Lahore went to Pakistan in 1947 and East Punjab needed a capital. Chandigarh was built for the purpose, planned by Le Corbusier with Pierre Jeanneret, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry from 1951 and inaugurated as the capital in October 1953.
In 1966, when Haryana was carved out, Chandigarh became a union territory serving as capital to both states. That arrangement is still in place and still disputed.
Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki drew a plan first, a fan shape with curved roads and neighbourhood units, and Nowicki was killed in an air crash in 1950. What replaced it was a rectilinear grid, which is a different theory of what a city is, and both plans are in the record.
The Capitol Complex, holding the Secretariat, the Assembly and the High Court, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.
It was made a union territory in 1966 and the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, an arrangement described as temporary. Its transfer to Punjab was announced in 1970 and again in the accord of 1985 and has not happened.
It was built because Lahore went to Pakistan and the new state had no capital. The site was chosen on the Powadh plain and about fifty villages were acquired for it.
The Capitol buildings are concrete, unfaced and deliberately monumental, with the Open Hand turning on its bearing and the Tower of Shadows built to demonstrate the sun angles through the year. They stand apart from the city on a plinth, and most people who live in Chandigarh have never walked round them.
The Capitol Complex is a world heritage site. The city is a union territory serving as the capital of two states, an arrangement meant to be temporary in 1966 and now sixty years old.