Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  For Nehru, the future of India had to be fashioned unencumbered by the burden of the past. In his writings and speeches, this conviction often reduced itself to a black-and-white representation where, mimicking colonial vocabulary, India’s past became some kind of dark cesspool threatening to hold the country back from a necessary progress towards the pure white utopia of a rational, industrial and scientific state. ‘India must break with much of her past and not allow it to dominate the present,’ he wrote in his book titled, ironically enough, The Discovery of India. ‘Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of the past; all that is dead and has served its purpose must go.’ 42 He railed against the ‘dust and dirt of ages’ that had mutilated India’s image, and the ‘excrescences and abortions that have twisted and petrified her spirit, set it in rigid frames and stunted her growth’. 43 Tradition for him was of little value, because it was overlaid by ‘dead thought and ceremonial’, and was debilitated by the ‘woeful accumulation of superstitions and degrading custom’. 44 ‘We have to get out,’ he exhorted, ‘of traditional ways of thought and living which, for all the good they must have done in a past age … have ceased to have significance today.’ 45

  Religious belief was one ‘relic’ of the past that particularly filled Nehru with horror. To be fair, he had little time for any religion, whether of the east or the west. He considered religion to be coterminous with superstition and obscurantism, and inimical to the ‘scientific temper’ which must be the attribute of the ‘modern’ man. ‘Organized religion … encourages a temper which is the very opposite to that of science,’ he wrote in The Discovery of India. ‘It produces narrowness and intolerance, credulity and superstition, emotionalism and irrationalism. It tends to close and limit the mind of man, and to produce the temper of a dependent, unfree person.’ 46 His espousal of the scientific approach, and new knowledge based on new evidence and not preconceived theory, ‘the hard discipline of the mind’, as he put it, made him hostile even to the long-established and eclectic tradition of religious mysticism in India, which he described as ‘vague and soft and flabby, not a rigorous discipline of the mind, but a surrender of mental faculties’. 47 Gandhi drew the inspiration for his message of religious harmony from the best in all religions. He was thus quintessentially religious in preaching communal harmony. Nehru, on the other hand, was a professed agnostic. In his last will and testament he wrote: ‘I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in any such ceremonies and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude ourselves.’ Of course, in spite of such expressly stated views, his last rites were performed in accordance with Vedic ritual and to the loud incantation of priests.

  The interesting thing is that Nehru’s emphatic rejection of the old and traditional did not suppress the tendency—common to the colonized—to romanticize the remote past, and reinvoke it in near-mythical terms, as something that was once pure and unsullied but had ‘fallen’ over the ages. Nehru, in fact, admitted that he could not resist the temptation to conjure India as Bharat Mata—Mother India—a very old but beautiful lady, imbued with nobility and greatness, her beauty ‘wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions’. 48 The syndrome was familiar and predictable: rejection, in conformity with the critique of the colonizer, and glorification as a reaction to that critique. In the case of Nehru, however, the sentimentalism about the past was definitely subsidiary to his belief that India needed to free itself from its hold. The newly independent nation of which he was at the helm must, he was convinced, put on a new garment, for the old was ‘torn and tattered’ beyond repair.

  Nehru’s choice of Charles Edouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), the Swiss-French architect more famously known as Le Corbusier, to design the new city of Chandigarh, has to be understood in this context. The invitation to him provides dramatic illustration of how, for the colonized, the future and the past are seen as irrevocably opposed, leaving only one choice: a past that must be rejected or a future without the past. Corbusier had very little to recommend him for the project of building an Indian city except that he was white, western and perceived to be ultra modern. The interesting thing, of course, is that his modernity was not acceptable to his own countrymen, and none of his futuristic plans were actually implemented in France or anywhere else in Europe. Only once, in Marseilles in 1915, had he been allowed to have his way when, according to critics, he succeeded in mutilating the happy Mediterranean ambience of this coastal town, with its bars and cobbled streets and street restaurants and quaint houses, by planting a massive concrete tower of twenty storeys. ‘Raised on thick columns called pilotis, it housed a series of duplex apartments in its dense concrete framework. Each apartment was approached along an unlit internal corridor and its only overlook was across a square balcony. There the owners stood for a view of the immensely beautiful landscape in which they seemed trapped by the single-mindedness of a new architecture.’ 49 Ten years later Corbusier proposed to build a new Paris, with skyscrapers and speedways and symmetrical parks, a plan ‘that defied all existing social, cultural, economic, political, historical, architectural, anthropological, even ecclesiastical norms’, 50 and would have destroyed more of historic Paris than the German bombs in the two world wars put together. Not surprisingly, his plan—known as the Voisin Plan—was rejected by the city fathers. By the 1950s, when he was approached to design Chandigarh, he was an architect past his prime, with few takers for his grandiose plans, a man with vision no doubt, but somewhat disillusioned, and with almost no work of any consequence to occupy him.

  But destiny was about to take a turn for the Frenchman. Far away in India, a country about which he knew very little, a person no less than the prime minister had decided that he would be the best person to create a new city symbolic of the modernity India wanted to adopt. In his official notes and letters, Nehru referred to Corbusier as ‘a genius of world reputation’ and ‘one of the biggest architects in the world’. He had no problems about Corbusier’s ultra-radical ideas, or the fact that they had been rejected on aesthetic and sociological grounds in France and elsewhere. His requirement was for the new city to be sanitized of the cultural identifications of the past, because this alone would provide concrete proof of India’s desire and capability for modernity, especially to the western world. The architectural historian Vikramaditya Prakash (whose father, Aditya Prakash, also an architect, was part of Corbusier’s team of Indian architects), has insightfully observed that ‘while the emergence into modernity is accepted in the West as part of the continuing devolution of its own history, in postcolonial India, modernity inevitably signifies a break with its own history, and the superiority of the west’. 51 Nehru’s pronouncements while Chandigarh was being built clearly bring this out. For instance, in a speech at the inauguration of the Punjab High Court in the new city, he went so far as to say that if the state capital were to be located in one of the old cities, Punjab would find it very difficult to progress. ‘I am very happy that the people of Punjab did not make the mistake of putting some old city as their new capital. It would have been a great mistake and foolishness. 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.’ 52 Chandigarh was to be built to compensate the people of India’s Punjab for the loss of the historic city of Lahore as a result of Partition. But Lahore, with its historic fort and traditional bazaars and canals and winding roads, was old in spirit, and Chandigarh was not to be so handicapped. Those who thought that one could be modern without excluding the past were, for Nehru, simply ‘bogged down in their narrow-mindedness’. ‘Especially in India,’ he felt, ‘people are so steeped in old customs and habits that often they cannot understand
new ideas.’ 53 Speaking at the Institution of Engineers he argued that Chandigarh was important because it was symbolic of ‘not being tied down to what had been done by our forefathers and the like but thinking out in new terms … not in terms of rules and regulations laid down by our ancestors.’

  Oblivious to the conditioning caused by colonial experience, Corbusier must have been very pleasantly surprised by the adulation he received in India. Unknown to him, he had become part of Nehru’s passionately idealistic vision for a new India because the city he would build would be ‘unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future.’ 54 The suitability or quality of his architecture was not of relevance; the fact that his designs were new and ‘modern’, even by western standards, was all that mattered. Nehru, with the candour only he was capable of, admitted as much. ‘It is totally immaterial whether you like it [Chandigarh] or not,’ he emphasized. ‘It is the biggest thing in India of this kind. That is why I welcome it. It is the biggest thing because it hits you on the head and makes you think. You may squirm at the impact but it makes you think and imbibe new ideas, and the one thing that India requires in so many fields is to be hit on the head so that you may think.’ 55

  Corbusier, the chosen midwife of the ‘big idea’, received a hero’s welcome on arrival in India. All the terms he asked for were agreed to, including payment in much-scarce foreign currency, and the induction of his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and two British architects, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, into his team. Already quite awed by his reputation, Nehru was further impressed when Corbusier lectured to him about how houses in India needed to have lower roofs and thinner walls and be sensitive to conditions for bathing in hot or cold water. 56 He was given a free hand to design the city, and if local people such as the chief minister of Punjab, Sardar Partap Singh Kairon, opposed any of his ideas, he had the liberty to write directly to the prime minister, who invariably interceded in his support. 57 Nine Indian architects were designated to assist him, and someone from the scores of minions on tap held up an umbrella to shield him from the fierce Indian sun as he inspected the undulating plains in the Himalayan foothills of a country he had never visited or designed for before. No one advised him that he should acquaint himself with aspects of Indian architecture, or travel a little to see variations of traditional buildings in the Punjab. In fact, quite happy without this exposure, he could claim with characteristic flourish that he had drawn the basic plan for the new city in just forty-eight hours.

  The author André Malraux, who was also the French minister of culture at the time, recalls in his memoirs that Corbusier took him around Chandigarh’s unfinished buildings, waving his hand to indicate where the Assembly would come up and where the lawcourts, ‘while files of men and women were climbing the inclined planes, like the bowman of Persepolis, with baskets of cement on their heads’. 58 India’s bureaucracy and red tape, especially if it did not agree with him, could be troublesome, but Corbusier was really quite the unquestioned creative patriarch, with a great many powerful Indians fawning around him constantly. Balkrishna Doshi, the well-known Indian architect who had the opportunity to work with Corbusier, remembered how imperious he could be. On one occasion, at a party in Chandigarh where many luminaries from the judiciary were present, he refused to shake hands with the judges, telling them bluntly that they did not dispense proper justice. 59 A rather interesting photograph shows how even his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, could in ‘jest’ tie to a tree with a rope the original chief administrator of the Chandigarh project, the greatly respected and senior architect P.N. Thapar, while a group of Indians stood by smiling sheepishly. 60

  Among Doshi’s other memories are that Corbusier liked Indian cows, miniature paintings, and tandoori chicken. Perhaps he would have come to appreciate a few more things had he ever spent more than two months in a year on the site. Even so, to Nehru he argued confidently on the need for India not to copy others, and this, of course, greatly enhanced his appeal for the prime minister. ‘In the course of a conversation with M. Corbusier,’ Nehru wrote to the Planning Commission, ‘he told me that he was surprised and somewhat unhappy at the way we copied foreign models in our buildings and houses, regardless of our own climate and environment. We had got so used to the Anglo-Saxon approach, which was largely based on foreign engineers or on our own engineers who had received their training in foreign countries, that we tended to forget that India was somewhat different from these countries of the west. I think there was a great deal in what M. Corbusier told me and we should definitely investigate what changes we should make to make our buildings conform more to Indian conditions …’ 61 The situation was, indeed, rich with irony. Nehru, who wanted Indians to break with tradition, was being convinced of the need to preserve it by a Frenchman who knew almost nothing about it. That such gratuitous, unoriginal advice should acquire an almost revelatory value for a fiercely nationalistic person who had spent his life fighting against unwanted foreign influence, is not the only thing of interest. Nehru’s near-blind trust in Corbusier is evidenced throughout the building of Chandigarh. In the speech at the inauguration of the Punjab High Court cited earlier, he admitted that he did not understand everything about Corbusier’s planning. ‘I cannot say that I can understand the true significance of every part which I see … later I shall request Monsieur Corbusier to explain it all to me.’ 62 For the prime minister of India to say that of an Indian city—that he needed the foreign architect to explain what it was all about—after the city was complete, was an extraordinary admission, and only Nehru, because he genuinely believed that it was in India’s interest to give Corbusier a carte blanche, could have made it publicly. It was a willing suspension of scrutiny, based on the faith that anyone who could bring in the new without reference to the old must be modern. That faith was enough; the rest would fall into place, because the message the new city was meant to give was more important than its design.

  Chandigarh, as designed by Corbusier, was an extra-territorial transplant in direct opposition to the notion of aesthetics and ornamentation and to the ethos of an Indian city. Over the years it has, in spite of Corbusier, been Indianized; the unfamiliar geometric austerity has been partially camouflaged by the undergrowth of a lived city. But at the time when it was built it was the most spectacular symbol of something that was—self-consciously—modern in the western context but alien in the Indian. Apart from the master plan, Corbusier had personally designed the vast Capitol Complex, where the organs of state, the Legislative Assembly, the Secretariat and the High Court, were located. Each of them is conspicuous for the uninspiring linear use of tonnes of unfinished concrete, without any Indian features in ornamentation and embellishment, and all of them have deteriorated over successive Indian monsoons into drab, grey rain-streaked concrete boxes. The city is planned, no doubt, but its severe rationalism, without the intimacies and unpredictability of the traditional South Asian city, gives it the feel of a ‘scientific’ project implemented at the expense of local sensibilities.

  What is particularly noticeable is how bereft it is of any association with Indian culture and heritage. The Chandi temple, after which the city is named, is, of course, completely ignored—and that must have pleased the evangelically secular Nehru—but, beyond that, there is not an arch, or minaret, or courtyard, or stone, or chhatri, or dome, or doorway that even attempts to be Indian in provenance. The city’s residents were condemned to live forever in anonymous ‘sectors’; their homes—like all government housing projects in modern India—were featureless blocks of brick and cement; the roads and boulevards recalled no bygone or living heroes; the gardens took no inspiration from the patterns of the past; and no sculptures or murals invoking the region’s history were thought to be necessary. Careful municipal planning was evident, but it could not compensate for the absence of an animating soul. Even the ‘designated’ shopping areas, normally such a colourful feature of any Indian city, were designed in a nondescript, minimalistic
and almost pedestrian manner—a row of shops in forgettable brick known only by the ‘sector’. One cannot escape the impression that Corbusier wanted the residents of Chandigarh to have the mandatory ‘conveniences’ but little else. Gautam Bhatia, the sensitive architect and historian, rightfully bemoans the manner in which ‘a great Cartesian grid of wide roads was arbitrarily dropped from the sky’; 63 he concedes that geometric planning was one way of approaching a flat site, but ‘the man-made ordering … was so severe—the roads marked straight along the edges of a T-square, the vision bound only by the curvature of the earth—that it only imposed a rectangular clutter on the city. The architecture that resulted was the unfortunate by-product of a stringent city plan; shopping centres were isolated into shadowless enclaves; as colonnaded blocks of concrete they rose from unqualified floors and formed the controlling backdrops to … great shadowless plazas.’ 64 ‘Like a controlled scientific experiment,’ he writes, ‘the city lived and grew in an architectural vacuum … its physical predictability, the sensory violence of its geometry … offering little of the unquantifiables and the intangibles that suggest a “city”.’ 65