Bangalore is a notoriously tough city to pin down. With no clear defining narrative, the spirit and essence of what drives this city has always been maddeningly elusive. Is it a pensioner’s paradise? A land of monotonously great temperate weather? Or one that is overrun by a tragic oversupply of mall rats, software start-ups and hive-like high-rise apartments?
Many of these thought-provoking questions, coupled with entertaining nuggets of anecdote, humour and comment joust for space in Multiple City: Writings on Bangalore, an engaging and very readable anthology of essays, personal recollections, translations from Kannada literature and short stories edited by Bangalore-based writer and journalist Aditi De.
Penned by a widely disparate group of writers spanning over a century (R.K. Narayan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Pankaj Mishra, Winston Churchill, Mahesh Dattani, Thomas Friedman, William Dalrymple and other less familiar names) the book’s 51 selections range from Bangalore’s amorphous geography to its peculiar festivals and social rituals, its lost multi-lingual communities and its recent transformation into a glossy hub of India’s technology boom — all of which almost startle the reader into an appreciation of the city’s boggling diversity.
Multiple City contains all the obvious signposts: in R.K. Narayan’s ‘The Town of Boiled Beans’ and Suryanth Kamath’s ‘A City Yet Unborn’, for instance, we’re introduced to Magadi Kempe Gowda, a warlord who rose to be the founder of Bangalore. Contrast Geeta Doctor’s lyrical, charming piece on the history of the Bangalore Cantonment Area against Sham Banerji’s ‘Bit by Byte’ and you will be able to map the city’s metamorphosis from a once-elegant city for retirees to one that now thrives on a 24/7 culture.
But for someone who has grown up in Bangalore, or for the rootless wanderers who have recently made it their home, it is the intimate stories — Ramachandra Guha’s moving portrait of Mr Shanbhag, the reticent owner of the famous Premier Bookshop, Shashi Deshpande and Janaki Nair’s evocative memoirs of the places they frequented as young girls — that reveal the real pulse of the city.
Taken together, this collection represents what is possibly one of the fullest pictures that you will see of Bangalore, a city that continues to be a wellspring of material for regional writing.