Constructed as a new capital for post-partition Indian Punjab, the city of Chandigarh is known for its Le Corbusier designed city plan and Capitol Complex. From the 1990s Chandigarh’s modernist furniture was removed from the city by French antiques dealers, exhibited, publicized, and sold for tens of thousands of dollars at major auction houses as the work of Swiss/French designer, and cousin of Courbusier, Pierre Jeanneret.

This paper calls into question the now hegemonic narrative of Chandigarh’s furniture – that their designer was Jeanneret, that they were "saved" by the French dealers, and that they should sit among other financially valued objects within the Western canon of Modernist design.

This paper suggests that such a narrative has emerged from, and is continued through, colonial power structures and does not accurately represent the historical reality of the furniture’s design, production, consumption and re-sale. We argue that the absence of solid, provable, and specific evidence has encouraged the propagation of a Western-focused narrative of Chandigarh’s furniture, which has created significant blind spots in its popular history, and risks overwriting the memory of their Indian context of creation and use.

Finally, this paper uses provisional data to illustrate how qualitative and experience-driven research into local histories of Chandigarh’s furniture can begin to address historical power imbalances and erasures of the ties between these pieces and India. Detailed collection of 13 years of auction data highlights the creation of a neo-colonial narrative, while initial explorations into oral histories and alternative sites of memory and data suggest a more complicated and nuanced story.

Such techniques, we argue, empowers design historical research to serve as decolonial activism, returning the story, prestige, and perhaps even physical examples of these pieces to India, as well as assigning India and Indian designers due credit in the broader history of modern design.