The Kolam and the Bazaar

I had been walking through the streets of Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu. I walked through street bazaars and almost every shop had in front of it a Kolam. It was now a week after Pongal. What was the relevance of the Kolam? I looked in the library for books where I’d find answers.

The first book said, “It is a common thing in Hindu quarters of towns and villages that young maidens with cheerful faces are engaged every morning early after sunrise, in forming designs called Kolam in Hindu Tamil phraseology, on the floor in front of each and every one of the houses along the street”. This was in a book first published in 1925 - ‘South Indian Customs’ by P.V. Jagadisa Ayyar.

Ayyar further explained: “Ancient Hindus used rice flour to form the designs and thus fed myriads of ants every day which would otherwise get into undesirable places in the house. Further ‘Start the business of a day with a sacrifice’ is the Hindu motto. What other better mode of sacrifice could be suggested than this”. So, was the Kolam in the Bazaar street as much in the Residential street because of this Hindu motto?

It seems that originally it was rice flour or pulverized corn that was used for making the Kolam. This was replaced by powdered limestone. In every house, the woman’s first task in the morning was to sweep the house entrance clean, sprinkle water to keep down the dust and decorate the place with Kolam.

I then began to look up what the books said about Pongal. Fred W.Clothey (1983) in ‘Rhythm and Intent’ explains that “Festivals are celebrated in every society at appropriate junctures of the year in such a way as to make these junctures meaningful. As with rituals, festivals express the polarities in cosmic and human life: there is fasting and feasting, there is ushering out of the old, the welcoming of the new”.

“A festival of ecological significance marks an astronomical or seasonal event. The Pongal is such a festival celebrating the harvest and also the sun’s entrance into its ‘northern’ journey after the winter solstice. On the other hand, a theological festival is primarily designed to celebrate some event in the life of a deity or sacred being”.

There was more. Abbe J.A.Dubois (1906) in ‘Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies’ had explained the reason behind the making of the kolam: “During the inauspicious month which precedes the Pongul, sannyasis or mendicants, go from door to door about four o’clock in the morning, waking all sleepers by beating their gongs, warning them to take precaution against the evil influences of this unlucky period.”

And, what I read next was really interesting. “With this purpose in view, the women of the house every morning prepare a small patch about a yard square outside the door, smearing it with cow-dung and tracing several white lines upon it with rice flour. They then place within this square several pellets of cow-dung each adorned with a pumpkin flower. These pellets are supposed to represent Vigneshwara, the god of obstacles, whom they seek to appease. Every evening, these little balls of cow-dung, together with their flowers, are carefully collected, to be kept till the last day of the month. When this day arrives, the women put these pellets into a new basket and solemnly carry them away beyond the precincts of their dwellings and throw them into a tank”.

I know this blogpost is really getting long, but there’s just a bit more. “On Pongal day, women put rice to boil in milk on a fire. As soon as it begins to simmer, they all cry out together, ‘Pongul, Pongul’. They then remove the vessel from the fire and place it before the idol of Vigneshwara, to whom they offer a portion of the rice; another portion is given to the cows, and the rest is eaten by the people of the house”.

"On this day Hindus exchange visits. On meeting each other, the first words they say are: ‘Has the rice boiled?’ to which the answer is ‘It has boiled’. It is for this reason that the feast is called Pongul, the word being derived from Pongedi in Telugu and Pongaradu in Tamil, both signifying to boil".

So, finally, I knew how it came about that Kolams were made during Pongal time. Even though sometimes we don’t know the complete story behind some of our traditions, they still continue, they are still a part of our lives, our streets. If the tradition hadn’t continued, we’d have never known!

The Architecture of the Bazaar

The Bazaar in India is not always a market building. One could say that the Bazaar is not always architecture. However, there have been market buildings which became the starting point in many Indian cities for an entire urban precinct which served as a marketplace.

In India, many of the Market buildings were built by the British before independence. There is the K.R.market in Bangalore, the Crawford market in Mumbai, the Devaraja market in Mysore, the Connemara market in Trivandrum or the Kurupam market in Visakhapatnam. These are buildings that hold value even today since they are both architectural heritage - telling a story of the indigenous skills of the artisans and also urban heritage - holding within them signs and memories of how the city has grown. There are two earlier posts that discuss this aspect of the Bazaar: The Marketplace as Urban heritage - the Devaraja market in Mysore and Urban Structure - City market and Russell market

Devaraja market in Mysore (from the inside)

If one were to look at examples outside of India, there are some historic market buildings that are even today thriving marketplaces. I've written earlier about the Grand Central Terminal market in New York city, that opened to the public in February 1913, almost exactly a hundred years before and is today a place for gourmet food. The Faneuil Hall market in Boston was built in 1742 and is today a place for tourists while it still serves the local population. Both of these market buildings were constructed in response to the increase in traders bringing their produce into town and the need for a formal place for the exchange of goods. Several of the historic markets in Europe have survived and as Meena Venkataraman points out in her post on Exploring Borough market, in order to survive change, markets have had to adapt, assimilate and to evolve.

In Architecture schools in India, Market architecture is not a subject or even a topic that is studied or discussed, just as vernacular domestic architecture is not studied. In the State of Andhra Pradesh alone, there are 23 districts each with its own vernacular architecture but we do not study it. It is often said that a bazaar grows organically, it cannot be designed and therefore cannot be a concern for architects. Can this be true?

There is also the term Built environment which is more expansive. Built environment includes all the structures people have built when considered as separate from the natural environment. The phrase acknowledges that the majority of urban environments already exist, that a small fraction of buildings constructed annually, even in the industrialized world, are designed by architects (Ref: Wikipedia).  So, can a Bazaar be termed as a Built-environment, if it is not a building? The Mulji Jetha market in Mumbai is an unusual bazaar, it can be termed either a 'building' or a 'built-environment'. If one looks at the plan of the bazaar, one finds that it occupies several streets within the dense south mumbai urban fabric and yet it is a roofed bazaar.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (2008), the Bazaar was originally a public market district of a Persian town. From Persia, the term spread to Arabia, Turkey and North Africa. In Turkish, it was the Pazar. In India, it came to be applied to a single shop, and currently implies a street lined with shops or a fair at which a variety of goods are sold. In an Arab city, a commercial quarter was termed as the Souq . Historically, Souqs were held outside of cities in the location where a caravan loaded with goods would stop and merchants would display their goods for sale. Later, due to the importance of the marketplace and the growth of cities, the locations of souqs shifted to urban centers (Ref: Wikipedia).

Krishna Raja (K.R.) market in Bangalore

A Bazaar is often an organically developed series of shops that eventually become an urban space that is termed as the Bazaar. The planning of this space does not take place formally in the offices of the City Planning departments in India. According to the National Association of Street Vendors in India (NASVI), vendors of fruits and vegetables have never been allocated space in the city in a pre-planned manner.

However, the morning market or the weekly markets have always existed in India, in South Asia and in the Middle Eastern countries. Today, there is a threat to the Periodic bazaar as land prices in the inner city escalate making both the traditional street bazaar and the historic market building of less economical value though their cultural and social value remain the same. In their paper Rendering Istanbul's Periodic Bazaars Invisible: Reflections on Urban Transformation and Contested Space, Ozlem Oz and Mine Eder explain that there have been repeated cases where the municipality has persuaded a resident to file a lawsuit against the people of the bazaar on grounds of noise and pollution to facilitate its relocation, so that land can be made available to a developer for constructing a mall or to be rented out as a car park.

In India, markets are initially neglected by the Municipalities who own these buildings and when they became dilapidated structures, it is suggested by the government that the vendors be relocated so that the building can be demolished in order to be replaced by a mall. There is an ongoing conflict between the Vendors and the Government in Bangalore which I discuss in The Riddle of Russell market.

We need to ask ourselves the question: Why were these markets built? At what time in the city's history did they come  in? What is changing now? Are these markets redundant for the new times we are living in?


Kurupam market in Visakhapatnam

According to INTACH vizag, the Kurupam market was built so that the revenue generated from the shops leased to merchants could be used to provide medical facilities to the poor of the city. The Russell market building was built in 1927 when the Municipal Commissioner T.B.Russell initiated its construction when he found that the existing informal market in the Cantonment area was insufficient for the growing needs of this neighbourhood. In Bombay, the Crawford market was built as a wholesale market for fruits and vegetables in 1869. It was designed by the British architect William Emerson. In 1996, the wholesale traders were relocated to Navi Mumbai when it was decided that this change would reduce the traffic congestion particularly with the goods entering the city by road through its north end and having to traverse the length of the linear city to reach Crawford market at its south end.

In both the Russell market and the Crawford market, the British seemed to have recognised the functional need of an Indian marketplace and planned large open spaces within the layout of the market building, where merchants could unload their goods, sort them out and display them for their customers, where the open space behind the ornate façade allowed a flexibility of operations similar to a Street bazaar or a Market square. If we were to generate an architectural typology for the Indian bazaar, this aspect of the colonial market buildings in India would be one of the key lessons to learn from.

Besides, we would need to observe closely the hundreds and thousands of street bazaars in our towns and cities to know how a market works and how it looks, because we have no repetition in our bazaar layouts, each one has its own character and its own order. What designer would not find that challenging enough to study?

Policing the Urban Space

In a City, some Urban spaces are always safe, others are not. Sometimes, the urban space becomes a temporal marketplace and the city administrators have to judge whether it will be a safe place for the public or if things may go "out of control".  If they anticipate unsafe conditions, they ensure that the Police will be present there when they are needed. However, the police exercise control in different ways and the urban spaces extend from being 'spaces as containers' to being 'spaces of power' *. I look at one such urban space in Bangalore - the Bull temple road which is pedestrianised for two days for a cultural festival around the Bull temple at Basavanagudi.

The Groundnut Fair (Kadlekai Parishe) that took place this year on December 10th and 11th had all the familiar elements – the Groundnuts, the Vendors, the Public and the Police. We had interviewed a few Police officers on duty during the Parishe and I reproduce here excerpts from the interview:

How many people from the Police department are present here during the two-day Parishe?
Approximately 200-300 police officers. Some of the officers are here in uniform and others are in mufti (plain clothes).

What are the duties of the Police officers during the Kadlekai Parishe?
There is a lot of crowd during the fair which means many crimes can occur without anyone’s notice. Petty crimes like chain snatching can occur without the victim’s knowledge. Sometimes, vehicles get stolen. We need to keep a check on the crowds coming in and out of the temple and also make it easier for them to move about in the Fair. In case of fire emergencies, we need to make arrangements to have it extinguished, get the fire department to respond immediately and so on. In case someone gets hurt we need to make sure they are taken to the hospital quickly and safely.

What are the arrangements made by your department for the Kadalekai Parishe?
At some places, barricades need to be put so that there is no vehicle interference with the pedestrians. We depute more officers on those roads where there are likely to be more people entering the Bull temple road. Basically, we try to minimise crime problems and traffic congestion.

Which police stations in the city are involved?
The South division of the Police department has three sub-divisions. There is the Jayanagar sub-division, the Chamrajpet sub-divison and the Banashankari sub-division. Each of these sub-divisions has seven stations under it. There are officers from about 21 stations here for the two days.

How is the work distributed to the officers?
There are both the Traffic police and the Law and Order police. The Traffic police supervise the Bull temple road and ensure that it is a pedestrian zone for these two days, not permitting vehicular traffic to enter from any of the connecting roads or from either ends of Bull temple road. The Law and Order police look after the internal movement of people within the Fair and their safety, between these two ends.

How are the zones demarcated for supervision? 
You will notice the row of barricades near the restaurant Halli thindi and another near Ramakrishna ashram. There are such barricades provided all along the Bull Temple road to demarcate the zones for supervision. For instance, to mark Hanumanthnagar police limits, there is a line of barricades and then from the next barricade another police station takes over the responsibility.

There are several police in uniform (although there are plainclothes policemen too) to signal to the public that they can spend their time at the Fair within a safe environment and to simultaneously signal to the unsocial elements that any crime or wrong act will be caught immediately. In these 'spaces of power', on the one hand, the city empowers the public and the vendors who work within the law and on the other it controls the users of the space who may have the tendency to break the law to do only that which society finds acceptable.

* Koskela, Hille. "‘The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space." Progress in Human Geography 24.2 (2000): 243-265.

(Interviewer: Rakshitha K.S.)

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Groundnut Fair and the Temple Priest

The Groundnut Fair is both a religious and a cultural festival that takes place every year on the Bull temple road in Bangalore and brings groundnut growers and traders from several villages in Karnataka to the city. We started to interview the Groundnut vendors, the Residents of Basavanagudi, the Traffic police and others to understand more about the Fair. I reproduce here a short interview with the Head Priest of the Bull Temple.

When was the Bull temple built?
The temple was built around 1537 A.D. It is said to be built by Kempegowda during his rule.

Why was this temple built, why here in Basavanagudi?
The idol of the Nandi (Bull) in this temple is said to have been that of “udbhava”. They say that the idol was always there, Kempegowda just built the temple. There is another legend that says Lord Nandi appeared in Kempegowda’s dreams and asked him to build a temple in his worship. The idol is 12 ft high, 20 ft in length. It is the second largest Nandi idol in south of India, the first being in Lepakshi, in Andhra Pradesh.

What about the legend of River Vrishabhavathi flowing under the idol?
If one looks closely at the idol, one can see that the right leg of lord Nandi rests on a veena (the musical instrument). The veena rests on a lotus flower. We know that the lotus flower grows only in water. This water is said to be the water from Vrishabhavathi river. It is said to rise from below the idol. I haven’t been a witness to it, neither has my father or grandfather who’ve been around for around 80 years now .

How did the Ganesha temple come to be? Was it a part of the Nandi temple?
The usual custom is that before starting anything good like say entering a new house, there is usually a ganesha idol placed and worshipped for success and prosperity. Similarly with this temple. Before the Bull temple was built there was probably a Ganesha temple built .

What are the special events at the temple during the Kadlekai Parishe?
Early in the morning there is the Panchamrutha abhisheka. Also, a Rudrabhisheka which involves abhisheka with milk. The nandi idol is totally covered with flowers. On the Monday that the Parishe begins on, in the evening there is “Nandi kolu”.  At 11 pm, there is the Mahamangalarthi.

What is the temple’s involvement in the Parishe?
The temple allocates the space for the vendors outside the temple entrance and along the Bull temple road. The contract for collecting the rent for the space is given out as a tender. The MUZRAI department (Department of Religious Endowment) plays a major role in organising the Parishe. They send us extra staff to handle the parishe.

The support required from various fields is taken into account by the chief executive officer. He writes out letters to different departments which includes the Police force, the Municipal corporation, Ambulance and medicine, Generator and Emergency power supply etc. They all co-operate and work together. The local politicians direct the police force to co-ordinate the event. The Municipal authority (BBMP) plays its role in cleaning of the streets during and after the Fair. Because there is a large crowd visiting the temple during the parishe, we need to add more priests to help maintain the place. Usually I call upon people I know and some from within my family too.

What about the revenue for the temple from the Parishe? What do the vendors pay?
The vendors need to pay some 200-300 rupees per day to the appointed person who has been awarded the tender. The temple gets around 10-15,000 rupees from it.

Do vendors like the coconut seller or the one who manages the shoe stand within the temple premises need to pay a rent for the space?
Yes, it’s more of a yearly contract though. This space is also auctioned and the highest bidder gets it. The shoe or chappal stand itself generates an income of about Rs.2,00,000/- per year.

What are the other roles that the MUZRAI department plays in supporting the temple?
Mainly, all the funds that the temple collects during the Parishe goes to a dedicated account of the temple with the MUZRAI department. They take care of everything from cleaning, maintenance, making new spaces, repairing old structures, granting salaries to the temple employees etc. The Priests and the maintenance staff at the temple are paid their salaries by the MUZRAI department. If say, a temple’s funds are insufficient for it’s own upkeep, then the Muzrai department can actually reach out to another temple’s funds and fund this temple. If any repairs to the old temple structure or new spaces need to be planned, the MUZRAI department works with the Archaeological survey of India to prepare the necessary plans and execute the work .

Interviewer: Rakshitha K.S.

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