A tale of one city: Jamshedpur and India’s fragile modernity

This winter, pollution in Delhi has yet again hit unimaginably high levels. As the capital’s residents struggle to breathe, Delhi has become a symbol of the urban crisis evident all over the country. Across India, cities seem to be characterised by a lack of empathy, incivility, a breakdown of neighbourly sentiment and growing incidents of road rage.

Is it possible for India’s cities to be different? Can we reimagine urban spaces that strive for a more idyllic kind of modernity? Is a cosmopolitan modernity possible even in smaller places?

These are some of the questions that occurred to me during a recent visit to Jamshedpur – India’s first planned industrial city.

Named after Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Tata Group, the city reflects the entrepreneurial vision of the conglomerate that built a steel plant here in 1908.

Jamshedpur combines capitalism with a strong focus on welfare, modernity with community. But fractures of gender, caste and even generational divides run through this strong sense of togetherness.

Sense of community

The fact that most residents of Jamshedpur are employees of Tata Steel gives the city a distinct character. It creates a sense of comfort for residents that one rarely witnesses in other cities.

This comfort is the consequence of familiarity and trust. The trust in turn seems to emerge from the company’s generous welfare policies. It is often said that employees and their families are taken care of from creche to grave. Like in Scandinavian countries, welfarism is integral to the social imaginary of Jameshedpur.

Tata’s welfarism is marked by decent housing for all its employees. The group runs a premium school and a super-specialty hospital. Once education and health are taken care of, residents’ anxieties come down by many notches.

In chance interactions, even if residents do not know someone personally, the knowledge that they are likely to be employees of the same company makes them at once familiar and accountable. It is this lack of accountability that is responsible for aggression and road rage in cities such as Delhi.

Adding to the sense of belonging in Jamshedpur are the public parks, such as the well-known Jubilee Park. The compact nature of the city too makes everyday living less rushed, cumbersome and tiring. Everything is in a radius of 10 kilometres.

A sense of egalitarianism is created by the fact that Jamshedpur still lacks avenues for conspicuous consumption. There are no fancy malls and restaurants. Instead, there is decent street food. This seems to take the visible effects of class out of the equation.

Sociologist David Harvey’s term, “compensatory consumption”, refers to the phenomenon of purchasing goods or experiences to cope with feelings of inadequacy or low self-esteem. In Jamshedpur, compensatory consumption seems to have been organically replaced by community ties and social life of banter, gossip and conversation.

I was told touching stories of residents helping each other cope with the bereavement of family members. Some said they overcame depression and suicidal tendencies because others around made them feel wanted and loved. They found respect and dignity in these gatherings.

Coming from Delhi, a place where neighbours can shoot at each other during disputes about parking, this sense of community seemed surreal.

Caste associations

Jamshedpur is also a city of clubs and associations, mostly built around the linguistic and regional identities of residents drawn from across India.

I had the opportunity to witness the workings of the Andhra Association from close quarters. It runs a school where 80% of the students are Muslim. I wondered how to make sense of this. What ethic is at work here?

Before I could romanticise the city some more, I realised that several of the associations in Jamshedpur have been created along caste lines.

When I participated in an event of the Andhra Brahmin association, the organisers explained that the group had been formed to promote the Telugu language.

When I asked about the need for such narrow and inward-looking associations, I was told other castes, such as Kapus, had also formed their own associations. There was, as expected, talk about helping poorer members of the Brahmin community and also of effecting marriage alliances within the caste. These conversations were not toxic but were certainly overlaid with caste-related anxieties.

To be sure, both regional and caste-related associations organised a lot of voluntary activities. Residents generously contributed time and money – but this was overlaid by caste and regional affiliations.

Strangely, outside of this association life, the everyday was marked by cross-regional, cross-cultural relations that were cosmopolitan. Inter-regional marriages, inter-religious and inter-caste marriages were not unheard of and nobody seemed to be shocked by them.

The ironic part of this seemingly idyllic atmosphere is that many of the city’s young people told me that they would like to make their lives elsewhere. I found this intriguing and disappointing but read it as a symptom of the disadvantage of life in a smaller place. The young people I met said that Jamshedpur has no night life and no exciting opportunities.

I also realised that Jameshepur is a city of middle-aged people. This was a classic conflict between excitement and belonging, between greater choice and comforting predictability.

Women, especially, said that they feel a sense of claustrophobia in Jamshedpur, with parents breathing down their necks. Single women find it particularly difficult to answer uncomfortable questions about personal choices, a problem they can overcome in the anonymity of large metros.

There is another factor I noticed. Is the romance of smaller communities a male fantasy? On a closer look, it seems like it is mostly the middle-aged men who are at ease in the city. Given a choice, perhaps most women would want to leave.

Jamshedpur reminded me how precariously cosmopolitan modernity is perched alongside community and caste-based associations.

There is no turning the clock back. But can we turn the clock off at a point where a collective imagination is still possible with all its frailties?

Ajay Gudavarthy is at the Center for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.