A new report by PRICE and Tata Sons has confirmed what most of us already felt in our bones: Chandigarh recorded the highest average household consumption among Indian cities, sharing that top spot with Thiruvananthapuram and Vadodara. On income, we’re not even first — Bengaluru leads with an average annual household income of nearly Rs 28 lakh, with Chandigarh close behind at roughly Rs 26 lakh. And yet despite that income gap, Chandigarh outranks Bengaluru on household consumption, placing first nationally on that metric.
Read that again. We don’t earn the most. We spend the most. That gap between the two numbers is basically a portrait of this city.
It’s not a new story either. Chandigarh has been called the country’s richest town for over two decades now, and back in 2003-04, the city’s own Finance Secretary said something that’s stayed with me: the numbers reflected a city opening up to a culture where people earn handsomely and spend with equal aplomb. Two decades on, that hasn’t changed. It’s only gotten louder.
Ahmad Shah Abdali has a lot to answer for. His plunder of Punjab is so deep in our collective memory that it turned into a philosophy, passed down without anyone quite meaning to: eat, play, make merry today, because tomorrow someone might just walk off with it anyway. Whatever the history, it’s produced a people who are large-hearted, gregarious, and completely unembarrassed about living well. We host beautifully. We’re house-proud, men and women both. We don’t wait.
And that instinct is finally turning toward art.
For the longest time, art in Chandigarh homes meant décor — something to match the sofa, fill a wall, finish a room. That’s shifting. People here are starting to buy art the way they buy everything else: with heart, with confidence, and increasingly, in public. Not just to make a home look good, but to say something about who they are. Punjab has never lacked for creative firepower — our poets, singers, painters, actors, and designers show up everywhere, on every stage, in every field, worldwide. What’s new is that the city is finally ready to back that talent with its wallet, not just its pride.
This is exactly the shift Mehak Bhan has been building toward at 105 Arts in Chandigarh. As gallerist and curator, she’s watched local buyers move from asking “will this look nice in my drawing room” to asking about the artist, the process, the story — the kind of question that turns a purchase into a collection. That’s the real marker of a maturing art market, and Chandigarh, with its spending muscle and its inherited “live now” instinct, might just be primed to get there faster than anyone expected.
We’ve always brought art into our homes in small ways — old family photographs, handwoven tapestries, craftwork picked up from around Punjab. The difference now is scale. As our spending capacity grows, so does our appetite. The only question left is whether that appetite goes toward art that decorates, or art that means something. Chandigarh, if its own history is any guide, will probably want both — and want it now.