CITY BEAUTIFUL, CITY PERFECT

Does Chandigarh belong only to Corbusier? In reclamation of the Modernist past as a living present, Noor Dasmesh Singh engages with the metropolis through photography and dialogue

- NAMRATA DEWANJEE

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, but what is an Indian city? Perhaps it is laced with curious irony that despite its gridlines, Chandigarh does not fit into a box. It is neither stereotypically Indian nor is it the poster child of Modernism that Le Corbusier pictured in the 1950s, and hoped, it would be.