Excerpt: Cubbon Park by Roopa Pai: ‘meeting place, sanctuary and thoroughfare’

— Paul Fernandes, artist, writer, designer and Bangalore’s pre-eminent visual chronicler Cubbon Park is an emotional issue for all Bangaloreans. — Excerpt from The Battle for Cubbon Park by Leo Saldanha, environmentalist and activist, in the November 1998 issue of The Bangalore Monthly 176pp, ₹499; Speaking Tiger In September 1998, almost a quarter of a century ago now, a legislation passed by the Karnataka government galvanized the citizens of an entire city into extraordinary and unprecedented action. With the Save Cubbon Park protests, a specific idea of what it meant to be part of this particular city took root, and a bar to live up to had been set. Historically, the Park lay at the intersection of two entirely different ways of life — the Bangalore Cantonment, administered by the British, and the Bengaluru Pettah, aka City, administered by the Maharaja of Mysore — making it a no-man’s land between oppressor and oppressed, soldiers and civilians, foreigners and natives, tea-drinkers and coffee-drinkers, largely church- and mosque-goers and largely templegoers, Tamil- and Urdu-speakers and Kannada-speakers.