For the last 20 years, British-Indian collector Rajan Bijlani has been painstakingly tracking down furniture from the city of Chandigarh, designed by a group of modernists, led by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Located in the northern Indian state of Punjab, Chandigarh was conceived in 1947, when India and Pakistan partitioned and the British occupation ended. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, sought to fashion a modern and forward-thinking country by building a city from scratch, commissioning Le Corbusier and Jeanneret to design the masterplan, many of the city’s main buildings and its furniture.
Crafted between 1954 and 1966 – primarily from teak and rosewood – the furniture is a unique fusion of Eastern and Western design, which Bijlani first started acquiring in 2004 in a collection that now amounts to around 500 pieces.
