About Book
'Chandigarh is in India' tells the stories of the city of Chandigarh through the works of Indian and Western artists. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s weathered buildings have long circulated as the dominant image of Chandigarh. However, as this book’s assertive title announces, there is much else that is of importance behind and alongside his buildings. The book seeks to present differing articulations by artists about Chandigarh, factoring in the inevitable contradictions, dilemmas and problems encountered in representing it “authentically”. Consciously making room for all the freely associative, fantastical and complex responses that make this city so beguiling, Chandigarh is in India explores how the architecture and the city itself have been used, adopted and adapted in the creative process. The book’s design plays with notions of interruption and discontinuity, creating a fluid sense of motion within a rigid structure. Working with the traditional forms of modernism, it seeks to visualize a sense of modularity by treating each page as a unit with its own set of axes. The two primary elements of the book – the essays and the artists’ sections – are woven together, creating a tensile tapestry that moves the reader out of the text into a wider set of references and then back again, reimagining how we could think about Chandigarh. Illustrated with over 250 colour and black and white images, this volume comprises three scholarly essays and ten artist sections, featuring Cyprien Gaillard, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gavin Hipkins, Madan Mahatta, Manuel Bougot, Pradeep Dalal, Seher Shah, Shezad Dawood, Thukral and Tagra, and Yamini Nayar.