Saving Chandigarh’s iconic Rock Garden
Chandigarh's administration faces backlash for vandalizing the Rock Garden's wall for road expansion, threatening this vital public heritage space.
It’s just last year that Chandigarh celebrated the birth centenary of Nek Chand Saini, the creator of the Rock Garden, an invaluable modern heritage of the city. But that has not stopped the city administration from pulling down a part of the garden’s outer wall to widen the road outside and facilitate parking. This is nothing but an act of vandalism, which raises questions about the illiteracy of most administrations regarding art, aesthetics, and heritage. A city is not merely its physical infrastructure. If roads and parking are essential for decent urban living, public spaces, especially parks and gardens, are the life breath of cities. The Rock Garden is one such public space but it is also much more. Spread over 40 acres, it is home to art made of industrial and home waste and other discarded materials. Ironically, this was Nek Chand’s private secret for many years. A public works inspector, he started creating it in 1957 and it remained outside the public gaze until the “illegal” open-air studio was discovered by the administration in 1976 only to be adopted by the city as a treasured public space, and later, turned into a tourist hotspot.
Two aspects of the garden stand out: One, its birth as a voluntary citizen initiative in an urban space; and two, its creator’s commitment to building art with recycled waste, much before the idea of recycling entered mainstream discourse. In a sense, Chand’s curation was not just futuristic in its vision, but also offered a counter-narrative to the grand vision of the Nehruvian State’s nation-building. In Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, a representative urban space built by the State, Chand’s Rock Garden stands apart as a single citizen’s endeavour to make his city beautiful. And that explains why the citizenry called out the administration’s vandalism and promised to protect the garden. The Rock Garden is a piece of national heritage, don’t mess with it.
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