[Reader-list] 2nd posting Bhatti Mines

[ravi]

JANUARY POSTING
Ravi Agarwal & Anita Soni

During the first month we made many exploratory visits (over 10) to the area
of Bhatti mines as well as the adjoining areas outside the Ridge. Our work
has been of great interest to the villagers and we found them to be willing
participants. The villagers already know us from our many associations with
them before, both in helping them on their impledings in the Supreme Court
as well as in their interest for their plight to be documented.

 It is with this growing perspective that we explore the project, under a
tentative working title : "Jaan de denge, ghar nahin. Marginalizing
communities: People, environment and urban spaces", has been conceived of as
documentation, visual and textual, of a site whose very identity is
contentious, and which has been surviving for over a decade now 'in the
twilight of illegality, where the poor dwell" - to borrow Usha Ramanathan's
succinct articulation.

The site has multiple descriptions, serving various purposes of the
concerned parties.

The official description is one of 'jhuggi clusters in the middle of
Wildlife Sanctuary':
environmentally harmful encroachments, slotted for relocation on the orders
of the Supreme Court.

The rhetorically 'people-oriented' description projects a confident rural
community aware of its rights and engaged in a 'movement against eviction'.

The saffron-coloured, demagogical description is that of undeservedly
neglected, long-settled urban colonies awaiting regularization and
rehabilitation in situ, in order to continue as serviceable vote banks.

All these descriptions have some element of plausibility about them. Each of
them can be endorsed and substantiated by suitable visuals and narratives,
and we have planned to include such 'quotes' with ironical intent, as part
of our project.

The challenge before us as chroniclers of this contentious site is how to
avoid getting
entrapped in any of those externally stereotyped projections, since each of
them is 'partly true and wholly false'.

To meet this challenge, we must step out of the confines of residential site
and follow
its inhabitants to their variously defined work sites, spread not only in
the vicinity of the sanctuary, but over vast stretches of the National
Capital Region, from Gurgaon to NOIDA

We must also transcend the synchronic practices of urban ethnography and
enter the diachronic discourse of socio-economic transformation, in which
hereditary rural workers  (the pre-modern, non-agricultural skilled labour
of the countryside) have been reduced, in the span of barely 30 years, to
casual wage earners of the urban informal sector.
We have to reconstruct, through an imaginative handling of the camera, and
sociological insights gained from a decade-long field research, the
continuous narrative of dislocations altering irreversibly the
legal/administrative status, and even the physical appearance of the
surrounding land, along with the lives and livelihoods of its inhabitants.

The use of archival photographs, found in possession of many old-time
settler families, and in Dr. Smitu Kothari's personal file from the time of
investigation by the PUCL team (l983) can help to bring out graphically the
vastness of change.

What strikes us as the defining feature of the present human situation at
Bhatti Mines is the coexistence of rural and urban frames of reference in
the everyday experience of the people.

Bhatti Mines has three separate areas of human habitation, since l990
classified as "JJ
Clusters" with code numbers  S-l63 (Balbir Nagar), S-l64 (Indira Nagar) and
S-l65 (Sanjay  Colony). The first two are non-happening places, without an
internal dynamics of their own.  Balbir Nagar is practically a deserted
village, with large open spaces made use of by the  stationing  ECO Task
Force of the military. Indira Nagar is a shabby cluster of huts resembling a
city slum. It is the main settlement, where the memories and pride of the
labouring communities of Bhatti Mines are kept alive. Since l980, its
official name has  been Sanjay Colony. Unofficially, it has been known as Od
Mandi.  The tribal Od component makes up three quarters of the population,
and imparts an archaic rustic flavour to this multi-ethnic locality.

On the residential plane, Od Mandi is still very much a village , with an
unspoilt rural ambience of homes, neighbourhoods, public spaces - both
sacred, like places of worship, and quite profane, like roadside gambling
sessions of idle old men. There is still a community feeling and
conviviality, albeit largely restricted to kinship groups.

In the work context - which is now located in the outside world, away from
the village -
there is complete subjugation to the urban market, there is dispersal and
atomization of
labour force, even when working in gangs deployed by the same  contractor.
Here, kinship loyalties and hierarchies do not hold. It is cut-throat
competition.

We find it tempting to document this duality - of the close-knit, supportive
relationships marking the village life, and of depersonalized, competitive
'market ethos' ruling at the work sites, in the specific instances of a few
typical families from Od Mandi.

We think this duality explains quite a few things. It explains the
respectability of the village paradigm in the imaginings of Bhatti Mines
residents  (Convening 'Gram Bachao Sangharsh Samiti' was their response to
the relocation order of l996). It also explains why the seemingly militant
graffiti on the house walls (inspired by a former NAPM activist who in
l996-97 led an agitation against the proposed resettlement of Bhatti Mines
residents to Jaunapur) do not reflect any sustained militancy in real terms.
The people know that the rules of the game are set by the market, and that
"marginalization, exclusion and the creation of urban nomads rest cheek by
jowl with the privileging of those in the city who can cast into the ring
the price of legality.' (Usha Ramanathan).

Their village community may survive only in memories. There is no place for
it in the new all-urban scheme of things in Delhi. Still, as long as it
exists, it is worth documenting as "a living critique of the city", in the
words of Ashish Nandy. ('The City of the Mind"  a lecture at the function of
release of Sarai Reader 02 : The village has now emerged as a living
critique of the city.")

In this particular case, the city finding its living critique in the village
of Od Mandi
is not the historical Delhi, but the futuristic imperial project of a
firewalled, high-tech city-state, a megafortress of the rich, with lush
green urban estates and an exclusive
"city forest" managed by the Forest Department with some help from the
military. This expansionist global city still needs the labouring poor, but
denies them their autonomous spaces, which the village did provide, but the
slum will not.