Making South Asian cities habitable: A perspective from the past

The final part of the 12th annual Neelan Tiruchelvam Memorial Lecture delivered by Professor Ramachandra Guha, Historian, Biographer, Columnist, Environmentalist and Cricket Writer, is reproduced below. The first part was published in the Daily FT of August 12

I move on now to an analysis of a single plan, that which Geddes wrote for the town of Balrampur, now in Uttar Pradesh. This report started with the palace and its grounds, suggesting that the shrubberies become less shabby by planting up gaps, with the naturalist in Geddes paying attention to species, recommending the short and large-leaved loquat in front of the tall and small-leaved shisham.

The west lawn would be given dignity and character by the planting of a banyan, in time to be ‘a great and monumental tree’. The approach to the palace would be a stately avenue planted with tamarind or ficus refusa.

Coming to public buildings, Geddes suggests the creation of a brand-new library which, apart from regular periodical and reference services and reading rooms, would also have a juvenile reading room ‘and some day even a ladies room’.

Next, Geddes moves on to the improvement of old Balrampur, mohalla by mohalla, suggesting thinning of houses here, clearing of tanks there, protection and planting up of open spaces. Clearly Geddes had walked over the entire area closely, and carefully.

His scheme revolved around the renewal of the town’s once extensive but now decayed tank system.

These once linked the mohallas, culminating in a grand lake in front of the palace. Geddes wished to clean the tanks, link them and plant up their sides and bunds, so that, as he said, ‘each neighbourhood and mohalla may thus speedily be brought to take pleasure and pride in its local portion of the park system and to protect it accordingly’.

Geddes thus hoped to convert Balrampur’s disused water tanks from being ‘fetid ponds and [a] civic disgrace’ to becoming ‘pure lakes and the main ornaments of their city’. This, he argued, would be a way to recover the finest aspects of Balrampur’s and India’s past.

‘It cannot be too often and clearly affirmed,’ he claimed, ‘that the old Tank Parks of so many Indian Cities are not only the glory of India, but are without rivals in Europe, since often surpassing in their beauty of mingled land and waterscapes, the glories of Versailles and Potsdam, as of Dutch and canal cities.’

Sacred aspects of tanks

Geddes ended his report with a stirring invocation of the sacred aspects of tanks, of what a carelessly modernising India appeared to have lost but what it might, with skilled guidance, yet reclaim.

Thus Geddes says that of ‘all unfavourable impressions of contemporary life and culture in India, none is more obvious and insistent than the general decline of aesthetic sense and productiveness, which till the Industrial Age was possessed by both Indians and Europeans, but is now eclipsed in both alike – witness their fallen taste in arts and crafts, in gardening and decoration, and above all in the general deterioration of architecture, [and] the indifference to landscape appreciation.’

Geddes said this in 1917; but it remains painfully true to this day. But like him we must hope that ‘this blindness is neither historic nor permanent in either of us [Indian or European],’ and that ‘the sense of beauty is returning in nature in cities alike,’ whether in Balrampur or in a hundred other places spread across the sub-continent.

This report on Balrampur, 80 pages long, is written with love and learning. It is an encrusted little gem, but, alas, a gem cast before swine. One cannot believe the Maharaja of Balrampur ever read it. Meanwhile the Professor himself had moved on to the next town, and the next Plan.

Mumford’s verdict

I would like to end this talk by sharing with you various verdicts on the life and work of Patrick Geddes. Let me begin with what was said about him by Lewis Mumford, who was in many ways Geddes’ true intellectual heir and disciple, and whose masterful books ‘Technics and Civilization’ and ‘The Culture of Cities’ are based on ideas and concepts derived from the Scottish Ecologist and Town Planner.

Mumford wrote in 1950 that his mentor would be remembered above all as an ecologist, as ‘the patient investigator of historic affiliations and dynamic biological and social inter-relationships’. His work on town planning would be of lasting importance.

Mumford thus remarked that ‘What Geddes’ outlook and method contribute to the planning of today, are precisely the elements that the administrator and bureaucrat, in the interests of economy or efficiency, are tempted to leave out: time, patience, loving care of detail, a watchful interrelation of past and future, an insistence upon the human scale and the human purpose, above all merely mechanical requirements: finally a willingness to leave an essential part of the process to those who are most intimately concerned with it: the ultimate consumers or citizens.’

Verdicts of Indian nationalists

Next, consider the verdicts of three great Indian nationalists. Annie Besant wrote to Geddes in January 1915 that ‘you are only the second Englishman I have met who sees what India means to the world’.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote to Geddes in May 1922 that ‘I have often wished for my mission, the help of men like yourself who not only have a most comprehensive sympathy and imagination but a wide range of knowledge and critical acumen. It was with bewilderment of admiration that I have so often followed the architectural immensity of your vision’.

Geddes died in April 1932; three years later Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his daughter Indira about his admiration for him. Nehru described Geddes as a ‘very great man’, a ‘genius in many fields’.

Writing to his teenage daughter from his cell in Almora jail, he emphasised the Scotsman’s approach to education and learning, of how he ‘wanted children to grow up with firsthand knowledge of the worlds of nature and of man and to develop an unspoiled appreciation of life [and] the beauty of nature...’

As Nehru summarised Geddes’s credo for the child, it consisted not of the three Rs but the three Hs: Heart, Hand, Head, in that order. Those who followed the Geddesian model, said Nehru to Indira, develop ‘what is called a well-integrated personality, something in harmony with life and nature, the very reverse of the quarrelsome, dissatisfied ever-complaining type that we see so often today’. The future Prime Minister of India even writes as if he is a chela or disciple of the Scottish Professor.

‘I sometimes console myself,’ says Nehru to Indira, ‘that I am in my own topsy-turvy way following Geddes’s course and so trying to develop that integrated personality’. Such is the esteem in which Patrick Geddes was held by those giants: Besant, Tagore, and Nehru.

A moving obituary

But listen now to an appreciation by someone who is otherwise unknown, a former student of Geddes in Bombay. In a moving obituary, Pheroze Bharucha wrote of how his teacher ‘just set you on fire with love of this earth and with desire to cleanse it, to beautify and re-beautify it, to build and re-build it. That he taught us to look at life with eyes of love and reverence and wonder is to put it rather coldly.

‘He opened up a new vision of life altogether, one which we are not accustomed to behold. A walk with him in a garden filled one with the sense of the entrancing miracle that Life is. It was not mere emotion which cools off and passes away. ...He set you on fire for practical endeavour and spoke of the futility of dreams that did not rouse the dreamer to action.’

These assessments of Patrick Geddes from Indians famous and obscure testify to the vision, the intelligence, the humanity and the precociousness of a man who is now largely forgotten but who in his time contributed greatly to Indian life and Indian debates.

A magnificent list of interesting failures

But to these appreciative judgments I wish, finally, to juxtapose the no less sincere and truthful verdict of the Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan. The life of Patrick Geddes, says Visvanathan, ‘was a magnificent list of interesting failures’.

Geddes’ work in South Asia is obscure, neglected, forgotten, and hence, in conventional terms, a failure. But there may yet be time to redeem and rehabilitate it. For social life and public policy in the cities of South Asia can be greatly improved if they were indeed to show a respect for nature, a respect for democracy, and a respect for tradition. In that noble quest we can take guidance and inspiration from the works and words of that remarkable Scottish internationalist, Patrick Geddes.