Our last session this semester will be on WEDNESDAY 28 MAY 2008 in MIT E51-195 from 2.30 p.m. to 4.30 p.m. when we will discuss:
Primary Text
Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2005).
Supplementary Texts
Janaki Nair, Beladide Noda Bengaluru Nagara!, Photo Exhibition on “Worlding the City : The Futures of Bangalore”, 2000
Our next session will be on WEDNESDAY 14 MAY 2008 in MIT E51-195 from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. when we will discuss the work of historian Swati Chattopadhyay.
Primary Text
Chattopadhyay, Swati. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny. Routledge, 2006.
Supplementary Texts
Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta”, Public Culture vol.10, no.1 (1997) pp.83-113.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp.65-79.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda: A History of Sociality” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp.180-213.
Our next session will be on WEDNESDAY 23 APRIL 2008 in MIT E51-195 from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. when we will discuss the work of geographer Stephen Legg on New Delhi.
Primary Text
Stephen Leggg. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
Supplementary Texts
Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739, New Ed (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Stephen Legg, “Beyond the European Province: Foucault and Postcolonialism,” in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden (Ashgate Publishing, 2007).
Stephen Legg, “Ambivalent Improvements: Biography, Biopolitics, and Colonial Delhi,” Environment and Planning A 40, no. 1 (2008): 37-56.
Panel at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) on Friday 18 April 2008 from 4:40 to 6:20 p.m. in Great Republic #7 at the Westin Copley Place Hotel, 10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts.
Panel
Over the last decade, Mumbai has become far more prominent within international coverage of contemporary urbanism. This greater focus on Mumbai has been a welcome rejoinder to a continued predominance of North American and European cities within urban studies and debate. Yet in accounting for urban change in Mumbai, there has been a tendency to uncritically adopt Eurocentric models and terminology.
This session seeks to explore some of the ways that Mumbai disrupts and contradicts existing categories, histories and narratives of urban analysis. The session will question some of the institutional frameworks for urban research and a tendency for debates about the future of cities to be initiated and directed by experts and practitioners based in the global North.
It will attempt to assess why Mumbai has recently assumed significance as an urban archetype, and examine ways urbanists can help facilitate scholarship in cities such as Mumbai, and develop new progressive forms of learning and research. The aim is not to isolate Mumbai as an exceptional form of urbanism nor to confer paradigmatic status on Mumbai, but to show how a city such as Mumbai can be used to generate new theoretical dialogue, greater historical perspective and open up new channels of urban policy formation.
Participants
Andrew Harris, Department of Geography and Urban Laboratory, University College London (UCL)
Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz
Shekhar Krishnan, Program in Science Technology & Society, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Nikhil Rao, Department of History, Wellesley College
Ninad Pandit, Department of Urban Studies & Planning (DUSP), MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Guiding Questions
- Why has Mumbai increasingly been used as a resource for international urban research and debate (e.g. Urban Age)? What models, metaphors and categories have been deployed to depict Mumbai, and what have been their capacities and limitations? Why have certain processes and spaces been emphasised?
- How does this new international spotlight on the city reinforce/overlap with the portrayal of Mumbai as world class? How and where do these new circuits of knowledge operate?
- Can Mumbai be used as a laboratory for refiguring, complicating and renewing (Eurocentric) urban concepts and theories? How can comparative research between Mumbai and cities elsewhere best be framed and undertaken?
- How have narratives of history in Bombay/Mumbai been assembled and fragmented, and has there been sufficient analysis of the city’s specific formations of modernity? Is a colonial gaze being replayed in contemporary urban redevelopment policies and practices? What does this teach us in terms of wider understandings of a ‘colonial present’?
- What research strategies and institutional arrangements are best able to cope with Mumbai’s opaque, mythical and chaotic qualities and the dynamic and performative forms of power in the city? Does researching Mumbai demand and generate new innovative methodologies and outputs?
- What examples and opportunities does Mumbai provide to imagine and realise new notions of citizenship that challenge neoliberal world views and offer a radical democratisation of urban politics? How have alliances been formed, dialogue created and ideas translated between Mumbai and other cities?
Our next session will be on WEDNESDAY 2 APRIL 2008 in MIT E51-195 from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m. when we will discuss the work of historian Sandip Hazareesingh.
Primary Text
Hazareesingh, Sandip. The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity : Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City 1900-1925. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007.
Supplementary Texts
Chopra, Preeti. “Refiguring the Colonial City: Recovering the Role of Local Inhabitants in the Construction of Colonial Bombay, 1854-1918.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 14 (2007): 109-125.
Hazareesingh, Sandip. “Colonial Modernism and the Flawed Paradigms of Urban Renewal: Uneven Development in Bombay, 1900–25.” Urban History 28, no. 02 (2001): 235-255.
Hazareesingh, Sandip. “The Quest for Urban Citizenship: Civic Rights, Public Opinion, and Colonial Resistance in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay.” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (October 2000): 797-829.
Our next session will be on WEDNESDAY 12 MARCH 2008 in MIT E51-195 from 6.30 p.m. to 8.30 p.m.
Primary Text
Glover, William J. Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Supplementary Texts
Glover, William J. “Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating Sentiment in Colonial India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 03 (2007): 539-566.
Glover, William J. “Construing Urban Space as “Public” in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab.” The Journal of Punjab Studies 15, no. 1 (forthcoming 2008): 1-14.
Plotz, John. “One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire.” In After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, edited by Antoinette Burton, 308-23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Our group reconvenes after a hiatus of almost a year on TUESDAY 19 FEBRUARY at 6.30 p.m. at MIT E51-195 . Please join us for dinner and conversation on the work of urban historian Prashant Kidambi.
Primary Text
Kidambi, Prashant. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1860-1920. Ashgate, 2007.
Supplementary Texts
Kidambi, Prashant. “‘An Infection of Locality’: Plague, Pythogenesis and the Poor in Bombay, 1896–1905.” Urban History 31, no. 02 (2005): 249-267.
Kidambi, Prashant. “Housing the Poor in a Colonial City: The Bombay Improvement Trust, 1898-1918.” Studies in History 17, no. 1 (February 1, 2001): 57-79.
This is the list of our public meetings and primary texts for the group in Spring 2008. Our meetings are from 6.30 to 8.30 p.m. in the MIT Program in Science Technology & Society (STS) in Building E51, Room 195.
Tuesday 19 February 2008
Kidambi, Prashant. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1860-1920. Ashgate, 2007.
Wednesday 12 March 2008
Glover, William J. Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Wednesday 2 April 2008
Hazareesingh, Sandip. The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity : Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City 1900-1925. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007.
Wednesday 23 April 2008
Legg, Stephen. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
Wednesday 14 May 2008
Chattopadhyay, Swati. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny. Routledge, 2006.
Wednesday 28 May 2008
Nair, Janaki. The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 2005.
The Students Council and Students of Color Committee of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the South Asia Forum at MIT invite you to a screening of the documentary film “Q2P” directed by Paromita Vohra on FRIDAY 27 APRIL at 6.00 P.M. in the Audio-Visual Theatre in Room 7-431 at DUSP, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Q2P
(Documentary, 2005, 53 minutes, DV, English, Hindi)
LOOK AT THE TOILET …
… SEE THE CITY
Who is dreaming up the global city? Q2P peers through the dream of a futuristic Mumbai and finds… public toilets… not enough of them.
As this film observes who has to queue to pee, we begin to understand the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape and the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space.
We meet whimsical people with novel ideas of social change, which thrive with mixed results. We learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together. In the Museum of Toilets, at a night concert, in a New Delhi “international toilet”, in a Bombay slum, we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality.
The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions - about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.
Roundtable at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Meeting on THURSDAY 22 March 2007 from 7.00 to 9.00 p.m.
Salon E, 4th Floor, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 110 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar was one of the foremost scholars of urban and working class history writing on South Asia. His sudden death in April 2006 has been an inestimable loss to the academic community. The empirical depth of Chandavarkar’s scholarship stood out amongst his contemporaries. The impact of his work on the field remains to be assessed.
This roundtable will focus on several areas where Chandavarkar’s contributions remain significant and offer new directions for future scholarship. His challenge to universalising narratives of world capitalism opened up new ways of understanding the social spaces, political choices and organising strategies of urban working classes. Larger formations such as class and nationalist politics articulated with everyday relations amongst women, migrants and the urban poor. The earlier importance given to the workplace as the primary site of class mobilisation gave way to a wider understanding of how the spaces of the neighbourhood and countryside enabled workers to engage in urban politics. His attention to social organisation emphasised the shifting nature of class and community identities in the context of mass action, challenging functionalist conceptions of social structure and political agency.
This roundtable will situate Chandavarkar’s wide-ranging contributions to the historiography of modern South Asia, addressing critiques of his work as well as areas where his interpretations have gained acceptance. This roundtable also points to new directions which his work and mentorship have helped shape amongst his peers and colleagues. The participants include senior historians, younger scholars, and Chandavarkar’s former students from the U.S., U.K. and India.
Chair
Frank F. Conlon, Department of History, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Participants
Douglas Haynes, Department of History, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
Subho Basu, Department of History, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
Lisa Trivedi, Department of History, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
Nikhil Rao, Department of History, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
Shekhar Krishnan, Program in History and Anthropology of Science & Technology, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
MAIN TEXTS
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “From Neighbourhood to Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Left in Bombay’s Girangaon in the 20th Century”, introductory essay from Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar, One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Mill Workers of Girangaon: An Oral History (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004).
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Workers’ Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay Between the Wars” from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.100-142
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Police and Public Order in Bombay, 1880-1947″ from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.180-233
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896-1914″ from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.234-265
Douglas Haynes and Subho Basu, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajnarayan_Chandavarkar
PAPER
Srinivas, Tulasi. “Divine Enterprise: Hindu Priests and Ritual Change in Neighbourhood Hindu Temples in Bangalore.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 29, no. 3 (2006): 321.
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Ashley, Wayne. “The Stations of the Cross: Christ, Politics, and Processions on New York City’s Lower East Side.” In Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, edited by Robert Orsi, 341-366. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Hall, Peter. “The City of Enterprise: Planning Turned Upside Down: Baltimore, Hong Kong, London, 1975-1987.” In Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 342-260. London: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Harvey, David. “Capitalism: The Factory of Fragmentation.” In Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, 121-127. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Harvey, David. “Cartographic Identitities: Geographical Knowledge Under Globalization.” In Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, 208-236. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Heitzman, James. “Becoming Silicon Valley.” Seminar (New Delhi), July 2001. http://www.india-seminar.com/2001/503/503%20james%20heitzman.htm
Nair, Janaki. “Battles for Bangalore: Re-Territorialising the City” presented at the SEPHIS (South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development). Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 2002.
PAPER
Eric Lewis Beverley, “Improvising Urbanism: Aesthetics and Sanitation in the Making of Modern Hyderabad”, draft chapter from dissertation in the Department of Indo-Islamic Cultures, Harvard University, 2006ms.
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Brush, John E. “The Morphology of Indian Cities.” In India’s Urban Future: Selected Studies from an International Conference sponsored by Kingsley Davis, Richard L. Park, and Catherine Bauer Wurster, edited by Roy Turner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
Celik, Zeynep. “The Regularization of the Urban Fabric.” In The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Ellefsen, Richard A. “City-Hinterland Relationships in India.” In India’s Urban Future: Selected Studies from an International Conference sponsored by Kingsley Davis, Richard L. Park, and Catherine Bauer Wurster, edited by Roy Turner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
Harrison, Mark. “The Foundations of Public Health in India: Crisis and Constraint.” In Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Paul Rabinow. “Techno-Cosmpolitanism: Governing Morocco.” In French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989.
Radha Kamal Mukherjee and J.M. Linton Bogle. “Town Planning in India.” Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1929.
Wang, Di. “Street Control.” In Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners and Local Politics, 1870-1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
PAPER
Anand Vivek Taneja, Columbia University, “The Archaeology of Myth: The Myth of Archaeology: The Pasts and Present of the Purana Qila”
Anand Vivek Taneja, “History and Heritage Woven in the New Urban Fabric: The Changing Landscapes of Delhi’s ‘First City’, 1995-2005 (or, Who Can Tell the Histories of Lado Sarai?)”
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Bayly, C.A. “Delhi and Other Cities of North India during the ‘Twilight’.” In The Delhi Omnibus, edited by R.E. Frykenberg, 121-136. New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2002.
Gupta, Narayani. “Delhi and Its Hinterland: The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In The Delhi Omnibus, edited by R.E. Frykenberg, 137-156. New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2002.
Khan, Naveeda. “Of Children and Jinn: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship during Uncertain Times.” Research-article, May 18, 2006.
Kumar, Sunil. “A Medieval Reservoir and Modern Urban Planning: Local Society and the Hauz-i-Rani” and “Making Sacred History or Everyone his/her own Historian: The Pasts of the Village of Saidlajab.” In The Present in Delhi’s Pasts, 62-118. New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2002.
Messick, Brinkley. Selections from The Calligraphic State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
PAPER
Nikhil Rao, “An Indian Suburbia”, chapter 1 from dissertation in the Department of History, University of Chicago, 2006ms.
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Archer, John. “Colonial Suburbs in South Asia, 1750-1850, and the Spaces of Modernity.” In Visions of Suburbia, edited by Roger Silverstone, 26-54. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
King, Anthony D. “Excavating the Multicultural Suburb: Hidden Histories of the Bungalow.” In Visions of Suburbia, edited by Roger Silverstone, 55-85. New York: Routledge, 1997.
We will meet for a screening of the film C.I.D. (1956) on TUESDAY 17 OCTOBER in MIT Building E-51 Room 191 (the STS Reading Room) at 7.00 p.m.
See you this evening and feel free to bring friends.
Main Texts
Patrick Geddes, Selection from “Cities in Evolution” from Marshall Stalley, ed., Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972.
Patrick Geddes, “Committee on Collaboration between the Bombay University and Bombay City” (Maharashtra State Archives, Educational Department, 1920)
Patrick Geddes, “Essential of Sociology in Relation to Economics”, Indian Journal of Economics, vol. III, part 1, 1919 (?)
Hellen Meller, “Urbanisation and the Introduction of Modern Town Planning Ideas in India, 1900-1925″
Ramachandra Guha, “Patrick Geddes and Ecological Town Planning in India”, talk given to the Seminar on Environmental and Agricultural History, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), September 2006
Indian Town Planning Reports by Patrick Geddes
(with sincere thanks to Arindam Datta for sharing his collection of these reports with the group)
Geddes, Reports on Re-Planning of Six Towns in Bombay Presidency, 1915. Bombay: Government of Maharashtra Urban Development and Public Health Dept, 1965.
Geddes, Town Planning in Lucknow: A Report to the Municipal Council. Lucknow: Murray’s London Printing Press, 1916.
Geddes, Report on Town Planning, Dacca. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Depot, 1917.
Geddes (with H.V. Lanchester), Town Planning in Jubbulpore: A Report to the Municipal Committee. Jubbulpore: Hitkarini Press, 1917.
Geddes, Town Planning towards City Development: A Report to the Durbar of Indore. Indore: Holkar State Printing Press, 1918.
PAPERS
Nikhil Rao, “The City as Subject: The Acquisitions of the Bombay Improvement Trust” (chapter 1) from dissertation in the Department of History, University of Chicago, 2006ms
Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Contrasting Case of Bombay” (unfinished) chapter from forthcoming book Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: Indian Evidence 2005-1925 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2007).
We will be screening Raj Kapoor’s classic film Shree 420 on TUESDAY 9 MAY 2006 from about 5.45 to 8.45 p.m., with discussion to follow. Released in 1955 and set in Bombay, Shree 420 is one of the most influential products of the booming fifties Bombay film industry, and a canonical representation of urban life in the postcolonial city.
Shree 420 names itself in a contradiction. Article 420 of the postcolonial Indian Penal Code provides juridical sanction for the prosecution of acts of cheating or fraud; Shree is a standard appellation of respect, naming a modern Mister, or denoting a gentleman. And this gentlemanly cheat is, in the text of the film examined here, embodied in the equally ambiguous figure of the subaltern hero Raj Kapoor — the tramp bumbling his way through the gullies and crowded, inhospitable streets of that favoured location of the 1950s popular Hindi cinema: the metropolis of Bombay, the privileged place for the production of the newly independent nation’s identity and the socialist vision. Hailed by cinema audiences throughout the new republic on its release in 1955, Raj Kapoor’s tramp-hero Raju was the cinematic embodiment of an unique historical conjuncture of the new Indian republic. The educated unemployed, the urban proletariat, Partition refugees, and the reformist petty bourgeoisie could all identify with Raju, newly arrived in the steamy concrete jungle of Bombay, following the noisy and irresistible path of the new expansive capitalism in search of distinction, prosperity, and a certain experience of modernity.
Paper
Svati Shah, “Sex Work and Secrecy” (ch.4) and “The Red Light Area: Producing the Spectacle of Sex Work” (ch.5) from Seeing Sexual Commerce: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, dissertation submitted to the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, 2005.
Primary Texts
David Harvey, “Introduction” and “On Bodies and Political Persons in Global Space” (ch.6 “The Body as Accumulation Strategy” and ch.7 “Body Politics and the Struggle for a Living Wage”) from Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 2000, pp.97-132
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Workers’ Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay Between the Wars” from Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950, pp.100-142
Kamala Kempadoo, “Introduction: Globalizing Sex Workers’ Rights” in Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp.1-28.
Jeremy Seabrook, selections from In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World (ch.1 “Myths of the Megacities”, ch.2 “Urbanization: The Making of a Transnational Working Class”, ch.3 “Migrants to the City”, ch.4 “Bombay in the Nineties”, ch.6 “Labour in the Cities”, and ch.10 “Slums and Settlements”), London: Verso, 1996, pp.1-73, 86-130, 174-209)
Supplementary Texts
Kalpana Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London: Verso Books, 2005.
Paper
Sarah Waheed, “Bombay and the Adeeb: Exploring Spaces of Sociability amongst Urdu Intellectuals, 1899-1965″, draft chapter of dissertation in the Department of History, Tufts University (2006)
Primary Texts
Ismat Chugtai, “From Bombay to Bhopal”
Sadat Hasan Manto, “Ismat Chugtai”
Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz, ed., Edmund Jephcott, trans., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, pp. 3-60.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Adda: A History of Sociality” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp.180-213.
Supplementary Texts
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity, London: Polity Press, 2002, ch.1 (The Flaneur in Social Theory), ch. 3 (Georg Simmel’s Metropolis), ch. 4 (Vienna is not Berlin), ch. 5 (Otto Wagner & Vienna), ch. 6 (Social Theory, the Metropolis and Expressionism).
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Thomas Levin, ed., trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Paper
Nikhil Rao, “The Bourgeois Street in Bombay”, draft chapter of dissertation in the Department of History, University of Chicago, 2006ms
Primary Texts
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City and Appendices to The Image of the City (1960). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp.65-79.
Sudipta Kaviraj, “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta”, Public Culture vol.10, no.1 (1997) pp.83-113.
Supplementary Texts
Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Practices” and “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp.91-130.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), New York: Modern Library, 1993.
Deyan Sudjic, The 100 Mile City. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1992.
Paper
Nikhil Rao, “House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay in the 1930s” and “Caste, Community and the Cooperative Society: The Emergence of Dadar-Matunga as Ethnic Neighbourhood in Bombay”, draft chapters from dissertation in the Department of History, University of Chicago, 2006ms
Primary Texts
Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment” (1915) in Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, eds., The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp.1-46 (chapter 1).
Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project” in Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, eds., The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp.47-62 (chapter 2).
Roderick D. McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community” in Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, eds., The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp.63-79 (chapter 3).
Supplementary Texts
Paul G. Cressey, “The Taxi-Dance Hall as a Social World” (1932) in James F. Short, Jr., ed. The Social Fabric of the Metropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Press, 1971, pp.193-209.William Foot Whyte, “Social Structure, The Gang and the Individual” (1943) in James F. Short, Jr., ed. The Social Fabric of the Metropolis: Contributions of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, Chicago: Univesity of Chicago Press, 1971, pp.214-235.
Ulf Hannerz, “Chicago Ethnographers” in Exploring the City: Inquiries Towards an Urban Anthropology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp.19-48 (chapter 2).
Paper
Eric Lewis Beverley. “Cosmopolitanism from Charminar to Cantontment: Urban Hyderabad and Colonialism”, draft chapter from dissertation in the Department of Indo-Islamic Cultures, Harvard University, 2006ms.
Primary Texts
David Harvey. “Paris, 1850-1870″ and “Monument and Myth: The Building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart” in Consciousness and The Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanisation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp.63-249 (reprinted in David Harvey, “Part II: Materializations: Paris 1848-1870″ and “Part III: Coda” in Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity, New York: Routledge, 2003).
Supplementary Texts
Marshall Berman. “Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets” in All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Verso Books, 1983, pp.131-172.
Alan Corbin. The Foul & the Fragrant: Odor and the French Imagination. 1986.
Michael Sprinker. History & Ideology in Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu and the Third French Republic, 1988.
Primary Text
Henri Lefebrve, The Urban Revolution (1969). Robert Bononno, trans. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Supplementary Texts Henri Lefebvre, “Plan of the Present Work” in The Production of Space (1974), Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans., Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000, pp.1-67.
Edward W. Soja, “The Extraordinary Voyages of Henri Lefebvre” (chapter 1) and “The Trialectics of Spatiality” (chapter 2) in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, pp.26-82.
Our next screening is tomorrow SATURDAY 19 NOVEMBER at 9.00 P.M.
Based on the Godfather, Sarkar (2005) is the last in an unique trilogy of films by director Ram Gopal Varma on the Mumbai criminal-political underworld. Satya (1998), the first film in the series, was a new kind of gangster film which hit the theatres when the city was the setting of major gangland warfare in the mid-nineties. Company (2002), its sequel, was a fictionalised tale of the rise of the real-world Mumbai dons Dawood Ibrahim and his understudy Chhota Rajan (Small Rajan), their subsequent split and war with each other, and the criminal-politician nexus which extends to the highest levels of the state. ‘Satya’ is the Gandhian-Ashokan motto of the Indian state, and ‘Company’ signifies the modern firm, but also the earlier form of the colonial state and its commercial empire. ‘Sarkar’ appropriately finishes this trilogy. Literally translated as ‘government’ but also a term of address to superiors in colloquial Hindi, Sarkar is a cognate for Godfather. Amitabh Bacchan plays a character based on the nativist political boss of Mumbai, Balasaheb Thackeray, chief of the Shiv Sena (Army of Shiv), the party machine which still rules Mumbai politics. Sarkar is about the rise and fall of this party and its ruling family. Along with Satya and Company, Sarkar explores the split domains of organised crime and politics in Mumbai, and related themes of business, morality, and the law.
On request, we will also screen either Satya or Company around 6.30 p.m. tomorrow before the main film.