Radicle City is a cinematic essay which imagines a future in which Bangalore’s gardens no longer exist. Narrated as a poetic address by a voice who has grown up in a city without trees, the film’s hybrid documentary and fictional narrative recovers and reinterprets footage of an unknown walker’s journey along a park that marks an old line of colonial segregation in the city. This is an old border with new lines: today the city is India’s “silicon valley,” an IT hub at the heart of a network of global capitalism, an incubator for the apparatuses of Modi’s digital technocracy and one of India’s most unequal and divided cities. Moving restlessly back and forth between past and possible future, the film is at once an investigation into the city’s complex colonial entanglements and their afterlives, and an elegy to the city’s gardens, fragile spaces of resistance in a metropolis which threatens their destruction.
Radicle City is a cinematic essay which imagines a future in which Bangalore’s gardens no longer exist. Narrated as a poetic address by a voice who has grown up in a city without trees, the film’s hybrid documentary and fictional narrative recovers and reinterprets footage of an unknown walker’s journey along a park that marks an old line of colonial segregation in the city. This is an old border with new lines: today the city is India’s “silicon valley,” an IT hub at the heart of a network of global capitalism, an incubator for the apparatuses of Modi’s digital technocracy and one of India’s most unequal and divided cities. Moving restlessly back and forth between past and possible future, the film is at once an investigation into the city’s complex colonial entanglements and their afterlives, and an elegy to the city’s gardens, fragile spaces of resistance in a metropolis which threatens their destruction.
Arjuna Keshvani-Ham
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