the adolescent city
Like people, cities have phases of life: childhood, youth, old age. London, for example, is an old man of a city: eccentric and cranky, with a streak of dry wit, smelling of stale gin and cigars. New York is at peak middle age, its hard-edged exterior masking a sophisticated and complex mix of identities. Dhaka, on the other hand, wears its youth like a banner, unfurled for all to see. It is the ultimate, the quintessential adolescent city: awkward, insecure, lanky, with a breaking voice and a scraggly beard.
Dhaka is a city full of reckless energy and vitality, a city of unbounded, planless growth, tangled traffic and teeming pedestrians. Most significantly, it is a city that is hardly a city at all, most of it having only just risen from the paddy fields, and still carrying with it the raw provincial mindset of the village. We can compare Dhaka with its erstwhile sister city, Kolkata. Though in the measure of years Kolkata is the younger, through the wear and tear of colonization she has aged the greater. Now we see her bent under the weight of her years, and her womb, that once bore such a plentiful harvest of culture, hangs between her hips like a shrivelled grape on the vine.
The pure image of Dhaka bespeaks its youth: in the broad, bold avenues that cut through the city, impatiently outstripping its size; in the signs of construction everywhere as buildings rise like new teeth from the virgin earth; in the dizzying patchwork of billboards and banners that pockmark its teenaged face; and in the upward thrust of the steel pilings that bristle from the roof of every house, seemingly proclaiming: ‘Another storey is yet to come!’
Most striking is the unbridled growth of the city, as it shoots up and outward in an uncontrolled spurt of adolescent energy. Teeming migrants swell its ranks by the thousands day after day, their fragile hopes of work and survival swallowed whole, as the city’s belly bloats in a horizontal expansion of sprawling ramshackle slums. For the more well-to-do, high-rise apartments push their way skyward, jostling one another in a frenzied race to fill every gap. To fuel its growth, the hungry city sucks the surrounding land dry of water and greenery. Paddy fields shrivel, and in their place apocalyptic brick fields spew forth torrents of fire and smoke, sending their blackened harvest of bricks lumbering towards the city on the backs of beastly trucks.
In Dhaka City we are confronted with startling contradictions: high-tech computer stores beside ramshackle tea stalls, suave mobile-toting businessmen side by side with fossilized bureaucrats, hand-painted rickshaws next to gleaming Pajeros¾visions of the strange coexistence of village and city, of old and new, which most pointedly recall the image of the awkward adolescent as he moves unsteadily through his new world, with his adult’s body and his child’s mind.
We must not forget the raw, pulsating voice of the city: the asynchronous symphony of millions of lives, the rumble of countless engines and the blaring of horns, the jingle of thousands of rickshaw bells and the mantras of myriad hawkers, the tapping of brick breakers and the whirring of garments machines; all these hover in the air with the smoke and dust of restless commotion. At intervals a chorus of azaans struggles to break through the cacophony. In an effort to compete with this urban din, their harmonious call is distorted to a whine by tin-can amplifiers, and they become one with the clamor of modernity. In some forgotten corner the lament of a flute brings brief respite, winding its way between concrete pilings, its melody the memory of a distant village home.
It is a lingering vestige of childhood perhaps, this persistent memory of the village, that reemerges again and again despite the enveloping walls of brick and concrete. It resurfaces in the folk paintings on rickshaws and buses and trucks that portray idyllic scenes of another, earlier life. The adolescent city yearns to return to this nurturing world of colour and festivity, to the green earth of the village that is only a generation away. ‘Where is your desh?’ (Desh in Bengali literally translates as country, but in this context means ‘home district’) the city-dwellers ask one another, as if this gray city could never be home, when, if truth be known, home is a distant rural sanctuary of swaying coconut groves and glittering ponds.
At intervals the city betrays its rural roots. During the annual Eid festivals, a mass stampede to village homes leaves the city abandoned; its frenzied pace is momentarily silenced then. Streets now become wastelands of concrete; even the sound of rickshaw bells is muted, and the sole remaining inhabitant is the wind, gently meandering between empty edifices.
But like a true rebellious teenager, the city also virulently rejects its agrarian past. All that is new and foreign is good: the skyline glitters with air-conditioned shopping plazas crammed with tantalizing consumer commodities; streets are lined with Dominous Pizza and Big Bite fast food joints; and schools and colleges spring up like mushrooms, with names like Oxford and Stamford, while scooters bedecked with pagan paintings are replaced by bright green CNG-powered vehicles, sporting painted slogans that paradoxically proclaim, ‘Send your children to madrasas’ and ‘Put your women in purdah.’
Beyond these images of Dhaka City one detects too an overarching, elemental sense of the spirit of the place: the spirit of youth. In tea houses, student meetings and cultural festivals, Ekushey melas and film screenings, we feel the pulsing vitality of that youth. The city conveys a sense of exuberance and limitless possibility, a sense that, at any moment, great things will be achieved. It is a city that knows how to dream, to imagine endless horizons, to undertake massive endeavours with its bare hands. And indeed, at that age of vitality and conviction, great things are really possible.
Dhaka may have the vitality of youth, but it is also full of the insecurity of adolescence, and the raw emotion that it breeds. Here there is the harsh simplicity of the village, not the bourgeois finesse of the aged city: here, friendship is fast and strong, but enmity is also quick to rise hot in the blood, while violence spurts forth readily like lava overflowing from a young volcano. Jealousy, one of the crudest of emotions, is openly displayed and virulently avenged. Impartial appreciation is an impossibility, and talent, however brilliant, quickly fades in misery, or dies in a tragic flash. Thus the potential fruit of the future is killed, recklessly and mercilessly.
Nevertheless, despite its flashes of cruelty, the adolescent city is capable of a spontaneous outpouring of remorse at its deeds. For a moment, sorrow and penitence overcome anger like a child scolded by a parent long taken for granted; it suddenly becomes aware of its faults. But then the city strides forth once again, cutting a swathe of creation and destruction in its wake.
Furthermore, this youthful city, inflated with the brashness of its age, is remarkably shortsighted with regard to the past. It has no sense of history, and thus no compassion for the intrinsic value of the old. While the keepsakes of its past rot in the recesses of decaying archives and libraries, a mad scramble ensues to embrace the latest gadgets and trends of distant lands. Ancient landmarks crumble so that neon markets sprout, giant trees fall to enable transmission towers to rise, rivers recede and factories expand, all in a chaotic tussle between ancient and modern, Eastern and Western. It is a city that constantly strives to recreate itself, trampling in the process whatever came before.
The adolescent city, then, has neither past nor future; here is only the present, where all survive or perish in the crucible of the moment.
But let us not forget the receding mother of the beast, Old Dhaka, at its core. Here is an abiding presence of a different age, an evolved, mature city with a memory of the past. This part of the city was sculpted gradually through the centuries, built upon silted layers of cross-breeding cultures, from Moghul emissaries and Christian missionaries, to Urduwallahs and Armenians. Unlike her youthful migrant neighbour, the old city’s roots run deep. ‘My desh is Old Dhaka!’ her residents proudly proclaim. Ageless ties of kinship and friendship bind the citizens here together into an organic, living whole. Rather than voraciously consuming all in its path, here pounds the ceaseless drumbeat of an industrious heart, churning out everything under the sun: machinery parts, car accessories, electronics, audio cassettes, bangles, umbrellas…Unapologetically branded ‘Made in Japan’ and ‘Made in USA’, the stream of produce flows through the old city’s narrow lanes to feed the markets and supply lines of the burgeoning metropolis beyond. From the tangled jumble of Shakhari Bazar to the sedate lanes of Gandaria, the faded grandeur of Ahasan Manzil to the crumbling facades of Farashi para, Old Dhaka carries her patchwork mantle with grace and aplomb. But at her borders too, the dense jungle of high-rises throw their lengthening shadows; and the mother shrinks, eclipsed and ignored.
From her vantage point on the choking banks of the Buriganga River, old Dhaka watches the son she has spawned outstrip her in size and scope, stretching his long arms to the countryside, consuming it all beneath a blanket of chaos and fumes, with his endless appetite for more people and more land. As night falls, she pulls her ragged garments close about her. And there, in her winding alleyways, in her darkened doorways, she shakes her weary head and whispers, ‘How soon they forget their mothers!’
Catherine Masud is a film-maker and film producer
Like people, cities have phases of life: childhood, youth, old age. London, for example, is an old man of a city: eccentric and cranky, with a streak of dry wit, smelling of stale gin and cigars. New York is at peak middle age, its hard-edged exterior masking a sophisticated and complex mix of identities. Dhaka,…