Where the streets have a name

The writer Nirupama Dutt, recently wrote with sadness in the Punjab papers that the house in which Amrita Pritam had lived with her partner Imroz, and which was a centre of the Punjabi world of letters, is being razed. Amrita Pritam had apparently expressed a desire that the house be preserved as a memorial to her life, love and work, but her children, for whatever reason, have not felt able to follow it through.


Illustrations/Jishu Dev Malakar

It's a long list -- the list of all the memorials to great cultural figures we do not have any longer, Ghalib's decrepit home in Ballimaran being the most well-known example. One could argue that the government can't keep buying these properties and private owners may not have the capacity to maintain them. But we're also a society that likes nostalgia and status more than history -- so we do have monuments and memorials of a political nature, but we rarely have any monuments named after artists who have shaped so much of our emotional and intellectual lives.

In the end, it's not a grand monument these artists need as much as a celebration of their life and work. The naming of city streets is one way we do this. City streets are a complex map of the many competing histories -- political, economic, poetic -- that made the city what it is and its idea of itself.

One of the most amazing cities I've been to in this regard is Mexico City. There are streets there named after saints, writers, revolutionaries but also places in the world -- Paris, London, Pakistan, Siberia;u00a0 for professions and pursuits -- Cardiology, Astronomy, Hairdressers, Novelists and I've read about (though not seen) Structural Analysis; mountain ranges, rivers, emotions --Happiness, Hope. Not to mention surrealist and symbolic ideas, like Forest of Dreams.

It's as if all the ideas, fancies, stories, marvels and events of the world are claimed as the universal heritage by the city's dwellers, world citizens without leaving home. It is as if they're saying, whatever is wonderful in this world shapes our lives, and we claim it all as our own, along with our own.

Delhi is not too bad --Copernicus, Akbar, Tito, Kautilya, Tolstoy, Amrita Sher-Gil -- a national and international kaleidoscope of ideas makes up the map of the capital along with names which recall the city when it was another way -- Kucha Seth, Ber Sarai, Katra Neel.

Mumbai is a little more local --or provincial, depending on your perspective -- it has more than a fair share of roads named after leaders of all political persuasions, as well as chowks and streets named after the actors Amjad Khan and Mohan Gokhale, musicians Shahir Amar Shaikh and Kishore Kumar, the charming Love Lane in Byculla and my favourite, Pali Naka's Ena Pereira Chowk named after a neighbourhood social activist who was better known, as the sign notes in brackets below her name, as Mummy.

And I don't know if there's a Begum Akhtar street somewhere, but I sure would like to live on it. But our street names remain inscrutable, because also, we prefer inquisitiveness over curiosity. We don't have the practice as in London, where little blue placques explain the history or meaning of street names. So we walk around oblivious of who walked there before us and why they mattered. They needn't turn the places where Sahir Ludhianvi or Narayan Surve lived and worked, into memorials, but it would be great even to have a sign outside to mark the fact, along with a poem maybe.

Imagine then, the city would be a magic book of characters, poems, equations, symbols amidst which we might be always enchanted and hopeful, never walking alone.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with
fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.