Tropical Modernism review – a complex story of power, freedom, craft… and cows

V&A, London
Modernist architecture’s arrival in India and colonial west Africa, and how, post-independence, a new generation of local architects made the style their own, is explored in an intriguing new exhibition

In Chandigarh, northern India, in 1957, a road inspector called Nek Chand started building a fantasy world, alone and with his bare hands, in a secluded wooded area. He constructed palaces and waterfalls and an evocation of his home village in what was now Pakistan, from which he had had to flee at partition in 1947. He peopled his creation with figures of dancers, gods and animals, and built it all out of waste material – odd stones he came across on walks and at work, broken glass and ceramics, iron-foundry slag, porcelain electrical switches. His unexplained absences on his secret building site made his wife wonder if he was having an affair. When in 1973 the authorities at last discovered Chand’s unauthorised construction, they ordered its demolition.

The Rock Garden, as it is called, was saved by popular demand, and this 16-hectare work of outsider architecture now attracts 5,000 visitors a day. It is also a striking counterpart to the monumental modernist government buildings designed by Le Corbusier for which Chandigarh is best known. The latter are unmissable, arranged over vast spaces in would-be rational straight lines and right angles, whereas Chand’s garden is introverted and irregular. “The city and my garden are as different as the sky and the earth,” he said.