Bhubaneswar @75: Perspectives

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The capital of Odisha and a city that is still in the process of being shaped, Bhubaneswar is many things to many people. The Temple City, as it was once called, was home to thousands of temples at one. time.

The foundation stone of 'modern' Bhubaneswar was laid in 1948 by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. It became the administrative capital of Odisha in the early 1950s. Bhubaneswar was declared a 'smart city' under the urban initiative by the government of India in 2014.

Bhubaneswar, one of the two capitals planned after independence, is today a vibrant city in Odisha with an equally vibrant culture. With a population of one and a half million, Bhubaneswar has become known as one of the most happening cities in Eastern India. India's evolving urban landscape places the city among its upcoming metropolises.

The book has essays on different aspects of Bhubaneswar written by scholars of standing. From temples to town planning, from becoming India's sports capital to urban living, from culture to literature, and from business to education, the book says it all. It is a compilation of all that has happened over the past 75 years. A 'portrait of the city is presented in the book.

Bhaskar Parichha (1957) is a senior journalist and author of five books 'Unbiased: Writings on India': 'No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha'; 'Madhubabau - The Global Indian'; and 'Biju Patnaik - A Biography.' He has edited an anthology of essays entitled 'Naveen @25 -Perspectives.' He is a bilingual writer and lives in Bhubaneswar.

Charudutta Panigrahi (1968) is a social advocate and practicing intellectual. He has set up think tanks in India and abroad. A TED Speaker and an author he is a polymath whose work takes him everywhere. This is from the last mile in indigenous communities to the high table of global policy making. He lives between Gurgaon, Bhubaneswar, and Panjim with his family. His recent release 'The Scent of Odisha' has been received well by readers all over and is acclaimed as an exceptional Odisha chronicle of current times. He is engaged in climate change work and has set up a global platform called Climatists in Berlin.

The Industrial and later Technological Revolutions brought massive changes to human settlements as rampant urbanisation took over the world since the mid nineteenth century. Political upheavals and World War I further compelled mass movements of people from rural to urban settings throughout the world. This made most cities practically unlivable when the Great Depression that followed in the 1920s. Realising the urgent need to address the problems of unplanned and unregulated city growth, a multinational body called CIAM (Congress Inernationaux d'Architecture Moderne) was formed in 1928 to discuss the structure of cities and urban planning. Under CIAM in 1933 an exclusive group of architects and city planners met in Athens and signed the historic Athens Charter on city planning.

The Athens Charter ordained various city functions to be carefully separated in order to keep residences, work places, recreation and traffic apart. This concept, famously referred to as Modernism, became the gold standard of urban planning, defining its central approach as 'functionalistic'. As time went by and most erstwhile colonies became independent, fresh problems were added to urban lives as established settlements got disturbed both in colonised and coloniser societies. Severe questions were raised against modernist ideas of free standing, mono-functional buildings surrounded by left over places (particularly relevant to us here in the context of Bhubaneswar).

Jane Jacobs challenged Modernist urban planning in her famous 1961 book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.' She flagged the problems of function-based modernist city planning and called for radically different directions that'd look more towards people and their lives rather than urban infrastructure and its functionalities. The movement unleashed by Jacobs compelled a rethinking of functionalistic urban planning and a new conference of city planners was held in Athens in 1998. Based on 65 years of experience since the first Athens Conference in 1933, the New Athens Charter was declared. It proclaims that residences, workplaces, recreation and communications must never be separated turning the 1933 Charter on its head. With this new gold standard, every city can now be measured.

The government of the newly created Odisha did well to select Bhubaneswar as the capital. It did even better by engaging the uniquely talented and socially sensitive Otto Konigsberger to plan the city. But then things fell apart as the city developed in a messy, bureaucratic and directionless manner veering farther and farther from Konigsberger's vision. Seventy five years of chaotic growth are visible all around as Bhubaneswar struggles to acquire either a clear or a composite identity from amongst 'Smart City', Sports City', 'Temple City', Education/Knowledge City', 'Health City', 'Power (political/bureaucratic) City'.

The twenty-five plus thought-provoking essays compiled here are filled with evocative, erudite, inspiring, critical and prescriptive feelings towards Bhubaneswar. Readers will find it full of nostalgia and hope while trying to figure out the right spectrum of feelings they'd like to look at the city with.

Seventy-five years ago, Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Odisha, was a sleepy temple town covered with a dense forest that was infested with wild animals. A railway line connecting Kolkata with Chennai passed through this town. During World War II, an airport had been built to secure the eastern flank of British India against advancing Japanese forces.

Bhubaneswar lay between Cuttack, the nerve centre of colonial administration, and Puri, the abode of Lord Jagannath and site of the Ratha Jatra (Chariot Festival). Bhubaneswar, however, bore the imprints of a glorious past: the Kalinga War was fought on its outskirts; the Ashokan rock edict at Dhauli and the caves of Khandagiri and Udayagiri offer visitors fascinating glimpses of Buddhist and Jain cultures prevailing in Odisha centuries ago.

The magnificent ruins of the ancient fort at Sisupalgarh remind us of a great civilization that had once flourished in and around Bhubaneswar. The majestic Lingaraj temple and the ruins of countless other temples underline the importance of Bhubaneswar as a major centre of Saivism.

In personal narratives and works of fiction, written before independence, Bhubaneswar appears to have receded to the margins of history. The once glorious city had got reconciled to its relative insignificance. In his autobiography titled Ardhasatabdhira Anubhuti, Chintamani Mishra, eminent freedom fighter and man of letters, recounts a journey he had undertaken as a young man in a bullock cart to Bhubaneswar. He wrote how he was petrified of being attacked by tigers on the lonely roads.

The famous actor Dinabandhu Das (Tima) describes a trip to Bhubaneswar and talks about bandits who would suddenly erupt from the densely wooded parts of the town and attack and loot Odias returning from Rangoon. The town was sparsely populated and full of dirt. In the Swiss writer Freida Hauswirth's novel Leaphome and Gentlebrawn, we come across a troop of monkeys harassing and looting a hapless flower-seller near Kedara Gouri.

The decision to locate the state capital in Bhubaneswar led to the dramatic transformation of this nondescript small town. A team of scholars, led by Harvard anthropologist Cora Dubois, studied the aspects of this transformation in the 1960s. James Freeman, Susan Seymour, Alan Sable and Richard Taub were the other scholars in this project, who have written insightfully about the incursion of modernity into a traditional society.

In the 1990s, historian Ravi Kalia sought to present a coherent narrative of the rise of a modern administrative capital from a sacred town, subjecting to close and careful scrutiny the conflicting visions of planners, politicians and architects that shaped the identity of the Bhubaneswar we see today.

Like every city, Bhubaneswar continues to grow and change. It parades its modernity and strikes even a casual visitor as a busy, bustling city swallowing up villages around it. Higher education, IT industry, and improved communication facilities have drawn to Bhubaneswar people from other parts of India, who have lent it a cosmopolitan character. An international airport has helped it establish vital links with the world outside.

As we look forward to the next 25 years

Since then, Bhubaneswar has remained a celebrated model of modern architecture and city planning with its prehistoric past as a temple city. Along with Jamshedpur and Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar is one of modern India's first planned cities.

While laying the foundation-stone, Nehru observed: 'Bhubaneswar would not be a city of high-rise buildings for officers and rich men without relation to the common masses. It would be consistent with the idea of reducing the differences between the rich and the poor. The New Capital would embody the beautiful art of Odisha, and it would be a place for beauty... so that life might become an adjunct to beauty.

Bhubaneswar is a temple town with a series of ancient sandstone temples varying in size from the towering eleventh century Lingaraja Temple. It was a city of temples. Once upon a time, there were more than 7,000 temples in and around Bhubaneswar. Today, there are only a few.

EXQUSITE ARCHITECTURE

Several Grade-l temples of national importance have been protected by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in Old Bhubaneswar, such as Ananta Basudeva, Mukteswara, Persurameswara, and Rajarani Temples, which are just a few examples. Bhubaneswar's modern capital is shaped by Old Bhubaneswar's ancient temples.

The state capital city planning began near the old temple town. The Master Plan for the upcoming city of Bhubaneswar was prepared by Dr Otto H Koenigsberger on the concept of neighbourhood unit planning. The original plan envisaged horizontal development rather than vertical growth for a population of 40,000 with administration as the primary function. Koenigsberger designed a linear pattern for the city, with administrative units on the main artery, and neighborhood units attached to them. Neighborhood units offer residents the most sophisticated amenities in a city. They were placed at short distances to give people easy access to schools, hospitals and other facilities.

CENTRAL VISTA