Amitabh Nanda: A new name does not make a new neighborhood

I live in an area called Prabhadevi. I was born here. And for as long as I can remember I’ve been trying to escape it.

Not the neighborhood itself -- which is a perfectly pleasant, centrally located, infrastructurally sound neck of the woods, home to many of my friends who belong to well-rounded and urbane middle and upper-middle class families.

Instead it is the vernacular earthiness of the name, which somehow has always embarrassed me in a way that other locals from areas with fancy anglicized addresses, or those with shorter, less clumsy appellations could not imagine. 

This is why I wasn’t surprised to read this recent report from Final Mile, a Mumbai-based consumer research company, which identifies a recent trend of mental remapping being effected by the marketing departments of our realty companies -- who are concocting pseudonyms for the addresses of their projects in order to raise their perceived value.

Final Mile’s “behavioural architects” pick up on the fact that their own office neighborhood of “Lower Parel” has mysteriously been flipped into “Upper Worli” by the developers of the headline grabbing Lodha World One project coming up nearby -- thereby removing a cognitive bias which conjures up images of the downwardly mobile mill workers who live in the humble but charming Parel chawls (or slums) and replacing it with a suggestion of confederacy with the jet-set gentry of nearby Worli.

Good fences make great neighbors

It is common knowledge that location is perhaps the most important determinant of property value and it is also no big secret that India’s nouveau riche are willing and able to put down large premiums for the right addresses.

But Mumbai (nee Bombay) provides a particular challenge.

While the government has embarked on a brutal pogrom -- dubbed the Slum Rehabilitation Act -- designed to clear out lower income settlers from valuable pieces of real estate, the sheer lack of land and complicated political equations have made this process slow and tedious.

As a solution, realtors were earlier content to promise hermetically sealed environments, where you could enter your high-end enclave and be among people like yourselves, locking the outside world out. 

A typical instance of this deceit is Planet Godrej, a five-tower central Mumbai behemoth which offers terraced gardens, climate-controlled lobbies and video conferencing between apartments, but which is hemmed in by the notorious Dagdi Chawl on one end and the Arthur Road jail on the other.

This façade seems to be falling apart though, with anecdotal evidence that property values have remained sticky in new developments that exist cheek by jowl with more humble neighbors. The quasi-legal re-zoning of Upper Worli courtesy Lodha’s marketing department is clearly a sign of desperation.

Location non-Parel

Making no comment about whether this new trend is as disingenuous as the builders' previous attempts to escape geography as destiny, the cultural scientists at Final Mile also avoid the point that vernacularism is generally gaining disfavor in India.

English has always been an aspirational language in India -- but following Thomas Friedman's flattening out of the world, it has become de rigueur. Even Bollywood, that final frontier of Hindi cool, has capitulated, with the release this year of “Kites” the first all-English-scripted film featuring A-list Indian actors.

The flipside of this argument is that vernacular usage has become almost a curse. A popular new meme in local advertising media is the embarrassed child packing his declasse parents off to an English language academy.

A larger conspiracy would imagine that Indian culture is being posited as being at odds with modernity; that our decorative and ponderous arts and letters cannot stand their own in the slick, processed world of post-modern aesthetics. 

A case in point is the new rupee symbol. Ostensibly a proud showcase of the local Devanagari script, it has been widely criticized for the inclusion of alien hash marks borrowed from standard international currency usage. 

The real estate industry has long pandered to our colonial hangover, routinely tacking "Royale," "Grande," "Residency" and other such superlatives on the back of Indian monikers to add a sense of ersatz sophistication. The buildings themselves crudely ape the Western rush towards modernism, with science fiction designs rendered using glass and metal where organic local materials and aesthetics would be more appropriate.

When we do use Indian names and plumb our own culture, such as in the selling of Rajasthani fortress cities to international tourists, we're intentionally selling an archaic version of history. When we want to talk about the future, we look to the West.

The evolving socio-political map

Opportunistic political parties in several states in India, including Maharashtra, have confounded this situation by appropriating the debate of native versus foreign to serve a narrow chauvinistic agenda -- pitting history against development in order to win favor from such significant political vote banks as the disenfranchised mill workers of Parel. 

This reactionism is most evident in unproductive and hollow populist measures like the rebranding of our cities and their visible landmarks using the regional idiom, in order to deliberately eschew the frame of reference of the newly globalized elites.

Therefore “Bombay” has become “Mumbai,” and each one of its major transport terminuses has been renamed for the Maratha leader Chattrapati Shivaji, leading to much confusion amongst visitors and frustration, no doubt, for the creators of Google Maps.

In such an environment, it is easier to justify the retaliation of the realtors, as it eases the confusion and paranoia of their aspiring clients, who seek to escape the chaos of the third-world existence and achieve, or at least be seen to have achieved, a cosmopolitan and international standard of living, with a title to match.

What we're witnessing is very much a story of two divergent India’s -- one seemingly progressive and the other seemingly regressive -- and of the people from the sleepy neighborhood of Prabhadevi stuck somewhere in between.