by Jerry Pinto
JERRY PINTO
AND
RAHUL SRIVASTAVA
Talk of the Town
Stories of Twelve Indian Cities
PUFFIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Bengaluru/Bangalore: The city is with IT
Bhopal: Lake city
Chandigarh: An experiment in modern living
Chennai/Madras: We have culture
Delhi: Power city
Hyderabad: From Charminar city to Cyberabad
Kolkata/Calcutta: We have even more culture
Lucknow: On the banks of the Gomti, the delicacy of the nawabs
Mumbai/Bombay: A city on constant fast forward
Patna: River city
Shillong: Skyline city
Thiruvananthapuram/Trivandrum: A city by the sea
References
Copyright Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PUFFIN BOOKS
TALK OF THE TOWN:
STORIES OF TWELVE INDIAN CITIES
Jerry Pinto lives in Mumbai as he has done for all the forty-something years of his life. This means that he does not have a car since his city has the finest public transport system in the country. This also means his lungs are black inside because the air is polluted. He often visits other cities because he is a journalist and works with Meljol, an NGO that works for the rights of children who don’t have food, shelter, education and the like, but he rushes back home quickly and when he gets to Mumbai, takes a deep breath of its dirty air and sighs fatly. (He weighs more than 90 kilos.) He says, ‘If you live in a city that has not been covered by this book, come on, write a chapter of your own, and stick it in at the back.’ He has also written a book called A Bear for Felicia (Puffin).
Rahul Srivastava is involved in urban issues and knowledge practices. He writes fiction for younger readers. He is the author of the novel Murder on Kaandoha Hill (Puffin) and several short stories. He co-authors a blog www.airoots.org and can be contacted on [email protected]. He is based in Goa.
Bengaluru/Bangalore
The city is with IT
If you believe one of the many legends around the name of Bangalore, the city is named after a bowl of boiled beans.
One day, hundreds of years ago, (some say that it happened precisely in the year AD 1120), a king named Hoysala Ballala (also known as Veera Ballala II) was on a hunting expedition. As is the habit of kings on hunting expeditions, he was separated from the rest of his party. You can see why this might happen. After all, the king probably had the best horse. And even if there were better riders among his courtiers, it would be a silly chump who would race the king.
After a while Hoysala Ballala lost his way as well. This too seems to have been fairly common. Getting lost is a reliable way of making sure something exciting happens to the king. Thus, Hoysala Ballala began to wander until he came to a small village at the edge of a forest. By this time, he was also very hungry. The village was empty except for a poor woman who fed him a delicious but simple meal of boiled beans. As the proverb puts it, ‘hunger is a fine sauce’, and this dish must have tasted like ambrosia to the starving king.
And as was the inclination of proud and satiated kings, he decided to rename the village to celebrate the simple meal he had just eaten. He christened it ‘Bende Kaalu Ooru’ or ‘Town of Boiled Beans’. That is how this city is said to have gotten its name!
City historians dismiss the story as the figment of a particularly hungry imagination—or what is worse in their dictionary—myth or common lore. Instead, many of them believe that the city’s name actually derives from an older village that still exists near Bangalore city, in a place called Kodigehalli. The village is known as Halebenguluru, which literally means Old Bangalore. Others point out that as early as the ninth century AD, the word ‘Bengaluru’ appeared on a stone edict of the Ganga dynasty, marking the occasion of a great battle fought in the region. And so the never-ending debates about the origin of the name continue …
If we move on to the medieval history of the city, we arrive at the glorious Vijayanagara kingdom—a prosperous, urban sprawl of forts, palaces, shrines, tanks and villages and townships that spread all over the region in the sixteenth century AD. According to some historians, a Vijayanagara king gifted a piece of land to a chieftain called Kempe Gowda I (1513–1569). Kempe Gowda started to build on the site at once. He began with a mud-fort that was completed in 1537 and called the place ‘Bengaluru’. Subsequently, he built the towns of Balepet, Cottonpet and Chickpet inside the fort. Today, these are the wholesale and commercial markets of Bangalore.
Bengaluru then must have been a cluster of local villages and small townships, connected by a network of dirt and paved roads. It was a province of the Vijayanagara kingdom. This meant that it was part of a global trading network that spread all the way to southern Europe. The kingdom had a healthy textile and armament industry based on skills of the many artisan and craft-based communities that lived there and contributed to the kingdom’s prosperity. Other inhabitants included construction workers, shopkeepers, priests, monks, merchants and traders. Numerous farming villages surrounded these small and scattered urban habitats. Young children must have chased bullock carts, played with hens, sheep and goats, and teased hawkers selling their wares on bazaar days. Come evening, the small trading centres and markets would have come alive with food-stalls, dance, music performances and people hawking all kinds of goods from local pottery to spices and from clothes to cooking ware.
Kempe Gowda’s descendant, Kempe Gowda II, built four watchtowers that eventually came to mark the boundaries of the city. One legend says that he had a bullock cart driven in four directions and mapped the boundaries based on the distance they covered in a day. The four watchtowers include Lalbagh, a point near Kempambudhi tank, Ulsoor Lake and Mekhri Circle. Kempe Gowda II also built several tanks—like the ones at Kempapura and the Karanjikere Tank near the Bangalore Fort. This shows he was a man who clearly understood the importance of urban planning. Water tanks meant an organized water supply for relatively large populations. They also acted as magnets to attract people from the thirsty villages around.
However, water was not the only thing people were looking for. For the city to grow, it had to attract migrants who could provide skilled and unskilled labour. In addition, it needed merchants. The merchants needed clerks to keep accounts and workers to carry their loads. They also needed smooth roads so that their goods could come and go easily. This meant engineers to design bridges and labourers to carry stones, bake bricks, and carry water. When the roads began to be used, some form of police was needed to prevent theft and dacoity.
No city can survive without attracting a steady supply of people from other areas. Each person who comes in brings in a skill or a pair of willing working hands. Each person contributes to the city. Therefore, it is no use asking whether someone is an outsider. By definition, all cities are built by outsiders. It is just that some people got there first and some people came later. No city has ever been created by the original inhabitants and no city can ever survive and grow if people do not want to come and live there.
Bangalore’s cultural diversity was evident during those times as well, though the size of the population that lived there was relatively small. This diversity was a spin-off from the Vijayanagara kingdom, which is known to have numerous temples, dargahs and chapels that represented the three major faiths of the land: Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. Being a gift seemed to be part of the city’s destiny. Kings, chieftains and emperors who won the city in war gifted it away for some good reason or the other! This was quite ordinary in those times. Land was the most valuable gift you could give, and no one thought to ask the common people
if they wanted to belong to this empire or that kingdom. However, most of the time, the common people did not really bother. The ruler was just someone who demanded taxes and they were too busy making a living to bother about the name of the king. He was far away and many probably lived and died without knowing too much about him.
It was in the middle of the seventeenth century that the great Vijayanagara Empire fell. Mohammed Adil Shah, the Sultan of Bijapur, took over the region. His able commander Ranadulla Khan had led the victorious Bijapur army. His second-in-command was the Maratha, Shahaji Bhonsle. The sultan, pleased with both of them, gifted them Bangalore and the surrounding areas as a jagir. Apparently, Shahaji’s son, the legendary Shivaji, lived in Bangalore for two years, during which time he married a Bangalore Maratha girl called Saibai Nimbalkar. Subsequently, he was gifted Pune as a jagir and went there.
This sounds odd to us today. Shivaji? Doesn’t he belong in Maharashtra? And where would he find a Maratha girl in Bangalore? However, that is because we are used to thinking of the states of India in terms of languages. In the 1950s, the government decided to look at the map of the country. The whole of India was roughly divided into provinces. The government decided to redraw the lines on the map and create new states based on the language a majority of the people spoke. Before that, a state might have several languages. The Bombay Presidency was a state that was formed by the British in the seventeenth century. It would have had people who spoke Gujarati, Kachchi, Marathi, Hindi and Kannada. Even today, every city speaks in many languages. Try counting how many languages you can hear in your city, on any given day. It is fun and if you do not know what language is being spoken, ask the speaker politely. If you were to go back in a time machine to Kempe Gowda II’s city, you would hear a number of languages spoken on the street. You would hear Tamil, Urdu, Kannada and Telugu.
This was a result of the intricate trading networks and the overlapping boundaries of kingdoms. Individuals, groups, families and communities moved across the land and enriched the diverse characters of these urban centres; Bangalore was no exception.
About half a century later, Bangalore was captured by the Mughal Commander Khasim Khan and subsequently sold off to Chikkadeva Raya, a descendant of the Wodeyar family of Mysore for three lakh rupees. This may sound like very little money—hardly enough to buy a shop in a city—but in those days it was a huge amount.
Chikkadeva Raya turned out to be an efficient ruler and is credited with establishing a good quality postal system in the kingdom. However, it was soon time to gift Bangalore again! This time, Krishnaraja Wodeyar II bestowed it upon Haider Ali, one of the fiercest enemies of the British.
Haider Ali is credited with building the Delhi and Mysore gates at the northern and southern ends of the city in the year 1760. He also drafted the design for the famous Lalbagh gardens. The emphasis on the colour red (lal) was a testimony to his love of roses. If you walked through the gardens those days you would have found exotic species of plants that had travelled all the way from Delhi, Lahore and Multan.
Haider Ali’s son was the legendary Tipu Sultan. Among other things, Tipu Sultan inherited his father’s passion for plants and gardens. He brought in plants from as far off as Persia and Turkey. Between the two, they left Bangalore with a cluster of gardens, parks and palaces.
However, it would be wrong to think of either Haider Ali or Tipu Sultan as men who spent most of their time in the garden. They were primarily fierce warriors. They fortified the southern fort and made Bangalore an army town. During their reign, the city, as part of the larger empire, did exceedingly well. Trade flourished with many foreign nations through the western port of Mangalore, a coastal town situated off the Arabian Sea. Traders and merchants carried goods through the hinterland on protected highways, from Bangalore all the way to the port-city of Mangalore. From there, goods were sold to international merchants who would then carry them to Africa, west Asia, Malaysia, China and Japan.
Haider Ali soon had many other things to worry about. Those were the days when the British East India Company was eagerly eyeing his territory. He remained firm in his resolve:the British had to be driven out of the entire south. He fought them on several occasions, until his death in 1782. Subsequently, Bangalore found that it was the prize of the third Mysore war—between Tipu Sultan and Lord Cornwallis. This time, the British won and occupied Bangalore for a year. They held Tipu Sultan’s sons hostage until he paid them three crore rupees as indemnity. (An indemnity is a sum you pay to someone against any loss you may cause them in the future.)
In the late eighteenth century, Bangalore was returned to Tipu Sultan. After his death, it came under the rule of the Mysore maharaja, Wodeyar. However, since the British loved the cool clear weather so much they kept a light hand on the reins of Bangalore, ruling it from behind the maharaja’s throne. The nineteenth century could well be called the century of the British in Bangalore. They played a major role in building the railway, telegraph, postal and police departments.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the first train rumbled out of Bangalore station. However, in 1881, for complicated political reasons, the British arranged for the administrative control of the city to be handed over to the Wodeyars again. This gave the diwans (ministers) Mirza Ismail and Sir Visheshwarayya a chance to shape it into a modern city. The diwans also built the Bangalore Palace in 1887, modelling it on Windsor Castle in England.
During their reign, the British had carved out a good part of the city into a military cantonment area. In the late nineteenth century, they added the townships of Richmond, Benson and Cleveland to the cantonment. However, much of the modernization that they encouraged in the city was limited to this privileged section. Subsequently, the divide between the old city (or pete as it was known) and the cantonment became increasingly pronounced. While there was no obvious physical marker, like a wall or a gate, the distinction was clear. Walking from one of these regions to the other was like going from one world to another. The pete was a typical small Indian town, full of bustling narrow streets marked by pathways for bullock carts, crowded shops, temples, mosques and chapels. The cantonment, on the other hand, was England with a Mughal touch—complete with bungalows and ornate buildings, wide roads and gardens. The names of neighbourhoods in the pete included Aralepet, Balepet, Nagarthpet and Chikkapet, while the cantonment had names such as Fraser Town, Cox Town and Cooke Town. Names of many contemporary Bangalore roads still resonate with the memory of colonial cantonment days: Artillery Road, Brigade Road, Infantry Road and Cavalry Road, for instance. The former name of Mahatma Gandhi Road was South Parade since it was built to the south of the military parade ground. The kings of Mysore had a Resident who lived within the cantonment area and his quarters were called the Residency, yielding the name Residency Road.
The city began to shift focus too. When it had been a part of the Vijayanagara kingdom and during the era of the sultans, the city lived in the pete. By the end of the nineteenth century, the pete neighbourhoods had begun to depend on the cantonment. The pete now supplied the British military with tailors, merchants, builders, clerks and waiters. For those who had been brought up in the pete areas, a walk into the cantonment area also meant the first contact with another society, a Western one, a ‘modern’ one. Many forbidden thrills were available here. These included mugs of foreign beer in a pub, meat-based delicacies at an Anglo-Indian eatery, exhilarating journeys to far-off lands in the company of beautiful strangers in the darkness of the cinema house, or simply drinking tea in a tea club.
At the same time, there remained a linguistic divide between these neighbourhoods. The older section was predominantly Kannada speaking, with a smattering of Urdu, while the newer neighbourhoods echoed with the sounds of English, Tamil and some Telugu.
Bangalore was hit by a plague epidemic in 1898 and thousands of people died. Not surprisingly, this period saw the building of a number of temples dedicated to the goddess Mariamma who is supposed to be the godd
ess of the plague. The plague was also a catalyst that helped transform the city into a more modern one, with improved sanitation and health facilities for the poor. Even telephone lines were laid to help fight the plague. If you wanted to build a house, you had to put in a toilet and modern sanitation. The city also got a new hospital named the Victoria Hospital.
In the early twentieth century, the supply of parachute silk and horse blankets to the British army during the war managed to revive a bit of the older city—but overall, the dominance of the cantonment continued.
This was the period when many clubs flourished in the cantonment area. These were glamorous places where the anglicized élite would meet to enjoy a game of cricket or tennis and then relax with a very English cup of tea. Ever since, these clubs have been training grounds for a number of sportspersons in badminton, tennis and cricket, and continue to produce players who play at the national level.
The marvels of industrial society began to ornament the city. For the first time, motorcars rode its roads and electric bulbs lit up Bangalore market. The city was the first in Asia to have electricity, supplied by the hydroelectric plant in Shivanasamudra.
In 1909, the Indian Institute of Science was established, which subsequently played a major role in developing the city as a science research hub. If Bangalore is now the geek capital of the world, this century-old institution certainly has something to do with it! 1940 saw the first flight between Bangalore and Bombay take off. It firmly placed the city on India’s new urban map. Soon after, the municipalities of the city and the cantonment were merged to become a single corporation. The divided city began to unite.
In independent India, Bangalore became a centre for many public sector enterprises, mainly run by the central government. These included the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Hindustan Machine Tools and Bharat Electronics Limited. The 1970s saw the establishment of various research institutions like the National Aerospace Laboratories, the Defence Research Development Organization, the Electronics and Research Development, Bangalore and the Central Power Research Institute among several others. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bangalore eventually emerged as the country’s leading research centre in information technology as well. Bangalore was always a major educational centre. It bustled with colleges and other educational institutions from the late nineteenth century onwards. In 1882, the French Fathers of the Foreign Mission set up St. Joseph’s College. Subsequently, a large number of missionary schools and colleges provided Bangalore a rich, well-educated work force that formed the foundation of its famous information technology industry.
