Portrait of a metropolis

Draught beer or majjige (spiced buttermilk)? Mavalli Tiffin Room, or Casa Piccola? Forum Mall, or Chickpet? Alliance Francaise, or Gayana Samaja? Bangalore, or Bengaluru? More apt- Bangalorean, or Bengalur... (oops, who coins this one now?)

An old Helava community folk narrative chronicles the day the strapping king Kempe Gowda’s hunger was satisfied by an old woman who fed him boiled beans. He blessed that generous patch of earth, home to the old lady, with prosperity for eons. One wonders what he would make of this motley collection of writings by those who have directly benefitted from his goodwill.

Historian Suryanath Kamath writes that occupants since about AD 350 have been enamoured of the city. It is said that the Ganga dynasty built the beautiful Begur Nageshwara Temple along with two tanks and an agrahara (residence for Brahmins). The Cholas and the Hoysalas followed suit in similar pattern. It was AD 1537 by the time Kempe Gowda marked the first east-west and north-south roads with his plough.

 

In 1800, after Lord Cornwallis had nine years earlier triumphed over Tipu Sultan, Francis Buchanan, a traveller, exclaims in wonder about the gardens developed by both the Muslim princes and by the British in the new cantonment. This and the rich thota (garden) tradition are documented by authors Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha.

The Mysore petah (turban) post independence gave way to the black cap and turbans of North Karnataka and even the Gandhi cap. But today you can't find any, says Chiranjiv Singh, yes of Sikh heritage, a retired civil servant and respected Kannada scholar. He feels again it is an act of providence that the ‘Ucch aspatre (mental hospital)’— the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS)— was set up to be ready for the coming of the depression and suicide capital of the country.

Deflated is how Pankaj Mishra, a writer, feels on finding that the shopping malls in Bangalore are nowhere close to being compared to their counterparts in Los Angeles. He gets his taste of Hollywood though in a cinema hall with a peep-show of Demi Moore in “Indecent Proposal”. He stops then for the draught beer and it is seconded by historian Janaki Nair. Sherry Simon, a visiting French teacher, meanwhile in her short story, dwells over steamy breakfast in the tiffin room and the smell of coconut hair oil.

The phenomenon of matinee idol Rajkumar gets examined in the context of the search for a place for the Kannada language in its own capital. He was the face of the Gokak agitation in the 1980s and whose fan following brought the city to a standstill even when he died of natural causes. Sociologist Tejaswini Niranjana points to and analyses an interesting event which happened when the actor was kidnapped by the bandit Veerappan. Eleven audio cassettes were released, to make his affliction Kannada.

The colour of the annual Karaga festival and doyens of Kannada literature such as Masti Venkatesh Iyengar and D.V. Gundappa have their admirers. Nemichandra, an engineer and prolific Kannada writer cutely throws the city’s minuscule Jewish community into the mix. She says once Sir C.V. Raman, who brought home the Nobel, thought of inviting Jewish scientists fleeing Hitler because they would have fit right in to the culture of the city.

The book comes at a time when urban India, bursting at its seams, is grappling to come to terms with identities of its populace. The debate in Bangalore has been on burner for a long time and no less than an “intellectual” such as U.R. Ananthamurthy has championed vigorously the cause for the “ooru”. The editor grants him the opinion and it is refreshing that the compilation translates into an informed exchange of impressions and ideas rather than the convenience of an "us and them" debate.

The disappointment is an absence of commentary on the accountability of administrators who oversaw the city's explosion to the present festering bloated state. The substitute is lip service. Writing on the IT sector is a tiring read, needing a desperate infusion of change. No less than Thomas L. Friedman sounds cliched.

But this is a start. Hopefully, Kempe Gowda's wishes stand good for the time he intended.

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MULTIPLE CITY: WRITINGS ON BANGALORE

Edited by Aditi De Penguin
Rs 399;
316 pages