Excerpt: Cubbon Park by Roopa Pai: ‘meeting place, sanctuary and thoroughfare’
This extract from the introductory chapter to a book on the city’s green cathedral pinpoints why it is so dear to citizens
How would I describe Cubbon Park? That’s easy! Central to a weekend!
— Paul Fernandes, artist, writer, designer and Bangalore’s pre-eminent visual chronicler
Cubbon Park is an emotional issue for all Bangaloreans. This one space does not threaten to exclude anybody. Cubbon Park is not a tourist show-piece.
The sustainability of a city is characterised by the righteous protection of its land. Parks and open spaces are created not out of political necessity or willingness, but by sheer necessity of survival within a densely crowded and inhumane habitat.
The wild beauty of Cubbon Park is incomparable. No other city can boast of 300 acres (or is it just 100 acres?) of verdant splendour at its very heart. The battle to save Cubbon Park therefore, is a whole-hearted and unified struggle to save our habitat.
— Excerpt from The Battle for Cubbon Park by Leo Saldanha, environmentalist and activist, in the November 1998 issue of The Bangalore Monthly
In September 1998, almost a quarter of a century ago now, a legislation passed by the Karnataka government galvanized the citizens of an entire city into extraordinary and unprecedented action. It was one of those watershed moments, when that amorphous amassment of people, passions and priorities that has earned the right to call itself a city pauses, briefly, in its ceaseless pulling in a hundred different directions at once, and coalesces spontaneously... into a single-pointed, high intensity laser beam, intent on achieving a common goal.
What made this coming together of Bangalore particularly remarkable was what was at stake — not public health or safety, not a lack of water or electricity, not garbage pile-ups or potholed roads or traffic congestion (all chronic Bangalore afflictions), but 32 acres of a park. The people’s protests of 1998 were against the government’s arbitrary “denotification” of those 32 acres, a move that stripped that parcel of land of the protection it had hitherto enjoyed under the Karnataka Government Parks (Preservation) Act of 1975, and laid it open to appropriation and redevelopment by the government and other influential parties.
What was also remarkable was the manner of the coming together. The issue brought thousands of ordinary and celebrity citizens out of their homes and into the streets, and inspired journalists across the spectrum to lay aside their differences and back the public against the establishment.
The protests went on for weeks and weeks, but never crossed the line from civil engagement into violence, or from constitutional, legal battles into vigilantism.
It is important to clarify that this was... a historic, then 128-year-old park, one of two heritage lung spaces of the city... With the Save Cubbon Park protests, a specific idea of what it meant to be part of this particular city took root, and a bar to live up to had been set.
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Which begs the question: what makes Cubbon Park so important, so meaningful and so beloved?...
Well, there is its physical location, for one. Historically, the Park lay at the intersection of two entirely different ways of life — the Bangalore Cantonment, administered by the British, and the Bengaluru Pettah, aka City, administered by the Maharaja of Mysore — making it a no-man’s land between oppressor and oppressed, soldiers and civilians, foreigners and natives, tea-drinkers and coffee-drinkers, largely church- and mosque-goers and largely templegoers, Tamil- and Urdu-speakers and Kannada-speakers (the elite on both sides, then as now, spoke English). After Independence, when City and Cantonment were merged to create the new capital city of Mysore State, the Park became a staging area for wary rapprochement, a safe space betwixt MG Road and KG Road.
By and by, it also became the state’s administrative centre... The Judiciary, in the form of the Karnataka High Court, settled into the Attara Kacheri, the state’s original administrative offices... Both houses of Legislature and the entire state cabinet moved into the Vidhana Soudha across the road. The Executive occupied the rather unimaginatively named Multi-Storeyed Building beside the Soudha. As for the Fourth Estate, it not only scattered itself in various locations around the Park’s boundaries but also... met each evening to trade yarns and hot tips at the Press Club inside the Park.
And yet, amid all the chaos that surrounded it, the Park offered oases of silence and birdsong and dappled shade to those who needed it. Never entirely fenced about in its 152-year-old history, the Park became Bangalore’s meeting place, sanctuary, and thoroughfare...
It was thus, over the years, organically and effortlessly, that Cubbon Park became central to the Bangalorean heart...
This book is as much about its people as it is about the Park. As long as Bangaloreans, old and new, carry in their hearts the spirit of these verdant, welcoming acres, and are willing to stand up to anyone or anything that threatens it, this city will have nothing to fear.