Bengaluru SouthOne of the largest constituencies in terms of voters and geographical size, Bengaluru South has eight Assembly segments — Basavanagudi, BTM Layout, Bommanahalli, Chickpet, Govindraj Nagar, Jayanagar, Padmanabhanagar, and Vijayanagar.
Bengaluru South is more than what the poll campaigns and political pundits will tell you.
A folk musician, he set up Global Kulture — in Basavanagudi — to create a space for musicians and artists to keep tribal and folk music traditions alive.
It would be good if there were more venues for folk music here,” he says.
Because of the one barrier of caste, an old friend distanced himself from me when he found out my caste.
Bengaluru South
One of the largest constituencies in terms of voters and geographical size, Bengaluru South has eight Assembly segments — Basavanagudi, BTM Layout, Bommanahalli, Chickpet, Govindraj Nagar, Jayanagar, Padmanabhanagar, and Vijayanagar.
Although the BJP has won the seat since 1991, this time around, it is a battle of prestige for both BJP and the Congress given the current political scenario. Former MLA Sowmya Reddy lost the Jayanagar Assembly election last year by 16 votes, a seat which the Congress won five times since 1989. She has support in many parts of the constituency partly because she is seen as accessible and responsive even though she lost the election and partly because of the clout her father, Transport Minister B Ramalinga Reddy, wields in those areas.
Even a cursory look at Tejasvi and Sowmya’s campaigns on social media shows starkly different approaches. Tejasvi is often seen meeting people out on their morning walks at parks and meeting residents of large apartment complexes in Basavanagudi, Jayanagar, and Padmanabhanagar, all affluent neighbourhoods culturally and politically aligned towards the BJP.
Sowmya projects a different persona. She is seen meeting members of posh resident welfare associations, posing with the odd woman autorickshaw driver she meets on the street or has held meetings with residents of lower-middle class or poorer areas on the streets and in community halls. She also has a significant following among women in several areas.
Bengaluru South is more than what the poll campaigns and political pundits will tell you. It comprises Chickpet, which dates back to Tipu Sultan’s time, and Basavanagudi, which the British built for the elites of the early 20th century. It also comprises villages swallowed up by an expanding city so that little trace remains of the people there before. Bommanahalli and BTM Layout, for instance, have swanky IT parks, upscale neighbourhoods where the software engineers live, as well as large areas of one-room houses that thousands of garment workers (mostly women) and waste pickers from across the country call home. Even these are generalisations that hide many of the city’s residents from view.
Amid this churn is a counterculture that not just exists but thrives.
Communities that eat together
The palpable communal rhetoric — which Tejasvi Surya often repeats — that has gained public currency in the last few years does not find acceptance in many parts of Bengaluru South. Rather, relations between different castes and religious groups are close, and the festival season — Ugadi and Eid — were occasions to celebrate for everyone.
Thirty-five-year-old Vijay Venkatesh, of Vivekananda Vasathi Sankeerana (VVS) in Jayanagar, says that when there is a festival, everyone turns up to help decorate and the food flows. Most of the residents of the slum eat meat, especially beef.
In Muslim-dominated Tilaknagar too, the situation is similar. Syed Ahmed (37), who runs an auto parts shop, says that the communal atmosphere does have him worried, but there has been no trouble in his neighbourhood. “You saw the Mariamma temple when you came, right? On one side of that is a big mosque, and down the road in the opposite direction is the church. Everybody celebrates every festival here. Festivals are days of affection, days to enjoy food. We got so much obbattu (sweet flatbread) two days ago on Ugadi,” he says.
On the day of our visit, he had drawn up two lists of his non-Muslim friends to invite for Eid lunch. “To my friends who eat meat, we will serve all the traditional Eid dishes. For the vegetarians, we have sweet boxes at home.”
Asked why he invites his non-Muslim friends for Eid, he quotes lines from Mohammed Iqbal’s famous poem, “Mazhab nahi sikhata, aapas me bair rakhna” (Religion does not teach you to hate another).
Counter culture
Southern Bengaluru, and Basavanagudi in particular, is definitely the “headquarters” of Indian classical music in the city, says Arun Sivag, a Bengaluru-based musician and founder of Global Kulture. A folk musician, he set up Global Kulture — in Basavanagudi — to create a space for musicians and artists to keep tribal and folk music traditions alive. In his experience, venues in this part of the city have little space for folk music, except as an opening act for a more prominent classical artiste or privately organised non-music events which invite folk musicians. “It’s hard for folk artistes to find affordable venues in these areas. It would be good if there were more venues for folk music here,” he says.
If classical music is one end of the musical spectrum, the other end comprises a vibrant nascent rap scene in the slums of Koramangala and Neelasandra in central Bengaluru .
“We live in Rajendra Nagar, not Koramangala,” 21-year-old Surya John corrects us.
For Surya, culture is rooted in his neighbourhood. “Culture includes everything. Fashion, music, food, hairstyle, hair colour. So much of the fashion you see in Bengaluru comes from the slums. A hairstyle that someone had in our slum two to three years ago, I see it now in my college,” Surya says. “The mainstream copies us in the name of fashion. Then they call it theirs.”
He is one of the 13 members of a band called the Big Bang. Aged between 16 and 23 years, the band’s members rap and sing oppari and gaana songs to the beats of the parai and djembe (percussion instruments). (Oppari is a form of mourning music, and gaana is a genre of Dalit urban folk songs sung in northern Chennai)
“We are not treated equally. Because of the one barrier of caste, an old friend distanced himself from me when he found out my caste. When people find out I eat beef, they judge me. They say ‘chee’.”
For Big Bang, art is not abstract. “It creates consciousness. Our music will help take the ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty to people,” Surya says.
