Post-Colonial & Post-Modern: The City of Discourses.

By Gokul Jayan

Baudrillard, he was in a real hurry. He missed the ultimate rustic power of Majestic. I think, he never witnessed the inner representation of this place. Bengaluru had this inner visual from its very beginning. The visual which sponged every sapiens from all the globe. This is a usual feature of every city. Especially Post-Colonial ones. As Rashmi Varma said, “cities produce a proliferation of subjects and collectivities difficult to categorise within the terms deployed in modernist as well as postmodernist discourses.” 

What she said can be actively related to our modern cityscapes. According to her argument, Every city is based on a conjuncture. The discourse here will be massive. Why Conjunctural? 

Because, the space of Bengaluru has this mega combination of historical events, varied materials, economic representations, even prophecies. And this is not something unheard. People have deliberated over this for the past trillion times and it never gets old. 

Bengaluru city is now having its course of Simulacrum. A kind of a re-representation of the old city. Now, I would like to see a recreation of this Simulacrum. Recreational simulacra include reenactments of historical events or replicas of landmarks. It will be a pretty massive job to do this. Doing the entire city of Bengaluru as a Caricature. Simulacra and Simulation furthermore converse how symbols and signs relate to contemporaneity. Baudrillard claims that our current society has “replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs and that human experience is of a simulation of reality.”

This is somewhat happening in the city also. 

A replaced reality.