Chandigarh

After months of travelling through cities that were essentially archaeological sites with traffic, Chandigarh promised a novelty I could barely picture: a major Indian city with no old quarter, no medieval gate, no layer beneath the layer, because there is no beneath. Chandigarh was willed into existence in the 1950s, on farmland below the Shivaliks, for the bluntest of reasons: Partition had given Punjab's beloved capital, Lahore, to the other side of the border, and the wounded state needed a new head. Nehru wanted more than a replacement; he wanted a statement, a city, in his phrase, unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation's faith in the future. The commission wound its way to the Swiss-French modernist Le Corbusier, who arrived with a fountain pen and a doctrine, and drew, sectors like a grid of garden villages, a hierarchy of roads, a 'head' of government buildings against the hills, green belts running like veins. I arrived by morning bus from Haryana into Sector 17, and the first sensation was almost vertiginous: roundabouts that worked, trees in disciplined avenues, signboards in a single typeface. My rickshaw driver watched me gawking at the tidiness and diagnosed me instantly: 'First time? Everyone looks like that. Don't worry, we are still Indian. Go to the vegetable market, you will feel at home.'