by Preeti Madhusudhan
India was considered the crown-jewel of the British Raj. The hill-towns or the “hill-stations” of the British Raj, be it Darjeeling, Simla, Ooty or the coffee plantations of the Coorg belt, are peaks of colonial decadence. In an effort to recreate their European environs in the tropical India, the British created what they thought were replicas of their cities, the result being India’s inheritance of a lumbering load of buildings and city centres. Such urban design reflects the oppressive intention of the conquerors. The pseudo-fascist structures were meant to impress the authority of the ruling British on the beholder. In modern terms, the Indians were meant to be awed at the contrast between a Gucci purse and a coir-woven purse as it were. So what we have now is a hilarious combination of a pantheon-look-alike cheek to jowl with a steel and glass Multi-national Corporation and a techno-coloured temple tower, anomalies anywhere, but more so in a country that is clearly, culturally at tangent with the thoughts behind a European town-square.
The surge of economy-related expansion that any country experiences renders one key aspect severely damaged – its anthropological heritage. Either in a bid to tap into historical association-related tourism as displayed in most of Europe, Egypt, China and even India, or as an assertion of some ideology which a landmark symbolises, the built heritage of any place is catalogued, conserved and exhibited to represent the collective identity of the place in question. But what about the people that inhabited, constructed and cherished the place? The Yosemite national park, California has a Native Indian centre, hardly any compensation for a race trod on and erased from their land and the collective memory of the modern world; but the centre is there, discreet yet present in Yosemite, Grand Canyon etc. Similar is the story of the native Aborigines of Australia. The quaint dots and dashes drawings, the quintessential boomerang and dijiridoo are everywhere as pop-art, totes, road signs – a classic case of over-compensation for an irreversible wrong. Now, this brings to question our own tribes. So, reverting to my original point about the global, economic tide of having pushed the passive, native dwellers of various nations against walls and literally up the hills. Anthropologists, historians and archaeologists acknowledge that there are tribes who even till a couple of centuries back thrived on the hills, speaking languages and celebrating rituals some of which are catalogued in the seals and pottery shards from the Saraswath basin, considered the fountainhead of civilisation in India. Where is their culture? Do we hear their tongues? Have their stories and wisdom been recorded? Are they goods to be haggled over by over-zealous missionaries seeking masses and right-wing politicians? Isn’t it true that the only time an average Indian in a metro or even a tier-2, 3 cities hears of them is when an all-out war breaks out between the said factions over these tribes and the news manages to garner a 30-second spot in prime time newscast?
Now, what is the identity of the average Indian hill-station? Apart from the climate, the availability of tea or coffee or spices, the hill stations still carry an uncanny resemblance to some obscure European town they were modelled after. It is shameful enough that all the Indian metros have to lumber ahead with the weight of their colonial inheritance, symbols of nation’s shame and another’s tyrannical dominance, but it is atrocious that the final strongholds of our ancients are also marred to this day with these warts. The city centre in all major cities, thankfully, have now shifted from the colonial ones owing to modern day commercial and transit hubs and the planned and unsupervised suburban sprawl. Chennai’s George Town, once the centre of the Madras Presidency, is now no more than the administrative centre, with commerce and transport centres being different parts of the city. But take Simla, the classic Indian hill-station, it boasts of a replica of London’s Gaiety theatre, a square around which are grouped the usual suspects – the ubiquitous library that hasn’t been updated since the turn of the century, a town hall and the standard church. The visiting masses are subjected to the bone-chilling Himalayan winds, no matter what the season, due to the fantastically vast open spaces of the square adapted from the European model-town.
Why aren’t these towns re-modelled to complement and coalesce with the rightful guardians of the land? There are lessons to be learnt here from our Australian friends. In an attempt to right the centuries-old wrong, the government has successfully formulated policies to acknowledge, empathise and nurture the Aborigines of the land, not in mere material gains for the vote-bank but also in terms of emotional support and succour. No assembly of any kind in Australia begins without the acknowledging the rightful owners, the guardians of the land. While such a verbal affirmation is unnecessary in India, signs other than the paltry reservation in the education and job sector need to be shown that the average Indian represented by the democratic government acknowledges and works towards the emancipation of the most neglected of the Indian masses.
A built environment is the symbol of an ideology .From the Egyptian pyramids, the Greek and Roman edifices and the renaissance and neo-classical structures that dot the world, to the modern nday sky-scrapers, buildings are perceived as an assertion of superiority, a form of declaration of the existence of that nation or the individual behind the construction of the structure – “I am here, to remain.” Though the big temple at Tanjore is dedicated to Lord Brihadeeswara, Rajaraja Chozha’s name is indelible to this day as the man behind the pinnacle of temple architecture in India. A country that has thousands of years of history, heritage and culture to solidify its position as a powerful nation in the eyes of the world need not scramble to preserve the brief 200-year history of its oppressors, who sought to undermine and demoralise an entire nation, the effects of which the ancient, tender and wise India is still suffering. While history need not be and cannot be re-written by demolishing all the colonial construction in India (we are after all not fascist to imagine such monstrosity), as a people, as a nation that still wanders without a course, we desperately need an identity. We have developed an external locus of identity; we think we are that which has been projected by the western perception and popular understanding. India is more than yoga, curry, chicken 65, Taj Mahal, palaces turned to hotels, Bollywood, the largest slum in Asia, dysentery, poverty and dirty politics. It is the land, the race, the people that developed and lived by the Sanatana Dharma, the people who have tolerated intrusions, incursions and invasions, inviting them all in our fold, making them our own. We are more than the handful of indo-saracenic (a style of architecture which evolved as an amalgamation of the neo-classical forms from Europe and the Islamic architecture in India, a style that later spread to the other Asian colonies ) structures designed by the colonial overlords. We aren’t the mass of clerical staff ready to jump through the hoops held by our masters. We are a nation that believed in the Sanatana Dharma that preaches the equality of races, in the perfect equilibrium of life which is best achieved by each individual practising his dharma and looking at each entity of the universe as parts of a whole, where in each part shares all the qualities of the whole and each part co-exists in peace, harmony with the other parts. The suffering of each individual causes endless agony to each of the whole. Such is our perception, our existence, our ethos.
Don’t our cities need to reflect the magnanimity of our heritage; shouldn’t they be the beacon lights of humanity? Our ancestors, the dwellers of the hill villages, deserve the rightful acknowledgement, a built environment that will promote greater regional development and improvement in the lifestyle of the people in that region. They do not seek the paltry goody bags in the form of seat allotments that the law-makers throw in their direction. What they need, and what the nation needs, is a sense of pride, an identity in the form of compassionate, humane development projects that reflect the personality of the ancient yet young and tender nation. What they need are regional development and rural renewal projects that empathise with and are beneficial economically and more importantly emotionally to the ancients of the land, for that is where the true identity of our nation lies. We should redeem our faltering self-esteem by re-building our cities, towns and centres of our tribes. From the nation that was all about embracing change and progressing we have allowed ourselves to become a lethargic mass of chaotic development that has no sense of purpose. What the nation needs and deserves is a jolt in the right direction, pride in its true identity that can only stem from renewal projects in the form of empathetic built forms supported by requisite infrastructure that generate regional economy and promote harmony.
Preeti Madhusudhan is a freelance architect/ interior designer living in Sydney with her husband and six-year-old son. She is passionate about books and is an ardent admirer of P.G.Wodehouse. She inherited her love for books and storytelling from her father, a Tamil writer. Preeti is trying to publish her maiden novella in English.
Very nice Preeti. Thoroughly enjoyed the reading.
Thought provoking 🙂