CITYZEN. Monumental efforts to erase history

Cities around the world have their own ways of remembering their past. Rome places a great deal of emphasis on its monuments. It is not just examples of ancient Roman architecture that are celebrated. Much later buildings with more local histories also have detailed plaques in front of them explaining their significance. London may not be as elaborate with its plaques but it too marks out the places where history was made, or even where those who made history elsewhere were in the city.

What is fascinating is that the history is not confined to celebrating heroes of the past. There is also recognition of the need to remember the evil the city had to endure. In 2011, Rome unveiled a recently-discovered 2000-year-old statue of Caligula who is remembered as a sex maniac who wanted his horse to be made consul.

Indian cities tend to look back on their past more selectively. Beyond the major monuments there is little effort to remember the past; the more common memories of recent history are frequently erased. A part of this erasure can be attributed to economic pressures. The cost of maintaining old buildings can be quite high. And when it is weighed against the value of the real estate the buildings occupy it is not difficult to spot which consideration usually wins.

It would not be entirely accurate, though, to blame the disdain for the past entirely on economic considerations. There is also a tendency to impose the present on the past. In contrast to the practice in Rome, there is a clear effort to obliterate all that the present generation considers evil. There is widespread belief that remembering the past is necessarily an endorsement of it.

This is best seen in the now-routine task of changing the names of roads in our cities. The very fact that the old names are associated with a past we do not endorse is seen as sufficient reason to change them. That this will also erase memories of the period associated with the old names does not seem to matter, and may even be seen as a bonus.

What’s more, the new names are seen as an endorsement of the personality whose name the road adopts, rather than as a memory of the relationship of that person to the city. Take the case of Mahatma Gandhi Road in Bengaluru. Gandhi had two important influences on the city. In 1915 he initiated work on an institute named after his mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who had passed away earlier that year. In 1927 Gandhi held prayer meetings in another part of the city and, as was his wont, commented extensively on the social and political situation. Yet when a decision to name a road after Mahatma Gandhi was taken, neither of the roads on which Gandhi’s two important encounters with Bengaluru took place was chosen. Instead, South Parade, with its dance halls and bars, was chosen to be named after the Mahatma simply because it was the most elite road in the city.

This view of memory as endorsement alters the written history of the city. It becomes imperative to black out all that the current generation does not endorse. Since endorsement is rarely unanimous we are left facing battles about who should figure in the history of our cities. Further battles are to be fought over what constitutes an endorsement. Protests have been held demanding the banning of books that add a passing less-than-favourable comment to an otherwise supportive commentary on a hero of the past, or for that matter a favourable comment on a historical personality who has fallen out of current favour.

Turning history into a battlefield in which there can be no agreement ensures we do not learn the lessons the past can teach us. It is not that Indian cities were always as dismissive of their past. Most of them had had to deal with the possibility of conflict between different groups. Sometimes their response was to spatially segregate groups while at other times the effort was to come up with norms that built respect for each other.

Few would deny that despite there being less cultural diversity in India today than there existed a century ago, there is no dearth of conflict. Yet there is little evidence of willingness to learn from some of the more enlightened approaches that may have succeeded in a city in the course of its history. Most Indian cities prefer to distort their history than learn from it.

The writer is a professor at the School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru