The hole story of Chandigarh

Anjali Sagar & Sonali Aggarwal

It was the golden hour of a beautiful summer day when daylight is magical. Everything was washed in the warm glow of the rising sun in the bylanes of Sector 22. We were on a treasure hunt for the lost jaalis in the oldest neighbourhood of Chandigarh. Sector 22, the first sector to be built when Chandigarh was planned, had provided the founding architects of the city an empty slate to experiment. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, the British couple who was a part of this team, had a tall order to complete. Resources were limited, climate was fierce and time was short. Around 20,000 refugees, who were living in tents following the Partition, were to be settled urgently in new affordable housing. The cheapest house had a budget of Rs800 per unit. In spite of the budget constraint, great attention was given to design as Chandigarh was the first modern city in India. Each house was to have a supply of potable water, toilets, waterborne sewerage system and electricity. The success of the dream city had rested on this model sector. In fact, prior to the construction of Corbusier's Capitol Complex, Sector 22 was known as Chandigarh.

Unique style

Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry devised a system of open terraces for each residential unit to cater to the Indian way of living. They came up with an ingenious idea of placing screens on these terraces that would give purdah from the street, control sun ingress and provide good air circulation. Simply put, they made these screens into a system of holes of different shapes and sizes in walls and parapets. These holes, when multiplied, resulted in jaalis that became the architectural elements of precast concrete and burnt brick. As brick was the most economical material for construction at that time, they were adopted in a big way. Attractive facades and street pictures emerged and these ‘gems’ took the entire region by storm, giving rise to the 'Chandigarh Style' of architecture.

The jaalis

Having spent our childhood in these streets, as our grandparents were among the first residents of Sector 22, we consider ourselves the original Chandigarh brats, and are proud of everything that Chandigarh is. That fine summer morning, we decided to track the jaalis to see how they had fared over the years. Starting at the landmark Kiran Cinema of Sector 22, with its iconic curve-within-a-curve shaped facade, we ambled over to a row of kiosks with its humbly scaled corridor and scarlet-painted round pillars.

A pair of pigeons cooing noisily, while perched on step ladders directed us to a simply staggering facade of the intricate jaalis adorning the length of a row of shop-cum-flats. As we turned the corner, every residential street flaunted its own style of perforations — dots & dashes, punched-out squares, geometric grids and even zig-zags! The jaalis were beckoning and the clues of the treasure hunt were waiting to be solved.

Five holes each in a square persuaded us to ‘roll a dice and get a five’. A magnified board of red and white 'checkers' invited us to play a turn. A balcony said ‘let’s play dots’ and tempted us to pluck the mangoes hanging deliciously low and move on to the next clue. A corner block splattered with a series of dots and dashes rising vertically, challenged us to decode the ‘morse code’. And a peepal plant triumphantly emerged out of a square, uniting the red and fawn.

These jaalis were a labour of love by the British couple who had spent countless hours creating innumerable permutations and combinations of solids and voids, hopeful of bringing in light and air to the poor refugees. Little did they imagine that one day, the residents themselves will block them, maybe to keep out the cold winter winds or summer dust or enclose a room for an increasing family size or simply to keep the cooing birds out. Wondering whether the people living behind the screens realised how big a part of Chandigarh's history they were, we snaked our way along a long curvilinear wall with punched-out holes, bordering the adjoining Sector 23. We waved goodbye to a pigeon winking at us, perched in a hole 'one brick tall', somewhere in a wall. Arriving at a cluster of dainty houses, we paid homage to the modestly scaled arched entrance in red brickwork — a hallmark of Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry's architecture. The photographer in us could not resist capturing the beautiful screens of Type 9 houses, which, dappled with the sunlight filtering through the trees, seemed to do a jaali dance— 'Two up and two down' and up again. The now walled-off jaalis of the houses, where we had played with our siblings, brought us back to reality. The blocked facades clearly announced the changing times of an inward looking society, where neighbours are strangers, air-conditioned environments dominate and the jaalis are lost.

Perspective

As academicians, we wanted to research the background of these holes in the walls that had been forgotten in the cobwebs of old memories. Digging into the history of Chandigarh's architecture, we found that PL Varma, then Chief Engineer chairing a committee in 1947, had ordered burning of five crore bricks in preparation for the project that was to start in November 1949! Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, with all these bricks on their hands, exploited this resource to the fullest by making innovative jaalis. Interestingly, UE Chowdhary (fondly called Eulie), the Indian woman architect in Corbusier's team, highlighted the disadvantages of these jaalis — the ingress of heat in summer, cold winds in winter and insects, mosquitoes and flies all year around.

In fact, based upon this experience, the system of jaalis was abandoned in subsequent developments around the year 1957-58. Whether the system of jaalis was a success or failure is debatable.

Within the constraints of budget and social considerations, the intention at the time was to have a functional architectural element that would give a regulated system of facade control. Jaalis gave that option as there was a restraint in use of materials and a certain uniformity in the street pictures.

They became popular and undoubtedly shaped a definitive Chandigarh style of architecture in North India.

The sun had come up and the morning shied away. Having found the lost jaalis of Sector 22, we bid adieu to them, promising to return, another day, another time.