[Urbanstudy] City One Conference

[Ravi Kumar]

Dear Friends,

I had sent this observation more than a week ago as well but perhaps due to some error it could not be posted. Here is another attempt.

I am extremely sorry for being late in submitting my observation on the City One Conference. It could not be done because of certain compulsions. This might appear lengthy but believe me I wanted to write more. It is my bad habit as I can not abridge my thoughts. Please bear with me.

The session on Calcutta provided a variety, dealt with a plethora of issues. Swati Chattopadhayay talked about re-encoding of space, creation of new imaginative spaces and gradual emergence of counter- cultural spaces. Calcutta experienced transformative epochs of being a city characterized by "profane" as well as "sacred" movements. She dwelt in detail how these transformations took place as part of a process. This had been evident from the explanations of issues such as violence as a symbol of nationalism, access to architecture, usurpation of physical spaces and changing power dynamics as well as a site of cultural protest etc. The presentation very well mixed the simultaneous revolts taking place at the level of altering the 'social values' and ethics and that against the British imperialism. This procesual framework seems to me as a significant hallmark of her presentation. However, while dealing with these issues the range of examples she employed were magnificent from political, literary to that of art. But, perhaps due to expanse of such examples, various aspects were left out. The play of colors in the painting of Bharat Mata and its significance had been one such aspect. Beneath the processes that Swati sought to unravel, she somewhere confined herself to the principles of localization where the response of various social sections of the city failed to get the prominence that it deserved.

Keya Dasgupta made a startling presentation of the contemporary Calcutta shattering the myth of an equal development opportunity as well as the apparent and much hyped politics of the masses. She traced how the planning of the city evolved and in the process of the wider socio-economic scenario refugee colonies after partition were followed by establishment of squatter settlements in light of migration.  In these settlements lived the marginalized, who are faced with displacement. She dealt in detail how the policies of the present government under the Operation Sunshine, ADB funded projects, ECADP program led to mass scale eviction and displacement of the poor. Multiplexes are being constructed and Calcutta is being beautified. She tried to trace the wider politics of investment and the connivance of state government with the big MNCs. In this whole process of re-designing space what is blatant is the interplay of a power structure and establishment of monopoly of elite on the city space. Once evicted out of the city and the subsequent efforts to, implicitly, redefine the culture will have much larger ramifications, which was not touched by the otherwise brilliant description of the current scenario of altering spaces in Calcutta city.

Anjan Ghosh in his presentation on Durga Puja's in the city and the changing discourse concerning it presented an overview of the reactions generated by the Puja with specific reference to the public-private dichotomization. He made references to how the newspapers have been critical of over-indulgence in Puja. It had also been highlighted as an issue of Civic Awareness by Telegraph, which also termed it unsecular. The city comes to a standstill and the work-culture becomes an issue. It somewhere indicated the interest of the corporate in evolving a critique of Puja on these grounds because of the man hours lost. This year the issue had not been over-indulgence and work-culture but the transgression of public space and the unresponsive governance. Quite interestingly, as well as ironically, the same corporates who are hurt by the man hours lost are also interested in commercializing the Puja through institution of prizes and sponsoring of statues.

The whole debate emanates from the hindrance posed by the pandals on roads and the choked traffic movement in Calcutta. However, this also brings to fore the conflicting view of 'transgression', which is not seen as such by the local organizers whereas certain sections of people view it as transgression. The issue that is important for me in this context is the identification of the 'mass', if there is any, which stands on two opposing sides. Once this can be recognized the whole debate on hitherto unheard or less spoken dichotomies of 'secular-unsecular', 'private as public', limits and characters of what is 'public' etc., can be seen in more coherent terms and can be related to the people-private-public-religion-space debate in a clearer manner. However, I must admit that this whole debate needs to be taken up more seriously and attempts are being made as by Anjan's paper. There are wider issues of redefinition of spaces in religious context, intertwined with the religion as private or public debate, as well as the private capital-'religion' interface. What also remains to be explained is the desire of private capital to control such occasions - sponsor them for it is an opportunity for publicity but also restrain and delimit its space and function because it hampers their corporatist notions such as that of 'efficiency' and 'productivity'. And unless they are tackled it will be extremely difficult to explain the phenomenon of Durga Puja and its relationship with the masses, which we term as 'public'.

Tapati Guhathakurta's paper traced the linearity of the aesthetics and the emergence of new styles taken from the local popular history (the one derived from the Wahabi-Farazi Movement era) or the cultural heritage of the 'subaltern'. Such popularization of hitherto ignored art forms or evolutions of styles as derivatives of popular folk/village culture are located in a milieu wherein the college students as well as designers, film set designers are actively participating. This is also a challenge posed to the established centres of art/aesthetics and in this process of redefinition emerges a layered world of artists and intellectuals. Good amount of field work, as in the case of Durga Puja depicting the Madhubani painting, is also being put in achieve authenticity. In the process of the conflicting styles emerges a variety of artists depicting different styles, trying to convey different messages through symbols. In this popular art space who is the artist, the designers or the artisans.

She concludes that the symbols being used are not communal and in certain cases are contributing to the secularization process. In fact, quite profoundly she also mentioned that the Calcutta Puja has not experienced the same kind of communalization as the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Bombay. New spaces are definitely being carved in the process but awhat is also important in this context is to look at more closely at the ends to which these are put or whether the new spaces are being monopolized by a certain section. It becomes more interesting to look at in the context of the dichotomies presented by Anjan Ghosh's presentation. Secondly, I have problem with simplification of the whole notion of 'secularism' and 'communalism', working within the ambit of religion, with religious parameters to judge communal vs. secular debate, and hence, the profundity of judgments passed on the issue of Durga Puja appears problematic. Though Tapati Guhathakurta mentioned that the work in this direction has begun quite recently and a lot more has to be done it will be interesting to look at the factors that propel changes in the popular art space.

Jan Breman's presentation on Gujarat was fantastic, as expected. He traced his over thirty years of association with the state. He explained his theory of reverse migration and how he, in these thirty years, moved along with the local people to cities and then from cities back to the villages. He asserted that the his findings have falsified the notion that the India was following the same development trajectory as that of Atlantic nations, i.e., going to the city meant betterment of skills and then resulted in movement higher up the ladder of employment. He very lucidly demonstrated how not only cultural nationalism but the "political economy" of the city needs to be looked at to understand the communal violence that rocked the state of Gujarat. The economic impoverishment of the masses, as the textile mills were being closed down, lost dignity of the working masses who had to stand in the daily labor bazaars, the political history of the state (BJP speaking the same language Sardar Patel and the present as well as past role of Congress being also communal), and communalization of the civic institutions contributed to the recent 'genocide' in Gujarat. His presentation made detailed presentation of how the union activities of Congress/Gandhi in form of the Mazdoor Mahajan Sangh itself had communal intonations. In the cultural sphere, use of Hindu gods and goddesses to promote the sale of commodities and the further popularization of symbols of one religion as the representative of whole Gujarat among other things further created a psyche that that facilitated the recent incidences. Gradual ghettoization of Ahmedabad took place and once ghettoization takes place it is difficult to go back to civil society. His stress was on to need to understand the riots in a historical perspective. Breman concluded that there is no feeling of remorse in Gujarat over what happened and that the case of Gujarat can not be called specific as it can happen anywhere eels in India. Left is non-existent there as it was wiped out by Congress during Independence Movement. And the 'other' is invisible in the day to day life now. Public space is needed to bring back the civil institutions but how will one deal with the contradiction that this public space itself is highly privatized. However, it would have been extremely interesting if he could have elaborated more on why any resistance to such violence was not seen in the state despite it being boastful of innumerable successful mobilizations by NGOs etc. And secondly, he did not dwell much on how the public space can be created to counter such designs.

The panel discussion on Karachi was interesting to me because I was getting to hear something first hand. It was informative as far as the presentation of Hasan Zaidi was concerned but he was could not provide clear explanations for the absence of city from the Pakistani cinema, except for that it deals with a 'feudal background' and is financed heavily by the Gujjars. Nasreen's presentation was a brilliant piece of literature. It dealt with a variety of situations locate through personal experiences - conservative society, language riots, mohajir issue, patriarchal Pathan culture, elite culture devoid of social concerns, corruption, migration etc. But there was hardly any explanation of why this has happened. In fact, even her presentation smelt of elitist concerns when she argued the case for good English schools bringing in focus the whole question of education-language-community-culture-society interface - the people's stock of knowledge versus the prescribed knowledge. Secondly, the contradiction that it presented to their (the panel's) notion of feudalism coexisting with elite, individualist culture could not be explained by the presentation. Zeenat continued this unexplained journey and presented an incomplete picture of the problems faced by the Kachhi Abaadi people in Karachi. I was quite confused by the presentations on the one hand because they were not providing a complete picture of even a fragment of the city and secondly, it was not substantiating its claims.

I was disappointed by the presentation on social movements because my topic for stipendship is itself Urban Social Movements and I got no answer from there, not even to my question and which constitutes the concern of my research. However, it was informative as it provided me with a lot of information about what NGOs are doing and also acquainted me about the contradictions as was evident in Dunnu Roy versus Sheila Patel presentation.

Out of the other presentations which were extremely interesting and I wanted to mention them but will become too lengthy were the one by Partha Chatterjee - the only one which presented a model, though some might critique it for being schematic sometimes - Radhika Subramanian, which sounded to me like a renewal of the romanticism versus positivism debate, and the one by Nayanjot Lahiri. The conference offered a variety as far as the themes and ideas are concerned. However, I feel that the models that are constructed and the studies that are undertaken focus more on big cities despite the fact that the variety that we have in India in terms of linearity of progress can provide us an opportunity to understand many issues concerning spaces - the shrinking as well as creation of new options. And it will be reality fascinating if sarai can do this. In fact, this has been a tragedy of approaches in India that we fight for issue only when they acquire a magnitude and not when they are in smaller proportion and can be tackled more easily. It is my appeal if the simultaneous interventions and studies can be undertaken in even smaller cities.

Thanks for providing an opportunity to be part of such an assembly.

Ravi

 

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