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 CONTENTS
C I T I E S

A H I N D U G R O U P P R E S E N T A T I O N

From nagar to metropolis . . . . .3

Copyright Kasturi and Sons Ltd., 2003.

Making Indian cities . . . . . . . . .7
No part of this document may be
republished or distributed without the
express written permission of
Kasturi and Sons Limited, Driving to nowhere . . . . . . . . .10
859-860 Anna Salai,
Chennai - 600002, INDIA.

Downtown lights . . . . . . . . . . .13

Compiled &
produced by
Partho Ray
N. Nagaraj
Pune: Past, present and future 15

Invisible labour . . . . . . . . . . . .18

Concrete jungle . . . . . . . . . . . .20

The vanishing tharawads of

Kerala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

The city in cinema . . . . . . . . . .25

Delhi: Nobody’s city . . . . . . . .27

The city as coral . . . . . . . . . . .29

All pictures from
The Hindu photo library.

Design & Graphics

Dog times - A beastly portrait of
K. Bala Sofia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
Partho Ray

Junagadh memories . . . . . . . . .35

2
 From nagar to metropolis
Ranjit Hoskot
F cities could be spoken of as personalities, most of
I the world’s cities today are schizoid. In one aspect,
they aspire to the comfort and sophistication of an
international economy and culture; in the other, they
conspire to maintain the oppressive local structures
that keep the shantytown enslaved, the hinterland bru-
talised, the inner-city ghetto isolated. The focus of this
edition of Folio is the metropolis in the age of globalisa-
tion: we look, here, at the various mutations and distor-
tions that come to characterise the collective life of
cities in an epoch of rapid, unassimilated, world-wide
change.
Such a change sharpens economic asymmetries that
already exist and produces new cultural discontinuities;
it generates social conflicts and political uncertainties,
all of which factors develop into a general crisis of sta-
bility. Elite and subaltern phrase their combat through
ever-renewed idioms of physical demarcation and cul-
3 tural signs; the recycling economy collides with the
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd.
throwaway economy; the physical apparatus of the
industrial economy, its mill-flues and assembly-lines, are
substituted with the plasma touch-screens and con-
soles of the virtual economy; the sociable exchanges of
workers changing shifts has been replaced by the
unnerving silences of automation.
A trajectory such as the one just outlined is perhaps
truest of post-colonial cities, although the great metro-
politan centres of the former imperial powers are not
immune to it either. Bombay, New York, Varanasi, New
Delhi, Sofia, Pune and Junagadh feature among the
cities that are visited in this edition of Folio: many of
these are post-colonial cities, but those that are not
have been acutely affected by the politics of post-colo-
nialism, in the form of the diffusion of populations, and
the cultural interfacing that is its inevitable result.
The contemporary city is held hostage by its multiple
pasts; equally, it is mortgaged to its alternative futures.
Bombay and Shanghai now serve as theatres where the
sunrise industries of information technology, financial
services and tourism seek to subject the urban land-
scape to a makeover while ignoring the harsh realities
 of a declining textile industry or a wrecked farming
economy. At the same time, Paris and Vienna are learn-
ing to cope with the traffic in illegal immigrants from
North Africa and South Asia, and to acknowledge the
existence of these wage-slaves in their midst. London
and New York have begun to accept the inevitability of
the various Third-World diasporas and the scintillating
cultural hybridity that they have created.
It has become fashionable, in certain circles, to speak
of the city as the only possible future of human associ-
ation. This future is situated, moreover, in the context
of a globalisation that is seen as a joyous blurring of
borders, an invitation to the individual to participate in
an emancipatory hybridity of choice, in defiance of the
imposed and hereditary values of specific cultures of
birth. And there is no doubt that globalisation does
offer the scope for such a liberation to those who are
privileged to take their place in this unfolding drama of
fulfilled potential. But what of those who cross borders
and renounce cultures under compulsion or in desper-
ation, in search of a better life, even if that should prove
to be an illusion?
The frequent-flyer NGO activist and the cyberspace
wizard embody one genre of globalisation, one aspect
of the new city; the environmental refugee and the
marginal peasant, forced to find employment in the city,
embody another. The sweatshop labourer in Dharavi,
the vast shantytown at the heart of Bombay which
attracts thousands of tough survivors from Andhra
Pradesh or Bangladesh to the megalopolis, is one face
of the global city; the Punjabi boy selling roasted chest-
nuts outside a Metro station in Paris, smuggled into
Europe by body-pirates and having survived possible
shipwreck off Marseilles or boatwreck on the Danube,
is another.
In traditional European culture, the city has been per-
ceived both as a negative and a positive site. In nega-
tive mode, its sophistication and shrewdness are
deplored as the opposite of the innocence of Arcadia,
the pastoral and the sylvan life; in positive mode, it is
seen to offer refuge from the terrors of the primaeval
forest, an opportunity for the cultivation of the higher
human possibilities. The word civilisation itself, at the
heart of its elaborate connotations of refinement and
sophistication, simply means “citification”, from the
Latin civitas, meaning settlement, city.
In Indic culture, at least since the advent of Gangetic
civilisation, the city has been celebrated as pura, as
prastha, as nagara: the fortified settlement, the design
that gives shape to natural terrain, the location of
civilised life. It is viewed as the place where normal
human relationships are expressed and fulfilled; where
4
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
all organised human life proceeds towards the attain-
ment of its goals, those of kama or pleasure, artha or
prosperity, dharma or the discipline of illumination.
The epitome of civilised Indic life was the nagarika,
the man-about-town, a dweller in Takshashila,
Shravasti, Kaushambi, Rajgriha or Kashi, whose entire
life was an art-form, his every choice and gesture
stylised and gracious. The traditional Indic city was the
stage, also, where the encounter between humans and
gods took place, with the temple and the palace as the
twin foci of the urban formation, embodying the sacred
and the secular sources of power. Those who wished
to quest for moksha, or release from the cycle of birth
and death, had to leave this template of collective life,
this golden world, behind and retreat to the green world
of the forest.
The city is a social and architectural environment sub-
ject to constant change: it could be seen as a floating
series of transactions between the society that occu-
pies it, and the spaces which that society generates
and transforms through its processes of interaction.
Victor Hugo wrote of Paris, in Notre Dame de Paris as
a twin city: the city of day, which was the venue of
work, and the city of night, which was the site of play,
when the rules of day are overturned. The contempo-
rary city has sharpened this polarisation of labour and
leisure, but given it a unique twist: in the city of today,
this is really a polarisation between the classes that
must labour for a living and the classes that can afford
the amenities of leisure. Bombay’s old mill lands offer a
dramatic example of this tendency: many of the com-
pounds of the defunct textile mills now house dis-
cotheques, entertainment arcades and chic restau-
rants; just beyond the wall, in Dickensian housing
colonies that are going to seed, live the families of the
workers who once staffed the mills.
Such leisure is ersatz: it is an outcome of lazy privi-
lege, a cynical apotheosis of the pleasure principle.
And yet, before we dismiss leisure as the preserve of
the elite, obtained at the expense of subaltern suffer-
ing, let us recall that the greatest cities have always
been distinguished by their cultivation of a genuine
leisure: the quality that transfigured the adjective
“urban” into the compliment “urbane”. Such a culti-
vated leisure gave to the urbane individual a unique
sensibility, an attitude towards the conduct and goals of
life, a definition of the personality in which achievement
was measured not by the quality of gain alone, but also
by the quality of leisurely accomplishment not motivat-
ed by profit.
We find this ideal of leisure celebrated in the Varanasi
ideal of masti, a bohemian ardour, a quirkiness and
 delightful eccentricity, a joy in living. It sustains the clogged streets, passing crowds of destitutes living on
devotion of Madras to its season of music and dance the streets or in railway-stations.
concerts, the dedication of Pune to its theatre perform- It is the story of Calcutta, also, whose vital and loqua-
ances, the pride that cious intellectual culture
Lucknow took in its literary survives in the face of
culture. It animates those extraordinary pressures.
urban types, masters of But urban decline can seep
self-refinement, variously like a slow poison into the
celebrated by Vatsyayana, veins of a city: Sofia, the
Baudelaire, Ghalib, Wilde, capital of Bulgaria, has
and Walter Benjamin: the become an arena for ambi-
rasika, the flaneur, the tious politicians and
shaukeen, the dandy. mafiosi in the aftermath of
These, too, are casualties the demise of
of the contemporary city. Communism; its Stalin-era
If one were looking for an architecture affords no
appropriate metaphor by play for the warmth and
means of which to describe consolation of community.
the contemporary city, that As urbanisation
metaphor would be the becomes the defining para-
fractal: the irregular lineari- digm of human settlement,
ty, every segment of itself para-urban forms like the
breaking up on detailed satellite township and the
examination into further, if small town begin to resem-
mathematically proportion- ble scaled-down versions
al irregularity. Shifting cen- of the big city, with the dis-
tres and ragged periph- tortions and fissures repli-
eries define the life-cycle of cated. Set between the vil-
the contemporary city: lage and the city, these
populations sag between forms of settlement now
the city’s foci and its edges incline towards the latter:
as the infrastructure of even in the pilgrimage-cen-
housing, transport, water tres of Dehu and
and power supply cracks Nathdvara, the unwary vis-
under pressure. And from itor is assailed by shrill
this predicament of conflict Hindi-movie music emanat-
over scarce or choked ing from barbers’ shops,
resources, there arise by garish posters of film
deeply divisive social and and television stars; the
political conflicts, which STD/ISD kiosk and now,
extremist forces exploit, using the rhetoric of insiders the cyber cafÇ, are ubiquitous. The city is on the march,
versus outsiders, invoking the tropes of belonging and devouring more and more of the hinterland to keep its
exclusion. engines of growth roaring.
The story of the contemporary city can be told as a The contemporary city is also a play of desire and ter-
narrative of decline, with an intermittent resurgence of ror. Its romance finds expression in the idioms of liter-
vibrancy. This is certainly the story of late 20th Century ary and visual art, experimental theatre, cinema and
Bombay, with its declining mills and the flourishing installation that urban life has made possible; beyond
informal sector economy anchored in its slums and these formal circuits, we find the informal, popular and
shanties, its lively theatre scene, whose adherents even kitsch expressions that are an integral feature of
refuse to let the imagination be defeated by the col- urban culture. The Hindi and Tamil movies, in particular,
lapse of urban planning imperatives, or by the sort of are haunted by the city: its architecture surfaces repeat-

5 cynicism that seeps into the soul as you negotiate rain- edly, in the chase sequence, the fight sequence, the

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 romantic duet, in which the mise-en-scene of back-
alleys and downed roller-shutters, and the sheer
facades of skyscrapers, play as important a role as the
hero, the heroine and the villain. In a more domestic
vein, in metropolitan India, a contemporary folklore of
ferocious monkey-men and nocturnal stone-killers, of
movie stars and game-show winners has developed
around the television set and the morning newspaper.
The nightmare folklore of the contemporary city may
well be both prevision and safety valve for pent-up
fears: the nocturnal stone-killer could be the dramatised
Other, representative of the hordes of strangers who
are brought in to change demographic patterns by the
manipulators of the politics of the census. The fero-
cious monkey-man might signal the subliminal recogni-
tion of a situation in which animal species, corralled and
driven to the wall in an environment dominated by
human needs and imperatives, have begun to strike
back through adaptive behaviour that we can only read
as disruptive.
It cannot be denied that this nightmare folklore has
some basis in the syndromes and pathologies of con-
temporary urban life: organised crime, sexual despera-
tion, policy-driven dispossession and the almost pro-
grammatic reversal of justice and equity. The dominant
idioms of urban space-use provoke their own special
genre of apocalyptic cautionary tales, cast in the Blade
Runner mould: if the average metropolis continues to
develop along current projections, its future is not a life
so much as it is an afterlife, a scenario fractured into
ghettoes, developer estates, shanties and waste-
dumps.
The city is also a space of unpredictable connections,
where individuals and groups previously held apart in
separate enclaves are brought into contact by mass
transport, commensality and mass entertainment: this
can make for damaging experiences of transgression
and shock, but also for creative ones of risk and
encounter. Sometimes, a city like New York can provide
individuals with a sense of elsewhereness, which strips
away ancestral feuds and nationalist suspicions like
moulted skins, leaving them receptive to communica-
tion and communion.
If apocalypse is a recurrent note in these evocations
of cities past, present and future, nostalgia is another.
As the steam-roller global economy levels the con-
served and slow-evolving forms of traditional society
and culture at the local level, witnesses who cherish
these for their grace, beauty and vitality record them in
nostalgic accounts. We walk through the lanes of medi-
aeval cities that have survived into modern times,
6 through these accounts, participate vicariously in the
high rituals of the haveli of Junagadh, the everyday ges-
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
tures in the precincts of the Vishwanath temple in
Varanasi.
These reflections on evanescence mark the end of
the nagara as a coherent symbolic reality, as a diagram
of life, a community bound together by traditional ties of
ritual, transaction and cosmology. The nagara was a
physical and spiritual location where all beings could
find their place in the seamless flow of intimate and pub-
lic spaces, of courtyards, streets, walled gardens, plat-
forms, terraces and stairways: it was renewed and revi-
talised by its periodicities, its festivals, pilgrimage
schedules and neighbourhood celebrations.
The replacement of the traditional nagara by the city
of modernity can be translated as the replacement of
order by chaos: the city of modernity has no cosmolo-
gy to sustain it, no social drama to be shared and enact-
ed on the mass scale. What therefore prevails in the
city of modernity is the quest for power, in its most sub-
tle and its most raw manifestations: its individuals and
classes are bound to one another, not by formal
restraining codes of obligations as previously, but by
barely disguised motives of competition; lacking com-
mon goals, such a city has no shared symbolic signifi-
cance in the eyes of its citizens.
And so these meditations on the city point the way,
also, to political critique. A city without a cosmology of
its own, a city that does not present itself as an image
of the universe, lacks coherence; and modernity
appears to lack the energy to promote secular versions
of public space and civic responsibility that can equal
those promoted by the sacred urban images of tradi-
tion. In the absence of such an affirmative energy, we
must turn to critical energy instead, and persist in inter-
rogating the contemporary city on such essential issues
as those of opportunity and entitlement, livelihood and
dignity, which form the basis of citizenship, and there-
fore of true belonging, in a democracy. Can our cities
guarantee such a true sense of belonging to all their cit-
izens? In asking these questions, the citizens of the
future may slowly begin to make their way from apoca-
lypse to redemption. ●
 Making
Indian
cities
Rahul Mehrotra

O
VER the last three decades, urbanisation has
shown unprecedented rates of growth, devastat-
ing the physical form of our cities which have
been unable to deal with the swelling numbers. While
this compression of people in a limited space symbolis-
es optimism and is characterised by many positive
attributes, it has spelt doom for the urban form of our
cities.
In a city, the pieces are essential to the well-being of
the whole. How these pieces are put together and their
relation to one another, is what is particular about the
design of a city. It is for this reason that a city is often
described as a machine - the little parts adding up to
create the grand design. In contemporary India there is
little logic that determines these relationships in a city,
from the overall plan or structure of the city, to its inte-
gral components, physical as well as social infrastruc-
ture, buildings, open spaces, streets, signage and
street furniture. How these are administratered or Unfortunately, in India today, architecture is no longer
orchestrated to work as a unified whole - greater than seriously considered by planners as an instrument for
the sum of the parts - is what makes appropriate and the structuring of the urban landscape. This has partly
relevant urban design. to do with the attitude of architects who have not
Large-scale architecture in cities is usually site-spe- engaged sufficiently to influence city policy, which in
cific, bound by client intentions and restricted (more turn implicitly determines what they can build. In fact,
often than not) to superficial styling. Planning (in the architects have almost no “policy sense” and this is
sense of master plans) has rarely even attempted to perhaps endemic of a larger cultural problem in India
represent issues pertaining to the physical form of where there is a slightly non-empirical bent of mind. As
cities. It is precisely to fill this lacuna that the discipline a result of this, far greater premium is paid to symbolic
of urban design should be considered, bridging the void action - represented often as policy decisions endorsed
between architecture and the larger concerns of cohe- and legitimised by politicians. In V. S. Naipaul’s book An
siveness and legibility of the overall urban form. The Area of Darkness, he touches upon symbolic action
precise goals of urban design should be the creation when he describes the sweeper who sweeps the corri-
and maintenance of those parts of the public realm that dor in his hotel and at the end of the day, it is dirtier than

7 are crucial to the collective urban memory. when he started sweeping. A symbolic action whose

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 result is contrary to what is wanted - a tendency to go
off into abstraction by creating a symbolic gesture to
solve a perceived problem.
The unfinished edge - the poor crafting of the edge
of a road, pavement and the building blocks of a city
have become emblematic of the physical state of
Indian cities.
Representative of this mindset is the notion of cen-
tralised urban planning - a situation where planners, in
abstraction, evolve policy across a city. In terms of
urban design, this often results in standardised build-
ing control rules that are imposed evenly across Indian
cities - be it for greenfield sites or historic city centres.
Again, a symbolic solution, one that supposedly
addresses the issue of equity - by treating all citizens
(across the city) equally. In reality however, it is an
attempt to abstract on account of a deficient database
to understand emerging patterns and plan for these. In
fact, this mode of centralised urban planning implies
that entire cities will be recast in the same mould and
image - resulting in monotony of urban form. In addi-
tion, the idea of blanket rules, applicable for an entire
city, cannot by definition be responsive to topography
and natural environment.
Moreover, if buildings on waterfronts, hills and hin-
terland are to be essentially of the same form, the nat-
ural features of the land would inevitably be
destroyed, thereby negatively impacting the ecologi-
8
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
cal balances that exist in the rich and diverse natural
systems that form the hinterland of cities. Also, this
will continue to obliterate the sense of a city as a
group of precincts, neighbourhoods and communities
with their differing physical forms, expressive of par-
ticular climatic conditions, economic situations, cultur-
al backgrounds and lifestyles - all the wonderful indi-
cators that give ultimate expression and uniqueness
to the form and style of a city.
Historically the most robust urban environments
(and perhaps the world over) have all grown and
evolved with active citizen participation, coupled with
enlightened patronage - where a set of shared values,
beliefs and rules have
implicitly guided the
parameters that deter-
mine the urban form of a
place. That is a series of
incremental decisions,
though consensus is
then expressed in the
richness and coherence
of the form resulting in a
clear image as well as
allowing for localised
idiosyncrasies and indi-
vidual expression. In
contrast, today the
repetitive nature of our
cities coupled with this
total detachment at the
neighbourhood level is
wreaking disaster in the
way our cities look and
are evolving in terms of
their form.
A street in South
Mumbai - lack of urban design controls for new devel-
opment produces an incoherent form and destroys
the structure and identity of the historic city.
Perhaps a recognition of the multiplicity and duali-
ties in the Indian cityscape being simultaneously valid
could be a first step in reorienting urban design
approaches in India. It would then seem appropriate
that the pluralism in Indian cities be given expression
through appropriate mechanisms - that urban design
policies for different areas are evolved individually and
separately, for the different cities and the many worlds
within them. Planning policies, with urban design
issues as one component, really should be made on
an “areawise” basis - where this “area” would
become the basic planning unit which displays some
 cohesiveness and consistencies beyond its topo-
graphical and architectural characteristics. Then it will
be possible for laws and policies to be written to focus
on the problems of each area. Once policy makers
recognise the characteristics of a particular area, laws
can be evolved to make the urban form respond, not
only to its physical constraints, but also to the social
city or regional level and the area level - where people
can present themselves, their needs and aspirations
and connect to the larger planning process. This would
be a crucial shift not only in terms of the evolution and
formulation of the plans but also their implementation.
Incremental growth - a slum in Mumbai. While the
inherent energy in incremental growth must be har-
nessed, some city interventions to regulate public
places could create an appropriate balance.
Of course, crucial to these dynamics is the participa-
tion at both levels, of the citizen in the policy making
process. At the city level, the policy making body
should largely, or ideally, comprise professionals, to
focus on the technicalities at a city level cannot be suc-
cessfully achieved without sufficiently depoliticising
the planning authority. But more crucial in the decen-
tralised planning model is the process that should be
set up at the area level - at the level where people have
to get involved.
To make a decentralised system work it is important
that a substantial body of people within the profession
of urban planning and design work with the concept of
“advocacy planning.” This is particularly pertinent
when policy problems are cast in a context of technical
analysis too abstract for the ordinary citizen to com-
prehend - how many architects, leave alone citizens,
understand the implications of the development con-
trol rules which directly effect the urban form of our
city? Advocacy planning has its origins in the percep-
tion that such groups need urban planners and design-
ers to make their case and to express their aspirations
at the inception of development plans and planning
strategy for city. Therefore, it should represent a
search by planners and urban designers for a new kind
of clientele - a constituency.
There already exist in Indian cities a number of citi-
zens’ groups which represent different issues ranging
from low-income groups and squatters to conservation
of historic precincts. So far these groups most often
stop short of proposing solutions and limit their
response to “protest”. Advocacy planning in its truest
sense would be realised when these groups or practi-
tioners are able to review and evaluate specific plan-
ning proposals which affect their constituents - be it
9 low-income families, heritage committees or an entire
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
neighbourhood - and go further to help them develop
planning strategies, physical design and implementa-
tion programmes. That is, to act as planning advocates
for the different areas of a city in order to make public
and city-level plans reflect the needs of the different
citizens.
The relentless repetition of the same building type
across the Indian landscape is producing cities of
essentially the same monotonous form - a view of
Navy Nagar, Mumbai.
Perhaps in advocacy planning we may find a new
means for political expression, one in which social and
physical conditions are integral in making a city which
promotes humane possibilities. The stakeholders of
the contemporary Indian city would actually get
involved with the “making of city” and its form. This
will give true expression to people’s aspirations in the
built form of cities - and facilitate urban design to play
its role in making legible and cohesive city form.
It is from such an engagement that will result the fin-
ished edge - the definite gesture, all the way from the
kerb of the city’s streets to the variety in urban form.
And from this process hopefully will emerge the new
Indian city, complex in its pluralistic composition but
with a robust urban form that facilitates many possibil-
ities - truly making the existence of urban Indians in the
next millennium pleasurable and meaningful. ●
The writer is an architect and conservation activist.
He is one of the founder members of the
Urban Design Research Group (UDRI), Mumbai,
which has done pioneering work in urban heritage
conservation in India.
 Driving to nowhere
flow of traffic. Unfortunately, the planners first built a
Darryl D’Monte road bridge over the Thane creek to Vashi, which did
not bring about a critical mass there. It was only a cou-

S
INCE the 1990s, there has been a thrust in India’s ple of decades later, with the rail bridge alongside it,
transport sector towards increasing reliance on that Navi Mumbai got the boost it badly needed.
private investment. This can take many forms: pri- However, the central business district (CBD) in the
vate entrepreneurs constructing roads and bridges, new city has not really taken off, because manage-
often on a “build, operate and transfer” basis, the entry ments have been reluctant to shift across the harbour,
of many more multinational car manufacturers, and the given the inadequate transport links. Although the
easing of restrictions in the imports of components. Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority
Throughout urban India, which now accounts for some (MMRDA) has been developing the Bandra-Kurla area
300 million people, the perception that the State is as an alternative CBD within Greater Mumbai, it is tak-
unwilling or unable to provide quick and reliable trans- ing some time to grow into a full-fledged centre. While
port is fast gaining ground. There is increasing depend- areas in the suburbs like Andheri are attracting some
ence on private modes of motorised transport, whether new sunrise service industries, South Mumbai retains
it is automobiles, two-wheelers or buses. its overwhelming importance.
Middle-class citizens aspire to owning or using these While successive State governments have been
vehicles and believe that the State’s responsibility is to guilty of neglecting Mumbai’s transport problems, it was
provide the infrastructure for this purpose. This has led the erstwhile Shiv Sena-BJP government which drasti-
to a situation where private modes are swallowing the cally altered the course. By initiating a range of road
bulk of funds earmarked
for transport in cities and
towns. Nowhere is this
stark contrast more appar-
ent than in Mumbai, the
country’s commercial and
industrial capital. There
has been heavy invest-
ment in a plethora of road-
ways and a near-total neg-
lect of public transport in a
metropolis where the
overwhelming majority rely
on this mode to commute
to work.
Mumbai’s peculiar geog-
raphy has admittedly com-
plicated the situation. The
north-south transport axis
has been part of the city’s
life for so many decades
that it is difficult to think of
changing it. The entire
concept of building a twin
city across the harbour in
the early 1970s was
meant to provide an east-

10 west axis and alter the

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 schemes, it unequivocally opted for private, motorised
transport in preference to public transport. This may be
said to fall in line with the economic liberalisation moves
encouraged by successive national governments, with
the State gradually withdrawing from area after area of
public life. In Mumbai, this coalition government took
the drastic step of bypassing the apex planning body,
the MMRDA, as its transport expert, A. V. Ghangurde,
publicly cited at a seminar. Instead, it entrusted both the
planning and execution of the road projects to the
Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation
(MSRDC), an engineering agency which has no expert-
ise to take an overall view of the merits of such
schemes. The total cost of all these schemes was over
Rs. 8,000 crores, excluding the Eastern Freeway Sea
Link.
W. S. Atkins, consultants hired by MMRDA to advise
on a comprehensive transport plan for the metropolitan
region in 1994, showed that Mumbai was unique in that
83 per cent of the passenger trips in peak hours were
by public transport (train and bus), another eight per
cent by “intermediate public transport” (taxis and three-
wheelers) and only nine per cent by private transport
(both cars and two-wheelers). This is why critics casti-
gate the overwhelming emphasis as the “nine per cent
solution” for a city which is poised to become the
world’s most populous in two decades. One can also
contrast the passenger carrying capacities of different
modes: cars carry only 4,000 passengers a hour, ver-
sus 15,000 by bus, 45,000 by train and 75,000 if there
11 were an underground system.
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
There are three sets of road projects which the Shiv
Sena-BJP government initiated: fly-overs, sea-links and
freeways. By far the most controversial of these were
the fly-overs. The government appointed a committee
to advise on the viability of fly-overs controversially
chaired by a builder, V. M. Jog, who obviously had no
expertise in this field. Mr. Jog dutifully obeyed his polit-
ical masters and recommended 50 fly-overs, for which
pains he was awarded an additional project at Andheri,
the only one not to be constructed by the MSRDC. The
50 fly-overs were to cost Rs. 1,500 crores and the one
at Andheri Rs. 110 crores. Mr. Jog’s controversial fly-
over was the subject of a writ filed by the Bombay
Environmental Action Group because he sought to
cover the cost by selling commercial space beneath it.
In other words, whatever con-
gestion was meant to have
been reduced by the fly-over
was created beneath it! He
was originally permitted
9,000 sq m but was eventual-
ly given 45,000 sq m - five
times the area - to exploit on
the market. After a delay of
several months, which
caused interminable traffic
jams, the court allowed him to
proceed with less space.
According to the MSRDC,
the fly-overs were justified on
the ground that the four major
expressways being con-
structed to take traffic in and
out of Greater Mumbai at a
cost of another Rs. 10,000
crores would not work unless
there were fly-overs to carry the vehicles smoothly
through the city. These were to link the metropolis with
Pune (this expressway has been completed at Rs.
1,450 crores), Nashik, Talasari and Sawantwadi. The
MSRDC cited how the earliest consultant on improving
the city’s transport links, Los Angeles-based firm,
Wilbur Smith, recommended fly-overs as early in 1962.
The consultants also mooted the highly debatable West
and East Island Freeways along the coasts of the island
city, a scheme which the MSRDC is now reviving.
Needless to say, Los Angeles experts are hardly quali-
fied to advise Mumbai since the Californian city is noto-
rious for sacrificing all planning norms for the benefit of
the all-powerful automobile lobby.
The MSRDC also argued, illogically, that the fly-overs
would help reduce air pollution. Maharashtra’s Minister
 of Public Works, Nitin Gadkari, to whom the flyovers now working with TCS, has stressed: “The automobile,
were a pet project, argued that since cars would move born in the beginning of the 20th century, can no longer
speedily, without being obstructed by traffic lights, remain the focus of the urban transport infrastructure
there would be less emissions. However, he was planning as was the case four-five decades ago.”
supremely indifferent to the counter argument that by To add insult to injury, the tolls with which the
building fly-overs, there would be a spurt in the number MSRDC had proposed to recover the cost of the fly-
of vehicles and the total emissions from these would overs were the subject of a writ petition in the High
surely increase the overall load of pollutants. Already, Court, which ruled against them.
vehicles account for 70 per cent of Mumbai’s air pollu- At present, only vehicles which enter the city and use
tion. Gadkari also believed with the coastal freeways the Western and Eastern Express Highways are liable to
and sea links that the pollutants would vanish into thin pay the tolls which is unfair and exempts the regular
air along the ocean, not realising that the prevalent wind users. This is a typical instance of the authorities pro-
currents are from the sea towards the land. ceeding without doing their homework and in the
The World Bank, which had funded the first phase of process, imposing a burden of Rs. 1,500 crores on the
the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) and want- state government for a scheme that benefits only a tiny
ed to initiate the second phase, unequivocally came out minority of motorists. ●
against the fly-overs during the course of a review of
MUTP2 in October 1998. It pointed out that “there The writer is a senior
appears to have been little traffic impact assessment” journalist and environmental activist.
or financial evaluation of the project. The fly-overs
would increase road capacity and encourage (and prob-
ably generate new) car use in the city. Some of them,
notably those in the island city like the Haji Ali-Wilson
College viaduct, would have “severe adverse environ-
mental impact (noise, visual intrusion etc)”. There was
no economic justification and the estimation of recovery
of costs through tolls was also inadequate.
As it happened, there were legal stays on the pro-
posed tolls. The state government eventually had to
scrap the tolls on fly-overs within the metropolis, includ-
ing 14 within the island city, and only charge those who
were entering the city. It will thus fall far short on recov-
ery of costs. The Bank observed: “While there is no
objection to the tolls per se, this programme neverthe-
less subsidises and appears to encourage car commut-
ing and could actually generate additional intra-Greater
Mumbai, particularly in island city, traffic demand with
consequent congestion impacts.” The Bank also criti-
cised the neglect of the bus system, since fly-overs
span too long distances to accommodate this form of
public transport. Finally, it commented on the lack of
public consultation prior to the project.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) examined the traf-
fic, economic and environmental impact of fly-overs and
also opposed them. In particular, it cited those in con-
gested areas as being undesirable. It found that “con-
struction of flyovers on the island will only increase the
usage of private vehicles . . . this would increase the
congestion levels and parking problems in the city”.
The investment in the island city would not be justified,
as the overall social benefits would be lower than the

12 cost. Dr. B. R. Patankar, a former head of the BEST and

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 Downtown lights
Amitava Kumar
I
T is New Year’s eve in New York City. Y2K is about
to begin. And I am sweeping my eyes over the lights
of Manhattan as I make my quick exit out of the city.
On the car stereo, Annie Lennox is singing “No More I
Love Yous”. There is very little traffic on Brooklyn
Bridge as the car crosses the river.
I turn and look at my wife, Mona, who always tells me
that she finds the view of the Manhattan skyline splen-
didly enticing. Her eyes glisten. It is as if the Statue of
Liberty, far away to our left, were actually using the glit-
tering lights to signal a secret message: “This is home
for all you desis. New York is where you come when
you are done with New Delhi.”
In that message lies the gospel according to the expa-
triate middle-class to which I firmly belong. None of the
direness and the desperation of the well-known address
to the hungry, the tired, and the poor - which the Statue
of Liberty has actually been morse-coding across the
13
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
waters during the century that is about to draw to a
close in a few hours.
As the car approaches the end of the bridge, and
Canal Street looms close, the music on the stereo
surges. As if on cue, Annie Lennox begins to sing
“Downtown Lights”.
Earlier in the evening, I was at New York City’s Times
Square. It was still a few hours before the giant ball was
to drop down on the last millennium, accompanied by
the chanting of a record crowd gathered to mark the
countdown to the final seconds of the passing era.
Electronic boards everywhere flashed the millennium
countdown. Every person on the already crowded
streets was made aware of the passing of time in its
smallest readable portions.
When I dived back into the 42nd Street subway sta-
tion under Times Square, I saw the tight bunches of
blue-clad NYPD policemen. On the Times Square shut-
tle, there was an announcement on the train’s wall. It
read: “Every 12 seconds another woman is beaten by
her husband or boyfriend.” This declaration of time
 passing made time stop for me. and, by an odd chance, we had happened to choose
There were photos of battered women above the this night for her move to Florida to the house where I
announcement; none of them looked Indian, but I know had been living for some time. In our household, I am
that South Asian women’s groups like Sakhi in New not allowed to say anything bad about the city. If I do,
York are active because there is a high occurrence of Mona reminds me gently that it is the city in which we
domestic abuse in our communities. Desi men, met. Mona came to New York City from Karachi; I came
unmoored from their familiar place, in all senses of the there from Patna via New Delhi.
word, hurt those who are closest to them and who are When I think of what happened between Mona and
often utterly dependent on them for support. me, I am also reminded of something else. The writer
There are other groups too - like Workers Awaaz and Suketu Mehta, who has his roots in Mumbai and who
Taxi Drivers Coalition - that fight for the immigrant rights now lives in the same neighbourhood in Brooklyn where
of South Asians in New York City. The city that I was Mona once lived, is a friend of mine. In an article called
leaving that last evening of the last millennium was a “The Fatal Love”, Suketu had written: “The first time I
city where, at street level, in a world distant from the met the enemy people, Pakistanis, was when I went to
lights of the soaring skyscrapers, are the struggles of New York. We shopped together, we ate together, we
working people from places like Ludhiana and Lahore. dated each other and had each others’ babies.” ●
By ten or eleven, I was speeding on the New Jersey
Turnpike, listening intently to the news on the car-radio. The writer is an academic based in the U.S. and the author of Passport
The news that was being repeated was about the Photos (Penguin India, 2000). He writes a literary column for tehelka.com.
release of the passengers on the hijacked Indian
Airlines flight. It was only when I heard that happy news
that it struck me that the new year had already arrived
in India.
The next day, Mona and I would stop at a gas-station
and buy the newspapers, the first newspapers of a new
era. The news of the end of the hijacking drama would
find space on the front pages of the New York Times. I
bought other newspapers, trying to get as much news
as I could about the exchange of prisoners for the Indian
Airlines passengers at an airport in Afghanistan. While
skimming over the Washington Post, I stumbled across
the photograph of an Indian woman. The face that had
caught my eye was of a woman who was one among a
hundred readers of the Post who had written a hundred
words about themselves.
This is what face number 33 had to say about herself:
“My name is Sushma Sondhi, of Sterling. I am from
India. We came to America with a dream to give our
boys the best life. We sacrificed our settled life in our
home country for our boys. One son, 19, met a much
older woman who has two children from two different
fathers. We asked him to complete his education
before getting involved. He said, ‘Go to hell. Stop call-
ing me.’ There is no bigger sorrow than to hear these
words from your loved ones.”
When midnight came, we had left the highway to find
shelter for the night. There was the live broadcast from
New York on the television where we had stopped.
People packed into Times Square looked happy and
excited as the countdown began. Champagne bottles
were being uncorked.
14 Mona had lived in New York City for several years

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 Pune: Past, present
and future
modern, high-tech layer of the upper and middle class-
Jayant Deshpande es forms the crust, the prevailing Maratha culture the
mantle, and the Brahmins descended from the Peshwas

F
OR years the word “Peshwa” was synonymous the core. Migrants form a fourth and atmospheric layer
with Pune, or Poona, as the British called it. The that gives the city a kind of buoyancy: they have come
association still persists to a degree. The here from virtually every corner of India; they have
Peshwas, after all, ruled Maharashtra from Pune for changed Pune’s face and vitalised it.
more than a century until 1818. The raison detre of a Marathi may be the city’s mother tongue, but it is the
town or city can be traced migrants’ ethnic mix - Parsis,
to its origins. Pune’s histo- Christians, Jews, Muslims,
ry supposedly begins with Gujaratis, South Indians,
the Bhonsles, Shivaji’s fam- Bengalis, Punjabis, Sindhis
ily - the Peshwas followed and rural folk from the Hindi
on their heels, and finally belt, to name just some of
the British made their mark the groups - that has
and remained there until enriched the city beyond
1947. During the latter measure, giving it a warmth
period, progressive reform- and vibrancy, even a certain
ers like Phule, Agarkar, cosmopolitan feel. These
Gokhale and Karve shaped diverse communities have
Pune’s distinctive social thrown up a riotous variety
ethos. Each dominant class we can all celebrate. Their
added its own layer to the social worlds, colliding and
city’s history and what we intersecting, each different
get is a palimpsest: nothing from the other, give Pune its
is completely erased; rem- colourful character.
nants of the old are still vis- Each community has
ible. merged with the others until
Pune has forged ahead, their tentacles have spread
its original raison detre and reached into every avail-
metamorphosing into a able piece of land that could
host of raison detre: the conceivably be settled. And
defence establishments of so Pune often seems like an
the Southern Command, overgrown village; it still
laboratories and scientific retains an old-world sort of
research institutes, hospi- charm, beating to a gentler
tals, colleges and a major university, computer training rhythm. Despite this, and despite some indolent ways it
schools and cyber cafes, technical vocational institutes, has inherited, Pune is on the whole a reasonably disci-
art schools and cultural organisations, theatres, muse- plined and industrious city. It is undoubtedly on the
ums, booksellers, publishers, printing presses, heavy move, ready to join the global village. Software firms,
industries, a stock exchange, national and international computer vendors, computer institutes and net cafes
banks, head offices of domestic and multinational com- have mushroomed, and generally set the mood and
panies, hotels, restaurants and boarding houses, a red- tone of the city.
light district. The list goes on. They seem eager to equip Pune for the 21st Century.

15 If Pune is viewed as a microcosm of planet earth, the This is the cyber-veneer Pune has recently acquired.

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 Who knows where the cyber-revolution will take this mimic that of Mumbai.
city, but it is changing many people’s lives. Pune seems Pune draws much strength also from its hinterland,
poised to become another Cyberabad. from rural people who have migrated to the urban clus-
Mumbaikars have always regarded Pune as a satellite ter it represents. Most Puneites have roots outside, in
town, a refuge for those weary of Mumbai’s frenetic a small town or village somewhere. Is it surprising, then,
pace. For the British Pune served as a retreat from the that it resembles an overgrown village? In a city like
burdens of the Bombay Presidency. But now, as Pune the line between tribal and townsman, rural and
Mumbai’s growth slows down, they’re eagerly gravitat- urban is often blurred. The civic idea is a superimposed
ing, if not flocking in droves, to this satellite, cashing in one that has to be learned. But a psychological urbani-
on the windfall profits made from the sale of golden real sation has been going on; former villagers who visit
estate in that port city, and driving up prices here. Even their native places find themselves out of step: they can
neither slow down, nor
can they see clearly
the beauty of nature
around them.
Some ironies are
cruel: the “prosperity”
of Indian cities is often
a symbol of what they
have taken away from
their rural cousins; how
they have enriched
themselves at the
expense of the rural
dweller. The gulf
between them is wide;
wider, perhaps, than
that between East and
West.
Instead of a master
plan for the city, Pune
has independent, and
mostly private, planned
developments under
various rubrics, com-
mercial or residential.
Kothrud was reported-
ly the fastest growing
suburb in the world. It
used to be a village on
the outskirts, as was
Bhamburda before it
became Shivaji Nagar.
Aundh has become an
“edge city”. To add to
this bustle are many
Pune’s gravitational centre of employment has shifted other burgeoning colonies and suburbs, some far from
to the twin, newly incorporated municipality of Pimpri- the main city which may be characterised by the trip-
Chinchwad, formerly village suburbs bordering on the tych formed by the Deccan Gymkhana, the Gaothan
vast plots of the Maharashtra Industrial Development (the original, or old city) and the Cantonment. In the
Corporation. Because of the natural flow of people from Gaothan area, Shaniwar Wada stands like a dark stone
16 Bombay, the rich ethnic variety of Pune may appear to colossus. It used to be the residence of the Peshwas

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 during the 18th Century, but functioned also as a fortifi- Grecian-Roman pillars and arches, imported theme-park
cation to deal with enemies and invaders. An impres- ideas, hotels done up as baroque palaces. Numerous
sive structure, it got destroyed before the Peshwas old wadas have been razed to make way for multi-sto-
were finally ousted. ried cement and concrete buildings in the cramped,
What we see today are its remains. The congested Gaothan. Where trees have been cut,
Archaeological Society of India had for many years kept streets widened, and flyovers built, the coziness and
this space off limits but now, inside, it features a Sound intimacy of small shops, stores and homes are lost.
and Light show like the one at Delhi’s Red Fort. Today garish signs, company billboards, hawkers, illegal
A “Pune Centre of Arts and Culture” housed within encroachments, crippling traffic, air and noise pollution
the Wada’s ramparts seems possible. Yet, arguably, have uglified the city. They signify a people’s exuber-
such a plan would be at odds with Pune’s reticent char- ance after years of privation.
acter and the diffuse nature of its cultural life. Central Pune is considered the Queen of the Deccan,
squares and monuments are not its style, though in the blessed with a magnificent physical setting that reminds
past crowds would gather around Shaniwar Wada to me of the American Southwest. But can its inhabitants
hear politicians make grand rhetorical speeches. The and their civic works match the grandeur of the land-
Wada could well play such a role again in the future. scape? Two years ago, the maverick municipal commis-
Still, Pune is culturally alive. Small, private music sioner, Arun Bhatia had the support of a large section of
schools are legion. The annual Sawai Gandharva Music Pune’s citizenry, but his reforming mission was foiled by
Fest has become a mecca, drawing veteran musicians the corporators. To make a great city, as Bhatia demon-
and fans from all over India; new talent is also present- strated, takes not grand sentiments, but worthy deeds.
ed. Classical singers like Bhimsen Joshi got their start To my mind, Pune is neither an urban “horror” nor a
at the august Bharat Gayan Samaj. Pune’s Ganesh “wonder”. It is an interesting amalgam of village, town
Festival now draws devotees from all over Maharashtra and city all rolled into one, but expressing the spirit of
and beyond. The theatre has always been Pune’s fortÇ. each. ●
Leading playwrights like Satish Alekar are a symbol of
Pune’s prominent role in staging new and old works,
and cultivating audiences. Small presses churn out myr-
iad titles. Marathi publishers based here serve major Freelance writer and literary translator,
and minor writers throughout the State, including who lives and works in Pune.
Mumbai. Readings by authors and talks by scholars are
an ongoing feature. Book exhibitions flourish, as do
exhibits of visual art.
In spite of these virtues, Pune heaves under its bur-
den and strains at the seams, trying to function without
bursting and spilling its contents. In its outer aspect,
Pune is much like any big, troubled urban settlement in
India’s interior, away from the four big metros that form
a diamond on the map.
Slums and shantytowns are an obvious symptom of
groups and communities on the move, in search of a
livelihood - they defy town planning. They grow like bar-
nacles. Pune owes its galloping spread to these shan-
tytowns, which sport an urban face. But behind this
face, the city festers, shudders, and occasionally
explodes.
The urban sprawl is unavoidable, as is unchecked
growth that has added new life to the city and the trap-
pings of modern life. The blandishments of American or
European culture are everywhere present. Offices of
multinational companies assert their slick presence.
And contradictions abound. Witness architecture that’s
17 out of tune with its drab surroundings: imitation

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 Invisible labour
Kalpana Sharma
NCE upon a time, the tall brick chimneys of
O Central Mumbai announced the city’s industrial
heart. Today the chimneys evoke only memories;
in their shadows lurk the ghosts of a past not so dis-
tant. Yet, already, it is being forgotten.
For among the skeletal remains of the once vibrant
mill district of Mumbai you find today sleaze, crime and
yuppie entertainment. And the plush offices of busi-
nesses that sell other images, not those of Mumbai’s
past.
But does the virtual death of “Girangaon,” where
once 54 textile mills spun yarn and wove cloth; where a
work force from nearby Konkan and distant Uttar
Pradesh worked side by side, where the mill maliks
ranged from generous to exploitative, mean that
Mumbai is not an “industrial” city any more? Has the
heart that pumped life into the city died - or has it mor-
phed into something else?
Superficially, you might conclude that Mumbai’s
industrial heart is dead. In the island-city, old industries
18
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like the mills have disappeared and new ones are not
permitted to take their place. All new industries are now
relegated to the distant suburbs, where a new, much
larger urban agglomeration has emerged.
But even in the heartland of Mumbai, in the island-
city, “industry” and enterprise have not died altogeth-
er; they have simply taken on a different avatar. And
they tend to hide in the jungle of slums that seem to
occupy a major part of the city. In fact, they cover less
than six per cent of the city’s area. But in them live over
half of Mumbai’s citizens, an estimated six million peo-
ple.
The visual images that the slums in Mumbai conjure
up are of dilapidated structures, some of brick and mor-
tar, others of tin and tarpaulin. Of dirt and disease. Of
disorder, transience and of despair.
There is all this. But there is also another side, one
not visible to the casual visitor. For what happens in
these hovels is the fuel that runs the city’s economy.
The people who live in these broken-down shelters
underwrite the city’s efficiency. Without them, people
would not be able to keep their houses clean, get a hot
meal in the middle of the day, buy affordable food in any
 part of the city, find vegetables and fruits at convenient option exists. On the contrary, the organised sector is
locations, find cheaper, yet reliable, alternatives for all diligently shedding its work force, forcing these men to
the famous brand names sold in the Indian market. turn to the informal sector.
In every nook and corner of the majority of Mumbai’s And this in turn is leading to a cascade effect, as each
slums there is “industry.” The lane between rows of wave of workers displaced by the organised sector, dis-
houses, the tiny lofts, any open space between struc- places workers in the informal sector.
tures, even disused toilet blocks are locations of tiny The entry of more workers also pushes down wages
manufacturing centres, producing readymade clothes, even lower than they already are. A labour surplus mar-
food stuffs, leather bags, suitcases, jewellery, soap, ket is a dream for the entrepreneur in the unorganised
just about anything. sector. And a nightmare for the workers looking for a
Surabhi Sharma’s recent film “Jari Mari and Other living wage.
Tales of Cloth” captures most vividly these islands of Yet, even this cannot last as the city’s focus shifts
intense enterprise. The location of her film is a slum that from manufacturing to the service sector. Mumbai-
hugs the runway of Mumbai airport. For over three based architect Arvind Adarkar predicts that 50 to 60
decades people have lived there, their daily lives punc- lakh workers in the city will be pushed from the indus-
tuated by landings and take-offs. But the inhabitants of trial to the self-employed sector in the next few years.
Jari Mari have not taken off. They cling precariously to Until 1971, just under half the city’s workforce was
their uncertain territory, waiting for a day when the bull- engaged in manufacturing. By 1990, this had declined
dozers will move in and flatten more than three decades to a little over 28 per cent.
of toil and savings. But this uncertain existence has not So, what of the future? The chimneys of Girangaon at
dampened their enterprise. Jari Mari resounds day and least survived to tell their tale. One wonders what sym-
night with the sound of sewing machines and other bols will remain from this vanishing, and virtually invisi-
instruments that produce all manner of goods. ble informal sector, that has sustained so many lives. ●
Dharavi, a few kilometres south, is Jari Mari on a
much larger scale. Here there are large organised units,
some employing more than 20 workers. They process
leather, make finished leather goods, produce ready-
made garments for the export market and for domestic
sale. In one factory, workers from different parts of
India make the special sweet from their region. These
are then packed and despatched to places where a
Dharavi cannot even be imagined.
And the women? Their hands are not still for a
moment. When they are not filling water, or cleaning
and cooking, they are busy working with their hands -
embroidery, making rakhis, making paper bags. Others
go and work in the recycling district sorting out plastic.
But while this informal industry might provide colour
and interest to writers and photographers, it represents
a drastic decline of livelihood choices for the millions of
poor people who have made Mumbai their home. By its
very nature, the informal sector breeds insecurity. It
survives because it can work with the smallest of mar-
gins. This means that workers get paid less than the
minimum wage. But they are in no position to question
or argue. There are no unions. And there are hundreds
waiting to take up these jobs at even lower salaries. So
workers, drawn from many parts of India, toil silently in
these sweatshops, and wait for their chance to move
on to something better.
In the past, that “something better” would have been
19 a secure job in the organised sector. Today, no such

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 Concrete jungle
P. Raghu Nandan
T
HIS urban conglomeration we call home, is also
the home to a diverse selection of fauna, some like
the snake we never imagined was here. In
Chennai, and in other cities, we have unwittingly pro-
vided niches of safety for creatures that have adapted
to urban life. It is not only the migrant birds that come
annually to the Adyar estuary, nor the occasional visitor,
like the monkey, which troops in from villages, the city
has a plethora of creatures, which choose to live here.
Amidst the tall buildings, the traffic, the urban garbage
dumps, sewer lines and storm water drains, animal life
survives, in fact thrives. It is a city within a city, the
secret life of the urban wildlife.
Last year in the empty plot next door, workmen clear-
ing the undergrowth ferreted out three snakes. There
20 was general panic and a snake catcher was sent for;
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
Murugan, the snake catcher, duly arrived that after-
noon. He was a professional and combed the plot
meticulously and searched the neighbouring houses as
well. He showed us snake tracks in an unused garage.
He said they were made a few days ago and were viper
tracks. Elsewhere a portion of a rain water pipe lay on
the ground, mud had collected in it. Murugan bent down
and we saw in the beam of a flashlight a snake track a
few inches wide. He said that pipe was the regular hid-
ing place of a large cobra. Here in the middle of an
urban city, a cobra? He laughed, “Snakes travel long
distances all over the city and go hunting in the night.
You are lucky there are no snakes here, but keep the
downstairs windows closed at night.”
If snakes live in the city, can mongoose be far behind?
There is a family of mongoose in my garden. They hunt
in our neighbourhood, but live in the storm water drains
and underground burrows. The storm water drains,
which are dry for most of the year, are a great place for
 the mongoose, to live and raise their young. Animals
find shelter in places that we never imagined - junk-
yards, office blocks, playgrounds, undergrowth and
vacant lots. Schools and colleges are silent places in
the night, safe for nocturnal animals.
There used to be four coconut trees in our garden. In
one season, every morning, we would find a coconut on
the ground, with a neat hole on its side and the contents
empty. It was always the same tree. The gardener told
us it was a maranai (Palm Civet) that was responsible
and suggested he get a narrikoravan (gypsy) to catch
the “nuisance”. I looked at the coconut, there was a
perfect hole on its side and only one tree was being har-
vested. I explained to the gardener, “If someone can cut
such a perfect hole on the side of a coconut, they
deserve my respect, let us leave this tree for the
maranai”. I have seen this shy and talented animal a
couple of times, in this city.
The ubiquitous rat survives in all parts of the globe
and if left unchecked, creates havoc. Rats, bandicoots
and voles have made themselves comfortable among
human habitats. They are favourite prey for hawks,
owls, cats, mongoose and other predators.
It was early May and my neighbour’s mango tree was
laden with fruit. I stayed awake, the time 1:30 a.m.; I
turned my binoculars towards the mango tree and its
nocturnal visitors - the flying foxes. These were huge
bats, with a wingspan of four feet. They were noisy
feeders, but graceful flyers. Once they finished feeding,
one by one they would take off and fly away in a lazy
flapping of their large wings. While I watched this, small-
er insectivorous bats (Indian pipistrelle) flitted about
catching small insects and mosquitoes. Every night
around street lamps the smaller bats would feed on the
insects attracted by the light. Bats help keep the insect
population down. Research done by the Bat
Conservation International, has shown that more
insects are attracted to certain kinds of street lighting
than others. By changing the kind of light we use we
could actually bring down the insect population by let-
ting the bats do their job. The smaller bats roost in old
buildings, temple gopurams and thick fronds of the
palmyra.
Animals and birds also find plenty of food in urban
areas. The waste of a city, like leftovers, kitchen scraps,
hotel and butchery scraps, seafood waste, grain stor-
age, vegetable market scraps are all food for these
creatures. The prey-predator equation also works ami-
cably, with hawks feeding on squirrels when there is a
population boom and owls and snakes keeping the rats
in checks.
21 Walking down Anna Salai one afternoon, near the LIC
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
building, I looked up and saw kites, eagles, vultures,
sailing the thermals. That day there must have been at
least several dozens of them in that area. They had
spotted food, carrion and butchery refuse. Some of
these birds make the city their home; others come from
afar to feed on waste that we choose to leave about.
Squirrels can be seen in most urban Indian cities.
During the day when the squirrels and mynahs start giv-
ing the alarm call, it is either a hawk or a cat, which is
on the prowl. Owls and hawks are common residents in
the city. Hawks can be seen perched on trees or tall
buildings eyeing the surrounding area. There is a large
rain tree on TTK Road, a busy thoroughfare; it is the
home of an owl. It resides in a hole high up in the
branches and comes out at night, to hunt for rats,
lizards and other small prey.
Tall high rise are home to pigeons; in older parts of
Triplicane near mosques, pigeons wheel around in large
flocks. In New York, pigeons have become tourist
attraction; they roost in the ledges of the skyscrapers,
high above the ground. Seagulls haunt the garbage
dumps and fishing wharfs in seaside towns. The one
bird that has sadly become a rarity is the house spar-
row. For unknown reasons, the sparrow has started to
die out, similar to the fall in frog and toad population
worldwide. Are they telling us something about the
state of affairs of this world?
The list continues: the common crow, sun bird, weav-
er bird, tailor bird, seven sisters, green parakeets, blue
kingfishers and the cuckoo; house lizards, skinks,
chameleons and the endless list of insects. Chennai
also has areas that attract wildlife, like the Adyar
Estuary, Guindy National Park, Madhavaram Jheel,
Simpson Estate, and Velachery Swamp. Why kid our-
selves that man gave up the jungle when he moved to
the city, the wildlife just moved in, making the city truly
the concrete jungle. ●
 The vanishing
tharawads of Kerala
split into manageable matrilineal groups that stayed in
S. Jayaraj different buildings. Some tharawads comprised over
200 inhabitants!
E came to the country of black pepper, Malabar. The Nairs followed the marumakkathayam - a system

W Its length is a journey two months from Sindhbar

to Kawlam. The whole way by land lies under the
shade of trees.And all this space of two months jour-
of matriarchial descent while the Namboodiris were
patriarchial. Nairs took land on lease from the
Namboodiris and cultivated the same. Among the
ney, there is not a space free from cultivation. For every Namboodiris only the eldest one could marry. The
man has his own orchard with his house in the middle younger ones could have “relations” called samband-
and a wooden fence around it. ham with Nair women. These women stayed in their
Kerala remained a farming community till recently own tharawads and the Namboodiris visited them from
with rigid caste class distinctions. Situated in the south time to time. Even Nair men never stayed with their
western corner of the country, and guarded by seas families. The relationships between husband and wife,
and high mountains, Kerala for a long time enjoyed iso- father and children were not recognised.Hence the
lation and was out of the way of the great migrations Namboodiri illams had spacious public areas while the
and invasions. Settlement patterns from early times Nair tharawads had more bedrooms.
remained the homestead unlike that of the other cultur- A tharawad consisted of the karanaver (senior most
al types like ancient, early, and medieval Hindu Mughal male member), his wife - ammayi (aunt) and their chil-
or even that of the Tamil Brahmin “agraharams” types. dren; his sisters and their children. Senior male mem-
The kovilakom of the ruling class, the illam and mana bers managed the property on behalf of the women.
of the Namboodiris (priestly class), and tharawads of The karanavar had the absolute powers to represent,
the Nair community (administrative and warrior group) possess and manage the tharawad and its properties.
are the major upper class housing
types that formed the settlement of
this region.
The Tharawad, though it now
stands generally for the ancestral
home, gains its name from the con-
text of which it is a part of. Thara is a
neighbourhood, mainly Nair dominat-
ed. The Namboodiri dominated areas
are called uru. Many thara formed a
desom and many desoms formed a
nadu and many nadus formed a swa-
roopam. The inhabitants of thara
formed a government under a
Karanavar (elder one) - a feudal
group that ruled the region. Thara as
a political organisation ceased to
exist long before, but still is lively in many places as a The karanavar provided everything from pocket money
community group. The many Nair houses associated to clothes to the members. No marriage took place
with a temple and its surroundings called thara is a between members of a tharawad as they are consid-
common settlement cluster in the region. ered related by blood.
The tharawad now stands for historic association with These tharawads were “urban clusters” in them-
generations of ancestors. It goes back several genera- selves. Functions and rituals considered sacred among
22 tions. Overburdened with inhabitants, the tharawad the Nair community that now take place in temples, like

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 naming of the child, ear boring ceremony, initiation to
letters, first tonsure of the new born and so on used to
be conducted within the tharawads. Festivals like
Onam, Vishu and Navarathri were celebrated with
pomp. Many local festivals associated with temples in
different parts of Kerala are even now conducted and
managed by the respective Nair tharawads of the
region.
The traditional building types of these tharawads were
nalukettu (four blocks), ettukettu (eight blocks), pathi-
narukettu (sixteen blocks) - the multiples of a basic
chatursala type. Chatursala, according to texts, is an
interconnected four blocked building around a central
courtyard called anganam or nadumuttam. The lower
class types mainly remained ekasala - the one sided.
The four blocks are the vadakini, thekkini, kizakkini and
padinjattini according to their corresponding cardinal
locations of N,S,E,W respectively. Vadakkini houses
the kitchen and dining, padinjatini, the bedroom and
granary, thekkini and kizhakkini are halls and rooms for
visitors.
These buildings were laid and constructed following
elaborate rituals and principles according to the tradi-
tional texts on Vastu Vidya which were highly articulat-
ed prescriptive building guidelines. The guidelines
ranged from selection of site, nature of soil, orientation
buildings , position of buildings and rooms according to
23
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
mandalas, to the perimeter of the building, dimensional
system, kind of motifs and decorations to be used and
so on. These buildings demonstrate excellent crafts-
manship in wood and a good understanding of con-
struction and building material science.
The structure and form of the roof system with their
eaves and gable ears is one of the uncomparable
achievements of Kerala’s traditional buildings and
craftsmanship. The rafter, wall plate, collar pins, ridge
beams, and ties join together with surprising sophisti-
cation and precision to form a self adjusting lattice. The
tiled roof allows for ventilation in hot and humid climate.
The pathayam (granary) , thulasithara (platform for the
tulasi), and sarpakavu (temple for snakes - snake wor-
ship used to be common among the Nairs), were an
indispensible part of all tharawads. Pillared verandahs
bordered the building and courtyards. Entry was
through a gateway called padipura, normally part of the
compound wall.
The Malabar Marriage Act of 1896, the Travancore
Nair Act of 1912, 1925 and the Cochin Nair Act of
1920, dealing with the laws of marriage and family suc-
cession, right to property, protection and management
have fundamentally affected the structure of Nair
tharawads. By the second half of the 20th century, the
joint family system collapsed in Kerala. The last stone
was the 1975 Joint Family Abolition Act. Nuclear family
 became the pervasive type.These brought about major and guidelines could do anything about these buildings
changes in property ownership and occupational pat- that are integrated with local histories and craftsman-
terns. The Namboodiris and Nairs, not used to farming ship, that are of immense heritage value to the region.
by themselves and also due to intra family dynamics, There are rules that gives provision to the local bod-
sold their properties to others. The Land Revenue Act ies, to document and preserve the important heritage
introduced by the communist goverment regularised buildings within their jurisdiction. If the local bodies or
the land for cultivators. That marked the end of the feu- the politically powerful Nair service societies,or at least
dal system in Kerala. the respective families of these tharawads do not take
The social change in Kerala was dramatic with politi- the initiative to preserve and reuse appropriately, all of
cal upsurges, accessibility to services due to the close- these would vanish as pieces to entertain tourists. ●
ly distributed settlement centres and ribbon develop-
ment, modern reformers and movements. People
migrated in search of better opportunities. According to The writer is an architect, Urban designer, Founder Member, Centre for
a recent census, at the state level there are 3.75 million Environment, Architecture and Human settlements based in Kozhikode.
migrants - nearly 40 per cent of households have
migrants. Around 1.5 million Keralites live outside India
with 95 per cent in the Gulf countries. The total remit-
tance according to a 1995 data is 10 per cent of the
state domestic product. Kerala was getting integrated References:
to a global system. Property prices were rising. The
agricultural sector declined. Kerala now does not even 1. Urban Process in Kerala, T. T. Sreekumar
produce 50 per cent of its rice needs. People sold agri-
cultural lands for money. The new middle class with 2. Marriage and the Family in Kerala, Fr. J .
more purchasing power powered by Gulf money turned Puthenkulam
bidders. The physical and cultural topography of Kerala
was changing, with new consumption practices and 3. C.D.S. working paper by K.C. Zakariah, E.T.
value systems. Mathew
The old tharawad houses and such traditional build-
ings found no place in the new middle class aesthetics 4. Impact of Migration on Kerala’s Economy and
and demand. Some of the traditional buildings like Society, S. Hrudayarajan
prominent monuments, kovilakoms and temples were
looked after by Dewaswom Boards, trusts, archaeolo-
gy departments and governments. The Nair tharawads
were distributed widely. Owners of these tharawads
had increased manifold by this time and were dispersed
in different parts of the world. The demand for wood-
work, especially the carved components in international
and national markets, the financial and physical burden
of maintaining them, the value of the prime land on
which these buildings stood, were factors that encour-
aged the owners to sell their property. The present
developments in the tourism sector which attempts to
create a “Kerala ambience” at any cost has probably
been the most damaging. These groups with their
transplantation architects and antique dealers brought
out the tharawads from even the interiors of the region
in bulk and reused its components - like columns,
doors, doorframes, rafters and wall plates to create the
“Kerala” ambience in resorts.
Neither the recent Vastu consciousness, the propo-
nents and guardians of traditional architecture, nor the
24 government with their defunct heritage commissions

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 The city in cinema
Ajit Duara
A
S is the case with the evolution of most artistic
disciplines in India, Hindu mythology provided the
ignition point for Indian cinema. Dadasaheb
Phalke, that pioneer of camerawork, editing, set design,
direction and production, set the ball rolling.
Mythological cinema is the most demanding on set
design and special effects. The most populist of audi-
ences has to be convinced that Lord Krishna has
appeared in human form, yet retains his celestial aura
and can appear and disappear at will. In films like “Raja
Harishchandra” (1914) and “Shri Krishna Janma”
(1919), Phalke maintained his magic touch and can
rightly be called the first architect of Indian cinema.
Phalke drew on the visual record of mythology for his
images - illustrated texts of the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana, temple sculpture, engravings on walls and
common structures, the emerging poster art of the time
and, of course, theatrical productions from the period.
But because it is all motion-picture photography, Phalke
had to have a performer, an actor, to play Krishna. And
it is at this point that architecture gives way to the
human dimension - the movie star as God and, some-
25
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
times, as politician. Set design in mythological cinema,
so long as it remains an area manipulated by cinematic
tools, is architecture. But the moment it crosses over to
the performer wearing the designer mask, it moves into
the second dimension, an area inhabited by mythologi-
cal performers like N. T. Rama Rao and M. G.
Ramachandran. You can no longer tell the man from the
mask.
Architecture is expressionism. The Mayas, the
Pharaohs of Egypt, the Mughals and the British in India
left their vision of themselves in their architecture:
where they came from, their perception of the universe
and their place in it. The same thing applies to cinema
and particularly to film with a strong ideological content.
In Bengal, Ritwik Ghatak made the cinema of cultural
resistance; resistance to practically everything that was
not indigenous to his society. He shows a fractured uni-
verse in his films, his uneven filmography truly graphic.
Dismembered by the Bengal famine of 1943 and
Partition in 1947, a culture cannot cope and starts to
disintegrate. Ghatak expresses this dislocation through
his stark landscapes and the barren architecture of
whatever he places before the camera. This is particu-
larly evident in a film like “Meghe Dhaka Tara” (1960).
In “Subarnarekha” (1962), the sequence set on an
abandoned World War II airstrip is sur-
real. It expresses the idea that the
world outside the immediate one of the
film is even more fractured.
At around the same time in Bombay,
Raj Kapoor was collaborating with K. A.
Abbas to produce a cinematic reflec-
tion of Nehruvian socialism in “Awara”
(1951) and “Shree 420” (1956). The
idea in the architecture of these films
was to produce stark contrasts in
urban landscapes in order to identify
the “haves” and the “have nots”, and
to express a sentimental appreciation
for the lives and the values of the poor,
vis-a-vis the corruption of the city’s
wealthy. With his Charlie Chaplin dress
sense accentuating the great divide,
Kapoor clearly indicates where his
heart is. Bombay city becomes the pro-
tagonist in some ways, the palatial
homes of the oppressors beautifully
shot by Radhu Karmakar, a Kapoor reg-
 ular. But a more interesting chronicler of city character
was the great Guru Dutt. Those unforgettable lyrics in
“C.I.D.” (1956) - “ay dil hai mushkil jeena yahan, zara
hatke, zara bachke, ye hai Bambai meri jaan” - shot var-
iously on Marine Drive, on the stretch of road between
the Taj Hotel and the Radio Club, and on Colaba
Causeway: this is the signature tune of Bombay city.
The tune may be lifted from “My Darling Clementine,”
but the statement is uniquely of the stress and the joy
of living in Mumbai.
But Guru Dutt did not restrict himself to Bombay. A
Calcutta man himself, he shot “Pyaasa” (1957) on
sets, but the film clearly evokes Calcutta and the
Bengali ambience of the bhadralok versus the common
people. The parks of the city and the banks of the
Hooghly river are also evoked in “Saheb, Bibi aur
Ghulam” (1962). But Guru Dutt’s most stunning archi-
tectural device must be the use of cranes to give the
audience “high” and “low” perspectives.
In “Kagaz ke Phool” (1959), which is about Dutt as a
film director and the illusionary nature of his profession,
the last scene shows him on a movie set. It is an empty
studio and the Dutt character dies sitting in the direc-
tor’s chair. The crane movements give you the sense of
space within an architecture (the studio) which is itself
an illusion created to entertain people.
The art director is the architect of cinema. Because of
the auteur theory of the film director being the supreme
creator of a film, we have lost sight of the contributions
of the art director working in collaboration with the
cameraman and the film director. That is why the histo-
ry of Indian cinema will never forget Bansi
Chandragupta, Satyajit Ray’s art director in every film
upto “Shatranj ke Khilari”.
Chandragupta worked as an assistant art director in
Jean Renoir’s “The River,” shot in Bengal in the early
1950s. He and Ray became founder members of the
Calcutta Film Society and started working on “Pather
Panchali” (completed in 1955) from around that time.
Films were largely shot in studios in Bengal. Shooting
on location, outdoor, was considered absurd.
Chandragupta and Ray, together with cameraman
Subrata Mitra, changed all that forever and created at
least six classics of Indian cinema - “Pather Panchali”,
“Aparajito”, “Apur Sansar”, “Jalsaghar”, “Devi” and
“Charulata.” The idea was to shoot on location, use
natural light as far as possible, and if a set were creat-
ed, to age the set down and make it look lived-in and
part of the environment. Not only was this in tune with
the neo-realist film style of the period, but it allowed for
camera movements that would not be hampered by the
26 restrictions of a studio. Architecturally, it would be the
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
equivalent of an open-air auditorium. The contribution
of architecture to Ray’s films can be judged not by mak-
ing an inventory of the films on which Bansi
Chandragupta and Subrata Mitra worked with Ray, but
by listing the Ray films from which they were absent:
their absence makes his films grow poorer. Mitra’s dis-
agreements with Ray began in the mid 1960s and he
had stopped working with him before the end of the
decade. “Chandragupta” moved to Bombay and
“Shatranj ke Khilari” (1977) was their last collabora-
tion. It is an indisputable fact that Ray’s films show a
spectacular decline in terms of atmosphere, texture
and general visual quality after the exit of what I would
like to call his cinematic architects.
In recent Hindi cinema, just two films come to mind as
works of architecture. One is J. P. Dutta’s “Border”
(1997), a film about the 1971 war with Pakistan. Shot
on wide screen in a desert, the film displays the devas-
tation of men by the technology of war. Battlefield after
battlefield shows the supremacy of the machine. And
yet the film is about the heroism of ordinary men in uni-
form.Dutta achieves this by shooting his film from
ground level, from the perspective of the foot-soldier
fighting against an entire brigade. Which is what the
heroism of “Border” is all about.
The other outstanding film in terms of architecture is
Ramgopal Verma’s “Satya” (1998). This is a story of
the Bombay mafia told from the lanes and bylanes of
the seedy areas of the city - the environment in which
this ruthless state of mind breeds. Crime is removed
from its usual Bollywood trappings and taken to its
locality of sudden power and sudden death. The gang-
sters live and die like sewer rats. The usual over-bright
lighting is done away with and the fights take place in
murky urban rat-holes.
In conclusion, a brief history of architecture in Indian
cinema is useful because it tells us of how we, as a cul-
ture, visualise our mythology, how we present our ever-
changing ideology on film and the perspective from
which we look at our social divisions. No doubt we
often deceive ourselves. But what is the architecture
we use in the process of that deception? ●
The writer is an independent film critic who divides his time between Mumbai
and Pune. He was formerly Entertainment Editor, Gentleman magazine.
 Delhi: Nobody’s city
Ashley Tellis
N December 2000, there was a mass exodus of
I poor people on trains and buses out of Delhi.
Hundreds of factories closed down, their owners
manipulated thousands of workers to protest, riots
ensued, some of these workers died. The factory own-
ers did not care, nor did Delhi’s population, who suf-
fered inconveniences to and back from work and won-
dered why. The reason was a Supreme Court directive
which called for “all polluting industries of whatever cat-
egory operating in residential areas” to be shut down.
Over the last year, over 15,000 jhuggies, with an
approximate total of 75,000 residents, were demol-
ished. The jhuggies were mowed down, smashed
beyond repair or burnt and these operations continue.
The reasons were, as usual, pollution, beautification of
Delhi and the “illegal” occupation of land. Public trans-
port prices increased, even as the government actively
supports the car and two-wheeler industry and cuts
down on public transport.
What do these three indicators say? That Delhi as a
city is bent on throwing out its poor, destroying them
and building a city just for the rich and the affluent. Walk
down the streets of Delhi in the middle of the night and
you will see thousands of workers, dead with exhaus-
27
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
tion, sleeping on the roads, on pavements, on carts.
There are hardly any shelters in Delhi. At signals,
women with drugged, near-dead babies slung across
their pregnant bellies, beg with glazed eyes. There is
not a single night shelter for women in the whole of
Delhi. People live in slums in the most deplorable con-
ditions of sanitation, electricity, water, quality of shelter.
The homeless have only Delhi’s harsh weather, the
boots of drunk policemen and sexual abuse, especially
for the women and children.
What kind of city is Delhi? From the moment you step
out on the roads to the moment when you think that you
are in the privacy of your own room, Delhi invades you.
The air you breathe is so polluted, it is surely and slow-
ly killing you. The auto wallah will fleece you, the bus
conductor may just crack your head open with a crow-
bar, you will watch women being molested on the bus,
you will see stupid men behind wheels kill each other on
the roads due to rash driving, you will see the worst
forms of exploitation of the poor and the powerless, you
will hear college students endorsing sexual harassment
on TV, politicians endorsing hatred and violence, you
will come home to brown water gushing from your tap
and you will sleep drenched in sweat because there is
no electricity. This is your usual day in Delhi and none of
this is unusual. This will happen to you almost every
day.
 But what is most shocking about the city is its aver- tant and brilliant journalism, for the people. It changes
age empowered citizen. This citizen is a selfish, unthink- their lives. Everyone appears deluded about the Delhi
ing, self-destructive creature, who cannot think beyond they live in. People in air-conditioned, closed cars think
himself/ herself and does not see how that mode of the city isn’t polluted and their children’s respiratory
being is slowly killing him/ her. Delhi’s problems - pollu- problems do not make them see it either. For them,
tion through vehicles and industry, lack of drinking water Delhi is those cars, their palatial houses and Punj
and electricity, road accidents - affect all its citizens baroque. Journalists think their rounds of political
across class, caste and gender barriers, though it offices is Delhi, yuppies think it is mobile phones and
doubtless affects the poor more. Yet nobody seems to the Mezz. And so on. Delhi is everything and nothing.
care. Delhi has a mushrooming crop of NGOs and yet It’s a DIY city and yet it is out there slowly killing us all.
they appear to be doing nothing about the real problems Living each day in Delhi is an act of survival. Most
under their own noses, which everyone seems to face. importantly, it is an act of survival for the very people
All the feminist NGOs cannot build one shelter for who built it, who continue to build it, who will eventual-
women, all the environmental NGOs cannot see the ly make it the jazzy metro-equipped and globalised hor-
connection between the way workers are treated and ror of the 21st Century. And they will be evicted,
the way the industries that employ them pollute the exposed to hazardous activity, underpaid, overworked
atmosphere. and killed for it. While the empowered citizens will just
A few groups - the People’s Union For Democratic stand and watch like shadow characters in M.
Rights (PUDR) and the Delhi Janwadi Adhikar Manch Mukundan’s short story “Delhi 1981”, where a woman
are examples - do exemplary work in trying to bring is raped in broad daylight and nobody does a thing. The
injustices to the light, fighting for the underprivileged rich will hog the water, electricity and all there is to hog,
who are violated most seriously everyday and have no the poor will suffer, and we will watch. This is the great
one to represent them. But hardly anyone has heard of city of Delhi, which has so wonderfully worked out its
them and their reports have anything but a wide circula- social order. ●
tion. Intellectuals bleat about the Partition in the blood-
less environs of the India Habitat Centre (IHC) and the
India International Centre (IIC), but do not care about The writer is an academic based in New Delhi.
the way workers are driven out of the cities or to their
deaths on a daily basis. We impel the violent engine of
this city and we wonder why it is so violent.
All those traditional arguments about how Delhi is
nobody’s city - about how it is a city of immigrants and,
therefore, nobody cares about it, how it is not really a
city but a concatenation of villages full of the coarse and
gormless nouveaux riches flashing their wealth shame-
lessly, about how there is no concept of cosmopoli-
tanism in Delhi - are fine and may well be true. But what
do this city’s well-placed denizens think? Do they think
at all? What is it about the city space of Delhi (it is called
a metro, it is the capital) that makes its citizens accept
their systematic and slow destruction?
The signboard reads “Basant Friends Welfare
Association heartily welcomes you.”

Delhi has a history, unlike a city like Mumbai, yet it

has no memory. The fact that many parts of it get com-
pletely undrinkable water does not concern the media,
the antics of a monkey man do. The fact that thousands
of dwelling places are set on fire by demolition squads
in Delhi does not concern the media. Taking millions of
rupees worth of equipment to politicians’ offices and
28 bribing them on hidden cameras is considered impor-

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 The city as coral
Ranjit Hoskot
O the Hindu, Varanasi is the holiest of cities, the
T centre of the world, a place of destruction and
redemption that humankind has known by many
names through the millennia: Banaras, Benares, Kashi,
the City of Shiva, the City of Light. Richard Lannoy, the
celebrated writer, photographer and painter, prefers to
define it very simply and eloquently as “the last living
sacred city in the world”.
Lannoy’s preoccupation with the City of Light dates
back to the early 1950s, when he was drawn to its aura
and lived in the “tirtha of tirthas” for several years, a
generation before the Flower Children. This period
marks the beginning of Lannoy’s intense engagement
with Indian society and civilisation, an engagement that
would bear such fruit as his 1971 study, “The Speaking
Tree”, which ranks among the most imaginative and
magisterial studies of Indian culture, and his empathetic
and visionary record of Indian erotic sculpture, “The Eye
of Love”.
Lannoy returned to spend a month in Benares nearly
four decades later, during February-March 1998, when
he retraced his trails, allowing his camera to record the
29 parallel lives of transaction and ritual, ordinary gesture
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
and sacred rite, which unfold in the streets and on the
ghats. These photographs have since been published in
a book that he describes as his “life’s work”: Benares
Seen From Within (1999). Parenthetically, it must be
noted that Lannoy uses the colonial-style appellation,
“Benares”, not from any love of the colonial order, but
for reasons of personal authenticity, since this is how he
has always known and thought of the city which carries
so great a significance to him. In deference to his sen-
timent, the usage is maintained throughout this article.
He experienced his return to Benares as both a
homecoming and a shock. Deeply moved by the
warmth of the support that he received, “at a time when
most people of sensitivity admit that the city is in dire
peril”, he was nonetheless only too keenly aware that
his beloved Benares had been wounded by the violence
and endemic insecurity of the 1990s, the aggressive
politics of the Hindu Right.
Lannoy admires the city’s abili-
ty to survive despite these
adverse circumstances: he
marvels at the paradox that its
people should have preserved
their traditional vitality in large
measure, even as the architec-
ture and street culture sink into
decline or express chaotic new
energies around them.
Imbued as he is with a deep
love for forms and practices
that have emerged from the
churning of centuries, he can-
not bear to see them trampled
upon by a callous present.
“The gardens and forests of
Anandavana, Shiva and
Parvati’s earthly paradise, have
been reduced to quagmires,
the lakes have dried up or are
choked with blue hyacinth, watchtowers and barricades
disfigure the city’s sacred centre,” he laments. “But, at
the same time, the community has not lost its cheerful-
ness, its cultivated idleness, its zest for life-affirmation,
its unique combination of bhoga and yoga, joie de vivre
and austere rectitude.”
II.Spry, bright-eyed and silver-bearded, Lannoy at 73
resembles the Chinese sage of legend: his swift, pre-
cise movements bespeak a life in which the active and
 the contemplative have been woven effortlessly togeth- Thompson’s writings as Mirror to the Light.
er. And one of the centres around which that life has It is possible that Lannoy saw his own possible choic-
been lived is a fascination with the sacred. Lannoy has es prefigured in Thompson’s decision to renounce the
been captivated, from as long ago as he can remember, West and live in India, and also his own ambivalent feel-
by the mystery of that transcendental dimension which ings about both cultures. “Thompson remained essen-
breathes at the edge of normality, and which inspires a tially Western as an artist,” remarks Lannoy, “but
reverence for the unknown as much as it does a ten- slipped deeply into the stream of Indian spirituality.”
derness for the familiar. And so it was that, in 1953, Lannoy came out to India.
He picks a few photographs from a heap of recent But unlike the Beatniks and the Flower Children who
images: a father giving his daughter an oil bath on the were to make the same crossing within a decade, he
rampart of a temple jutting out over the Ganga; a came equipped with glimmerings of possibility rather
woman reaching out to receive a bunch of flowers in the than with blissful certitudes; his preoccupation with the
morning sun. The oblique yet burnished quality of the sacred has always been tempered by a tough scepti-
light and the solemnity of the gesture lift these fugitive cism towards the excesses of religiosity.
moments from the flux of time and invest them with a And yet, it was in Benares, among the chanting and
grave, magical stillness. “As a foreigner, I have been the cries of the boatmen, the blazing pyres and the tem-
excluded from the major rites,” muses the scholar-pho- ple bells, that he discovered and became fascinated by
tographer. “But I concentrate
on the sacred drama of little
events, the evanescent minuti-
ae, the intimate acts of tender-
ness, communion and grace
that form the texture of the
everyday.”
Benares began in the mind
for Lannoy: he first became
attracted to the mystique of the
city during conversations with
his friend, the poet Deben
Bhattacharya, in London in the
1950s. Trained as a painter at
the Heatherley School of Art,
London, Lannoy was attracted
to cultures beyond the rim of
Europe, to the Levant and to
South Asia. Benares seized
him as a cosmic image of death
and renewal, the sacred in its
most paradoxical manifesta-
tion; he was also excited by the
thought that he might understand something of the sen- a compelling religious figure, whom he has memori-
timent that had moved Bhattacharya’s friend, the British alised in another of his books: Anandamayi. “In this
poet and mystic Lewis Thompson, to settle in Benares. complex, highly intricate society, I discovered a person
Many of the themes of Lannoy’s mature career origi- who was the essence of simplicity,” he recalls. “And
nated here. Bhattacharya and Thompson had translated she was not by any means unsophisticated -
the songs of the mediaeval eastern Indian mystic, Anandamayi was a jnani, a bhakta, a Vedantin. But there
Chandidas, together; Thompson, who went on to was, about her, a complete absence of that ostentation
become librarian and poet-in-residence at J. which is such an alarming feature of religious cultures
Krishnamurti’s Rajghat School in Benares, had died today. There were no caparisoned elephants or finery in
young, of sunstroke, in the sacred city; Lannoy was to her ethos at that time, no room for any kind of distrac-
serve as librarian at Rajghat himself, and much later, in tion. She had pared herself down to essentials, and she
30 the 1980s, he edited and published a compilation of made others pare themselves down to essentials too.”

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 III.Such a world-view was exactly what Lannoy need- “These were the first pathfinders,” recalls Lannoy.
ed to anchor him in that difficult time. “In the decade “And now, largely due to their efforts, Benares is an
after World War II, photo-journalism had reached a cri- international crossroads for many scholars in many dis-
sis,” he recounts. “Many of us were dissatisfied with ciplines. It’s a paradox, again, that while the city appears
the mainstream styles set by Life and National to be dying, these signs of vitality are visible as well.”
Geographic - some of us fell quiet, others developed a And during 1957-1958, when Lannoy worked at
questing spirit.” Against this backdrop of discontent, Krishnamurti’s school, he came into occasional contact
Lannoy had an argument with Cartier-Bresson, then with that enigmatic teacher who was to spend a lifetime
already acknowledged as a master: “During a conver- meditating on communication and silence, dialogue and
sation that I had with him in 1955, he asserted his belief encounter.
that a photographer Precisely because
from a Western culture his camera brings him
could only remain into direct, unavoidable
detached in Asia. I dis- confrontation with his
agreed.” subject, Lannoy has
Fatefully, that was evolved his own lan-
the year in which the guage of silent dia-
pioneering Cubist logue; he brings a lumi-
painter Braque trans- nosity to bear on the
formed Cartier- balancing act between
Bresson’s life by intro- intrusiveness and sen-
ducing him to Eugen sitivity that the photog-
Herrigel’s legendary rapher has to perform.
book, Zen and the Art “I close my eyes and
of Archery. “After indicate my asking for
Cartier-Bresson dis- forgiveness,” he says.
covered the Chinese “And in that way, the
and Japanese philoso- camera reaches
phies of perception, his beyond the surface,
pictures changed dra- beyond the capturing
matically,” chuckles of facts, and relates to
Lannoy. “And around the Other.”
the same time, I dis- IV.Animated as he is
covered the Indian by a concern for rever-
philosophies of percep- ence and understand-
tion and aesthetics.” ing in human relation-
In Benares, Lannoy ships, Lannoy now
also discovered a senses the sharp
theme - that of the odour of menace in the
sacred realm and its air of Benares. “The
relationship to every- reverence for life at its
day life - even as he most folkloric and best
realised that “the camera could capture something has been diminished substantially,” he observes. “It still
about the sacred culture that couldn’t have been cap- exists in little refuges and havens - not around the great
tured otherwise.” Lannoy eventually spent three years, temples, but around the smaller, older shrines, espe-
from 1957 to 1960, in Benares, joining a circle of bril- cially the tree shrines.” Lannoy is deeply disturbed,
liant individuals resident there, including the art histori- also, by the inroads that a garish contemporaneity has
an Stella Kramrisch, the musicologist and mythologist made into the traditional patterns of living. “The elegant
Alain Danielou, the scholars Alice Boner and Blanca simplicity of costume has given way to loud chiffon, the
Schlamm, and Leopold Fischer, the Viennese who had young are losing the cultivated idleness of their sophis-
embraced sanyasa under the name of Agehananda ticated, cosmopolitan elders, an attitude that is sacred
31 Bharati. yet urbane,” he says. “The death of these languages of

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 expression marks the death of the subsoil from which away at the Benaresi masti”, rues Lannoy.
the culture is renewed.” Despite this, what gives Lannoy hope for the future is
“Visually,” maintains Lannoy, “Benares has become the resilience with which Benares seems to meet every
a disaster.” The facades of the temples along the river- assault on its space and culture. “There is one kind of
front were traditionally honey-coloured or whitewashed: sacred city, which develops formally around a model of
the animation of people’s lives and clothes provided the solar kingship, with an archetypal cross-and-circle
colour, as did the rituals, whose colours could then burn plan,” he reflects. “And there is another, like Benares,
against a neutral ground. Today, the facades have been which grows in rhythm with the growth of the people
painted “in hideous colours, bright green and yellow”, who invest it with value. That kind of sacred city
and “every ghat has a great yellow sign in Devanagari extends itself through its myriad local sites of worship,
and Roman, and is plastered with advertisements for renews itself through its circuits of pilgrimage, develop-
yoga schools.” Worse, the subtle play of light and shad- ing through that vital sense of community which alone
ow on the banks of the Ganga has been destroyed for- guarantees the longevity of the tradition. Benares is the
ever, with the advent of neon signs and the ubiquity of tirtha of tirthas, inclusive and cosmopolitan, because all
floodlit restaurants. the regions of India are represented there. Such a city
There is also, Lannoy remarks, an appreciable decline grows like coral, slowly, until it has become a micro-
in the fervour and focus of the river-front rituals: “These cosm of the world.” ●
are dispersed and afocal now, not gathered purposeful-
ly together into communion.” And wherever the visitor
goes, he continues sadly, “there are hundreds of hip-
pies, degenerate scruffies who create their own unique
corruption, attended by dubious masseurs, touts,
money-changers and children who have learnt far too
much, far too early.” These, Lannoy recognises, are the
costs to be paid for the city’s “absorption into the
world-system of globalisation”.
Worst of all, in his view, is the fact that the heart of
the city now resembles an Auschwitz, complete with
security perimeters and armed patrols. The sacred cen-
tre of Benares is the Jnana Vapi or “Well of
Knowledge”, which marks the cosmic axis: it is situat-
ed between the widely venerated Kashi Vishwanath
temple and the Aurangzeb Mosque. One could not have
wished for a more striking or poignant symbol of post-
colonial India’s central crisis as a society and polity: the
encounter of Hinduism and Islam, with all the possibili-
ties of synthesis and perils of confrontation that this
implies.
The symbolism acquires baleful embodiment as
Lannoy describes the area, which - because the close
proximity of a temple and a mosque renders the threat
of possible riot or desecration very high - has become
transformed into a zone of combat-readiness. “The
most sacred inner circle of Benares, the city that is an
image of the universe, is surrounded by a steel stock-
ade of 25 ft high stakes with barbed wire at the top,”
says the writer. “The area is under surveillance from
high watchtowers and rooftop sentry-posts, it swarms
with hundreds of police, visitors are subjected to metal
detectors and photography is forbidden.” This unfortu-
nate tension has poisoned the atmosphere as much as
32 “the cynical philistinism and despair that are gnawing

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 Dog times - a beastly
portrait of Sofia
Ilija Trojanow
one thought that it could get worse. Suddenly, one
Stalinesque complex houses the office of the could no longer afford the dog, not its grub, not the pre-

A Prime Minister and his cabinet. Ferocious-looking

dogs stray between the arcades. While I marvel at
this sight, I hear a pensioner with torn mittens and a
scribed vaccinations, and not the regular visit to the vet.
All this exceeded the financial abilities of those who
pondered over every apple at the market before placing
wart on his chin mumble: Such a pity they don’t eat min- it in their basket. The dogs were driven out of the apart-
isters. ments; they were abandoned.
The end of the Cold War introduced the domestic dog The homeless dogs teamed up with the wild dogs. In
to Sofia. Before that, there were dogs in the villages - winter they shivered with protruding tongues in front of
dogs which had to perform particular tasks like guarding the heated shops. They rummaged in the garbage, they
the sheep. But a lap-dog on the fauteuil was a bizarre jumped into the massive dustbins, searching for some-
concept for any Bulgarian. thing to eat. But there were
With the rising crime-rate, no leftovers; humans had
the citizens of Sofia felt inse- already gnawed off the
cure behind their weak bones.
doors. Rumours regarding The creatures howled,
brutal robberies went sometimes all through the
around; newspapers dis- night. Light sleepers knew
turbed their readers with a no peace. The curs
daily potion of concentrated devoured one another, they
crime. The lonelier people were beaten to death, they
became, the more they attacked human beings,
reached out to the dog, sav- mauled and mangled them.
iour of the young, comforter One could read: 5,000 dogs
of the weak. live in the forests of
Besides, the people of Schumen, killing all the other
Sofia were not above a cer- wild animals. They attack the
tain snobbishness, caused nearby villages in large
by the craze for the West - packs. The villagers do not
for a TV-mirage-West, where dare leave their houses after
every citizen not only dark.
delights in his snug home, The homeless creatures in
his chic car and his glittering Sofia were thought to num-
kitchenware, but also takes his dog out for a stroll, or is ber about 1,00,000, against 60,000 “official” domestic
greeted with a hug by his pug after work. The imitation dogs. In one year, the city hospitals registered 6,500
started with the dogs. Soon, the small socialist flats cases of dog bites, 1,000 children were seriously
were filled with dogs large and small, with pedigree injured. Every week, newspapers carried reports about
German shepherds as well as a large variety of mon- old people who had died of vicious attacks. According
grels. Conversation about dogs became a daily routine. to animal doctors, castration was the most humane
The initial years after the dismantling of the Iron alternative to reducing the threatening number of dogs.
Curtain were not happy ones for the people; but they And they urged the authorities to hasten, since a male
were confident that, soon, everything would get better. dog’s reproductive ability can potentially allow him to
People often talked about a new beginning beyond the sire thousands of pups in less than ten years. But cas-
valley, which had to be traversed, the slump, which had tration is costly, even for a dog: ten dollars, one third of
33 to be endured. Nobody expected the decline to last, no the average monthly pension. Neither the town council

© Kasturi And Sons Ltd

 nor the general public would waste such a fortune on
stray dogs. So the barking and howling continues. But
to this day, no minister has been eaten. Not even so
much as bitten.
Note:
Like the rest of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria was
released from the clutches of the Soviet Union in
autumn 1989. The Communist elite, including the
omnipotent State Security apparatus modelled after the
KGB, became the entrepreneurs of a semi-liberal econ-
omy heavily manipulated by mafia-like forces. The living
standard of the population fell; a mass exodus, mostly
of young people, ensued. Although there have been
signs of a slight improvement recently, Bulgaria remains
one of Europe’s least productive and advanced coun-
tries.
Sofia, not having been the historic capital of Bulgaria,
has little to offer in terms of architectural heritage. A
few fin-de-siecle buildings rub shoulders with massive
post-World War II structures. The suburbs consist of
cheaply constructed high-rises without community
spaces, supplying the working masses with a roof but
also isolating people from one another. The redeeming
feature of Sofia is the often snow-clad mountain of
Vitosha, which overlooks the city. ●

The writer is a Bulgarian-born German novelist, who now lives in Mumbai.

This extract is taken from his book, Hundezeiten: Heimkehr in ein fremdes
Land (Dog Times: Homecoming to a Foreign Land), 1999.

34
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
 Junagadh memories
Minakshi Raja
I
should not have returned to my past, I should not
have gone back to Junagadh, the land of my forefa-
thers, my birth, my first love. And yet, after a 25 year
absence, I turned around and headed back to my 200-
year-old ancestral home, to rest awhile, or perhaps to
lick my wounds in the relative security of a return to the
womb?
The plane arrived on time at Keshod airport, where
the family car had been sent to meet me. As I came
down the steps the very air seemed different, probably
because I knew I was on home territory once more. In
the car, the kilometres
went by fast enough
until, at last, I recog-
nised, rising from the
mist of distance, the
Girnar hills range;
Junagadh was rising
before my eyes.
Nearer still, crowds,
new buildings, shops,
where once there was
nothing. I searched for
familiar faces but there
was none. I thankfully
identified Bahuddin
College still standing
on its spacious grounds. Thank goodness Moti Baug
had been left untouched by carpetbaggers; closer to
home was the state guest house, once called Rasul-e-
Gulzar, where the Viceroy stayed when he came on a
lion shoot as the honoured guest of the Babi-dynasty
Nawab of Junagadh. It was re-named Manoranjan after
the Nawab fled to Pakistan with several of his beloved
dogs.
I entered the once-walled town through Shapur
Darwaaza. More crowds, more carpetbaggers. I recog-
nised nothing until, in the middle of the vegetable mar-
ket arose the white-washed walls of my home, where
the massive, carved, teakwood door was open, wel-
coming me.
At the entrance, there used to be a swing where
Tapu, our pagi or watchman sat, guarding the open
door. It was a tradition that the ancestral home was
35 never closed. Some rooms may have been locked, but
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
never the main door. Tapu was a tribal, handsomely
fearsome with an impressive moustache and he sat all
day long, lazily swinging himself with one leg, while the
other rested on the swing under a bended knee.
In the morning he would keep a large pot of wheat
flour beside him and Brahmin mendicants would stop
by, calling out, “Daya prabhuni,” and Tapu would empty
a fistful of flour into their proffered bowls, and they
would say “Swastik” as they rushed on to the next
home that busy morning. I must have been seven on
my school holidays once and I was given permission by
my father to sit with Tapu to mete out largesse. My
small hand couldn’t grasp a generous amount, I
thought, so I scooped out flour with both hands joined
together to give to the
pleased recipient. Tapu
was aghast, “You’ll
ruin your father,” he
scolded, “if you pour
out so much flour to
these no-gooders . . .
and your father won’t
be the nagarsheth any-
more.” That frightened
me a lot and I ran up
the stairs in tears to
my mother who was
upstairs in the living
area, where she com-
forted me.
At the top of those stairs was a large chowk which led
to the verandahs, the divankhana, the treasury room
and the birth room where I was born, like most of my
siblings and probably those ancestors whose mothers
had not returned to their maternal homes for the
impending births.
In the middle of this first-floor chowk was a built-in
square under which was a pillar that reached the earth
through the basement floor. My father enjoyed arrang-
ing the occasional yagna at home, but the havan fire had
to touch the earth, so he had this pillar built so that the
chowk touched the earth for all intents and purposes.
We lived around the corner from Haveli Galli which
lead to the Vaishnava haveli, one of seven in India,
where the maharaj held daily services. Once a year,
while we holidayed in Junagadh, my father would
arrange a service to honour my grandfather’s birthday.
The Hindol was my favourite service, at which time the
 family would sit in the front seats while the haveli
maharaj gently pushed the elaborately-decorated swing
with Krishna’s image placed in it. He would wave an
attractive fan (with the other hand over the swing).
It was an impressive occasion as the fountains played
in the background and Babubhai, the local musician,
sang kirtans to the sound of his own pakhwaj. At the
end of the service the maharaj would come forward and
drop prasad into my father’s outstretched hand, careful
not to be touched by him. Then later in the day, bearers
would bring trays of the haveli’s ankot to our home.
Trays and trays, but we children were not allowed to eat
any of the delicacies for fear of the oil or ghee used,
except for the thor, thick, crisp, biscuit-like chapattis
with the most mouth-watering icing that we children
adored.
I stood in the chowk on that return journey, and then
walked from room to room, touching, feeling, remem-
bering. The caretaker followed, unlocking room after
room, regretting the dust and lack of care. No one from
the family lived there any more and the servants begged
me to return.
That night I slept in my father’s four-poster bed with
the mosquito net comfortably tucked into the mattress.
In the distance I could hear the roar of the Gir Forest
lions in Sakkar Baug’s zoo; the forest was once part of
Junagadh state in princely India and we were exceed-
ingly proud of our lions. Below my window, donkeys
brayed and dogs howled as the vegetable market
closed for the night. At noon, of course, all was quiet,
even the dogs wouldn’t go out in the mid-day sun, and
shops were closed until 4 p.m. One of these shops I
remember from my childhood belonged to the local kan-
doi, Dama maharaj, the sweetmeat maker and milkman.
He would send up to us the most delicious sweets
made from the milk given by our own cows. These cows
would be sent to us from our small farm in the com-
pound of our mills in Shapur, seven miles outside
Junagadh, and they would remain with us through our
annual holidays until it was time for our return to
Bombay .
The kandoi also made sweet muramba for my mother
while she spent the holidays making other pickles to
take to Bombay and for my brother who lived in
Junagadh. My mother made the best chhunda pickle in
the world and her papad and fur-fur were to die for, as
they lay drying in the afternoon sun in the chowk. She
always gave us little pats of raw undad dal batter
soaked in oil, to nibble while she and the maids rolled
out the papad. I shudder at the thought of raw batter
today!
36 The next morning of my return I went to Bhavnath
© Kasturi And Sons Ltd
temple which was always my family’s favourite. Nestling
at the foot of the Girnar hills, this was an unadorned
Shaivite temple where sadhus descending from the hills
would rest. Temple bells would occasionally ring at their
behest or the few worshippers who braved the rough
road from the distant town. It was quiet and peaceful
(except during the famous Shivratri mela) and I longed
for that rare communion with the temple and the neigh-
bouring tank in which fallen flowers and leaves floated.
This was the temple then. It had changed beyond
recognition and instead of the solitary lingam there was
a garish overflow of decoration and I saw no sadhus
there. Only fat women in gaudy saris accompanied by
their equally obese and newly prosperous husbands.
There was a huge dharamshala built in the large new
compound and it was wash-coloured in green and yel-
low and blue. Film music blared from the rooms and I
found neither peace nor quiet. I shouldn’t have come. I
shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have come.
Shall I go to the Wellington Dam? My evening play-
ground of happy school vacations when the forest offi-
cer cared for the dam’s beautiful garden and arranged
for my mother to receive forbidden bamboo stalks from
the jungle to pickle?
I hesitated but finally drove up to the dam. I looked at
it through a mist of tears, my memories hiding the pain
of what I saw. There were no flowers, no gardeners, no
love, no care. After that I didn’t visit other early haunts,
not to Sakkar Baug where I knew visitors would throw
pebbles at monkeys caught in the surrounding jungles,
and stones at lions to make them roar.
I returned home to familiar rooms and furnishings
even though in disrepair, and in my pain I climbed up to
the terrace to look at the Girnar range on which, if I bor-
rowed my father’s binoculars in my childhood, I could
see pilgrims go up the steps either on foot or in dolis. I
looked up and in the neighbouring house the owners
had put up a very high wall, denoting, I imagine, their
acquired FSI. The Girnar range and its pilgrims were for-
ever lost to me. ●
Freelance writer and film critic based in Mumbai.