Understanding your city

All of us would benefit from exploring our surroundings in greater depth than just figuring out the location of landmarks and establishments

VS Naipaul writes about Gandhi that, when he first landed abroad, in Tilbury in 1888, he only noticed two things: that it was October and that he was the only one in white flannels. The differences between India and Europe, the quality of the architecture, the orderliness, all of that was lost on him, observes Naipaul. 

The crotchety old West Indian makes the point in a different way in his brilliant novel, A Bend in the River. He talks about Indians at a great airport, not noticing how it works, taking for granted the way that the world functions and having no contribution to make in it. Even if one is opposed to many things that Naipaul has written, as an Indian it is difficult to deny that he gets it right in saying that Indians abroad are for the most part oblivious. We seem to have internalised the fact, without much trouble, that “India” is a particular way and that the rest of the world is different.

I should confess that my own experience bears out what Naipaul accuses us of. I left India for the first time at the age of 16 and spent a year in a small American town (a village by our standards) of 50,000 people called Janesville. I gave almost no thought to the new surroundings I was in and made no specific comparison to the way my hometown, the city of Surat, was different from Janesville, or Chicago, or Washington DC, all of which I also saw.

It was only much later, when I was made aware that this was a flaw, that I tried to be more attentive. I began to force myself to observe what was around me in our cities. Naturally, being such an enormous place, there was a difference not only between “India” and “abroad” but also inside of India, even if slightly more subtle and perhaps even difficult to distinguish for the rank outsider. 

Our region is called a subcontinent for a reason: it is the landmass with the most number of people on the planet. The Arabs also referred to it in similar terms, through the name “Barr-e-sagheer”, which also means sub-continent or minor continent. Here are my observations of the differences that one can see in the places we call home.

The first and most important aspect of our metro cities to know is that they were built by the British. Most Business Standard readers are probably located in one of them. But if one wants to understand what an “Indian” city is, one must look at cities that Indians built. Bombay, New Delhi, Madras, Karachi and Calcutta do not count, even if they have been renamed to make it seem as if they were built by Indians: they were not for the most part. Other cities were made by Indians but are relatively recent. For example, Jaipur was built from scratch only in the 1720s and Islamabad was designed by Ayub in the 1960s, the same time as Corbusier was designing Chandigarh. 

It is places such as Surat and Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Varanasi to which we must go to see what a properly Indian city is.

Today, India’s metro cities are home to probably a majority, and certainly a plurality, of people who would a few decades ago be identified as ‘outsiders’. Photo: iStock

The old city of Surat is designed entirely keeping in mind caste. For example, there is Golwad, where the Gola community lives (my dictionary says the word means “male and female servants of the harem”, which is fascinating. Then there is Dabgarwad (dictionary: “Dabgar — person whose profession is to cover drums with leather”) where the shops selling musical instruments still are.  

My mother’s ancestral house is in Sidhdhmata Ni Sheri (meaning the lane of Devi Sidhdh), which had almost all homes belonging to our Leuva Patidar community. 

Even the Muslims of Surat are divided by caste. For example, Zampa Bazaar, or Jhampa Bajar, is the neighbourhood of the Bohris.

All these neighbourhoods are on small lanes with houses sharing a wall and facing each other at a distance of no more than 20 feet. There is only one access point at the end of the street and this is clearly a defensive design. It is meant to keep the outsider out and are a design from a time when there was much less security, and the state was a much smaller one. It was the British expansion of the role of the state that produced the architecture and design of our metro cities.

It is, of course, unavoidable that some of these characteristics were brought into the cities that the British also founded which have some elements of caste and community spaces. But these are not designed through the same closed, suspicious sentiment that Surat and Ahmedabad are. 

New Delhi looks like absolutely nothing else else on the subcontinent. Why does it have the design that it does? What was the imperialist trying to achieve in using that scale and that architecture? What was the purpose of putting all the major buildings so far away from one another, unlike in London? 

How did the modern area of Mumbai, from the Victoria Terminus to Colaba, develop? Why does everything else in that city look so different from the areas we call South Bombay? Surely it should interest the native and the newcomer into the city. 

Today, India’s metro cities are home to probably a majority, and certainly a plurality, of people who would a few decades ago be identified as “outsiders”. All of us would benefit from exploring, purely out of curiosity, our surroundings in greater depth than just figuring out the location of landmarks and establishments. I, for one, would like to explore my neighbourhood in Bengaluru a little more. I know almost nothing about it and its history and certainly I know it with nothing like the depth and penetration I do Surat. 

It was when I was able to look more closely at what seemed very familiar and tried to understand why it was the way it was, that the cities became more understandable. The way things are around us is for a reason. The way that they are different is because of design and not default. What is that which has produced it? Knowing is important. I think this is what Naipaul was reaching for when he writes of Gandhi’s lack of awareness or interest in England.