How I became a Nek Chand fan for life

My relationship with Nek Chand goes back to 1975 when I arrived in Chandigarh on my first Secretariat posting. I had been in the IAS for just four years and retained much of the hangover of having grown up in the heady Sixties as a radical, left wing, iconoclastic student in Delhi University, for whom conformity was the cardinal bourgeois sin. Chandigarh then represented everything that I found disagreeable — stifling bureaucratic hierarchies, conservative politics, a deeply rooted cultural distrust of intellectual activity, disapproval of unconventional lifestyles and an urban aesthetic distinguished by rigid frame controls and division of spaces along social and cultural class distinctions. There was no room for creative chaos and disruptive thinking. One despaired of the cultural sterility one seemed to be confined to.

Among the few people who seemed to defy this rigid socio-cultural norm was, ironically, a much older person, Champa Mangat Rai — a woman who had been the wife of a legendary Chief Secretary of Punjab, a woman full of spirit, who had no patience with bureaucratic ways and thinking, who cultivated a healthy irreverence for middle class social conventions, a passion for literature, the arts and creative endeavours. She lived by herself but her home was like a bohemian salon, with lively conversation, wit and repartee, much laughter and a sense of intellectual camaraderie cutting across age and class divisions.

It was Champa who introduced a group of us to Nek Chand and his garden. Not more than a dozen people in Chandigarh knew of the existence of this secret site. It was a storage site for building materials and the concrete and metal junk generated by a city still being built. Hidden behind a stack of coal tar drums and surrounded by an urban forest, Nek Chand performed his secret ministry. No one could ever suspect that behind those stacked drums there was a wizard creating a wonderland of such breathtakingly artistic daring. That first visit had me spellbound and the impact was huge enough for me to revise all my opinions about the stultifying character of the city and its residents. It was a discovery of profound import.

The Nek Chand story is well documented and need not be recounted here. Personally, for me, after that first encounter, I became a Nek Chand fan for life. Rupan Deol Bajaj, who I think was a part of that first visit, set up a group called Admirers of Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, spread the word around and facilitated the process of the Chandigarh Administration giving due recognition to the garden and its creator and having it opened to the public.

However, for two years between my first discovery and its public opening, access to the Rock Garden was the exclusive privilege accorded by Nek Chand to us and all our guests — artists, creative industry luminaries, eminent foreign tourists, academics, poets, dancers, musicians. Anyone who visited the city would be escorted to the garden and I would personally conduct them through the garden to ensure that they experienced the thrill of its discovery the same way as I did on my first visit. I would ensure that every visitor gained appreciation of the unique ‘perspectival architecture’ of the garden — the way in which the creator intended you to see it.

Every feature, every step, every change of level, every shape, every plant or shrub or tree, the placement of every stone or sculpture or object, every change of materials used and of texture followed a plan, a design. Nothing was accidental or casual even though it might have seemed so. This was genius at work.

The garden was designed to create a unique theatrical experience — the dramatic use of levels, of narrow openings where one needed to bend and crouch to enter a new vista, the stimulation of one's senses through changes of texture, everything was as intended. It was important to me that every visitor that I conducted should see the uniqueness of this grand design. I was fiercely defensive of the creation as though it was my own and was thrilled when others saw the creation the same way as I did, and utterly disappointed in their aesthetic sensibility if they did not.

I think Nek Chand realised the intensity of my response to his creativity, and therefore made me privy to all his plans, the way he saw the garden expanding and how he visualised its future.

We developed a relation of complete trust and though Nek Chand communicated mostly in silences occasionally punctuated with cryptic aphorisms, our instinctive understanding of one another was quite, quite profound. I realised that he was something of an oracle, like a divine creator or a Kubla Khan, who would wake up one morning and say to himself, “Here, I shall build a mountain, here a waterfall, there a palace and there a stately pleasure dome”, and then go on to do exactly that. I know of no one else who combined such extraordinary humility with such grand artistic ambition and thought on the imperial scale that he did.

I have a huge closet full of memories of the way our relationship grew, the hundreds of people I introduced to Nek Chand’s magic, ironing out his often troubled relationship with the administration, introducing him to VIPs — Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, among others — trying to create an institutional architecture of permanent support to him and to the garden.

Nek Chand restored my faith in humanity, in human relationships and the way in which creative endeavours can influence a whole city and its people.

— The writer is a former IAS officer