YOU don't call them citizens in these parts, you call them survivors, bodies concentrated into eyes. The eye of the average survivor in Mumbai would have met Dronacharya's exacting standards with ease: fixed on its often moving target of the moment, it allows the rest of the ambient world to stream by in a blur. The pedestrians are too busy fighting their way to their destinations, slicing a path through the density of the throng, to look up. The motorists are too involved with fending off devious lane-cutters and jumping catatonic traffic lights to look around. The intermediate classes of public-space users are too preoccupied with the transactions and delights, the slippages and treacheries of everyday life in the great Indian metropolis to take much notice of the built form around them. Or then, they are too caught up with introducing pragmatic variations and extensions into these buildings — which could range from lean-tos and awnings to cubicles and enclosures — to regard them with a connoisseurial eye.


In any case, even for those who appear to have the leisure for it, dependable sources of information and insight on the architecture of urban India are not widely available outside the circles inhabited by specialists and enthusiasts. All that percolates down to the great reading public, through the columns of the daily newspapers, are a few catchphrases and descriptions. And this too, only on those occasions when the local media see fit to feature the more presentable among the conservationists in the lifestyle section; or when they decide to cover an urban heritage conference on the news pages in honour of its implications for urban development policy. Among these catchphrases and descriptions, which the reading public has gleaned from its afternoon reading — or at least, that section of the public which reads its tabloids in English — is the reassuring, all-purpose term "neo-Gothic". You can't go wrong with that one. It is the heritage correspondent's gift to Mumbai's articulation-challenged survivors.


It meets all contingencies, this term for all seasons, so that any building that appears to date from the colonial period can readily be glossed with it. To the average uninformed mind, and even, I have recently been told, to some volunteers engaged with managing heritage walks in the city's colonial quarter, the label "neo-Gothic" can be stretched to fit everything from the austere quasi-Parthenon of the Town Hall (which houses the Asiatic Society, founded in 1804 and currently celebrating its bicentennial anniversary) through the many-balconied Venetian Gothic façades of Elphinstone College and the University's Rajabai Tower, with their rosettes, arches and gargoyles, to the white-domed Indo-Saracenic massifs of the Prince of Wales Museum and the General Post Office.


The British architects, who threw away their manuals and learned to savour the flamboyant structures of the Mughal and Rajput past, reworking them into the variable patterns of European revivalism, seem to have laboured in vain. The Andhra craftsmen, who applied their hereditary skills to unfamiliar stones and strange sculptural mandates, might as well never have existed.
The enigmatic productions that grew from these phantasmagoric encounters among lineages, expectations, horizons of meaning, may as well never have occurred. The blight of ignorance obscures these facades and colonnades more brutally than a century of soot.


I never cease to be amazed by the inattention with which Mumbai's people treat their built environment, the lack of critical discernment that mars their understanding of the buildings which provide their lifeworld with some of its finest features. I cannot presume to speak for other great urban centres in South Asia, but certainly in Mumbai — since it is home to a vigorous and successful architectural heritage conservation movement — we would be justified in expecting a more widespread knowledge of the stylistic and material experiments, the planning and design choices, from which the city's historic buildings have evolved. Instead, all we have are dead words: words that blur past reality, instead of picking reality out in detail.
Perhaps it is a persisting Brahminism of attitude, made worse by the internalisation of nonsensical Romantic ideas about Indian civilisation, that is responsible for our general aversion to manual precision, the pursuit of artisanal perfection, and attention to detail. We have lived in the Heaven of Ideas too long, to the extent that we are, in many existential contexts, such as metropolitan architecture, unable to connect the words in our textbooks and guidebooks with the facts as they are, the visual and tactile actualities of stone, brick, course and spandrel. We approach these in the spirit of nonchalance signified by that popular verbal assertion of the right to vagueness, the habitual "whatever" of the teenager and the adult whose youth is well past its sell-by date. Whatever, indeed, happened to that Arjuna-like focus with which we have just credited the survivor in his or her role as negotiator of public terrain in the metropolis? Whatever happened to that other Brahminism, the vigilant, flexible, open-eyed responsiveness to the sensory world, embodied by Drona? Is that faculty to be reserved for practical life, and not to be extended as a form of attention in the domain of knowledge?

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