Anniversary issue: Pride, prejudice and people

Across the high and low, how ordinary life appropriates public spaces

22 Jan 2026

Hindustan ek khwab hai. India is a dream. In 2019, when the country was engulfed in protests that questioned who gets to call themselves Indian, these words by poet and artist Aamir Aziz became a rallying cry of dissent. Dreams are a tempting provocation. Empires fall, governments change seats and still we harbour our desires despite all odds — for dreams have no proprietors, no moral obligations, nor any inkling of bounds. While some dream of palaces, others still aspire for a life with basic dignity. Yet even in this Tower of Babel, there is common ground. A dream of a better future. It appears in how everyday life presses back and how we repurpose spaces designed to exclude. The lynchpin of the world’s largest democracy may lie not in erasing the darkness of our shared past, but in noticing how daily life recasts it into a cacophonous, lived present. A maximalism of the spirit.

In 1857, by the Arabian Sea, a centuries-old port city trading with Persians and Arabs was on a quest to become Bombay. Urbs Prima Indis required a stage to display the greatness of Britain’s crown jewel colony. This ambition produced the Government Central Museum, later renamed the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum after the city’s first Indian Sheriff. When Tasneem Zakaria Mehta encountered it in 1994, the building stood derelict, dismissed as a colonial relic. “I was determined to restore it,” she recalls, “but no one understood the importance of conservation at the time.”

“While each object’s story highlights the city’s remarkable character, embedded in them is also the history of colonisation and that history is equally important to deconstruct”

— Tasneem Zakaria Mehta

Nalanda in ancient Magadha was a renowned space for learning in the antiquity, operating for a thousand years before its destruction in the 13th century; Photography by aubi1309, stock.adobe. co

Through her doctoral research on colonial art institutions, Tasneem recognised it as a repository of Mumbai’s history. With support from the Municipal Corporation and the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation, the museum was restored and reprogrammed. “Each object speaks of the city’s remarkable character,” she explains, “but embedded within them is also the history of colonisation, which is equally important to deconstruct.” Museums, she argues, are conscience keepers, shaping how the public questions inherited beliefs. Elsewhere, the fate of knowledge took a far more violent turn. Circa 400 CE, at the height of ancient Nalanda, students from Eastern and Central Asia gathered to study medicine, logic and mathematics alongside Buddhist philosophy. We all know of its eventual decline. While responsibility for its destruction remains debated, the intention is evident. Erase knowledge, and you fracture a civilisation’s relationship with its past. Render it contextless.

This anxiety around knowledge, classification and hierarchy resurfaces in the architectural discourse of the Indo-Saracenic movement. Was it a concession to Indian aesthetics or a declaration of British mastery over them? James Fergusson, whose History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1876) shaped colonial understanding of the subcontinent, divided Indian buildings along racial and religious lines, privileging Aryan and North Indian genealogies while dismissing southern traditions as intellectually inferior and their civil architecture as “effectively extinct”. Islamic styles, meanwhile, were framed as more naturally adapted to India, positioning the British as rightful successors to the Mughals. The term Saracenic, derived from “Saracen”, invoked an unrelated Arabian lineage. It flattened India’s architectural history into a colonial taxonomy that misnamed, misread and reordered the past. On the east coast, in 1890s Madras, these ideas materialised in brick and mortar.

Designed by Henry Irwin in the late 19th century, the Indo-Saracenic structure of Connemara Public Library in Chennai features intricate woodwork, stained-glass windows with floral patterns, ornate pillars, and a curved roof with a wooden ceiling; Photography by Shrutismriti Changkakoti

The architecture was centered around courtyards, pillared verandas and thick walls for insulation; Photography by Thotsaporn, stock.adobe.co

Lord Connemara commissioned a public library, and Henry Irwin wrapped it in a flamboyant crossbreed of Gothic, Byzantine, Rajput, Mughal and so-called Deccani motifs. A spectacle burdened with uneasy origins. Nearby, another of Irwin’s creations, the Madras, now Chennai, High Court rose as a monumental ode to law and order, its Indo-Saracenic formal language bearing little relation to local spatial customs. Yet the High Court’s present meaning is shaped less by ideology than by daily occupation. Lawyers, litigants and clerks animate its corridors, reinscribing the building into democratic life through routine use. In a similar gesture of civic recalibration, Connemara’s walls were, in 1948, reordained as the State Library of Chennai. A monument can either justify failing authority or stand as a toast to the irony of hubris, depending on how it is read. In 1878, the British embarked on creating the first grand railway terminus of the subcontinent to commemorate their queen’s Golden Jubilee. Designed by FW Stevens, Victoria Terminus sprawled over more than two hectares, a palatial assertion of power amid mounting political unrest. Its rechristening as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in 2017 marked a shift in the ownership of our past. The mismatched tympanum, the menacing gargoyles that spit torrential rain and the towering turrets that looked up to an imperial crown now stand amid swirling vada pav sellers and kaali-peeli taxis. Years after the change of name. Three million bodies stream through each day. It was not built for us, yet we have made it our own.

Madras High Court, now Chennai High Court, designed by Henry Irwin and inaugurated in 1892; Photography by Presse750, Dreamstime

The merit of Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai is beyond its jewel-box architecture and hinges on its programming that aims to question public beliefs and assumptions; Photography by Anil Rane

Long before colonial infrastructure, water shaped settlement and survival in the arid west. The 9th century Chand Baori in Rajasthan plunges 64 ft underground through 3,500 steps. Among the most socially complex public spaces of their time, stepwells were sites of ritual, respite and meeting. Their descending steps organised public life vertically, drawing people downward toward the water. Access to survival was collective, as was access to absolution. In this, Chand Baori finds a resonance with Varanasi. Where the stepwell descends inward, the ghats of Benaras, patronised by multiple empires, unfold outward, meeting the Ganga in a continuous negotiation between land, river and life. Side by side occur prayer, cremation, bathing and commerce. In both cases, purpose emerges from collective use rather than singular authorship. Are all our urban utilities a product of the Crown? Does inheritance automatically translate into access? Why do history books celebrate palaces over public works?

Chand Baori in Rajasthan is defined by 3,500 steps descending 13 storeys, creating a cool microclimate and serving as a water source and community hub since the 9th century; Photography by Nicolò Diamante

With Tasneem Zakaria Mehta at its helm, the museum acknowledges its colonial past while paving the way for its future; Photography by Anil Rane

Perhaps because publicness cannot be conferred simply by style or statute. It is practised daily through appropriation. Step into any roadside barbershop and you will find a forum of exchange. A chair, a mirror and a blade suffice, yet cricket scores, gossip and advice circulate freely. Its civic interiority is expressed on every surface: calendars, film posters, talismans and bizarre signage. Chaiwallas perform a similar alchemy in the open. Despite their constant vulnerability to eviction, they hold the social capital to anchor communities. The long pour of tea becomes public theatre, gathering people to pause, over small talk or a political debate that can rival any courtroom. This instinct to dignify function extends into landscapes of movement. Trucks and buses, designed for logistics, accumulate layers of authorship over time. Hand-painted slogans, mirrored tassels and religious iconography alter steel bodies into inhabited surfaces. Even the oft-quoted phrase “Horn OK Please” is a reminder that life on the road is sustained through mutual recognition. Somewhere between the colonisation of the mind and the privileges of class, we dismiss this everyday urbanism as kitsch. What we gloss over is the term itself, coined during the Industrial Revolution, was always a charge levelled at the aesthetics of the unauthorised. It may be vulgar to our polished sensibilities, but in its irreverence, it destabilises hierarchies without seeking validation.

The ghats of Varanasi become a stage for public life where access to absolution is a collective right; Photography by Poras Chaudhary

In urban India, barbershops become unspoken third spaces. Rising above the utilitarian, their kitschy decor provides a space for expression and identity that may not always conform with the aesthetic sensibilities of high culture. Photograph by Abhishek Mittal from Shutterstock

Why else do we make things beautiful, if not for an unspoken tryst with our cities, negotiated each morning at ticket counters, on footpaths, under flyovers? The city bears witness to its citizens, how we move, what we carry, where we pause. A constant ledger of what we take and what we give back. Yet what reverberates daily through its streets is the distance between what is declared public and what is felt as such. We demand ramps, shade and legible signs because dignity should not be aspirational. The greatness of our metropolises survives not on monumental grandeur alone, but on how generously they allow ordinary life to pass through them. No wonder we exalt the mundane into exemplars of beauty, not of scale or permanence, but one of an indomitable spirit. In a country where education, safe transit, and even walking without fear remain aspirations for many, the everyday becomes an assertion of presence. Hindustan ek khwab hai. In a nation of billions, we wear this shared dream of a better future like an old heirloom, accepting its flaws as we do our own. A hope for tomorrow and a joy, however fleeting, for today.