Chandigarh is unlike anywhere else you’ll visit in India. Purpose-built in the wake of partition, after Lahore and much of Punjab became part of Pakistan, it’s an uncompromisingly straight-edged, sharp-cornered, Brutalist masterpiece (if you’re a fan) — or ugly and un-Indian (if you’re not). Either way, you can’t say it’s not interesting.

An experiment in utopian town planning by noted curve-hater and concrete-fancier, Le Corbusier, Chandigarh’s tree-lined boulevards, grand civic buildings and plentiful green spaces were meant to symbolize modern India’s freedom from the past. Jawaharlal Nehru said of it that ‘it hits you on the head and makes you think’, pointing out that you don’t have to like every building in Chandigarh to appreciate its liberation from tradition. Though not everyone will love the hulking austerity of the architecture, it’d be hard to argue it wasn’t successful: Chandigarh today is one of the greenest, cleanest, happiest and wealthiest cities in India.

If you’re not drawn to Le Corbusier’s concrete dream, you might be won over by another man’s vision. For decades, Nek Chand, a former city road inspector, collected bits of rubbish — bottle caps, bicycle frames, old lightbulbs, broken plates — to build a secret, Güell-like fantasyland of bug-eyed figures, mosaics and eccentric, abstract sculpture. When the authorities discovered his work in 1975, Chand had already been beavering away for 18 years. In an astonishingly forward-thinking move, they didn’t demolish his illegal ‘garden’ but instead gave him a salary and a 30-strong workforce to continue. Today, up to 5,000 visitors come to admire his surrealist masterpiece — now known as the Rock Garden of Chandigarh — every day.

Chandigarh is a snapshot of India in a moment when it was being asked to remake itself; to decide what it is to be Indian after Independence. Successful or not, in the words of Nehru, it makes you think.