The country’s capital was Delhi, but Kolkata was considered to be the most important industrial, commercial and cultural centre of the country. It housed the headquarters of many of India’s largest companies as well as multinationals (foreign companies that have branches in many countries). The city had lost part of its surrounding area to East Pakistan but it still had industries and factories from the British era as well as new ones set up by the Indian government, like the Chittaranjan locomotive Works. Park Street was famous for its clubs and late-night parties—it was said to be the liveliest in Asia!
But in the late sixties, communism grew in Kolkata and with it came demanding trade unions. Through the seventies and eighties, the city was repeatedly brought to a halt by strikes against ‘capitalists’ (the industrialists and factory-owners), American policies, the Central government and even against computers! One by one, the companies moved and with that, the art-and-culture scene in the city also suffered. There was politics everywhere, including in educational institutions. By the 1980s, the middle class began to leave in search of better education and jobs. Mumbai was now the country’s new commercial capital—the city for doing business.
By the fifties, Delhi had once again become a patchwork of cities—like the Delhi Ibn Batuta had seen six centuries earlier. There was Old Delhi, including Shahjehanabad and Civil Lines. Then there was Lutyens’s Delhi which was dominated by the national government. There were also many colonies which had been given to the refugees who had come to Delhi after Partition. As the capital city, Delhi also needed space for the civil servants and other government employees who had to come into the city to do their jobs. And so, new government colonies were created for them. Bapanagar, Kakanagar, Satya Marg and Moti Bagh are some of them. In the seventies, a large, new township called rama Krishna Puram was built to the south-west.
These government areas were planned in such a way that employees would get housing according to their ranks. So if you were a civil servant, you were expected to slowly make your way up this housing ladder. This ladder was there for the military, public sector, university professors and even for the private sector. Smaller versions of it were created in the state capitals and in industrial townships.
Life in the government colonies had its pluses and minuses. Design and maintenance was poor. Painted in limewash, the walls flaked off to the touch. The doors and windows expanded and contracted with the seasons. But the houses for the more senior officials were spacious, located in a convenient area, and there were parks and other such facilities available for their use. Everyone would move up the rank at around the same time, so this meant that though people were moving homes, their neighbours more or less remained the same!
By the late eighties, the children who had grown up in such colonies began to marry across communities. Till then, the Indian middle class had been strongly linked to its origins. There was the Tamil middle class, the Bengali middle class, the Punjabi middle class and so on. It’s not that they weren’t proud of their Indian identity but their roots were firmly tied to where they had come from. This changed with the next generation intermarrying. Suddenly, there was a group of people whose identity came from living in such housing colonies across community lines, going through the stiff examination systems, Bollywood films, cricket etc. Their roots were not really in the place of their origin (or rather the place of their parents’ origin).
In the period between the mid-fifties and the mid-eighties, there were many ‘modernist’ buildings that came up in the cities. Somehow, the idea of such unappealing, stark buildings caught on and architects designed buildings that were not just unfriendly to the user and difficult to maintain, but were also super ugly! And so, India, which is home to the beautiful Taj Mahal is also home to some of the world’s ugliest buildings. Every major city has them—Nehru Place and Inter-State Bus Terminal in Delhi, the Indian Express Building in Mumbai and the Haryana State Secretariat in Chandigarh.
In 1950, Prime Minister Nehru invited Le Corbusier, a French architect, to design the new city of Chandigarh. Although the new city was to be built at the heart of the ancient Sapta-Sindhu and very close to the Saraswati-Ghaggar, Nehru told corbusier to create a city that was ‘unfettered’ by India’s ancient civilization. That is, the Prime Minister did not want the city to have any links with the past. A lot of money and material was poured into building the new city. Other existing cities were also subjected to ‘master plans’. Delhi was master-planned in 1962 into strict zones according to use. But then, this never really worked. New cities like durgapur never really took off. Even Chandigarh, an expensively built city, is not of much economic or cultural value though it’s been many decades since it was built. Chandigarh was constructed according to Nehru’s idea of what India should be like in the future.
The twenty-first century city that has become the face of India is a chaotic, unplanned, annoying and dynamic township: Gurgaon.
GURGAON IS KEWL
Gurgaon lies to the south of Delhi. You have already read that it was here that Dronacharya, the guru of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, is said to have lived. Though Gurgaon is near Delhi, its population was estimated to be just 3990 in 1881 and nearby towns like rewari and Farrukhnagar had much larger populations. The British used Gurgaon as district headquarters, and the town had a small market, public offices, the homes of some Europeans and a settlement called Jacombpura. An old road connected Gurgaon to Delhi through Mehrauli. This is MG Road as we know it today.
For the first few decades after Independence, Gurgaon remained a small town in a mostly rural district. The first major change came when Sanjay Gandhi, son of then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, acquired a large plot of Land to start an automobile company in the early 1970s. This is now the Maruti-Suzuki factory, but the project didn’t take off immediately.
However, from the early eighties, a number of real estate developers (people who buy Land and develop it so they can sell it for profit later), particularly DLF, began to purchase farmland along the Delhi border. The idea was to build a suburbia for Delhi’s retiring civil servants. Though the Maruti car factory got on its feet by 1983, nobody really thought Gurgaon would one day become what it is now.
What changed? In 1991, India liberalized its economy.
Economic liberalization means the government reduces its regulations and restrictions so that more private businesses can participate in the economy. Liberalization in short is ‘the removal of controls’ in order to encourage economic development.
Around the same time, communications and information technology also improved hugely. A number of multinational companies saw their opportunity—call centres and back office operations could now be outsourced to India. Delhi was a good location for this because not only were there people who’d be able to do these jobs, it also had a well-connected international airport.
But remember Delhi was master-planned? The old planners had never really thought that such offices would come up in the future and there was simply no space for them to be set up. And so, the outsourcing companies jumped across the border to Gurgaon and began to build huge facilities for this new industry. A lot of young workers moved to Gurgaon because of this. Many of these people were the children of civil servants, public sector employees, military officers and schoolteachers.
With the young people came the malls and the restaurants. As they got married and had children, apartment buildings that were more suited to their lifestyle came up. Schools and other educational institutions began to multiply. All of this happened really fast as well. You can figure that out by looking at the lone milestone that survives on MG Road under the elevated Metro line (in front of Bristol Hotel). This is now actually the city-centre but the milestone says that Gurgaon is 6 km away!
The construction of Gurgaon was not planned. The city came up because of lack of rules and a disregard for rules when they existed. What was a sleepy town till the mid-1990s has become a throbbing city full of gleaming office towers, metro st
ations, malls, luxury hotels and millions of jobs. Of course, Gurgaon has serious civic problems, ranging from clogged roads to bad power supply. It’s also true that if it had been better managed, it would have been a more attractive city.
But it’s hard to deny the bursting energy of the place. It stands for the new India which the government is struggling to keep up with.
SLUMDOGS WITH BITE
One of the important things about new India is that the children of farmers no longer want to farm. This is true across the country. There are many reasons for this change. Literacy and growing access to television are transforming attitudes as well as aspirations. But the biggest reason is probably money. The farm economy now generates 13 per cent of the GDP and it is steadily decreasing. This has happened because of various factors. Farmers can obviously see for themselves where the money is and they do not want to invest in their Land any more. Indian farming has become inefficient and its rewards are too few. The children of farmers desire other options. They want the cities.
This means that there will be more and more migration to the cities in future. Large cities will grow larger, small towns will expand and brand new cities will be built. In some ways, India is going through the same phase that developed countries have gone through at some point. Development, in the end, is about shifting people from farming for their own needs to other activities. And urbanization is how we see this process in terms of space. That is, people moving from rural farming areas to the city areas. Urban India will probably have to take in 300–350 million people over the next three decades. A huge expansion!
The explosive growth of cities like Gurgaon shows that India’s rapidly expanding economy can generate enough jobs for all these people who want to move in. But how to match them to the jobs? Where will they live? What facilities will they have? This is not an easy business. Countries like China managed to do this by using very harsh social controls. How will India cope?
Most people are horrified by the kind of living conditions we see in Indian slums. The usual reaction is to think that this is a housing problem. Over the decades, we have seen many slum re-development projects that try to send slum-dwellers into specially built housing blocks, often built on the outskirts. But most of these efforts have failed. More often than not, the slum-dwellers sell, rent out or even abandon these blocks and move to a new slum!
Why does this happen? Slums don’t form only because people don’t have houses to stay in. A slum is an economy of its own which gives people information about jobs (inside and outside), a sense of security and a feeling of community. It’s through the slum that people from rural areas learn the ways of the city and become part of it. They also provide the city its blue-collar workers—maids, drivers, factory-workers.
Slums are not really new to India. We know there were slums in Harappan Dholavira, Mughal Delhi and in colonial Bombay. Slums are not unique to India either. There were slums in New York and London in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Indian slums are full of enterprise and energy. They are also quite safe. You can walk through the average Indian slum even at night without the fear of being harmed. How does this happen? It happens because the people living there, the migrants, don’t look at the slum as a symbol of all that they can’t have. Instead, they look at it as a foothold into the city. Life in a slum is definitely hard but in a fast growing economy, there is enough work for people to do so they can improve the state of their lives if they work hard, show enterprise and obey the law. This is not to say slums are awesome and that the people living there don’t need any help. Obviously, they need better sanitation, health and education facilities, among others. Just that in real life, an Indian slum is not the kind of hopeless place as shown in movies like Slumdog Millionaire.
ROCKING TO MUNNI
A city usually expands by taking in the countryside surrounding it. In some cases, the old villages are swept away. But in most parts of India, the old villages often survive despite being surrounded by the city. Scattered across modern Indian cities, there are places where you can clearly see the borders of the old villages even decades after the farmlands surrounding them have been taken over by offices, roads, houses and shops.
Allowing the past to live on in the present is not new to Indian civilization. From the villages surrounding the city come the the cattle we often see on urban roads! They are also places you may want to visit if you are looking to buy bathroom tiles or electrical fittings. Many of these villages have become part of the city very recently but some are very old and have been within the city for many generations. In Mumbai, the villages of Bandra and Walkeshwar are located at the heart of the city but they still bear the remains of their origins.
Let’s look at the experience of urban villages in and around Delhi. Roughly speaking, we can say that these villages go through the following cycle. In the first stage, the farmers sell their farmland to the government or to a developer. But they usually leave the village settlement alone. The former farmers then notice that there isn’t enough living space for the large groups of workers, contractors and suppliers who have come to work on the construction site in their farmland. And so, they use the money they got by selling their farmland to build a bunch of buildings within the village settlement. These buildings are often unsafe and have poor ventilation. And they become home to the workers. Thus, the village itself turns into a slum and the former farmers become slumlords.
What happens next? The construction work comes to an end in the area and the workers move away to other places where there is a better chance of earning a livelihood. New people move into the village because there are now jobs in the newly built buildings—security guards, maids, drivers and others. The shops selling construction material and hardware change into shops that sell mobile phones, street food, car parts and so on. Facilities such as common toilets are set up. As the new batch of workers settles in, they bring along their families from their Ancestral villages. English medium schools come up—the language is held by the poor as the single most important tool for going up the social ladder.
Another ten to fifteen years and the village goes through its third transformation. By this time, the surrounding area is well settled and the open fields are a thing of the past. We now see students, salesmen and small businessmen move into the village. Some of them may be the newly educated children of those who came to the area as workers, the children of migrants, but they are now of a higher social class.
The old villagers continue to be the dominant owners of the Land but they also spend money to improve their properties so they can get better rent. These buildings are now in a prime location, after all. In many cases, the owners also have political connections by this stage and they manage to get drainage and sanitation facilities. The shops improve, the old street-food shops become cheap restaurants.
In the final stage, the old village becomes a place that suits the tastes of the urban middle class. This can happen in a number of ways. Since the early nineties, hauz Khas village has become a place full of boutiques, shops, art galleries and trendy restaurants. Mahipalpur, near the international airport, has seen an explosion of cheap hotels in the last decade. Anyone driving to or from the airport would have seen the screaming neon signs that are quite like those of Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district. Similarly, Shahpur Jat has become home to many small offices and designer workshops.
The old farmers now become part of the real estate business. The old farmlands now have new problems—parking space! Out of this messy process, a new India emerges. It’s dominated by the new middle class who are very different from the middle class of the past. They come from slums and small towns. They are usually the first in their family who can speak some English. Their parents were probably the first in the family to become literate. Their grandparents were probably illiterate, small-time farmers. The new middle class works in call centres or as shop assistants in malls. Sports heroes in India used to come from wealthy backgrounds but now, they come from
more modest social backgrounds.
As the new middle class goes up the social ladder, its tastes and attitudes change what is considered mainstream in society. You can see it happening everywhere—from Bollywood music to television news. Find yourself humming to Munni? Welcome to the new mainstream! The uppity people of the old middle class may not like this but this is generally a good thing.
OUTSOURCED
As we saw in the earlier chapter, Indians had once again begun to travel and settle abroad during the time of the British. What happened to these people after British rule in India ended? In some places like Singapore and Mauritius, the Indian community did well. But in many other places, they ran into problems. In 1962, the Indian community in Burma was expelled by the dictator Ne Win. Property owned by Indians was taken away from them. The same thing happened to the Gujaratis who had moved to Uganda. Some of these groups came back to India but some left for other countries. The Ugandan Gujaratis, for example, moved to Britain and became successful business people there.
After Independence, the nature of how people moved from India to other countries changed. There was one wave in the fifties and the sixties, with Punjabis moving to the United Kingdom as industrial workers. Another was of Anglo-Indians who moved to Australia and Canada. By the 1970s, the oil-rich Arab states in the Persian Gulf became a popular destination because they needed labourers in large numbers for their construction sites. Most labourers who moved to Saudi Arabia were from Kerala and many of these people were descendants of Arabs who had come to India in the Middle ages to trade. By the 1990s, large Indian communities settled down in places like Dubai.
The Incredible History of India's Geography Page 21