[Reader-list] Re: [Urbanstudy] marking city scapes

[Anand V. Taneja]

hi,

am pasting here the last part of apaper i wrote in september 2003, as a
sarai student stipendiary.
it deals with issues of 'democracy', jugaad, narrating/imagining the city,
and conservation...

cheers,
anand

Suppose you went to the Qila on a Sunday morning, when most people do; and
got off at the Pragati Maidan Bus Terminal. Then, between the drab
concrete of the Bus Terminal and the elevated sandstone, marble and
quartzite of the Qila-e-Kohna mosque, you would notice the hustle and
bustle and colour of the regular Sunday mela around the place.  You would
see a long line of people, easily over a thousand, gathered on a field and
moving towards the interiors of the Bhairon Mandir, built into the eastern
wall of the Purana Qila. You would observe that Bhairon seems to have a
preference for whiskey over other alcohol, if the bottles the people carry
is any indication. You would observe that for a place that has a tantric,
alcohol-swilling main deity, there is a remarkable amount of brahminical
Aloo-Kachori being served. You would observe that the Mata Kunti Dvar
constructed in 1994, and inaugurated by Sahib Singh Verma, is in obvious
contravention of ASI laws. It’s way too close to the Qila walls, and what
it does is create a juxtaposition with the mosque looming overhead,
particularly if you’re on the ground below standing there with whiskey in
your hands, in anticipation of pouring it over the tantric figure of black
Bhairon. The gate, which states the Pandav Kaleen lineage of the temple,
which no signage in the temple will let you miss anyway, framing the
sixteenth century mosque above, and the long line of Sunday Hindus below,
creates a narrative that is altogether too common now, post Babri-Masjid.
The other signage you can’t miss is the bright banners everywhere saying
that it is forbidden to give alcohol to the beggars. As you leave the
temple, and the concrete cow that has water taps in its udders, you walk
beside the east wall of the Qila, on the road parallel to it, exclusively
leading to the temple, and you pass a few hundred beggars on hand-pedalled
rickshaws. Most of them will seem to be genuinely handicapped, but you
might encounter a woman, Asha, who jumps out of her rickshaw at periodic
intervals, and chases and picks fights with anyone drunk enough to be rude
to the handicapped. If you ask her she’ll probably tell you that like a
lot of the beggars here, she comes from the slum near Gate no. 7 of Nehru
Stadium. She’ll tell you her regular begging haunts, at Sai Baba Temple,
Hanuman Mandir, CP and here, on fixed days of the week. That she brings
her eight-year-old son along with her, but what she really wants to do is
put him into a school with a hostel, except that she doesn’t have a birth
certificate for him, which complicates manners. And that all the babus
know that she isn’t handicapped, but they give her money/booze anyway,
because her husband used to be handicapped, but since his death she
doesn’t get a pension, so what choice does she have? Her fellow beggars
will laugh with you, and you will probably enjoy the carnival sense of
bonhomie and drunken revelry that begins from mid-morning and goes on well
into the night; despite those big signs warning you off from giving
beggars alcohol. From here, you round the corner bastion of the Qila,
along with others from the mandir, and enter the DDA Physical Fitness
Trail, which has built parallel bars right beside the northern walls of
the fort, next to the gravel lined path that takes you to the Delhi
Tourism Boats on the Old Fort Lake. You might wonder about all this
nineties development around the Qila, the smooth geographical continuity
between religion, recreation and physical fitness. You might be tempted to
usurp the phrase Shahid Amin so evocatively uses to describe the condition
of the North Delhi Ridge – the Purana Qila has been made to exist in a
non-historical present. You exit the Physical Fitness trail near the
entrance to the Fort, where couples, and those rebuffed by the huge crowds
at the Zoo, are moving in to the Fort, and you go in along with them. For
a place as historically significant as this is, strangely enough, there
are no guides. If you’re with a significant other, however, and want to
make out, you might have a hard time. Since this May, private security
guards have been hired, eight of them patrolling the fort in two shifts –
to stop, in the words of BS Negi, in charge of the horticultural division
with in the fort – ‘close up’ activities. Meanwhile, many parts of the
Fort are a totally unkempt mess, so you wonder if the ASI doesn’t have
slightly misplaced priorities. Plastic bottles and other junk are piled up
in many corners, and the grass has grown over six feet tall in some
places. If you aren’t looking for the sites of the excavations you won’t
notice them. The ASI hasn’t exactly gone out of it way to help. Forget
signposting, the sites are overgrown and covered with debris to the point
where they look like shallow, pointless scratchings. The Archeological
Museum inside the Qila has been closed for the last three years, and
according to the various people who at various times sit by its locked
doors, the entire collection has been moved to the Red Fort. But there is
a permanent, and unfriendly, Police picket inside the Qila, and rumours
are rife of treasure unearthed in the digs.
Inside the Qila-I-Kohna, you might meet Ram Pyari, who like about a
hundred other ASI employees was moved out of the Qila when she lived here
in the mid-eighties. She might tell you about how she now lives in the
nearby illegal settlement of Nangla Majhi, and about the Chidiya Ghar
Waali Colony, built between the zoo wall and the railway line, originally
settled by zoo employees. And how the only reason they can keep their
illegal homes is because of the intervention of the local MLA, Tajdar
Babar.
If you’re really lucky you might meet Bhardwaj of the Kunti Mata Mandir
inside the Qila, which is hard to spot because the ASI (according to him)
has planted rows of thick Ashoka trees all around it. His father refused
to move out with the refugees in 1963, because the temple, he claims dates
back to the original Indarpat village. He still lives with his family in
the small temple hidden by trees inside the Purana Qila, under a stay
order in a court case filed by the ASI. He claims that The Bhairon Mandir
was actually built only in the last thirty years, that all history taught
in schools is ‘duffer’ history, and that the five arches of the
Qila-e-Kohna Masjid signify the five halls in which the Pandavas used to
sit, and hence is their palace.

There are so many more stories to narrate, incidents to tell, but let us
get out from the Qila now to Kishan Lal’s teashop. Kishan Lal’s life has
been associated with the Qila for the past fifty-five years. It was his
home, his brothers studied here, his children were born here, his shop is
just outside it. He is the most stoic of people, about all the changes in
the Purana Qila since he has known it , he says, “Pehle rihaish thi, ab
sairgah hai.” ( roughly  - “It was a dwelling earlier, now it is a place
to stroll.”) But now, he is worried because of Jagmohan’s proposal to turn
it into a World Heritage Site. He is afraid that the row of shops leading
to the Qila, including his own, won’t fit with Jagmohan’s plans to
‘welcome the Pandavas back to the Purana Qila.’

His fears were not unfounded. By late August, Kishan Lal and the other
shop owners, who cater to tourists who come to the Zoo and the Qila, had
got eviction notices. They are within the three hundred metre regulated
zone, and though they hope to be around till the end of October, none of
them expects to be here after that. At age seventy (?), Kishan Lal will
have to relocate again, if only his business; and when the ASI offices
inside the Qila, in what used to be the school for the refugee camp are
demolished,  the last traces of the Qila’s refugee camps will have been
removed from its vicinity.

 Since its inclusion as an important element of the British plan for their
new capital, the Purana Qila and its pasts have become vital to the
narrative of the Empire and later, the Nation. Since then, there has
always been an attempt to ignore, and to remove, the histories of the
banal, the quotidian, the everyday, from ever having happened here. The
Sound and Light show, which is as official a history of the Qila as you
can get, has the Yamuna as its narrator, history as a river, flowing down
the great events of the past of the nation, towards the sea of
Independence. But as twentieth century histories around the Qila prove,
it is the flotsam and jetsam left by that grand narrative current, the
stories of migration, settlement and displacement that make the histories
of a city, and give meaning to its monuments.

David Lowenthal writes, ‘Once aware that relics, history, and memory are
continually refashioned, we are less inhibited by the past, less
frustrated by the fruitless quest for sacrosanct originals. We must reckon
with the artifice no less than the truth of our heritage. Nothing ever
made has been left untouched, nothing ever known remains immutable; yet
these facts should not distress but emancipate us. It is far better to
realize the past has always been altered than to pretend it has always
been the same...’

The Conservation Movement, perhaps, needs to rethink its approach to the
preservation of the past, lest they find themselves unwitting allies to
Jagmohan’s agenda. It might be relevant here to recall what Walter
Benjamin had to say about the class struggle and  ‘cultural treasures’, “

All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them
 Whoever has
emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in
which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.
According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the
procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical
materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the
cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate
without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the
great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous
toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which
is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”  The tombs and palaces
and forts of Delhi, the ‘elite’ remains of the past for which the
conservationist is willing to spout the discourse of ‘encroachment’ and
‘eviction’ against the underdogs of the present, are all drenched in
blood.  If we continue to think in this Benjamin-ian  fashion, can we not
imagine the Purana Qila being redeemed from this history of barbarism,
because of the shelter it has provided to the victims of history, time and
time again, over two centuries. A redemption that might soon be forgotten.
What if the conservationists of Delhi campaigned for a memorial to the
post-partition camps inside the Purana Qila?  What better metaphor could
there be for the common ground, the shared suffering of those times? For
if we keep going the Jagmohan way, only preserving Indraprastha and
nothing that came beyond, then this city will be like Leonard Shelby from
the movie ‘Memento’ . A man who cannot form new memories, and hence is
condemned to be constantly manipulated into an endless cycle of
retributive violence. If the horrors of 1947 are erased from a space that
sheltered its victims, then aren’t we already condemned to repeat it?
In the words of Leonard Shelby, ‘How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel
time?’
XXX

 closely connected to street life but also impacted by broader events.
>
> Some wonderful lines from Zainab's postings:
>
> Democracy and information operate despite labels and boundaries of
> legality and illegality. .....People develop tactics over a period of
> time. They develop tactics of how to deal with power and with persons in
> power. They know how to make their way around. The key lies in not being
> fearful of authority. If you fear, you can be terrorized.
>
> I am reminded of a wonderful book that shows Bombay (of the early
> eighties) in a similar detail, 'Shantaram' by Gregory Roberts. What I feel
> is critically important in these accounts is that they force us to look at
> the city terrain from alternative categories, and see how the ones used by
> architects and planners (to beautify the city and urban form) can
> seriously hurt others who use the city as a place for survival. The move
> Zainab writes of selling toys to socks being dictated by what you can save
> from a police raid in a zone declared as a no-hawking zone. Or then, the
> move to make VT a museum (by the conservationist?). Are these then
> competing forms of marking? I am reminded of some recent debates in
> Bangalore where in the concern for trees being cut, and disappearing
> wetlands, we have almost a comical reaction - if the issue was not so
> tragic and serious. First, if one should term tanks as lakes or not, the
> discussion being steeped in aesthetics - leading to a subtle hedging of
>  the more serious underlying political issues. Second, and equally
> de-politicizing, is the argument to bring back greenery and developing
> 'mini-forests'. Like the conservation efforts made in Bombay, these three
> approaches coming from architecture and urban design, see the city as a
> physical entity and hence the marking of it, in those terms. Can we then
> move beyond the physical attributes of space and location which seem to
> imprison us in politically neutralizing categories? Zainab's essay,
> reminds me of a wonderful book, "Street signs Chicago: Neighborhood and
> other illusion of big city life" by Bowden and Kreinberg which is a
> devastating critique of the planners aligning with big business to make
> the concept of neighborhoods a myth. This however, brings me to what
> seems a saving grace for our context which in the US has been cleaned out
> from the era of Tammany Hall: The complex, messy, local politics that
> still may allow the Shah Rukh, Raghu Kaka, and Arjun Bhai to survive.
> Such a
>  democracy may not resemble the one that George Bush wants (and perhaps
> thank god for that!) or be one that the BBC sees as being "proper". If
> some of you saw the recent documentary films on Venezuela and the
> election of Chavez, such a democracy is also not one coming out as social
> movements against an authoritarian dictatorship. Instead, it is perhaps
> one of stealth, of tactic, and how to not feel terrorized despite the
> difficult situations. Perhaps, this is the real nightmare of the Master
> planners, the return home landscapists, conservationists and the
> "Swadesh" types,  the party high commands, the World Bank lending to the
> MMRDA, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force and their corporate funders, the
> Kharniars and Ragendra Raos: A politics of "Juugaard" which is human but
> also few central figures to drive it, which is underground but open in
> every street corner, and where the everyday acts of people in the street
> form its building blocks.
>
> Solly Benjamin 26 dec 2004
>
> Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life
> partneronline._______________________________________________
> Urbanstudygroup mailing list
> Urban Study Group: Reading the South Asian City
>


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