De - Multiple city: writings on Bangalore

First Person Singular: In Search of a City

ITS A windy May morning in the year 2007. About 7.15 a.m. Im helmeted, strapped into the passenger seat of a motorized hang-glider. At the helm is a veteran naval officer with a passion for the air sport. The glider, 1000 feet above the city that Ive called home since May 1992, soars skywards from Jakkur, then banks, glides and, as I seem to suspend my breath for an incredible fifteen minutes, offers me an alternative lens through which to view Bangalore or Bengaluru. Or is that a mythical landscape that unfolds below us?

Im conscious that I have no parachute on board, nor the shell of a cabin to cushion me from the breeze that had the windsock at the airfield jigging furiously since dawn. The chill morning air nips at my ear lobes, teases my bare toes. Wonder surges through me as I consciously shift gears mentallyand jettison inherited or collective notions about the city we hover over.

I gaze upon sheets of pristine water. Is that Hebbal lake? Verdant stretches, seemingly unpopulated, cross, twist and zigzag on terra firma. Is that the Life Insurance Corporation building on arterial Mahatma Gandhi Road, and the new United Breweries tower on Vittal Mallya Road? Impeccable toy-sized houses swing into sight, as if conjured up from a Lego kit, with dinky red, yellow and blue cars arrayed in open garages. The scene unfolding below has the unlived-in openness of a Google Earth exploration.

I mull over the past years of searching for our city through writings on it. My journey has unfolded through stopstart scenes where Ive stumbled upon facts and features, characters and cartoons, even alternate or divisive perspectives, in lieu of a grand, linear narrative. Ive sensed unidentified shadows through multiple conversations, had chance encounters both literary and political, gauged readings over steaming by-two cups at the India Coffee House, even entered high-voltage debates about the interior landscapes of gays and hijras. Ive listened to the narratives of Generation Next and tuned in to their grandparents ajja-ajji stories over set dosas at stand-and-eat darshinis, often buoyed by excursions into the Kannada literary landscape with practitioners and interpreters.

What layered identities exist, or once flourished, within this emerging global city? What schismatic tugs of war rage between Bengaluru and Bangalore, between the western pete that can be traced back at least five centuries and the eastern Cantonment, at least three centuries younger, between the City and the Civil and Military Station, the native and the colonial, as the Mysore peta and the silk roomal from northern Karnataka come to terms with the Gandhi cap? Did the traditions of stately Mysore vanish when the City and the Cantonment were united under a single municipal administration in 1949? Is the cosmopolitan nature of Bangalore, then, a stumbling block to defining its identity? Has the IT-propelled new city taken the shine off its established public sector undertakings, its famed silk looms? Will the city on fast-forward mode towards the future spell its doom, especially since its population has boomed from 1.5 to nearly seven million in barely three decades?

As I fly over these warring entities, deep-seated flickers of unknowing flutter within me, along with unrequited curiosity, and yet a sense of belonging. This is a city, or multiple cities within, that has enfolded me and drawn me in, oddball that I am, Bengali by birth and south Indian by choice. Is this the terrain of the four boundary mantapas or towers that the Yelahanka nadaprabhu or chieftain Kempe Gowda is said to have founded around 1537, celebrated in folk ballad and contemporary narratives alike? Why did he choose the village of Sivanasamudram, ten miles to the south of Yelahanka, to build his mud fort in? Did the city derive its name from the meal of boiled beans or bendakalu that an old woman shared with him?

Every city dweller I interact with seems to espouse a private vision of Bangalore. I stumble upon hidden stories retold in whispers, threadbare yet convergent narratives. Of a memorial to a ninth century hero commemorated during an ancient Battle of Bengaluru. Of megalithic tombs and iron tools dating back to 1000 BC , besides records of Roman silver coins that hark back to the emperor Augustus. Of a tutelary deity named Annamma, whose temple borders the Dharmambudhi tank. Of a Jewish settlement that gave rise to Asias biggest shoe store of the early twentieth century. Of a city that had access to electricity before the rest of Asia. Of the base where Indias first indigenous helicopter was developed, and where the Bangalore torpedo was devised by British Captain McClintock of the Bengal, Bombay and Madras Sappers in 1912.