Work Cultures

A collection of photographs from the project - "Worlding the City : The Futures of Bangalore".

In 1949, the twin municipalities of Bangalore City and Cantonment were brought together in the Bangalore City Corporation. A pete founded in the 16th century and a cantonment established in the 19th century were administratively united in the 20th century. More important, two distinct cultures, linguistic territories and spatial identities, separated by a swathe of parkland and institutional areas -- stretching from the Indian Institute of Science in the North west through the Palace Grounds, Golf course and Cubbon Park, to the Mental Hospital in the south east -- were joined. Some of the older divisions continue to haunt the city to this day, as the ‘east-west zonation’ of the city continues. Others have disappeared over the past fifty years as new challenges and opportunities have been thrown up, continually transforming the shape of the city and the lives of its people. First wrenched out of its existence as a divided town to become a big city in the 1970s, Bangalore was startled into the recognition that it was already a metropolis by the 1980s, hurtling towards a destiny it only reluctantly acknowledges, and for which it is largely unprepared. While the population has increased from 7.79 lakhs in 1951 to more than 50 lakhs by the turn of the century, the city has expanded far beyond the 66 sq km of that time to a conurbation area of 449 sq km today.

Bangalore is at once the capital of Karnataka state, the home of several large scale public sector industries and their ancillaries -- and more recently the infotech and garment industries -- and gateway to styles of globalised consumption. Thus the city has always been marked by regional, national and global forces and interests in very definite ways. These interests lay claim to the city, its many pasts, and possible futures, and thereby make it their own. If the middle class locality once wore the proud badge of the public sector company (e.g. HAL Second Stage), today the dream of dollars lends it name to entire colonies (e.g. Dollar Colony). If there once were areas of the city where Kannada was rarely heard, (e.g. Fraser Town) as the city is reterritorialised today, a more assertive voice of the region is heard (e.g. Pulakeshi Nagara). From a time when local market-gardeners (Tigalas) prided themselves on growing European fruits, flowers, and vegetables for the colonial master, on farms scattered across the city, to a time when global foods crowd the supermarket shelf, internationalised tastes are widely cultivated and encouraged. The tank bed, once considered open or waste land, fit only for occupation by the poor, is the most contested site in Bangalore today. Consequently, the city is a far more disturbed zone, a restless territory which rarely conforms to the planners’ map or the administrators’ designs.

From a town of tanks and vineyards, low walled compounds and walkable distances in the 1950s, the city has spread in all directions, unhindered by any natural boundaries. The growing middle class thirst for sites has consumed farmland and village, within and beyond corporation limits, displacing thousands from market-gardening communities, and transforming the urban fabric. By the late 1970s, the city found a new vertical orientation, and apartments and multistoried office blocks soon became not just a necessity but a desirable address. In the late 1990s, the metropolis has continued to expand both upward and outward, the grid of the layout marching on over farm and tank bed, on the one hand, while high rise structures crowd out small lanes.

At which historical moment may we say that the city has taken its final shape? All developments produce new spaces as much as they breathe life into older ones. A space designed for military activities was turned into the metropolis’ most desirable business district (MG Road area). A cinema hall yielded space to a shopping complex (e.g.Alankar and Minerva). A tank bed was throttled with buildings (e.g.Millers’ Tank) and the city stretched beyond the bicycle’s reach. In the early 1970s, bicycles were the dominant mode of transport in the city (accounting for 71 per cent of daily passenger trips): today the city is ferociously automobilised, and one-way streets make Bangalore unfamiliar to older residents. The neighbourhood no longer meets the needs of all people for work, education or leisure; the metropolis requires corridors of speed which bypass or flyover the thick profusion of city life on the ground. The imaginary boundary of the green belt has given way to a new girdle that is thrown around the city, the Ring Road.

At the same time, the need for globalised spaces - five star hotels, golf courses or tech parks which conform to international standards -- takes uneasy precedence over the democratic demands of the poor or underprivileged for water, housing, public transport. The privacies of the privileged can no longer be guaranteed in a deeply iniquitous city, except in gated apartment blocks with 24 hour security systems, a new, sometimes tyrannical privacy. And no part of the city’s development has occurred without its costs. The story of Kempegowda’s triumph as a city founder was also the story of Lakshmamma’s sacrifice. The metropolis is not just a place where people live, love and die, but a space founded on contests, pain, loss, negotiation and even violence. Beneath every monumental edifice, every architectural masterpiece, every idyllic advertisement, are transactions that are not always just, negotiations that are sometimes reversed, and people who are dispossessed. Within the unity that was declared in 1949, then, there are many cities of Bangalore.

Yet, in a democracy such as ours, people make their own meanings of urban space, in both physical-material and mental-imaginative ways. The two dimensional map may be only one limited way of getting to know the territory of the city. Territories are marked and used in ways that were not anticipated by planners and designers. These are moments in a city’s history that are not usually memorialised in stone, recorded in texts, or captured in photographs. Yet they tell us much that is different from the triumphal procession of heroes and victors in usual histories of the city. This exhibition offers a different perspective, free of nostalgia for other times (e.g. the colonial past) or yearning for unreal spaces ( e.g. Singapore). Because only an unsentimental look at the city of our time may help us imagine a possible future.

- Janaki Nair

Work Cultures

The field of information technology, although very visible in the media today, is only the latest in a long history of work cultures that Bangalore city has nurtured. The Bangalore drugget, a once prized product of the city’s woollen industry, is only a dim memory. But the clack of power looms in the Cubbonpet area to this day echoes the work culture of the oldest manufacturing zone of the city. Weavers and dyers of the artificial silk industry, which has adapted to new markets and demands, work in darkened rooms and in dangerous conditions to produce vibrant fabrics. Other large 19th century textile mills in the western part of Bangalore have been less fortunate by comparison, falling silent as they succumb to the pressures of new markets and technologies.

Central and state government workers still account for nearly two thirds of all organised sector jobs in the city. Largely ‘invisible’, since they lie in what were once the outskirts of the city, are Bangalore’s massive public sector units, which produce anything from aircraft and earth movers to watches and telephones. In the early 1980s these units employed nearly 80,000 workers. Along with the public sector came the ancillaries, as well as the national labs and defence establishments which worked in close co-operation.

Bangalore was a ‘union city’ in the 1970s, dominated by the privileged, male public sector worker. The new face of city’s workforce today is the young female, usually non-unionised garment worker, health transcriptionist, or TV assembler, who works in scattered units across the city, and in far less secure working conditions. Today’s shopfloor may contain more computers than conveyor belts, more women than men, and much younger workers.

Since the 1980s, the city has become the centre of new ‘producer services’ – banking, finance, advertising, real estate – as well as expanding consumer services demanded by the more affluent sections of city society. Bangalore abounds in establishments offering computer services, leisure activities, specialised shopping, catering, and beauty care, where greater flexibility has come to mean longer hours, including work at night and on weekends.

But by far the most important section of workers in Bangalore are those of the informal sector, in which people eke out a living from a wide range of jobs which are neither permanent nor in fixed locations, and are impossible to unionise. The side streets and pavements of an area marked as a slum throb with economic activity, producing a range of products and services for local or city wide consumption. An expanding city provides jobs to hundreds of women and men who toil as builders, though their conditions of work have changed little over the past fifty years. Children are important wage earners, thronging the hotel industry and often engaged in home-based production.

Other services and occupations have simply faded away, in the face of changing tastes and styles of consumption. Many itinerants are no more than a receding memory. No longer does the Chinese man come around with a tin box full of silks or rice flour to make dolls to order. Few people have use for the man who freshened the cotton mattress, or the woman who ground spices for the family. Even the photographer who once roamed the streets and willingly took family photographs has now retreated into the full- fledged photo studio. And although Bangalore has provided jobs to hundreds of workers in the Kannada film industry since the 1960s, photographic reproductions are fast replacing the signboard painter.