ABSTRACT
Venkatarayappa’s description of Bangalore above, although written more than fifty years ago, continues to aptly describe its contemporary urban environment. Traveling only a short distance anywhere in the city, its complex and overlapping landscapes are immediately apparent. Billboards advertising the latest ex-urban housing developments loom over village landscapes enveloped by post-independence city expansions where traders unproblematically combine real estate deals with rice trading. Paan-wallahs set up shop on the sidewalk across from Intel India, while nearby, ICT workers, their corporate ID badges marking them out as members of the global software workforce, await the air-conditioned buses which will take them to corporate campus enclaves on the city’s perimeter. All this takes place just a short distance from the former colonial cantonment, where the Indian military occupies large tracts of the central city, and where the colonial-era bungalow compounds that distinguished the British settlement and helped define it as “the garden city of India” are fast being replaced by spec office buildings and apartment blocks.
