'Pete' and Cantonment, worlds apart...

Most literature on Bangalore has references to the dichotomy of the City, the line drawn between the City area and Cantonment. Excerpts:

*In the old city, the main streets were oriented to the cardinal points, and contained the wholesale and retail shops in Doddpet, Chikpet, Siddikatta, Taragupet, Arlepet, and Nagarthpet.

*There was little or no manufacturing activity in the C&M Station, except that which served the needs of the troops. Taverns supplying beer, and later the Bangalore Brewery, were set up for the European troops, in part to keep them from an excessive consumption of country liquor. A series of tanneries developed in the east towards Devarajeevanhalli on the edge of the Cantonment to meet the growing demand for leather.

*The only attempt to set up a factory, the Bangalore Steam Woollen Mills established in 1877, languished initially and dramatically improved its fortunes only when it was taken over by managing agents, Binny and Co., and shifted to the western edge of the city in the late 1880s.

(Janaki Nair, ‘The Promise of the Metropolis)

*There was intermixing and integration of religious, social and cultural elements in both. For instance, in the predominantly Muslim and Christian area near Russel Market, there are streets with names like Dharmaraja Koil Street and Meenakshi Koil Street. There were broad groupings of communities such as Brahmins in Basavanagudi and Malleswaram, whereas Muslims tended to congregate near Shivajinagar, Kalasipalayam, and Mclver Town, and Christians in Murphy Town, Ashoknagar, and Mclver Town, to identify but a few areas.

*Fraser Town, named after the penultimate Resident of the Civil and Military Station, came into being in 1906 as a result of a scheme to relieve a congestion of hovels by acquiring and demolishing houses, improving the drainage, opening spaces on the lines of small parks or squares, widening bylanes and reconstructing houses on improved lines. It cost Rs 17 lakh and was known, at first, as Papareddipalaya, from an adjacent place with the name.

*Richards Town was named after E.J. Richards, District Magistrate and Collector of the Civil and Military Station, who took great interest in developing the town. A continuation of Fraser Town, it has a gently sloping ground with drains on all four sides. It has a park, around which the tram coming from Tannery Road used to run. Cox Town was named after another ICS officer, also a Collector and District Magistrate of the C & M Station. It is described by the Campbell’s Directory as a healthy and sociable town.

*Here is a strong contrast to the broad avenues and the military town of Bangalore. There are no red bricks, grey stones, windows, balconies or lamp posts. You see a long moderately narrow street with houses of one story, flat-roofed and whitewashed and windowless. Parallel with them runs a thinly planted avenue of cocoa-nut trees. Monkeys are countless and scrambling up the side walls, playing antics up the roof, bounding from the houses to the trees, and peering everywhere in search of plunder.

The street is thronged by turbaned men, some fully clad in shining white, the majority bare from the waist up, some with flowing beard, some with moustache and some with every hair shaven from the very eyebrow. There are a number of women bearing water pots, some basket of fruits, some having a child on the hip with its face against the mother’s side.

His first glimpse of an Indian bazaar is equally descriptive. ‘Instead of the grand buildings and glittering display that suit your Eastern notions, there is the same long narrow street, differing only in this – that the houses are not built up in the front but open in the fashion of a coach house’

(Rev. William Arthur, in ‘A Mission to the Mysore , 1847)