Original subtitles

These men live in Chandigarh which,

so far as the future is concerned,

is the most remarkable city in India. The city is still being built.

It began in 1950 when the government of the Punjab

asked the advice of Le Corbusier in Paris

about appointing a team of architecture to build a new state capital.

Le Corbusier, aged 63, took on the job himself and became head of the team.

It was the first and only time during his life

that the was given a chance to put into practice

his vision of what a modern city might be:

a vision he had worked on for over 30 years.

A CITY AT CHANDIGARH

Already 120,000 people live in Chandigarh.

Already it is full of stories, needs, ambitions, suffering.

The project on the drawing board has become part of life.

It has lost its neatness.

It has become complex, noisy, untidy.

It is not only that it contains life.

Life also contains it.

Like all living centres it draws people, things, ideas towards it.

Gipsies come to the outskirts

to sell their pots and pans and later to pass on to another centre.

She beats the metal, holding it with her feet,

as the helmet-makers at the time of Homer must have done.

Each night inside the city, during the season of marriages,

there is the sound of another wedding feast.

Life contains the city.

But the city is also changing the lives of those who live in it.

To those who travel to Chandigarh from other parts of India,

the avenues, the open spaces,

the lack of the hopeless never-dispersible crowds must seem fantastic.

Nobody lives in the street here. Everybody is housed.

There is underground sewage,

there is running water and electricity in even the cheapest house.

It is not only the city's university

and schools which makes Chandigarh a city to learn from.

Fifteen years ago on the site where Chandigarh now stands,

life was like this.

There were thirty villages scattered over the plateau at the foothills of the Himalayas.

This is the tradition of India.

This is what has to be accepted and changed.

Three hundred and sixty million Indians live in villages

that is 80 per cent of the population.

The Indian cow has a curious hump behind its shoulders

- like a perpetual yoke beneath the skin,

as though it were accommodating itself to its own sacred servitude.

It is somewhat similar with men.

Their religious teaching encourages them to accept all that befalls them.

Patience has been the necessity and the tragedy of India.

Toady half a mile from the city of Chandigarh

there are still entirely traditional villages.

The vast majority of Indians own no land of their own.

They work either as sharecroppers or daily labourers.

They earn in one year less than the average European worker earns in two weeks.

To build Chandigarh meant crossing many centuries.

But crossing them, as it were, on foot.

The city of Chandigarh was built by hand and carried on the heads of women.

What is architecturally one of the most modern cities of the world

is being built by men and women

who have to cart each brick, each measure of earth

and concrete, as they were carted 4000 years ago.

The city plan and all the large capitol buildings, the secretariat,

the High Court and the Assembly Hall were the work of Le Corbusier.

The city is cut up into 30 residential sectors by the road system.

Each residential sector, which measures 1,200 by 800 meters,

has its own shops, post office, school, health centre, playground, gardens.

On the extreme east is the university area:

on the west the industrial sector.

The road system is designed in such a way that no door of any house or building

opens on to a thoroughfare of fast traffic.

The traffic crosses the city between the sectors.

Chandigarh had to be built very cheaply,

therefore the cheapest material had to be used - brick.

With brick you cannot build high buildings.

This is why Chandigarh is a horizontal city

and not the vertical one such as Corbusier had often dreamt of building.

It is a flat city laid out in a garden - almost impossible to see as a whole.

Trees have been planted everywhere.

When they are fully grown,

a road or area will acquire special character because of the red flowers of its trees.

Another on will have yellow flowers, another blue.

There is something very special about the silence of a library.

It is as though the world outside were hushed,

waiting for the evidence to be sifted and its fate decided.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon the silence

The problem of building Chandigarh as a city for men to live properly in,

are the problems of India itself.

First - the climate.

The extreme heat.

With it - dust, high winds, the need for water.

But also the very cold nights of winter and the torrential rains of the monsoon.

Buildings have to become sanctuaries from the climate.

The sun breakers break the summer sun when it is high in the sky,

and admit the winter sun when it is low.

On every plan that Corbusier made there was drawn

what he called a climate grid. This showed the points of the compass,

the direction of the prevailing winds in winter and summer, and the angle of the sun.

These are the factors which govern the orientation of every building in the city.

Apart from the climate, India is beset with very ancient and deep social problems.

The builders, who built the city and are still building it

are the only people of the city who do not live in it.

They live in settlements outside.

They earn two rupees a day.

A rupee in Chandigarh is worth about one and sixpence.

Each morning the building workers walk through the city

from where they live outside it to their work inside it.

It may well be a distance of four or five miles.

With them they carry their children, their food,

and the family bed for the children to lie on.

The leave behind in the settlement only the old, the sick and a few children.

When they have work, they work seven days a week.

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?

In books you read the names of kings.

Was it kings who carried the stones for building?

And Babylon, destroyed repeatedly:

Who built it up again, so many times?

In Lima radiant with old, which were the houses.

Where the building workers lived?

On the night the Great Wall of China was finished, where did the masons go?

This is where the peons live. Peons are office servants or doormen.

This is where the architects live, and other professions - doctors, lawyers.

Here the civil servants.

Every house built by the State in each category of buildings

has a terrace on the roof or a court with trees in it,

so that in the summer the family can sleep out of doors.

This is where the legislators live.

In the industrial sector of the city there is so far a chemical works,

a flour works and a wool factory which employs about 200 workers.

Mr. Krishan is 40 years old. He earns 120 rupees a month.

Compared to the building labourers he is fortunate.

But the majority in Chandigarh work in the government offices.

Mr. Thapar is 55 years old. He is a high government official in planning.

He earns ten times as much as the factory worker.

He is expansive - he is used to having space around him.

He lives spaciously.

Here in Mr. Krishan's house, space is what you must adapt to.

Mr. Kirshan has a daughter and a son.

Their home consists of two small rooms, a space for cooking and a shower.

Yet in any other city of India the whole family would be living in one room.

Mr. Thapar pays 130 rupees a month for his house.

The factory worker pays 12.

All State housing in v is planned to a wage scale.

Every man pays one-tenth of his wages in rent.

Some accuse Chandigarh of perpetuating the caste system

It would be fairer to say that it has not been able to destroy it overnight.

Even to teach people to be impatient can take a long time.

The difference between a village like this and the new city is already enormous.

But there must also be a minimum continuity,

so that the villagers should not feel lost - when they live in Chandigarh.

This is not to say that everything must always evolve gradually.

But it is to say that people cannot be separated from their own sense of identity,

and this sense of identity is sustained by countless

daily habits of actions and thought.

Chandigarh is not a futurist city

- a dream solution ignoring present realities and present possibilities.

Nor is it an imposed solution - a European drawing imposed upon Asia.

The atmosphere of a traditional Indian bazaar is preserved,

but its structure, its hygiene and its population are rationalized.

The city recognizes a traditional way of life and at the same time changes it.

The architectural school was also deigned y Corbusier.

The senior students work on further plans for Chandigarh.

A plan is more than a blueprint for construction.

It is a declaration of intention...

an act of faith in man's ability to make decisions and carry them out.

The stones and cement shifted

can also eventually shift the direction of people's thoughts and beliefs.

It was said that it would be impossible

to build a city at Chandigarh because of the shortage of water.

To rid people of this doubt Corbusier named the main street

Now there is a vast reservoir combined with an artificial lake

with a promenade

- where not traffic is allowed and people can relax in sight of the water.

In many Indian cities the poor share what little living space

they have with their cows, which yield hardly any milk at all.

In Chandigarh no cows are allowed inside the city.

Instead there is one State-controlled dairy on the edge of the town.

On the outskirts of the big cities in India there are extensive shanty towns.

At Chandigarh there are none.

The country begins where the city stops.

And the land around the city

has been bought by the State to prevent speculators taking it over.

Technology, Corbusier aid, has extended the poetic field.

It has not closed horizons, killed space or imprisoned poets.

Technology, by the precision of its measurements,

opens fantastic news spaces for us and so opens also the world of dreams.

The appetite for life: life as something different

from the oppressive everyday routine: the search for a joie de vivre:

this, Corbusier said, is the only aim of any civilization anywhere in the world.

It is too soon to say whether the plans will be effective

and the drams realized.

But the city is there to learn from.

It is a city that can teach, a city of students.

As historians we look back to the past

to understand the present better.

My young son asks me: shall I learn mathematics?

What for, I'd like to say.

That two slices of bread are more than one, You'll find that out anyway.

My young son asks me: shall I learn French?

What for, I'd like to say. This empire is ending

Just rub your stomach with your hand and groan:

they'll understand.

My young son asks me: shall I learn history?

What for, I'd like to say. Learn to duck your head underground,

Then perhaps you'll survive.

Yes, learn mathematics, I say, Learn French, learn history.

They are the future instrument makers of India.

Their instruments will be essential for the work of surveyors, dam builders, agronomists.

Gandhi said, Truth is God. Truth is also precision.

The precision of a Sikh harvest dance

in the university open-air theatre is much finer and more coordinated

than the actual methods of sowing,

cultivating and harvesting in 95 per cent of India's agriculture today.

The dance perhaps originated in the dream of such a harvest

as only now the teachers

and chemists and instrument makers can make red.

Her grace should be like that of a tiger. For a tiger, you know, its waist is so supple

that it can bend its head round to the tail end: so should her waist be supple.

Her teeth should be like a diamond:

the lips should be like the pod of lentils:

her eyebrows should be like the new moon.

At the University of Chandigarh and at the High Schools there are many women students.

In India a woman can be prime minister.

But mostly, men make all the decisions for women.

Women are worshipped as mothers.

Yet they are considered ignorant and unspiritual.

And they have been kept in ignorance.

An Indian speaks: they are not treated like people.

They have bangles and necklaces, but so have many sacred animals.

How can they teach their children to want something better,

when they are satisfied themselves with things as they are?

But when women have education, it is very different.

She has a face whose promise is so great

that the face in front of me seems less than real.

I consider the subject of the following discourse

as one of the most interesting questions philosophy can pose:

and unhappily for us, one of the most thorny that philosophers have to solve.

For how should we know the source of inequality between men,

if we do not begin by knowing mankind?

The hostel of the men students is at the far opposite end of the sector.

On public occasions the men keep very separate from the women.

But many of these men, will eventually marry whom they choose.

Their marriages will not be arranged for them.

Most marriages in India still are.

Today even a young man in Chandigarh can remember a very different life.

The government schools in the city are free.

But the budget for educaiton is severely restricted.

The primary school for these children had to be built with less than £5.000.

There are outdoor teaching arenas for use in the winter.

In the summer it is too hot to be outside and the classes are held indoors.

Today 70 percent of Indians are illiterate,

but every boy and girl in Chandigarh will learn to read.

There are also paying schools in the city where the children of richer parents go.

Will these children help to revolutionize India?

The experience of being brought up in Chandigarh

could lead them to imagine

and to demand a previously unimaginable future of India.

Or will they be too privileged to do anything

but try to preserve their own comparative good fortune?

Every sector in the city has its own health center.

When the purpose of a building is made clear

and fits into a civic plan that can be understood,

people's thoughts become clearer.

The problems become defined.

The advance of all knowledge is a process of first making distinctions

and then connecting.

There are lectures on birth control

which are well-attended and already effective.

India produces enough food to feed adequately only two-thirds of its population.

Its population is increasing by 9 million people a year.

The answer is not simply birth control.

The more profound answer is in industrial and scientific development.

Nevertheless women should have the right to choose

how many children they want to bear.

In the minds of ordinary people a plan begins to compete

with a destiny decided by the stars and revealed in horoscopes.

The rock which crumbles into soil The deserted threshed into grain

The day spelt out in birds

The convict, the slave, the pariah In blossom and harmonious

The night made fertile The end of hunger - Of the face spa upon

I walk in History better Than in daylight.

Copyright by Alain Tanner Ernest Artaria, John Berger