The Destruction of a City

Its now close to a couple of weeks since nature's fury battered the city of Mumbai. Sitting a breadth of a subcontinent away, without access to television images (a conscious decision though!) and having just the internet as a source for images of the terrible damage that was done, it was hard for me not to think about whether we, as a society, have actively killed our cities and whether the damage that was done was just an extreme manifestation of the same.

What does a city really mean to a society/country? Take a look at any of the great civilizations in human history and you will find that cities were their heart and soul. Cities have always been not only the centers of economic activity and power but also centers of political activity, trade, culture, modern education and what not. The histories of Athens, Rome, Baghdad, Bejing, St Petersburg and others do conjure up images in popular imagination that confirm to the role these cities played in their civilizations. Closer home it is impossible to think of the Indus Valley civilization without thinking of the great city of Mohenjodaro, of the Mughals without Delhi or Agra, of even the British Empire in India without Calcutta. Needless to say, the histories of nations or civilizations and the histories of nations have and will be intertwined. When cities fall, nations fall and when nations fall cities fall (clichéd as it may sound).

Of course, none of this should in any way mean that societies needn’t look beyond their cities. The village or the small town is definitely as important to its well being as a city. But unfortunately in a poor country like ours, the issue of development has been seen in conflictive terms. It’s always portrayed as a question of the big city versus the small village. As if there is some kind of a fundamental duty to place the development of a village over that of a city and city dwellers, enjoying the comforts and better living standards that they do, are in some ways denying the people in villages of their due. Popular dialogue (in the mainstream political process, among NGOs, activists and the like) has always used this image of a conflict between the developmental needs of a city and of a village very effectively. None of it has in any case meant that our villages have seen any true development because of this; they continue to be in their downtrodden state as ever.

I think one of the reasons for all this has been due to the common metaphors that dominate political/societal thinking about the city versus village question. The Gandhian metaphor of “India lives in its villages” has been stretched far beyond its usefulness. Gandhi, in his times, saw the poverty and suffering in rural India as the most extreme manifestation of the destruction that British rule caused on India. To him, that was the arena where the battle for independence could be fought. He was also tacitly questioning the relevance of urban, western educated and elitist Indians (primarily the leaders of the Congress party before he took center stage) in the fight for freedom. For him, the battle had to be fought as much against the British as it had to be fought against the mindset of these Indians. Moreover, his conception of the economic problem that India faced also played a role in this. The idea of a self sustained village republic was a powerful solution, in his mind, to the problem of colonial rule.

But then, how relevant are these ideas today? We have moved fully away from any kind of economic prescription that Gandhi had. So how useful will these ideas, however egalitarian they may sound, when they are used as metaphors for decisions about development that society makes? Why should the developmental needs of a city and a village (different as they are) be conflicting (or rather viewed as such)? Have we somehow forgotten the role that cities can play in the development of the society as a whole? Cities do have their problems and suffering. But they also have their potential to uplift societies and act as the centers/sources of change. They have played this role in the past; they will play it in the future. We ignore it to our own peril.