The Forgotten Modernists

As a new exhibition throws light on how Indian professionals played a foundational role in the making of Chandigarh, the curators — Deepika Gandhi, Eashan Chaufla, Vikramaditya Prakash & Maristella Casciato — deliberate on its significance

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Updated At : 03:01 AM Mar 01, 2026 IST

The Indian Modernists at Sukhna Lake. Left to right (standing): RR Handa, Jeet Lal Malhotra, Anantrao Ramchandra Prabhawalkar, Aditya Prakash. Left to right (seated, middle): Manmohan Nath Sharma, Mohinder Singh Randhawa, Urmila Eulie Chowdhury. (Seated, below): Harbinder Singh Chopra and Bhanu Pratap Mathur. Photographer: SB Durga. Date: c. 1968. Source: Panjab Digital Library

What do we mean when we call Chandigarh ‘modern’?

Deepika Gandhi

Deepika Gandhi: Chandigarh is famous all over the world as a “modern city”, but people use the term loosely — almost casually — without asking what modernity really means. Many assume it’s simply an architectural style: buildings made in a certain way because a few architects arrived and imposed what they had in mind on a flat, blank site. That story misses something far more interesting: how the city’s planning and institutions shaped the evolution of its culture, its society, even its art scene. Modernism here becomes larger than buildings. It becomes a lifestyle.

What we noticed — again and again — was that many of the architects we’re calling “Indian modernists” did not limit themselves to architecture. Their creativity took many forms: painting, photography, graphic expression, furniture, and public culture.

Vikramaditya Prakash

Vikramaditya Prakash: I’d put it very plainly: the making of Chandigarh was about making modern life. Not just modern buildings. “Modernity” wasn’t a decorative layer. It was a project to align institutions, spaces, and everyday routines with a society that had already begun to change. Life had become modern — through new forms of work, new infrastructures, new aspirations — but the forms and habits of living hadn’t caught up. There was a break: a kind of split between a society moving forward and systems that still carried the weight of colonial history.

So Chandigarh becomes a site where modern life had to be invented — on the ground, in offices, in drawing rooms and classrooms, in the grammar of public space. That’s a very different claim than “modernism as style”.

Eashan Chaufla

Eashan Chaufla: These were decades before the Internet. Much of the creativity seems to have been inspired by what these architects and administrators saw around them — the climate, the new institutions, the demands of a young city, rather than by simply borrowing “international trends”. They weren’t trying to revive traditional idioms to prove Indianness by returning to temple motifs or folk formats. They were evolving new forms that answered the moment.

Maristella Casciato

Maristella Casciato: This is why the exhibition opens with a proposition: “Chandigarh’s Indian Modernists opens a window onto a generation of pioneering modern Indian architects, engineers, and administrators whose contribution was deeply intertwined with the foundation, growth, and fate of Chandigarh.” The modernity of Chandigarh was never a single-authored gesture; it was an ecology of roles — technical, administrative, pedagogical, artistic — working together to create a new civic reality.

Clockwise from left: Jeet Malhotra Cricket Stadium Sector 16, Chandigarh; S.D. Sharma Arts College Hostels Sector 10, Chandigarh; Jeet Malhotra P.G.I.M.E.R. Sector 12, Chandigarh; Aditya Prakash District Law Courts Sector 17 Chandigarh; J.K. Chowdhury P.E.C. Squash Court Sector 12, Chandigarh; Jeet Malhotra Chandigarh Club Sector 1, Chandigarh.

Why focus on ‘Indian modernists’ now?

Maristella: Because, despite their central roles, these figures appear only sporadically in the histories of Indian modern architecture and remain insufficiently visible in international scholarship. The omission cannot be explained by lack of significance. Rather, it stems from how the story of Chandigarh has been narrated, often framed by a one-directional historiography that privileges a narrow set of “master” authors.

Architectural history often prefers singular authorship: one genius, one signature, one masterpiece. But the work and positions of the first-generation Indian modernists did not align neatly into that convention. Their contributions were collective, embedded in offices, committees, systems, and teams. As a result, their biographies and agencies have been overshadowed.

Deepika: Locally, this flattening has consequences. If Chandigarh is told as an imported object, citizens can begin to feel that the city doesn’t belong to them — at least not in an authorship sense. But Chandigarh was made by Indians in profound ways: in execution, yes, but also in interpretation, expansion, and invention. The foreign architects mattered, but the city as it grew depended on Indian professionals who turned ideas into institutions and adapted them to conditions that no outsider could fully grasp.

Vikram: Choosing modernity was not automatic. After Independence, there was a powerful current of revivalism — an understandable desire to reassert cultural confidence by returning to older forms. And there was another sentiment too: antagonism toward colonial rule could translate into a suspicion of anything that felt “modern”. In that climate, building a modern capital city was a choice, a wager, and in some cases, an argument fought for. Chandigarh didn’t simply “happen”. It was made.

Eashan: And the exhibition insists that the story doesn’t end at the moment the iconic forms are established. The city continues to be shaped by administrators, pedagogues, designers of furniture and signage, by photographers and artists who documented and interpreted it.

Beyond the ‘heroic years’ and the problem of ‘amnesia’

Maristella: We explicitly move beyond the celebrated “heroic years” (1951-1965), documented in archives and collections that have provided a robust foundation of knowledge, but have also fostered a kind of amnesia. This is not a critique of archives but a reflection on how they become overly determinative: what is well-documented becomes what is remembered; what is less visible is forgotten. The result is an unbalanced historical imagination. Our exhibition introduces new research — drawing from private and institutional documentation — to expand the field of visibility.

Eashan: That phrase — “a kind of amnesia” — feels sharp because it’s true not only in scholarship but in practice. You can see a clustering of work in certain decades and then a falling off. That pattern parallels the broader trajectory of modernism itself: a peak, then a crisis, then fragmentation. But in Chandigarh it’s also about how critique travels.

Western architectural criticism — some of it insightful, some of it reductive — had real effects on self-identification. It’s not trivial when a global discourse frames modernism as authoritarian or alienating. Local confidence can erode. The question becomes: are we only “imitating”, and if so, why continue? That doubt changes pedagogy, practice, and even what gets valued.

Deepika: There have been periods when architecture students in Chandigarh were not even taken to the Capitol Complex as a serious site of study. That tells you that the problem is not only heritage law or funding; it’s interpretive confidence. If people don’t feel the city’s modernism is theirs — intellectually, culturally — they won’t defend it.

Vikram: And in a country with millennium-old buildings, modern heritage often gets caught in a time trap: too young to be revered, old enough to be replaced. That makes Chandigarh vulnerable.

Chandigarh as an experiment in institutions, not just monuments

Deepika: The popular Chandigarh story tends to focus on monuments. But the city’s modernity is actually most visible in its institutions — in education, health, administration, housing, and everyday infrastructure. It’s in how a sector works, how a market sits in relation to neighbourhoods, how trees, sidewalks produce a sense of calm. These are design choices, but they’re also social choices.

These Indian modernists expanded architecture outward. Over time, into adjacent domains: furniture design, visual arts, photography, and graphic expression. That’s not peripheral. It’s central to how Chandigarh built an environment, not simply a skyline.

Vikram: When you look closely, the so-called Architects’ Office becomes a pedagogy, not just a bureaucracy. You learn not only to make forms but to think systematically: climate, construction, public life, detailing, maintenance, and the ethics of public work. That kind of institutional modernism — procedural, collective, oriented toward civic outcomes — doesn’t fit neatly into the hero-story of architecture. But it is exactly what makes Chandigarh distinctive.

Maristella: This is also why the exhibition asserts, without exaggeration, that “in many ways, the pedagogical programme of the Architects’ Office evolved into a unique total work of art, fully expressing the Indianness of Chandigarh”. Here, “Indianness” is not a stylistic ornament. It is expressed through practices: how design was taught, how systems were coordinated, how the public realm was cultivated, how everyday objects — chairs, signage, photographs — translated civic ideals into daily experience.

Eashan: People think furniture is “interior”. But in Chandigarh, furniture is civic. It becomes a language shared across institutions. When that furniture is discarded or replaced by generic imports, something critical is lost — continuity of a designed world.

The urgency — what is being lost today

Eashan: Many significant residences are being demolished or altered beyond recognition. Institutional buildings face neglect or insensitive renovations. Original furniture, railings, built-in elements — details that make Chandigarh Chandigarh are discarded because they’re seen as “old” or inconvenient.

What is striking is that people still desire Chandigarh: its ease, its tree cover, its relative coherence. But they don’t always understand what produces those qualities. And if you don’t understand what produces them, you can destroy them while thinking you are “improving” the city.

Deepika: This is why the exhibition is also a public invitation to look again. Chandigarh’s modernism is not a museum piece. It is a living environment. Preservation cannot mean freezing. But change cannot mean erasure. We need an informed evolution.

Vikram: If Chandigarh is “relevant”, it’s because it offers a model of livability that many Indian cities urgently lack. Even now, people move here seeking order, safety, shade, civic life. That relevance should deepen the obligation to understand. If we want to repair and transform the city intelligently, we need a shared literacy about its origins and its makers.

Maristella: Back to the exhibition’s core premise: Chandigarh was conceived as a city whose seeds were well sown, yet whose flourishing required young visions and new voices. These young professionals are not footnotes. They are central to understanding how Chandigarh became a lived modernity.

Why a museum exhibition, and why now?

Deepika: A museum is where a city’s public memory can be revised — carefully, responsibly, with evidence. Chandigarh is full of memory, but much of it is informal: anecdotes, myths, assumptions. The museum allows another kind of seeing.

Eashan: It allows an encounter across generations. The exhibition creates a meeting place between experience and scholarship.

Vikram: It’s also a gesture of recognition: thanking this first generation of Indian modernists and celebrating their enduring legacy. That’s not sentimental. It’s corrective.

Maristella: If the exhibition accomplishes anything, it will be to widen the frame. Not to remove the famous figures, but to situate them within a larger field of agency.

— Gandhi is an architect and design professional; Prakash is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle; Chaufla is a multidisciplinary artist and designer; and Casciato is an architectural historian and Senior Curator at the Getty Research Institute, LA

‘Chandigarh’s Indian Modernists’

The exhibition is on view at the Government Museum and Art Gallery, Sector 10, Chandigarh.

February 28-March 29, from 11 am-7 pm.

(Mondays and holidays closed)

The Forgotten Modernists

As a new exhibition throws light on how Indian professionals played a foundational role in the making of Chandigarh, the curators — Deepika Gandhi, Eashan Chaufla, Vikramaditya Prakash & Maristella Casciato — deliberate on its significance

.

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