







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 1(2): 95–99, July 2018 

 
NOTES FROM THE FIELD  
 

Thinking Beyond Fairy Lights and Fountains: 
Lessons from the Waterscape of Bengaluru 
 

Hita Unnikrishnan  
 
1. THE FAIRY LIGHTS AND THE FOUNTAINS 

In March 2013, I was part of a group of researchers participating in a 
discussion with a nodal agency responsible for maintaining one of peri-
urban Bengaluru's information technology (IT) hubs. The objective was to 
seek academic collaboration to understand the ecology of two lakes 
earmarked for rejuvenation and evolve a plan to clear ‘weeds’. We quickly 
found out ‘weeds’ included forms of vegetation (like reeds) that were not 
pleasing to the human eye although they were important resources feeding 
informal economies integral to this landscape. The discussion included 
propositions to make these lakes ‘attractive’– musical fountains, lights, 
jogging tracks … – in essence, everything that would fuel aspirations of the 
urban middle and upper classes but would exclude people whose lives and 
livelihoods were directly supported by those water bodies – farmers, 
fishermen, commercial launderers, urban foragers, and livestock owners. 
For them, the lake was not an embodiment of beauty and pleasure, but 
something sustaining their ways of life. That discussion, though 
disappointing, was not unique. It was representative of how visions, 
policies, and planning agencies responsible for the city’s waterscape operate. 
It was a glimpse into how the idea of urban Bengaluru as a city of educated, 
elite upper and middle classes has permeated the identity of the city to the 

 
 Urban Institute, ICOSS, The University of Sheffield, 219, Portobello, Sheffield S1 4DP, 
United Kingdom and Azim Premji University, PES Campus, Pixel Park, B Block, 
Electronics City, Hosur Road (Beside Nice Road), Bengaluru 560100, Karnataka, India; 
h.unnikrishnan@sheffield.ac.uk; hita.unnikrishnan@apu.edu.in 

Copyright © Unnikrishnan 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i2.43  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i2.43


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [96] 

exclusion of several people whose lifestyles, livelihoods, and traditions have 
unwittingly been relegated to the peripheral margins of the grand urban 
design.  

 

2. COMPLEX REALITIES 

However, the identity of urban Bengaluru is more complex than what 
emerges out of these myopic visions. Having grown engulfing peri-urban 
villages that today make up the bulk of the city, Bengaluru can only be 
described as a continuum of sorts – a space where rural and urban meld – 
in ways of life, livelihoods, and more importantly in how people relate to 
the land, water, and trees around them (Nagendra et al. 2013). It was these 
interconnections that interested me while I conducted fieldwork as a 
doctoral student in the city I have called home for over 15 years. Despite 
having lived in Bengaluru for practically my entire life, having been part of 
activist groups looking to rejuvenate lakes and clean the city, I had 
remained oblivious to these interdependencies hidden in plain sight. That 
realisation was humbling, yet at the same time made me curious – were 
there ways I could engage better with the complexity of this landscape? And 
so I tried to research the tangible and intangible ways people have 
connected across centuries to the waterscape represented by the lakes of 
Bengaluru. These lakes have grabbed headlines for extraordinary levels of 
pollution, flammability, encroachment, citizen engagement movements, and 
evoked nostalgia. Built centuries ago to support an agricultural, semi-arid 
landscape, they provided water for the city until the end of the 19th century, 
when Bengaluru started obtaining water from a river 100 kilometres 
upstream (Nair 2005). Since then many of these lakes have fallen into disuse 
and become vulnerable to threats like pollution, encroachments, and 
conversion (Sudhira et al. 2007). Lakes that survive in the city, albeit in a 
highly vulnerable form, are focal points for urban (often middle class and 
elite) resident welfare associations, nodal agencies, bureaucrats, schools, and 
local leaders to rally over. With worthy intentions, these groups devise 
strategies to understand the complexity of water bodies and to intervene in 
ways they perceive will benefit either the ecosystem or the communities 
living around them. Many of these proposed interventions seek to engage 
with the same myopic visions of promoting or enhancing the values of 
aesthetics and recreation discussed at the meeting. However, lakes in 
Bengaluru are not just spaces where people jog, walk, exercise, play music, 
or sit meditatively in front of a large expanse of water at sunrise or sunset. 
They are not just spaces affording a great view from balconies of apartment 
complexes, separated from houses by sliding glass doors. They are in fact 



[97] Hita Unnikrishnan 

spaces that support lives, livelihoods, and cultures, and have done so 
through centuries. 

 

3. UNPACKING THE WATERSCAPE OF BENGALURU 

My research gave me some important insights. First, lakes are resources that 
stand testimony to this changing urban landscape. Remains of sluice gates 
(known locally as thoobu), often ornately sculpted, stand sentinel alongside 
blocks of granite used to mark levels of water. On digging deeper, one 
learns that the lake provided water to the village communities its banks 
connected. These communities were responsible for maintenance of the 
lake, as it was valuable for both water-intensive agriculture (paddy) and 
dryland agriculture (millets, vegetables, flowers) in the vicinity. Community 
members assumed specific roles – village waterman, headman, and village 
crier – to take stock and keep the system functioning. The lake itself met 
irrigational, industrial, and domestic needs of communities living nearby. 
Plants such as Onaganesoppu (Alternanthera sessilis) that grow on the banks of 
lakes formed the mainstay of people’s diets during periods of drought and 
famine due to their high perceived water content (Unnikrishnan et al. 2016). 
It is perhaps because of this remembered interdependence that people’s 
rituals of birth, marriage, illness, prosperity, and death remain to this day 
centred around lakes, their waters, and deities delivering divine protection 
from associated natural calamities such as flooding. 

Lakes are also associated with several commons that served to meet 
community requirements in several ways in the precolonial past of the city 
and, to some extent, in its colonial past too. The village temple and 
cemetery, which serve to meet spiritual beliefs of life and afterlife, were 
found associated with a lake in deference to the perceived sacred nature of 
water. Very often today, these structures persist in the absence of the lake 
that once connected them. The gundathope or village grove consisted of 
fruiting or timber trees cultivated on banks of lakes to provide resources for 
community gatherings such as village festivals or marriages (Mundoli et al. 
2017 a). Harvesting timber or fruit for an individual’s personal needs was 
strictly prohibited, and compliance was assured because the community 
held these groves sacred. They served as shelter for nomadic tribes who 
periodically visited villages to receive food and clothing in exchange for 
services such as fortune-telling or theatrical entertainment. These groves 
also provided shade and watering holes for livestock owners and their herds 
when out in the afternoon sun. In addition to these commons, villages also 
boasted of communal threshing grounds (where millets and paddy harvests 
were threshed to separate straws from grain), grazing commons (gomala), 
and spaces where cattle could be tied up (gokatte). Further, one could also 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [98] 

find the Ashwathkatte – a raised platform that in addition to providing 
seating also housed two to three trees of neem (Azadirachta indica) and/or 
peepal (Ficus religiosa) and idols representing religious figures near a lake. In 
the past, the Ashwathkatte represented a communal space where the village 
headman administered justice (Nagendra 2016). 

Today, many lakes have been replaced by malls, bus stands, stadiums, 
residential gated communities, and educational institutions. The ones that 
survive are dynamic in their own ways. Village groves that remain in their 
original form are used by nomadic communities (who have since changed 
occupations to include lock making and knife sharpening) and by livestock 
owners for grazing cattle. Local men and women harvest the reeds growing 
on the banks of lakes to feed cattle and livestock. Commercial launderers 
use water from lakes to wash clothes. Local women harvest the green leafy 
vegetables growing on the banks of lakes either for their own sustenance or 
to sell in markets for supplementary income. Marginalised daily wage 
workers (often belonging to the building industry) set up temporary shelters 
on the banks of lakes. People use lake water to bathe and wash clothes and 
utensils, notwithstanding the pollution level; sometimes, they even drink it. 
Cultural traditions such as village festivals (jaatres) often involving ritualistic 
sacrifices and offerings made to lake deities are still practised around these 
spaces. Ashwathkattes no longer serve as spaces for delivering judgement, 
but communities frequent them to perform religious ceremonies or simply 
to get together and exchange thoughts. Cemeteries and temples are still an 
integral part of the waterscape of Bengaluru. 

 

4. TOWARDS ALTERNATIVE, INCLUSIVE URBAN VISIONS 

Grand urban visions such as the Smart City Programme or community-led 
visions of lake rejuvenation have often failed to adequately consider the 
interdependence of marginalised or vulnerable communities with water 
bodies (Mundoli et al. 2017b). Consequently, these visions prioritise the 
needs of urban middle and elite classes and give shape to an urban design 
that creates enclosures of aesthetic and recreational utilities while excluding 
(both physically and ideologically) other existing alternative utilities of the 
water body, such as those described here. Exceptions to this do exist, like 
the case of Kaikondrahalli lake to the south and Jakkur lake to the north 
(Nagendra 2016), but these cases are too few and too far between. It is time 
urban resident collectives, bureaucracies, and planning agencies recognise 
and encourage informal economies and resource-dependent lives and 
livelihoods around urban spaces. Only through promoting equitable access 
to these resources can we evolve targeted schemes of community-led 



[99] Hita Unnikrishnan 

stewardship of urban nature, which is important to urban resilience in a 
changing world. 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

This paper draws on insights from research that was funded by a USAID PEER 
grant to my supervisor Harini Nagendra. I thank Harini Nagendra for her valuable 
comments on this piece as well as acknowledge the contributions of Manjunatha B 
and Seema Mundoli without whom my work would not have been possible. I thank 
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) and Azim 
Premji University, Bengaluru, India for enabling the research presented here. This 
paper was also made possible through a Newton International Fellowship granted 
to me by the British Academy and hosted by the Urban Institute at The University 
of Sheffield, UK. 

 

REFERENCES 

Mundoli S, B. Manjunatha, and H. Nagendra. 2017 a. “Commons that provide: the 
importance of Bengaluru’s wooded groves for urban resilience”. International Journal 
of Urban Sustainable Development 9(2): 184–206. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/19463138.2016.1264404  

Mundoli S, H. Unnikrishnan, and H Nagendra. 2017b. “The ‘sustainable’ in smart 
cities: ignoring the importance of urban ecosystems”. Decision 44(2): 103–120. 
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40622-017-0152-x 

Nagendra H, H. Unnikrishnan, and S. Sen. 2013. “Villages in the city: spatial and 
temporal heterogeneity in rurality and urbanity in Bangalore, India”. Land 3(1): 1–
18. https://doi.org/10.3390/land3010001 

Nagendra H. 2016. Nature in the city: Bengaluru in the past, present, and future. Oxford 
University Press, India. 
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199465927.001.0001 

Nair J. 2005. The promise of the metropolis: Bangalore’s twentieth century. Oxford University 
Press, India 

Sudhira H.S., T.V. Ramachandra, and M.H. B. Subrahmanya. 2007. “City Profile: 
Bangalore”. Cities 24(5): 379–390. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2007.04.003 

Unnikrishnan H. S. Mundoli, B. Manjunatha, and H. Nagendra. 2016. “Down the 
drain: the tragedy of the disappearing urban commons of Bengaluru”. South Asian 
Water Studies 6(1): 7–11.  

https://doi.org/10.1080/19463138.2016.1264404
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40622-017-0152-x
https://doi.org/10.3390/land3010001
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199465927.001.0001
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2007.04.003

