Mapping history of the Garden City

Mapping history of the Garden City
Much-loved Bangalore was, it seems, a hit with the British too. Giridhar Khasnis on Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha’s book Deccan Traverses, which traces the history of the city.
Deccan Herald


Late last year, US-based architects, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, set up a unique exhibition in Lalbhag’s glass-house and guided the visitors through an extraordinary journey of Bangalore. Today, even as the principles of the Philadelphia-based firm, Mathur and da Cunha are busy providing finishing touches to their meticulously researched work culminating in a major publication, they retain the same love and passion for the city as they did while initiating the project as far back as 2000.

Navigating through seemingly infinite space and time, Deccan Traverses: From ‘Naked Country’ to‘Garden City’, celebrates the history and culture of our very own ‘Bengalooru’, a city whose origins are traced in official records as well as in popular accounts to a mud-walled town laid out in 1537 by an agricultural chieftain, Kempegowda I. The book is packed with revealing information, historical data, and astonishing anecdotes. The authors, who explain how the title, Garden City, was originated in English ambitions for this land at the turn of the 18th century, provide a plethora of illuminating quotes as well.

If William Arthur, a missionary in the 1840s spoke of the city’s “smiling bungalows . . . not a few bearing marks of horticultural taste”, a soldier in Lord Cornwallis’ army (which captured the town in 1791 on behalf of the English East India Company) referred to its climate as “extremely temperate and salubrious” and “the soil fruitful, and producing the necessaries of life in great plenty”. Toward the end of the 1800s Winston Churchill found Bangalore an exemplary cantonment, where “fore thought and order have been denied neither time nor space” and felt that the planners had not held back in providing the “considerable white communities” with “splendid roads, endless double avenues of shady trees, abundant supplies of pure water”. More recently, (but actually as far back 1962) Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was horrified that “one of the most beautiful cities of India” had slums!

Mathur and daCunha claim that the Garden City presented in the book is as much a cultivated eye as it is a cultivated land. While applauding those individuals in the service of the East India Company who first took hold of the land for their endeavours (making surveys, sketches, studies,etc.) as extraordinary pioneering ventures by amateurs, the authors are quick to acknowledge that there was another side to these projects, “where surveys fixed boundaries and defined properties for the purposes of revenue; sketches and paintings were a means of statistical documentation; plant studies and introductions served the Company’s economic objectives....These were colonial enterprises and they served not merely to exploit, but also to construct the land, its image, and its self-image”. Deccan Traverses, they aver, is about the materials, ideas, images, skills, and modes of representation that they introduced and the landscapes that they constructed. But it is also about a land that exceeded their reach and exerted its own will.

The visual material in the book runs parallel to the text, the two relating to one another more analogously than convergently. “The number of rare maps and drawings that we have uncovered are not only significant for their depiction of a place,” the authors say, “but also for the techniques and modes of recording a land that was being introduced to new measurements and portrayals.” Extensively referring to and presenting surveys, topographical data, boundaries as also a tradition of maps, textbooks, guide books, and other “carriers of knowledge”, they splatter their book with innumerable sketches, drawings and paintings, plant studies, etc., covering more than 300 years of the city’s checkered history. The authors also proceed to create their own ‘map-prints’ and appropriate some of the found documents in the construction of layered screen prints that embed particular histories and geographies. The digital line drawings and photographs suggesting a mode of traversing these constructed terrains, collectively draw out material rhythms and contemporary issues of Bangalore’s landscape. In the final section of the book, Mathur and da Cunha recount their engagement with this less evident Bangalore, a place of potential rather than identity, ultimately constructing a Bangalore that is as extraordinarily enigmatic as it is emergent.

“Deccan Traverses is ultimately a platform for engaging Bangalore as an open terrain,” believe Mathur and da Cunha. “For recovering the moments of wonder that make the ordinary extraordinary; for seeding new initiatives that cultivate fresh vocabularies and trajectories for future interventions.” Slated for release early next year from the stable of Rupa and Co., the book promises to be informative, illustrative and insightful. Scholarly in approach but equally amenable to the common reader, this is one book which would surely delight not only Bangaloreans but everyone who is interested in its colourful history and uncertain future.

EXCERPTS

The day before Cornwallis’s army stormed the Bangalore pettah at the heart of the Bound Hedge on 7 March 1791 route surveyors reconnoitred it, searching for ways to penetrate its ‘three-mile circumference’ which was fortified with a lofty mud wall, a thick hedge of bamboo, thorny bushes and prickly shrubs nearly a hundred yards wide, and a dry ditch. They found four entrances with strong gates, bastions and guns. They were aware that ‘Many years ago these defences, on repeated occasions, baffled the whole Maratta force’.

The surveyors chose to attack the north entrance of this secure entity… Once within, route surveyors recorded the ‘many streets laid out with much regularity, and of great width; few towns in Hindostan can boast of better houses, or of richer inhabitants, if credit can be given to appearances’.

Surveyors’ records within the pettah were not simple linear progressions anymore but complex ones involving a fanning from and a returning to key points and main roads. They were following the enemy who ‘fled from the gate, but continued firing from the houses for some time. Parties were sent in different directions to dislodge them; and before nine we were in complete possession of the place’. The hills, reservoirs, and trees of the ‘vast flat mountain’ that they had crossed on the march from the Moogly Passwere replaced by walls of houses in which were found ‘bales of cloth, with immense quantities of cotton and grain; . . . [1]ndeed the booty dug up by individuals, out of concealments and deserted houses, strongly indicated ease, comfort, and happiness in former times’.

The surveyor’s drawing of the pettah records an event as much as a spatial entity, registering elements of resistance, lines of access, even lines of fire. It was a historical event of considerable significance according to Robert Colebrooke. ‘If the circumstances attending the siege’, he writes, ‘be considered, … the capture of Bangalore may be deemed one of the greatest achievements of the British arms in India. To Tippoo it was a blow which threw him into such a state of distraction at the time that he is said to have wept’. The event made it a household name in England and led to an East India Company ship being named after Bangalore.