by Jerry Pinto
But there were also other forces at work. The trade union movement was very strong in the mill-dominated areas and in order to break their hold on the voters, the Congress party encouraged a young cartoonist Bal Thackeray to form a new party that would seek to establish Bombay as a city that was run by Maharashtrians, for Maharashtrians. This eventually backfired, as Thackeray became a law unto himself and his party routinely took the law into its own hands, attacking people they considered ‘outsiders’ to the city.
The decline of the textile industry contributed to the crisis and after the 1982-83 strike, led by veteran trade unionist Datta Samant, Girangaon, the village of mills lost its status in the city. After economic liberalization, the city has transformed itself into a global city, in spirit closer to its erstwhile identity especially in the nineteenth century. However, its villages have become slums in which the poor struggle to live. The middle classes have been squeezed into tiny apartments in far-flung suburbs and only the privileged live in new luxury complexes. The name of the city was changed to Mumbai but that didn’t matter much. Mumbai continues to fuel the Indian economy with its vibrant businesses among which the vast film industry is one of the most high profile.
Child-nation
H. Masud Taj
Parents gathering to see their children off to school; a common sight at the beginning of the school year. But these five kids (two are twelve years old and the others younger) are going to board a train in Mumbai (then Bombay) and spend the next three days and two nights, changing four trains to reach their school. The train they board will take them to Chennai, another one will take them to Coimbatore, a third one will be a shorter ride to Mettupalyam where they will board the final toy train to Ooty. Even three decades later, on the other side of the world, those students are still in touch.
‘Bharat, do you recall the station between Mumbai and Chennai where the train halted for six hours and we would leave our luggage on the platform and go cycling?’
‘Arkonam.’
‘How do you manage to remember that name after all these years?’
But the more important question is for my eighty-four-year-old parents. I was their only son so how did they, and all the other parents, allow their kids to travel across India with their large steel trunks as luggage, unescorted by any adult? After waving goodbye and fighting back tears (can’t let the other guys see you cry), you were gobbled up by the Great Indian Railway System only to re-emerge as a long-distance voice across bad landlines three days later, saying you had reached school.
H. Masud Taj is a poet and an architect. He grew up in Bombay and now lives in Canada.
‘What made you so sure nothing would happen to us along the way?’
‘We weren’t sure nothing would happen to you but we were sure if something did happen you would be well taken care of because others would treat you as their own kids.’
‘Would you do that today?’
‘No way!’
‘So why then?’
‘Perhaps it was something in the air. The nation too was young, in its twenties. It was normal to be naïve.’
It was fun growing up as a kid when grown ups were naïve and the nation was itself a child.
Patna
River city
This is one city you may have actually read about in great detail in school without necessarily associating it with its present-day avatar as capital of Bihar. You have probably heard it mentioned by old name Pataliputra; and you have probably heard about it when someone was talking of the golden age of our history. In many ways this history is undoubtedly magnificent. The city was an early example of cosmopolitan living, global connections and a showcase of a vibrant and dynamic marketplace. It is however important to note that the city had its highs and lows all through its lifetime, irrespective of the religious or cultural affinities of its rulers.
One of the earliest references to the city of Patna is made in Jain and Buddhist scriptures more than 2000 years ago. It is mentioned in the records of King Ajatashatru of Magadha in 490 BC as being a possible alternative capital of his kingdom. He chose a spot on the banks of the River Ganga, fortified it and called it Pataligram, which eventually became Patna. From that time onwards, the city has been consistently mentioned in historical records under various names including Pataligram, Pataliputra, Palibothra, Kusumpur, Pushpapura, Azimabad and Bankipore. Gautam Buddha himself is supposed to have passed through the city prophesying both a great future and its tragic ruin due to flood, fire and feud.
According to some historians, Patna derives its name from the word ‘pattan’ that translates from Sanskrit as ‘port’. The function as a port for centuries. This explains its commercial value, which in turn made it a centre of power.
The city rose in prominence between the years 321 and 185 BC when the Mauryan Empire ruled the region. Emperor Chandragupta controlled a vast empire from this city as its capital. At its zenith, this empire stretched from the Bay of Bengal to Afghanistan. He set up a centralized state with a complex administration under the guidance of his clever political adviser Kautilya. Kautilya’s work Arthashastra (The Science of Money) provides vivid descriptions of Patna in those times.
It was a prosperous city in which administrative civil servants worked for the king. Aristocrats, traders and merchants led luxurious lives, and the dirty work was done by a huge network of slaves.
Men and women roamed its streets freely. It had an extensive system of legal courts, taxation procedures, manufacture of goods and crafts, fisheries, trading corporations and shipping companies that navigated its rivers. The streets were lined by drinking saloons, courtesan homes and sports houses.
The city had a systematic approach to sanitation and health with many hospitals that catered to all sections of society. It had trade links with China for chinapatta or silk fabrics and was lined with shops selling these exquisite textiles. These were of a high quality and worn largely by rich citizens. The poor had to be content with wearing locally made coarser silk robes.
Patna was well connected to different parts of Chandragupta’s empire. The chief road was called the King’s Way, it went right across the country starting from the capital all the way to the northwest frontier.
Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador, tells us that the citizens of this great city loved finery and beauty, and even talks about ‘the use of specially designed shoes to add to one’s height’. He describes the city’s planning in precise terms: ‘At the junction of this river (Ganga) with another is situated Patlibothra, a city of eighty stadia (9.2 miles or 14.805 km) in length and fifteen stadia (1.7 miles or 2.735 km) in breadth. It is in the shape of a parallelogram and is girded with a wooden wall, pierced with loopholes for the discharge of arrows. It has a ditch in front for defence and for receiving the sewage of the city. This ditch, which encompasses it all round, is 600 feet in breadth and thirty cubits in depth, and the wall is crowned with 570 towers and has 460 gates.’
The area was known to suffer from earthquakes so most homes in the city were made of wood. Thus elaborate precautions had to be taken against fire. Every householder had to keep ladders, hooks and vessels full of water.
The city had a municipality that was elected by its aristocracy. It had thirty members, divided up into six committees of five representatives each. They dealt with industries and handicrafts, deaths and births, manufactures and arrangements for travellers and pilgrims. The municipal council looked after finance, sanitation, water supply, public buildings and gardens. The city’s buildings and palaces rose to several stories and were surrounded by parks and ponds.
Under the rule of King Ashoka, the grandson of Chandragupta, Pataliputra emerged as the capital of an empire that covered large chunks of the Indian subcontinent. It was Ashoka who transformed the capital from a city made of wood into a city built of stone around 273 BC. We know this through the writings of Chinese scholar Faxian, who, while visiting India between 399 and 414 BC, provides a detailed description of the sto
ne structures in his travelogue.
The city produced a gallery of learned scholars during the reign of the Mauryas. These include Aryabhatta, the famous astronomer and mathematician who established the value of pi correct to four decimal places; Ashvaghosha; a poet and influential Buddhist writer; Chanakya or Kautilya, the master of statecraft and author of Arthashashtra, Panini, the ancient Hindu grammarian who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology; and Vatsyayana, the author of Kama Sutra. These scholars contributed to the cultural and intellectual sophistication of the city in diverse ways. From spirituality to statecraft to sexuality, they provided new ways to think about life.
It must be said, however, that as in most societies of the world of those times, slaves comprised a large portion of the population and did not enjoy the same status as its aristocracy. That does not mean, however, that they could not participate in the exuberance of the city as a whole. Most records, the Arthashastra included, describe Patna as a city that provided space to individuals to be themselves and had enough opportunities to satisfy the needs of even the poorest slaves.
It is believed that Pataliputra became the largest city in the world between 300 and 195 BC, taking that position from Alexandria, Egypt. It was eventually succeeded by the Chinese capital Chang’an.
After the Mauryan dynasty, the empire disintegrated into a cluster of disconnected kingdoms. However, it did not mean anarchy at all, since the most unifying force at that time was not political but spiritual. Buddhism spread in the region like a raging fire. Subsequently, Chandragupta I (320–335 BC) conquered Magadha. He too set up his capital in Patna and consolidated his empire in the eastern part of northern India. He revived many of Ashoka’s principles of administration. His son Samudragupta extended his empire to the whole of the north as well as to parts of the Deccan. His grandson Chandragupta II (376–415 BC) was called Vikramaditya. It was during his reign that the magnificent wall paintings of the Ajanta caves in central Deccan were created. Kalidasa, the great romantic poet wrote during his reign and Patna once again emerged as a major intellectual and artistic hub. However, as in the case of most cities, its fortunes rose and fell with the political upheavals of those times. Eventually, in the sixth century AD, Harshavardhana, a descendant of the Guptas, established an empire and restored Patna to its former glory—even though it no longer remained the political capital.
The fate of Patna became even more intimately connected to the larger political transformations in the region, especially with Delhi. During the twelfth century, one of Mohammad of Ghori’s generals, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, proclaimed himself Sultan of Delhi and established the first dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate. By the middle of that century Ikhtiar Uddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiar Khilji, one of the generals of Qutb-ud-din Aibak, conquered Bihar and Bengal, and made Patna a part of the Delhi Sultanate. By then the city was going through a low phase.
Things changed for the better with the rise of Sher Shah Suri to power a couple of centuries later. He hailed from Sasaram, about 160 kilometres southwest of Patna and revived Patna in the middle of the sixteenth century. On his return from one of his expeditions, while standing by the Ganga, he visualized the construction of a fort and a new township and got to work on it immediately. Unfortunately, Sher Shah’s fort does not survive, but his mosque does.
The earliest mosque in Patna is dated 1489 and was built by Alauddin Hussaini Shah, a ruler from Bengal. Local people call it the Begum Hajjam’s mosque in honour of a barber.
In 1574, Emperor Akbar came to Patna to crush the Afghan chief Daud Khan. Abul Fazl-i-Allami, Akbar’s secretary of state and author of the treatise Ain-i-Akbari, refers to Patna as a flourishing centre for paper, stone and glass industries. During the Mughal reign, the city regained its economic and cultural status and benefited immensely from the well-organized system of trading that the political élite had established.
Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s grandson Muhammad Azim wanted to rename the city after himself and the emperor obliged, calling the city Azimabad, in the early eighteenth century. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, Patna was transferred to the Nawabs of Bengal. They managed the city fairly well though were not very popular as rulers. This was mainly because they imposed heavy taxes on the citizens even as they ensured that it flourished as a commercial centre.
The British East India Company arrived in the city in the middle of the seventeenth century and started a factory for the purchase and storage of calico and silk. The city soon became a major trading centre for saltpetre and attracted other Europeans, especially the Portuguese, French, Dutch and the Danes. Various European factories and godowns mushroomed in Patna and it acquired a trading fame that attracted far-off merchants. The city was also the hub for the trade of opium, which fuelled the growing colonial economy. The vast hinterland of the city was used for the cultivation of poppy that was ultimately transported to China.
After the Battle of Buxar (around a hundred kilometres from Patna) in 1764, the East India Company took charge not only of the city but most of the surrounding mineral-rich regions as well including modern day Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, as also some parts of Bangladesh.
With the Company control in Bihar, Patna emerged as one of the most important commercial and trading centres next only to Calcutta. It became an important and strategic centre of learning and trade in India. When the Bengal Presidency was partitioned in 1912 to carve out a separate province, Patna was made the capital of the new province of Bihar and Orissa. However, even as the city itself prospered with its class of traders and merchants benefiting immensely from the commercial activities in the region, its rural hinterland suffered. The agricultural activities were intimately linked to colonial trade that encouraged a system of zamindari and the consequent growth of landlessness and poverty. This had a major impact on the economy of the region and eventually on the fate of the city as well.
During its high colonial growth, Patna grew to absorb the township of Bankipore so that a new administrative base could be set up which was referred to as the New Capital Area. The Patna Secretariat, with its imposing clock tower, and the Patna High Court were two magnificent buildings that are a legacy of this era. The architect of these majestic buildings was I.F. Munnings. Many colonial buildings reflected what architectural historians refer to an ‘Indo-Saracenic influence’ (like the Patna Museum and the State Assembly), or ‘Overt Renaissance’ (like the Raj Bhawan and the High Court), while the General Post Office (GPO) and the Old Secretariat allegedly bear a ‘pseudo-Renaissance’ touch.
According to some historians, the experience of building the new capital area of Patna proved very useful in the subsequent construction of the imperial capital of New Delhi. The British built several educational institutions like Patna College, Patna Science College, Bihar College of Engineering, Prince of Wales Medical College and the Patna Veterinary College.
After the creation of Orissa as a separate province in 1935, Patna continued as the capital of Bihar under the British Raj and in independent India. The city saw major political events unfold during the heady days of the freedom struggle, especially the Champaran movement against the indigo plantations (that had caused massive unrest in the countryside) and the Quit India Movement of 1942.
Today, as the capital of Bihar, Patna may have lost most of its ancient shine but its dynamism still peeps through occasionally—in the intelligence and resourcefulness of its people. You never know when it may regain its lost glory to become a major commercial and political centre of the region, all over again.
When the waters flooded Patna
Amitava Kumar
When I was a boy, I would look out of the window of my classroom, and watch a boat passing on the muddy waters of the Ganges. The teacher could be teaching us about arithmetic, or the ancient kingdom ruled by Kanishka, or, for that matter, the Tanami desert in Australia—but I would quietly turn away and gaze at the river. On the back pages of my notebooks meant for math, history or geography, I would dra
w little scenes of boats with tiny, triangular flags.
Then, when I was twelve, during the monsoon season, the level of the water in the Ganges and the nearby Sone rose very high. There had been heavy rainfall for weeks. And to make matters worse, the bandh broke. When I woke up one morning, our house was already surrounded with water.
Amitava Kumar is a writer who lives in America.
I was certain there was not going to be any school that day. At first, I was very excited. The water was already so high that our neighbours on the ground floor had to rescue their valuables and move up to our flat. I kept getting in their way because I was standing on the steps trying to float paper boats on the swiftly flowing waters.
Then I heard that my father could not reach us because all train and bus services had been cancelled. My mother was worried about drinking water. The water pumping station had been flooded and was no longer working.
The floodwaters continued to rise. I went up to the roof and in the distance I could see people standing on the roofs of their houses with the water lapping at their feet. That afternoon, a helicopter hovered in the sky. This only added to the excitement I had felt all day.
I heard that an army man who lived in the flat above us had taken water out of the cistern in his toilet and boiled it for drinking. When I saw the Army man on the roof, I asked him if the story I had heard was true. He said, ‘There’s no water today in the Governor’s House either.’
Then he smiled, and said, ‘But they also have many toilets.’
Shillong
Skyline city
If Tokyo had been called Tokyo in the eighteenth century, Shillong would have been called Iewduh. But Tokyo was then known as Ido and so, when the British officers of the East India Company were looking around to set up a new town in the eighteenth century, they renamed the village of Iewduh as Shillong. (They thought the two names would sound too similar.) The name comes from the god who lives on the Shillong Peak, the highest point in the state of Meghalaya, almost 2000 meters above sea level: Leishyllong.
