Rock Garden of Chandigarh
Interesting facts
- Nek Chand kept the garden hidden from the authorities for about eighteen years, building it on a forest buffer zone where construction had been banned since 1902.
- He imagined the site as the divine kingdom of Sukrani, a realm of gods, people and animals that he populated piece by piece from the city's rubbish.
- Nek Chand was born in 1924 in a village near Shakargarh, now in Pakistan, and his family crossed into India during the Partition of 1947.
- Each figure has a core of cement and sand, finished with a burnished cement skin set with broken glass, bangles, crockery and iron-foundry slag.
- Once the garden was legalised, Chand received the official title of Sub-Divisional Engineer, Rock Garden, along with a workforce of about fifty labourers.
- With official support, collection points were set up around Chandigarh to gather waste for the garden, especially rags and broken ceramics.
- The garden appeared on an Indian postage stamp in 1983, a year before its creator received the Padma Shri.
- While Chand was abroad on a lecture tour in the 1990s, the city cut funding and vandals struck, so the Rock Garden Society took over its care.
- The largest collection of Chand's sculptures outside Chandigarh belongs to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, USA.
- His figures also stand at the entrance of the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and in the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
Why it is worth it
The Rock Garden of Chandigarh began as a secret. Nek Chand, a road inspector with the Public Works Department who had come to the newly built city of Chandigarh in 1951, started collecting the debris of demolished villages and building sites: broken crockery, tiles, bottles, bangles, sinks, pipes and stones. Working at night and at weekends in a patch of government forest reserve near Sukhna Lake, land on which nothing was supposed to be built, he assembled from this waste a kingdom of his own imagining. Sources differ on exactly when he began, but when city officials stumbled on it in 1975 it already covered about twelve acres.
The work was illegal and could have been bulldozed. Instead, public enthusiasm won the day: the garden was formally opened on 24 January 1976, and Nek Chand was given a salary, an official title and a team of labourers to carry on full time. The garden has since grown to many times its original size, with several thousand sculptures, and it became one of the best-known works of self-taught art in the world, bringing its creator exhibitions abroad and the Padma Shri in 1984.
The pleasure lies in walking it. Walled paths wind between a chain of interlinked courtyards, each with a different mood. In some, hundreds of concrete figures of dancers, musicians and villagers stand in ranks, their bodies clad in shards of pottery; in others there are monkeys, peacocks, elephants, bears and imaginary creatures. Later phases add man-made waterfalls, a miniature village and an open-air theatre. Almost everything is made from what the city threw away, and the closer you look, the more you recognise: tiles, bottles, bangles, sinks, broken pipes and electrical scrap, all put to new use.
Nek Chand also made rag dolls from waste cloth in the 1970s, and some two hundred of them are now shown in a dolls' museum inside the garden. The Rock Garden Society looks after the site, which remains one of Chandigarh's most visited places.
Getting there
The garden lies close to Sukhna Lake and about 2.5 km from the city centre. Chandigarh's Shaheed Bhagat Singh International Airport (IXC) is about 9 km away, and Chandigarh railway station has fast trains to New Delhi.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Rock Garden of Chandigarh is a sculpture garden in Chandigarh, India. It is also known as Nek Chand Saini's Rock Garden of Nathupur after its founder Nek Chand Saini, a government official who started building the garden secretly in his spare time in 1957. It has spread over an area of 40 acres (16 ha), and is completely built from industrial, home waste, and discarded items.
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