SPEECH BY SHRI K.R. NARAYANAN, PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE INAUGURATION OF CONFERENCE "CELEBRATING CHANDIGARH-50 YEARS OF THE IDEA"

CHANDIGARH, SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 1999

We are gathered here to celebrate the golden jubilee of the founding of the city of Chandigarh. It is true that this planned city has provoked some strongly held and diametrically opposed opinions from its very inception.

In 1952 when controversies about the planning of Chandigarh were still raging, Pandit Nehru said: "The proposed capital of Chandigarh under construction has good planning and is a combination of the old and the new where all possible amenities would be made available for all the people. The new city would grow into a fine place gradually. Many of the local people who oppose this do not realize how much importance the capital will lend to their area both in the matter of business and trade and the populace." He also added: "Let us also remember that after a free expression of opinion and exchange of views once a decision is taken we must stick to it and, instead of any opposition, should try to see it through."

Despite every sort of disagreement and opposition Chandigarh has come up and has had fifty years of growth and development. Someone has said that architecture is frozen music. One may say that it is rather a frozen concert. Like every living city Chandigarh may be a concert with many a discordant note. But as a writer critical of the planning of the city has grudgingly admitted "all said and done, Chandigarh is still the best city in the country and cynosure of all eyes." We in India, particularly the people of Punjab and Haryana have reason to be proud of this city which has served them magnificently for fifty years and which represents the spirit of new India and the new Punjab intertwined, as it inevitably is, with the traditions, good and not so good, of eternal India. Chandigarh like new India was born in the exhilaration of freedom and the tragedy and trauma of partition which was felt more intensely and intimately by Punjab than any other part of India. It has grown as a challenge to a dversity and a promise for the future. It is symbolic of the indomitable spirit of enterprise of the people of Punjab.

Arnold Toynbee has said that capital cities are chosen for prestige, for convenience or for strategy. The British chose Delhi as the Capital of the Raj primarily for prestige as the inheritor of the Mughal Empire. Lutyens before drawing the plan for New Delhi had gone around India looking at our architectural monuments and finally decided that he would build Delhi not after Hindu or Islamic architecture, nor after European architecture. He said he would build a city that was Imperial.

Le Corbusier had his own vision of an Indian capital. He wrote in one of his letters, quoted by Sunand Prasad, in his "Le Corbusier in India". "At this moment in the evolution of modern civilization, India represents a quality of spirit particularly attractive. Our task is to discover the architecture to be immersed in the sieve of this powerful and profound civilization and the endowment of favourable modern tools to find it a place in present time." His idea was to fix the capital of the Punjab in the matrix of Indian civilization standing tip-toe at the door-step of the modern age. But he had not ignored the traditional civilization as, when he observed, "I have eyes and heart still full of the cows and buffaloes, of the birds, of the peasants, of the women on my High Court site."

Those who criticise Le Corbusier's city as an artificial imposition on India forget this aspect of his thinking in contrast to that of Lutyens. They also forget that Indian architecture like Indian culture and society is a composite thing and Persian, Arabic, Central Asian, not to speak of British concepts, styles and patterns have got mixed up with the traditional Indian architecture. There is plurality in Indian architecture as in Indian culture. When Le Corbusier told Pandit Nehru that there is "no Indian style" of architecture, he seems to have meant mainly modern architecture and not the traditional styles. This is clear from what he said elsewhere: "I would like to share with you my impressions as I went through India on my way home. India had, and always has had a peasant culture which has existed for a thousand years! India possesses Hindu temples (generally carved in stones) and Muslim temples in red stone whose architecture is very geometrical. India also possesses Maharaja's palaces and gardens, but India has not yet created an architecture for modern civilization (offices, factory buildings). India jumps suddenly into the second era of modernization. Instead of sinking into the groupings and errors of the first era we will be able to fill our mission: to give India the architecture of modern times (modern techniques, modern mind, the adaptations to surrounding conditions that are extreme over there)."

In providing India an architecture for the modern age, Le Corbusier seems to have had at the back of his mind, perhaps at the back of the mind of Nehru also, another interesting consideration. It has been observed that Le Corbusier fancied to view France and India as bastions of resistance to Americanism, the ultra-modern culture of America, which for all its popular fluency lacked cultural depth. Chandigarh could perhaps be looked on as an Indo-French enterprise to create a new architectural and also cultural model, for a society that was moving from an old rural one to an urban-technological society. As early as 1819 John Ruskin had prophetically said: "The vitality of nations was crowding in upon city gates, modern life would be acted upon the urban stage". Even Gandhiji who held that India lived in its villages had observed in 1917 that "the way to national life lies through the cities". It is, therefore, not surprising that Le Corbusier in the middle of 20th century understood the importance of a new architecture for the present age.

Le Corbusier's concept of city planning appealed to the modernizing vision of Jawaharlal Nehru - the builder of modern India. Nehru wanted Chandigarh to be the symbol of forward-looking new India, a city of prestige, a city of progress, reflecting the pride of Punjab and the pride of new India. He said: "Let it be the first large expression of our genius flowering on our newly earned freedom". Thus a historic role, a representational role, was cast upon Chandigarh right from its inception.

Even more than the historic and prestige aspects of Chandigarh's planning, what appealed to Nehru was its rationale as a city of convenience, a city that stood up to the poignant human problems of partition, and a city that was planned to provide the basic social amenities to its citizens. Of Corbusier's plan of Chandigarh, Nehru observed that "the whole conception is very good and if given effect to, will produce an attractive city, combining somewhat modern conceptions of town planning and the needs of the community with our own customs and habits and the requirements of the climate". Nehru was especially attracted by Corbusier's idea that town planning should give precedence to social amenities. He wrote in August 1952 "I have long been convinced that in India the problem is not firstly of building houses, but of providing essential services. It is much better to have an open space with proper water supply, drainage, bathing facilities and lighting than to have just roofs over slum buildings. " He insisted that "the main point in building a city should be to keep the social aspect always in view". That Chandigarh is a city built with the social aspect in view is to-day a matter of civic pride for its inhabitants.

The city has been criticized for its failure to house the very poorest and its classification of housing in sectors designed to be unequal. While these criticisms may be valid, Chandigarh, in contrast to other Indian cities, was designed to provide a more satisfying existence to all, and not merely a few of its inhabitants. We must not forget how revolutionary it was then to think of giving to everyone of the lowest category of government employees - those whom we now call Group D - a house with two rooms, running water, a flush toilet, access to recreational space, with schools and medical facilities conveniently available. Some of the most innovative work was in fact done in the design and layout of these modest dwellings, though that does not approach the housing architecture of one like Laurie Baker who specializes in cheap but attractive houses built with the minimum use of energy-free materials as much as possible, and if one must use energy-intensive materials - like steel, cement, glass and aluminium, then use them as carefully or as little as possible. One wonders whether there is scope for filling in Corbusier's city plan with an element of Laurie Baker's concept and technology as Chandigarh grows and expands both inwards and outwards and faces the much too familiar problems associated with population pressure and the march of urbanisation.

India has been urbanizing itself with rapidity since Chandigarh was planned and built. During this period the urban population of India grew from 19% to over 32% of the Indian population. The population of Chandigarh has grown from 1,00,000 to 800 thousand or nearly a million. The city may have to see itself less and less as a brand new experiment in urban planning, and more and more as an existing city, one among many, facing new problems and pressures it was not designed to cope with. It has been often asked why should there be slums in the city of Chandigarh, why there are squatters, why there are informal markets, why do cows and buffaloes roam in the streets, why public sanitation is so inadequate? It would not be fair to level these charges at the door of Corbusier and his colleagues who planned the city. After all don't we see cows and buffaloes roaming about in Lutyens city of New Delhi, and slums and squatters swelling up to nearly half the population of the capital of India. Long ago in 1917 Mahatma Gandhi told the Indian people "Unless we alter the conditions in our cities, rid ourselves of our dirty habits and have improved latrines, swaraj can have no value for us." That is true even fifty years after our independence. There is no city planning that can succeed in the face of the facts of our society, the habits of our people, lapses of our administration, and the poverty and the lack of education and health care of our people. To some extent Corbusier had taken some of these social facts into account while planning Chandigarh and to a degree his city is better off than most other cities of India in the matter of services, health and educational facilities, greenery and relatively pollution-free environment. Its social and communal harmony has been creditable in the context of the events of the last decades. Perhaps the visionary faith of its planner, Le Corbusier, in the ability of the built environment to mould a community of people, has really been realized here. But it has been realized only very partially. Ultimately, it is the facts and the forces of society, the degree of education, the economic development, and the level of satisfaction of the needs and aspirations of its people, and, of course, the quality of the governance that would produce that intangible civic sense and civic pride that will sustain Chandigarh.

In the formation of this civic sense and this civic pride the originality and the aesthetic beauty of the architecture of Chandigarh have played a determining role. Here in Chandigarh there was no attempt to return to any historic past, nothing like the revivalism that characterized so much Indian building of the same period. Pandit Nehru had wanted a city "unfettered by the traditions of the past" and Le Corbusier's modernism and internationalism answered this requirement. And yet despite all its freedom from the fetters of past traditions the architecture of Chandigarh could not ignore the compelling needs of Indian society and the stubborn cultural values underlying them. Chandigarh is not a castle built in the air. But its originality and modernism are obvious. Chandigarh's lasting importance lies most in the field of architecture, not merely in the monumental structures we see around us but the influence it had on the profession of architecture in our country. It influenced a whole generation of Indian architects. Charles Correa has written that "a number of architectural practices - including my own - have probably survived only because of the interest in architecture suggested by that City."

During the course of this conference in Chandigarh, you will be discussing many things, many issues on which universal agreement is not possible, nor should the achievement of any particular sort of consensus be the object of such a Conference as this. Your discussions, whatever the individual opinion you may express, will still be a celebration of Chandigarh. To show why this is so, I shall end with another quotation from Pandit Nehru, our first Prime Minister, without whose vision and continuing support this city might never have been built. Those of you who have visited the City Museum may have already seen these words on the wall there, but they will bear repetition:

"I have welcomed very greatly one experiment in India, Chandigarh. Many people argue about it, some like it and some dislike it...It hits you on the head, and makes you think. You may squirm at the impact but it has made you think and imbibe new ideas, and the one thing which India requires in many fields is being hit on the head so that it may think..."

On this fiftieth year of its founding let us remember those imaginative men who conceived, planned and executed the building of this great city of Chandigarh, a befitting capital for a State where "the mind is without fear and the head is held high".