‘Must we look forward?’: Digital Collage 
Abhay Narasimhan + Emil Sarkisyan
THE NEW FACE OF MODERNISM IN BENGALURU
Modernism and the city of Bangalore are no strangers to one another, and in many ways; a continued colonial ethos prevails concerning the spatial logics and hierarchies that this architecture style promotes in the Global South. As a synecdoche, from 1898 onwards, Bangalore faced the bubonic plague that killed around 10% of the city’s population. In response, the British colonial government necessitated a series of modernist architectural reforms as ‘improvement projects’ in the name of better sanitation infrastructure. Prior to this, the British had already established ‘clean’ colonies based on this architectural identity. British-built housing was designed around the Civil and Military Station (CMS), located on what is today known as Bengaluru’s MG Road. Here, colonial architecture was built on higher altitudes of the city, imposing a physical and symbolic superiority over the ‘rest’ (non-British ruled areas/lower caste and class citizens of the CMS) who failed to benefit from these changes. As Rao and Srinivas (2021) argue, “one’s place in the city’s social hierarchy came to determine where one lived.” 

In this context, the British administration’s response to the 1898 plague was to extend their modernist modifications to the remainder of the city that they ruled over. ‘Clean’ colonies such as Frazer Town emerged which housed Europeans and Upper Caste Hindus who could afford the real estate ‘and were afforded better access to basic services. Marginalised communities (Dhobis, Gollas etc.) were displaced and chastised for being responsible for the plague. Dhanpal (2021) presents that unsanitary conditions in slum areas such as Blackpully and Ulsoor Lake were not due to how ‘unreformable’ Indians were, but rather a fault of undemocratic and unequal governance that contributed to their existences. The system was designed such that lower classes and castes found the new sanitised colonies unaffordable, often gentrified to make space for those who were  socially welcome in higher society (Ranganathan 2018). 

To summarise, Dhanpal (2021: 113) reveals that: “(Modernist) improvement projects became central to the imagination of the city, twinning as both sanitary and moral reform. But capitalist imperatives and laissez faire economics compromised planning measures, making available such improvements to limited (privileged) populations.”

Understanding the positionality of India post-1947, Prakash et al. (2022) explain that Modernism remains very-much present in the postcolonial world, rather than being a relic of the colonial past. Instead, “postcolonies …initiated, and continue to demand, access to this global colonial infrastructure” (p. 13), not as passive recipients of Western architecture but with the goals of catching up with the West in mind. For instance, Nehru’s vision of Chandigarh is the most cited example of expanding Western modernist ideals imposed onto India. Countering this claim, (Stierlo 2022: 280) argues that the decision to embrace concrete in Chandigarh’s design is an expression of  “a direct and willful representation of the very means of production available in what was then considered a “developing” country.” Scriver and Srivastava (2017) comment on this ‘developing country’ narrative, explaining how Chandigarh’s buildings with rough concrete finishes symbolises the struggles as well the determination of the postcolonial world to ‘move forward.’ 

As Stierlo (2022: 279-280) concludes: “Chandigarh, in other words, was not merely the result of an export of architectural knowledge from Paris to the Punjab, but rather a project fundamentally shaped and enabled by the specific historical and socioeconomic conditions on site.”

Amongst the examples provided by Prakash et al. of the postcolonial world engaging with Modernism are ‘Special Economic Zones (SEZs).’ Perhaps no city in the Global South has embraced the spirit of Modernist architecture in recent decades than Bengaluru, in an effort to become a global city akin to Western counterparts through spaces such as SEZs. 

Bengaluru has seen an explosion of SEZs around the periphery, what Ranganathan (2022) argues to be “facilitating exclusive and seamless access to networks for the global elite.” 

However, as established so far in this essay, Bengaluru’s seemingly recent experiment with Modernism needs to be understood through two nuances. Firstly, British colonial architecture in Bangalore was a strong propagator of the Modernist ethic, whose institutions and values carried on in the city even post-independence. Next, Modernism is not a one-way street flowing from West to East, rather the postcolonial world implements this architecture by also being cognizant of the local contexts in which these spaces exist in.

Emerging from this framework, we take the case study of ‘Tech-Adjacent Housing.’ 

In the case of Tech-Adjacent Housing, not only is the architecture style modernist but also the ethos of the campus. Having upscale apartments and villas within the same private gates as SEZs and IT Offices means the intended resident of such spaces could easily live within this bubble of wide and clean roads, fancy restaurants and access to sports facilities without ever stepping outside. However, Tech-Adjacent Housing is also deeply reliant on the informal sector (what Dhanpal calls the ‘unintended city’ in colonial Bangalore) for daily sustenance - as security guards, maids, cleaners, delivery boys etc. Such labourers working in private islands of prosperity (i.e. Tech-Adjacent Housing) face extreme uncertainty in terms of access to income and employment. For instance, our interviews revealed that the cleaning ladies didn’t receive water from the developer, instead having to ask residents to fill up their bottles at the end of the day. Or, construction workers are placed into shabby huts with limited/no access to basic services on the backroad to construct more spaces to compliment the world-class amenities that tech-adjacent housing promotes. We find the brutal contrast between these tech-adjacent spaces in creating clean, organised and modern facilities for its residents and the extreme vulnerabilities in access to basic resources faced by informal labourers despite prosperity all over as deeply problematic. 

Therefore, we present tech-adjacent housing to be the ‘new face of modernism’ in Bengaluru, carrying over values from European Colonialism on how space should be divided as well as modernist architecture. Considering that tech-adjacent housing intends to be as convenient as possible for a white-collared officer to go to work, do their grocery shopping, take a meeting at a café amongst other daily activities without ever having to step outside the campus. We are aware that gated communities have always existed in Independent India, but the gentrification and inequalities emerging from the global vision of living in tech-adjacent housing draws many parallels to Modernist architecture during British colonial rule, which we find to be deeply alarming and an area to be studied.