Nek Chand Saini, a road inspector in the Chandigarh Public Works Department, began in about 1957 to collect construction waste, broken tiles, bangles, sockets, crockery and rubble from the villages the city had demolished, and to build sculptures with it in a forest gully on government land.
He did it in secret for eighteen years, at night and on days off, on land where building was prohibited. By the time it was discovered in 1975 it covered several acres and held thousands of figures.
The city could have demolished it. It employed him instead, gave him a salary and a labour force, and the Rock Garden opened to the public in 1976.
It now covers about forty acres and is among the most visited sites in northern India.
It is built out of the debris of the villages that were cleared to make Chandigarh, by a refugee from Shakargarh in what is now Pakistan, on land beside a planned city designed by a Swiss architect.
Nek Chand had no training. He died in 2015.
The figures are built over a frame of wire and concrete and faced with whatever the surface material is: bangle glass, broken sanitaryware, tile shards, electrical fittings, coal slag and mosaic. The colour comes out of the waste rather than from paint, so the palette is whatever the city was throwing away that year.
It is laid out as a route and not as a park. The visitor goes through low doorways that force a stoop, along corridors, under a waterfall and into courtyards that open without warning, and the sequence is controlled from the first gate to the last one. A road inspector with no training built a processional landscape.
It has had to be defended since. A road was driven through part of the site in the 1990s, volunteers and public pressure stopped further building, and the garden has been in dispute with the city that employs it more than once.