Suman Gopinath, 'Bangalore'
In: Magnet. Edited by Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2001, pp. 30-31.
It was the summer of 2001, in London, that the idea for a research project on Bangalore was first talked abut. The 'Century City' show at the Tate Modern had just opened. Grant Watson, a curator I work with, and I had been to a seminar which accompanied the show. We were asked if we would like to research an exhibition on Bangalore "not as a requiem for a dead city" we were told, "but instead as an investigation of one of the liveliest and fastest growing cities in Asia". I was excited, as this would give me a chance to regard critically the city that I have always lived in, but , like all things familiar, never thought much about.
It was about the same time that our group – Magnet – decided to address the notion of non-place as the theme for our journal. In my attempt to define this concept I saw the new Bangalore as a location for both place and non-place. Material from our research on the city could perhaps provide an entry into a whole new area – that of non-place.
Up until the 1970s, Bangalore was quiet, middle-class, laid back in character, remarkable for its moderate climate, trees and gardens. The most common descriptions I seem to remember were either 'Pensioners Paradise' or 'Garden City'. All this changed dramatically in the late 1990s with economic liberalization. Large multinationals and Infotech industries brought an inflow of global money into the city. The result: unbelievably high salaries, inflationary prices and high levels of consumption. The shift to the fast track has changed the urban fabric of the city entirely.
The Lonely Planet guide describes Bangalore as: "The capital of Karnataka State ….a thriving modern business center , dubbed the silicon Valley of India whose gracious garrison features are being remodeled in the image of India's mall loving middle class…Its stark contrast with the rest of the state is evident in the MG Road area where fast food joints, yuppie theme bars and glitzy malls are all the rage."
The city has begun to reinvent itself but in the process has created an environment that is divorced from its people and context. And yet for all its rapid urbanization, Bangalore's development as a city has remained piecemeal. Unplanned growth has led to the city engulfing villages: though absorbed by the city, many of them continue their self-contained existence relatively independent of the commercial center. This proximity of the rural with the urban doesn't always make for a tension- free existence but it does provide the space for two completely different lifestyles to continue side by side.
Sheela Gowda addresses some of these issues in her work Private Gallery, made in 1998/99 for a group show called Tales of 6 Cities: this work reflects Gowda’s perceptions as an artist living in Bangalore City and working on the periphery, where the borders between the urban and the rural are blurred. Private Gallery is a room made of a synthetic wooden veneer, 5 ft. x 5 ft. in size, and looks like a large sculptural piece from the outside. On the inside, it is made up of two panels fixed perpendicular to each other ( 6.5 ft. x 6.5 ft.), dotted with cowdung pats and paintings.
The first response to the work is sensory, an overwhelming awareness of the smell of cowdung, coupled with the discomfort of feeling hemmed-in. Gowda uses the three genres of painting: still life, landscape and portraiture – to allude to different aspects of the city. The images of Bangalore that she evokes through these are Bangalore as the 'Garden City', the fast growing metropolis and as a space where the urban and rural co exist. The last is suggested in the rough portraits of some of the people she knows from this milieu.
On a formal level, the work situates itself somewhere between painting, installation and performance, while in a very literal sense, in her choice of materials – the artificial veneer and cowdung, the work can be read as the co-existence of the pseudo-modern city with the village. Gowda doesn’t see this as derogatory but rather as a positive sign of resistance.
Historian Janaki Nair who is currently writing a book on Bangalore, sees these signs as hope for the city. The metropolis, she says, is not just a place where people live but a space founded on contests, pain, loss, dispossession, negotiation and violence. She suggests that for every attempt to render 'place' into 'space' there lies a struggle, which we in our context may call the operation of democracy.
It remains a matter of speculation if Bangalore can withstand the onslaught of urbanization or if it will succumb and be transformed into a global, homogenized non-place.