How grey was my city then

How grey was my city then
Sashi Sivramkrishna & Heisnam Bison Singh
Deccan Herald

It was not as though Bangalore was always green. The trees were introduced quite recently and mostly for commercial purposes. A look at some old records of the city prove that.

Just a few days back we came across an interesting book entitled, “Select Views in Mysore: The Country of Tippoo Sultan from Drawings Taken on the Spot by Home”. The book was published in 1808, a few years after the Fourth War of Mysore, the sketches having being made by Home in the last decade of 18th century.

Many of the sketches are of forts and places that we were not familiar with. Luckily for us, Home had made a few sketches of Bangalore. As we looked at the “old” Bangalore, we were overwhelmed by nostalgia… a sense of loss, a longing for the past… even though it was of a place and time of which we had little knowledge and no experience. No sooner had the sense of nostalgia abated that we began drawing a comparison of Bangalore … then and now.

There is probably an imbedded programme in the human brain, which makes us compulsively compare and contrast … things, people or places.

Home’s sketches of Bangalore had one thing in common … the fort. Two hundred years ago a fort enclosed almost all of Bangalore. Even Tipu Sultan’s palace was situated within the fort walls. Just outside the fort was the marketplace, the pettah. This is the City Market or K.R. Market that we know of today.

Since little of the fort exists now, we began by trying to locate the actual spots from where Home made his sketches. The first was the view of the fort from the Kempe Gowda tower at Kempambudhi tank in Chamrajpet. Though Home does not specifically say that he was near the tower, the structure is obviously the same.

The location from where Home made the second sketch of the fort is not clear to us. Though we are confident that it is the Kempe Gowda tower in Lalbagh, we are not absolutely sure. This doubt arose because Home’s depiction of tower is different from what it is today. One website, however, mentions that the tower at Lalbagh has been rebuilt. In that case, Home’s sketch may well have been from here.

The third is from perhaps somewhere just below the city market flyover. In the foreground is the pettah and in the background, the fort. One section of the fort wall is all that remains today.

Bangalore has changed in many ways. But the sketches tell us something not so obvious; that Bangalore has changed colour, from grey to green. If you look closely at the sketches, you will notice the almost complete absence of trees. This is not the Bangalore we know of today. Except for some concrete structures peeping out from here and there, Bangalore’s skyline looks like a tropical rain forest. The sketches tell us something quite contradictory to common knowledge - the area in and around Bangalore was forested and modern development is transforming this landscape into concrete, destroying the greenery around us. It is quite common to hear an older person recalling the “good old days”, when Koramangala and Jayanagar were jungles and few dared to go there. How did we change all that?

A grey city

Home was telling us a rather different story. Two hundred years ago the area around the fort was barren. This area is nothing but the present-day Bangalore. The tree cover over the city came later. We looked for evidence, which could establish this possibility. The first was a survey by Francis Buchanan. Buchanan in his long journey through Southern India during the years 1800-1801 had traveled through Bangalore and its vicinity.

His report on the 10th of May 1800 reads:

In the morning I traveled from Catcolli to Bangalore, through a very naked country … The remainder is covered with low bushes …

Catcolli is Kadgodi, just a few kilometers east of Whitefield.

On the 12th of May he leaves Bangalore for Srirangapatnam via Kingara or Tingara (now Kengeri). He reports:

The uncultivated land is more hilly than any between the Ghats and Bangalore. It is very rocky and bare, and does not contain even copse wood …

Then weeks later, on the 4th of July, he reports on his way from Agara to Sarjapur.

Owing to the want of hands, much of the country through which I passed to-day is waste … the country is remarkably bare. The crops of dry grains ought now to cover the ground; owing, however, to the want of rain, they have not yet begun to spring.

But the most interesting is his report from Bangalore itself, in particular his report on Lalbagh.

I visited the gardens made by the late Mussalman princes, Hyder and Tippoo … want of water is the principal defect of these gardens; for in the arid country every thing, during the dry season, must be artificially watered.

Though Buchanan records the presence of many cypress and fruit trees at Lalbagh, the diversity is not the same as what we find today. He goes on to give us a clue as to the kind of trees that could be introduced into Bangalore’s landscape … and would be introduced later.

Some pine and oak plants, lately introduced from the Cape of Good Hope, seem to be thriving. I think there can be little doubt, but that in this country all the valuable plants of the Levant would succeed.

Levant refers to the Mediterranean.

What emerges from Home and Buchanan is a picture of the landscape around the Bangalore fort in 1800: dry, barren, and naked except for Lalbagh.

We turned to our second source, compiled almost a century after Buchanan’s; B.L. Rice’s Revised Gazetteer of 1897. Rice elaborates on the forests of Bangalore District:

The earliest accounts describe the District as covered with forest, forming a part of the great Dandakaranya. The distinctive names have been preserved of some of the wooded tracts, such as the Chandanaranya (sandal forest) on the Arkavati near Nelamangala; the Ganjaranya (forest of the abnes precatarius) around Sivaganga; the Kundaranya (jasmin forest) at Devanhalli, &c.

As late as the sixteenth century, when Devanhalli, Dod-Ballapur, Hoskote and other chief places were founded, the original settlers are reported to have commenced operations by clearing the surrounding forest.

Reporting on the situation towards of the end of the 19th century, the Gazetteer mentions that the most dense forests in Bangalore District were at Magadi and Kankanhalli. The Chennapatna taluk is also hilly, but the tree vegetation is smaller. There is much scrub jungle around Ujjani-betta and along the western border of the Doddabalapur and Nelamangala taluks.

It is clear from Buchanan, Home and Rice that Bangalore was not dense forests in the 18th and 19th century. Even if Bangalore and its immediate vicinity was at one time a forest, it is likely that agriculture, trade and human habitation had changed its landscape, perhaps in the 15th or 16th centuries.

When it went green

So when did the tree cover over Bangalore spread? As the city grew; grew beyond the constraints of the fort wall. This was during the 19th and 20th centuries. This is quite paradoxical actually, for one normally associates urban development with the destruction of trees and forests.

In 1894, Rice reported that there were about 2000 topes with about 100,000 trees in the entire Bangalore District. Topes are groves of trees which formed a canopy and were planted near wells, lakes and travel shelters. Not many of these are visible in the vicinity of Bangalore fort, at least in Home’s sketches.

So it is likely that the green cover actually came when the Government introduced arboriculture or the plantation of trees for timber:

The great demand for fuel created by the railway and the increasing consumption at Bangalore has led to the formation of fuel plantations both by Government and by private individuals.

The common cassia florida and the casuarina muricata have been largely planted in the reserves … avenues have been planted along all the public roads, 542 miles in length, the best growing indigenous trees being generally employed for the purpose. These consist of the mango, figs, honge, and nerale, which are raised in nurseries and then transplanted.

We can clearly see from this that Bangalore’s trees were supposed to be functional, specifically fuel wood, rather than to serve an ecological purpose. The other reason why the Government undertook tree planting was for “ornamental reasons”.

Ornamental trees have been introduced into the station of Bangalore in great variety. The poinciana regia or “flame of the forest”, with its splendid scarlet blossoms, has become quite common. The spathodea, with a still more gorgeous flower of deep orange tint, is also met with on all sides. Numerous coniferous trees have been cultivated with success, including araucaria and other varieties of pine. The Java fig, a graceful and fast-growing tree, with glossy and delicate foliage, has been much planted in gardens, as well as the Moreton Bay chestnut and the grevillea robusta. Many of these trees also find their way into the taluq stations and into compounds of the dawk bungalows.

It is now clear to us why the new layouts on the outskirts of the city have far less green cover than the city. They perhaps are the kind of landscapes that Home and Buchanan saw around Bangalore fort two hundred years ago.

‘Good’ trees

Looking back at Bangalore’s ‘green history’, it seems to us that the then Government, especially under British influence, was purely driven by economic and cosmetic reasons in their choice of trees. We cannot but help wonder if people’s health was a considered a factor on deciding the kind of trees.

After all Bangalore is known as a green city but also well known for many allergic ailments, breathing disorders, a feeling of dullness, and so on. The dispersion of automobile pollution, blocking of street lights, forcing heavy vehicles to the right (instead of the left) lane, and also damage to life, property and essential services during heavy rains, are other urban factors that must be taken into account.

What is the optimum number and species of trees that are best for modern urban spaces might be something worth looking into by scientists as we continue to replenish and plant more trees in future.

Just as we were discussing our conclusion, we decided to check the Internet for any possible research that has been done on trees and urban landscapes. A lot of research has been done of tree species that are better suited for urban environments and the health of its inhabitants. We quote from an article on “Allergies, Asthma and City Trees” by Thomas Ogren, an allergy researcher.

Some urban tree species cause an inordinate amount of asthma and allergy problems, while other tree species cause little or no health problems. A large part of the problem is that the aborists and landscape professionals, who plant these trees, often don’t know the difference.

Home’s sketches had indeed led us to a rather unexpected issue. And that feeling of nostalgia had by now changed its colour… from grey to grey green.