By Swapan Dasgupta
My introduction to Chandigarh, that fabled city of
Le Corbusier’s indulgences and Jawaharlal Nehru’s modernist dream, happened in
rather unusual circumstances one summer night some 26 years ago.
Stepping off the air-conditioned bus from Delhi I
hailed a cycle-rickshaw to take me to the hotel where I had a booking. The
rickshaw-wallah pedalled his way past long and deserted roads—the Punjab
militancy was at its height—and delivered me to a modern building with a long
driveway. “This is not the hotel”, I remarked to the man in my somewhat
imperfect Hindi. “It is a guest house, Sir” he retorted. “But I want to go to
the hotel”, I protested. “No sahib, you should stay at this guest house.”
I was somewhat aghast at the man’s presumptuousness
and repeated my instruction to take me to the hotel. The rickshaw-wallah became
a little Bolshie. “I have been instructed to bring all passengers to this guest
house. It belongs to a senior police officer”, he added by way of enlightenment.
The raised voices brought a gentleman from the guest
house to the gate, and he attempted to grab my suitcase. “We have all the
comforts of a hotel”, he assured me in a voice that had a discernible menacing
undertone. “But I want to go to the hotel”, I kept on protesting. Then, when
the whole thing threatened to get out of hand, I produced my trump card. “Listen,
I am a press reporter.”
The pronouncement had a magical effect. “You must
not take offence”, the man from the guest house assured me, “the
rickshaw-wallah was just trying to help. He will, of course, take you to the
hotel you want to go to.” And that was that.
Whenever I think of Chandigarh, I cannot but recall
my somewhat harrowing initiation into this showpiece city. When India’s first
Prime Minister chose Le Corbusier, a man with a reputation for architectural wackiness
whose plans for a new Paris is said to have “defied all existing social,
cultural, economic, political, historical, architectural, anthropological, even
ecclesiastical norms” to build a new capital for Punjab, he was of course being
unilateral. It was not for the imperious Nehru to actually explain why this
particular Frenchman whose earlier works had left people underwhelmed was
chosen. Those were the days when there was no Comptroller and Auditor General
to ask if there had been a semblance of a competitive tender. Nehru had chosen
and in these matters only he knew best.
Historians have subsequently tried to detect a
method in Nehru’s unilateralism. To Sunil Khilnani in The Idea of India, “The design of Chandigarh expressed one aspect
of Nehru’s idea of a modern India: the sense that India must free itself of
both the contradictory modernity of the Raj and nostalgia for its imperial
past. It had to move forward by one decisive act that broke both with its
ancient and its more recent history…Chandigarh boldly divested itself of
history, rejecting both colonial imagery and nationalist sentimentalism or
ornament…It refused to concede anything to its location.”
The virtues of aesthetic deracination were driven
home by Nehru in an astonishing speech at the inauguration of the High Court in
Chandigarh: “I am very happy that the people of Punjab did not make the mistake
of putting some old city as their new capital. It is not merely a question of
buildings. If you had chosen an old city as the capital, Punjab would have
become a mentally stagnant, backward state. It may have made some progress,
with great effort, but it could not have taken a grand step forward.”
Sir Edwin Lutyens, the man who designed the new
imperial capital of the Raj, believed he was there to “express modern India in
stone”; Nehru planned Chandigarh to extricate India from itself.
This audacious exercise in rootless modernity
acquires a measure of relevance in the light of contemporary happenings. Over
the past few years, the grapevine in Lutyens’ Delhi has been abuzz with
suggestions of a ‘Chandigarh Club’ that wields considerable influence over the
feeble power centre in Race Course Road. The nomenclature of the group the
Prime Minister feels most comfortable with may be bound in a degree of
geographical inexactitude. But what is undeniable is that a sharp distinction
has been made between, say, Jharkhand MP Subodh Kant Sahay who was sacked from
the Council of Ministers for the allotment of a coal block to his brother, and
Pawan Kumar Bansal who continues as Railways Minister in the Cabinet despite
damaging evidence to link him with a nephew who was caught receiving an
instalment of Rs 90 lakh from a member of the Railway Board. The difference, it
is said, is the difference between Ranchi and Chandigarh.
Nor is Bansal the only beneficiary of the Le
Corbusier link. There is considerable bewilderment over Manmohan Singh’s
decision to stand firmly with his Law Minister Ashwini Kumar despite
irrefutable evidence of the minister’s act of grave impropriety and his brazen
subversion of a Supreme Court order. The issue, as has been repeatedly pointed
out by a galaxy of luminaries, is not whether Kumar merely undertook to give
the CBI a linguistic polish or whether he made ‘minor’ changes that didn’t
affect the substance of the investigation into the irregular allotment of coal
blocks. In other countries, ministers have had to pay a heavy price for minor
transgressions. John Profumo was drummed out in disgrace from both the Cabinet
and public, not because he had an extra-marital affair, but because he lied to
Parliament. By that logic, Kumar’s political career ought to come to an
inglorious end because, as Law Minister, he violated the trust reposed by the
judiciary on the executive.
Instead, the Prime Minister has stood by Kumar, even—reportedly—going
to the extent of linking his own future with that of his Law Minister. The
defence of a loyalist is touching and may even prompt those with a long memory
to compare Singh’s apparent resoluteness to Nehru’s reluctance to part with
V.K. Krishna Menon after the 1962 debacle in the Sino-Indian conflict. At the
same time, however, the wicked people are questioning the bonds between the
Prime Minister and his Law Minister. And the conclusion points in only one
direction: Chandigarh.
In 50 years, Chandigarh has come a long way. The
citadel of cosmopolitan modernity bound in concrete has indeed become a symbol
of a historical rupture. But the rupture, unfortunately, is not with India but
from a Nehru who sought to disentangle India from its history, its aesthetics
and even its geography. India, it would seem, has remarkable adhesive
qualities: it sticks to men, to politics, to institutions and even to those who
otherwise shun all suggestions of disrepute. There is a dharma that moulds the
Indian mentality and which govern critical choices between right and wrong,
between continuity and change. Paradoxically, what has made this dharma
enduring is its astonishing flexibility: the right to exercise discretion, the
separation of the private from the public, the primacy of connections over
principles, and the subordination of the nation to the clan.
In all innocence, Nehru believed that recreating the
urban space would reshape the modern India. Chandigarh has proved him wrong.
The dreamland of Le Corbusier has been effortlessly subsumed by the replication
of the age of the decrepit Later Moghuls amid the energy of globalisation. The
Chandigarh Club is shorthand for the new India: brazen and unscrupulous.
No comments:
Post a Comment