Like all people, the citizens of India tend to be gregarious. They enjoy gathering outside the home in the course of daily work, shopping and other tasks requiring a foray into the public areas in every settlement regardless of size or location. Chaos is a strong characteristic of these places where they gather. Cars with horns honking constantly drive through any passage wide enough to accommodate them. Animals are herded through: water buffalo and cattle, camels and goats and elephants surprise no one when they appear. People interact in a blaze of color and movement; haggling, buying, leading and following; eating drinking spitting and sleeping. The deeply imbedded order which defines chaos is felt beneath a cacophony that everyone appears to enjoy. What of the place itself? It is usually a street: squares and plazas are rare, often vestiges of the Raj, These places of former pomp are now quiet save for games of cricket. Whether in their hometowns or at foreign locales within India, the place people gather is the street. They do in the hill stations, in the towns, and the villages just as they do in Bombay and Calcutta. Bazaars are almost always widened streets themselves. These are the people who take their shoes (and the street) off when entering the home, a home with floors washed daily on hand and knee. This is the case with temples as well: barefoot people and spotless floors. But what of the street, the plaza, and roadside, even the common corridors in office buildings? They are squalid and filthy, filled with trash and debris. Along every road, in every town, and in every place Indians gather offal and trash gathers too. The smell is unmistakable, the thing most unsightly, but the people add to it everyday, tossing wrappers out car windows and leaving trash at the site of a picnic. Indians share a dialectical world view with their western neighbors. There is good and evil, beauty and ugliness, happiness and sadness and so on. When one places clean homes and trashy byways in this context their coexistence begins to become clearer. Homes and temples are sacred. Streets and alleyways are profane. Certain activities as well as standards of hygiene probably follow this paradigm. For an urbanist, Indian or foreigner to India, the question is ” Do Indians notice the squalor?” Westerners do not care for it at all: to be neat on the street is a fundamental requisite of their social behavior. Sloppy public behavior is probably not a cofactor of education per se; illiterate people may not be exactly as clean as others, but this may be a function of circumstance rather than world view. Many Indians say that this phenomenon appalls them as well. This group joins the western contingent; the jolly leavers of detritus are in question here. India’s caste system may provide the necessary component of cause and effect for urban detritus. This system has a group at the top, lots of groups in the middle, and a group at the bottom. This last group, the “untouchables” , are still considered unclean and are assigned the most unpleasant work in Indian society. Many members of this caste are found in public areas for the simple reason that they have poor lodgings to return to or have no lodgings at all. To a culture with caste present for over a thousand years, beliefs persist despite public hue and cry against them. It is similar to racism to the effect that even the most educated person says and wishes he were not racist. Deep down tough, there is a primitive urge that is very hard to ignore completely. Indians have abolished caste, and there are political and commercial successes for persons of low caste as a result. Old habits die hard. Persons of the underclass especially in the cities are dirty themselves, untouchable by both cultural and hygiene standards. It is not entirely unlikely that this group has always lived in a variation of where and how it now lives, and has been avoided for similar reasons for an equal amount of time. In Indian society people of every stripe comingle frequently. There is a tolerance for what more Cartesian societies would call “vagrancy”. People hang about everywhere. In essence the street is the home of the underclass and the “lowest” space in Indian culture. I would speculate that this sentient is a very old one, and that India did not begin leaving debris around recently. Perhaps it is as old and tenacious as the caste system, and will be as resistant to change.
You observations are absolutely right, if you just look at it as a jaywalker. The people spend most of their time on the streets, they make leave it dirty and yet this is where all the diverse groups come and meet.
When you look at this whole phenomenon and try to understand it, theretically/academically from a sociologist/urban designers view, you get a lot of contradictory informations. I will just share of some os them with you.
For the Indians, streets are just a mode of transport/generating money. They consider streets, not as an extention of personal space, but as a buffer between their own and neighbor’s personal spaces. It is only in the old fabrics, where the streets were designed as an extension of personal space into the private space, where the users start feeling the sense of owning the street ’space’. You should try seeing some old cities of India, maybe Udaipur, Jaipur, etc. YOu will understand what i am trying to say.
Another reason for the ‘abuse of the street spaces in India, can be attributed to the fact that, it is the space where ‘millions of diverse groups’ in India come and meet. Due to the socio political conditions of the country, these groups meet with each other, on the streets with a sense of insecurity. They dont have a sense of belonging to the streets (now this is also happening within neighborhoods). No human being would do anything for the larger community, until he has a feeling of being a part of the same. That feeling is not there in the citizens of the cities. So it doesnt matter if the personal is from a well to do background or not, he basically does not care about the street.
There is another thing which is worth mentioning here, since you have raised the issue of a huge economic divide between the the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Indian society is an ‘orthodox’ society when it comes to consider the economic standards of its citizens. It doent matter, if the person is a social activist, a religious leader, a preacher or the countries head. We all need, HELP, and not just help, we need economically weaker HELP who does not talk about tax, insuarance, medical insuarance, travel allowance, telephone allowance or anyother form of social security. The society needs them to be the way they are, for its own survival. This is where we beat the west and hence the presentation on the streets. Because if u see carefully, it is mostly these people who spend their time on the streets, while their bosses live in airconditioned cacoons.
This article seems to come from someone who is just a pretense of being an expert.
I wish there was a method to check the credentials before allowing a member or allowing him to post his views.
The Bio stinks of work which gives a false image of works done by others/ done for others but claimed to individual property. There’s been no completed work done by this guy on his own for I don’t know how long.Yet he writes about a country, he doesn’t even know.
Its like a footballer who plays in the backstreets of New York, commenting on how cricket can be better in India.
The mountain city of India Shimla was a colonial urban development established by the Britishers in the nineteenth century in the Indian hills. It is hypothesized that the evolution of mountain city has been through three main stages. The first is the period of colonial domination, primarily considered health resort. They developed as expressions of political, economic and social power exercised by the British, who established these towns as replicas of British heritage.
The insemination and health problems are related with the garbage disposed practices followed by the people. The garbage is found littered on hill slopes, especially in the residential areas, hotel, and guest house coulplexes, offices and hospitals. There seems to be no concept of garbage collection and its disposal at a proper place provided by the municipal corporation, although garbage dumpers are placed at various places, but people throw it not in the dumper but outside it. The irony is that they walk up the dumpers by fail to put the garbage there. The polythene bags containing garbage keep on lying for weeks together. Since polythene is not bio-degrable material it remains in fact. The same city bags are also found in the drainage all over the city. The non-cleaning of the drainage results in their chocking during the rainy season. In this way the dirty water stink spreads around in the air.
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