Suresh Jayaram’s new book about Cubbon Park is built on a simple but radical idea: the park belongs to everyone. He doesn’t just say that. He proves it by letting 26 other people speak.
Jayaram is a writer and visual artist. He founded the 1Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery in Bengaluru.
His book, Cubbon Park: Citizens’ Perspectives and Many Visions for the Future, is a collection of interviews. He calls himself a conductor, or a sutradhar — the narrator who strings a story together in Indian theater. He gathered voices.
He did not impose his own. The book treats the park as a living document.
Jayaram describes it as a palimpsest. That means layers of history written over each other — pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial. The park’s ecology and built environment sit inside those layers.
But the book goes further than history or botany. It presents the park as a place where people simply exist. Where desire happens.
Where love grows. Where someone finds a quiet corner in a noisy city.
That is the close read here. Jayaram is not writing a preservationist’s lament or a government report. He is writing an ethnographic document.
He is collecting contemporary evidence of what a public space actually means to the people who use it. The timing matters.
Bengaluru is a city under tremendous pressure. Its green spaces shrink. Its traffic swells.
Its civic infrastructure groans. Cubbon Park, the central green lung, becomes a battleground. Some want it regimented.
Some want it commercialized. Some want it fenced off.
Jayaram’s book pushes back. It questions the role of government in managing such spaces. “It gives them the idea that parks need not be regimented like this,” he says.
The book’s format is its argument. Twenty-six interviews.
Factoids. Evocative photographs. No single expert dominates.
No single narrative wins. The park belongs to the gardener and the jogger and the lover and the artist. It belongs to the person who has never read a book about parks.
Jayaram calls the park a “very eclectic, secular space.” It has been, he says, an axis of the city for a long time. An axis holds things together.
It allows movement around it. That is what Cubbon Park does. It allows the city to revolve around something that is not a mall or a tech campus or a gated community.
The book is also a question. It asks who gets to decide what a park is for.
It does not answer that question neatly. It presents the evidence — the voices, the memories, the photographs — and lets the reader decide. That is the job of a conductor.
That is the job of a sutradhar. Jayaram thinks of his work as archival material. Not dead archival material.
Living. Contemporary.
Something that reflects the Bengaluru-specific identity of the people in it. The city is not abstract in this book. It is concrete.
It is the smell of wet earth after rain. It is the bench where someone sat and read a book for the first time.
It is the path where a couple walked and decided to stay together. The book insists that these small, personal things are political. They are evidence that a public space works.
They are proof that the park belongs to everyone.
