Styles of consumption

Talk about shopping, dining and socialising, Bangalore is the place to be in. JANAKI NAIR writes on the city's culture and its transformation over the past Century.

SHOPPING was once that purposive act, driven by necessity rather than desire, a brief and hasty exchange of commodity for money. Growing up in a house that stood at the corner of a street in the heart of Bangalore Cantonment, I neither knew the tyrannies of privacy nor the single-minded devotion to selling that marks the floor of the supermarket, the specialty store or mall today. We were perched on top of a store, a tailor's shop and a homeopath's clinic. The Haberdashery Store, so bald in its self description, was a high-ceilinged cave of commodities. Not all of its wares were visible to an eye unaccustomed to darkness. The shop assistant arose from behind the counter in his rimless hat, to produce ric rac, buttons, lace, buckram, bolts of dusty cloth, and thick white stockings (for Anglo-Indians, or nurses, or some who were both), from various recesses and shelves. It was not a place to linger, or run one's hands over the fabrics, since the owner, a man called Enayath, was his obsequious best in the presence of a stray European or Anglo Indian but did not hesitate to bring his wooden yard rule down on sticky Indian fingers. The tailor's shop next door wore its relationship to the colonial order lightly, despite the signboard's alarming claim that Vithal Rao was the Late Cutter of Agnes. The Master Cutter worked on the floor, marking and cutting ladies' clothes while the tailors wielded the machine, and apprentices worked on buttonholes, in a shop filled with the smell of freshly cut cloth and the warm sounds of Marathi.

Today the pains and pleasures of having clothes stitched have by and large yielded to the convenience of the ready made, the brief hot tussle in small fitting rooms to check the right size being the only delay between desire and ownership. Tailoring retains a tenuous hold on the sari choli, but has otherwise been displaced to the garment factory's shop floor which is invisible to most city dwellers. Now three or four sizes succeed in clothing the people. Only the more privileged can afford the services of the designer, a cut above the mere tailor, and yet not a cutter at all, dealing with fabrics, textures and drapes, rather than machines.

The supermarket or mall, moreover, has retreated into enclosed but well-lit spaces, and the happy commingling of traffic and commerce on the street has increasingly been abandoned, once more by the upper classes, who prefer unhindered focus on the object of one's desire. Here, in the withdrawn spaces of the mall, one may take in all the goods at once, finger the merchandise, and believe that you are making informed decisions in the midst of intoxicating choices. Gone are the dubious pleasures of bargaining: fixed prices, and the well-fed voices of other customers and salespersons alike, keep the uncertainties of the bazaar away from the mall. The streets are left to a different class of loiterer, usually male, who is actively discouraged from disrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic by the uncomfortable grills which have replaced the rounded bars on the kerb, as on Bangalore's central Brigade Road. Still there are people who throng the Commercial Street, undaunted by the heightened noise and light in their pursuit of the ideal commodity. At one end of the scale of the new styles of shopping are the gigantic stores, which are floors full of intoxicating goods. The consumer here is in a mass, and derives some pleasure from the sheer vastness of scale and infinite choice. The man-in-the-mass, as Walter Benjamin said, might once have gathered together only in moments of scarcity, but is now tied together for intensified consumption.

At another end of the scale is the specialty store: the growing preference of the upper middle classes is for these stores, which are discreet and charming, with well-crafted goods lit up in a warm glow. The stores stock a wide variety of overpriced commodities, many of which have, in Walter Benjamin's inimitable phrase, been entirely "freed from the drudgery of being useful": a zipped-up coconut thus charms only the professional collector. The specialty stores for global foods are also gaining ground, where a high price is paid for novelties. Now that Chinese cuisine has been annexed and subordinated to the Indian, newer and rarer kinds of bread, chocolate, packaged meats and plastic wrapped broccoli arouse new desires. Moreover, the enforced intimacies of the local grocery store have by and large yielded ground to the self-help supermarket.

But such signs of "progress" are not without their ironies, in a deeply segmented social order such as ours. If the local grocery store was one to which the domestic help could be despatched with a long list, and informal credit obtained, the self service supermarket demands the presence of the middle class shopper herself. No one dares to send a maid to Food World - and who would sign the credit card? In India therefore there is an unusual mix of shopping styles, for the self service market is hardly a response, as it has been elsewhere, to the scarcity of domestic help. As such it is shopping whose pleasures lie less in convenience and more in the knowledge that the plastic packaged good is somewhat superior to the paper cones of rice.

Bangalore's culture of eating out has a long and interesting history:

D. V. Gundappa recalls his own guilty pleasures of eating in the earliest Brahmin restaurants of the old city area. Indeed, the first restaurants in the late 19th and early 20th Century were run by Brahmins for other Brahmins who were without families in the city, and sprang up to meet the crisis of the 1898 plague. (Most upper caste students in the city who had no hostels long- availed of the system of varanna which allowed them to eat in a variety of homes once a week; they sometimes paid by doing small chores.) The hotel was a place where one gathered for a chat over unhurried coffees, divided by two or even three, of course. Visits to some hotels, like Mavalli Tiffin Rooms near Lalbagh, were also lessons in citizenship, with detailed instructions provided on ways of enhancing public hygiene and order. Nittoor Srinivasa Rao recalls that the citizen's protection groups formed during the War in the early 1940s, regularly met and divided their duties at MTR, sometimes choosing other restaurants in the area for a change, but always in manner that was purposive.

The "by two" tradition has continued well into the 1990s, though Brahmin-only restaurants have been largely secularised as vegetarian ones. The fast food culture which was launched in the 1960s with the opening of a string of Udipi style restaurants, standardised food and prices. It is likely that the masala dosai is an invention of the hotel industry, just as bonda soup has made a quiet entry into most vegetarian restaurants. But consumption was restrained and far from conspicuous. There was a wartime ban on serving rice-based foods in hotels in the late 1940s; the idli vanished, under protest, from the menu. I remember that wheat (and the "north Indian" chapathi) made a hesitant entry into our diets in the 1960s, once more as a result of food shortage and rationing. During the Emergency in the 1970s, guest control orders were the norm at weddings, and the Janata Meal was introduced by Labour Minister Sriramuloo. The "Sriramuloo" meals specified the quantity and cost of meals in average restaurants frequented by the middle class or working class person. It was not infrequent to see hotels placing a pair of scales on the front counter for people to verify the specifications, or perhaps as a muted "protest".

Today the increasingly common "darshini" embodies the logic of the market in prepared food: it is not merely, as in the Udipi style restaurants, production of food at high speed, but consumption beats all records as well. Costs are minimised by the complete absence of seating, which also compels people to hastily gobble their food and move on, rather than linger. The menu is standardised, limited in variety with glossy back lit pictures that tell you what to expect. If the gods were sometimes invoked in naming or blessing these restaurants - and who better than Shri Krishna and Shri Vinayaka - there has been a more solemn consecration of eating out as "worship" in the Roti Mandir. New internationalised styles of eating, in a society such as ours, might even require unusual arrangements, for who does not recall that the dubious pleasures of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in Bangalore were, for several months in 1996, only possible with police protection? Threatened by attacks from the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, the restaurant was obligingly guarded by a van full of bored Bangalore police on the city's central Brigade Road. The city has come a long way from the protection of consumer rights through restrictions to the proclamation and protection of the right to consume brand name chicken.

Over the past 20 years, the widespread use of glass panes in construction of buildings and restaurants has made new styles of consumption possible. The glass window was a rarer presence in Bangalore's cantonment area: Koshy's as well as India Coffee House, were and continue to be places where the glass allowed for interaction with the street, where looking out was more important than looking in. Koshy's was, furthermore, an important node between the city and the cantonment, a safe "middle ground" where people gathered to eat and drink and were even encouraged to linger. The new use of glass marks a departure: eating itself becomes a spectacle when it is done in a large window on the second floor, elevated above, and yet visible to all on the street. In a country where eating is still a luxury for many, the glass panes, which encourage people to look in, serve simultaneously, to paraphrase Sudipta Kaviraj, as both "invitation and denial".

Glass was always a way of attracting the attention of strollers, and the street level glass window was quite the preferred mode of show-casing wares, even if, as in the Phoenix Atelier, you only look into a tortured chamber of watches and clocks. Today, glass is used in quite a different way, sometimes up to the third floor, so that buildings appear to have a wall cut away, turning all passers by into witnesses to the theatre of consumption or worshippers at an altar. Overstuffed (and unoccupied) armchairs, entire living rooms, lights and washing machines may suddenly loom out of a darkened street as phantoms in the night, hovering above at unexpected street corners, or even busy streets, since this is not yet a generalised mode of addressing the consuming public. Art here enters the service of the merchant to build new and entrancing sets which define and arouse desire. There is profusion, but of separate objects, each well placed in relation to others, to be admired, envied or sometimes bought. But glass in shop windows fosters other kinds of spectatorship as well; the throng outside a TV store during a cricket match is a case in point.

Yet if enhanced and heightened displays have transformed the look of shops and restaurants in a city like Bangalore, there are moments in the city's history when the changed use of the same space makes discretion an imperative. Opposite the house where I was born, was a charming structure in Bangalore granite, with steeped gables, turrets and tiled roofs. The stone steps on which we played in the 1960s led to the Tract and Book Society, which sold an assortment of Bibles, calendars, missals, and other necessities of church going. Before our time, this place had been the famous Blighty's (after Vilaiyati or foreigner!) Tea Rooms, to which young European men and women came for their cupcakes and tea, perhaps after the service at St Mark's Church. In the 1970s and 1980s, the shops were divided between a music store and the Oxford University Press, and both were pleasurable places to visit. In its latest and perhaps most scandalous reincarnation, the book shop has been transformed into an expensive bar called 180 Proof, the favoured night time haunt of trendy young men and women. Perhaps the protests about the sale of liquor on these once hallowed premises has prompted the bar to shut down the building's relationship to the street. Thus large glass windows that once displayed books retain only a ghostly outline of their presence, and a thick and rather formidable door (and doorman) allows only restricted passage to those who qualify for a drink here. The uses of this space have thus come full circle, after a brief and pious interregnum, for if Blighty's Tea Rooms kept out the Indian, by a combination of power and segregational practices, the hottest bar in town uses the logic of the high- priced menu card to keep away those whose dress codes and purses can ill afford the luxuries of an expensive drink.

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