We Indians are either living in denial or just too happy to be here. The better undoubtedly is denial. Looking at our country, we at least should be on the first step to grief, with one more to go: anger. The reality, however, maybe that too many Indians are happy. There is no impatience with brimming drains, poor workmanship or rampant littering.
A few days ago, Tucker Carlson, an American presenter for broadcast station Fox News, a racist usually, dealt us more home truth. After 75 years of Independence, Tucker asks, has India built anything as beautiful as the erstwhile Victoria Terminus in Bombay? The Happy Indians didn’t even come to know because such news is transmitted in English. The ones in denial wrote the usual outraged rebuttal.
A familiar intuition would have struck those who heard the news as soon as it came out: you just knew Shashi Tharoor would be articulate about Empire’s evils again, and so he was for about 10 minutes on prime-time NDTV. He is a surreal idea: a man whose voice is so posh most English wouldn’t trust it. Tharoor now defends India’s honour from colonial history ever since he won the Oxford Union debate, and some of us were very impressed. He speaks not so much for India as its wounded pride, feelings that commonly afflict the best of us, the emigrant Indians, who go abroad to places of such urban splendour they are hurt by what they are newly conscious of: that India is so crassly different, so full of misery.
Even Indians who lived all their lives in wealthy enclaves suffer when they meet the egalitarian gaze of the white man. In his eyes, you, your maid who lives in a slum, and the many Indians who defecate openly belong to the same people, separated only by a small play of chance: an idea seemingly facile but rudely true.
But this time, at least, we must curb the urge to sound smart like Shashi Tharoor. No matter what Tucker Carlson thinks of Empire, what he said about India’s public buildings is right. Any Indian could have said what he said in private, and it would have been received kindly.
Very few public constructions in India have character. Footpaths are so thick a child might have to climb over them with her or his hands. Almost every bridge in Kerala looks the same, with the same black and white bannister assembled from cement logs because the state tender seeking the builder comes with the same simple aim every time: build something that works as cheap as possible. Yet, in so many instances, the final bridge is neither cheap nor functional.
There are small mercies, though. If how the railway station looked was any indication of India’s professionalism, would anyone get on a train? Isn’t it marvellous how our trains run without being murderously dangerous? But it seems here, too, India’s colonists have a claim.
The fact is our cities are so irredeemably warped even light tinkering would cause great suffering.
Early in its modern life, India did dally with beautiful architecture. And so now, Mumbai has the highest number of Art Deco buildings after Miami, and in Chandigarh, on invitation from Jawaharlal Nehru, Le Corbusier built the Palace of Assembly with a coiffed roof like Elvis Presley’s hair, and Charles Correa built airy, brutal-looking train stations in Navi Mumbai. All of these structural movements are dead as the infatuations they were at the time, and they are closer to India’s long past than its future.
Some of them, like Corbusier’s, were utterly discordant with their surroundings.
V S Naipaul called it ‘megalomaniac architecture’. For Naipaul, Corbusier’s buildings were as alien as the Gothic Victoria Terminus in Bombay: “India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself,” he said. The massive new triangular parliament India is constructing now at great cost is nothing much new either. It, too, will be a mix of red and cream sandstone like the old circular parliament.
The fact is the best of India is in its past, some of which our erstwhile colonisers built. There are so many wonders you can eloquently quote like Shashi Tharoor: the Iron Pillar in Qutub Minar that doesn’t rust, the monolithic bull of Hampi, the intricate marble carvings of Dilwara, the Taj Mahal that has a wooden foundation, and so on. But even this cherished past is not safe from the wildering chaos in India. Some of that precious heritage lies in utter disregard.
Since India’s sense of creed is still forming, for many, the country is still more myth than reality. And so, to a cowherd, the ruins of a Buddhist stupa in the Aravallis hold no particular sentiment but are a convenient spot to dry dung.
For India to truly reignite its passion for beautiful architecture, it must advance from denial to anger. Every Indian deserves so much more than she or he works for. We must have laws against littering and not flatter ourselves with awareness campaigns. We must build stations, parks, bus sheds and apartments more imaginatively. What if India had a national design body?
Every day, it seems India is passing up an opportunity to prove Tucker Carlson wrong. Decades since the Hindutva nationalists demolished Babri Masjid, part of our heritage, a new Ram temple is yet to be. Several lives were lost to this cause.
With the Hindu hardliners seated strongly in power and little scope for a churn in political power, the wrongs of the past may never be set right. But can the Hindutva nationalists at least build a good-looking temple? Can Shashi Tharoor persuade his nationalist friends?
Writer, editor, and investment banking professional from Mumbai