A song for a small town

The train arrives at the station, and where the platform begins, a white concrete plaque with dark letters in Bangla announces the name of the station, the name of the town. A small town. The town stretches out from the station like cardio-vascular arteries.

Since the railway was established by the colonial English people as a network of connectivity and control, it carved up the landscape into new regimes of comprehension in which the small town formed a critical node. I remember, as a young boy, traveling with my parents to Jamalpur on holidays. The arrival at the train station was always an event, of entering a world of a different rhythm.

Travelling by train reveals how small towns – mofussil or chhoto shohor – form nodes in the geographic matrix of the subcontinent. In the division of regions, mofussils are those areas that are outside large metropolitan places. Came to be seen as backward in that artificial classification, mofussil towns suffered a cognitive regression.

Arrival in a town is now without an event, without a coiled anticipation that was released by the train station. One now mostly takes a bus or drive to the town in which the cognition of small towns has regressed. At the same time, small-town narratives seem to be lost between the overwhelming epic of the big city and the grand mythology of gram Bangla.

We need a new vocabulary that will help us understand the image and structure of small towns before imposing planning and development actions. We need to acknowledge that the small town is not a mini-me of the big city; it is its own ontology. The first thing in the understanding of a small town is the scale of things, the cluster of buildings, their shapes and materiality, the character of streets, and the overall picture of life.

In imagining an aerial view of his hometown Kishorgonj, the author Nirad Chaudhuri writes: "Had there been aeroplanes in our boyhood the town would have had the same appearance to our eyes, when looked at from a height… of five hundred feet, as a patch of white and brown mushrooms in the grass below must have to a little bird perched on a tree. The white corrugated, iron roofs were indeed too hard for the surrounding landscape, but this unattractive material had in my childhood just begun to oust the thatch. The brown mat walls, however, matched with the trees and the soil." The huts that formed the fabric of the town were flimsy in structure, one strong wind was enough to dissolve the distinction between town and nature. On a return to Kishorgonj from Calcutta after the big cyclone in 1919, Chaudhuri notes: "I myself, arriving home one dark night from Calcutta… had very great difficulty in finding the town among the fallen trees."

Not everything is glorious in small towns. The scale that is valued in small towns is often thwarted by the increasing presence of an alien scale that presents an antithesis. Broad highways, bridges, electrical pylons and boxy governmental buildings are juxtaposed "violently" in the environment of small towns. In the 1950s, whether in the film of Ozu or Satyajit Ray, trains or electricity towers were the harbingers of something disruptive or ominous in the fabric of villages and small towns.

A small town is also an ecology, its footprint creates a careful balance with the regional landscape of agriculture, flood plains and wetlands. The much vaunted "green," an adjacency to "nature" in the form of paddy fields or ribbons of rivers, can literally be glimpsed from one's window in such places. The modernist fantasy of light, green and air that defined the futuristic, modern city is a reality in small towns.

A group of architects studying the nature of a small town looked at Mymensingh: Emerging from the banks of the Brahmaputra, Mymensingh like most towns in Bangladesh owes its beginning to the banks of a river (until the railway arrives). Nadir paar is an existential orientation in the geography of the town, providing the characteristic river walk and riverside activities. The Circuit House, the DC bungalow, a zamindar's villa, and other loci of power are often close to the riverbanks and create a de facto "civic precinct." Areas around those buildings form a park-like situation with open spaces, ancient trees, and community buildings such as gymnasiums and clubs. Older architecture not only form heritage sites and structures, but lend an aura to the milieu of the town. Mohollas are also unique, characterised by an interweave of low, detached buildings, ponds, orchards, shops, and local lanes.

Specific rituals and festivals, artistic crafts, production of various savouries, and musical or literary traditions give each town its identity. Comilla offers roshomalais at its Matri Bhandar stores, Pabna has its kite festival, and Mymensingh prides itself on its literary "Mymensingh Geetika."

Small towns are immensely walkable. The expression paa fellei (you can have what you need within a stone's throw away. Some have described this as the "horizon of reach," in which one's corporeality is manifested in the property of walking that prescribes what is traversable and available. In a small town, the body knows.

Time is a shadow in small towns. If the big city is structured by time – what time do I have to reach there, how long will it take to get to that place – the small town keeps it at bay. In the big city, one has either embraced or succumbed to the impersonal rhythm of the city with its risk and uncertainty. On the other hand, a small town pace can be exasperating, especially to the young increasingly made restless in a telecommunicative world.

In a small town, an emotional investment is not yet superseded by financial or entrepreneurial motivations. An immigrant condition of creating anonymity in the big city is not part of the small town dynamic. People can push back their pasts when they move to a big city, and greet the ever emergent potential. "My Mymensingh," for example, overlaps with "our Mymensingh," while "my Dhaka" is one listless raft among many in the vast ocean that is "our Dhaka."

The writer is an architect and architectural critic, and directs the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements.