British rulers confiscated land especially from those who rebelled against their authority and transferred it to conniving acolytes. But it still doesn't explain today's fetish for the real estate and the mindless quest for private cities.
At least partly, it can be explained by the brutality of partition and the dispossession it engendered on a scale that is probably historically unprecedented. It triggered a mad hunt among the uprooted millions for a roof over their heads and, only later, for the more secure comfort of home and hearth. And yet, in the 1950s not too long after the trauma of 1947, in India there was a discernible self-assuredness which reflected the resilient beauty of a deep and ancient culture.
Dr Rajendra Prasad, the new nation's first president, once hosted an open house for, among others, the country's cultural icons. As he mingled with some of the greatest musicians that South Asia has produced on the lawns of the fabled British-built presidential palace, he came to shake hands with Ustad Haafiz Ali Khan. The legendary sarod player was a simple man with a single-minded devotion to Indian classical music.
In the course of their conversation, the president of India asked the proud ustad if there was anything at all he could do for him. “Sir, if you really want to help the sacred cause of our music, it would be wonderful if you could use your good offices to stop All India Radio from broadcasting Raag Darbari at the wrong time of the day,” the ustad is said to have replied. If that exchange had taken place today, the chances are that the ustad would have asked for a plot of land or a subsidised government house.
At about the same time Laddan Mian of Mustafabad, a relic of the Shia nobility of Awadh, was feverishly gifting away his land straddling several villages to strangers and subordinates, declaiming in ornate Urdu “If the Roman Empire couldn't withstand the march of time, who am I to resist it?”
That Laddan Mian shared Haafiz Ali Khan's devotion to music would not have seemed noteworthy to many today. And yet the two would have been horrified by the circus of latter-day fellow artistes being forced to scramble for the state's patronage.
It would have made for a gross evolution of a supreme culture. Is there an artiste today who doesn't ask for land from the state or who doesn't lobby for other means of rewards? It's not their fault. They have to learn to survive in a new India. After all they have to jostle for what was not relevant to them not too long ago.
I suspect the contemporary rush to corner land, both arable and the urban variety came initially from uprooted communities. Speculators stepped in later. (Else Israel would have remained focused on other, perhaps easier, possibly more outrageously ruthless ways of tormenting the Palestinians. That the Zionist worldview gave primacy to stealing their land reflected economic exigency as much as it flowed from the memory of the diaspora.)
That Laddan Mian threw away his land or that it didn't occur to Hafiz Ali Khan to ask a fawning state for a small piece of it to set up, say, a music school as they do these days, appears as a great anomaly of our times.
The rush to steal land in the name of development has spawned a culture of gross obsessions. Builders' lobbies are big players on the political firmament. Private cities were a fad in America and Israel. So they deemed it a sign of progress. Gurgaon is a consequent urban township in the vicinity of Delhi. It is what is part of the National Capital Region (though Pakistani visitors to Delhi need a separate visa to visit its sprawling malls).
Gurgaon was rich in sugarcane farming. Its name literally translates as 'jaggery village', which makes it part of a cluster of similarly mouthwatering names of villages in its vicinity — for example, Saunf-gaon, Misri-gaon, Mirchi-gaon and so forth, named after local condiments and produce. Other than the fact that Gurgaon's mushrooming skyscrapers are sucking up scarce and rapidly depleting groundwater reservoirs the bevy of real estate agents wolfing on the rich if temporary spin-offs is a regular sight in the concrete jungle.
Yet it is not quite as outrageous a proposition as some of the others across the country that are waiting in the wings to usher a new India to its elusive superpowerdom. They include projects, which flaunt their inspiration as being bequeathed to autocratic city states such as Singapore and Dubai.
In the chanting of its new development mantra India is not only subverting a deeply ingrained primacy of cultural spaces that bind it in a mosaic but the advent of land-grabbing gated communities seems set to discard whatever remains of the pretence of its young democracy.
According to one set of estimates by the United Nations, India's urban population is set to expand by 10 million every year. But, the fact remains that such corporate-led urban development is rarely aimed at catering to this mass of migration.
In interviews, promoters of a private city coming up near Pune have described the provision of 100,000 “chawl-like places for people like drivers to stay in”. It is unclear, however, from published details, whether this housing will be available for purchase or only for rental, since the lower end of purchase prices for apartments in the city is listed in other accounts at a minimum of Rs16 lakh, a figure that is unlikely to fit easily within working-class budgets.
It is hardly believable that not so long ago. Haafiz Ali Khan and Laddan Mian lived in the same land and breathed the same air.
The writer is Dawn'scorrespondent in Delhi.
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.