Workmen on bamboo scaffolding on the site of the Government Press Building in sector 18, Chandigarh (Architect: E. Maxwell Fry)
Photograph: © Copyright Ernst Scheidegger, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Human chain for pouring concrete, probably on the site of the Government Press Building in sector 18.
Photograph: © Copyright Ernst Scheidegger, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

High Court Building, Chandigarh, view of the
rear wing with brise-soleils. (Architect: Le Corbusier)
Photograph: © Copyright Ernst Scheidegger,
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Photograph: Courtesy of Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich

Book Review

Ernst Scheidegger, photographs
Stanislaus von Moos, editor
Chandigarh 1956: Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jane B. Drew, E. Maxwell Fry

Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010, 272 pp., 145 color and 132 b/w illus., CHF 79 / € 55

ISBN: 978-3-85881-222-3

Prior to the publication of this book, the texture of photographic reportage surrounding Le Corbusier’s project for Chandigarh had been predominantly preoccupied with the finished product.  It excluded the representation of a critical agency, the migrant construction laborer—the mazdoor—who was unequivocally involved with the modernizing project of the newly created “Indian nation,” but whose presence, as well as history, had not been acknowledged. This position of the mazdoor—of being intrinsically central to a grand modernizing narrative, yet simultaneously being outside it—can be seen, through a postcolonial imperative, to inscribe the nation far more accurately than nationalisitic ambitions of the time desirous of the “progress” and “modernity” of the west. A situation that is also ominously reflected in contemporary ideology surrounding the architectural canon in India, and indeed in other parts of the world, the mazdoor’s gaze has a destabilizing effect on the sense of stability and closure of the dominant discourses that collaborate in the making of the canon.

In the context of this exclusion of the laborer, it is of phenomenal significance that the book Chandigarh 1956: Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jane B. Drew, E Maxwell Fry has been published, documenting the construction of Nehru’s visionary city predominantly through black & white and recently discovered color images shot by the Swiss photographer Ernst Scheidegger.  The publication, which has a parallel German/English text throughout, comes half a century after the telling images were rejected by Girsberger, the Zurich-based publisher of Le Corbusier’s complete works. It includes a facsimile of the original mock-up of the book that Scheidegger had proposed in 1956. The fundamental ontological significance of the images lies in viewing “building” not as an inert finished product, but as a cultural process subject to uneven, unequal, violent and exploitative forces, and in doing so, reminding us that the visual is as significant as the textual in the writing of history.

The book documents the laborer in the act of construction of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic projects, but transcends the orientalist impulse to record “how they hand-built the machine aesthetic” by including laborers’ dwellings, their actions when not at work, as well as a negotiated habitation of the city in its ordinary working life. The workers’ realities are so devastatingly different from what the modernizing project hoped to achieve that the images open up fundamental questions about the participants and beneficiaries of this process and about the frames of references deployed to represent this ideology. What would be the history of Chandigarh, written by and for the mazdoor who built it? What would be the tone of this voice? How would it be recorded and understood? Like the works of Indian socialist poet Sahir Ludhianvi (1921-1980), the images form a critique of domination. In his poem “Taj Mahal,” Ludhianvi speaks for the voiceless laborer “whose blood and bone fattens the powerful, engaged in the construction of ‘supreme’ relics.”

Four essays by Scheidegger, Stanislaus Von Moos, Maristella Casciato and Verena Nievergelt accompany the photographs exploring the personal and political contexts within which Scheidegger operated, catalyzed by a European postwar mood to celebrate industrial production methods. While Nievergelt places his practice of photography, focused on the everyday, between the motivations of photojournalism and architectural documentation, Casciato situates them historically, detailing how Chandigarh came to be through the interactions of Nehru, Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, Drew and Fry.

Of these essays Stanislaus von Moos’s “Ruins in Reverse – Notes on Photography and the Architectural ‘Non-Finito’” best interrogates the relationship between labor, the efforts of media and the architect. While construction remains a marginal preoccupation in Le Corbusier’s publications on his own work, it is an explicit political issue that inspired the masses during the erection of the city of Brasilia—contemporary with Chandigarh—through the publication of Brasilia, the state-funded magazine. Why didn’t the construction of Nehru’s “new temple of India” inspire a zeitgeist on a nationwide scale in the same spirit or scope as Brasilia? The design of Chandigarh expressed one aspect of Nehru’s idea of a modern India: the sense that India must free itself from both the contradictory modernity of the Raj and nostalgia for its indigenous past.* Yet it is ironic that the modes of production used in terms of labor were the very same ones set up by the British government for the expansion of the imperial economy. This was primarily through the Public Works Department (PWD)—the colonial construction agency, which realized the modernist concept using the economically displaced semi-rural migrant laborer. The setting up of the PWD involved the production of traditionalist pattern books, which in turn involved a systematic de-skilling of craftspersons to “laborers.” This crisis in production, of being unable to recognize and transform a violent colonial constructional practice into a more appropriate one is what renders the modernizing project hollow in Chandigarh, quite unlike the case in Brasilia, where construction itself embodied the hopes of modernity.

This is a stimulating and provocative book that engages the reader through the immediacy and power of Scheidegger’s images.  Its importance lies in invoking the idea of a messy contested modernity through the interactions of the pre-colonial, the colonial, and the postcolonial, which also makes it significant for a readership outside the domain of architecture.  The continual “hyper-exploitation,” displacement and suppression of the skilled and unskilled migrant laborer in the Indian metropolis have been the focus of many international and national agencies and grassroots activists, yet on a daily basis we are presented with atrocities against them to make way for “modern iconic developments.” The professional agencies that collaborate with this particular ideology are complicit in the acts of violence, in their tacit omission of the laborer from representations of “their” work. Scheidegger’s photographs urge these agencies, including the architect, to engage with this pressing reality by acknowledging the workers’ mere presence.

Megha Chand Inglis

The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

*Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, London: Penguin, 1998, p. 131