Panel Abstracts
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Panel: Unsettling Frontiers: Border, State, and Identity FormationsPanel: Locating Violence: Politics, Institutions and Disciplines
Panel: Methods, Tactics and Postcolonial Historiographies
Panel: Confronting the State: Negotiation Identity, Agency and History
Panel: History, Culture, and Power in the Construction of Globalization
Panel: Unsettling Frontiers: Border, State, and Identity Formations
Mark Flummerfelt
University of Chicago
Dept. of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
National borders, transnational literatures: Poetry and Place in Bhanubhakta’s Nepali Ramayan
From its beginnings in the mid-19th century, the development of modern Nepali literature and ideas of Nepali national identity have been linked in both the popular and scholarly imagination. Motiram Bhatta (1866 – 1896) is celebrated in contemporary Nepal for publishing and promoting the Nepali Ramayan of Bhanubhakta Acharya, a text generally considered both the first major work of modern Nepali literature and a fundamental component of a broader Nepali national, ethnic, and linguistic identity. The linkage between the development of a distinctly Nepali literature and the Nepali nation put forth by Motiram continues to have a central place in contemporary discussions about Nepali identity in the 21st century. Joint invocations of desh-prem and bhasa-prem – love of country and love of language – recur throughout modern Nepali history, and Motiram’s efforts on behalf of Bhanubhakta did much to encourage the force and logic of that invocation.
This paper will consider the role of literature in shaping ideas of Nepali national identity by focusing on the status of Bhanubhakta in Nepal and the Darjeeling region of West Bengal. Nepali speakers in Nepal and the Darjeeling region of North-east India share a common language and literature, while remaining divided by national borders; political boundaries complicate Bhanubhakta’s relations with the transnational Nepali-speaking community, and make Nepali literature itself a potentially divisive political and cultural touchstone in the region. For Nepali speakers in both Nepal and India, Nepali literature is a potent symbol of a shared Nepali cultural identity, and an at times complicated reminder that ethnic Nepalis are separated by the political borders of modern Nepal and India. Modern Nepali literature thus becomes both a means of transcending national boundaries and, for some, a means of reinforcing them.
Haimanti Roy
History Department
University of Cincinnati
Partition and Making of National Borders, 1947-65
The Partition of 1947 created the two new nation states of India and Pakistan and set up territorial demarcations that sought to define not only their geographical outline, but also the limits of their national sovereignty. I focus on the border between India and East Pakistan to trace the creation of this border as a continuous process between 1947 and 1965. As a manifestation of historical and cultural claims of inclusion within an imagined nation, I argue that this border played a significant role in the formation of a national identity in India and Pakistan.
During the period 1947-65, this border assumed added importance because of two factors. First the continual movement of people from East Pakistan to India and vice versa, repeatedly called into question the state’s ability to control and regulate human flows across the border. In response the Indian government attempted to make its control tangible through setting up passport and visa regulations and in later years, issuing migration certificates to the Hindu migrants from East Pakistan. In the process, official discourse began to classify the people crossing the border into refugees, displaced, legal and illegal migrants and infiltrators.
Secondly, my paper investigates the continuous territorial disputes and ‘border incidents’ which threatened and questioned the territorial and national claims of both nations. Ecological changes such as alterations in river courses, appearance (and disappearance) of alluvial belts (char) and cultivation on them, movement of livestock etc challenged cartographic certainties and fuelled ongoing border disputes. Although the quotidian life at the border at times contested the homogenizing tendency of national identity, it became increasingly apparent that the border was here to stay. Radcliffe had only begun the process of drawing a line to divide the nations. By the Indo Pakistan war of 1965 that line had metamorphosed into an international border. I argue that the border was significant not only as a linear manifestation of territorial and jurisdictional control but also became an important site of how a nation defined itself and whom it included as its citizens.
Lim Tai Wei
History Department
Cornell University
Wartime Permeability: The Indian-Chinese-Burmese Supply Front in WWII
WWII in the Asian theater is often characterized by the battles of the Pacific War between the principle actors of the US and Japan. This essay aims to examine the prosecution of the war through a different lens: that of the permeable Indian-Chinese-Burmese supply front. Firstly, through this front, it is possible to reinterpret the war in East Asia as having a multinational nature, renovating the perception of a bilateral conflict solely between the US and Japan, usually portrayed in the Pacific War. The Indian-Chinese-Burmese supply route required coordination between British India, the Americans, the Chinese Nationalist regime, overseas Chinese and Southeast Asians to become operational. Secondly, instead of being solely focusing on Pacific naval battles, the Indian-Chinese-Burmese reformulates the geo-strategic conception of the war in South and East Asia through the tying down of Japanese troops on the mainland to divert manpower away from the naval battles. This mitigates the overpowering prominence of American and Japanese naval battle strategies that have been exceptionalized as the pivotal points of the war. Thirdly, the front is contexualized against the backdrop of pan-Asianism. More than solely a conflict between imperialist powers, there is a pan-Asian in the Indian-Chinese-Burmese front as many of the Asians involved were volunteers whose mobilization and funding came from indigenous Asian sources. Pan-Asianism is also highlighted in the permeability of borders in Asia as manpower and finances for the supply front filtered from the reaches of South Asia and Southeast Asia, a permeable process overcoming colonial border constructs. The involvement of non-state actors like chambers of commerce and salvation fronts also point to an alternative source of indigenous mobilization. It was the collaborative effort of colonials and the organized indigenous groups that invented this supply route.
Sara Shneiderman
Anthropology Department
Cornell University
Migrating Identities: The Case of the Darjeeling Thangmi
This paper explores the history of labor migration between Nepal and the Darjeeling District of West Bengal, India, and the attendant shifts in ethnic identity for those who cross this border. Through a case study of the 40,000-strong Thangmi ethnic group, whose homeland is in the Dolakha and Sindhupalcok districts of Nepal, but who have been migrating to Darjeeling to work for over 150 years, I address the following issues. How is ethnicity differently constructed within the two adjacent nation-states of Nepal and India? In particular, how have state policies towards ethnicity--the Scheduled Tribes and Backwards Classes legislation in India, and the Muluki Ain (Civil Code) in Nepal--affected the construction of identities on the ground? What are the different meanings of Nepali and Indian national identity for individuals with potential claims to citizenship of both countries? In answering these questions, I draw upon original ethnographic material from both the Nepali and Indian Thangmi communities, as well as published sources from Thangmi cultural associations. I trace the historical and contemporary connections between the two Thangmi groups, examining their reactions to, and interactions with, each other's concepts of identity to draw out both the congruences and tensions between them. Finally, I situate this case study within broader debates about ethnicity and nationalism within South Asian Studies and beyond.
Anila Daulatzai
Dept of Anthropology
John Hopkins University
The Silent Residue of Politics
Political upheavals independent of and coupled to the emergence of the ‘nation-state’ and the imperialist and modernizing tendencies that often accompany it as well as varying historical circumstances(i.e.colonialisms) have placed millions in the categories of “refugee” and “displaced”. By focusing on the ‘voluntary repatriation” of Afghan refugees instituted by the Government of Pakistan(hereafter, GoP) and in collusion with the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees(hereafter, UNHCR), I hope to locate the refugee camps in Pakistan as a critical site of power for the state and a large international institution(UNHCR) in the hope of contributing to a larger critique of the nation. I will draw upon the work of Liisa Malkki with indirect influences by Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault, and the Sub-altern Studies Project. I will first give a brief history of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Then I will use personal narratives of refugees I collected in the Nasr Bagh and Jallozai refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan throughout my 35 months of work there throughout the past eight years, most recently being the summer of 2003.
Liisa Malkki traces the diverse discursive and institutional domains in which the categories ‘the refugee’ and ‘in-exile’ are constituted. She historically situates the emergence of these categories by analyzing how the displacement of millions was managed in Europe post-World War II. Malkki continues by discussing how mass refugees flows enabled the creation of administrative and bureaucratic processes to manage these populations that have had far-reaching consequences. The refugee camps in themselves became a source of power for those in authority. Such authorities concentrated groups of people, organized and often segregated them, tracked and controlled their movements and continuously screened them. These practices that began in the post-World War II period eventually became standard operating procedures since then. I hope to continue Mallki’s critique of such procedures and control of refugees as carried forth by the GoP. I will invoke Foucault’s concept of bio-power in explaining the most recent procedures that authorities in Pakistan have taken to using to ‘control’ Afghan refugees and to force their return to Afghanistan. This paper will attempt to dislocate the notion of any essential refugee by historicizing the Afghan refugee crisis within the context of the nation-state of Pakistan and it’s politics, by specifically focusing on GoP policy toward Pasthuns. I hope to contextualize these narratives within relevant theoretical frameworks of Foucault and others to recooperate refugees as agents and not mere victims of these multi-layered dominant forces.
Panel: Locating Violence: Politics, Institutions and Disciplines
Francesca Bremner
Department of Sociology
Columbia University
Bonds and Boundaries: The Spatial Dynamics of a Riot.
My article is an ethnographic study of the social, political and symbolic geography of a place, here a little street in Colombo, Sri Lanka, which was rewritten by an act of collective violence in 1983. During this moment of nationwide violence the mostly young Sinhalese men from one end of the street attacked the Tamils who lived at the other end of the street. This moment then reorganized the social, political and symbolic geography of this little street molding new hierarchies, symbolic spaces and identity. I explore these new formations in my study paying close attention to identity as an “emergent” property of the violence. This aspect of my study is based on the narratives of the men who committed these acts of violence.
The moment of 83 had consequences at the national and international level through the escalating war and different patterns of migration. These patterns of migrations shaped a different geography of ethnic interactions at the local level, especially as the new actors within these migrations encountered the hierarchies, symbolic spaces and boundaries unleashed by the violence of 83. My article focuses on the intense negotiations within the moment of violence and also illustrates the way in which the structural and ideological effects of this specific moment continue to emerge and shape everyday life in an ongoing present to collage new conceptual possibilities of interaction (which includes violence) and new ways of being.
Jessica Falcone
Department of Anthropology
Cornell University
"I Spy…": The (Im)possibilities of Ethical Participant Observation with Religious Fundamentalists
The AAA Code of Ethics sensibly emphasizes that anthropologists must “avoid harm” to informants. However, if one’s informants are militant extremists and any unsympathetic ethnographic narrative could likely “harm” the political projects and public credibility of those informants, does "harm" become more or less ethical?
Since the methodology of anthropology requires that the researcher develop abiding personal relationships with informants, I would argue that an ethnography that evokes staunch antagonism towards one’s informants may both “harm” the researcher’s credibility and violate the discipline’s ethical standards. Is an anthropologist working with a community s/he fully intends to repudiate and politically undermine actually spying? Richard Handler has argued that anthropologists have no responsibility to faithfully represent informants in their own politics in their terms. Yet, what is the ethical cost of hiding our intentions and personal animosity from unsavory informants in order to maintain access? If completely ethical research with fundamentalists is impossible, what then is the ethical cost of eschewing such research altogether?
This paper draws upon the ethical issues that arose during my year of aborted fieldwork with Hindu and Sikh fundamentalist immigrant communities in the Washington D.C. area. I will tackle issues of collusion, representation, responsibilities to the informants, the readership and the discipline. Drawing on Geertz, George Marcus explored the problematics of “rapport” in the participant observation methodology by discussing the “intellectual/cognitive affinity” between researcher and subject despite the lack of “ethical affinity.” In part, it is the collusion inherent in this “intellectual/cognitive affinity” that ethically compromises the anthropologist working with fundamentalists. Are there ethical possibilities left for an anthropologist researching a community whose politics s/he finds inherently reprehensible?
Niveditha Menon
Pre-Doctoral Graduate Student
Department of Sociology and Demography
Pennsylvania State University
Michael P. Johnson
Associate Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and African and African American Studies
Department of Sociology
Pennsylvania State University
A Feminist Study of Domestic Violence in Rural India
The focus of this paper is domestic violence among rural women in India. The question asked by this study is: How do regional, family, and personal characteristics of a woman affect her likelihood of being hit by her husband? By examining contextual factors in this study, I have attempted to incorporate both interpersonal relationships and structural forces into my explanation of husbands’ violence towards their wives. Using logistic regression on the 1999 DHS data for India, I found clear regional and religious variability in the reported rates of domestic violence. As expected, higher levels of socio-economic status and education are powerful forces that dissuade violence against women. Contrary to predicted results, however, being in a nuclear family structure, having higher decision-making powers, and labor force participation increased the risk of women being assaulted by their husbands. These surprising findings, taken together, require an elaboration of the feminist analyses of motivations of domestic violence and suggest that the relationship between power and violence is not a clear-cut one.
Feminist researchers believe that these patriarchal attitudes of the society and their manifestation within the family are one of the primary sources of gender violence. One would expect, then, that more patriarchal contexts should produce a higher incidence of violence against women. In this study however, the joint family system with its rigid male hierarchical system and role expectations seems to be less prone to violence than nuclear families that are relatively less rigid. The explanation may lie in an elaboration of the feminist theory that trends in domestic violence as the patriarchal control tactic of last resort. Violence is used to control women only after all other means of control mechanism have failed.
In the joint family system where systems of control not only take the form of specific and rigid role expectations, but also encompass additional monitoring of behavior by other family members, women’s lives are controlled to quite a degree by the institutional structure of the joint family system. Violence in this case is unnecessary. On the other hand, nuclear families, especially in this age of increased labor force participation of women, have very unclear role expectations and poor systems of structural control. In this case, men could potentially resort to acts of violence to elicit compliance from women.
The broader implications of this explanation are that the functions of patriarchal institutions should be examined more closely. Two important characteristics of domestic violence emerge from the results of this study. First, patriarchy does not necessarily lead to the use of violence. Second, violence is usually used as a means of last resort, after all other control tactics have failed. I believe that it is not enough to realize that a patriarchal family system occasionally endorses acts of violence, or that violence often is not a man ‘out of control’, but a man ‘taking control’. A deeper understanding of the conditions under which violence is used by patriarchal families to control recalcitrant women will enable feminists and researchers to more fully comprehend the ways in which patriarchy controls women’s lives.
Samarpita Mitra
Syracuse University
Violence against Verse: Colonial Censorship and the Rebel Poet of Bengal
The British government’s surveillance of the printed word in colonial South Asia provides a critical perspective into one integral aspect of state-sponsored violence and the relation between that violence and aesthetics. It provides an excellent opportunity for an exploration of the representations and language of violence perpetrated by the Raj and how the experience of that violence played a critical role in the literary world of colonial India.
This paper will explore the strategies deployed by the British Raj to counter a progressively radical and antinomian literary production in colonial South Asia. It demonstrates how press and censorship regulations not only made aesthetics vulnerable to contemporary political pressures but in fact became the very apparatus of state-sponsored violence against the freedom of imaginative expressions. I will examine this encounter between aesthetics and state-sponsored violence in the context of the early publications of one major Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, hailed as the ‘rebel poet’ and also possibly the first poet to be indicted on serious charges of libelous anti-British nationalist literature. Nazrul’s trial and sentence became a highly charged case that rallied important writers and politicians including Rabindranath Tagore, Chittaranjan Das and Suhrawardy on the defendant’s side. Being persecuted for the production of literature deemed ‘seditious’ became an act of exemplary self-sacrifice that was believed to have the potential of changing society and was not unlike the martyrdoms of armed revolutionaries.
The encounter between an increasingly apprehensive Raj and an emergent and assertive Bengali literature of the post-Swadeshi Movement (post-1905) world sets the larger context for Nazrul’s compositions. In a way Agnibina (his first book of collected verse that included the best known of his poems Bidrohi or the Rebel) and Dhumketu (Comet, the first journal initiated and edited by Nazrul) marked the culmination in literature of a radical questioning of colonial rule that had begun with the spontaneous mass agitations following Lord Curzon’s decision to partition Bengal in 1905. The language of sedition and proscription embodied in the various Press Acts and their selective usages by a desperate bureaucracy made the state a participant in the processes of production and dissemination of political and literary orientations in Bengal. Nazrul’s verse and editorials, their reception amongst the reading public, and the colonial state’s intensified response demonstrate how literature became transformed into a domain for effective anti-colonial resistance. His poetry underscored the revolutionary function of literature and further aggravated the already ongoing ideological struggles against the inhumanities of colonialism. His anarchist verses were therefore a response to colonial autocracy. Consequently, the rhetoric and prosody of his verses combining as they did both anarchist and humanist qualities had to be powerful enough to outmaneuver the heavy weight of oppressive official surveillance.
Panel: Methods, Tactics and Postcolonial Historiographies
Teresa Raczek
Department of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
The Impossibility and Possibility of a Subaltern Archaeology
Over the past thirty years Subaltern Studies have grown to exert an immense sway on historical writing. While some disciplines, such as anthropology, have responded to its call, others have passed it by. For example, archaeology in South Asia remains largely uninfluenced by the collective writing of Subaltern Studies. This paper will investigate the many reasons that account for this phenomenon, both theoretical and methodological. While a strictly faithful subaltern archaeology may not be possible, this paper will outline the lessons that archaeology could learn from the subaltern approach. Finally, it will provide concrete examples and explore what archaeology has to offer those who study the subaltern.
The interests of Subaltern Studies are diverse and have shifted over the years. Most commonly known as “history from below,” the school of thought provides a people’s history that portrays the powerless as resistant. The approach offers a postcolonial critique of traditional histories that emphasize stories of the elite and the nation. It has addressed a broad swath of topics including gender, subsistence, and politics. While the impossibility of a Subaltern Studies has been acknowledged, the influence of this school cannot be denied.
Archaeology in South Asia, particularly in India, has bypassed the subaltern school. The major theoretical and methodological trends of the past fifty years—the search for culture histories and the investigation of cultural ecology—provided an inhospitable environment for this approach. Recent ties between archaeology and the nationalist agenda render the possibility of a subaltern archaeology even more difficult. Methodologically, archaeologists must confront the realities of the site, where all material culture— those of elites and subalterns—frequently mix together. Moreover, the nature of archaeological data is such that it frequently hinders subject oriented research.
However, even in light of these obstacles, archaeology could learn much from Subaltern Studies. This paper will explore three possible avenues of research that would benefit from this school of research. First, intact burials such as those from the Chalcolithic and Iron Age frequently include grave goods that accompany the deceased. Because a broad swath of society may be buried at any given site, the opportunity exists to investigate the identities and status of non-elites, as well as statements of resistance in the form of material grave goods. Second, while most investigations of early trade emphasize elite luxury goods, the study of everyday implements like the stone sickles of agricultural laborers provides an alternative view of the past. For example, the movement of stone tools and raw materials indicate the ability of non-elites to form their own economic networks. Finally, archaeologists could incorporate local oral histories about archaeological sites into their investigations.
Archaeology is the study of the material culture of the past and as such it can demonstrate how to use material culture to explore subaltern histories. By incorporating the archaeological point of view into the future of Subaltern Studies, historians and researchers of other disciplines can broaden their respective approaches beyond the text.
Sarah Khokhar
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
The Partition and Punjabi Identity in Pakistan
The Partition of 1947 represents a disruption of the social fabric of Punjab and marks a radical rupture with the colonial past. The Punjab was a region cohabited by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. This Partition resulted in a violent and forced separation of populations. In the process, approximately 5.5 million Hindus and Sikhs were forcibly displaced to East Punjab in India, and about 5.8 million Muslims to West Punjab in what became West Pakistan . Families, relationships and notions of the self were torn asunder as multiple identities conflicted and opposing loyalties surfaced. Punjabiyat or Punjabi identity is seminal to the formation of the nation-state of Pakistan and important to understanding contemporary conflicts and tensions. I will argue that 1947 offers a unique point of entry for studying the following relational processes: the genesis of Punjabiyat as an identity category under colonialism; its fragmentation during partition; and its eventual reconstitution in the post-colonial state.
In this paper I will delineate the multiple ways in which Punjab was being constructed/ imagined in the late 19th century and depict its fluid, open and pluralistic nature. Identities, in the modern sense were being formulated at the time and were later evoked in 1947 in significant ways. If this can be called the making of Punjabi identity, then 1947 was an unmaking, in that allegiances were fixed and congealed around religious categories. I will examine both official and popular conceptualizations of Punjabi identity to garner a richer understanding of the making and unmaking of that identity and its relationship to Pakistani state formation.
Subaltern Studies offers a methodological precedent for studying the popular, and for integrating state and popular constructs. I will trace the political and social history of Punjab and highlight British constructions of Punjab. I will also provide the Pakistani nationalist and historian point of view. I will then juxtapose this “history” with oral histories and “popular accounts”. In using “history” and “memory” I point to the idea that official and unofficial accounts are not closed categories. They are necessarily entangled and “peoples’ stories” flow into the “larger events of the time”. Constructions of identity occur in the domain of the popular and in relation to state ideologies. Tracing contradictions and paradoxes found in each of these narratives, and the competing claims each one makes regarding Punjabi identity is key to understanding the relationship between “Punjabiyat” and the nation-building project of Pakistan.
Yuthika Sharma
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Reconstructing the ‘Self: The landscape of (post) colonial monument parks in Delhi
In the years following independence, the quest for an identity of Indian design posed a veritable challenge to designers. The challenge was conspicuous in the landscape of the capital city of New Delhi, whose physical and governmental infrastructure had evolved from a colonial precedent. The resuscitation of British precedents in the construction of a nationalist rhetoric through landscape design in Delhi was paradoxical. The diversity of the mid-twentieth century landscape of Delhi was woven into the city’s fabric making a reversal to ‘tradition’ a dilemma in itself. To the present day, the issue of an obliterated and diverse historical past reappears as a central challenge in landscape design in postcolonial Delhi. The paper will revaluate Delhi’s parks in an attempt to examine the mechanisms by which park landscapes in Imperial Delhi (1858-1947) were designed and established and became instrumental in constructing a culture of landscape design in postcolonial Delhi. My paper will illustrate the ongoing research through the case study of Lodi Gardens, constructed during the British occupation of Delhi. The historical and architectural frameworks of the research will assess the contribution of British assessment of Indian antiquity and monuments in relation to the Mughal and Islamic monuments enclosed within Delhi’s colonial parks. Finally, I will enunciate the debates around remodeling or restoration of these parks through issues of landscape heritage and conservation of their monuments. In conclusion, the ramifications of identity production through built culture within a fast decolonizing climate of globalization will be discussed.
Rupali Gupte
Department of Architecture
Cornell University
Tactical City, Tenali Rama and Other Stories of Mumbai's Urbanism
The Thesis
‘TACTICAL CITY, TENALI RAMA AND OTHER STORIES OF MUMBAI’S URBANISM’, is an imagined/fictitious history of Mumbai; a multimedia manifesto/archive of urban practices in the city of Mumbai. The thesis sees the city as a set of TACTICS and further formulates a manifesto of urban practice for architects and planners as one that requires to be TACTICAL/OPPORTUNISTIC.
The Context
The post 90s urban landscapes of developing economies experienced an immense pressure to dismantle and reorganize conventional control mechanisms in order to make way for something called ‘economic growth’, thereby causing tremendous reconfigurations in resource managing institutions . These moves were perhaps little different from the earlier colonizing attempts at siphoning resources. Urban practices – architectural and planning, always aligned themselves with these initiatives – either through the interests of the dominant elite of through a blind inheritance of the nuts and bolts of the practices that these initiatives generated.
Tactical City
In the light of the above observations on the context, the contention of the thesis is that conditions in most third world cities have gone beyond the means of any rational positivist planning especially one that believes in an incrementalist development process. One needs new EYES to SEE the present conditions and new TOOLS to OPERATE and perhaps a new IMAGINATION to intervene in these contexts. TACTICAL CITY is such an IMAGINATION.
Tactical City adopts a position of opportunistic realignment with those left behind by the dominant imagination. Tactical City is an IMAGINED city made of a set of TACTICS of different interests that manifest themselves in different forms in the city; an imagination that creatively goes against the grain of the dominant imagination.
Though the contention is that such a position is valid for most third world contexts, the case taken up here is one that I understand the best, the City of Mumbai.
Tactical City derives it name from Michel De Certeau’s thesis of tactics vs. strategies: where he says that strategies are the tools of the dominant elite while TACTICS work in the shadow of strategies and are ‘an art of the weak’ , which form mute processes that organize socio economic order. Tactical City acknowledges these processes albeit mute, as ones that have a creative potential in the way they negotiate the city, work against the grain of dominant discourse and come closest in their attempts at bridging the gap between the dominant imagination and the aspirations of the city.
Tactical City is a means of bringing these mute processes to mainstream discourse.
The idea of a fictitious history perhaps has several points of origin. The first is embedded in the history of the discipline of architectural/planning theory itself, in its ‘tradition of proposing alternative pasts and futures for the discipline and especially for the city’ The second point of origin is in Appudarai’s formulations on imagination where he says, ‘Imagination today is the staging ground for action and not only for escape. Imagination, especially when collective can become the fuel for action’.
Methods and devices
Tactical City, as a fictitious History of Mumbai’s urbanism, uses many devices, literary and visual – The protagonist of the story is the popular south Indian folkloric figure Tenali Rama. The choice of Tenali Rama is primarily because he is known as a simple, everyday character who transforms the status quo with his tactics.
The stories that follow do two things: one they help build the nuances of the cultural context of Mumbai and two, they make way for a tactical intervention, which could be a design intervention or an analytical one.
Mumbai here is analyzed as three cities on the basis of the shifts in its political and economic structure (based on Kosambi 1986, Design Cell, 2001): the colonial city, the socialist city, the global city. Tactical City weaves through this larger structure.
Through out the narrative relevant cultural and urban theorists immerge anachronistically as characters in the city. This is specifically to drive home the fact that Tactical City claims to be a theoretical position, a stance for operating in the contemporary context – and a way of thinking about cities.
If nothing else this is meant to be a bed time story for architects and urbanists.
Form and structure
In its final manifestation the research takes the form of a mixed media novel with images, stories and movies. The structure of the novel is tripartite. One part presents the context; the history of Mumbai as it shifts through political and economic structures and their consequences on urbanism, the second distorts this rendition of history with the infiltration/imagination of various tactical interventions in the city and the third employs the device of having relevant cultural and urban theorists in the narrative as markers/props of suggesting/troubling certain ways of thinking about the urban.
Formulations on practice
I conclude by summarizing the implications of Tactical City on contemporary practice. To recapitulate, Tactical City is a stance, a manifesto of sorts for practice in a third world context. With this in mind, it does three things: one: it attempts to realign with those left behind by the dominant imagination; two: it learns from the Tactics that the city engages in to work against the grain of the dominant imagination and three: it works with the methods, practices and tools of the disciplines of architecture and planning, tactically/ deceitfully tweaking them to generate a practice that refuses to become the hand maiden of the dominant imagination.
Maya Dodd
Modern Thought and Literature
Stanford University
Political Mediations: "Trying" Technologies of Witness
The Emergency of 1975-77 can be seen as an aberrational moment in the history of Indian democracy. However, this period presaged several repercussions for Indian notions of the freedom of the expression. By drawing from episodes reasoning state censorship through legal battles fought over the freedom of expression in the realm of politics, I will outline implications for the right to information in a context of state secrecy. By so doing, I hope to bring up discussions of historical and literary methodology for this period.
By identifying key debates around this issue in the wake of the Emergency, I hope to set out the parallel tracks of "public trial" in the media and court cases which demand evidence in a certain form. In a sense both forms attempt a narration of the nation during times of prohibition of expression. This will set out the concept of the witnessing of political events-literally in the court-room (which requires a form of information as evidence) and also the witnessing of the citizen (be it as journalist or novelist). By this, I hope to display the continuities between old and new media by establishing a contiguous history of what constituted "public interest" from 1975-2001.
Panel: Confronting the State: Negotiation Identity, Agency and History
Namita Datta
Department of City and Regional Planning
Cornell University
Gender and Property Rights in Urban Informal Settlements in Chandigarh, India
A large proportion of the urban population in India, as in many other developing countries, lives in informal settlements. Informal settlements come up unauthorizedly on vacant public land in violation of the city’s Master Plan and building regulations. Providing the only possible access to affordable housing for the poor, informal settlements often lack basic services like water and sewage.
While large metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai have a long history of informal settlements, newer urban centers and smaller cities too are now witnessing rapid urbanization and “informalization”. Chandigarh or the ‘City Beautiful’ offers an extremely interesting example of a modern, planned, new city that is now struggling with mushrooming informal settlements.
The single, almost overriding concern among urban policy-makers of Chandigarh was that after an informal settlement was rehabilitated and the poor squatters were allotted houses or sites with all essential civic services by the government, the allottees would often sell off the new house/site for quick profit, and then go looking for alternative vacant public land to squat again, thus perpetuating a spiral of informal settlements in the city. How can we prevent the poor from selling off the government-allotted land/ house, was the question uppermost on the policy agenda. (1)
One possible solution to the above problem, according to the Government of India’s recent and well-publicized National Slum Policy, was joint titling. Instead of allotting the house during rehabilitation of an informal settlement in the name of the husband only, the government would now grant joint titles in the name of both husband and wife. The assumption of the joint titling initiative was that women being more attached to the home would help prevent sale of the allotted house/site.
While exploring the connection between joint titles and sales in informal settlements is an obvious research question, a related, although unintended effect of joint property rights could be a change in gender relations. Feminist scholars like Bina Agarwal and Deere and Leon have written extensively about the importance of property rights as means of womens empowerment. However, most feminist research on gender and property rights has been centered on rural agricultural land. The critical role that a houseplays in the lives of poor urban women shows that urban property rights is an important though neglected research area. This paper serves to fill that gap. By granting property titles jointly to husband and wife, instead of just the husband, does the government affect gender relations among the poor in any way? Does it enhance womens bargaining power? Do men feel threatened? Are urban housing property rights different from rural land rights as a source of empowerment for women? I propose to address the above questions in my paper presentation.
Since joint titling is a recent initiative, there is only one settlement in Chandigarh where joint titles were granted in 2000. Now, after 3 years of having property rights, the beginnings of an awakening among women in this settlement are obvious. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, I have focussed on 3 settlements of Chandigarh. One settlement is regularized with joint titles, one has been regularized with individual titles to only men, and the third has not been regularized. Instead of interviewing only women, I have included mens responses to understand gender relations. My fieldwork includes about 500 structured interviews, 50 unstructured interviews and about 15 Focus Group Discussions.
(1) While the government very clearly makes sale of allotted sites illegal, sales take place nevertheless, without ever appearing in government records.
Roger Begrich
Department of Anthropology
Johns Hopkins University
Don't Drink and Tribe. Conspiracy and Stigma in Jharkhand
A frequent topic of conversations with adivasis in Jharkhand is that of a large scale conspiracy that aims at annihilating the indigenous population. Among the weapons used by the dikus (outsiders, i.e., settlers from other parts of India, as well as the state in its multifarious manifestations), the story goes, is alcohol.
Drinking is one of the markers of tribal identity in the Indian social imaginary. The stigma of the drunkard defines not only much of the popular opinions on adivasis. The relationship between the administrative apparatus or developmental strategies of the state (and increasingly: corporate capital) is marked by the same prejudiced positions. And this very stigma has also been internalized: alcohol is the 'original sin of the adivasi', as one of my informants put it. As my paper will show, the relationship that adivasis have to drinking is one marked by ambiguities and stark contradictions. The alcohol problematic does not only exemplify their suffering, it is also a crucial component of their religious tradition, and closely tied in with what it means to be adivasi.
Among the reasons why theories about a conspiracy against adivasis might seem plausible is that tribal movements were at the core of all popular uprisings against authorities (state or otherwise) in India during the past few centuries. Furthermore, as a considerable part of India's mineral resources are concentrated within the newly created state of Jharkhand, there is vested interest of authorities and corporate capital to obtain much of the land that local cultivators are reluctant to let go.
Building on ethnographic illustrations, my paper will use conspiracy theories as a site at which to reflect on the relationships between indigenous communities and sovereignty. Conspiracy theories are interesting for my project not because they are true or false, but because, as over-determinations of the commonsensical, they are indicators for the paranoid subjectivities cultivated by the subjects themselves, as well as by the circumstances under which they live.
Sovereignty is relevant for my work because it is the precondition for indigeneity – and it is as indigenous, or tribal communities that resistance movements articulate their demands. The sovereign claim over the territories and lives of communities that predated the state which assumes sovereignty is what creates the category of indigenous peoples. It is such a situational (and clearly political) definition of indigeneity that is relevant here (and in the context of an alliance of local movements in Jharkhand with international indigenous activism) much rather than histories of settlement or difference.
My paper will use reflections on the conspiracy against the adivasis, as well as ethnographic detail about the alcohol problematic, to illustrate the biopolitical relationship between state and tribal communities in India.
Karthika Sasikumar
Department of Government
Cornell University
Structure and agency in the ‘Coalition of the willing’: India and the evolving international counter-terrorism regime
As international efforts to build a counter-terrorist regime acquired a new urgency after 9/11, Indian diplomats presented several initiatives at international forums. At the same time, India thrust itself forward as a new strategic partner of the US. A common interest in combating terrorism was added to the list of reasons why India and the US were, in the words of the Indian Prime Minister, ‘natural allies’. The conflict in Iraq forced India into a balancing act between multilateral regime-building and membership in the ‘coalition of the willing’.
Studying the evolving Indian position on international efforts against terrorism provides us with important insights into structure-agency relations in world politics. This paper argues that Indian policy-makers are both constrained by the international power structure, and actively engaged in transforming it using discursive power.
Simply stated, the structural argument posits that the international power structure presents opportunities to decision-makers, who choose among them based on a cost-benefit comparison of costs and benefits. The statist strand of Realism explains policies in terms of security needs; therefore, Indian policy is aimed at bringing international efforts to bear on terrorist activity within its borders. However, neither argument helps us understand the nature of the role that India plays in the ‘coalition of the willing’. Moreover, these approaches do not capture the many ways in which India’s activities transform the structure of international interaction and indirectly constrain the US and other countries.
A focus on structure-agency interaction shows us that while structure can constrain actors’ choices, these actors can also shape the structure itself. While some liberal institutionalist arguments have dealt with the use of international agreements to ‘bind’ powerful states, similar effects can be achieved in a non-institutionalized situation where material benefits are uncertain. India’s effort uses the intangible power of international norms invoked against terrorism, in order to serve its own national interest.
This paper will identify the normative mechanisms and resources through which India’s agency operates. Some of these resources are: India’s democratic record, the specter of Islamic fundamentalism, India’s reputation for responsible behavior in the international sphere (including its nuclear status), and its support of international organizations.
Anoop Mirpuri
Department of English
University of Washington
A Postcolonial Impasse? Subaltern Studies and the Critique of Colonial Discourse
Developments in Subaltern Studies have aroused criticism about the “cultural” turn the project is often seen to have taken. What started as historiographical explorations of peasant autonomy in colonial South Asia soon began to incorporate methodological critiques of the dominance of European thought in writing third world histories. Spivak’s attention to the problems of applying “universal” concepts of modernity to South Asian history—concepts developed in ignorance of cultures outside Europe—helped multiply the directions Subaltern Studies would eventually take. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe has emerged among these various critiques of Eurocentric discourse to analyze the impact of postcolonial thought on the discipline of history. Well before this work appeared, however, Chakrabarty’s project galvanized a critical debate between him and Sumit Sarkar that hinges on the influence of poststructuralism on Subaltern Studies. For Sarkar, this influence maintains the nationalist colonial/anti-colonial binary, which obscures the value of Marxism in movements for social justice within India. By engendering cultural relativism, according to Sarkar, the critique of Enlightenment rationalism implicitly supports the quest of the BJP to control history writing in accordance with its political will. My paper will address this critique by asking whether it is possible to create an effective resistance to current forms of state authority while also recognizing the inadequacy of applying Western concepts of political modernity to India.
The difficulty that emerges in the debate is how to reconcile the need for writing socially responsible Indian histories with the importance of destabilizing the centrality of European thought. This paper will be a defense of Chakrabarty’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism against claims of political irresponsibility, while seriously dialoging with Sarkar’s concerns about the ways this critique can accommodate the ascendancy of Hindutva ideology. My defense will hinge on the importance of cultural and historical discourse in constructing the very ideologies that finance and resist state authority, a concept which Sarkar de-emphasizes. A defense such as this is crucial in validating the postcolonial project envisioned by Spivak and Said, while addressing its limits and contradictions. It is also vital in thinking through the concerns in advancing South Asian historiography beyond critiques of colonial discourse, while wrenching the production of history away from sites of power.
Panel: History, Culture, and Power in the Construction of Globalization
Matthew A. Cook
Anthropology Department
Columbia University
Localizing the Global: British Imperialism and the Annexation of Sindh
The conquest of Sindh is an important and often missed chapter in one of the most successful global campaigns of domination—the British Empire. The British gained ground in Sindh through cultural sleights of hand (not absence of mind) and the initiation of skirmishes on Indian soil against other imperial European states. British actions in Sindh are always linked to an aggressive and global anti-Russian policy. (1) Such historiography captures texture that surrounds British actions in Sindh, yet often neglects localized textures—it robs the complex actions of the colonized in Sindh from the region’s history. Against the backdrop of the imperial great game, the fabric of colonial power in Sindh—with its own incongruent players and circumstances—is lost to context’s conceit. (2)
Historians often explain the expansion of the British Empire in Sindh—and across much of the world—by emphasizing economic factors. They highlight links between a British military presence and Indian merchants. They focus on the role of local moneyed groups and indigenous credit institutions to argue that the British Empire provided property security and types of institutional stability that South Asian states were incapable of guaranteeing. (3) As a result, merchants abandoned indigenous states and shifted their support in favor of British sovereignty. Such studies, which dominate the historiography of Sindh, emphasize how the British transformed Indian commercial classes into the “servile tools of English despotism.” (4)
This paper looks beyond the emphasis on the importance of money in the global expansion of the British Empire. It explores why economic rationality is not the only scheme for explaining merchants’ support for colonialism. I focus on the annexation of Sindh to illustrate how merchants’ support for the British Empire appears “rational” if explained from within perceived local bodies of shared dispositions. I argue that such local rationalities give important insights into larger processes, like the establishment of global empires. My emphasis on the local is also aimed at rethreading indigenous voices into the contexture of the history of British colonialism in Sindh.
(1) Robert Huttenback, British Relations with Sind, 1799-1843 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); William Napier, The History of General Sir Charles Napier’s Conquest of Scinde (Karachi: Oxford University Press2001 [1857]); Adrian Duarte, A History of British Relations with Sind, 1613-1843 (Karachi: National Book Foundation, 1976); Kala Thairani, British Political Missions to Sind (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1973).
(2) Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 14.
(3) Sanjay Subramanian, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5.
(4) Michael H. Fisher, ed., The Politics of The British Annexation of India, 1757-1857 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 30.
Angela C. Rudert
Asian Studies Department
Cornell University
The Bochasanwasi Shree Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS): A Case study of Globalization and Religion
This paper looks at theoretical issues of religion and globalization through a case study of the South Asian diasporic religious movement, the Bochasanwasi Shree Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), which has great representation in the United States. For over a decade, religious studies scholars have vigorously researched religious diversity in the United States and religions of India in diaspora, but now, religious studies needs to address questions of globalization and religion, which have thus far been dominated by the sociology of religion. Swaminarayan Hinduism, along with other transnational diasporic religious identities, inhabits a space in-between that of homogenizing forms of religion, such as those with global missionary movements, and that of reactionary forms of religion seeking to assert “localized” identity.
The BAPS sanstha represents a localized ethno-religious Gujarati Hindu tradition, which because of the needs of its diaspora, strives to maintain identity, but nonetheless has globalized and entered into a global arena of new socio-religious movements.
The sect has embraced the processes of globalization with efficient use of mass communications, a clearly defined doctrine and mission, key transformations in the training programs for sadhus, centralized authority and organizational efficiency. Most importantly, BAPS has positioned itself to participate fully in transnational civil society and to enter the public sphere of charitable social movements in its role as global caregiver.