What is the price of belonging?

By Vedanth and Lakshmi

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Vedanth and I visited Madiwala, a suburb in South Bangalore, on a weekday evening, mostly out of curiosity and partly because I kept hearing it described as “Kerala in Bangalore.” The label sounded exaggerated until we reached the site. Malayalam everywhere. On boards, on shop shutters, drifting out of bakeries. A tea shop discussion about Kerala politics was louder than the traffic. For a moment, the city felt displaced. Or maybe folded. It’s easy to see why Malayalis land here. In a city that constantly asks you to prove your belonging, familiarity becomes a form of shelter. It is perhaps the only place in Bangalore where no one has asked me, “Nimage Kannada barutha?” In fact, here you sometimes witness the reversal, that is, Kannadigas speaking in Malayalam.

However, once you walk a little deeper into the lanes, you see a different picture. Buildings packed too close. Balconies facing other balconies at arm’s length. Inside, rooms split with plywood sheets, curtains doubling as walls. Three people sleeping in shifts because space doesn’t allow otherwise. The rent isn’t cheap either. In fact, it is often higher precisely because this is a “Malayali area.” Brokers know what they are selling. What unsettled me wasn’t just the overcrowding. It was how normal it felt. How quickly compromise is absorbed when the alternative is isolation. And even here, the word “home” serves differently depending on who is inhabiting it. An IT employee renting a well-ventilated 2BHK calls it convenience. A nursing student sharing a hall calls it an adjustment. A daily wage worker sharing a room with five others calls it manageable. Same neighbourhood. Same language. Different tolerances for discomfort. So, what exactly is being attained here? Is home about privacy? About ownership? About the ability to shut a door and not negotiate space? Or is it simply the relief of not feeling alien?

Madiwala shows how belonging can soften precarity without removing it. How language and food can make compression bearable. How emotional comfort can be monetised. How class redraws the boundaries of ease even within a so-called enclave. On our way back, I kept thinking about who actually gets to feel at home here. The city runs on migrant labour. The delivery worker weaving through traffic, the construction worker who works morning shifts and night shifts, the domestic worker who leaves before sunrise; they materially produce Bangalore every single day. And yet, the comfort of “home” within the city seems reserved for others. It is often the white-collar migrant, the software engineer, the corporate employee who can afford privacy, ventilation, a lockable room that doesn’t double as someone else’s sleeping space. For them, belonging can feel stable. It can look like a choice. For those who materially construct the city, home is more fragile. They prioritise cultural and linguistic familiarity over anything in a city that considers them structurally irrelevant. While white-collar migrants chase the feeling of home in Bangalore, it is blue-collar workers who construct and maintain it every day. And too often, in building homes for others, they gamble with their own safety, security, and shelter.