Maghie Ghali is a British-Lebanese journalist based in Beirut. She reports on arts, culture, travel, design, food, the environment and humanitarian issues, both regionally and internationally.
Left: Teak and cane office chairs, 1956, around a teak dining table, 1960. Right: Teak and cane demountable chairs, c1955For the last 20 years, British-Indian collector Rajan Bijlani has been painstakingly tracking down furniture from the city of Chandigarh, designed by a group of modernists, led byand Pierre Jeanneret. Located in the northern Indian state of Punjab, Chandigarh was conceived in 1947, when India and Pakistan partitioned and the British occupation ended.
‘It was quite amazing because it was all local materials, handmade by local carpenters and craftsmen who had these ancient skills, but designed by European modernist architects,’ he says. ‘I started collecting it to help conserve this design legacy, because it was not really being looked after, and because I loved the materiality of it, compared to the backdrop of the concrete and the brutalism of Le Corbusier’s architecture.
Standout pieces from the collection include some teak and zinc tables from the cafeteria at Chandigarh hospital and a library chair by Eulie Chowdhury, India’s first qualified woman architect, who worked with Jeanneret on furniture production. There are a pair of rarely-seen rattan chairs, from a private doctor’s house, which still have their original rattan in decent shape – a rare find after 70 years. Bijlani is also working with expert restorers to care for some of the pieces.
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