Empty hands: Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh between symbol and reality

Today, its modernist symbols—from the towering Open Hand Monument to the unused Pit of Contemplation—float like ghostly ideals.

The Open Hand Monument in Capitol Complex, Chandigarh. | Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Symbols have a way of being rendered hollow when not inhabited by people. Floating as idealised, sealed clouds, they vapourise the material world untouched by the breath-like pressure of their push. At the Capitol Complex tour in Chandigarh—a free tour offered three times a day, only accessible with a guide who is accompanied by an armed officer—the Open Hand Monument was waving softly on its axis, its weight of 50 tonnes caressed by the wind. Ghostly empty, the concrete of the complex was burning hot in the noontime heat, and the pool around the Palace of Assembly dried up six years ago, I was told. Such is the way things are. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s concrete creations were sunning themselves dry. When I prodded, I was told to write to the Prime Minister to get the pool filled if I cared so much. It rained the next day.

At 85 feet, the Open Hand Monument is imposing, and its meaning and monumentalism congeal to produce this sharp citric gash of hope, with “the hand to give and the hand to take”. Besides, the open hand can never hold a weapon—a potent symbol of the Non-Aligned Movement of the Nehruvian decades. (The monument was inaugurated only in 1985, although Le Corbusier had been tinkering with it for decades.)

In front of the Open Hand is a pit, an amphitheatre. In the centre is a pedestal that looks like a witness stand floating mid-air. This is the “Pit of Contemplation”, or the Fosse de la Consideration. You stand on the pedestal and air your grievances. Right near the High Court, or “Palace of Justice”, this was to be the place where citizens could come to vocalise their problems, not to any higher authority but to each other. A powerful space, democratised by design and empty in practice, but its emptiness so pregnant with possibility that it would be hard for hard cynical edges not to soften.

There are no water taps nearby, and the nearest public restroom is a long walk away. Was this space ever used? Was it made to be used? The guide was unsure, maybe, he said, when the space was inaugurated in 1985 it was peopled? Or during the 50th anniversary celebration of Le Corbusier’s death in 2015?

The Palace of Justice has three giant pylons painted in bright colours against the Brutalist grey, symbolising both the monumental nature of law and also, by not being gated, law’s embracing openness to the public. We were not allowed to enter. If we had to go in, we had to use the entrance on the other side. How can a symbol possibly hope to compete against the barrel of the gun? Openness as metaphor, not materialised.

When the first drawings of the Capitol Complex were being made in 1952, the British architect Jane Drew, who built Chandigarh along with Le Corbusier and E. Maxwell Fry, suggested: “Corbu, why don’t you set between the edifices of the Capitol some of the signs you sometimes evoke, which symbolise your strongest preoccupations?” These were that.

A Post-Independence city

So much thought went into the making of this city, a post-Independence creation. Lahore was lost to Pakistan during Partition: since India got Kolkata, India had to give up Lahore; such were the swapping games being played by the authorities. Indian Punjab needed a capital, and the search began under the P.L. Varma committee in 1948. A survey of existing towns was done; no city was found to be a plausible replacement, either due to defence vulnerability or water shortage or sheer inaccessibility. A city had to be raised not only to house the refugees but to build a physical and cultural alternative to Lahore. With the Shivalik Hills in the background, Chandigarh—the name comes from Chandi, a Hindu goddess worshipped here—was considered ideal. The land on which Chandigarh was built was no vacuum, though; it had 36,000 people who had to be displaced.

Nehru noted: “This shall be the new city of free India, totally fresh and wholly responsive to the aspirations of the future generations of this great country… free from all shackles… unfettered by the traditions of the past.” This would be where historic modernism was brewed.

After a Polish architect selected for the job died, Le Corbusier was brought in. He saw the city as a biological phenomenon, with the Capitol Complex as the brain, at the head of the city. The industrial and educational belts, on either side of the city, were the limbs. The network of roads snaking through sectors became the circulatory system. The very cartography flirted passionately with meaning, with idealism. Even the drain covers were made as objects of art; many have been stolen since and replaced by the usual ones, ones that will not be considered valuable enough to be stolen and sold. The remaining drain covers are mostly in Sector 5, where the government officials stay.

The Brutalist theatres are all decrepit, and films are now watched in PVR-Cinepolis theatres in stale malls lit by harsh white light. The texture of people’s lives seems untouched by ideas. The men I met spoke of evenings spent with friends driving around, “gedi maarna” (showing off) or “villa spotting”, by which they mean stopping by villas to look, and having looked, driving on. The villas themselves are built with modern features, indifferent to the language of the red clay brick and white plastered surfaces that Pierre Jeanneret, the chief architect of the city, built in.

Do symbols corrode? Or simply float about, reminding you of what could be, what could always be. In Problems of Chandigarh Architecture, E. Maxwell Fry speaks of the “element of exaggeration” in Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh: “Law Courts, in order to embody the grandeur of the conception of law and order and the power they represent, are always made rather more than life size; and railway terminals must stand as monuments to the achievement of the whole railway system.” A building must symbolise the apogee of what it will house. Corbusier writes: “The only luxury authorized (and attained) was the luxury of proportion.”

It was by Sukhna Lake, dug out and filled, that I found some coherence, where the symbol exploded with life and did not escape it. There is a plaque there that reads: “The founders of Chandigarh have offered this lake and dam to the citizens of the new city so that they may escape the humdrum of city life and enjoy the beauty of nature in peace and silence.”

The lakefront is a reprieve. On my morning runs, it was full of people on power walks and stiff runs, and in the evenings I saw young people milling about on the quietly lit paths, enjoying the breeze. The light would not shine directly. It would hit the block of concrete, and it is in the reflected light from that concrete—soft enough to make out people’s silhouettes but not their features—that the lake would glisten as though whispering: come rest your weary legs here. 

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.