Uniquely Indian traits that produce civic indifference
Every Indian city is founded on a rich mix of illegalities that breeds layers of rent-seeking intermediaries. Bengaluru is no exception
I often wish Richard Sennett, that great and inspiring writer on cities and civic life in the western world, had a chance to live in Bengaluru for a couple of months. Maybe then he would have seriously revised some of his important, though sadly inappropriate, insights into what western cities can/have become. When he advocated, in The Uses of Disorder, an “unzoned urban place” that would promote visual and functional disorder, it was because he believed that predetermined planning deadened humans and restricted “effective social exploration”. In other works, such as Flesh and Stone, he lamented that the demand for increased speed, efficiency, and comfort while travelling was to the detriment of the unexpected encounter, which would produce the capacity to empathise.
Don’t get me wrong: I am a loyal fan of Sennett’s writing and his critique of bland, sanitised gridded spaces that facilitate and enhance individualism. Maximising comfort, speed, and efficiency should not be the only goal of life in the city.
Sennett’s critique notwithstanding, the insipid, challenge-less, and, yes, comfortable and efficient, western city is what most middle-class Indians yearn for. They have it in slivers, in the gated communities at the city’s edges, a promise of planning that has all but failed more widely. Still, there is no escape from the state of permanent disorder in a grotesquely unequal society such as ours once one leaves the gates of these communities. The yawning pits that promise the arrival of cables underground, the cratered road surfaces that challenge the spine, and the “footpath” that teems with the kind of life that Sennett would never have imagined put paid to the kind of leisurely flaneurism, Sennett undertook in Lower Manhattan, something that enabled his many insights. There are unexpected encounters aplenty, as temporary occupations of the street can leave you waiting, even if it is inside your air-conditioned car, for the celebration, mourning, or protest, to end/pass.
I am not sure if these daily anarchic encounters with the Other produce greater compassion, as Sennett romantically believes. Take the case of Bengaluru. The city’s cheek-by-jowl diversity has begun to act as a leveller that Sennett had not at all anticipated. Taxpaying denizens of the Garden City must remain content with parks scattered in homeopathic doses across the city. But the gracious and generously arching avenue trees pose an unexpected threat, given the savage cuts to branches and roots alike by those in “pursuit of happiness”. To match the threats from above are the horrors below, especially when there has been an unseasonal or unusually good rain, as happened this season. Swirling waters impeded the flow of traffic, making journeys hazardous even in the most expensive luxury vehicles.
Increasingly, the forces of nature show no respect for the gates of the better-off. Middle-class hand-wringing over inefficient municipal services, in a city where practically no one pays for parking, matches the blasé violations of building laws in which all, especially the endowed, indulge. In the raja kaluves blocked or built over, water bodies choked with sewage and industrial waste, and illegally drilled borewells in private properties in the Cauvery-served areas, blindness to civic law reigns supreme.
Every Indian city is founded on a rich mix of illegalities that breeds layers of rent-seeking intermediaries. Bengaluru is no exception. But on recent visits to Thailand and Cambodia, I realised that respect for building laws, driving rules, everyday civility, and cleanliness are not the exclusive historical experience of advanced capitalist cities, East or West. Bangkok’s population matches Bengaluru’s (11 million to my city’s 13.5 million). Its roads are mercifully free of honking, or impatient overtaking. Pavements are not a tedious obstacle race; even in crowded flower markets and food zones, there is enough space for citizens to walk safely. The ubiquitous “spirit houses” do not abut the street or noisily compete to assault the senses, as our multiple shrines do. There is no garbage on the streets despite high levels of plastic usage. And finally, there is a degree of civility, now only a faint memory in our cities.
How do other countries stay civil, law-abiding, and free of garbage? Or what is uniquely Indian that produces civic indifference? Indians are inured to class difference, but are equally unconscious of other sets of privileges and hierarchies. We are hardwired in our caste-based society into believing that the mess on our streets and homes is someone else’s responsibility. We have not developed a respect for public spaces or for each other in ways that are humane, just, and empathetic. In the “war of all against all” that the Indian city has become, individualism, and not community values, are heightened.
Meanwhile, the State dutifully caters to the fragile sentiments of the majority. Recently, the municipal body thoughtfully provided hundreds of tanks of precious water for immersion of Ganesha idols, whose quantity has reached unsustainable levels. Will the recent announcement that not just Ramanagaram but even Tumkur may be joined to Bengaluru only extend the cacotopia? Will the just-announced Super App help people navigate hell on the streets, with the integration of a Public Eye, and draw cheers? Or should we simply hope for the levelling effects of nature where humans have failed?
Janaki Nair is a Bengaluru-based historian and the author of The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. The views expressed are personal
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