The American and the French Kitchen

Last November I wrote in Apartment Living in Ankara and Paris about the arrangement of space in my 1960s-built Ankara apartment and the early 1900s built Paris apartment.  Both were designed for upper middle-class families in an affluent area of the city, and the physical space in each apartment was arranged to accommodate the bourgeois lifestyle and the domestic technology of its era.

As usual, I took note of the way floor plans in the apartments reflected distinct aspects of each culture. For example, French friends point out to me the differences between the American kitchen and the French kitchen. In the States, the kitchen is located near the entrance of the house, is where family activities are centered, and as I have written previously in some detail, is open to everyone. Most American kitchens are without a door. In French homes I knew decades ago, the kitchen was at the back of the house and reserved as a private space for the family. Breakfast may have been eaten there at a small table but other meals were served in the dining room. Daily mails were taken in a more formal manner than in America, with a cloth napkin in a napkin ring for each person. (I am writing about the Paris I and my friends knew, not about elsewhere in France.)

I took note, also, of a difference in ideas about plumbing. Our first Paris apartment faced onto Blvd. Raspail. One entered the apartment into an open area and from there, toward the front, toward the street, were the salon and a petite salon. The dining room was on the other side of the hall area, toward the back of the apartment. Beginning at the dining room, a narrow windowless hallway ran to the back of the apartment, with doors opening on to a bedroom behind the dining room, then a second room, then the huge, cavernous laundry room with a bathtub and sink, and finally the kitchen at the very back of the apartment, small and strictly for cooking. The apartment’s back door opened from the kitchen onto a narrow back staircase that lead down to the open court between our building and the next, and up to the floor under the Mansard roof. In the past, the maids lived on that floor, each in a small room, and they shared with other maids in other maid’s rooms the one toilet and sink in a room off their hallway.

On each landing of this back staircase was a closet-sized room with an old-fashioned toilet, seemingly not used. I imagine these were the original toilets in the building. In the apartment, our toilette, a toilet and a sink, was in a tiny room in the front, near the petite salon. My son remembers that the toilet had a chain flush. The apartment’s bath/laundry room had no toilet, which surprised me. I had never before seen a bathroom without a toilet in it.

Our apartment on the Place du Panthéon was in a corner building on the Place. The building fronted onto the Place but our living room, dining room, a small salon we used as a bedroom, and a bedroom, all with windows, were along a side street, rue Clotilde. Our apartment front door opened into a hall and hallway, with all the rooms opening off the hallway. The rooms with plumbing were, front to back, the kitchen, the toilette, space for a washing machine, the bathroom without a toilet and a tiny room at the end of the hallway. At that time, when clothes dryers, and dishwashers, too, were standard equipment in an American middle-class home, none of my French apartments had them.

The kitchen was across the hallway from the living and dining rooms, well separated from the social spaces. It had a back door onto a service staircase up to the maids’ rooms and down to the interior court. The kitchen was fairly convenient but not a place where family sat around being social, and certainly, guests were not invited in. It never occurred to me to close the kitchen door into the apartment hallway. As I think back on those days, the only person who spent time in the kitchen with me was an Indian woman friend who came occasionally to visit me. My kids were always in and out, but that is to be expected.

In the early 1990s, my husband and I lived in a modern apartment building in Enghien-les-Bains. The front door opened into a good-sized entrance hall, with a large living/dining room to the right. The kitchen was off the entrance hall, with a door that was easy to keep closed. A hook-up was provided in the kitchen for installing a washing machine. There was no space for even a small table and chair. A toilette, or what Americans call a half-bath, was near the large living/dining room in the front of the apartment. At the back, near the larger bedroom, was an American-style bathroom with a toilet and no bidet.

Now, in my American house, on stepping into the entrance hall, or what Americans called a foyer, one sees a rather formal living room/dining room. That is for conversation, reading and when friends visit. To the right is a doorway without a door into a well-equipped kitchen where someone can sit and talk with me while I cook. We take our usual, informal meals in a cozy space off the kitchen I call our TV room. I am somewhere between French and American in arranging the social space in my home.

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Ravi in Bangalore — Part One

Ravi’s identity as Indian was complex. In a land where regional cultures can be significantly different, his parents, Papaji and Didai, were from different regions, Papaji North India and Didai South India, and they spoke different languages. Ravi’s first language was English, his parents’ language in common and therefore the language of the home; he had to be tutored in Hindi, the national language. He was taught no religion. Further in making them different, the parents rejected caste and used a surname that sounded Hindu but indicated neither caste nor region. With important consequences for them all, the family homes were in very different cities, in Benares/Varanasi (southeast of Lucknow), the holiest of India’s holy cities, and beginning when Ravi was fifteen, in 1945, in modern, dynamic Bombay/Mumbai. Between Benares and Bombay, they had Bangalore/Bangaluru, Didai’s family home, where Ravi often stayed and went to school. There he experienced a cosmopolitan world that prepared him, coming from traditional Benares, to fit in and take advantage in Bombay of that city’s vast opportunities for education, career, adventure, and finally as a launching platform to America and beyond.

In the 1970s, when Ravi and I were in our 40s, I proposed to him that we buy an apartment in Bangalore for our retirement and I would begin learning Kannada and get to know the city. (He was not interested.) For some reason I liked Bangalore — orderly compared with elsewhere in India, lively, green and attractive, pleasant weather – and now, after reading its history and seeing it more fully as it was during the time I knew it, I understand why I could imagine living there.

To visualize Ravi’s Bangalore I looked for a map and found one from 1924 I think is fairly representative of his time in the city, the 1930s and ’40s.

Bangalore 1924

Moreover, the design of the map sets out the dual nature of pre-Independence Bangalore, the original Indian city, the British addition and the two together making for a rich, unique urban environment.

Kempe Gowda 1510 – 1570 CE

Bangalore, like Bombay, was founded as a commercial city, but by an Indian entrepreneur, not a foreign colonial power. In 1537 CE, Kempe Gowda, the ruler of a principality in the Vijayanagara Empire, gained Imperial permission to establish his new capital in a forested area he had conquered. He built a fort and a fortified city, the oval-shaped area center and left on the map, labeled Petta, a word in Kannada that translates either as neighborhood or town. I think Petta or Pet is synonymous with Mahalle in Turkish or Hindi, translated as district or suburb. It is a district or neighborhood with residences, workplaces, religious center, shopping, schools, everything one needs within walking distance, traditionally governed by the dominant guild or by civil servants from the central government. In the context of the map it is the original Bangalore, the old city.

Kempe Gowde built a city surrounded by a tamped earth wall for his army and he brought in, or invited in, artisans and craftsmen from near and far, plus priests and learned men to build temples, and they settled into districts, petes, each named for the trade or craft practiced there. The story is told that at the crossroads of present-day Avenue Road and Old Taluk Kacheri Road in the Pettah he situated his major market (where I bought my treasured small bronze Hindu god figures and temple spoons) and on an auspicious moment fixed by his astrologer, he had decorated white bulls harnessed to plows and sent them forth to carve in the soil two main roads to the four cardinal points, one road north-south and the other east-west. Other roads were made parallel or perpendicular to them. Gates for the major two roads were named for the places where they led, the Halasoor Gate for Lake Ulsoor to the east, the Yelanhanka Gate for Kempe Gowde’s clan and his original town, now a north Bangalore suburb, and the other two Gates for villages that provided the townspeople their food, with ragi grain as basic in the diet.

In 1687 Bangalore fell to a Mogul ruler who leased the city to the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore who built the fort marked on the map at the southern boundary of the Pettah. In 1761 Haider Ali, Sultan of the Mysore Kingdom, renovated and turned it into a large, substantial stone fort. In 1791, the British East India Company army, in battle against Haider Ali’s son, Tippu Sultan, bombed the fort and Tippu Sultan later repaired it. Today, in Chamarajpet, only the Delhi gate, the armory and Tippu Sultan’s Summer Palace remain.

Villages in the hinterland of Kempe Gowda’s Bangalore prospered as subcenters for an active and growing trade. Goods produced in the town were silk saris, cotton cloth, gold jewelry, sandlewood oil and more. Goods brought in included salt, betel leaves, tamarind, etc. for the household and items such as sulphur, indigo, zinc, lac, etc. for the craftsmen. In the 1600s, under the ruler in Mysore, uniform weights and measures and postal services were put into effect. As the city grew beyond its walls, the villages were eventually incorporated into the urban fabric. Among them are Halasur in central Bangalore, Agara to the southeast, Varthur in Whitefield suburb, Hesaraghatta to the northwest.

On the map, south of the Petta, note three residential areas with streets laid out in a grid. These became, from what I saw, new mahalles. Chamarajapet and Shankarapuram were added in 1892. In 1898 Basavangudi was built in the south and Malleshwaram in the northwest. Didai’s family lived on a road south of Halsur Tank in the 1930s until 1944, when they moved into a large house set in a garden on a street in Banavangudi. This was the house I knew. The oldest brother in the family, generally known as Dada, kept the family house and it was where everyone related to them, including me, stayed when in Bangalore. I will later describe Ravi in Basavangudi and other places on the map.

The one tourist attraction in Bangalore that Ravi took me to see was Tippu Sultan’s Summer Palace at the fort.

Tippu Sultan’s Summer Palace

Another summer palace, the Maharaja’s Palace, is indicated on the map, north and center. It was built in 1862 by the British and bought by the Maharaja of Mysore as his summer residence.

Maharaja’s Palace, built in 1862

I thought Tippu Sultan’s Palace was lovely. Ravi was a fan of Tippu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, 1750-1799 CE, because Tippu fought the British East India Company and did battle against their presence in India.

French Admiral meeting with Haider Ali 1789

I am struck by how involved Portuguese and French military forces were in the many and fierce dynasty wars of South India. Besides being the military genius and patriot whom Ravi admired, Tippu was a scholar and poet and progressive in his thinking and contacts with other countries. (His palace was built of French rosewood.) He introduced administrative innovations into his domain, including a new coinage, a lunisolar calendar, a new land revenue system, and the profitable silk industry.

A major feature in Bangalore’s history fascinates me. Unlike most major cities, the original Bangalore was not located on, or even near, a river. Instead, it depended upon water flowing in streams down hills and ravines to be harvested and stored in reservoirs called tanks. More than six hundred years ago the people of the region had already learned how to create and maintain such reservoirs. Kempe Gowde could build on this and incorporate tanks and lakes into the physical layout and social structure of the new Bangalore. He provided a continuous water supply for his subjects, as did his son and the rulers of the Mysore Kingdom who succeeded him. In the 19th century, the British brought new technology to expanding the water supply for an increasing population.

Lake Ulsoor and the lake at Lalbagh Park are from the time of Kempe Gowda. The tank on the map south of Chamarajpet was Kempambudhi Lake, now a sewerage collection tank in a city park. In modern times urban infrastructure has encroached upon and replaced many of the water reservoirs. In the 1960s the number of tanks and lakes was 280, by 1993 less than 80. In1985 the heart of the city had 51 healthy lakes; today only 17 good lakes remain.

On the map, note the Dharmambudhi Tank to the upper left of the Petta and the Sampangi Tank at its eastern tip. Tanks, like rivers and lakes elsewhere, were where people bathed, did laundry, carried out religious and cultural ceremonies, swam and boated. Drinking water for people in the original Bangalore flowed from the Dharmambudhi tank through a complex network of channels to conveniently located basins for all homes and workplaces in the town.

The very existence of Bangalore depended upon a type of irrigation system and this had its consequences. The city’s water source was not a river that an individual or family could access at will. The tanks and the drinking water network had to be a community endeavor from its inception, from planning to construction to continual maintenance. Everyone was involved. The laborers who dug, banked and maintained a tank and built a distribution system were also the end users. Management had to have been with community leaders who knew to whom to allocate water and when. They would have organized workers and acquired materials for the continual maintenance required. A body of rules and laws for social order and justice would have arisen and evolved. This is intrinsic in societies based on an irrigation system. (The Ifugao of Northern Luzon, a small tribal society, had a complex, sophisticated body of law that evolved because of their irrigation system.) I imagine the Bangalore community developing a body of rules for order and justice around its water system and that evolving into a broader system of law and governance covering all aspects of city life. (I observed it in Bali, Indonesia.) A mindset for the larger culture is created. By the mid-1800s, Bangalore had developed a solid municipal government, without which its current prosperity would not have been possible.

At this point I should move on to the British in Bangalore but not before regarding some of the art from South India that is so beautiful it stops my heart. The strong Tamil presence in Bangalore gives me an excuse to display bronze statues from the Chola Dynasty, even though they are not in Bangalore. Tanjore and Madras are where one finds them, plus the Natraj here in the Los Angeles art museum.

Natraja Shiva Chola 950 – 1000 CE

Even Rodin considered Chola bronzes as the world’s greatest.

Parvati, Chola, 10-1200 CE, Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

 

I adore Mogul architecture (who does not?) and find South India architecture puzzling. However, the Someshwara temple in Ulsoor, from the 1500s, is so beautiful that I will try again to appreciate the unfamiliar aesthetic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16th Century Someshwara Temple in Halsur

 

Dharmaraya Swamy Temple in Nagarathpet

Experts have concluded that the Dharmarayaswamy Temple is about eight hundred years old. It was on the ground, in the Petta, when Kempe Gowda began Bangalore. I will have to think about it as architecture.

Next to the British period and Ravi’s experiences in Bangalore.

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