Every city has a soul, a spirit, a culture that breathes life into its streets and binds its people together. Every city, that is, except my hometown.
I grew up in Gurgaon, a city built on corporate wealth and capitalist expansion. It’s a place where history feels absent, where culture seems manufactured. Gurgaon isn’t a city with deep roots; it’s a city that sprouted from the influx of immigrants chasing lucrative jobs and end up staying for the cosmopolitan lifestyle.
I grew up in gated communities, with great amenities and wide roads. The outer area was surrounded by roads with potholes, slums full of poverty and non-existent drainage. Within the interiors of my community, I could stay out till as late as I wanted, dress how I pleased and speak as I wanted. Outside its bounds, I felt shy, exposed, uncomfortable and demeaned. Stepping out was like a wholly different world- we’d stay away unless it was to travel somewhere else by car.
It’s almost like Gurgaon has these islands of wealth and comfort. Some of those islands are residential, some are for eating and some are for shopping. I hear people from other towns talk about the things they can do in their cities, the landmarks they can visit and the history they can witness. And I’m bemused…Â
What’s the culture of Gurgaon? We go to cafes, bars, and malls. We work stressful 9-to-5 jobs that we can’t afford to leave, too accustomed to the comforts they provide. Gurgaon offers golden handcuffs—we resent living here, yet can’t imagine life without it. This city, which floods with every rain and reeks of poor urban planning, somehow ensnares us, until we reluctantly call it home.
I’m not even an immigrant—I was born and raised here. But often, I feel robbed of an identity. If I can’t connect with my hometown, the place where I spent my childhood, do I have any history or culture to claim as my own? Most people derive a significant part of their heritage from their city, apart from their inherited cultural traditions. I lack the former. So even if I sometimes tap into a feeling of imaginary Punjabi-ness or pan-Indianness to make sense of my cultural identity, it’s not enough. I feel like I have nothing to call uniquely my own.
Despite all this, there is a cultural vocabulary to Gurgaon that is unnameable. There’s a way to navigate Gurgaon effortlessly, which makes me wonder if there is, after all, a culture here. There’s a shared way of living and speaking that I recognize among my friends, many of whom have also spent their entire lives in Gurgaon. But I’ve also seen how easy it is to assimilate here. Perhaps our cultural commonalities lack history and depth. It could be attributed to the fact that Gurgaon is new, so perhaps our culture is nascent and needs some generations to develop. Yet I fear that what we have isn’t culture at all, but the distilled essence of capitalism in urban garb .
I once mused that living in Gurgaon is about waiting to be old enough to take the metro to Delhi, to actually have fun beyond the soulless drudgery of spending money on nothing in Gurgaon. But truly- the relationship Gurgaon-ites have with Delhi is contentious. Many are repulsed by the idea of Delhi, but many of us also identify as being “from Delhi” when asked, because really, who wants to be known as being “from Gurgaon”?
My attachment to this city is perhaps more practical than emotional. It’s where my family lives, where my friends are. I could easily move somewhere else if they did. And yet, I’m lying if I say this place doesn’t mean something to me. I think of the malls, the gardens in my gated community, the bookstores, and the tiny stationery shop in a slum that I frequented as a child.
The landmarks of my memories may not be culturally sacrosanct, but I do have memories associated with them, and I certainly had a happy childhood. They may be soulless, but they mean something to me.Â
I can divide my life in Gurgaon into two parts. Till I was twelve, we lived in a matchbox sized apartment in a simple gated community. It was small, yet homely. After that, we moved to a much larger house where I had my own room and where we had more floor space than we had furniture for. While my newer apartment is more comfortable and more spacious, my heart yearns with longing and nostalgia when I step into my old society, where the embers of my childhood remain.
So what gives a city as soulless as Gurgaon its soul? Its people. People can turn houses into homes and malls into memories. Even if capitalism has stripped Gurgaon of a traditional cultural identity, it hasn’t stripped us of our humanity.Â
And perhaps that is enough, for now.