Mapping places where women hung out in Bengaluru's Cantonment area

The Hindu

27-05-2025

It was while reading historian and writer Janaki Nair's book, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century, that Nikhita Thomas first encountered an interesting expression: kineticization, 'a phenomenon in the 80s and early 90s where there was an increased presence of women in the public sphere due to the popularity of the Kinetic Honda.'
But the Bengaluru-based writer and teacher, an assistant professor at St. Joseph's University, did not just stumble upon Nair's term serendipitously. 'I was initially reading Mobile Girls Koottam: Working Women Speak by Madhumita Dutta, and was talking to my dean, Dr. Arul Mani, about the book,' she says. 'It was he who suggested I read Janaki Nair.'
The growing participation of women in public life got her thinking about how the phenomenon of just hanging out transpires for women, says Nikhita, who, along with Pranav V.S., has embarked on a project to map places where women hung out in the city's Cantonment area between 1984 and 1994. 'The idea was to talk to women who lived, studied and worked in Bengaluru Cantonment during the 80s and the 90s,' she says. 'We picked this specific period because of the 'kineticization' that Janaki Nair talks about and because this was a period of rapid change in the country, including two waves of liberalisation.'
This project, supported by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) under its Neighbourhood Engagements of Project 560, 'seeks to explore the spatial relationships women have with the cities and neighbourhoods they call home,' states the IFA website, adding that Nikhita's and Pranav's research engages with the following questions: When are women rendered invisible, and when are they on display in the city? How does the purpose of their movement through the city get women tossed between obscurity/safety, and visibility/danger? And how can spaces designated for one kind of interaction be persuaded to house other exchanges, given the spatial practices of women?
Origin of the idea
Nikhita first applied for an IFA grant in 2023, wanting to look at student migrants in the city and the spaces they occupied, 'specifically to go into their hostel or PG rooms and draw from that,' she says. While she cleared the first round of the grant, she didn't make it to the final round, 'but they encouraged me to apply again.'
In July 2024, Pranav, too, joined the English Department at St. Joseph's University. They were in conversation with Dr. Mani, she says, who encouraged them to apply for the grant together this time. 'We were bouncing ideas off each other, with Pranav initially suggesting we do something about the lakes that used to exist in Bengaluru,' she says.
Dr. Mani, however, was not enthusiastic about this idea, recalls Nikhita, who, around the same time, was also reading the Janaki Nair book. There was also a movie that both of them liked, Brahman Naman, 'a movie about the quizzing culture in Bangalore with mostly boys who loiter about the city,' she says. 'It is a super movie, but it left us wondering: Where are all the women?'
That was the starting question for the project, which involved the duo interviewing about 15 women who had lived, worked or studied in the city between 1984 and 1994 to understand their relationship with the Cantonment. 'A lot of people thought we were looking to hear about famous spots in Bengaluru that no longer exist, but we are actually also curious about pockets of the city that no one's ever heard of,' she says.
Memories and more
Take, for instance, the memory of a participant who used to go to an all-women's gym. 'At the end of the gym session, the girls would gather outside the Hosur Road Cemetery for a smoke,' she says, pointing out that it wasn't a famous hangout spot but just 'one corner of the road where nobody stared at them.' She also mentions a conversation with someone who had brought her husband, then boyfriend, home to meet her parents. 'The place where they hung out was a swing in her parents' backyard, and that's still there…somewhere in Victoria Layout,' she says.
Another participant whose stories enthralled them was the accounts of the journalist and novelist C.K. Meena, who had moved to Bengaluru from Kerala for her master's degree. 'She just owns the city like nobody else I've met. You cannot tell that she has lived anywhere else but here,' says Nikhita, recalling the plethora of experiences that Meena shared with them. These include accounts of working with the City Tab – a weekly Bengaluru newspaper – living alone in the garage of someone's house, which had a makeshift entrance and windows she curtained with an old Mysore silk saree that her editor's wife donated, eating at Hotel Shyamprakash, a restaurant on Infantry Road, which offered cheap food, stale beer and live music and of lugging a typewriter about the city, the way someone today carries a laptop. 'We were very excited about hearing stories like that,' she says.
Essay Book
All these stories will come together into a co-created art essay book, which will be showcased at 1ShanthiRoad Gallery/Studio on June 14 and 15. 'The idea was for us to create a sort of heritage walk through this book,' says Pranav. Elaborating on the nature of the final product, which will consist of illustrations and anecdotes running through the text, they say, 'When you read this, it should feel like you are going through these neighbourhoods.'
While Nikhita and Pranav are still finalising the text and illustrations that will go into this book, they have also been actively engaging with the community, part of the mandate of Project 560, through a series of quizzes. 'Both of us are quizzers who have been part of the college quiz club,' says Pranav. 'So, we thought this was one of our strengths, and we can work from there.'
So far, they have conducted three quizzes in the city, all within the Cantonment area and specifically focusing on it, with the questions drawn from 'all the books that we had read and combed through all our conversations to find nice little fundas about the Bengaluru Cantonment.' Pranav adds that many women come to quizzes even though they are traditionally seen as masculine spaces among women. 'So we were very, very happy about that.'
Deeper relationship
Another impact of the project, says Nikhita, is that it has led to a deeper relationship with the city, one that began for them as college students. 'Our relationship with the Cantonment began in college because St. Joseph's, where we studied, is right on the border of it,' she says. One of the assignments she had to do, as a journalism student, was to look at how neighbourhoods in the Cantonment and the pete area outside of it got their names. 'To me, till then, Bengaluru was Bengaluru. This concept of Cantonment and pete did not exist for me,' she says. 'I started grasping all of this only in college.'
According to her, encountering the neighbourhood this way, unearthing streets and discovering why they are named the way they are, changed how she looked at her city. 'All these things which, in some ways, would be boring history if you read it from a textbook suddenly become superbly interesting because you pass these streets every day,' she says, listing some of the reading material that helped them on the journey, including Roopa Pai's columns, Kirtana Kumar's Bangalore Blues' and Multiple City: Writings on Bangalore, edited by Aditi De. 'Personally, the project has made me feel great affection towards my city. Previously, it was just a city where I lived, where everyone is always complaining about the traffic.'
The duo also thinks of the project as a way of archiving the city, capturing stories of places that no longer exist or have never been written about before, and a physical way of holding onto the spirit of the city that Bengaluru used to be. 'I know it is romantic, but I can't help but miss that time,' says Pranav. 'It seems to have been a much kinder city than it is now.'