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?

Link to AAG Online Program Panel 4551

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.

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria. “Street Hawkers and Public Space in Mumbai.” Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006.

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.

The Indian economy underwent a radical transformation from the late nineteenth century onwards under the twin impact of global capitalism and financial needs of British imperial networks. Complex interactions among these factors contributed to the emergence of a large industrial sector comprising mining, tea and coffee plantations, railway networks, cotton textile, sugar cane processing and various agro based seasonal industries. These industries generated new employment and brought into existence large wage earning industrial working classes. Though employed in a variety of work settings under different working conditions, the process of emergence of industrial working classes was viewed by many from the perspective of universally applicable homogenizing discourse of class formation. Many contemporary observers and later historians and sociologists were dismayed by the failure of Indian workers to behave in accordance with the theoretical master script prepared for them. Many scholars sought to explain their belied expectations in terms of structural in adequacies of India’s transition towards industrialization. For example, though by 1931 nearly four million workers were employed in the organized industrial sector and the number of urban dwellers came to constitute nearly 17% of Indian population, this industrialization appeared to be limited in scope in comparison to the vastness of agrarian economy. Indeed, many were disappointed by the nature of slow progress of industrialization in India and the industrial growth had been characterized as enclaved in nature. There often existed a sense of dejection in this seemingly spasmodic development of industrial sector and the related transformation of Indian society and economy which was aptly captured in India’s one of the most influential Marxist historian Sumit Sarkar’s words “incomplete transition towards bourgeois society”.

This very use of the term ‘incomplete transition’ points towards various universalizing discourses of transition from pre-capitalist societies towards capitalist industrial societies. Depending on their ideological convictions scholars used different theoretical tools to explain this incompleteness of Indian transition. Developmental sociologists often described such ‘incomplete transitions’ in terms of battle between modernity and tradition, many nationalist Marxist historians pointed their fingers to the retardation of Indian economy under the impact of colonial rule and hence the limited nature of industrialization. Some subaltern scholars analyzed such development in terms of the failure of universalizing logic of capital to subjugate indigenous pre-capitalist forms of community. In the context of labor history, these concerns were also invested with political expectations. Can workers steeped in peasant traditions of India act as revolutionary proletariat? Can class and class consciousness constitute a critical conceptual apparatus in understanding forms of social and political consciousness in India? Does India constitute a cultural exception that cannot be analyzed through existing theories of social transformations towards capitalistic modernity? India in this case became larger than its geographic location and stood almost as a metaphor for African and Asian societies where industrial working classes were perceived to be a hybrid creature ‘peasant workers’ who were incapable of organizing effective resistance to designs of capital.

Raj Chandavarkar challenged these notions in his PhD thesis written in 1981. He then transformed this thesis over a span of thirteen years into a book entitled The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). . He further explored implications of the arguments of the tome in the sphere of Indian politics in his second monograph Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). . Chandavarkar questioned these universalizing narratives by looking into specificities of the business strategies and labor resistance in Bombay. In a highly imaginative account he dissolved different boundaries that often informed labor history writing. He rejected the perceived dichotomy between agriculture and industry, rural and urban, work place and neighborhood, informal and formal industries. Chandavarkar also sought capture workers’ experience of their lives rather than viewing them as actors in contests between larger than life forces ideas namely modernity and tradition. For Chandravarkar labor history could not be divorced from business strategies and also more significantly the way state exercised political power in shaping politics of business and labor. If ideological moorings of early subaltern scholars could be located in Thompsonian and Foucauldian concerns, Chandravarkar’s work was heavily influenced by his intellectual mentor Gareth Stedman Jones whose seminal work Outcaste London (Pantheon, 1984). cast its long shadow over Chandavarkar’s analysis of the making of Bombay working classes. Stedman Jone’s influence is evident in the way Chandavarkar challenged the fixity of the notion of class as a given category produced on the shop floor where working classes and bourgeoisie supposedly confronted each other.

Rather than perceiving them to be homogenous and naturally solidaristic, Chandavarkar demonstrated the fluidity and tensions embedded in such categories. Almost reversing earlier historical assumptions in this regard, Chanadavarkar brings forth the salience of neighborhood and how the extension of industrial conflicts on the streets of neighborhood create conditions for the production of class solidarity and the intensification of class conflicts. Like Gareth Stedman Jones, Chandavarkar actually brings forth the significance of multiple processes of industrial production organizations ranging from small workshops to large industries and how the emphasis on the distinction between informal and formal industries actually blur our understanding of labor history. Here obviously one has to also take into account seminal contribution of Mark Holmstorm as well. Based on the reading of this genre of labor history Chandavarkar sought to provide agency to Bombay mill workers in shaping business strategies of their employers. Indeed, the most important aspect of Chandavarkar’s writings is the centrality he attributed to the story of resistance mounted by workers and their ability to compel mill owners to refashion the strategies of industrialization. In a way Chadavarkar undertakes a political reading of social history and thus provides new conceptual power to the idea of class not as a given totalizing category but as a social force that is in the process of making and unmaking within a particular historical context through interactions with state, strategies of capital and historical organization of social spaces within urban context. He thus simultaneously denies and affirms what Marx said in the Eighteenth Brumaire “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Chandravarkar further elucidated this argument in his second monograph which was a collection of essays. Here Chandavarkar actually explored fundamentally the fluidity and flexibility of social formations of class in relation to political language, power and political practice. Two important essays stand out in this volume where Chandavarkar advances the earlier understanding of labor history writing in India through an analysis of discourse of colonial governance. Echoing Stedman Jones’ arguments about casual workers of London Chandavarkar further asserted that workers were not intrinsically violent rather the colonial state because of its deep seated insecurity of masses actually engaged in violent practices that was reproduced by workers in their moments of resistance. More importantly he shows how workers’ response to the nationalist movement actually evolved through different and unusual medium of the Communist Party due to the Congress’s attempt to being everything for everybody and thus catering to large and disparate constituencies with contradictory interests. Though Chandavarkar strenuously denied that class relations were not inscribed in industrial relations his works actually broadened the framework of the idea of class formation and demonstrates again how class action within neighborhood, in the context of nationalist movements and as a form of resistance to police atrocities inform not only labor history but also politics in general in Bombay in the interwar period.

I would now turn towards a rather uncertain territory of explaining briefly how these insights generated by Chandavarkar had informed and influenced my work. By delving into the politics of Bengal from late 19th century to 1939, I have sought to demonstrate how struggles waged by industrial workers actually transformed not simply labor politics but the very nature of urban popular struggles in Bengal and finally Bengal politics. Workers in Bengal, despite their ever shifting fragmented loyalties towards diverse forms of templates of identities, were not only able to assert their presence in Bengal politics, but because of their location in jute industry at the nodal point of connections between global capitalism and peasant economy, had actually compelled in 1937 the propertied elites to consolidate their support behind a rickety alliance between British capitalists spearheaded by Benthal, Bengal landlords represented by Nazimuddin and B. P Singh Roy and Indian capitalists such as Nalini Ranjan Sarkar backed by G. D Birla. This coalition could continue up to 1939 because of the labor militancy from below. In other words, if we remove from the idea of working class their assigned and expected task of liberating humankind from capitalism and accept it as a diffused social force always engaged in the process of making and unmaking, we may find that even in a predominantly agrarian economy intense class action waged by an alliance among working classes could play a pivotal role in shaping not only popular politics but politics in general. While asserting that I must say at the end that I affirm and possibly also contest my intellectual mentor Chandavarkar’s thesis by stating that class relation is inscribed in the action of workers and we could recognize it if we de- scale our perspectives from the metaphysics of orientalist assumptions about Indian working classes.

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

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.

You are cordially invited to a talk and presentation by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, media historian and archivist from the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society in Bangalore, India on THURSDAY 11 MAY 2006 at 5.00 p.m. Ashish will introduce the Comprehensive Online Resource for Education (CORE), a recent initiative of CSCS, and present a short history of changing practices of database management, digital archiving, and curriculum and courseware development at CSCS for teaching cultural studies and social sciences in India.

CSCS and the New Academic Domain in India

The Centre for the Study of Culture & Society was founded in 1998 in Bangalore, as a ‘new generation’ academic research centre. While CSCS derived its historical legacy from the tradition of institutionalised social science research as supported by the well-known state-run institutes of the ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research), it has also struck out on its own with new
models for inter-disciplinary and inter-institutional pedagogy and research in the field of social science and theory.

The Digital Resource

Since the late 1990s, CSCS has experimented with database formats that could be transformed into teachable instruments. In 1999 CSCS started its Media & Culture Archive, and extended this in 2004 into India’s only M.A. programme in Cultural Studies taught entirely online. In 2005, this was further extended into the Undergraduate Diploma Programme in Cultural Studies. In the future, CSCS seeks to consolidate effective databasing with online pedagogy, by further linking this connection to the larger needs of social science pedagogy in India.

The Social Sciences in India

Indian social science research has been, since the 1970s and the pioneering work of the Subaltern Studies Collective, perhaps the most significant social science research tradition worldwide for close to two decades. Among its significant aspects has been its interlinking with the priorities of India’s NGO movement together with the needs of academic institutions both inside and outside the
University.

Furthering this linkage, social science research has mined the resources provided by numerous practices of independent informal archiving. As such archiving encounters the problems of digitization, it has also opened social science practice into three further areas: (1) The linking of the special skills of navigating the archives with new techniques of online pedagogy, (2) The
options opened up by online publication, and (3) The need for consolidated structures of data collaboration including academically valid search platforms.

The Domain of ‘Informal Archiving’ in India

Since roughly the late 1970s (conventionally from the time of the end of the Emergency), non-governmental organisations have attempted a form of archiving, alongside their work on advocacy, research, training and monitoring in their specialised fields of interest. Since the mid-1990s, this movement has also sought to enter the domain of digitization at various levels, and with varying
results.

The ‘informal archive’ in India could consist of anything between 3-5,000 institutions seeking to work at various levels, from the collection to the catalogue to the archive itself. It is now a sufficiently significant database, with sufficiently significant problems, to merit an independent look, as the phenomenon grows in tandem with the research work of social scientists in India.

About CORE

The Comprehensive Online Resource for Education (CORE) is an attempt to think through a possible strategy for bringing together the diverse resources and research materials available in different locations of new social science research in India, with a possible Asian extension. CORE hopes to bring into focus the the need to convert critical research into teachable, intelligible and easily accessible knowledge bases, the identifying of effective online tools and methods for teaching and learning, and the relocation of education centres, the educators and the students within the digital interfaces of cyberspace - all within the domain of higher education in social sciences in Asia.

ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA is Senior Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Culture & Society (CSCS) in Bangalore, where he coordinates the CSCS Media Archive and the CSCS CORE (Comprehensive Online Resource for Education). With Paul Willemen, he was co-author and editor of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (1999). He is an active member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Arts and Ideas, and is a regular contributor to the journals Framework and Sight & Sound, and an advisor to CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Mumbai.

He has written Ritwik Ghatak: A Return to the Epic (1983), was Editor, The Sad and Glad of Kishore Kumar (Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1988); was Editor, with Amrit Gangar, of Ghatak: Arguments/Stories (Screen Unit/Research Centre for Cinema Studies, 1987). He was co-curator, with Geeta Kapur, of the exhibition Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001, part of the exhibition Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, at the Tate Modern, London, 2001 [6]. Ashish’s forthcoming book is called CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CELLULOID: INDIAN EVIDENCE 2005-1925 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2007).

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.