Often the most flattering albeit low-brow compliment you can bestow on any Indian city is that it “does not look Indian at all.” Blame it on our collective colonial hangover or an acquired taste for all things European and exotic, but what is an Indian city? Perhaps it is laced with delightful irony that despite its gridlines, Chandigarh does not fit into a box. It is neither stereotypically Indian nor is it the poster child of austere Modernism that Le Corbusier pictured, and hoped, it would be. It is a negotiation of ideas and people, who live alongside the lauded ideals of Utopia in the “city of the future.”
Architect Noor Dasmesh Singh of NOOR Architects Consultants, who lives and practices here tells us about its history, “Envisaged after the partition of Punjab, the city’s capital was meant to be untethered from the past. Since cities are like living microcosms, they do need to evolve with time.” Created on the bedrock of displaced agrarian villages and an ancient civilisation, the futuristic metropolis evolves through informality, in the cricket ground behind the Capitol Complex and the rebellion of shopfronts.
