Designed to furnish the planned post-independence capital of the Indian Punjab, modernist furniture from the city of Chandigarh has taken the world by storm. From the pages of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal to dentist’s offices and restaurants in New York, and from Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s Calabasas mansion to prints on designer clothing, the bulky, angular forms of Chandigarh’s modernist furniture are now hard to miss. Popular narratives of the furniture, told in glossy full-color coffee table books and re-told by the design and popular press highlight the pieces’ design by Pierre Jeanneret, the supposed ‘neglect’ of this furniture by Chandigarh residents and government officials, and the ‘saving’ of Chandigarh’s modern design heritage by French dealers and wealthy design collectors. As a result of this narrative, these now iconic objects have been transformed from Chandigarh Chairs to “Jeanneret Chairs,” from utilitarian furniture to pieces of high design, and from embodiments of Indian design to items residing solidly in the European modernist design canon (Seitz et.al, 2022).

Understanding such effects to be harmful, this paper proposes leveraging histories and realities of use as a tool to build more truthful and resolutely anti-colonial histories and present realties of designed objects (Feldman, 2024; Henderson, 2020). By detailing, emphasizing and encouraging normal day-to-day use of Chandigarh’s furniture we can undermine suggestions that Chandigarh’s residents have not appropriately appreciated the city’s furniture, help ensure that those for whom these pieces were created maintain access to them, and aid in the recategorization of Chandigarh’s modernism as a part of Indian – not European – design history (Holtorf and Bolin, 2024; Fekrsanati and Marçal, 2022).