As Chandīgarh, a city in northern India, was being redeveloped under the aggressively modernist plans of Swiss architect Le Corbusier in the mid-twentieth century, Nek Chand collected cast-off construction materials and the remains of the old villages being destroyed to make way for urbanization. He turned what he found into a fantastic rock garden, explaining in an interview, “I saw beauty and art in what people said was junk.” Located on the outskirts of Chandīgarh, the landscape that Chand made is full of thousands of cement sculptures, their vibrant clothing formed from glass and ceramic shards. Some have baskets on their heads; others dance or play instruments. They represent the range of Indian rural life, from its playing children to its police officers. Cement monkeys, oxen, and birds adorn the garden’s slopes, which visitors navigate through passageways that wind alongside waterfalls, streams, and lush plantings.
Chand started the garden in secret in 1958. Born in 1924 in a Punjabi village in today’s Pakistan, Nek Chand Saini, better known as Nek Chand, fled with his family to the Indian side of the border during the 1947 Partition. He went on to work in supervising road construction in Chandīgarh, getting a close look at the rapid changes happening in the city and the places that were still overlooked. He chose one of the overgrown spaces on the city’s northern edge, reimagining it by night as “a kingdom of gods and goddesses.” As he once stated, “What they threw away, I used.” This included broken bikes, which were used as armatures for the sculptures made by layering cement and salvaged materials like bottle caps and fluorescent-light tubes. He also created hundreds of rag dolls from salvaged cloth with his same ingenuity for transforming waste into something beautiful.
The garden was discovered during urban expansion in 1973. Not only did the authorities encourage Chand to continue but he was given a team to help him increase the garden’s scale, and it opened to the public in 1976 with the Indian government’s support. It later endured through proposed roads and vandalism, and the Nek Chand Foundation was organized to steward its maintenance. Chand died in 2015, with what is now known as the Rock Garden in Chandīgarh established as a major tourist site in India; visitors still come each day in multitudes to explore what he created.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
