Urban History Association
4th Biennial Conference on “Shock Cities”: Urban Form in Historical Perspective
Houston, 6 November 2008, 10.45 a.m,. to 12.15 p.m.

Panel Abstract

Until recently, the historical study of cities in South Asia has had to contend with an anti-urban bias. If, as nationalists often asserted, “the real India” lived in its villages, the countryside was more deserving of scholarly inquiry than cities. When forced to confront rapid urbanization in recent decades, postcolonial planners viewed the city less as a ocial form than as a set of problems, an ahistorical object of state intervention and control. These biases have shaped modern scholarship on South Asia, where urban change has been submerged within the narrative frameworks of colonial power, resistance and identity – concerns which have dominated nationalist historiography and postwar area studies.

Recent urban “shocks” in South Asia – from communal violence and religious extremism to ecological crises and infrastructure collapse – have renewed the debate on the significance of urban form and governance in India and cities of the postcolonial world. New urban histories of South Asia have demonstrated that its cities were a key arena for the circulation of transnational ideas and technologies of sanitation, mass housing and town planning, as well as a site for the articulation of novel forms of modernity whose history is neither “colonial” nor “national”, but are part of global urban history.

Our panel includes historians of Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad and Lahore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an attempt to rethink urban change in colonial India beyond the nationalist framework of “impact” and “response”, and the dualism which structures most studies of colonial urbanism. While the great port cities and princely capitals of the subcontinent gave expression to the British Empire as paramount power in India, the colonial state was often most insecure in its urban seats of command and control. Rapid urbanization rendered the boundaries between colonial cantonments and native towns contested and porous, as Indian elites and masses confronted and appropriated “shocks” to the time, space, and built environment of the colonial city.

The subjects of the individual papers include battles over urban clocks and standard time between colonial scientists, municipal politicians and merchants in turn of the century Bombay; the cholera pandemics which shaped colonial Calcutta as a sanitary space through fever theory, colonial ethnology and free trade doctrine; contests over legal sovereignty and territorial control between the British imperial state and Muslim princely state in Hyderabad; and the innovation and rapid growth of the apartment building in late colonial Bombay as this type was shaped by colonial engineers, Indian architects, and middle-class apartment dwellers.

Panelists

Ishita Pande is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

Eric Lewis Beverley is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, SUNY (State University of New York), Stony Brook.

Nikhil Rao is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Wellesley College, Massachusetts.

Shekhar Krishnan is a Graduate Student in the Program in Science Technology & Society at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Discussant

William J. Glover is Associate Professor in the Taubmann College of Architecture and Planning and Director of South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

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?

Link to AAG Online Program Panel 4551

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

Labour Space and Politics:
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and the History of Modern South Asia

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