Sepia-toned interlude

An exhibition of photos and sketches takes you down Bangalore's memory lane

It looks like gridlock, but not quite the same as those over which Bangalore's denizens routinely tear their hair out. The bumper-to-bumper traffic seen in this image, which was taken a century ago, is of bullock carts on a dusty road. Other images show the first motor car in Bangalore being taken out for a spin by its evidently proud English owner accompanied by two women in the outsized hats fashionable then, and a pristine Ulsoor Tank and a Lal Bagh Road flanked by monkey-topped houses, down which a tonga is rolling.

"I wanted to showcase the forgotten images of the city as well as evoke nostalgia," says Surekha, curator of Visual Tales: Bangalore Since 1900, an ongoing exhibition of photographs, paintings and sketches at Rangoli Metro Art Centre, part of the MG Road metro station. The photos and sketches gives a sense of what the city used to be, from an artist's representation of the fort built by the 16th century ruler Kempegowda, believed to be the founder of Bangalore, to the unveiling of queen Victoria's statue in Cubbon Park and a photo of Victoria Hotel, the mention of which makes many old Bangaloreans sigh, especially since it has been razed to make way for a sprawling mall.

In the debate about who the city "belongs" to and the grumbling against "outsiders," what is ignored is the fact that Bangalore had been hosting people of diverse ethnicities at least for the last couple of centuries. "That tends to be forgotten," says Surekha. The Arab horse dealers, who used to come to trade because of the presence of the Bangalore Turf Club and the races held there, were among them, and one photo shows three happy traders in their costume. Surekha says she also wanted to portray the different settlements that had come up in the time of the British, from the Anglo-Indian Cantonment and the more traditional areas of Basavangudi, which existed simultaneously.

The images were sourced from various people, such as photographer Clare Arni, whose father had collected postcards while he was posted in India. These have been reproduced on archival paper. Some contributions came from visitors who had come for an earlier edition of the exhibition, such as the owners of Plaza cinema, which was demolished to make way for the metro station and the exhibition's current venue. The set of images show the theatre, when it was built in the 1940s, another of audience queueing up to watch The Ten Commandments and the latest, when it was showing Jurassic Park. Another interesting source was the Madras Engineering Group, or the Madras Sappers, the Indian Army regiment stationed in Bangalore. They had built much of the city's infrastructure once, including bridges and even the old Life Insurance Corporation building. The regiment had photos from the past 150 years showing how Bangalore was built.

The exhibition is split over two adjacent galleries, and the second has more photographs, a sketch map of the city from 1850 and extracts taken from books in English and Kannada of visitors' impressions of the city. Norman Mcleod, writing about the city in 1807, wasn't too impressed with the traditional quarters, complaining that "...the native city had nothing peculiar about it. We saw what we had so often seen before - the same narrow and crowded streets or lanes; the same tumble-down houses…" But others had kinder views. Churchill waxed eloquent about the excellent climate (and nautch-girls who danced "by the light of the moon"), while Mahatma Gandhi, found it a "... model of cleanliness, lovely weather and amazing serenity."

One of the last photos is a juxtaposition of MG Road when it was South Parade and the way it is now. The old photo is of a genteel road, with a woman in a dress and hat cycling down, while the new photograph shows a speeding metro, and red lights of innumerable cars stuck in traffic down below. And that brings the viewer back to the reality outside the gallery, after a pleasant sepia-toned interlude.

The exhibition is on view at Rangoli Metro Art Centre till June 2