In Chandigarh, northern India, in 1957, a road inspector called Nek Chand started building a fantasy world, alone and with his bare hands, in a secluded wooded area. He constructed palaces and waterfalls and an evocation of his home village in what was now Pakistan, from which he had had to flee at partition in 1947. He peopled his creation with figures of dancers, gods and animals, and built it all out of waste material – odd stones he came across on walks and at work, broken glass and ceramics, iron-foundry slag, porcelain electrical switches. His unexplained absences on his secret building site made his wife wonder if he was having an affair. When in 1973 the authorities at last discovered Chand’s unauthorised construction, they ordered its demolition.
The Rock Garden, as it is called, was saved by popular demand, and this 16-hectare work of outsider architecture now attracts 5,000 visitors a day. It is also a striking counterpart to the monumental modernist government buildings designed by Le Corbusier for which Chandigarh is best known. The latter are unmissable, arranged over vast spaces in would-be rational straight lines and right angles, whereas Chand’s garden is introverted and irregular. “The city and my garden are as different as the sky and the earth,” he said.
Three of Chand’s statues gaze across a gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence exhibition. Before them are beautiful pieces of dark teak furniture, including a rounded dock for the city’s law courts, designed by Eulie Chowdhury, the only female Indian architect on the Chandigarh design team, and Le Corbusier’s cousin Pierre Jeanneret. They share the room with a video of the city under construction, in which gangs of women unceasingly carry wet concrete on their heads, and drawings and mementoes of Edwin Lutyens’s prewar imperial capital in New Delhi, which Chandigarh aimed to emulate and exceed.
The exhibition as a whole, like this room, presents a complex picture of power and freedom, and of modernity and craft. It traces the evolution of architecture in India and Ghana, as they moved from colonial rule to independence, both countries led by men – Jawaharlal Nehru and Kwame Nkrumah – who wanted to use modern architecture and construction as emblems of a new order. “Land of Freedom and Justice where progress and development never cease” proclaims an old Nkrumah-friendly newspaper, on show in the exhibition, alongside images of ambitious projects.
Paradoxes arose – in particular the fact that modernist architecture was primarily a European invention and therefore associated with the old imperial powers. Central figures in the V&A show are Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, “two potty types” as they called themselves, an earnest British couple who had battled to establish continental modernism in their soggy country before the second world war. At first commissioned by the British government to design public projects intended to placate the restive population of Ghana – a community centre, educational buildings – from 1951 they helped plan Chandigarh, the new capital city ordained by Nehru for the state of Punjab. They then invited Le Corbusier, the most influential architect of the time, to design a capitol of government buildings, for the assembly, the law courts and the secretariat.
In warmer climates, with the help of top-down political leaders, modernist ideas could be realised with a scale and confidence hard to find in Europe. These architects adapted their style to local conditions, with overhanging roofs to provide shade from the sun, and perforated screens and narrow floor plans to allow breezes to pass through. Concrete, in Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, is not a material of machine-age precision but a rough and muddy, labour-intensive substance built, as Drew put it, “with aid of men, women, children and donkeys”.
They didn’t, though, much engage with local traditions. Fry was dismissive of indigenous architecture, and his and Drew’s engagement with west African culture didn’t go much beyond the use of patterns abstracted from Ashanti ceremonial stools on their concrete screens. In Chandigarh, Le Corbusier banned cows and informal markets – essential features of most Indian cities – from his capitol. “It’s a place for gods to play; it’s not for humans,” objected Aditya Prakash, principal of the Chandigarh College of Architecture from 1967.
It took a generation of African and Indian architects to develop approaches that belonged more to their countries. The Ghanaian president had an architecture school set up at his Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Knust) in order to achieve just that. Nehru insisted that the design team in Chandigarh be staffed with young Indians, who could learn their trade while working on the city.
The results included architects such as John Owusu Addo in Ghana and Balkrishna Doshi and Prakash in India, who took the devices of Fry and Drew and Le Corbusier and made them their own. This was partly a case, as it was for Doshi and Prakash, of adapting modernism to create the kinds of spaces that Indians would want to inhabit, and partly about developing a more free and celebratory form of modernism that drew on new ideas. The geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, represented in the show by a silvery, softened version by Knust students, was a popular influence. And then there was the untrained Chand, whose Rock Garden can be seen as a flat-out rejection of almost everything the Europeans stood for.
Modern architecture, in this intriguing exhibition, has many faces. In the later years of Nkrumah’s increasingly authoritarian rule it became grandiose and oppressive, to make which point the show ends with one of the many statues he had made in his image, battered and torn down in the coup that deposed him. Tropical Modernism doesn’t draw conclusions, but it gives glimpses of creative endeavours to make sense of some of the most dramatic transformations of the 20th century.
• Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence is at the V&A, London, until 22 September
