Celebrating the “old” , the place “that was” through his words, H.A. Anil Kumar finds and relives Yeshwanthpur in the new Bengaluru
The conductor took five paise each, from both my friend and myself, gave back one-five-paise, tore a ticket into two and distributed it between us. It was a Saturday afternoon, we were studying in the primary school and it was a regular Saturday-discount for us, while travelling from Malleswaram to Yeshwanthpur (north of Bangalore), in the early 1970s. Only one eyebrow of the bus conductor – ‘Shivajirao’ written on his badge — was all that was visible on his forehead, which went missing for a while, later. After a couple of years, he, the now superstar Rajnikanth, reappeared as the poster-villain in the Kannada film ‘Katha Sangama’! He was our conductor in route no.1 and 14, in Bengaluru.
Occasionally we classmates would walk between these two points, from our school to our respective homes, not because he had quit ‘conducting’ his transport profession. This ritualistic, weekly-once walk via the Indian Institute of Science campus (begun in 1910) was meant to pick up gulaganji seeds, seemingly lacquered red-black in appearance, in order to make costly-looking beads that would be pierced through a thread. These seeds can be picked up even now, under the lush green trees of IISc campus. Entering and emerging out of it, now, even after four decades, seems like passing through a frozen time. If pollution is the first thing that one smells (literally) in today’s Bengaluru, it is ‘nostalgia’ that one does with IISc. The city around it has changed, or would it have remained ‘as-it-is’ even if the city wouldn’t have changed?
Institutions are supposed to be the first to change; and change the city around it. Here is a case wherein it is preaching the city that not-changing is the best way to change! Yeshwanthpur, to the north-eastern part of the city and just outside IISc, is the only space that seems to have learnt a lesson or two from this scientific institution’s scientific outlook. It is like a mom learning from her kids, since it is so old that they have found 300BC Roman coins in Yeshwanthpur, the location carries a seemingly-Marathi-name and is older to the ‘ITised-Bangalore’ by at least 1200 years. At the same, they say that in another fifty years Mexico and Bangalore—both — would be deserted due to lack of water sources! If that is the case, IISc and Yeshwanthpur would be the two places that would yet outlive the city.
My birthplace was in a village outside Bangalore. My parents moved into the city to educate us; and now my village is part of the larger-Bangalore. This poses a philosophical paradox: I was an outsider to Bangalore, from a place which is Bangalore now. Paradoxes never let you settle; and settle at a place with singular identity.
We settled down in Yeshwanthpur, went to school to the next-town called Malleswaram, to a Brahmin-Convent, where one could learn English without the fear of being baptized into Christianity. The famous Himamshu School — which looks the same even now, from outside – was a poor man’s (child’s) equivalent to ‘convent education’.
In a way I am an old-Yeshwantpurite. The Vidhyarthi Bhavan known for dosa and Kannada literary personalities’ regular visits; Dewar’s pub wherein the British would pour a drink to the Indians who were made to compulsorily wait outside its doors, the Kothas Coffee powder shop in Malleswaram, the Kohinoor chai shop in Brigade road, the Boulevard on M.G.Road, Ramakrishna Mutt in Hanumanthanagar, the garadi manes (fitness gym with local and Vijayanagar flavor), the Koshys café – all in all, still exist and frame a different Bengaluru with Yeshwanthpur at its top. ‘Bengaluru’ is the foundation upon which a mindlessly inarticulate architectural disaster called as ‘Bangalore’ was construed. Yeshwanthpur was and is going to be a part of Bengaluru, arguably forever.
The day when Dr.Rajkumar, the Kannada film superstar of five decades, passed away, a non-Kannadiga art gallery owner and wife to a famous artist, born and brought up in Bengaluru, asked what is so great about him. Someone asked her to wait for another twenty four hours. There were seven people dead by the time the stalwart was put to rest (2006), when the burial procession went through Yeshwanthpur and through fan-frenzy-madness, despite a prediction of it! All of us knew for sure that that would be the last time some ‘one’ captured the imagination of the city, enmasse. In fact the coffin with Raj Kumar’s body went missing for an hour; and – realistically and metaphorically — was retraced amongst the fans, by a comedian, inside the Bangalore Palace, belonging to Mysore Maharaja, near Yeshwanthpur! This dear locality of mine is a site wherein a comedian heroically recovers the missing body of a hero, after the latter’s natural demise, from the Maharaja’s abode, in (the time of) a democratic State. This reality is so analogous to all multiple-dimensions that Yeshwanthpur – an old Bengaluru premise — has gone through.
I had seen Indira Gandhi give a talk and the goggled Mysore Maharaja on a horse in Yeshwanthpur near the current road transport office at Yeshwanthpur in 1970s. The only change is that the office was an open field, then, meant for such political and bureaucratic affairs. Even now, two BMW cars find it difficult to cross each other in these streets, without side stepping the other’s legs or rather wheels!
Yeshwanthpur is that part of Bengaluru that refutes metamorphosis of any kind. This is true despite the fact that the biggest Metro of the city (Orion mall) is located just outside it. The single screen ‘Gopal’ film theatre which would charge not more than rupees five for a balcony ticket then, though charges 100 rupees now, is still intact, both as a memory and a reality. The barber used to make his client suspend his legs into the dry ditch, make him hold the mirror in one hand and an umbrella against heat in the other, while giving him a close shave or a haircut. No doubt that the umbrella was not meant for the client. This was in front of the location’s prime spot: the government school and next to the railway lines. These still do exist, despite Yeshwanthpur railway station having become a nationally familiar railway-stop. It’s easier to pick up a railway ticket to wherever from here rather than at the city-central station; and only Yeshwanthpur-dwellers know it!
The roads at Yeshwanthpur are as narrow as it was four decades ago, the market is still lack luster, the smell of the old oil shop is intact, and the garbage is almost nascent. Between 1970 and 79, we had changed eight houses within this locality. And recently when I took a stroll throughout, I found out that none of the houses existed, neither were they demolished and built over! There were additions upon old constructions, like plaster molds upon wounded limbs. The wound remains and the mound camouflages. The smell of the chai shops, the afternoon heat of asphalted rustic roadside, the samosa-chai-shops, the small arrack shops (local pubs), the half-lit-electric-bulbs, the dull rainy evenings — all in all do exist, despite the onslaught of LED colour televisions, small-malls and urbanism all around it. Yeshwanthpur is the place inside the metropolis-Bengaluru, which makes you feel that you are at its margin, at the rural-Bengaluru site.
In the 80s, the famous Mangharam’s Biscuit Factory to the east of Yeshwanthpur was attacked. The huge bus loaded with varieties of Christmas biscuits, to be transported to Bombay, was emptied by the localities. It was so because it seems the localites who were promised with jobs inside the factory (for having pledged their land to the factory) were kept waiting for too long. When I returned from school, from Malleswaram to Yeshwanthpur, my locality was full of biscuit packs – in the dustbin, hay stack, under the bed, above the roof – in the most unpredictable sites. The next day, a relative who had legally brought glucose biscuit from the shop was also arrested, along with all men above 18 years, from this place and were stationed at Yeshwanthpur police station, which is still intact!
Most of those arrested were my relatives, by blood or by friendship. Some have gone, others remind of those who have left, just like Yeshwanthpur. It has withstood the onslaught of the neo-capitalistic IT globalization of Bangalore, like the Gauls resist the Romans in Asterix comics. It has evolved in such a way as to not to change easily!
When I recently went into a small shed-like samosa-chai shop at Yeshwanthpur, the old 70s songs were being placed. The ambience of the smell, sound and space were intact. Earlier those were contemporary songs from the radio. Now, the owner had gone out of his way to buy a DVD consisting of those old songs. There was someone like me; both of us knew that here is the place within Bengaluru wherein two varying times (and nostalgia in-between) co-exists. He was one of those guys who had pledged their vast lands at Yeshwanthpur, to a landlord, just for the temptation of regularly eating masala dosa and coffee, in the 50s!
