That side of the street
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| R.
Prasad |
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| OPINION |
| That Side Of
The Street |
| An
involuntary apartheid, it's in the fabric of the
'successful' city |
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| Jeremy Seabrook |
For
the past quarter-century, Indian politicians have been obsessed with
transforming their cities into a futuristic elsewhere: Bal Thackeray's
1980s vision of Mumbai as Chicago, the current ambition to make Mumbai
the Shanghai of tomorrow, the desire to bring Manhattan to Marine Drive
and to reshape Bangalore or Hyderabad as Singapore. It seems a pity
that India, land of villages, cannot invent or imagine a city that is
Indian, without reference to some gilded outstation of fantasy.
Now that more than half the world's population is urban, the 'heart' of
a country is no longer to be sought in the rural areas. |
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Emblems
of the new India, Bangalore and Hyderabad flaunt the borrowed plumes of
an alien urbanism. |
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Its cities determine the
country's self-presentation; and image becomes
all-important. The positive image of the city is essentially corporate,
international, a hub of connectivity with other 'world cities'.
Bangalore and Hyderabad have flaunted these borrowed plumes |
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of
an alien urbanism better than anywhere in India; and this is why they,
rather than Mumbai or Delhi, are promoted as emblems of the new India:
characterised by what Solomon Benjamin sees as the distinction between
the 'corporate' and the 'local' economies. The former has priority, in
terms of land, water and power resources, amenities and services, while
the second depends upon local political linkages and networks of
production and distribution. These are bound to go down before the
superior circuits of national and international elites.
Few
cities in India are concerned with all the usual 'social cleansing',
that is the removal to the far periphery of settlements of the poor,
usually for the sake of some high-profile international event (the
Delhi clearances are in anticipation of the Commonwealth Games), some
infrastructural imperative or 'developmental' necessity. All justify
the transfer of land from use for local livelihoods to the corporate
sector. In the process, those disadvantaged by it become virtually
invisible.
There is no need to dilate on the often-rehearsed
'miracle' of Bangalore or Hyderabad. Who is not familiar with those
pyramids of glass lodging footloose international capital, the gilded
nomads of globalism wanting to 'give back' something to India, as long
as they can enjoy luxurious condos, farmhouses, golf courses and
resorts, the tree canopies and colonial bungalows demolished and
transformed into real estate, the four-wheel-drive cars purring in the
ruts of congested streets? IT alone contributes more than 5 per cent to
the Indian economy, and sector exports are estimated at over $30
billion this year. People come from all over India to marvel at
Bangalore and Hyderabad: perhaps they see their own future inscribed in
an iconography of fabulous luxury.
The face India shows to the
world has changed in the past 15 years, from impoverished supplicant to
global competitor. The altered decor of the successful cities is the
embodiment of this. But behind the marble facades, another India
languishes, thrust into an involuntary apartheid by the heroic makers
of fortunes.
The urban poor: on their unacknowledged labour
glittering cities rise. They learned the meaning of hardship very
young: on the stony streets, child labourers—recently once more
legislated out of existence in India—spread their scavenged
treasures—rusty metal, rags, plastic, the toxic residue of
electronic
goods, broken glass and bone. Meanwhile, in the factory, with its long
rows of Juki sewing machines, the rays of sunlight are thick with dust
and cotton particles which quietly, damagingly enter the lungs of young
women bent over garments they will never wear.
If privilege
thinks of poor people at all, it is as hands to open doors, serve
meals, wash clothes; eyes to keep guard over private villas and watch
by night palaces of glass; ears to listen for the thief in the night or
the intruder on the stairs— fragments of humanity.Injustice is
built
into the fabric of the 'successful' city, which exhibits only one
aspect of a world far more complex than anything that appears in its
exotic imagery. The city is undermined by the pain, exploitation and
loss which are built into its fabric, and which remain a constant
threat even to its most soaring structures and glittering monuments to
modernity.
(This is an extract from the author's forthcoming book on
global
cities)
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20070716&fname=FJeremy+Seabrook+%28F%29&sid=1
