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Listening to the land

Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur read Bangalore's history from its undulating landscape, says BAGESHREE S.

It is one of the worst traffic jams in Indiranagar. A virtual war, in fact — everyone trying to get ahead of everyone else when there is no place to move, men madly honking horns for the lack of anything else to do...

And there you are, in the middle of it all, trying to imagine vast and open lands in place of all the shops and buildings flanking the road and clashing armies of Tipu Sultan and Cornwallis in place of the people around you who seem to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown...

Reading Deccan Traverses and talking to its authors Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur might have different effects on different people. The scholarly work, which studies Bangalore's landscape and the layers of meanings it has been invested with over the last two centuries, might make a historian or a culture critic question some of the assumptions underlying the reading of a city. But if you are a true blue Bangalorean, a little ashamed of the fact that you live in a somewhat non-descript city with nothing "spectacular" to see or show, Dilip and Anuradha might just open your eyes blinded by conditioning and force of habit. They might help you recover a sense of wonder for this land that looked like "naked country" to the early British surveyors and was transformed both through historical exigencies and conscious design into a "garden city" through the colonial period.

In a voluminous work (six years in the making), divided into four sections, Dilip and Anuradha use historical narratives, rare maps, drawings, pictures, letters and illustrations to uncover layers of history that remain hidden from a casual eye. Tanks, towers, rocks, gardens, avenue trees, marigolds in the baskets of vendors in City Market, jasmines in the hair of women... All these and more come together in an effort to map the city's landscape and understand the flux of this "open terrain".

"Maybe all colonial cities can be subjected to such an enquiry. But Bangalore offers a particularly exciting opportunity because its history remains behind the scenes. It's hidden under the everyday and the ordinary. In fact it's the ordinary that is really rich in this city. There are no big monuments to distract you," says Dilip, who grew up in Langford town here and now teaches architecture in a U.S. university.

"This project was also our own journey and discovery," chips in Anuradha, also an architect, and goes on to narrate all the excitement this journey has entailed.

It has meant running hither and thither on a rocky terrain ravaged by quarrying, desperately looking for markings left by a British officer. It has meant travelling in a coracle on the Cauvery cradling their four-month-old baby in their arms. And it has meant wading through mountains of material in libraries in India and abroad and the joy of suddenly stumbling upon a map or a document, which has remained unnoticed for centuries. "All this information is not sitting in a file labelled `Bangalore' in some university or library!" laughs Anuradha. The project has involved unearthing material from unlikely places, seeing them come together in unlikely ways and understanding the past and the present in the light of what this coming together throws up.

Consider, as one example, the way Dilip and Anuradha understand our tank system and its impact on the way we conceive our developmental projects today.

PHOTO: BHAGYA PRAKASH K.

BOLD TRAVELLERS Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur, authors of Deccan Traverses; a 1799 painting of Gavi Gangadhareshwara temple from the book

Hard as it is to imagine, Dilip will tell you that the land where Parade Grounds stand today was once a tank and the promenade skirting M.G. Road was its bund. What's today Rest House Crescent Road was a canal running from it. Is it any wonder then that the basements in those parts get flooded when it rains heavily? "It was meant to be that way, you see!" says Dilip.

While there has been a great deal of debate on Sankey tank preservation, Anuradha would like to ask if it makes sense to ornament it with Japanese grass and turn it into a gated community. "That kind of beautification is dead. We should learn ways of integrating our tank systems into our urban life," she says. Adds Dilip: "Notice how we call all these water bodies lakes while they are man-made tanks. Tank suggests utility and lake suggests beautification."

It's interesting that we call the body that governs the water bodies in the city Lake Development Authority while our city has no perennial water sources and has (rather, had) only a fantastic system of tanks. "In fact I would like to go to all schools and tell them to stop talking endlessly about river civilisations. We are a tank civilisation!"

What makes Deccan Traverses a fascinating read, in fact, are all the fundamental questions it keeps throwing up to shake the very vocabulary we use to describe ourselves and our city. Why did the British call our city Bangalore and not Doddagunta or Domlur? Would Bangalore have had its `Garden City' tag at all if Tipu hadn't fallen to the British troupes at a certain point in history? Do even maps, taken to be "authentic" sources of history, come with a hidden colonial design? While we talk so much about globalisation today, was Bangalore always globalised with only a change in the agency of globalisation? What do these shifts imply for a land and the people inhabiting it?

Says Dilip: "Histories regurgitate the same facts without questioning them. When you see history from down below, from the landscape, you come upon new ways of seeing."

Deccan Traverses (Rupa & Co.) will be released at 5 p.m. today by Governor T.N. Chaturvedi at Raj Bhavan.

How a tank economy works

Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur write about the multiple purposes a tank serves in Deccan Traverses: "Rather than operating on a scale between full and empty, tanks operate between two ends of a clay economy — a bed that provides clay and a surface for a range of activities including bazaars, sports, games, fairs etc. and a reservoir that provides water... Tanks appear as lakes but only at a particular part of the year. However, tanks such as Ulsoor are often forced to maintain this appearance throughout the year... Today it is held as a lake... "

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