CITY FRAMES : Nostalgia City

BENGALURU: Is there a hunger for a Bangalore that no longer exists? There’s a deep hunger for the way things were – especially among middle-class Bengalureans.

There’s a popular Facebook group called Bangalore - Photos from a Bygone Age. Membership is by invitation only. It has close to 30,000 members, and that’s a high number for a closed Facebook group. “We started the group around four years ago, but membership has really spiked in the past couple of years,” says Mansoor Ali, an architect and one of the group’s administrators. Initially, most of the members were people who had lived in Bangalore when they were young, but later moved abroad to study or work. “For them, it was a way of connecting with the city they grew up in,” says Ali.

The nature of the content posted has changed too, says Ali. “Initially it was all archived material – stuff that would be found in libraries, but now people are posting much more personal material,” he says. It’s true. There are photos of lovingly preserved ticket stubs to shows in theatres long gone. Photos of uncles on Norton motorcycles – remember those? And photo after photo of MG Road, from the days when nobody thought the city would need a metro line.

According to Ali, what happened to MG Road is emblematic of what has happened to the city. “The green space at the heart of the city was where we used to hang out, and for a certain generation of citizens, the loss of that space to the metro was a disaster.

It’s not just the group. Get on Youtube and you’ll find page after page of results for “Old Bangalore”, mostly slideshows of old photographs and movie scenes. Every week, it seems that one newspaper or another carries stories about heritage buildings.

You can’t have social change without nostalgia. And looking at a sepiatone past through rose-tinted spectacles is easy…and can deceive. People were people, just as mean and petty and cruel and generous and good then as they are now. No amount of age can render the brutalism of some of our government buildings beautiful. But when the change is rapid, irreversible – and unsightly, the nostalgia becomes a route to a deep rage and a sense of impotence – something that manifests in public anger about murderous potholes and sewers that turn deathtraps in an evening’s rain and lakes that catch fire.

Perhaps nothing symbolizes this attitude more than the fate of the Krumbiegel Lecture Hall in Lalbagh. Left neglected until a wall collapsed, the 157 year old building was demolished – despite the efforts of citizens to get the authorities to restore it. In the meanwhile, the horticulture department has been spending its time and money on recreating “Niagara Falls” in Lalbagh as a tourist attraction.

Critics of nostalgia point out that it’s much better to deal with the complexity of the future, instead of moping about a past that might never have existed. But faced with a present that contains intractable traffic jams, terrible infrastructure, an exploding population and an uncaring state, sometimes a fantasy of the past is all you have.

(In this column, people record their impressions of Bengaluru)