City of the future

"You know you're in Bangalore, you know you're in the Silicon Valley of India, when you go to play golf and the caddy on the first tee says you can either aim at the Microsoft building or the IBM building. You know you're in Bangalore when you see the Pizza Hut advertisement says 'gigabytes of taste'," famously said the US journalist Thomas Friedman in 2004. Ever since, reams have been written on outsourcing, the software boom and the rise of the uber-smart, uber-rich new technogeeks of Bangalore. But whatever happened to the other Bangalores, the ones that shun the arc lights that the outsourcing world shines upon the city? What happened to the Bangalore that lives in its crowded markets, or the one that lives in the shaded avenues of its genteel old suburbs?

Bangalore is unique among all major Indian cities for its very special history. For almost 150 years, the city was actually two cities, each with its own administration, and following entirely separate growth trajectories. The cantonment, established in 1809, was administered by the British; while the western part of the city, including the Fort and, later, suburbs such as Basavanagudi and Malleswaram, were under the rule of the Mysore maharajas. Naturally, the different histories of the two parts of the city left distinct impressions on the populations in these two areas. With the setting-up of the cantonment during the first decade of the 19th century, the area experienced in-migration from neighbouring regions, especially of Tamil-speakers, who came in both as soldiers in the Madras regiments, and as suppliers and contractors to the British Indian Army. It was only in 1949 that the city was united under a common municipal corporation.