Big city, small city

If you’re driving from Bangalore on SH17, as you approach Mysore, the hoardings begin to flash past with increasing regularity. The long stretch of coconut trees and paddy fields are foregrounded by the pulsing glimmer of luxury hotels, gold jewellery, silk saris. If you’re paying attention, you might see one especially eye-catching billboard — a family of four gazing down with an otherworldly rapture. The man’s protective, outstretched arms make it clear that he’s a hunter-gatherer, the urbane kind, one with a perfect side-parting. The woman rests her head on his shoulder in wifely adoration and the two children display a cutesiness of such intensity that you long to cast them as demonic arsonists in the next Ram Gopal Varma film. Behind them a shimmering tableau: the windows of a high-rise, light glancing off a pool, a glimpse of a silvery foyer. The tag line: ‘Big City Living, Now in Mysore.’

This, of course, should set off all kinds of grumbling and hand-wringing about the end of small-city urban life. The signs have been there for a while. Small-city dwellers can also now enjoy the viscid fumes that seep through the vents of a KFC before gazing at the giant images of Caucasian models in the windows of Pantaloons. We too run the daily risk of being knocked down by a courier laden with Flipkart goodies as we try to get to the market. And, yes, we do have the malls. After an amble through their chilly passages on any Sunday afternoon, dear metropolitan India, we can confirm that our teenagers are just as horny as yours and our middle-aged couples just as embittered.

But it could all be so much worse, we say to ourselves, as we contemplate the traffic snarls and real estate prices of Mumbai and Delhi. After all, we are still lucky enough to live in a city where a 15-minute auto ride will get you almost anywhere you need to go; where the trinket sellers of Mandi Mohalla display the same sort of bangles and baubles that they always did (albeit now manufactured in Guangdong province); and where you can buy coffee in an alley off Shivrampet blended to a family recipe that is at least a hundred years old. And surely there is no large city in India where you can open up the classifieds of a local newspaper and thrill to the following announcement: ‘Dr Savithri Krishnaswamy is leaving for a month long sojourn in USA (covering the states of New Jersey, Arizona and Texas). The staff of SK Clinic wish her a bon voyage and safe and speedy return.’

We reassure ourselves that, in spite of it all, we remain compact and we have retained our character. If we need confirmation of this fact we only have to crane our necks and look northwards, in the direction of Bangalore. Mysoreans have watched its growth with a horrified fascination over the last couple of decades, going from a sibling city of warm familiarity to becoming a watchword for a certain kind of globalisation in international bestsellers. Mysore tried to take notes as Bangalore went from being a garden city to a pensioner’s paradise to India’s pub capital, gay capital, outsourcing capital, start-up capital and traffic capital — and now, finally, Mysore’s given up. All we can do is watch nervously. Bangalore has already gobbled up the satellite town of Kengeri and its environs and, smacking its chops, advanced towards Bidadi, the next town in sight. Bidadi too has been swallowed whole. And now we wait anxiously for the moment when Ramanagara, the next town on SH17, finally succumbs, the famed boulders of Sholay becoming the centrepiece of a new IT park.

It’s development, we tell ourselves, it’s progress, it’s linear. The opening chapter of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 classic, The Magnificent Ambersons , charts precisely this notion of urban ontogeny. The book is a layered exploration of the decline of a powerful family and the metamorphosis of a mid-Western city at a time of rapid social and economic change in the US. Many will be familiar with the montage of changes at the start of the novel because of the scenes in Orson Welles’s 1942 film version. Tarkington takes the reader through changing styles in everything from hats and shoes to architecture and furniture. And as ‘a mist of white whisker’ appears upon the throat of a Senator, even small changes in male grooming are seen as indicative of this inexorable movement down the line of advancement: ‘Surely no more is needed to prove that so short a time ago we were living in another age…’

But the scenes that we see in Indian urban-life defy this notion of steady movement in one direction: a description that may be pure invention by a novelist for the purposes of a fluid first chapter. What should astonish us is that in our big cities it is still possible to locate their former selves. Instead of a glassy linearity, our urban growth is about fractures and dissonance — a splintered synchronicity where obscure memories recreate themselves on the streets of an unfamiliar neighbourhood, where a mottled snapshot comes to life under an arch or in a courtyard. There are neighbourhoods in Bangalore where people still queue up with pails and churns, as cows are milked in front of them. In Chennai there are roads where, as in any small town, a shamiana will sprout up for a family function, blocking traffic in both directions, as uncles discuss property prices and gluttonous children are sick in the gutter. Walk up a few floors in dozens of buildings in Mumbai or Delhi and you will still find the fourth generation of a family of tailors, seated at an ancient Singer sewing machine, copying patterns out of a magazine. Across India’s megacities, when the dust has settled after all the razing and sandblasting, a raddiwallah still raises his old brass scales.

And while the exponential growth of urban India will continue, whether we like it or not, we do need large, red-blooded cities, don’t we? There are, at a conservative estimate, 12 million young people who enter the Indian workforce every year. The jobs they seek are unlikely to be created by a bunch of dilettantes idling away the hours at a coffee house in a Malgudi-esque idyll.

Beyond that, surely our best hope to escape the conservatism that feeds our many chauvinisms — caste, linguistic, religious, gendered — is in our large cities. There’s still such a long way to go of course: we’ve seen the atrocities that erupt in the metros. But we can at least hope that urban centres will provide the crucial freedom and anonymity that enable their inhabitants to experiment with their sense of self and push beyond constricting roles and expectations. In Soft City , Jonathan Raban’s 1974 classic of urban life, he maps out London as a place that is moulded by the different versions of a person, the city’s plasticity awaiting the connections made by an individual’s affinities and yearnings. This is the city seen as a place of construction — not just of high-rises, bridges and flyovers, but of identities. And, surely, so many thousands who arrive in Bhayander or Dwarka or Nayandahalli seek the same: a kind of psychic unclenching. Chowks and bazaars, colonies and layouts, bastis and maidans , all become potential locations of fantasy, aspiration and transformation.

Our big cities are here and, as cranes swing down and stanchions shoot up, our small cities are getting larger all the time. Taken together, the experience of these disparate urban centres is that of a hall of mirrors, some broken, some intact, squares and shards that infinitely reflect their images back at each other. Together they provide a shifting kaleidoscope of every aspect of what it means to live in urban India today. The big city/small city distinction is no longer a meaningful division in our cityscapes.

The real division is that between public and private, marked by the shifting boundaries of the parts of a city that commit repeated acts of secession. Locked park gates, vanished lakes, private green spaces; lanes and roads that are commandeered by religious trusts for lengthy functions; pavements that are used for everything but walking. Municipal land that mysteriously disappears into private hands; walls and barriers that segregate open spaces with no trace of accountability. ‘Public’ has always been a bit of a dirty word in upper middle-class India, encapsulated by the terror many well-heeled parents feel in the face of a public swimming pool, a fetid stew of disease and contamination caused by children whose English pronunciation is far from ideal. And the demonisation of the word and the sense that a genuinely shared urban space is of any value looks likely to continue.

The current buzzword when it comes to urban planning is ‘smart’. The Modi government has announced its plans to invest heavily in smart cities, both by building new cities and upgrading existing ones. Certainly, investment in urban infrastructure ought to be welcomed but these plans remain high on gloss and low on many particulars. Never mind, we can say to ourselves: we’re sure all will be made clear in good time. In the interim, we can entertain ourselves with the promotional materials, the dazzling facades, the whirl of bullet trains and fibre optic circuitry and smart cards. There it is again, that word: ‘smart’. There is an implication that the city itself will be quick-witted and intelligent, a place where sensors blink and panels gleam, a domain capable of independent action, its inhabitants almost being incidental to the data that surges around its networks. Discussion at smart city conferences have already touched upon the policing and surveillance that will be required to preserve these enclaves from those considered not meritorious enough to enjoy them. The shiny brochures make locked cities a very natural extension of locked parks. They are, after all, the most technologically efficient way of keeping the public at bay.

But then we return from the daze of these splendid visions, brought back to the real world by the sound of water suddenly drumming into a plastic bucket, a reminder of the absence of a regular clean water supply, basic sewerage services, reliable garbage collection, all the things that so many would gratefully settle for in our existing communities — even if they don’t amount to the sharp thrill of a bullet train.

Let’s see. Let’s not be negative. Perhaps the mirage of these smart cities will come to pass. The breathless video voiceovers will be vindicated as the scale models rise through the smog and grime to fill the horizon. One day in the future we might indeed be able to sit in front of a screen in our steel box on the 25th floor, sealed and secure, looking back with nostalgia at the days when any of us, all of us, could walk down the street, any street, with the sun on our faces and the wind in our hair.

Mahesh Raois the author of The Smoke is Rising. His collection of short stories, One Point Two Billion is being published in October 2015

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