Global Gurgaon

The new takes over the old way of life in what was once a sleepy little town in the Bajra belt, writes Nirupama Dutt, as she travels from the national highway to the memory bylanes An old joke of Gurgaon says that tents all set up and mats spread on the ground lured a Jat to a congregation. Like the others, he took off his shoes and went in. Bored with the mystical musings, he soon came out and found his shoes gone. Nodding his head knowingly, he said, "I know it all, this was no mela but a pilan to rob me of my shoes."

The new is very visible here and one has to hunt for the old. It is a long journey indeed from the mythical Guru ka Gram.

The hot ‘n’ rocking Gurgaon is changing rapidly. — Photos by Mukesh Aggarwal

This is the place where Dronacharya taught archery to the Kaurava and Pandava princes and the village along with some surrounding areas is said to have been gifted to him by Yudhishthira.

Wind through the overcrowded lanes of the old city to reach the new railway road and a tank still exists there in the memory of the Guru. This is the only relic said to date back to the times of the Mahabharata.

After Independence, a crudely made Dronacharya temple too was built but for some reason it is shut. Children play cricket in the compound as it is time for the game all over the country. There is also a college called Dronacharya Government College. There is nothing, however, in the memory of Eklavya who gave the Guru the greatest dakshina of all.

Pass the resort at the 32nd milestone, turn left at a point and one is on the Jharsa road. Much of the land of this large village has been taken over by private builders and the road leading to the village is lined with shops selling just about everything from groceries to light cane furniture.

In the village, a Jat farmer, Hoshiar Singh, who has seen some 75 years, takes us to some ruins which were once a part of Begum Samru’s fort. Samru was a unique woman of the 18th century. A singing girl married to a European mercenary, she acquired sizeable property and owned Badshahpur and Jharsa along with a lot of other property in and around Delhi. Her cantonment was in Jharsa and the British moved to this area to keep an eye on her army. "No one comes to see these ruins. Everyone is busy buying and selling land which is as much as Rs 10,000 a yard," says the old farmer.

The villages which constituted the Gurgaon area also offered resistance to the British at the time of the First War of Independence in 1857. People of the region had to pay a heavy price for allying with the ‘mutineers’ and many of them were hanged to death when Delhi fell into the hands of the British. But all this is history and now it is a race to keep up with the lifestyle that the multinationals have forced on the good old Gurgaon.

Neelima Sharma, a theatre actress of Delhi, who is building her home on the Sohna road says, "We moved to Gurgaon because Delhi was overcrowded and we could afford a little more space here. But the new American culture is somewhat unsettling. My husband, a left-wing activist, and I have decided to paint across our balcony the portraits of Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh and Ashfaqullah, who laid down their lives during the freedom struggle."

Such emotion and holding onto the past is a rarity in the new life around Gurgaon. The mood is jet-set even as one drives down the Mehrauli- Gurgaon road with its plush farm houses, designer outlets and eateries. It is lasagne and pizza at Village Shop in Sikanderpur, Thai cuisine at Red Hot Curry and drink and dance at The Buzz. Even the dhabas on the National Highway have been given a makeover. Come late evening and the boys and girls from call centres are seen partying along the road with beer bottles in hand. Anita Singh, a young homemaker who is on the party circuit of Gurgaon, says: "Things are changing everywhere. And Gurgaon is no exception to the rule. In fact the local people here are so backward that they find the good life strange."

The landscape is altered and so is the lifestyle with an influx of a large population from outside. The mood is upbeat as young boys wizz past the old Sadar Bazar and girls in hipster jeans and short tops move around Sector 14, developed some two decades ago by HUDA. The most coveted places are the malls providing the great shopping experience along with movies seen in exclusive cinema halls and lounges.

Pawan Kumar, a real estate agent, says: "The National Highway is the dividing line between two different Gurgaons. On the one side is the old Gurgaon, on the other the new and upcoming Gurgaon. It is a greater privilege to be on the other side and, of course, the property too is more costly there." Such is the rush to Gurgaon even with the expressway only half done and the metro still a few years away. So the millennium city moves on no matter what be the pilan.

"There was an old peepul tree in the heart of our village. A platform was built around it for the village elders to sit on. We would often play there and eat the tiny yellow peepli fruits. How we loved that tree!"

So says Roop Chand, a seasoned artist from Dundahera village, who was born to a land-owing peasant Brahmin of the Jangehra clan with a lineage of idol-makers. If memory fights forgetting, it is at his studio-home where the millet fields of his father once stood. Sitting in the artistically built square home, which also serves as an art centre founded by him here some three decades ago, choked between workshops making Maruti parts in Gurgaon’s Udyog Vihar, he recalls: "We would bleed the kikkar trees for gum and make ink of it. And there was the game of kai danka that we played among the lashurha trees. The den could not catch anyone who climbed the tree."

In the small garden round his place with sloping roofs is a wild mulberry tree. "Mulberries and guavas grew aplenty in this region. My father grew bajra, jowar and vegetables. We had two workers and my mother and five of us boys helped him in the fields," says the 70-plus artist. He recalls going to the old mosque in Sadar Bazaar with his father, who used get bullock carts made there. "There was a tank by the mosque and I would drink water from it. Once I was doing so and a man said ‘See a Hindu child is drinking water from a Muslim tank.’ My father chided him saying that I was too small to know the religion of water."

"I studied in Coronation Government School in Gurgaon. Some parts of its beautiful Victorian architecture are still there. The most unhappy time was that of the Partition when I saw trucks full of corpses and people fleeing," recalls this chronicler of Gurgaon. "But the elders of our village saved our rangraenj (dyer) Dalmira. His son still lives in the village." With a chuckle, he tells of the 1857 stories handed down by his ancestors, "The villagers caught hold of the British officials here and turned them into farmhands for a few days before Delhi fell. They did not prove to be good workers and when bajre ke roti and onion were served to them, they thought that the roti was a plate."

Roop Chand, who graduated from the J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in 1958, still paints the landscape as it was in the days of his youth from memory. Taking a swig of German beer, he says: "Much has changed. Prosperity has come. People who could barely eat two meals by tilling their small patches of land now have cars and bungalows. There has been development but we have lost our green fields and fresh air." — N.D.