Anneli Xie
Prof. Nikhil Rao
HIST 276: The City in Modern South Asia
2019/02/20
Prof. Nikhil Rao
HIST 276: The City in Modern South Asia
2019/02/20
The Politics of Power: Conceptualizing and Appropriating Public Spaces in India
Detangling
the idea of “the public” in modern India is an attempt to detangle how the
intersection between pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial thoughts and
values have established themselves within Indian cities. Visible and encoded
into the built environment of urban Indian cityscapes, these different modes of
thought – all conflicting – provide indication that public spaces and
spatial relations are a historically determined product of these. From the
indigenous public spaces, such as narrow and irregular streets and crowded
bazaars, to the big open spaces built exclusively for the British under
colonial rule, such as the maidan and
other parks and gardens, (Kaviraj 1997, 87) to the ‘plebianization’ of streets and parks in the post-colonial period,
public spaces represent sites of political power, identity, and belief. Still
today, as cities in India have come to undergo rapid urbanization following the
rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, public spaces have come to privilege the
claims of the elite and middle-classes, restricting the access of the urban
poor. (Chatterjee 2003, 170-186) Studying notions of the public and public space is thus important because it
helps us understand public spaces as sites of conflicts over claims to control
and over rights of occupation, revealing negotiations that reflect the politics
of power in the city.
Pre-colonial and early colonial organization in India referred public spaces, conceptualized as being on the “outside,” to the commons; and yet, while being accessible to most, (Glover 2007, 3) these spaces did not belong to anyone. Instead, streets and open spaces, such as bazaars and mohallas, were unregulated spaces of spontaneous participation and interaction within which people acted in accordance to appropriateness and title, as concluded by Sudipta Kaviraj in his 1997 essay “Filth and the Public Sphere,” and exemplified in Rohinton Mistry’s short story “Auspicious Occasion.” In his essay, Kaviraj argues that the Indian relationship between the outside streets and the home was not understood so much as a physical distinction, but rather a conceptual one, in which “the outside” was conceptualized as a space lacking personal association, and therefore also lacking association with obligations. Continuing this thought, Kaviraj argues that what was missing in India was “the notion of universality of access, the idea that an activity is open to all, irrespective of their social attributes,”which happened to be the opposite of the perception of the public in a Western context: to provide equal access and individual rights through the idea of attributelessness. (Kaviraj 1997, 90) Because of this idea of universality and commonness amongst individuals, Kaviraj argues that an urban individual in the Western context could lay claim to public spaces, giving the Western city a certain level of civil society, which in India, on the other hand, was lacking. There, the city functioned very differently, with no individual obligations towards public land, with public land without designated use, and with people only laying claim to the areas in which it was appropriate for them to act. In this way, the Indian perception of the public became a confrontation between modes of conceptualizing personhood in space, with a strict notion of having a set role in society by the virtue of birth determining the appropriateness of your actions within public spaces in the city, and within society as a whole. As exemplified by Kaviraj, “a puja can be undertaken properly only by a Brahmin [...], just as the function of building a bench can be performed by a carpenter, shaving by a barber—a doctrine of adhikari-bheda [...].” (Kaviraj 1997, 101) Similarly, this doctrine of appropriateness is furthered in Mistry’s short story, in which one of the main characters, a middle-class Parsi man, thinks that it is appropriate for him to cut the bus line because he is of higher status than the others, and then proceeds to ignore both the yelling conductor and paying his bus fare due to the same reason. (Mistry 1987, 16) Opposing this idea of appropriateness with the idea of universality earlier discussed, it is not difficult to imagine that the arrival of Western thought during the colonial period brought about significant changes to public spaces in India by initiating a transformation within the perception of public space through British sovereignty and its resulting formations.
Britain brought with them a greater regulation of public areas, as well as a shift in the perception and use of public spaces in the urban cityscapes. Firstly, Britain introduced greater governmental control and showcased state power against “spontaneous ‘indiscipline’” by implementing things such as street signs to regulate everyday behavior, such as promoting hygiene and enforcing traffic regulations. These signs were, up until the 1960s, all written in English – a non-native language – displaying the power imbalance between the colonial rule and the native population in a public domain which the natives had to obey, but did not fully understand. (Kaviraj 1997, 85) This was further reinforced in the divide between British and indigenous land, often separated by big open spaces, and in the public spaces that were built within the British quarters. (Brush 1962, 60-61) These public spaces, although deemed “public,” were exclusive and had very restricted access to the indigenous population, telling a distinct narrative of who had the right to access public land and to which function it had been designed to serve. In his essay “Construing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab,” William J. Glover manifests that “these rules through new urban institutions the colonial government created both a concept and a corporeal substance – ‘public space’ –that had no prior history in the Indian city,” suggesting a conflict further complicating the way in which the indigenous population conceptualized the relationship between personhood and space; the inside and outside, and the private and the public. (Glover 2007, 3)
Kaviraj notes that the “social group that was most strongly attracted to the European model of the public sphere was the middle-class educated elite,” whom no longer deemed the public as being a disfavored “outside.” (Kaviraj 1997, 92) During the latter years of colonial rule and the onset of independence, the upper classes in Indian cities replaced the British to become patrons, government officials, and municipal representatives. With their recent power, they exercised their dominance over the city through bourgeois imaginaries of public spaces, appropriating the city to fit their own needs. As a result, cities came to hide a level of stratification within their societies, with neighborhoods – although mixed in class – hiding crowded slums by “a street front lined by large mansions or elegant middle-class houses,” and the urban poor being tied to serve the elites in patron-client relationships. (Chatterjee 2003, 171-172) In this way, cities in India continued to act with a caste-like associated life and with the idea of the appropriate and exclusive rather than the attributeless and universal.
It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that this changed, under an extended period of time within which cities became “plebianized” and organized into political societies. ]Simultaneously as a deepening within the democratic process occurred, causing non-elites to be more persistent in their claim to the public, India experienced a “huge increase in the population of the big cities, caused mainly by migrations from the countryside, creat[ing] explosive social conditions.” (Chatterjee 2003, 175) The combination of the two led, for instance, to refugees squatting in parks or close to railroads, as well as the construction of temporary shacks for shopkeepers along the streets. These soon came to establish themselves as a part of the neighborhoods, causing a loss of the “solidly middle-class character” (Kaviraj 1997, 105) of public spaces by their appropriation of the urban poor. The deepening of democratic practice gave lower classes confidence to make moral claims to public spaces that had previously not been appropriate for them to exist fully within.
Following the neoliberal rise of India in the 1990s, cities in India are gearing towards becoming part of the global economy and attracting foreign investment. As a result, much like the process of gentrification in the United States, there has been a big effort to “clean up” Indian cities by improving infrastructure and technology to make them luxurious and commercial, evicting squatters and encroachers who are not ‘useful’ for the new economy, and transforming public spaces back to their “solidly middle-class character.” (Kaviraj 1997, 186)
Through looking at how the idea of the public and the use of public spaces have varied in India through history, it becomes clear that both the appropriation and conceptualization of public land reflect the politics of power in the city. As we look towards India’s future, gearing towards the global economy’s market principles, we ought to seek for a mixed-use public space, acknowledging the interests of multiple groups within the city – and fitting it to accommodate all.
Brush, John E. “The Morphology of Indian Cities.” In India’s Urban Future, edited by Roy Turner, 57-70. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962.
Chatterjee, Partha. “Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?” In body.city – sitting contemporary culture in India, edited by Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel, 170-86. Berlin: The House of World Cultures, Delhi: Tulika Books, 2003.
Glover, William J. “Construing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab.” The Journal of Punjab Studies 15, no. 1 (2007): 1-14.
Kaviraj, Sudipta.”Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices About Space in Calcutta.” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 83-113.
Mistry, Rohinton. “Auspicious Occasion.” In Tales From Firozsha Baag. 1-14. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1987.
Pre-colonial and early colonial organization in India referred public spaces, conceptualized as being on the “outside,” to the commons; and yet, while being accessible to most, (Glover 2007, 3) these spaces did not belong to anyone. Instead, streets and open spaces, such as bazaars and mohallas, were unregulated spaces of spontaneous participation and interaction within which people acted in accordance to appropriateness and title, as concluded by Sudipta Kaviraj in his 1997 essay “Filth and the Public Sphere,” and exemplified in Rohinton Mistry’s short story “Auspicious Occasion.” In his essay, Kaviraj argues that the Indian relationship between the outside streets and the home was not understood so much as a physical distinction, but rather a conceptual one, in which “the outside” was conceptualized as a space lacking personal association, and therefore also lacking association with obligations. Continuing this thought, Kaviraj argues that what was missing in India was “the notion of universality of access, the idea that an activity is open to all, irrespective of their social attributes,”which happened to be the opposite of the perception of the public in a Western context: to provide equal access and individual rights through the idea of attributelessness. (Kaviraj 1997, 90) Because of this idea of universality and commonness amongst individuals, Kaviraj argues that an urban individual in the Western context could lay claim to public spaces, giving the Western city a certain level of civil society, which in India, on the other hand, was lacking. There, the city functioned very differently, with no individual obligations towards public land, with public land without designated use, and with people only laying claim to the areas in which it was appropriate for them to act. In this way, the Indian perception of the public became a confrontation between modes of conceptualizing personhood in space, with a strict notion of having a set role in society by the virtue of birth determining the appropriateness of your actions within public spaces in the city, and within society as a whole. As exemplified by Kaviraj, “a puja can be undertaken properly only by a Brahmin [...], just as the function of building a bench can be performed by a carpenter, shaving by a barber—a doctrine of adhikari-bheda [...].” (Kaviraj 1997, 101) Similarly, this doctrine of appropriateness is furthered in Mistry’s short story, in which one of the main characters, a middle-class Parsi man, thinks that it is appropriate for him to cut the bus line because he is of higher status than the others, and then proceeds to ignore both the yelling conductor and paying his bus fare due to the same reason. (Mistry 1987, 16) Opposing this idea of appropriateness with the idea of universality earlier discussed, it is not difficult to imagine that the arrival of Western thought during the colonial period brought about significant changes to public spaces in India by initiating a transformation within the perception of public space through British sovereignty and its resulting formations.
Britain brought with them a greater regulation of public areas, as well as a shift in the perception and use of public spaces in the urban cityscapes. Firstly, Britain introduced greater governmental control and showcased state power against “spontaneous ‘indiscipline’” by implementing things such as street signs to regulate everyday behavior, such as promoting hygiene and enforcing traffic regulations. These signs were, up until the 1960s, all written in English – a non-native language – displaying the power imbalance between the colonial rule and the native population in a public domain which the natives had to obey, but did not fully understand. (Kaviraj 1997, 85) This was further reinforced in the divide between British and indigenous land, often separated by big open spaces, and in the public spaces that were built within the British quarters. (Brush 1962, 60-61) These public spaces, although deemed “public,” were exclusive and had very restricted access to the indigenous population, telling a distinct narrative of who had the right to access public land and to which function it had been designed to serve. In his essay “Construing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab,” William J. Glover manifests that “these rules through new urban institutions the colonial government created both a concept and a corporeal substance – ‘public space’ –that had no prior history in the Indian city,” suggesting a conflict further complicating the way in which the indigenous population conceptualized the relationship between personhood and space; the inside and outside, and the private and the public. (Glover 2007, 3)
Kaviraj notes that the “social group that was most strongly attracted to the European model of the public sphere was the middle-class educated elite,” whom no longer deemed the public as being a disfavored “outside.” (Kaviraj 1997, 92) During the latter years of colonial rule and the onset of independence, the upper classes in Indian cities replaced the British to become patrons, government officials, and municipal representatives. With their recent power, they exercised their dominance over the city through bourgeois imaginaries of public spaces, appropriating the city to fit their own needs. As a result, cities came to hide a level of stratification within their societies, with neighborhoods – although mixed in class – hiding crowded slums by “a street front lined by large mansions or elegant middle-class houses,” and the urban poor being tied to serve the elites in patron-client relationships. (Chatterjee 2003, 171-172) In this way, cities in India continued to act with a caste-like associated life and with the idea of the appropriate and exclusive rather than the attributeless and universal.
It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that this changed, under an extended period of time within which cities became “plebianized” and organized into political societies. ]Simultaneously as a deepening within the democratic process occurred, causing non-elites to be more persistent in their claim to the public, India experienced a “huge increase in the population of the big cities, caused mainly by migrations from the countryside, creat[ing] explosive social conditions.” (Chatterjee 2003, 175) The combination of the two led, for instance, to refugees squatting in parks or close to railroads, as well as the construction of temporary shacks for shopkeepers along the streets. These soon came to establish themselves as a part of the neighborhoods, causing a loss of the “solidly middle-class character” (Kaviraj 1997, 105) of public spaces by their appropriation of the urban poor. The deepening of democratic practice gave lower classes confidence to make moral claims to public spaces that had previously not been appropriate for them to exist fully within.
Following the neoliberal rise of India in the 1990s, cities in India are gearing towards becoming part of the global economy and attracting foreign investment. As a result, much like the process of gentrification in the United States, there has been a big effort to “clean up” Indian cities by improving infrastructure and technology to make them luxurious and commercial, evicting squatters and encroachers who are not ‘useful’ for the new economy, and transforming public spaces back to their “solidly middle-class character.” (Kaviraj 1997, 186)
Through looking at how the idea of the public and the use of public spaces have varied in India through history, it becomes clear that both the appropriation and conceptualization of public land reflect the politics of power in the city. As we look towards India’s future, gearing towards the global economy’s market principles, we ought to seek for a mixed-use public space, acknowledging the interests of multiple groups within the city – and fitting it to accommodate all.
References
Brush, John E. “The Morphology of Indian Cities.” In India’s Urban Future, edited by Roy Turner, 57-70. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962.
Chatterjee, Partha. “Are Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois at Last?” In body.city – sitting contemporary culture in India, edited by Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel, 170-86. Berlin: The House of World Cultures, Delhi: Tulika Books, 2003.
Glover, William J. “Construing Urban Space as ‘Public’ in Colonial India: Some Notes from the Punjab.” The Journal of Punjab Studies 15, no. 1 (2007): 1-14.
Kaviraj, Sudipta.”Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices About Space in Calcutta.” Public Culture 10, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 83-113.
Mistry, Rohinton. “Auspicious Occasion.” In Tales From Firozsha Baag. 1-14. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1987.