Hola Mohalla, the annual Sikh festival of martial display and devotion, arrives in an unexpected setting this season: the concrete geometry of Le Corbusier’s Government Museum and Art Gallery in Chandigarh. From 27 July to 15 September 2026, Hola Mohalla, a photography exhibition by Sanjay Das curated by Dr. Seema Bhalla, stages a meeting between a living regional tradition and one of India’s most iconic modernist buildings.
About the Exhibition
Organised in collaboration with the Government Museum and Art Gallery and the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi, the exhibition unfolds across five sections — Garhwa, Shastra (Weapons), Martial Mastery, The Cavalry, and Langar (The Seva) — tracing Hola Mohalla from its martial roots to its ethos of collective service. Thirty-two monochrome works, ranging from intimate 6×4-inch prints to sweeping installations up to 10×20 feet, draw viewers into the textures of the festival: the charged air of the battlefield re-enactments, the choreography of mounted warriors, the sheen of weapons, and the quiet labour of langar.
On Curation
What distinguishes this presentation is its conscious dialogue with Le Corbusier’s architecture. Bhalla’s display design mirrors the building’s logic of light, proportion and volume: large-format scrolls suspended in space echo the weightless lift of pilotis, while natural light falls across the photographs like a spotlight, sharpening silhouettes, dust, and motion. The play between massive prints and small images recalls the Modulor — Corbusier’s human-scaled system of measurement — positioning the human body as the measure through which both festival and architecture are experienced.
Das’s decision to work in black and white is a conceptual one. Stripping away colour from a famously exuberant festival removes the sensory overload that Hola Mohalla often carries in popular imagery. What remains is line, contrast, grain: the arc of a horse in mid-air, the grip on a sword, the faces of participants caught between exertion and focus, and the dense flows of bodies in langar. In this reduced palette, the photographs reveal what the curatorial note calls “the true core and soul of Hola Mohalla, a timeless tradition of deep faith, valour, and selfless service.”
The images lean into its planes, voids and deep shadows, meeting Corbusier’s béton brut with their own rigorous formal vocabulary. The result is a double reading. The building tames the festival’s energy into legible sequences. While the festival’s intensity, in turn, unsettles the cool abstraction of modernism. Ritual becomes architecture, as Bhalla writes, and architecture becomes a frame for living ritual.
Relevance of the exhibition
For visitors in Chandigarh, Sanjay Das’s Hola Mohalla offers more than a documentary account of a Sikh tradition. It proposes a way of seeing. Looking at a familiar festival through the disciplined eye of black-and-white photography. And looking again at a canonical modernist building through the lens of movement, dust, and human scale. In the concrete and light of Sector 10C, a centuries-old practice of faith and martial artistry is momentarily held still. Not to fix it in time, but to allow its layers to become visible.
Hola Mohalla
Photographs by: Sanjay Das
Curated by: Dr. Seema Bhalla
Venue: Government Museum and Art Gallery, Sector-10C, Chandigarh
Dates: 27 July – 15 September 2026
Pari tiwari is a third year english literature student at Delhi University. She is interested in art, Feminism, politics of representation, literature, philosophy, film, and photography.
