The city’s changing, and how

Early this month, Morgan Stanley India released a report on India’s urbanisation using what it calls the AlphaWise City Vibrancy Index to measure changes in urbanisation. Introduced in 2011, the firm’s latest survey confirms the trend noted by the 2011 Census of a rise in the urban population: in the ten years to 2011, the proportion of Indians living in urban spaces had increased from 28 per cent to 31 per cent.

That kind of growth, Morgan Stanley suggests, is being led by tier-2 and tier-3 cities. In its first report two years ago, the firm had pointed to Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad followed by Jalandhar and Aurangabad as the drivers of urban growth; cities other than the top 50 of the 200 cities measured high on the “vibrancy” index.

Vibrancy seems to be palpable as one drives down to Pune from Mumbai less than 200 km away. Were it not for the wisps of anxiety that linger over the frequent reports of accidents between Mumbai and Pune, you could almost believe the six-lane, high-speed Expressway that starts at Panvel on the outer edge of Mumbai was somewhere on the American continent. Just fleetingly so because, as your vehicle shifts gears for the gentle climb towards Lonavala and then the straight ride onto Pune, billboards more than twenty ft across and high scream their promise of the good life at you.

The billboards that line the run from Lonavala to Pune let you know that globalisation has hit the hinterlands. Spanish, Thai and Swiss villas, huge lifestyle towers with names such as Cappriccio Privet Drive, Balmoral and Euthania cover the dreary shanty-town visible below and beyond the promise of the good life. You know that you have entered the territory of hyper-reality.

Illusion and reality

Those billboards never leave you; they cover scoured-off hills, unimaginative apartment blocks, the half-hearted, ill-informed attempts at a global reach. They exercise a hypnotic power, the power to steer your vision and imagination away from the countryside behind them to the more colourful and vivid representation of one in the foreground. We are entering the world of the many-splendoured versions of paradise: why spend just a few days in Switzerland? Why not live in a Swiss cottage?

The Westerly Bypass that loops past the inner city to Katraj Ghat on the southern end towards Bangalore has exit routes into the city via Aundh, Baner and Pashan, once three sleepy villages that have made the unimaginable leap into rootless, souped-up dreariness. The first sign is the rampant misuse of English names: Privet Drive and on Sus Road, Mont Vert’s Dieu, a block of peach and dusty brown apartment towers with mobile, laundry and “fashion” shops fronting the broad pavements that are already in various stages of occupation by street vendors and packs of stray dogs.

These are the hubs of the city’s self-referential modernity whose fountainhead — the call centres at Hinjewadi across the bypass — defines the city’s new identity as a “vibrant” city.

These neighbourhoods’ demographic mix evokes India’s demographic dividend; young expatriates from another country called India, their striped shirts and tops bedecked with the insignias of arrival: identity tags, black sling bags, mobile phone; on Sundays, Bermuda shorts, striped t-shirts and children in tow, shopping furiously at a well-known grocery outlet.

Economic growth has brought IT to Pune’s western suburbs in a replay of Bangalore and with that, the purchasing power that, in turn, has fed an insatiable appetite for self-transformation among the folks at the fringes of Pune city.

Village to city

Rich farmlands skirting the city’s hitherto narrow circumference, farmlands stretching away from the old city’s limits towards the surrounding hills, are fast disappearing.

The eastern ridge at Hadapsar, a township within the city now, is a place for the farming gentry of small landowners tired of cultivation, of youth in those sleepy villages wasting away on the edge of an unknown but exciting future.

Farmers have been selling lands together or singly to hawk-eyed builders; some rich landowners have turned builders themselves; sons of poor or rich farmers who have cashed in on the building boom, on the rapid growth of this city towards the surrounding hills, spreading like ink on all sides, those new men of capital, forsaking farming, have leapt into the globalised economy’s periphery as the expanding city’s new middle-class.

The new middle

The inhabitants of this new middle class are different from those of a city such as Mumbai or even from those within Pune’s old limits, usually upper caste and stolidly immersed in the cultural and clerical life of an administrative-educational city; a middle class reared on modernity and its accompanying anxieties.

The middle class constituents on the fringes of the city are recipients of instant wealth because of their super-historical leap from rural-pastoral to urban-frenetic. They have arrived with the knowledge of opportunities for more wealth via the agency of globalisation’s ancillary functions: sons of farmers are now contractors, mobile shop owners, bar managers or bar-owners.

They have skipped the traditional rites of the spatial and temporal passage from the rural to the urban, the painstaking journey of an earlier generation from an indifferent agriculture and its own tensions to a post-colonial modernity. That modernity was one in which ideologies as expressions of civilisational modes, embodied by Gandhi and Tagore on the one hand and Nehru and Ambedkar on the other, continued to haunt their imagination and determine the tenuous urban-ness of the urban Indian.

For the new middle class now emerging on the fringes of cities such as Pune, the passage to urbanism spells the death of the ‘village’ as a civilisational counterpoint. Now, the movement from the rural to the urban is a leap into civilisation, or more precisely into self-referential acquisition; consumption defines the new middle class stripped of anxiety, doubts about the self; nostalgia gives way to craving.

Journey as obliteration

This dramatic journey to a self-reinforcing consumption-driven lifestyle obliterates the village and much else. Local rivers and waterways on the western fringes below the Sus hills are cemented over for those lifestyle complexes that promise swimming pools; the open commons, where cows once grazed and children played, is bought by a private mall developer who houses an open-air theatre.

The obliteration carries its psychic costs. There is an uprooting of the farmer from his land, of the traditional tie between him and his surroundings, the rivers and trees and the hills; the journey to consuming self-referentiality strips away the need for meanings. A swimming pool is cleaner than a river to wade in.

One of the themes V.S. Naipaul keeps coming back to in his early and arguably greatest novels is the sense of uprootedness, of man’s displacement from his landscape. In The Mimic Men , Ralph Singh and the other intellectuals of Isabella, the tropical island, are rootless persons. In The Enigma of Arrival , set in England’s countryside, Naipaul sees Jack, “fitting in the landscape” a being like those butterflies that have survived the military base nearby, traffic, and much else.

In Pune, you can feel the “vibrancy” — of bulldozers erasing the trees and undergrowth and history and memory. And that is the face of India’s urbanisation.

( >blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )

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