City of strangers

Delhi is a sprawl of black-gated, fortified enclaves (or dense warrens of crumbling housing), with hardly any common spaces. Our roads are like conveyor belts for furiously moving specks of traffic to ring around, fly over or pass under. It’s a Point A to Point B city without a downtown, or a meaningful street life. If indigenous town planning with its chowks and bazaars literally made space for the thrumming patchwork of human energy, for conversation and exchange, “modern” urban planning in India is hopelessly haunted by its colonial past of garrisons and civil lines. Our cities are designed to minimise contact with the other, deny the publicness of public space. As anthropologist Teresa Caldeira has written about Sao Paulo, invoking urban fear is a way of separating the affluent and the poor, the beautiful and the damned — so that work, leisure and living are conducted in sealed spaces. We experience the city in privatised bubbles, we seek our pleasures among people like us.

Our administrative apparatus is hardwired for suspicion — scowling at couples, harassing street vendors, banning dance-bars, deeming cheerleaders at a cricket match inappropriate entertainment for the great unwashed — even as expensive versions of the same pleasures rollick on, unpoliced. Freighted terms like “loitering” imply the impossibility of confidently and rightfully inhabiting an open urban arena. Contrast this to the Parisian flaneur, the purposeless stroller and archetype of urbanity, beloved of writers like Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin — a man who simply (and it is most certainly a man, because the relationship of women and public spaces is a whole other grim story) observes the fragments of his metropolis. The flaneur is a man without a plan, someone who is open to the surprises of a city, who resolutely eschews intention. But don’t try this at home — Delhi, doubtless, gives a hard time to anyone who tries leaving his senses open to a similar experience. It’s no wonder we never learnt to just hang out — compared to cities where public spaces are lavished with attention and artwork, in India it is slightly suspect to seek out the company of crowds, even if there were places to do so.

And predictably, the only semblance of collective life and sensation of ease in a crowd is at a shopping mall. But malls are pretend public spaces. Even as they seemingly invite the world in, they retain the right to evict those who they consider undesirable. The poor and the derelict know they don’t belong, if they are not brutally told so. A shiny happy corporate plaza is not where you find singing and speechifying and socialising, political leaflets or chance conversations — they are consecrated to consumption, and their use is a privilege, not a right.

A public space should be an open vista, accessible to children and lovers and tramps and preachers and old people, because everyone has a right to the city. And the working classes have special stakes in them. While those who can afford it devise their own entertainment in fancy movie theatres or restaurants, city commons are vital for those who want to hang out somewhere without spending money merely to occupy a space. A place like India Gate, where multitudes gather just to watch a child chuck a ball or buy a string of jasmine, eat ice cream and hang out in the open, socialise and gawk at the world, is an eloquent statement on how badly our lives need room for spontaneous, free-form fun.

Perhaps it stands to sense that a society of stark partitions will produce a civic arena just as shrunken and joyless. But then again, cities are the places we transcend petty divisions and learn to relate as impersonal, equal citizens despite them. That’s the grand ethical project at the heart of city life — to be urbane is to be civilised, at the deepest level. It is the tragedy of our towns that they resist this urban adventure, and choose to remain hemmed in rather than living in difference.

amulya.gopalakrishnanexpressindia.com