A forest of curious cement statues stands on the edge of the city of Chandigarh in northern India, their bodies dressed in colourful costumes made from beads and broken glass bangles. There are figures of women carrying baskets on their heads, alongside dancers and athletes, police officers and patients, ministers and musicians, beggars and children – scenes of rural village life, frozen in mineral form. An army of concrete monkeys squat on a slope nearby, while a herd of oxen roam a tiled pasture, their bodies covered with fragments of broken china. Narrow passages weave between these mystical tableaux of ceramic creatures, channelling visitors through deep gorges, past streams and waterfalls that cascade between the lush vegetation.
This sprawling 25-acre fantasy land is the arresting vision of Nek Chand Saini, a local highways inspector turned self-taught sculptor, who spent years piecing together his dreamscape in secret. While the Swiss architect Le Corbusier was building his megalomaniacal plan for the Punjab capital – a place of imposing government buildings linked by monumental axes – Chand was busy collecting leftover construction waste, and fashioning it into a spiritual mirror image of the modernist city. “What Le Corbusier built is the sky,” Chand said. “My work is the earth.”
