the union government, and the city became the centre of three governments. Periodic unofficial reports after the reorganisation suggested that the people of Chandigarh wanted the city to stay a union territory. According to a 1982 survey, 80% of the city’s residents preferred it staying a UT. In 1985, terms of an unimplemented wider accord granted the city to the state of Punjab, with Haryana slated to get 70,000 acres of land from Punjab in return.
By 1971, 11–15% of Chandigarh’s population was living in illegal settlements. Transit colonies for slum-dwellers were set up on the margins of the city, becoming permanent with time. In the 1970s, city officials discovered a sculpture park built by public works employee and artist Nek Chand who had been secretly building it since 1957 using various materials—rocks found in the hills and waterbodies around the city, discarded materials from pre-existing villages, and waste generated by the city’s construction—on a piece of forest land adjacent to the capitol complex. The park was named 'Rock Garden' and inaugurated in 1976, receiving national and international attention in the 1980s. In the late 1980s and 1990s, attempts by the city authorities to demolish the garden were thwarted by public protests.
Funding for the Open Hand monument, whose construction had been delayed due to financial constraints, was sanctioned in 1972. It was completed in 1985 and the motif was adopted and vigorously promoted as the official symbol of the city in the 1980s, with smaller monuments containing the icon built at other places such that the sign became ubiquitous in the city.
The city is surrounded by several satellite towns that depend on it for services and facilities. Punjab built the town of Mohali in an area originally set aside for greenbelt southwest of Chandigarh, and Haryana developed Panchkula to the city’s southeast (in addition to the already built Chandimandir cantonment to its east), both with the aim of reinforcing their claims on the city. The villages in the union territory saw rapid urbanisation. In the late 1970s and 1980s, efforts were made towards more integrated regional urban planning in the wider Chandigarh Capital Region.
