Udupi Sri Krishna Bhavan

I had been walking in Chickpete for some time now. It was nearing lunch time and I had unknowingly started to read the nameboards at just above the normal line of vision, looking for a place to eat. It had to be the usual – reasonably clean but with old-world charm. That’s what one looked for in a bazaar precinct.

I wasn’t going to eat in a spotlessly clean, new type restaurant. Saw a ‘Gokul Lodge’. It seemed old alright, but old AND neglected. It was dark in there and not so clean-looking. I thought I wasn’t going to find my place today. Anyways, I kept walking. The purpose was just that, to walk the chickpete area of old Bangalore with its large expanse of market activity – an area originating from the time the city began, being one of the two main nuclei in Bangalore, the other one being the Cantonment area.

As I walked further, I saw this board Udupi Sri Krishna Bhavan. The name was familiar of course. There was one at Malleswaram, another of the old Bangalore localities, a restaurant we had often frequented. It had the nicest neer dosa (with coconut milk). This had to be the same. It would be good.

Going into the restaurant, I found that here time had moved so much slower than on the street just outside it or on the many streets amidst which it was nestled. The place was quiet, not so many people about. I was early for lunch perhaps. I picked a table so I could see the restaurant and its entrance the way I felt like, with plenty of space in front of me, a bit of the light from the street coming in and the lights inside just enough so as to not drown out the natural light.

I ordered the food and waited, as I looked around me. It was better than I had expected. It actually had rosewood tables and chairs. The table top had been changed to a smooth, black granite top and the chair seats had a white, worn-out laminate, where probably canework had once been.

In front of me, I saw a brass nameplate that said ‘Special room’. This was the typical Family room that restaurants of old had always had. It had a five foot high wooden partition, partly glass. You had your privacy and yet were not too separated from the others. The flooring was the old checkerboard pattern – black and white marble squares. It had been a while since I last saw that. The washbasins located on a side wall of this large hall space had mirrors with teakwood frames.

The ceilings were high and supported by I-beams and I-sections. Just above the serving counter, where the menu was written in large bold letters were large photo-frames. There was one set of pictures of deities – the Raja Ravi Varma prints and another set a little away, of the founders of the hotel, these in black and white.

It had been a discovery, this Udupi Sri Krishna Bhavan. There weren’t so many in the city anymore. It was like going into a time machine. After I had eaten my dosa and had my coffee, I got up to leave, knowing that I could come back into this art deco time machine anytime I wanted to and they even served you the finest filter coffee, as you traced the city back in time!

Marketplace as an aesthetic urban experience

Every marketplace in India is an aesthetic urban experience – whether it’s a flower market, a wholesale tomato market or a temple bazaar. I recollect and share here my experience of the flower market in Bangalore. It is an informal market that takes place for two hours every morning in the vicinity of the Krishna Rajendra market. The K.R. market zone is one of the most chaotic, congested and noisy neighbourhoods in the city of Bangalore. The city’s main intercity and local bus terminal and the main railway station are located within a radius of a kilometre from here. However, there is one time of the day when you would go there even if you had no task or purpose in mind, in the early mornings, just to enjoy the visual experience of the flower market.

The place where the market happens is not a street, it is not a square and it is not within a building. The market comes into being at an extremely busy traffic junction, a crossing of roads, a space just below a flyover. It is difficult to imagine this urban space as a flower market because it is not designed as a place for flowers and neither is it an organised traffic junction. It is simply a point in the city where the most number of cars, people and goods cross paths. This is where flower vendors gather every day and where business is brisk as retailers and individual customers buy flowers for consumption.

If one thinks about the edges of this urban space and of the flower market, one realises that it has no defined edges. The market stops where the last flower vendor sits. When there are no more flower vendors, there is no more flower market; until it appears again in a small lane much further away from the central location under the flyover. But, these small flower vendors in the small lanes continue to sell flowers throughout the day; whereas the main flower market opens at 5am and closes at 8am.

The visual experience of this market depends on who you are and why you are here. If you are a temple priest and have come to buy flowers for the rituals of the day, you may or may not take note of who sells large garlands and who sells small garlands. You may simply go towards the vendors who sell loose flowers and perhaps directly go to the vendor who knows your daily requirement of the golden yellow marigolds.

If you are a flower retailer and have come to pick flowers that you will sell in another part of the city, your experience of the market is an ‘everyday’ experience but you may want to look for the unusual and the exotic, your eyes searching for that which you have not seen the day before or the week before. Just as your eyes search for a special buy, your ears listen intently to the prices being shouted by the vendors as they deftly move their hands and raise their voices to attract customers.

If you are an individual visiting the market for a regular, weekly purchase of fruits and vegetables, you may walk through the paths that meander between flower vendors, partly just to enjoy the visual and the sensory experience of the morning and partly to choose which vendor has for you the best flowers at the best price.

If you are a tourist, a first-time visitor to the city of Bangalore, the visual and spatial experience of the market will be completely different for you. The colours of the flowers will make you walk this way and that in a marketplace that has no straight lines and no defined routes within it. On one hand, you will smell the roses and the jasmines and wafting through the same air will be unbearable smells of goods that have gone rotten and drains that are overflowing. Inspite of everything that doesn’t seem right, this walk can be a beautiful experience and one that you will always cherish!!

Related Posts:
Flower sellers: To create, to forget
Dadar Flower market, Mumbai
The Garland makers in the Bazaar

Peanut festival in Bangalore

The Groundnut (Peanut) Fair, colloquially called the Kadalekai Parishe takes place once a year at Basavanagudi, in close proximity to Gandhi Bazaar. Every year during November-December over 200 vendors come to the city of Bangalore offering for sale tonnes of groundnuts. This photo essay covers the 2011 Fair that took place this week on Nov 21st and 22nd with Bull temple road becoming completely pedestrianised for the two days.

The legend goes that for some years, on every full moon day, a bull would charge into the groundnut fields located here and damage the crop. The farmers then offered prayers to the Nandi Bull to stop this and pledged to offer their first crop. Ever since, farmers and traders come here from the neighbouring villages and towns with cartloads of groundnuts a week in advance and there are visitors to the fair from within the city and from many places nearby.

Groundnut growers, Balloon sellers and the Sugarcane juice vendors

It's late afternoon and the crowds are increasing

Flower sellers in front of the Bull temple

Puffed rice, fried snacks - all part of the fair

Stall selling tapioca chips

Bull temple in the evening with the colourful lights - on the trees, across the road, everywhere!

For anyone who loves blowing bubbles!

It's the third day now and the traffic resumes on Bull temple road - the groundnut vendors will be here for a few more days

The quantum of groundnut has been increasing year after year and in 2010, the business turnover was around 100 million rupees

The numbers of people who come here has increased and last year, more than 0.6 million people participated

The Fair has been organised year after year by the growers themselves and is now also supported by two government institutions - the Department of Muzrai (Religious Endowment) and the Municipal Corporation of Bangalore

The residents of Basavanagudi believe that this tradition must continue and that the groundnut vendors who come from the nearby villages once a year must receive greater support from the city.

As the city of Bangalore expands, the groundnut fields near Bull Temple road move outwards and away from the temple. The relationship between the temple and the farmer still continues. The growth of the residential and the commercial neighbourhood in Basavanagudi has been a recent one, however, the urban fabric now envelops the Bull temple. One wonders if it is the groundnut vendors who are appropriating territory that is not theirs or is it the city that has appropriated land that was historically a place for the groundnut growers to make their offering to Lord Basava?

Read about:
Groundnut fair at Basavanagudi 2010
a Sea of Silence
Udaipur City
Fish market at Sasoon docks

Walking thru’ Chickpete

I had a printout of the google map of Chickpete that I studied quickly before I set out. It looked like I could start at the K.R.market and then walk through the many streets and come out towards the Majestic Bus stand at the other end. It was tempting to go into and around the K.R.market as I neared it. I had been there before. Always a hustle of activity, with its fruit and vegetable vendors making brisk sales almost at all times of the day! I loved watching that.

I was trying to be focused that day. So, knowing from my map that taking Avenue road would be a good point of entry into chickpete, I started out. As I walked here, there were stationery shops, diwali cracker shops, jewellery shops and all kinds of other shops. The footpaths are not so wide but there ARE footpaths and they had no encroachments. There is an interesting article ‘Narrow avenue, broader minds’ at Citizen Matters that talks about Avenue road and the communities who live and work here.

The place was crowded at 11.30 in the morning. I got to a “circle” and took a left towards Balepet. A four-way road junction was being referred to as a “circle” whenever I asked for directions. “You will come to a circle, take a right there” someone would guide. There was no circular traffic island or roundabout, just the chaos of a four-way junction without a centrepoint identified.

Soon, I came across a Mutt building and then, some time later saw a Jain dharamshala. These were old buildings – the only ones with elements of vernacular architecture and seemed like they’d been here for many years. That suddenly took me into the past and I began to look at every new façade I passed with a different eye and an imagination of what it might have earlier been before it became a place of “grand sale” and “bumper offer”

What was Chickpete like fifty years before? Was the fading away of the vernacular architecture also a fading away of the traditional shopping culture? Had there been a traditional shopping culture? Were the streets less crowded then? Had there been horsecarts on the avenue road and not the loud, honking autorickshaws that deafened me from sensing the past or contemplating the future?

There seem to be similarities between inner city cores in our cities – Chickpete has characteristics that remind me of Georgetown in Chennai or the Crawford market area in Mumbai. I’ve written earlier at a Street corner in Mumbai about how in the Indian city, the bazaar has been the nucleus of the city growing into many intersecting streets that tell a story of livelihoods and a story of the city's evolution.

I was nearing yet another edge of the Chickpete market precinct and the walk had been about getting a feel of the maze of the streets that made it this dense shopping experience – both in physical and cultural terms – layers of everyday life that unfolded itself in front of you with every step and every thought that time took forward for you.

I knew I was coming back again soon. It was the next day that this happened. I was now at the Mysore Bank entering Avenue road from the other end. There was informal vending all over the place. Many many book titles looking at you from the footpath curb where stands balanced themselves and the books on them. Many booksellers of secondhand books occupied the sidewalks. Were they a spill-over from the formal shops? No, these were independent street vendors, for whom public space was where their livelihoods were anchored.

Suddenly, today, it seemed as if Chickpete was only about the informal sector. Nothing else was as predominant as this incredible range of things on sale – plastic flowers, bags of all kinds, dryfruits, sunglasses, what-not. There was street food of all kinds – from boiled groundnuts to cut-fruit stalls that were on push-carts that stood in the middle of the street sometimes, it really was sometimes the middle or at least half-way to the middle of the road!

I continue to ponder about this marketplace also after my walking around is done. What was a typical street in Chickpete, if one were to do an anatomy of it? It was this undefinable mix of pedestrian, street food vendor, car, autorickshaw, imitation barbie dolls positioned on parked two-wheelers or some other attractive item for sale – all put together – bringing back memories of the dizzying hand movements of the street vendor in old-time calcutta as he would mix the jhal-muri in that tin container with the aroma of mustard oil flowing towards you to tell you that the mixing was good and right!

If you were to walk through Chickpete in the morning, any time before 10am when the shops begin to open, it is quite another place. The streets are rather empty and you might see pigeons perched in the middle of the road, as I saw this morning as I chose to explore the streets of the Pete area when business has not yet begun here. You see tender coconut vendors on bicycles parked momentarily, sipping their morning tea alongwith street sweepers. There are newspaper vendors who have the news laid out for you on the steps of the merchant establishments.

In the morning, you can walk freely with the sun coming in and gently lighting up the street facades that you now see more easily since you are not jostling your way through the street crowds. There is a Nankatai vendor with a bicycle, who is stocking up fresh baked biscuits into a large glass jar for the corner Paan shop, who sells snacks and the paan. There are empty white, wooden shelves along the white wall of a building, which I had seen the day before covered with many books. I see them now in this morning light, waiting for their owner to come fill them again for this day and waiting for those who will read the books for their stories, in a way that others would read the city through walking its streets.

Read about:
Walking in Lille
Faces in the Bazaar

Tender Coconut in a Street Bazaar

You are walking along a Street Bazaar absorbed in looking at the busy sweet-meat stall where you know you shouldn’t go but where your heart takes you nevertheless. You quickly turn away so as to shrug off just one more culinary temptation of the marketplace. Aromas of enticing street food waft towards you from another street corner. You tell yourself that you are not hungry, but then, you are suddenly thirsty!!

1  Welcome to Ahmedabad : the paan stalls, the farsan stalls, the chai stalls and coconut water stalls – Manek Chowk has everything.

In the Bazaar, there is no dearth of drinks to buy. Today, you can buy a bottle of mineral water anywhere. But, it’s such a waste to be in the Bazaar and to spend Rs.12 buying a bottle of mineral water!! Drinking water is what you will get yourself at home, you say to yourself. You can also buy a Coke or another cold drink. But, you look around hoping to find either a Sugarcane juice stall or a Tender Coconut seller. That’s what you get here that you don’t get elsewhere, and that’s what you want now! You find a vendor selling tender coconuts and walk up to him, standing in the middle of nowhere, a bunch of coconuts on a bicycle making brisk business in this hot afternoon. It gets you thinking about coconut-sellers and their place in the bazaar.

2  Banjara (gypsy) woman who sells bangles on D.V.G.road in Bangalore stops for a tender coconut

I look at the coconut-sellers in J.P.Nagar in Bangalore. There are two individual shops on the two sides of the road where the Mini-forest meets the Ring road. As I speak to one of these sellers, I learn that he buys a thousand coconuts each time, once in two days. There is a wholesale exchange at the Mandya at Mysore road. He sells about five hundred coconuts per day. The responsibility for carting away the waste of the coconut is that of the coconut-seller. He pays Rs.200 to have it taken away. This is also done once in two days. That’s the story of just one coconut vendor in a city of 9.5 million inhabitants in a country with a population of 1.2 billion.

3  Push-cart vendor has customers from the Brahmin café at Basavanagudi in Bangalore

You realise as you try to remember the different coconut-sellers you’ve seen and photographed that they are sometimes on a bicycle, sometimes with a push-cart and sometimes just with a bunch of cocontus that rest on the footpath. Often times, the vendor sits in the shade of a tree and sometimes he is constantly on the move, with the sun on his head for hours at a stretch. If it is a regular location, the selling space is established mostly at a corner junction, where you would have maximum visibility from as many potential customers as possible.

4  Serving those who worship the Lord: at the Bull Temple in Bangalore

The bazaar has a place for every kind of vendor, the one who walks, the one who cycles, the one who moves with his push-cart and the one who sells from a shop. The bazaar also has a space for every kind of commodity – food, drink, shoe, bangle, utensil, anything that you want to consume in a day or possess for a life time.

5  Tender coconut for the street, water melon for the home : at K.R.market in Bangalore




I do a google search on ‘Coconut water’. I find the lyrics of Harry Belafonte’s song ‘Coconut woman’ that goes:
“The thing that's best if you're feelin' glum
Is coconut water with a little rum
It could make you very tipsy, four for five
Make you feel like a gypsy, four for five
Coco got a lotta iron, four for five
Make you strong like a lion, four for five”

6  Fixed Price: Rs 12 only for tender coconut (No extra charge for the shade of the tree)

Another link is to the Seminar Proceedings for ‘Coconut revival: new possibilities for the Tree of life’ held in Australia by the International Coconut Forum and it says that “More than 11 million farmers, mostly small holders with low income, grow the palm in 90 countries” Indonesia is the largest coconut producing country, followed by the Phillipines, with India occupying third place.

7  Café coffee day: 
a lot can happen over coffee 
vs. 
Tender coconut: 
quenching your thirst 





Coming back to the Tender coconut vendor in the bazaar – it is a question of livelihood. He doesn’t know the Caribbean song and he does not hear what the experts discuss on Coconut. He is unaware that there are emerging new markets for “functional drinks from coconut – the sports drink, the energy drink, welcome drink and well-being drink” His life goes on and so does that of the blogger who contemplates on what goes on in the bazaar and outside of it, thinking that while a lot can happen in a street bazaar, life seems to be about quenching thirst of one kind or another.

Read about :
The Golla wallah
the Garland Makers in the Bazaar
Bollywood Posters
What is Chai

Art in Urban Spaces

The Bazaars in India are spaces for everyday but they are also places where vendors express themselves through their creative displays, to attract people and to sell goods. This is a form of art perceived not as a "representation" of the real world but as a "way of seeing".

A walk through a traditional Street bazaar can be compared to a walk through a modern Urban environment. Although two people could see the same things at the same time, they might not always do so. In a Bazaar, what might be within the range of vision one moment, might not be, in the next.

If you don't see the hands that make the flower garland at this moment, in the next moment, you see only red and blue plastic buckets. When two of us walk along a street, you experience in one moment the labyrinth of garlands to your right, and I, the brass pots in front of me. The next moment, you see no twirling garland in the making and I see no sunshine on the brass. It was only for the moment and that moment is now gone.

In the Indian City, the urban experience draws from more than just architecture. The streets are also places of exchange. Each vendor finds his own way of displaying the goods and makes a shelter within the public space with materials locally and easily available, with a sensibility very much his own.

There is a pictorial language in the forms that the goods bear individually and collectively and the spaces that are generated between goods and the vendor, between vendor and a building façade and between the vendor, façade and the customer.

There is a temporariness in this creation that depends on the time of the day, the season of the year and the access to public space. Here, the art is functional; it attracts and the wares are sold. It is not the art that sells.

The photographs included here are from a collection that was exhibited at the Urban Visualities Exhibition and Symposium at Dakshinachitra in Chennai from 27Jan – 27Feb 2011

Read about :
Art and daily commodity
an Art Installation

a Street Bazaar & the CITY

The changing nature of the spaces and the displays in a Street bazaar in India makes it a complex phenomenon that differs from formal retail environments. In a Street Bazaar, there are patterns of human interaction and movement that are generated only to disappear again in a little while, to be created once more in another way. This blogpost includes a film about a simple day in a bazaar in the city of Bangalore.



In the Gandhi Bazaar in Bangalore, there have been two to three generations of vendors who have been involved with trading activity. They have developed a symbiotic relationship with the generations of families who have lived in the residential neighbourhood of Basavanagudi and have a sense of belonging to the place as much as the residents do. People come to Gandhi Bazaar to buy vegetables, fruits, flowers, banana leaves, silk sarees, bangles and puja items amongst many other household goods. It is a place to experience the culture of the city.

There is a territoriality in the Indian bazaar where there are single unit territories that individual vendors create at the street level and there are multiple unit territories that clusters of vendors generate at the city level. What is interesting is that this spatially delimited control described by Mattias Karrholm in his paper 'Territoriality in Urban spaces' may imply that the concept of neutrality in a public space may be crucial in urban design in the Indian context. Can an Indian street be enclosed between two parallel lines? Where will the cobbler sit? How to accommodate the roadside shrine or the sugarcane juice stall? So, how do we design our streets?

Read about:
Groundnut Fair at Basavanagudi
an Afternoon in Festive Dussehra
Flower sellers: To create, to forget
Bazaar Tour : Gandhi Bazaar

Groundnut Fair in Bangalore city

When we first moved to Bangalore three years ago, we were quite awed by the malls and the glass facade IT buildings lining the road where we lived. We made up our minds not to like the city. This was not a place for us. But, we had to continue to live here. As time passed, we discovered the old, charming parts of the "booming metropolis". It had remnants of what we knew Bangalore once was "the garden city" in South India. There have been small and beautiful places and happenings within the city that have unveiled themselves gradually and finally made us feel like this is a city we like!

This week, I read in the news : “On the last Monday of Karthikamasa (a month in the Hindu Lunar calendar), the traditional Kadlekai Parishe, a two-day annual groundnut (peanut) fair will begin at Basavanagudi (Bull Temple road) and Groundnut growers from many neighbouring towns will be here”

Every year over 200 vendors come to the city of Bangalore offering for sale tonnes of groundnuts and other products such as puffed rice, colourful toys and so on. The entire stretch of Bull Temple road is pedestrianised for these two days, vehicular traffic is reorganised and security arrangements are made for the evenings as the excitement of the fair attracts visitors from all over. 

I change my plans for the day and I’m at the Gandhi Bazaar by the afternoon. It is at the Ramakrishna Math circle that the fair starts. I begin to walk…

I couldn't believe that this was all happening in the heart of Bangalore city... a tradition that had to continue no matter how much the city contemporarised itself.

Read about: 
Peanut festival in Bangalore
Udaipur City
Art in Urban Spaces
Fish market Mumbai


This post is part of the blog carnival 'Carnival of Cities' hosted at Sophie's World. - a carnival about cities from around the world. Do check it out!

Festival of Lights

It was Diwali last week and bazaars all over the city of Bangalore and everywhere in the country were “places” to experience the sanctity and joy that comes with this festival of lights. In a simple way, place means ‘character’ of a space. This is a term that needs to be understood since the design of architecture and city planning are based on experiential learning. As I now write this blogpost about a walk in the bazaar during the Festival of Lights, I think about the meaning of place and its relevance to an understanding of the Indian bazaar.

There are shrines and temples on the way to Gandhi Bazaar that are beautifully decorated with lights of different colour. The pushcart vendor and his business thrive in the shared light and shared festivity. 

Christian Norberg-Schulz mentions George Trakl’s poem Winter evening in his writings on the phenomenology of place. He says it is more than a point in the calendar. In our own context, we try to analyse this. Winter evening – it tells you that it is winter, it tells you that it is evening. Winter evening has two attributes – winter and evening. It conjures images of cold weather, dull and husky air, a sky that has less light than otherwise. Whereas winter is related to time of the year, evening is related to time of day. There is a small phenomenon embedded within a larger phenomenon. Within a city, different places have different numbers of attributes that define its character. Here again, some perceive all the attributes and create their definition of the character of the space. Others perceive a few of the attributes which make up for them another character of the space or the sense of place.

The Plaintain leaves that are being offered for sale on D.V.G. Road at Gandhi Bazaar become the decoration for the footpath as shoppers turn the corner, some to stop and buy the leaves for this auspicious time of the year, others to move onto the street beyond. 

Place is always more than the spaces we design. A place may have collective memory. Its character may be defined from what people remember about their experiences of or within that space. Each person in a city has a set of memories. These add up to make a place what it is. What Gandhi Bazaar is as a place could be defined by the collective memory of the many generations who have lived in Bangalore. 

The streets are made more beautiful by the lights that are up for sale and also the lights that the shopowners have jointly organised making the entry to the shopping experience more special.

Sometimes, an event also has a collective memory. For example, the collective memory of the Commonwealth Games 2010 would comprise of what took place before the start of the games and towards the preparation of it. It could also be the winning of medals from the Indian players. For an event of this nature, the collective memory of the place would necessarily need to be built up from people who are not only living near the stadium, or living in Delhi but people from all over the country. Similarly, the festival of lights builds up memories of the Gandhi Bazaar in our minds in many different ways. 

As years pass by, the Diwali festival is celebrated with new kinds of paper lantern designs coming out each year. The clay diyas or lamps continue to be sold year after year.

If one were to explore the idea of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ - what are the inside and outside spaces in the context of a city? I may enter Bangalore from its outside, from another town, from a highway. I am now inside Bangalore city. In the past, a settlement had sometimes a fort and the walls of the fort determined the inside and the outside. A wall is the element that creates often the inside and the outside, also in a house. It creates an enclosure. What kind of enclosures do we have within our cities? The wall or the boundary. In a house, the wall is the boundary. In a city, the boundary may not be a visual barrier. The boundary may be a river, for example. In Benares, there is river, there are the ghats and there is the town. The ghats are not just a “series of steps’. There is a character, a sense of place. It has also collective memory.
 

There is a gentle rain and shoppers take shelter for a while. Soon the bazaar is alive again with some choosing paper lanterns and others gathering at the Granthige stores to choose what they need for the puja at home.

If you visit D.V.G.Road in the Gandhi Bazaar area during Diwali time, there is also an inside and an outside. One of the streets is covered with arches of lights, there are festoons and lanterns for sale, there are kiosks of popcorn, there is the loudspeaker announcing offers for discount sales. There is a note of welcome in the air as you step into the “inside” of the festive bazaar street with its arched lights. In India, with each festival season, urban spaces take on a different character. In the Bazaar, a sense of place is created with its own meaning for each of us. 

Read about :
Mylapore Temple Bazaar, Chennai
Fish market, Mumbai
Gandhi Bazaar, Bangalore
An afternoon in Festive Dussehra