A certain type of angst arises when some in the Subcontinent look at Western cities and compare them with our own megalopolises. Often, such comparisons are followed by a deep sigh. Slow traffic, narrow roads, people all over on the streets, flaunting of traffic rules, all this coupled with the incredible spectrum of vehicles, cycles and animals – well, traffic of the type that is enjoyed in many Western cities quickly comes to look like an unattainable dream. The nature of the 'solutions' that are then discussed are predictable: widening of roads (including tearing down of slums), getting people off the streets by tightening and enforcing traffic rules and, possibly, keeping rickshaws and bicycles out of the busier areas. Yet these ideas indicate something deeply troubling about the nature of our urban citizenship – who is included and who is not, who the city is 'for' and who not.
Among the upwardly mobile in Southasian cities, there is an evolving homogenising vision of what the future of urbanity should look like. This vision has been long in the making, expressed privately in deep frustration. Today, however, this progressively exclusive vision has enough confidence to be forthright about itself, under the garb of urban development in the new millennium.
Still, some facts are worth mentioning at the outset. At least 40 percent of the population of Calcutta and Delhi, and at least 50 percent in Dhaka, live in the bostee, or slums. The bostee represents not only the underbelly of a city, but also a constant, living critique of its dominant socio-political order, as enunciated by the political scientist Ashis Nandy. Hence, the question of roads and traffic collectively constitute just another extended stage on which the contestation of ownership of the city can be acted out. In this contest, there is a more plural view of the city from one side: no slum ever dares to imagine that it will gobble up the quarters of the perfumed. Rather, the city that the slum and the lower middle class imagine necessarily includes those very catagories who want to see the slums – and the jaywalkers – eradicated.
The dominant urban vision, meanwhile, has no time or imagination for such plurality. In fact, for some reason, the city the elite classes want almost never looks like the city in which they live. Many are ashamed of it. When I was growing up in Chetla, a part of Kolkata that is far from posh, I would often hear people say that they lived 'near New Alipore' – New Alipore being a elite quarter where, for instance, one would find far fewer people wearing lungis and brushing their teeth in the streets in the morning. What would these maladjusted souls have thought about their great-grandfather from the village, garu (water-carrying vessel) in hand, crossing a meadow in the morning to defecate in the field?