I asked Girish Karnad what he made of Bangalore’s IT transformation. “Actually, I became comfortable financially because of Infosys,” he said. He’s vaguely related, he explained, to Nandan Nilekani, one of the company’s founders. Back when they were getting started, and no one understood what IT was, Nilekani had urged Karnad to buy shares in the company. “I said, no, I don’t want to buy shares, I’m not interested in investment,” Karnad said. “He said, take it, take it. I got very irritated; I said to my wife, look, this Nandan Nilekani is irritating me. I told him I don’t want shares, but he won’t let go. And my wife gave a very typical small-town answer: she said, you know, he has such nice parents, they’re such loving relatives to us, why don’t you buy a few shares? So I bought it for family reasons. And suddenly within ten years it had become the miracle firm, and those shares paid for this house. That really pulled me up from being a lower-middle-class family man to a comfortable economic frame. I wish I’d invested more.”
It wasn’t a boom for everyone. “A large section of the local population feels completely lost,” Karnad said. “In the good old days, there was employment for local people, at factories and manufacturing units and so on. They could see where the money came from, how it was related. With information technology, it’s all remote; it’s all happening somewhere electronic. And it’s employing people who have nothing to do with you. It’s a layer of money which is totally incomprehensible to those who came here earlier.”
Lucky young techies, men and women alike, poured into Bangalore from all over India, liberated upon their arrival in the city by their pay cheques, their stock options, and a globalised culture that was the tech companies’ double-edged bequeathal. And liberated by distance: these engineers – so young and so quickly rich – could live a city life untethered by the conservative village-style social mores that had heretofore dictated their every move. And Bangalore rose to meet them. The city mushroomed with café chains and colossal malls and microbreweries and nightclubs to cater to the techies’ fancies and absorb their salaries.
Many Bangaloreans who’d at first thought of IT as a blessing came to think of it as a curse. Locals began to feel like servants to the techies, just as an earlier generation of locals had been servants to the British (and just as the techies themselves were largely serving Western corporate interests). And they began to feel alienated in their own city. From 1980 to 2000, Bangalore’s population doubled; then from 2000 to 2020, it doubled again. Its streets became more congested with traffic than any city not just in India but in the entire world, an incomprehensible development to old Bangaloreans whose whole self-image was built on the assumption that they lived in a sleepy town. Road-widening projects destroyed countless parks and trees. Smog descended. The temperature elevated. Even as its water needs exploded, unchecked development obliterated hundreds of its famous lakes – the equivalent of paving over twenty square kilometres of urban wetlands. Of the three primary lakes that Kempe Gowda built, none are still functional. For the first time, the city is vulnerable to floods, even as it threatens to run out of drinking water entirely; many neighbourhoods now need to have it trucked in daily. Since 2015, one of the few surviving major lakes has regularly overflowed with a toxic, foul-smelling white foam, as high as ten feet and frothing onto the roadway. Twice while I was in Bangalore the lake also caught fire.
But the locals knew whom to blame. When tensions erupt over dwindling resources – as in September 2016, when scarce water led to riots in Bangalore – techies are typically the targets, the glass windows of their office towers smashed, their employee buses pelted with stones. The old generation of scientists is as likely as anyone to resent the new generation of tech. Meanwhile, in the United States, “Bangalore” became a pejorative verb: laid-off American workers claimed that they’d been “Bangalored,” that the city had ‘stolen’ their jobs.
Depending on how you count it, one in ten or even one in five Bangaloreans now work in tech. The locals often complain that the techies are generally divorced from local culture, local history, local language, and local politics. When they do vote, techies tend to vote for the BJP, which promises an India in which traditionalist Hindus dominate – but which also promises a business-friendly India, a free-market India, a privatised India, a technologically uplifted India.
“All cities grow, all cities have a population of people constantly floating in from outside,” the novelist Shashi Deshpande writes. “But this generally happens over a period of time, giving room for assimilation, for absorption. In Bangalore, this process has been just too rapid, so there are too many people who have no idea of its original culture and yet, because of their incomes and positions, have a great influence over the shape of the city. And therefore the danger that it could be a city completely cut off from its past. An amnesiac city.”
Bangalore is the kind of city that’s long felt a sense of decline, of the best years continuously receding; in part, nostalgia is simply a facet of its personality. Like New York City, Bangalore is a place whose heyday was always before you got there (and you’re constantly schooled on what you missed out on by anyone who got there slightly before you did).
When Gauri Lankesh wrote to complain about the transformation of Bangalore, she was unsentimental about it. She didn’t eulogise lost bungalows or shuttered restaurants. She wrote that, even as the city grew, its spaces for protest had shrunk: first protesters were banned from demonstrating across from the state legislature building and pushed towards the city’s town hall; then they were pushed towards Freedom Park (the grounds of a former prison), and now some Bangaloreans want to push protesters outside the city limits, where they won’t disrupt traffic. “This way,” she wrote, “protestors have the satisfaction of having raised their voice, the government is happy that it is not being bothered, and the ‘common man’ is blissful in his ignorance since he does not know what’s happening around him.” Or she rued the loss of safety for women in the Bangalore of her youth; when a man was a pest on the street, she wrote, “the atmosphere those days was such that if a girl stood her ground and said ‘haccha,’ or yelled, ‘yenu, chappali seve beka?’ (what, you want me to beat you with my slipper?), they would vamoose faster than Lewis Hamilton.”
More often, she wrote about the old injustices that hadn’t changed at all: for example, that the new IT companies, for all their reputation of egalitarianism, were just as likely as any other high-prestige industry to pass over ‘low’ caste and Muslim job applicants in favour of Brahmins. And she railed against the idea that Bangalore should benefit disproportionately from state-funded development simply because it now – thanks to IT – generated most of the state’s tax revenues. “Bengaluru sucks from outside, digests the best portions, and throws out the waste,” she wrote. “Money, like garbage, works both ways, folks! Both should be spread around, if not, they start to stink.”
In these past few pages, I’ve made Bangalore sound like hell. But I’m describing a city I love, a city that I dream of living in. I never experienced the old, mourned, and for all I know mythical Bangalore in its golden years, and honestly, the Bangalore I do know seems…wonderful, just as I loved the New York City I moved to in 2000, while old-timers assured me that it was already dead and gone. It’s clearly a deep loss that so many of the city’s lakes, trees, and heritage buildings are gone forever. Otherwise, though, I’d argue that Bangalore’s uneasy mash-up of a small-town sensibility in a booming cosmopolitan technopolis is central to its charm. Cities are strange that way: their hellishness is often inseparable from what we love about them. (That’s certainly how I feel about Detroit, the crazy city I grew up in: it was a uniquely stimulating and community-centred place precisely because it was so dysfunctional and fucked up.) It’s notable that nearly everyone who complains about how much better Bangalore used to be keeps living there anyway. Girish Karnad was moving, but he wasn’t moving out of town – he was moving to an apartment closer to Bangalore’s centre.
I asked Karnad what he thought of Gauri as a writer. In his unfailingly frank way, he was dismissive. “Her writing had no power,” he said. “She took stances, and she was bold, courageous.” But her newspaper, he said, was no match for her father’s. “To me, her assassination is a mystery,” he said. “She was not such a powerful journalist. And an underground killing like that, it will cost something; why should someone invest in killing Gauri? Her articles didn’t damage the RSS – I mean, okay, she attacked them and called them chaddis. But her articles didn’t damage anyone.”
He considered the theory that Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, and Gauri were all killed by the same conspirators. “They probably were all similarly killed because there is an organisation of guns for sale,” he said. “If you try hard enough, you will probably know people who, for a certain amount of money, will come and do the killing. But it must cost.” In the case of Kalburgi, the third victim in the pattern, Karnad thought it was clear who might have underwritten the assassination: elite Lingayats who saw him as an obstacle. “I’m sure the police know who killed Kalburgi,” he went on. “And the inner community knows perfectly well who had him bumped off, and why he was bumped off. Kalburgi mattered, but Gauri was not big enough.” He paused to reflect. “This sad figure of a middle-aged woman coming home after a day’s work, tired, and being shot down – this really wrenched the heart of the country,” he said. “It was the wrongest moment to choose, the wrongest person to choose. And overnight she became an all-India figure, a symbol of martyrdom, motherhood, womanhood, everything. Everything she would have loved to be.”
He also thought it unlikely that the RSS had ordered her killed. “Because it boosted the opposition to the RSS,” he said. “Suddenly everyone said, the RSS kills women, women who are unprotected, just for saying that they wear chaddis – it’s the image they don’t want. I certainly don’t like them, but I don’t think they are that stupid. And what for? The RSS is too vast for this woman to have affected it.”
“But, I mean, the RSS is just one tier,” Raghu said, “there must have been other organisations –”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Karnad said. “There must be some loose cannons.”
Excerpted with permission from I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India, Rollo Romig, Westland.
