Political Discourse and the Planned City: Nehru’s Projection and Appropriation of Chandigarh, the Capital of Punjab

Abstract

This article aims to understand how the political discourse shaped and underwrote the creation of the planned city of Chandigarh. This has been achieved by carrying out critical discourse analysis of speeches and writings of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and also by relating them to the wider discourses of nationalism, planning, and modernism that were prevalent at the time of the building of the city. The focus is on how the city was conceived by Nehru and how through a selective and partial projection of its characteristics he created an image of the new city that was an embodiment of the ideals and goals of the newly independent State of India. Using such mechanisms, he appropriated a provincial capital and constructed it as a symbol of the entire nation.

本文旨在理解政治论述如何形塑并承保昌迪加尔的规划之城的打造。本文通过对贾瓦哈拉尔．尼赫鲁的演说与写作进行批判论述分析，并将其连结至打造该城时盛行的更广泛的国族主义、规划与现代主义之论述，达到上述目标。本文聚焦尼赫鲁如何理解该城市，并通过选择性和部分投射其特徵，创造一个体现印度作为新兴独立国家的理想和目标之崭新城市意象。尼赫鲁运用此般机制，挪用州的资本，并将其打造成为全国的象徵。

Este artículo pretende entender cómo el discurso político ayudó a configurar y aseguró la creación de la ciudad planeada de Chandigarh. Esto lo hemos logrado ejecutando un análisis crítico del discurso sobre la forma de hablar y los escritos del Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru, y también relacionando esto con los discursos más amplios sobre nacionalismo, planificación y modernismo que prevalecían en la época en que se construyó la ciudad. El enfoque principal es sobre el modo como se concibió la ciudad por Nehru y cómo mediante una proyección selectiva y parcial de sus características él creó una imagen de la nueva ciudad a manera de encarnación de los ideales y metas del nuevo estado independiente de la India. Con el uso de tales mecanismos, él se apropió de una capital provincial para edificarla como el símbolo de la nación entera.

Key Words:

• critical discourse analysis
• planned city
• political discourse
• power relations

关键词:

• 批判论述分析
• 规划之城
• 政治论述
• 权力关系。

Palabras clave:

• análisis crítico del discurso
• ciudad planeada
• discurso político
• relaciones de poder

Acknowledgments

The thorough reading and generous feedback received from the three anonymous reviewers and the insightful suggestions from the editor, Nik Heynen, have contributed immensely in strengthening and orienting the article. We are deeply grateful to all four of them.

Notes

1 Although there were other politicians linked with the building of Chandigarh, a perusal of writings of different politicians who were involved in the project brought out the dominant role played by Nehru. This article focuses exclusively on Nehru’s writings because of his defining influence.

2 Chandigarh was not the only capital built in India during this period but was one of the three new state capitals, the other two being Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar (planned by Otto Koenigsberger) and Gujarat’s capital Gandhinagar (planned by H. K. Mewada and P. M. Apte). The other two state capitals did not garner as much attention as Chandigarh did, however. For details regarding Bhubaneswar, see Kalia (1994), and for Gandhinagar, see Kalia (2004). Nehru’s rhetoric in the case of Bhubaneswar was different, one that harked back to Odisha’s past. Nehru passed away before the material construction of Gandhinagar commenced.

3 The words secular and socialist were added later in 1976 through the 42nd amendment.

4 The villagers—the original occupants of the proposed site—had launched massive protests against the government’s decision. An anti-Rajdhani (literally anticapital) committee, including socialists, local leaders, and the affected villagers, was formed to get the site of the new capital changed from Chandigarh. Arguing that the site included highly fertile land and would lead to uprooting of several villages, they threatened to launch a nonviolent satyagraha against the government. Nehru’s colleagues from Punjab, who belonged to his own political party, such as Bhim Sen Sachar (then chief minister, Punjab), Sardar Hukum Singh (member of parliament), and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (member of parliament), were also not in favor of building the new capital at Chandigarh. For more detail on protests against the new capital, see Kalia (1988).

5 Spivak (1997) argued that Chandigarh was a failed attempt at decolonization because “the West was on tap.” Prakash (2002) argued that the contested nature of Chandigarh’s “modernness” requires a more nuanced understanding and that the failure was not because the city was “un-Indian” or “Western” but because it was an “elitist” modernism that “came top-down” (Prakash 2002, 153).

6 This is in keeping with Khilnani’s (2012) argument that Chandigarh was an expression of Nehru’s conception of modern India: one that is “free of both the contradictory modernity of the Raj and nostalgia for its indigenous past” and that “had to move forward by one decisive act that broke both with its ancient and its more recent history” (101).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ganeshwari Singh

GANESHWARI SINGH is a Senior Research Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Geography at Panjab University, Chandigarh 160014, India. E-mail: [email protected]. She is currently working on discourse, sociospatial dialectic, and production of space in Chandigarh. Her research interests include cultural landscapes, power relations, and feminist geography.

Simrit Kahlon

SIMRIT KAHLON is Professor and Chair in the Department of Geography at Panjab University, Chandigarh 160014, India. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include cultural landscapes, human–environment relations, and urban geography.

Vishwa Bandhu Singh Chandel

VISHWA BANDHU SINGH CHANDEL is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Panjab University, Chandigarh 160014, India. E-mail: [email protected]. His research focuses on disasters and cultural landscapes in the context of the Himalayas.