A Literary Trip down the Stream of Cities

                                                        Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Asnières sur Seine.

 

 

People born in small town India like me are haunted by the term "moffusil," a persian loan word that was used in newspapers to describe us even in independent India. To live away from the former imperial centres or the East India Company capitals of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta was to lack nagarika, the inimitable sophistication that comes from inhabiting urban spaces and sharing their swish and propensity to reinvent themselves like new toys or fashion jewels. When my father went on a trip to Madras, my grandmother would simply say that he had gone to "Pattinam," i.e. "The City."  Film songs purposefully set to folk tunes, "Pattinamthan Pogalamadi" used to enhance the unique romance of Madras. Youngsters, especially girls, thus got to dream of cities, cities in heaven, rich and shiny like that of Kubera paved with marble, cities on earth such as London, New York, Paris, Singapore, Venice, Vladivostok …

 

For many of us as students in India, the incontrovertible illustration for a sonnet was, of course, Wordsworth's "Earth has not anything to show more fair." Generations of students learnt English from the abridged version of Dickens's Tale of Two Cities which was prescribed as non-detailed text. Memories of Dickens flooded back, when years later I opened the first page of Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories – "a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name."[1] Medieval students travelled from Oxford to Sorbonne, from Bologna to Salamanca. In order to bring us back from dream cities to Indian reality during our undergraduate days, the founding editor of the Journal of Indian Writing in English, Dr. Balram Gupta introduced us to R.K. Narayan and Pritish Nandy:

Calcutta, if you must exile me, wound my lips before I go

Only words remain and the gentle touch of your finger on my lips

Calcutta burn my eyes before I go into the night." [2]

The imaginary journey between the familiar Malgudi and far away Calcutta, that city of darkness but nevertheless of joy, an epitome of the texts of Tagore and Ray for the outsiders –no wonder the French president François Hollande pronounced Tagore's name with an acute accent on the final "e" when he visited India in February 2013- with a stopover in Raja Rao's Benares brought me to Paris.

Benares and Paris are cities of light. To wake up in Benares is to be part of the dawn of creation, the singular dance of light on water, the meeting of river and sky at the misty horizon and the parting of life from body on earth. To walk in Paris is to feel free and safe in your rendez-vous with your self and celebrate the permanence of art by treading on the footsteps of poets and painters. For Isaac de Benserade, there is nothing like Paris. From Francis Carco's "Parvis de Notre Dame" to Apollinaire's "Pont Mirabeau," it is an unforgettable promenade that awaits the reader of history. Marc-Antoine Désaugiers went to sleep only at five o' clock in the morning when all Paris was waking up. Paul Eluard captured the revolutionary potential of Paris in a trope of reversal:

 

               In Paris, there is a street;

               in that street, there is a house;

               in that house, there is a staircase;

               on that staircase, there is a room;

               in that room, there is a table;

               on that table, there is a cloth;

               on that cloth, there is a cage;

               in that cage, there is a nest;

               in that nest, there is an egg;

               in that egg, there is a bird;

 

               The bird knocked the egg over;

               the egg knocked the nest over;

               the nest knocked the cage over;

               the cage knocked the cloth over;

               the cloth knocked the table over;

               the table knocked the room over;

               the room knocked the staircase over;

               the staircase knocked the house over;

               the house knocked the street over;

               the street knocked the town of Paris over; [3]

 

The other name for Paris is University, Museum, Art Galleries, Festivals, in short, Cultural diversity. If the evening in Paris had been immortalized by movie and the perfume makers alike, Paris by night is popular with tourists. Only the shimmer of the lantern lit nights of the Japanese city of Nara in literary descriptions surpasses the poetry of Parisian nights whose quiet is punctuated by the stiletto heels of women's footfall.

 

The centrality of Paris is resented by people living in other French cities who denounce the parochial "parisianisme." The rivalry between cities is constitutive of their glory. If you want to benchmark the beauty of cities in Europe, you have just to hop into the Eurostar, eat breakfast in Brussels, lunch in Paris and dinner in London. To widen the range, you might try Tokyo in Spring, Saint Petersburg in Summer, Helsinki in Winter and Montréal in Autumn. Or, if you are lazy, you might watch Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, To Rome with Love, Match Point and Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona. The competition between Bombay and Calcutta, Delhi and Lucknow, Madras and Mysore is ongoing and generates tension as well as a million different stories. The nicknames given to cities such as Maximum City, the Cultural Capital of India, Windy City, the Pink City, Sin City either endear us to some spaces or alienate us. I was quite disappointed when the name change to Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai was immediately endorsed by airports. The breaking of the close albeit arbitrary bond between the signifier and the signified was uncanny. When you landed in Chennai rather than in Madras, you felt twice exiled until you heard the ascending scale of Hindolam float in the air and felt the smell of fading jasmine flowers invade your nostrils.

 

There are people who prefer to see cities from the grand stand point of view, from the top of a tower – Eiffel tower in Paris, the CN tower in Toronto or a high set wheel (London Eye). There are others who prefer to take the pulse of the cities by travelling in buses and trains and getting immersed. Some others do not do in Rome as others do and resort to driving to explore the length and breadth of cities. Indeed if we were to believe Jean Baudrillard, Los Angeles is "a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation -- a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension."[4] There are still others who are unconditional fans of flanerie, an activity which ruptures the march of progress in a capitalist society, as Amit Chadhuri points out. [5] These days, as space is becoming rare and the time is getting compressed, cities are sprawling underground with shopping centres, super markets and beauty parlors. However, there is nothing like the space offered for sailing in cities.  The bateaux-mouches in Paris, the gondolos in Venice or the amphibious crafts in London change your sense of time and space. The city, the offers, the visitor changing tableaux as in an opera. Roads become rivers and buses become boats in monsoon time in Mumbai and Manila. The bridges in cities connect the watery surface of rivers and lakes to the alternate and solid surface of parks and flowerbeds. A city without a bridge is like a soul without its mate. -- Suffixes of place names in different languages such as 'ham' or 'ford' in English or 'ville' or 'bourg' in French, 'grad' or 'gorod' in Russian, or 'pur' or 'nagar' in Hindi [6], 'abad' or 'shahr' in Urdu and 'ur' and 'palayam'  in Tamil function as linguistic bridges to cities that try to tame the vastness of the world.
 

But once you change the status, i.e., from visitor to a city to dweller in a city, then you become aware of the hellish side of cities, its tentacular suburbs and its overcrowded slums and remember Dante's City of Dis. Pollution has become the scourge of cities all over the world. The common feature of city dwellers who commute in the morning is the mask they wear be it in Beijing or Sao Paulo. In search of fresh air, we inevitably desert cityscapes and flee to village hide outs. The irony is that villages are being mapped into satellite cities by promoters in almost every corner of the world. I felt a pang in my heart when I saw a copy of our old family home in a heritage village near Chennai last summer.

 

Notes:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

[1] Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, London: Granta Books, 1991, 15.

 

[2] The English translation of Paul Eluard's "Chanson enfantine des Deux-Sèvres" quoted in the website http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00009P

 

 

[3] Pritish Nandy, The Poetry of Pritish Nandy, Delhi: Oxford/IBH Publishing Company, 1973, 145.

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated  by Sheila Faria Glaser, Michigan: University of Michigan, 1994, 13.

 

[5] Amit Chadhuri, " In the Waiting-Room of History," London Review of Books, 26-12 (24 June 2004): 3-8.

 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n12/amit-chaudhuri/in-the-waiting-room-of-history, consulted on 29th March 2015.

 

[6] Denis Vidal, Narayani Gupta, "Urban vocabulary in North India" in Unesco's City Words project. http://www.unesco.org/most/p2vidal.htm