A Prosaic Ode to Bangalore!

I finally finished reading Hari Kunzru’s Transmission a few weeks back and started devoting all my attention to Kavita Watsa’s “Brahmins and Bungalows – Travels through South Indian History” (2004). One of the chapters deals with Bangalore – though I would love to post excerpts from every chapter, for I found something worth sharing in each chapter, I have to restrain myself to one chapter. I picked this city, since I know so many people who stay there or have visited the city – all of whom are charmed by this cantonment city! I think after reading these excerpt you will want to head for the nearest store and pick up a copy of the book :

The residential areas that developed within the cantonment (which was also called “Laskar” Town) were called “towns” and even today bear British names such as Langford, Fraser, Richmond and Benson. Their large bungalows were set in generous gardens, and the townscape was dotted with tastefully designed parks, churches, clubs, schools and shopping areas. One of these establishments, the Bangalore United Services Club, still functions as the ‘Bangalore Club’, and its pillars, verandas and simple but elegant proportions constitute an excellent example of the architecture that was popular in the mid-nineteenth century. It was this originally white male preserve that Churchill left an unpaid ‘due’ of thirteen rupees, which the club eventually wrote off as irrecoverable.

-Not to mention the sign at the entrance that prohibited entry of Dogs and Indians! I believe, it is still difficult to get membership at this club – some things never change, eh?

In recent years, if one can forgive the senseless attrition of heritage architecture, it is possible to appreciate the stable urban identity hat has developed after a period of careless growth, an identity that borrows much from the character of the old cantonment in its leaning towards the West and its taste for the good life. Today’s Bangalore owes much to the liberalism that was in vogue here long before the Indian economic revolution of the early nineties. Here, globalization was not contrived; it was merely a matter of re-packaging an old tradition in twenty-first century wrapping, and allowing Westernisation to spread out of the cantonment and into suburbs once known for their orthodoxy. People who move to the city, even the freshest of settlers, now tend to discard their prior identities and become Bangalorean with ease. Although there is a tendency for new Bangaloreans to behave as if they invented the city – and who can blame them, for so little is left to remind anyone of the old days- it is a pleasant and sought-after place, and people who live here for a time often find it hard to adjust to city life anywhere else in India.

-Don’t I know that! I know more than one Bangalorean who’s sung praises of the city so often, its almost a refrain! :-)

The one restaurant I dearly loved, and to which I would have directed any traveler without wasting a second, no longer exists: it was appropriately called The Only Place, and was situated in a dreary compound at the bottom of Brigade Road, sandwiched between a guest house so liberal that it allowed only one lady to love there with a dozen pet snakes, and Snaize Brothers, the local undertaker’s. None of the existing restaurants, sophisticated though they are, could ever rustle up enough savoir-faire to serve beef-steak followed by peach pie in a tiny bougainvillea-clad bower, even as carpenters hammered nails slowly into half-finished coffins strewn about within view. The people who frequented The Only Place were characters all, from long-boned socialites with diamond earrings who fished insects gingerly out of their wine, to sad-faced Americans who lingered in the cantonment for months or even years in search of the meaning of life. There is no OP’s now; yet another shopping mall has been erected in the old compound. The restaurant did resume its activities briefly in one of the mall’s boring corridors, but in this new location, and with its new clientele, we all agreed it might as well have been called Pizza Hut.

-And to think I was so charmed by its “Pizza Hut” avatar – makes me want to travel back in time, to experience The Only Place in its hey-days…

Much as the desecration of its architecture and the congestion of its streets bewilder me, there is always a sense of homecoming when I return to Bangalore, for wherever my interest in travel has subsequently taken me, I have found no other city in the world to match its particular charms, and no other such concentration of like-minded people. Some aspects of the city come to mind at the oddest times, bludgeoning me in some unfamiliar place where nothing but a map connects me to reality, and all of a sudden my heart fills with a great desire to go home again: to sip a lime juice at Koshy’s and listen to the conversation of college students and journalists; to watch the low, violet clouds of the monsoon roll in across the plateau in early June, transforming the hot weather overnight to something akin to Scotland in summer, and reminding me that the British used to call Bangalore a hill station; to catch my breath while driving past a park in full bloom with jacaranda and frangipani. As long as there is still a high bank of flowers on one side of South Parade, and a few bungalows left to uphold a gracious aesthetic; as long as there are old-timers to mourn the passing of the old days, yet accept the new with lightness of heart; as long as I can walk into a restaurant and order a beefsteak without batting an eyelid; and as long as the night train still pulls into a little grey and grey station in the chill of a Bangalore dawn, there will be reason for me, and hundreds like me, to return to the vanishing cantonment for a few decades yet.

The last paragraph in the chapter on Bangalore – perhaps the most touching – paraphrases beautifully her love for the city. I know quite a few Bangaloreans who would echo these sentiments…Bangalore to them is their Mecca!

While I’m on the subject, I’ll make a small concession to my dearest jijaji (a self-confessed Banglo-phile!) that apart from Bombay, I think, Bangalore is the only city in India where I could be happy…ouch I can see the onslaught coming again! ;-)

Her passion for the city shines through every word - now if someone could write something on similar lines about Bombay!!!

P.S - You can find my review of "Brahmins and Bungalows" on Literary Mosaic