Sushmita Pati and Sarbani Sharma

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Arts Projects (Research and Practice), will explore Bangalore’s urban transformation through oral histories of retired PSU managers, highlighting their experiences of deindustrialisation, shifting identities and nostalgia in the post-liberalisation era of the city. Using a multidisciplinary approach, including social sciences research methods, illustrations and creative mapping the project will culminate in a zine. Sushmita Pati and Sarbani Sharma are the Project Coordinators for this project. 

Sushmita Pati is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. She is the author of Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won the BISA-IPEG Book Award (2023) and the BASAS Book Prize (2024). Her work has been published in journals like Public Culture and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Sarbani Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Sociology & Social Anthropology at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. She is currently a THEMIS Fellow at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, and a recipient of the Erasmus Mobility Grant for a project on environmental transformations in the Himalayas. Her work has been published in journals like Contributions to Indian Sociology and Journal of Human Rights. Sarbani holds a PhD from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.  Given their experience, Sushmita Pati and Sarbani Sharma are best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. 

This project will examine the urban transformation of Bangalore through the experiences of retired middle and upper-management employees from the Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) that once thrived in the city. The project will foreground the social and personal histories of those who lived through the changes in Bangalore that remain unexplored, as against the transformation of the city from a sleepy pensioner’s paradise to the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent, which is well documented in terms of economic and infrastructural shifts. The senior managers, who were born in the 1950s, close on the heels of the Midnight’s Children, and were brought up in the Nehruvian Modern, built their lives around state-led industrialisation, but lived on to witness their workplaces decline with the rise of privatisation and globalisation. Their narratives will provide a unique perspective on urban memory, industrial decline, and the shifting socio-political fabric of the city. 

The research process of the project will be through oral histories and participant observations, to uncover how these men recall their neighbourhoods, workplaces, and social networks in PSU colonies like ITI Layout, HAL Layout or BHEL Layout and how their experiences shaped their identities in their contemporary life. A key motivation for this project is the lived experiences of the Project Coordinators in PSU townships in Jharkhand and Arunachal Pradesh, which paralleled Bangalore’s industrial culture. This insider perspective of a transitional nation will allow for a critical, reflexive approach to understand class, masculinity, and nostalgia about Bangalore, set in a post-liberalisation India. Through this research, how deindustrialisation reshaped urban identities in Bangalore, will be illuminated as a broader narrative through the perspectives of the retired PSU employees who straddle both privilege and displacement, as a study that will highlight an underrepresented group. The project will also contribute to ‘masculinity studies’, examining how elderly, upper-caste, and upper-class men perform authority in urban spaces, with special emphasis on Bangalore. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the project will aim to contribute to urban studies, political economy, while fostering a deeper public understanding of the changing social fabric of Bangalore. The Project Coordinators will collaborate with an illustrator, to visually reconstruct PSU neighbourhoods and their transformations, in order to make the research accessible beyond traditional academic formats. Public lectures and interactive sessions with the illustrator will attempt to bridge scholarly analysis with broader civic engagement. To equally engage with both academic and public audiences, the project will culminate in a zine titled Good’ol Bangalore, combining oral histories with illustrations and creative maps. 

The outcome of the project will be an illustrated zine, public lectures and interactive sessions. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be physical and digital copies of the zine, and audio-visual or photographic documentation of the public lectures and interactive sessions.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Project 560 programme in the manner in which it attempts to position Bangalore as a lens to examine postcolonial economic transitions, class dynamics, and urban memory, through an intimate archive of lived history, of the retired male PSU employees, whose life has been mirroring the transitions of the nation, reflecting on the city’s past and its uncertain future. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by BNP Paribas India Foundation.