THE BADLANDS

Words and Images by Charu Soni

“Reason is born spastic in colony,” – Ranajit Guha, historian

IIn a city some-50 km from Delhi, a 15-year-old girl, Iqra, working as caretaker to an elderly lady, living at a high-rise apartment complex, was slapped, pulled by the hair and dragged through a corridor by two of her older brothers. The atmosphere was fraught.

The brothers were accompanied by thugs who had overpowered the security guards at the barricaded entry gate and subsequently, stormed the apartment. The intent was to extract the girl from the place. But since Iqra was owed her wage, they dropped the battered girl on the floor, and left.

The old lady’s daughter, Fatima, aged 40 plus, learnt of the incident on her visit to Greater Noida, a day later. Her concern was for her ailing mother. She also felt sorry for the teenager.

“Why did they do this to you?” she asked, as she rang up Iqra’s mother.

“Ameena? Why did Aftab and Aman barge into the flat yesterday? Punch Iqra? The poor girl can barely speak. My mother was terrified,” Fatima was fuming.

At the other end, Ameena was combative.

“I have found a groom for Iqra. My sons will pick her up tomorrow morning. Please, give her the cash you owe,” she informed.

“What do you mean? She’s supposed to look after my mother, that was our deal,” Fatima asserted. The call was switched off by Ameena at the other end.

Fatima was taken aback. This was an unexpected development. She dialled her friends and decided on a plan of action.

Next day, before the sun rose, she took Iqra away from the condominium in a cab, to a Delhi-based shelter for abused women. She informed the NGO that Ameena intended to sell her. While she wanted Iqra to study, have her own life.

A week passed. The shelter invited Ameena and her sons to resolve the situation. The mother pleaded with the NGO to return the daughter to her. But, they did not.

Three months later, with the tacit consent of the NGO, Fatima fled with Iqra to another big city, where the teenager continues to do household chores and tend to her aged mother.

Fatima, a social activist, had worked at various organisations in the Capital and other metro cities, immersing herself in issues of gender justice, media matters and organising legal representation for abused women. She had been encouraging Iqra to study. Bought her English alphabet and colouring books.

Ameena had lost her husband in the dusty boondocks of Uttar Pradesh. The duo earned notoriety as dacoits. Abductions, extortion and murder was a way of life. She had evaded a police chase and escaped with her daughter and two sons to Greater Noida. She sought employment for Iqra at Fatima’s residence.

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When Iqra first arrived in Greater Noida, she was mesmerised. The tree-lined avenues, the high-rise buildings, the teeming market squares, the shimmering lights of the malls, the manicured lawns of the apartment block, was a magical world. The city, to her, was an unknown. But it was a welcome escape from the cesspool of social hierarchies, class inequalities and normalised caste violence in the countryside. It offered anonymity, a wage, a cell phone, three meals a day.

She definitely did not expect to be sold by her mother or abducted by her employer. But India’s big city ‘suburbs’ are shape-shifting territories. Anything can happen anywhere. They are neither urban in spirit nor in practice. One such place is Greater Noida, squatting pompously at the fringes of the Capital.

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It is a city that is not a city. One real estate developer came up with a name for it — “NO IDEA”. And this is the closest we have got to finding a clue to its being.

Designed on a North-to South axis, on a square grid with wide roads intersecting at right angles, it includes sectors – Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, Sigma, Omicron, Omega – aping Le Corbusier’s functionalist “machine for the living” approach. But unlike the city in the Punjab that Corbusier helped create, it has no city centre.

No social, cultural or political compass to help residents navigate the area. The District Magistrate’s office is located in Noida, 10 km from Delhi but 35 km from Greater Noida. It has three legislative assembly segments: Noida, Dadri and Jewar, but none of them speak for the city. No architectural remnants of the past. No sensory or emotional engagement. No cultural spaces – theatre, art, music or a community/ public library or a public square.

But it has industrial estates, institutional parks, SEZs, malls with cinema multiplexes, hotels, residential enclaves, a central university, a district court, a sport stadium, an export mart, a Formula 1 racing track, a world class golf course and an up-coming international airport and not to omit, more than 300 villages – all of which is administered by a government-run real estate developer, called meaningfully, “Authority”. The Authority, headed by a CEO, is assisted in its work by a Police Commissionerate.

Historically, it is the second planned city after Chandigarh in North India. A prototype, a model city, whose architect remains unknown and its first town plan untraceable. Year on year it keeps growing in size (in 2011 it was 1282 sq km, in 2023 it’ s 1442 sq km), a hungry termite, shredding feudal estates, villages, grazing area, arable land, small qasbas, people histories, folklore, language.

Greater Noida is one of the three cities (the other two being Noida and Yamuna Expressway area) of a district known as Gautam Buddh Nagar. Its area is carved out of Bulandshahr and Ghaziabad which in 1857 was the Meerut district. Historically, describable. Linguistically, varied. Agriculturally, fertile. Ecologically, part of the Ganga-Yamuna doab. It still forms the inner skin of the place which erupts in acts of violence and occasionally, cultural expressions – in songs and festive pageantry in rural pockets.

The city sits at the north-western periphery of the Uttar Pradesh state’s border with Delhi, one could also argue that it represents a frontier in relation to the Capital. As a periphery, it posits itself as an “industrial integrated township” and a flagship “smart city” on the basis of its town planning and a high tax payer profile.

As a frontier it exercises political muscle in denying its citizens participation in democratic processes by depriving them of the municipal corporations (nagar palika) and panchayats (village level representative bodies). And when deemed necessary, as was witnessed during the Covid shutdown, holding flag marches by armed constabulary and barricading of the border between Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, to prevent free movement of people. Rigid. Strict. Paternalistic.

For Delhi, it is an outpost to accommodate the spill over from the overcrowded city. On paper, it’s the National Capital Region. Cities like Greater Noida, in bureaucratic parlance, are known as “magnet cities” aimed to draw population and polluting industries out of the Capital. In practice, apart from a fragment of population that is tied to Delhi by places of work or familial ties, the connection with the grand old city is severed or simply, absent. For most, the capital serves only as a shopping or tourist destination. price and Fatima, who chained her to her household, is not unlike the Authority’s unilateral decision to deny residents representation and keep them tied to its writ. It requires draconian measures to maintain a grip. In 2023 itself, the city was under a month-long curfew in January, February, March and then again, in April.

Majority of migrants to Greater Noida originate from neighbouring towns of Uttar Pradesh – the middle classes (often traders or property and landowning classes), from Tier 2 cities like Meerut, Muradabad, Agra, Aligarh and so on. For this section of populace, the city has provided a semblance of order and affordable accommodation. It doesn’t matter that the access to recreational, educational, and health facilities is expensive, they regardless laud themselves for having achieved, a foothold, a stepping stone to the Capital.

In his book, The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani outlines how India in the 1950s fell in love with the idea of the concrete. The steel plants, canals and dams became futuristic temples of the nation. Their straight lines and brutalist architecture came to frame and regulate the citizen. From the 1990s, this frame and regulation have reached their logical conclusion in the Greater Noida prototype, minus the dams and canals.

Strip the city of its grandiose pretensions, its apartment blocks and mini-townships with names like Jorbagh, Ansal Plaza, Golf Links, Connaught Place, JP Township, the Edens and the Vistas etc, and what you get is dystopian reality. Gated housing blocks that have no relationship with each other. Each separate and serviced by a private army of security guards and the unorganised and unrecognised mass of humanity – maids, delivery men, plumbers, electricians, cab drivers, gardeners, sweepers that emerge like busy bees from ramshackle village apiaries.

There is no mass public transport within the city. Private cars and motorcycles, autorickshaws and cabs are the only way to move around the place. Streets have no pavements. But there is metro. It does not connect the city with the Capital or provide mobility within it. Instead, it snakes from Greater Noida to Noida’s border with Ghaziabad, another industrial district. Hardly anyone uses it.

In the mid-19th century this was a land of fiefdoms, land usurpers, loan sharks, cattle thieves, clan rivalries and caste violence. The Badlands, Delhi residents feared to venture into. The situation remains largely unchanged, except for an architecture of a city imposed upon it. Expectedly, its modern day bahubalis and their henchmen have mutated into real estate brokers, building contractors, transport mafia, scrap dealers or clan/caste netas. The neighbourhood sectors are tense with their presence, especially at night, when one cannot predict where or when a gun will go off.

This prototype of the city fits seamlessly with colonial India. In the old, it was the British crown (and its administration) that exercised unrestricted power: in the new, it’s the Authority, a real estate agency manned by the State’s bureaucracy. Democracy and the Constitution are its marigold flowers. A mere decoration.