If you stand on the upper parapets of any tall building in Delhi, Lucknow, Patna or most North Indian cities, the view is essentially the same: close up, the buildings resemble architect-designed structures with some semblance of self-created order — a partial cityscape that has emerged from a drawing board. But as the eye moves away, architecture dissipates into half-baked urbanity. In the middle distance is a composition of people and buildings, of movement and unhindered human action; and farther afield, the scene appears as a soft focus dust haze — a pantomime of half-finished walls set in city squalor — barely decipherable as a place with precise intentions.

Chandigarh was the only modern city in North India conceived in geometry and with a European sense of urban control. Its perception and visible structure still retains to a great extent the vision of its master architect, Le Corbusier. Of the numerous texts published on it, almost all address two specific issues: one, the architectural conception of the city; and two, the urbanity of its division into sectors, along with its garden-planning ideas.

Shanay Jhaveri adds a third type to the list. Chandigarh is in India — despite the strained reference in its title — is unusual, in that it casts a welcoming glance on the many forms of art that emerged full-blown at the time — painting, textile, collage, screen art, landscape, photography, film, interiors, etc. 

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What remains of Chandigarh’s modernistic model is only a tribute to Indian bureaucracy. Like all formal structures in India, the city survives only because of strict zoning and paralysing building regulations. Rules as old as the city itself. Had the real India been unleashed on the place over the period, had waves of rural migrants been allowed to make space within the plan of a continually changing Chandigarh, the city would have been a true experiment in Indian urbanism. In its sealed state, and half a century of bureaucratic control later, its false sense of liveability is fostered by a draconian conservation, similar to providing fences around monuments. The care lavished on its parkland, leisure valleys and sculpture gardens, the wide avenues and bureaucratic bungalows makes it an altogether artificial construction surviving in a vacuum. A brilliant monumental lie.

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Still, the book’s eccentric offering is its greatest asset. By choosing to represent such myriad forms of art and in ways that captivate the reader with graphic idiosyncrasies — cropping photographs, juxtaposing text and drawings, oversizing lettering, framing the banal, and tilting and overturning images, the book makes constant unsettling demands on the reader; thus becoming a work of the very art described in its pages — a book on art that is a work of art. It is a compliment to an age that is overrun by the messy tumult of Indian city life, and a formal tribute to a style that history refuses to acknowledge.