T Nagar and Ranganathan Street – Chennai’s Commercial and Shopping Hub

Introduction

As a goal and task of our supposed essay about a place in Chennai, we were asked not only to state facts, give quotes and re-call theory from the semester’s lectures, but to tell a narrative, something which might go beyond the information one can easily find on the internet or the course literature. Approaching this quite unusual task, I first asked myself what this means and could then be in my case. These thoughts, I felt, made it necessary for me to start with this prolog-like introduction about the way I interpret the given task and the outline of this essay.

The key word to the character of a narrative to me is “perspective” – on an individual level. As the way we look at things determines how we perceive and conceive and therefore how we generate knowledge about the world and our environment, the unique character of every narrative, and so of mine, lies in the perspective of the author, who wrote it.

Many factors influenced the outcome of my investigation consciously or unconsciously. I being a foreigner to India, Chennai and the place itself and my European and German background certainly affected my view on the things I experienced and how I interpreted them. Furthermore the questions I considered important to ask myself during the visits and on whose basis I conducted my analysis, mirror my very personal perspective, and thus set the frame and build the character of my narrative.

So by this, the following essay is both - complete and incomplete - at the same time. It is complete as it gives a coherent picture of Ranganathan Street (and T Nagar) from my view and of what I considered important and worth of being part of my narrative. It is incomplete, too, as the statement in the sentence before already implies, since its very subjective character constrains it and makes a claim for objective generalization impossible.

The essay’s structural logic then can be seen as following the steps of one of my visits to the site as it addresses the topics and questions very much in the order they arose to me - from getting there (infrastructure & location), over engaging in the historical context for a better understanding in general, to the economic character of the place, the people at Ranganathan Street while engaging in a more social analysis, and finally to the issue of criminality.

Getting There - The Importance of Infrastructure and Location

Attempting to go to T Nagar and Ranganathan Street, my core locality of interest, from the IIT main gate, one has different choices. You can take a taxi or auto rickshaw for around 100 to 150 Rupees (probably prices Indians laugh at, but that is what we white folks have to pay), the train or the bus as the cheapest option. I usually took the auto rickshaw as a matter of convenience and laziness, when going to my site during the semester, but also used the bus twice together with my friend Kanaan, who has been raised in Chennai, speaks Tamil and served me as a translator during some of my interviews in case English, good will and hand signs had failed as means of communication.

Though not yet in the area of investigation, the way and possibilities of getting there already reveal a lot about the reasons for success of this area, which is today at least one of the three and maybe the most important shopping and commercial district in Chennai. As Anita Berrizbeitia and Linda Pollak point out in their book “Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape” about the importance of infrastructure:” Infrastructures acquire the spatial and functional characteristics of the places onto which they are grafted. They emerge as frame works for urban development.” Infrastructure therefore connects places and by this determines their importance in a city and the ways they can function. T Nagar and Ranganathan Street are located in Chennai’s Central South, only 10km away from Chennai Airport and 8km from the city’s center. They are well accessible by the above described means of public and private transportation as well as by car or motorbike. The close by bus terminal and Mambalam railway station, which borders Ranganathan Street to its one end, has made it a preferred shopping site, and like the whole of T Nagar made it attractive not only for people from Chennai, but all over Tamil Nadu, India and in most recent years even overseas from places like Singapore, Thailand or Malaysia as some of my interview partners alluded.

Due to discounts and special offers during the festival seasons the numbers of visitors easily reach the millions, but even during regular weekends hundreds of thousands visit the shopping district to buy everything needed. And though the quiet central location and excellent transport connection might seem to make T Nagar and Ranganathan Street a natural site for this kind of business, its history and original purpose has been quite different.

Engaging the Context - A brief History and an Example for Urban City Planning

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday” – Pearl Buck

To understand a place in its contemporary form, it is surly interesting to know its past and how it developed. T Nagar, or Theagaraya Nagar as its full name is, was named after Justice party leader Sir P. Theagaraya Chetty. The district was originally conceived as a residential area by urban and city planners and was constructed between 1923 and 1925 as a part of town planning activities initiated according to the Madras Town Planning Act of 1920. It developed very quickly and became popular even among famous Indians in the 1930s, while beside the living complexes and houses, parks and other sites of comfort were constructed to please the residents. As urban planning efforts aimed at supplying services and infrastructure to the area and by this accommodated growth, the framework was set that made T Nagar increasingly interesting for commercial and economic business. So partially following consequences of active urban city planning and partially an “organic internal logic”, the place developed to its contemporary form. Especially since the mid 1990s, as John, a 64 year old retail shop owner told me, the huge shopping complexes like Textile India, Saravana Stores or Jeyachandran Textiles emerged around Ranganathan Street shaping its today’s face.

This development appeared to me like a kind of contrary “broken window”-effect, to re-call a conceptual idea first introduced by William D. Eggers and John O'Leary in their article “Broken Window” from 1982. According to their theory, if one window in a neighborhood is left unrepaired, others will follow shortly. This means that the first obvious sign of decline will soon lead to a general apathy to take care and the whole vicinity will be caught in a downward spiral. For T Nagar and Ranganathan Street the opposite seems to account. The preferred location, good infrastructure and neighborhood attracted business and commerce, leading to economic accumulation in this area.

The Economic Character – Business and Bureaucracy

Latest since the 1990s, economic business has taken over as the prevailing force in shaping the character and face of T Nagar and Ranganathan Street. Before, as the earlier mentioned shop owner told me with a little anecdote out of his more than 40 years of lived experience at Ranganathan Street and T Nagar, there used to be cricket games as the major event on Sunday’s. After the turn of the tide the cricket fields slowly vanished and business took over as the prevailing activity, making the place a center of action every day of the week during the day and even most of the night.

Ranganathan Street is mostly constituted of retail stores and builds together with the enclosed fruits and vegetables market a unity within T Nagar. Other than for example Pondi Bazaar, which also accommodates more fancy and expensive shops for jewellery and silk, Ranganathan Street attracts with its low to medium prizes especially people from the lower-middle and middle strata. Complete sari dresses are already labeled for around 250 Rupees and other clothes for even less. Back packs start at 100 Rupees and some dishes can even be bought for less than 60 Rupees to give just some examples. Most prices are then even still open for bargaining. And ‘people bargaining with the shop owners’ is defiantly one of the most prevailing pictures. So it is of no surprise that when people comefrom far away to shop at Ranganathan and T Nagar they buy a lot since all they need from clothes to dishes, mobile phones, jewellery, toys, household articles, shoes and plenty more can be purchased.

All this reveals something interesting about the economic development around Ranganathan Street as some of my interview partners like the mobile shop owners Mohammed Riaz and Mohammed Iqbal pointed out. One the one side the business agglomeration increased the attraction of the site for buyers, thus increasing the business conducted. On the other side the explosion of shops – many of the same kind – has led to more competition and choice, leaving the buyers with more bargaining power. This to a certain extend might even lead to an overall increase in the sales volume from which the individual seller not necessarily profits. However all the shop owners I talked to stated that the overall and their personal business situation today is better than it used to be before the agglomeration. So apparently overall sales increases seem to overpower the negative consequences caused by it.

When it comes to the shops themselves, I basically recognized three different kinds – the big shopping complexes like Saravana Stores that dominate the street to its right and left, the small retail shops in the attached side streets and catacombs of the main buildings and the road-side shops in front of the facilities.

The shopping complexes sell either solely jewellery or household articles or pretty much everything on up to ten different stories. Their character as rather ‘conventional’ shopping opportunities made them actually of lesser interest to me.

More interesting have been the smaller retail and the road-side shops. The first ones were of importance to me, because the owners were mostly selling themselves and they served as main sources of information, giving me a better and deeper understanding of the spatial characteristics and social dynamics of the place. The second were interesting, because their existence and ‘status’ reveal a lot about the way things are handled bureaucratically and the spirit to do business. The existence of these road-side shops shows the will to do business and to use all available space for it. This might seem as a rather trivial statement in first place, but when I compare the situation to another country I stayed for a longer period – the Philippines – where a similar behavior is rare, I think, this reveals a lot about the economic forces working and the will to economic activity and maybe even progress and development. Space, originally conceived for a different purpose as a walkway for pedestrians, is re-produced and added to the economic space available. This is certainly a dynamic that follows an organic logic of development and is not a result of urban planning effort.

But developments of the kind seem at least not to be hindered from official side. Since most these road-side shops are illegal, they are still tolerated as long as they do not disturb anyone. This, as I was told, mainly means that they are getting removed, when political cadres are about to pass. Also beside that, the shop owners spoke much in favor of bureaucracy and official intervention, which they said was very little. Only the level of taxation would change every year, causing some inconvenience.

Furthermore both types of shops are interesting when it comes to a more social analysis of Ranganathan Street.

The Social Context – The People of Ranganathan and the Sense of Community

The most prevailing difference in the way the shop owners and I perceived the place, to borrow a term from Henri Lefebvre’s conceptual triad of space, got obvious when I asked them about their opinion on negative and positive developments in the last decades around Ranganathan Street and T Nagar. I posed the questions in a rather suggestive manner, assuming certain kinds of answers according to my own observations. While I expected them to name the economic progress as a positive aspect, I was convinced that they point out pollution, bad waste management or over-population as negative consequences as for me they were two sides of the same coin in an urban environment of a development country like India. In this I was surely being affected by my Western and academic background. But even on enquiry, none would recognize any negative appearances as worth mentioning, at least not in the interviews with me.

They solely spoke of the positive aspects as the place developed economically and so did their personal situation. In this context the notion of “habitus”, first introduced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, came to my mind. The term describes how people in a certain place, especially in an urban environment, adjust their behavior and adapt to a specific attitude and way of thinking unique to this space. According to this idea, I felt that the overwhelming economic character of their inhabited space totally aligned and even narrowed their perspective to this one aspect. By this, the spatial meaning of the place enforced its influence on the people constantly working there and in reverse gets further approved and shaped by them.

But for me the most astonishing finding about the character of social relations at my site of investigation was only revealed to me by talking to the shop owners and salesperson inhabiting it. When I walked the place in the first couple of times only watching and observing, I had the feeling there were rather less strong bonds between the different working people, as many were sitting alone in their shops. The extent to which the different shop men know one another at least seemed not to go further than a couple of neighboring stores. According to Ferdinand Tönnies’ ideas in his work “From Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft”, I assumed that the pressure of the urban forces the people in a rather anonymous co-existence. Furthermore the prevailing economic character ought to impose a high degree of competition among the different stores, thus leading to a further alienation in social relations. But the conversations with the shop owners proofed me wrong, revealing a highly dynamic and comprehensive net of social relations among the sales people. They stated that at the respective site everyone would know everyone and newcomers would be widely introduced within less than six months. This establishes a sense of community, which opposes Tönnies’ idea of anonymity within an urban society and that even lead to a high degree of solidarity and reciprocal help. Instead of increased conflict caused by the increased competition, the local people managed to reconcile their needs and arising tensions by increased patterns of cooperation.

Criminality – A concluding punch line

At the end of my personal narrative around Ranganathan Street I want to share my findings on criminality around the site which, though serious in nature and consequence, are nonetheless quiet amusing. First I talked to a road-side shop owner about this topic with the help of my earlier mentioned friend, who needed to translate. In his “official” answers to me the shop owner solely mentioned the improvements achieved in recent years by the police. But what he only told my friend then in Tamil was that though the threat of street criminality may have declined the need to bribe the police forces to maintain one’s business has thus put an ever-increasing economic burden on the sales people of Ranganathan Street. Later I talked to some police women via my translator. They confirmed the successes in the fight against street criminality, which they said was mostly achieved by an increased police presence around the place at day and night times.

Hearing that, I couldn’t resist the thought that the decrease in street criminality and the economic benefits it bears, may well be eaten up by the need to bribe the increasing police force, which achieved this decline.

Conclusion

The study of Ranganathan Street has been an interesting endeavor for me, resulting in this very personal narrative about the place and the aspects I considered to be important. As some of my pre-investigative expectations were met, others were altered or proofed to be wrong. In any case I learned a lot about its historical context, economic character and social relations, which make it an interesting object of study as a dynamic example of urban development. It is also a very unique site as the special sense of community is surely not an ever integral part of an economic and commercial hub like this, which is ought to be characterized by high levels of competition and therefore conflict.

The only question that really interested me and which I could not answer to the end is how high the bribes actually are shop owners need to pay around Ranganathan and what determines their rate. When I told Kanaan to ask the police woman on how much bribery she actually takes during one shift, he surprisingly denied. I think for a short moment even his heart stopped beating!