The Idea of India by Khilnani Sunil

Author:Khilnani, Sunil [Khilnani, Sunil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141937243
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

As a counterpoint to these new cities, the British also invented a new countryside for themselves. Not very keen on the exhaustingly hot, dusty plains and low villages that encircled their new cities, they created the hill station – superb sites in the Himalayas and in the more gentle Nilgiri mountains in the south. Here an image of the English countryside, complete with creaking gates and pruned roses, was tenderly nurtured. The British gratefully retreated to mock-Tudor bungalows and wooden cottages, and indulged in homesick idylls; but they also did business, turning the hill stations into temporary secretariats: Simla, the grandest and most elegant of them all, was for at least part of the year the supreme power in the land.

The civilizing ambitions of the British Raj were routinely rehearsed in the city. No longer merely a pier whence to freight wealth out of the country, the city become a stage where the regalia of British sovereignty was displayed, where the Indian was ruled, where space was most explicitly governed. The rectangular securities of the European station became a notional norm for the entire society. But the conception of the city embodied in the precise assignments of space within British civil and military lines did not mesh with any Indian conceptions, and Indians played little part in defining its meanings. There was no prolonged duel, as in Britain or France, about what a city and its purposes should be, no jostling between crowds and the state which gave a political sense to the public squares or boulevards. The colonial conception was imposed. Given the scale and numbers involved, the success of this imposition depended less on active surveillance and police, more on the ability to fabricate shared, self-disciplinary meanings: of what a city was, of its public and private spaces, and of the rules of each. But this domain of shared meanings extended only to the Indian élites and middle classes, who by the early decades of the twentieth century had grown to a substantial presence in the cities. They aspired to the glistening fruits of modernity tantalizingly arranged before them – street lights, electric fans, tree–lined streets, clubs, gardens and parks – and they willingly emulated the behaviour and acquired the self-restraining habits of the modern city-dweller. Outside these powerful but small circles, however, assent to metropolitan civilities abruptly tailed off. To the poor, to migrants from the countryside, to the destitute, the British idea of a modern city was meaningless; it never reached them.

This conceptual stand-off was evinced by a trait that has repeatedly struck the eye attuned to the modern city, a fact that nonplussed colonials and that present-day visitors have ceaselessly fretted over: the stance that residents of Indian cities appear to take towards waste – refuse, excreta, death. A city like Benares, for instance, seemed to the Western eye defective in its reluctance to rationalize social life by quarantining activities in different parts of the city, by assigning them to European definitions of the public and private realms.

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