Why Kannada on signboards make more sense than ever before in Bengaluru?

Chickpet in Bangalore

Over the years, you might have heard of rants and complaints about all the cities looking the same because of the visual generalization of the infrastructure and the architecture. Indian metro cities, due to the late 2000s IT boom, had to cater to the infrastructural requirements of the sector. The consequent economic growth reward was always big enough to accommodate certain compromises when it came to preserving the typology of a city. The change was not something that happened overnight but was a product of gradual growth and development decisions over a long course of time. With the development of the new sector, came new job opportunities and mass migration of the population, resulting in a massive cultural shift within a short period of time, regardless of the fact that the cities might not have been ready for such changes at the time.

Typologies are not just building aesthetics and methods but go beyond that. For any place, from a human scale and human experience factor, the building typologies are no less than the identity of the place. The local arts and crafts, combined with the building methods and aesthetics, become the elements that define the place and the culture, language being the most important of all.

Alphonse Daudet wrote in his book that language is the key to cultural preservation and local identity, that one must hold on to strongly. A city/town/village is made up of both physical and non-physical elements - the stories, folklores, music, lakes, gardens, places of worship, the markets, commerce etc., and within all this, language is the foundation of everything. Bangalore is a place where cultures overlap, languages clash, and identities are always underrepresented, simply because of the overwhelming numbers of each. It is a place where environmental sustainability is more talked about than social sustainability among the general population, when both require equal attention and importance.

For contemporary city culture to co-exist with the traditional hyperlocal elements of the city, it becomes important to address the need to conserve the non-physical elements of the place. Buildings might replaced with the new ones, but it is the stories and the poems that traverse through time. For anything to be relevant, it becomes important for those things to stay visible, not just as a reminder, but as a sign of significance.

So for the city to recognize that its cultural identity is at risk, why wouldn't it make sense to demand the due respect and non-alienation of the very language that the city is made of? Kannada on signboards can be seen as a feasible step.