[Reader-list] Students Stipends Workshop for Research on the City

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Students Stipends Workshop for Research on the City
19-20 August 2004
Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054

Each year the Sarai programme supports young research students for 
short-term studentships to facilitate research on urban life in South 
Asia. The process includes a public call for applications in 
September-October, a teaching workshop for selected students, and a 
public presentation of the research in August, at Sarai. The programme 
encourages practice-based and cross-disciplinary research, as well as 
research in the traditional academic mode.

This year, 17 proposals were selected for the student stipendship. 
However, two of the selected candidates did not participate in our 
preliminary workshop; nor did they show commitment to pursuing their 
proposed research. A joint proposal also did not finally yield any 
results, though the researchers had done their field and library work, 
and were in the advanced stages of their research; serious family and 
personal problems kept them from participating in the final workshop. 
Among the 14 final presentations, 8 were by women, 5 by men and 1 by a 
man-woman team. These students came from diverse social backgrounds; 4 
were from minority communities; 3 presentations were in Hindi. Overall, 
the research material covered a range of disciplines---mass 
communication, history, literature, film studies, anthropology, 
sociology, environmental studies, architecture, urban planing and 
education.

Each panel at the final workshop included a discussant, assigned from 
in-house as well as from among the stipendiaries, who facilitated the 
question/answer session following the presentations. Several projects 
were supported by audiovisuals, indicating the students' greater ease 
with the formats of new media. The presentations were in English and 
Hindi. Creative, experimental, technologically innovative and anecdotal 
presentations alternated with the more conventional. There was a lively 
interactive session on the themes, methods and sources of urban research 
and the possibilities of networking and resource building, which was 
initiated by Prabhu Mohapatra, Solomon Benjamin, Ravi Sundaram and 
Awadhendra Sharan.

The stipendiaries offered detailed feedback with regard to their 
experience of the workshop itself and the preparatory activities and 
dialogue initiated by Sarai for several months preceding the actual 
event. It was suggested that if the papers were circulated in advance, 
they would speak more to each other as well as to the audience; that the 
student could post electronically in the public domain on the existing 
Sarai urban web list. Some students asserted that the research 
experience had been “fun”; that it had helped them to understand their 
own academic practices better; that they might extend their stipendiary 
research into wider practice or develop it further in scholarly ways. 
All found the cross-disciplinary format of the studentship both dynamic 
and challenging.

19 August 2004

Panel 1/Witnessing the Urban: Memory, Event and Violence

/Jerry Cherian /Goa University, Goa / /_/jerrycherian at rediffmail.com/_ 
<mailto:jerrycherian at rediffmail.com>
“Living in Heritage: The Fontainhas Festival in Panjim”

This study attempts to interpret issues of power, culture and identity 
construction in Fontainhas, known as the Latin Quarter in the city of 
Panaji, Goa. The settlement is a mix of Catholic and Hindu communities. 
The paper explores the possible configuration in the social power 
equation at macro and micro levels. It asks how one-dimensional and 
often totalitarian meta-narratives of identity, based on the notion of 
singularity of truth, are claimed, developed and adpated according to 
place and in relation to other meta-narratives.

/Shwetal Vyas /Delhi University, Delhi /generallyalive at hotmail.com/
“Mass Violence, Memory and Mahesh Dattani”

This paper describes the writer's efforts to confront and negotiate 
personal responses to the post-Godhra Hindu-Muslim communal violence in 
Gujarat, through various discursive frames—literature, film, history and 
psychoanalysis---including /Final Solutions/, Mahesh Dattani's play on 
this theme. The researcher explored issues of identity, memory, trauma 
and loss, within the larger political context.

Ravi Sundaram's opening remarks prior to the presentations focused on 
the need to spend some time thinking about how clearly we could 
articulate the urban experience, variously defined as the city, urban 
life, etc. On the one hand, the city is described as a formal unit, and 
on the other hand it is described as a range of experiences. Two 
distinct models are foregrounded when speaking of the city. The first is 
the classic 17^th century European city, that developed from the 
medieval configuration of the church and the streets leading to it, 
around which the central square, the market, public spaces, consolidated 
themselves. The second is the 19^th century city based on rational 
planning and organization. Another model was that of the colonial city, 
based on the principle of racial segregation; there was also the model 
of the Turko-Islamic city built around the relationship between the 
mosque, the fort and the market. But these categories are not adequate 
when it comes to understanding the contemporary city. How can we map the 
discontinuities between the historical and contemporary forms that the 
urban realm has assumed? Could we even speak of a “city” any more? We 
speak now of an “urban sprawl” that was characteristic of our 
cities---Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata. What exactly was happening 
to our idea of the city? This was a conundrum especially for people such 
as urban planners, charged with producing the city. How was the city to 
be represented. When we looked at the question historically, the 
discontinuities were very sharp; we needed to think about the transition 
in historical terms as well. The other question that came up when we 
spoke of the city was whether we should make a distinction between urban 
history and research on the urban experience.

Awadhendra Sharan spoke briefly about the ideas underlying the 
stipendship programme. He clarified that Sarai's aim was to provoke the 
asking of larger questions that students might not be encouraged to 
explore in other contexts. He also expressed some dissatisfaction with 
the lack of attention that the stipendiaries had paid to the initial 
resources provided by Sarai in the form of readings and a CD, which few 
of the students seemed to have explored.

The first presentation was by Jerry Cherian on the Fontainhas festival 
in Panjim, Goa. His work consisted of a short film shot in that 
location, interspersed with explanations. The film explored the tensions 
inherent in the practice of the conservation of heritage as imposed by 
outside agencies, and the alienation that the residents of the 
neighbourhood experienced during this process. He examined the rift 
between the Catholic and Hindu communities. The Catholics had a 
historical sense of connection to the area, and there was a continuity 
in their narratives. The Hindus were migrants from other parts of Goa 
and experienced various forms of rupture in their relationship with the 
locality. The conflict became polarized during the debate regard the 
naming of Fontainhas, which was also called Mala. Finally it was called 
the Fontainhas/Mala festival, to assuage the sentiments of both 
communities. Jerry ended by raising some questions regarding the place 
of individual narratives within the larger narrative of 'conservation' 
that was part of the political agenda of various groups.

Anand was the discussant for this paper. He began by saying he wished 
the interviews with the local residents of Fontainhas had been presented 
in their entirety, because arguments raised in the paper did not 
coincide with those presented in the film, so it was disorienting while 
listening to/reading one, and viewing the other. He suggested that it 
might be useful to look at the role of the local elites and their 
relationship with the colonial Portuguese state. The upper echelons of 
the Goan bureaucracy during colonial rule consisted of Hindus who 
adopted local cultural practices. The paper located community tensions 
at the wrong places, foregrounding less relevant identity politics. 
Anand also commented that the paper was a strong critique of the 
marketing of culture in post-Independent India. Was the effort to make 
the past/heritage accessible to consumers a desirable project at all, 
and if so, was it possible to do it in non-essentialist terms? How 
important is it to make people aware of their past? Were the 
conservation efforts of local authorities more legitimate than the 
efforts of local residents to maintain their history on a smaller, 
immediate and subjective scale?

Responding to the questions, Jerry clarified that he had not intended to 
say that the local authorities were wrong in their effort to hold the 
festival, his point was that it had been organized without taking the 
sentiments of the local people into account; nor had they been included 
in the organizational process. To Anand's question of whether it was at 
all possible to have a multilayered history within the nationalist 
frame, he noted that he needed to think about this since he was 
grappling with these issues for the first time.

The second paper, “Mass Violence, Memory and Mahesh Dattani”, was 
presented by Shwetal Vyas. Focusing on the communal riots in Gujarat in 
2002, she asked how the “reality” of the experience of trauma is 
constructed through various narrative forms, and at various points of 
time. Smriti was the discussant for this presentation. She raised the 
central question of whether it was at all possible to adequately 
describe trauma, no matter how it was accessed, because discursive 
frames often failed. She brought up the notion of “othering” and related 
it to the concept of “phobogenesis”, employed by Frantz Fanon in his 
accounts of the struggle of the Algerian population against their French 
colonizers. Fanon extends this to negritude in general, and asks how 
mechanisms of “othering” influence the self. What happens when phobia, 
the irrational fear of the other, arises in one's mind? The impulse is 
to distance oneself from the other; distancing is most easily achieved 
through objectification; when the other is reduced to an object, it is 
easier to inflict violence. She suggested that the only way to tackle 
fear that leads to the committing of acts of hatred upon an innocent 
other is to look within oneself, observe the fear, instead of projecting 
it upon the other. She recalled a song she had heard on the radio in 
which the protagonist describes his feeling for his beloved by comparing 
it to sandalwood burning, and said that this trope took her mind in an 
unexpected direction. When a sandalwood forest burns there is flame and 
fragrance simultaneously; in the same manner, cruelty and compassion are 
always found together, in the same place, they give meaning to one 
another. During the riots people did brutalize each other, but they also 
risked their lives to save one another.

Vivek added that we could perhaps think of competing versions of history 
and the tensions between different communities. Shwetal was interested 
in the idea of phobogenesis, adding that she wished we did not have to 
experience cruelty in order to experience compassion.

Dipu opened the general discussion by noting that both papers were 
audacious in their scope, and had interesting threads that could be 
pushed further. He urged Jerry to examine the figure of the migrant, who 
was neither tourist nor native. He advised Shwetal to focus her gaze 
further, since the larger question of how to make meaning was an 
intimidating one. Otherwise she would find herself in an endless debate 
about the nature of the self, the nature of knowledge, etc.

Solly referred to Veena Das's work on the Trilokpuri riots and asked 
whether the manner in which cities evolve structurally and spatially has 
anything to do with violence. Not far from the Trilokpuri unauthorized 
colony was a legal residential colony which supported the residents of 
Trilokpuri during the demolitions. There seemed to be a differential 
manner in which different spaces evolved out of different sets of 
political and other processes. Our understandings of city violence may 
have something to do with structures.

Responding to Jerry's paper, Yasmin noted that most of the issues he had 
raised were standard in heritage discourse. The new questions that could 
be asked had to do with the way the everyday was being interpreted in 
terms of art. Foregrounding this might be useful when asking what 
motivated various actors, such as the community, the authorities, etc.

Ravi Sundaram asked Jerry what constituted the histories of the 
relationships between these communities. He also asked what constituted 
the logic of location. He remarked that Jerry was positing a classic 
heritage problem: the Portuguese had set up this neighbourhood, various 
communities generated various contestations. There were many directions 
the debate could go in. One could think about the politics of heritage 
and cultural divides, since the state had a BJP government. One could 
look at the financial aspects of selling heritage. One also needed to 
look at the neighbourhood itself, the dynamics between “insiders” and 
“outsiders”, how these groups evolved, the identities they claimed. How 
did this operate in terms of lived experience, representation and 
heritage? In this instance, the third aspect seemed to have catalyzed 
tensions between the other two. When brought together, it became less a 
question of individual narratives and more one of conjunctions. The 
inquiry around the cultural moment/site of the festival could be an 
initial step in longer and broader analysis. Jerry acknowledged that 
midway through his project he recognized that he had somehow lost the 
richness of the neighbourhood he was trying to describe.

Ravi commented that with regard to Shwetal's paper, his concern was not 
with the categories she was working with, but with the rendition of the 
trauma narrative, which was the kernel. She was trying to define 
“reality”, and this sensorium could be rendered in two possible ways: 
individually, and through the inter-subjective realm. Shwetal said that 
she realized she did not have an adequate framework for her exploration; 
she was confused about whether to focus on the subjective, or rely on 
theoretical frames.

Panel 2/Urban Histories

/Osamazaid Rahman /Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi 
/zaid_osama at rediffmail.com/
“Epidemics, Communities and Colonial Urban Policy: Calcutta 1872-1941”

This paper examined statistical data with regard to the plague at a 
particular historical period, in specific urban contexts. It traced the 
mechanisms of epidemiological surveillance and control strategies in 
areas occupied by different communities, and described the narrative of 
the disease as found in the public and medical discourse of the time.

This study focused on the settlement patterns of Hindu and Muslim 
communities in Calcutta during a particular historical period. It was a 
slide-based statistical analysis, based on the argument migrants into 
the city were carriers of plague, and the mortality rate was higher in 
the Hindu settlements which were more densely populated. In the 
discussion following the presentation, Prabhu questioned the 
researcher's understanding of the character of epidemics and the sources 
that had been used. He also suggested that the relationship between the 
Hindu and Muslim communities should be studied more sociologically, with 
a more narrative style. Ravi Sundaram asked Osama to clarify the 
intellectual question at the core of the research, and suggested that he 
consult historical accounts of plague. It was crucial for the researcher 
to position himself intellectually regarding his material. Dipu 
recommended that Osama find a more descriptive way to “read the numbers 
of death”; and also research the existent discourses of public 
hygiene/sanitation and their cultural implications, as well as the 
existent medical discourse and public writing on plague, which could be 
found in government documents, libraries and newspapers. Ravikant 
suggested that Osama could also focus on the community traditions and 
mythologies regarding plague, and compare these to the official viewpoint.

Panel 3/Interactive Discussion/Urban Research: Themes, Methods and Sources

(/Resource Persons: Solomon Benjamin, Prabhu Mohapatra, Awadhendra 
Sharan, Ravi Sundaram/)

The interactive session on research practices and reflections on 
fieldwork began with Solly remarking that he seemed to have “fallen into 
events” which did not turn out to be research practices. He stressed the 
need to generate categories of analysis and apply theory to these. The 
field approach might be “fuzzy”, but it had a lot of scope. There was a 
lot of good, evocative, descriptive writing in Victorian and colonial 
accounts, which lent themselves to theory. But these categories were 
insufficient: research keeps changing, subjects, contexts, inputs 
change. Research is still dominated by bureaucratic language, there was 
a need to bring in alternative sources and foreground secondary sources. 
For example, land economy and politics, the patterns of settlement are 
best understood not through historians but through local informants, who 
may provide an account that is chaotic and subjective but rich and 
promising.

Prabhu Mohapatra stated that any social science researcher has to face 
the fact that research is an orientation of one's being in relation to 
the research material. The material appears chaotic in the first 
instance, and the encounter is of the dispersal of settled meanings. The 
material's chaos can be a block or a challenge. On the primary level, 
the effort is to construct and put a frame on the chaotic 
material---ultimately, all researchers do this. The secondary level of 
recognition is phenomenological: the material is patterned independently 
of the researcher, it is produced by the material itself. Do we see and 
seek a pattern in the material because this is inherent to the human 
mind? The emergent pattern may coincide with the existent pattern of the 
material—a sudden congruence often surprises fieldworkers. If one 
interacts with material according to a preconceived classificatory 
scheme, the emergent pattern often conflicts with the scheme. This 
induces crisis in the researcher, and it /should/ induce crisis. If you 
are not surprised by the material, it is either a sense of deja-vu, or 
something is definitely wrong. The modality of this encounter with the 
material is that it is an act of surprise. All kinds of stories are 
happening all the time, around the researcher. The final truth of 
research is that the construction has to be done, the researcher is not 
the messenger. Structure is forced upon the material, and this coercion 
should be acknowledged.

Prabhu defined research as an “orientation” which allowed one to inhabit 
a space between pure observation and pure immersion. This state of being 
is a productive state, and can be connected to a major methodological 
issue, from the debate on positivism, the status of hypothesis and 
experimentation. The German social thinker Theodore Adorno claims that 
as a researcher, you begin with a particular image of what you want to 
do. The encounter of that image with the material is based on a 
particular world-view. The material has its own logic, it should rise up 
and approximate the world-view. This approximation is called research. 
City/urban research is unique in that the world of representation and 
the world of imagination have to find common ground with the 
physical/empirical world, in a particular direction.

Ravi Sundaram raised the question of why research was undertaken. He 
suggested that it was crucial to define the particular intellectual 
question for oneself in one paragraph or one page. If this short account 
did not interest the researcher, it would not be possible to produce 
anything interesting. Curiosity was foundational in this regard. The 
classic colonial encounter with the native produced the tradition of 
documenting the “other”; professional academics are obsessed with and 
challenged by material, driven by it; but in the context of the urban 
research, the city throws everything out of place. It destabilizes 
creativity and professionalism. Small sets of planners and architects 
have gone into urban studies; non-academics, such as artists, the avant 
garde, Marxists, have produced creative work. The researcher is 
basically anyone who is curious. Fieldwork needs a particular, often 
intuitive way of perception that professionalism can kill. There's also 
a serious need to do associated reading. The ethnographer is the 
quintessential urban researcher. He/she is not professionally trained as 
an academic, and is always curious about voice.

Dipu remarked that he admired professionals, their skill at finding a 
way to ground questions, produce knowledge in a certain way. He asserted 
that the key question in any research project must continually redefine 
itself. The questioning of the material and of one's relation to the 
material must go on. Sarai emphasizes fieldwork and processes; how to 
organize and present the material is training best given by academics.

According to Solly, if you look at Western literature on methodology 
uptil 1945, it was fairly substantial and unified. After this came a 
substantial disconnect; fieldwork splits off from theory, in urban 
studies. Sarai is pushing people to build up urban knowledge in a 
different way. More interaction between researchers could lead to the 
sharing of field experiences and the desired and continual redefinition 
of the question. Established categories are “jails”—researchers should 
be extremely skeptical and unpack all categories, there should be 
continual exploration of discursive parameters.

Ravi Sundaram reiterated that he “would like to hear stories” about how 
the field “disturbs” researchers, and asked whether contradictions in 
data makes research interesting; these also included contradictions in 
the researcher's own life. Asserting that she was speaking “on behalf of 
the anthropology tribe”, Yasmin made a distinction between “city” and 
“urban”, two segments of the categories being deconstructed by urban 
research. Fieldwork was a huge story in itself, and involved complex 
ethnography. In any research project, an early paragraph expressing the 
core of the research interest should acknowledge this complexity.

Jeebesh commented that “fortunately” he did not belong to any 
discipline, so did not have to defend himself. But he understood the 
need for research because of his background as a documentary filmmaker; 
research was crucial to getting basic material, the images and sound to 
work with. After World War II research, research became 
“institutionalized”; and from then till the present day, this had 
remained its dominant voice. The debate can be accessed through any 
discipline: for instance, his art practice was shaped not by 
anthropology or ethnography but by photography. The sources of our 
critical reflections are from these disciplinary spaces. If there was no 
interesting question at the core of the research project, any findings 
would simply be “flat”, “propaganda” and basically useless. The issue is 
not about an adequate description of the world but an interesting and 
relevant entry point. The practice has to be interrogated by each 
researcher individually, not only within the parameters of a discipline.

Yasmin remarked that we are conditioned by the accumulated body of 
knowledge that already exists; with regard to the speech act, there is 
no such thing as a pure question. Ravi Sundaram said that if you break 
disciplines, fieldwork produces unique results, fascinating questions. 
According to Jeebesh, research is a generalized practice involving 
experiential richness and open narrative forms; in contrast to this, 
academic and textual knowledge systems and the politics associated with 
them continue to intimidate and illegitimize all other forms of 
research. This is “disciplinary terrorism” of the worst kind. Dipu added 
that there had to be a relationship between the way a question is asked 
and the way the material is used to answer it: for this, you had to do 
solid reading, integrate a textual understanding. Jeebesh replied that 
he was not opposed to reading, but that he felt questions, curiosities, 
passions were what made research successful. There is a lack of 
generosity in academic dealings with any practice-based or alternative 
kind of research. All research space is difficult, tense and contested. 
Activists attack research fundamentals, but that is not the point 
either. The point is that if passion is subordinated to methodology, 
research will lose its meaning, its relevance both to the 
researcher/practitioner and to the disciplines.

Ravi Sundaram clarified that only in South Asia was there a rigid 
distance between the academic and the practitioner. These boundaries 
need to be broken through creative interventions. Dipu asked why 
creativity and method should be separated, and that he like the idea of 
the “curious interloper” in research. The mark of the good researcher 
was the ability to produce challenging questions. Location was not that 
important. If the research question was constantly redefined, the manner 
in which the question was answered should also be continually 
interrogated. One should look at the core question and inquire if it 
could be asked or answered in any other way.

Prabhu remarked that interesting research can accommodate many 
contradictions and points of view, all kinds of voices. There are ways 
of writing that accommodate plurality and open-endedness. These should 
indicate that other accounts are as valid and plausible. This is a more 
generous and ethical approach. “Suppressing evidence” is legally a 
crime; similarly, in research it is wrong to suppress anything that 
would undercut one's narrative and claims. The researcher actually 
combines three functions: that of judge, lawyer and witness. From the 
standpoint of excitement, putting contradictions together, leaving the 
findings open: these are tactical ways of presenting research. 
Simplistic and contrived views set against one another are not 
interesting. It is not about balance either, the rebel view versus the 
official view, etc. How do we see different academic modes as 
constraining, how do we understand the constraint as enabling rather 
than disempowering? The material produces constraint, but also produces 
the condition of freedom and allows for the emergence of creative 
potential. We also need to be careful about the term “action research”: 
this compounds tautology upon tautology. Research is a form of broad 
social intervention, like art practice.

Sharada referred to Dipesh Chakravarty's research on minority history, 
making the point that if these narratives were seen as part of a 
rational cause and effect scheme, subaltern history is validated and 
assimilated into mainstream history. Citing Ronojit Guha's account of 
adivasis called to court to give “evidence”, and their later saying “God 
told us to testify”, as an example of subjectivity that escaped 
regulation, she also brought up her own research on street children, 
whose narratives keep changing, whose sense of self is contradictory. 
These contradictions were part of the “tangible excitement of 
fieldwork”, where nothing is fixed and the research question keeps 
expanding and complicating itself; the level of learning is on the 
researcher's own terms.

Osama commented that all research had to follow some methodology, as the 
data had to be “rationalized” according to one discipline or the other. 
Jeebesh said there was a need to clarify the concepts by which a 
dialogue between practitioners could be created. How do practitioners 
talk to one another, how can interventions in social life come about 
through collaborative practice---these are crucial questions. But there 
is an anxiety among practitioners with regard to losing control of their 
material, and this fear blocks conversations that might be valuable and 
enriching. Solly described his process of returning to documents and 
case studies collected earlier, but which had not been processed and so 
not used. The material was not fixed, nor was it open-ended. Sometimes 
the narrative followed the desired course, at other times it deviated: 
Each layer of documentation had its own character—notepad, register, 
handwritten drafts, typed copies---and these were edited and 
reconceptualized along the way to the final version. These research 
formats were also valuable in themselves, and the transparent, 
contradictory and informal traces of human effort were also valid and 
valuable.

Sadan raised a methodological question, recalling a project that 
involved interviewing victims of violence, who often wanted to carry on 
talking; how to end the interview with skill, so that the subject didn't 
experience the termination as violent. If the subject was allowed to 
prevail, the researcher himself/herself underwent a process of violence. 
Responding to Jeebesh's earlier comment, Prabhu asked whether it was 
fair to censor a discipline by calling it “regimented” and 
“terroristic”: such accusations were in fact what severed possibilities 
of dialogue. With regard to Sadan's query, he remarked that all research 
involves a simultaneous loss and gain of information; simultaneous 
closure and opening is taking place in all research modes and knowledge 
forms. Closure is inevitable, and necessary: we have to put structures 
upon our chaos. We have to keep trying to understand conditions of 
constraint and conditions of possibility in research. The truth is that 
we only possess sets of techniques, protocols, and these persist in the 
manner that certain caste rituals persist. The methodological clashes 
and impasses are actually based on “stupid” and irrelevant chronological 
and spatial markers that demarcate research into disciplines, so we have 
different orders of knowledge formation, through historians, 
anthropologists, sociologists.

Ravi Sundaram concluded the session by remarking that research issues 
were not about disciplinary demands or research conventions or the 
politics of information gathering. We need to talk about other forms and 
creative formats, outside the binaries of fieldwork and archive---this 
was crucial. But the central problem was the “cruelty” of 
professionalization. Universities in the US had become a business 
enterprise for knowledge production. The parameters of the debate have 
changed: it is not about what kind of knowledge is produced but about 
who is permitted to produce knowledge.

Panel 4/ Neighbourhood, Market and Ecology

/Dhara Radia /CEPT, Ahmedabad/ dhararadia at hotmail.com/
“Institutional and Legal Frameworks for the Urban Private Water Market: 
Ahmedabad City”

This study explores the role of water markets, particularly in the 
context of water supply. It brings out the mechanisms adapted by 
informal institutes to meet the water demand in Ahmedabad, and maps the 
local water markets in terms of microstructure, scale and economics.

/Sirisha Indukuri /Delhi University, Delhi /sirishaindukuri at yahoo.com/
“Perspectives from Environmental Sociology/Anthropology for the Study of 
Urban Ecology”

The research takes environmental and ecological parameters in sociology 
and anthropology, normally applied to rural frameworks, and transposes 
these to urban terrain. It asks what fresh interdisciplinary 
perspectives emerge from the shift. It reads the urban landscape as a 
text and studies the society-state interface in relation to 
environmental concerns.

/Jayani Bonnerjee /Jadavpur University, Kolkata /jayanibon at yahoo.com/
“Neighbourhood Patterns and Urban Planning in Calcutta”

This study aims to contextualize debates on modern urban planning 
strategies and the logic of socio-spatiality: the relationships of 
communities to their neighbourhoods, with particular reference to the 
Old Chinatown area of Kolkata, and the ethnic/territorial identity 
politics of that area.

Solly opened the discussion after the first presentation on the water 
market in Ahmedabad, by commenting that a lot of private companies would 
be interested in the paper for its market research value. The paper 
could have included interviews with the people involved in this economy. 
There was also the possibility of comparing the tension around water 
sale with the water riots in Chile; this information was available on 
the Internet and also in published form. The study could expand to 
include a sense of the politics of the process, the political economies 
inherent in the water struggle; the key question is, who gets the water 
and at what cost, and what kind of theories need to be drawn upon for 
understanding this very serious issue. Shwetal pointed out that after 
the communal riots of 1992, Ahmedabad was referred to as two cities. One 
side is more developed, this is the “IIM side”; the other is the 
“chawl/pol/Muslim side”. This dichotomy is systematically built up. The 
IIM side is run by the “sophisticated bureaucracy” of the Ahmedabad 
Urban Development Association, while the “chawl” side is run by the 
Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and is looked on as “traditional and 
stagnant”. The lower-income groups dependent on the AMC have a different 
set of struggles regarding infrastructure; the local landowning castes 
have sold their property for non-agricultural purposes, such as the 
building of restaurants, multiplexes, apartments, servicing the 
high-income groups who demand better infrastructure. Dipu commented that 
the paper was solidly researched, but more in the way of a 
“consultancy”; the statistics had little to do with the actual 
ground-level struggle for water. Also, the paper needed to work out the 
resource base with regard to the pricing of water in the informal 
sector: these new findings would make the research original; research 
“should be more than numbers.”

Following Sirisha Indukuri's presentation, Vivek remarked that the paper 
was an “impressive literature review” which brings together a range of 
issues and tries to break down the dichotomy of the urban as a built 
environment and the rural as “natural” environment. He asked for a 
definition of urban ecology: why do we need to demarcate it, why not 
just go ahead and “do” it, pick a case study and interrogate the concept 
through it. The paper needs to engage critically with the texts used, in 
this expanding field. Biological issues, religious cosmology, urban 
planning and other discourses are also involved, have to be studied in a 
focused manner, as we try to understand the shrinking commons of the 
city and the liminal zones of urban sprawl. Vivek asked if there was a 
difference between urban ecology and urban studies. Anthropological and 
ecological discourses are a bit discredited in how they relate to 
scientific methodology, and their relationship to biological discourse. 
Ravikant commented that the “net is not wide enough” with regard to the 
interlinking of categories, and that the language borrowed between 
disciplines is not problematized at all. Communities get constituted 
through language, through tropes are borrowed from cultural sources, 
like the Ramlila. This trend is not problematized either. Dipu suggested 
that the researcher foreground what she was personally interested in and 
passionate about, and construct the complexity of the debate with this 
at the core. According to Yasmin, the paper is caught up in dualisms, 
which have been discarded in the discourses of anthropology and 
sociology quite a while ago. She remarked that she was not sure if water 
and air could be essentialized as values, since they have profoundly 
different larger implications and meanings for urban and rural contexts.

Following Jayani Bonerjee's presentation on the politics of space, 
community and ethnic identity in Kolkata's Chinatown area, the 
discussion focused on the differentiation between “community” and 
“neighbourhood”, terms which tended to be used interchangeably but had 
very different implications. Ritika commented that formal planning 
discourse, which implies a uniformity of lifestyle, does not take into 
account the heterogeneity of communities. Jayani clarified that she was 
not judging anything, but merely pointing out a certain strand of 
developmental logic within the debate: her use of the term “community” 
implied a spatial dimension, not a cultural one. Dipu suggested that it 
might be a good idea to study localities established before planning 
became mandatory: the older “paras” and “mohallas”. The study could 
explore Chinese identity issues and racism as manifested in the planning 
discourse; and whether they were being selected for purposes of 
“cultural tourism”. He asked if the researcher had found any evidence 
that the Chinese were scapegoated for “clean-up” by Kolkata authorities, 
as it was common to target politically/economically marginalized groups 
when planning strategies were put into operation.

Solly remarked that the paper was “critically astute” with regard to 
resettlement politics, but needed to present material from the 
interviews with community residents. There are different political 
economies involved, a cross-platform of the discourses of development, 
environment, tourism: is planning a way of exercising social control in 
all these areas? Sadan added that ethnicity had definitely become a 
commodity in the global market, and this opened up the complex terrain 
of assimilation, a packaged Chinatown, complete with the relevant 
exotica, and ready to be marketed. Jayani replied that this was not her 
research focus; that she was interested in comparing the old Chinatown 
in central Kolkata with the newer enclave. Urban planning had introduced 
physical changes in the newer segment, but could not penetrate the older 
one, it remained an ethnic pocket and resisted being modernized. Ravi 
Sundaram stated that US urban planning had mastered the art of combining 
ethnicity with tourism/heritage development. The notion of community and 
neighbourhood had become globalized; the representation of self had 
fissured, or become diasporic. Nothing had escaped commodification, 
everything in a market economy was commodified. The interesting question 
was of power, property, control, the key issue was of material space. 
Sooner or later, identity would also enter this circuit.

20 August 2004

Panel 1/ Work and Space

/Sumit Roy and Saumya B.Verma /Mass Communication Research Institute, 
Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi _/finisafricae at gmx.net/_ 
<mailto:finisafricae at gmx.net>; /vermasaumya at rediffmail.com/
“Architectures of Sociability: Workers' Coffee Houses of Delhi, a Case 
Study of the Tent and Mohan Singh Place Coffee Houses”

This paper attempts to create a narrative about two significant domains 
that provided Delhi's public with the possibility of a distinctive mode 
of sociality, culture, national and local politics. The dynamic space of 
the coffee house is posited as an ideal catalyst for the shaping of 
modern urban sensibilities.

/Syed Khalid Jamal /Mass Communication Research Institute, Jamia Millia 
Islamia, Delhi
/zzjamal at rediffmail.com/
“The Work Culture at Fast Food Chains and Restaurants”

This paper explored the economic, social and psychological impact of 
fast food chains upon the workforce, using participatory research 
methodology. The effort is to understand the parameters of fast food as 
a global industry, as well as the particulars of the lives of the 
employees, their aspirations, illusions and dreams.

/N.R.Levin /Delhi University, Delhi _/nrlevin at indiatimes.com/_ 
<mailto:nrlevin at indiatimes.com>
“Body Odour as Social Order in Colonial and Postcolonial Kerala”

The study analyzed the patterns of social/sexual discrimimation and 
'othering' established through local olfactory regimes and their 
cultural associations, for instance fish, attar, etc. It also focused on 
the methods of policing and manipulating the image of the female body as 
cultural property available for utilization by the state, for tourism 
and related profit-making industries.

The first presentation was followed by an animated discussion. Jerry, 
who was the discussant, said he liked the way the paper was written but 
at times, as an outsider to Delhi, he found the narrative a bit “loose”. 
He suggested that the focus stay on the particular mode of sociality 
fostered by the coffee house, and other views on the space be included. 
Aarti said that she had enjoyed the paper and was curious about how the 
narrative had been pieced together, the research process. Ravi Sundaram 
felt that the paper was a bit “overwritten” and needed some editing in 
terms of paring down the style; it made an interesting story, but the 
“adjectivized” introduction and conclusion which built up the Kodak 
colour” could be avoided. Taking up the paper's allusion to Habermas's 
concept of a public space for “non-instrumental communication”, he said 
this was characteristic specially of 18^th century European coffee house 
culture, and the narrative of political mobilization that the paper had 
included, was not intrinsically part of this. If reworked, the paper had 
the potential to accommodate both kinds of narrative. Ravikant pointed 
out that the coffee house was popular among writers and intellectuals of 
the Hindi literary circuit; new historians writing in Hindi had produced 
many “thick” descriptions of the coffee house movement, but these were 
not that well-known. The paper could include some comparative analysis.

Jeebesh commented that he had enjoyed the paper and also appreciated the 
visuals (handbills and posters that were projected). It provided an 
insight into the print culture of the past, a different entry point into 
the public's encounter with print. The housewife's letter of protest was 
particularly intriguing, because it demonstrated a specific node of 
circulation of print culture, a relationship of a different order. 
Saumya added that the effort to create gazettes for the price rise 
resistance movement included groups of four to five people wearing paper 
chogas inscribed with anti-hoarding slogans; thus clad, the groups would 
go down streets picketing shops suspected of hoarding, etc. Prabhu said 
that he also found the descriptions of the price rise resistance 
movement fascinating. The small group of highly articulate coffee house 
patrons—government servants, intellectuals, journalists---expanded into 
a dispersed public through the political mobilization against the price 
rise. This perhaps could connect to the fact of Nehru's death and the 
new state government trying to create its own public. This was always a 
male public, and the housewife's concern that the coffee house as an 
“adda” had a negative influence upon the patrons, could serve as an 
entry point into an analysis of the gendered nature of coffee house 
sociality. Anand suggested that some sociological comparison be done 
with contemporary coffee house culture fostered by the presence of large 
chains like Barista.

Syed Khalid Jamal's exploration of the work culture of fast food chains 
used the methodology of participatory observation: he worked in Pizza 
Hut himself for the purpose of collecting data, and said that it was 
very difficult to record his findings. He did not tell his subjects that 
he was researching them, and they related to him as a friend and 
colleague, which provoked feelings of guilt in him. He also made 
observations regarding the work culture in Pizza Corner, McDonald's and 
Barista. He began by describing the Nirula's advertisment, which offers 
workers “serious money”, and Domino's, which offer “cool money”--Rs 
13/hour, for 12-hour shifts. In general the workers have to often take 
abuse from customers; if customers complain to the manager, the worker 
is then berated by his superiors. The workers were commanded to 
compulsorily “smile”, be patient and accomodating at all times, never 
argue with the customer, and take all abuse with a “smile”. The 
management is opposed to workers being friends, and to the workers being 
social with customers, on any level.

Khaled said that his fluency in English was an advantage as he was put 
to work in the front of the restaurant, interfacing with the customers, 
whereas those who were not fluent were relegated to the kitchen. Also, 
“charming faces” were preferred in the front, “ugly faces” in the 
kitchen. The management did not want workers to speak in Hindi, but most 
workers struggled with English, at the most they were comfortable with 
describing the items on the menu. There was a very high turnover of 
workers, because of the low wages, an average of Rs 2200/month. The 
workers stole money and food, according to an elaborate system of verbal 
codes that the management could not interpret. Workers and workplaces 
were regularly inspected by teams from the head office and official 
consultants, who had their own means of monitoring employees and 
reporting discrepancies. There was a good deal of bonding among workers 
in different fast food chains, who compared notes and worked out schemes 
to dupe the management together. Most workers who stayed in the low-paid 
and oppressive jobs in fast food chains did so from financial necessity, 
and because “Western” work represented a particular kind of progress and 
acculturation in their scheme of aspirations; also because they hoped 
this diverse site would create broader social horizons and perhaps a 
wider range of supportive acquaintances and possible partners.

Udita and Meghna, who were to present their paper in a later session, 
were discussants following the presentation. They remarked that they 
appreciated the anecdotal value of the narrative, but it was too focused 
on the researcher's self and needed to include more opinions from other 
sources. The paper also needed to analyze the nature of “fast food”, and 
ask if the fast food site is more than just a busy restaurant; also, 
analyze the workers' self-image in more detail, as well as the networks, 
friendships, socialization patterns that were created by the particular 
context. Ravi Sundaram commented that he liked the paper's reflective 
stance and the way it brought out different worlds; this line of inquiry 
could be pursued. Dipu asked what implications the study brought out. If 
the paper was read as a study of space, it was adequate; if read as a 
study of work, it was inadequate. It was crucial to understand how the 
mandated “smile” restructured the work experience; the “smile” was not 
an innocent signifier.

The presentation by Levin attempted to look at the experience of the 
fishworker community, in particular fisherwomen, in the “new” city, a 
space which was being heavily marketed for the global tourism industry, 
using the new triadic mantra of ayurveda, spirituality and aromatherapy. 
Among other things, the study described the traditional Malayali 
obsession with cleanliness and its relationship to the construction of 
the (female) body as a sensual object. As the city was made cleaner to 
attract tourists, there was a parallel demand that the movements of 
“unclean” people such as butchers, vendors and fisherwomen be 
controlled, and that these groups (lower castes, traditionally 
considered foul and polluted) be urged to clean themselves by using 
soaps and detergents. There are several mythologies around the smell of 
fish, and community leaders tell of a time when this was considered 
seductive; but today the same smell is considered offensive, and those 
who carry the smell are similarly considered offensive, particularly 
women. Fisherwomen are also “sniffed” by their menfolk when they return 
from vending, to check for smells of tobacco or attar, which signify 
that the woman has been in contact with non-community males; attar is 
associated with Muslim men. The paper contrasted this with the image of 
the virtuous, immaculately clean and decorously garbed respectable city 
woman, hair fragrant with the smell of jasmine flowers and coconut oil, 
that is part of the state's cultural ideology and foregrounded in the 
discourse around tourism. The paper concluded that there had been a 
complete elision of the history of sensibilities, of touch, smell, sound 
and taste; we need to recover this history, and map its trajectories.

Sadan was the discussant for this paper. He noted that Levin's study was 
part of a larger project around development discourse in Kerala, and 
that the paper posed questions at two levels: body odour and its 
relationship to the sexual regimes constructed around the 
(transgressive) bodies of fisherwomen; and the construction of odour 
itself as a commodity in a global economy, for the profit-making tourist 
industry. He asked if the city as a space was responsible for catalyzing 
particular modes of social/sexual categorization and community dynamics, 
and suggested that the research could also explore concepts of body 
odour in relation to the advent of the colonial knowledge system in the 
late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, when the colonized body was 
perceived in a different register. He also asked why the paper did not 
speak of how the fisherwomen perceived themselves; Levin replied that he 
had only spoken to male community leaders, and that it was very 
difficult for him, as a male researcher, to convince the fisherwomen to 
speak with him openly or frankly. Sadan added that in north India too a 
discourse of sanitation and hygiene was deployed to enforce rigid caste 
stratification.

Yasmin also asked why Levin had excluded male bodies from his analysis. 
Ravikant commented that “unusual subjects raised unusual expectations”. 
He recalled the last chapter of Raj Kamal Jha's novel /The Blue 
Bedspread/, in which a tribal woman carrying datuns to sell in the 
market is part of an informal exploitative dynamic between her and a 
policeman, which she negotiates within a matrix of cultural assumptions 
of working-class women and women belonging to particular castes and 
communities, who are looked upon as more promiscuous and also more 
available. Sadan recalled a short story by Manto based on the body odour 
of a labourer and the feeling of nostalgia it evokes. Dipu pointed out 
that the study focused on the intersection of the development agenda 
with a cultural reform movement; and also raised issues about the 
constructions of the self in modernization discourse, on an individual 
and community level.

Jeebesh commented that just as the Inuit had dozens of words for “snow”, 
snow being a primary presence in the life of those tribes, societies 
might narrate smell through particular lexicons. It might be interesting 
to take the 1990s as the conjuncture and the rail compartment as the 
site for such analysis. He gave an example from the French cultural 
theorist Deleuze, who spoke of a conflict in a taxi between the 
passenger who wished to smoke and the driver who objected to this. The 
matter went to court, which ruled in favour of the passenger. The ruling 
centred around the logic of property, the driver claimed that the 
vehicle is his property but the court stated that having paid the fare, 
the passenger had in effect rented that property for the duration of the 
ride. In the 1990s there would have been no case at all, because the 
discourse of public health, including that of smell, had been 
constructed as a regulatory apparatus with regard to public space.

Prabhu Mohapatra pointed to the interesting case of Ma Amritanandmayi, a 
renowned contemporary sadhavi from a fisher caste, who blesses her 
devotess, numbering hundreds of thousands the world over, through 
hugging each one. Ritika asked how fisherwomen looked at their 
contributions to the household economy, as they were the wage-earners, 
and whether this fact gave them leverage with regard to being controlled 
by their husbands. Iram wanted to know whether the system of policing 
the bodies of Hindu fisherwomen (as evidenced by their suspicious 
“sniffing” husbands alert for “Muslim” smells) also operated with regard 
to the bodies of Muslim women, were these sniffed for “Hindu” smells. 
Smriti recalled Syed Khaled Jamal's earlier presentation on the workers 
in fast food chains, and the command that they had to always smile at 
the customers. Just as the underpaid and underprivileged worker was not 
seen as an individual but as a mechanical component of his labour, e.g., 
the fast food worker became fused with a signifier, his mandatory smile, 
the fisherwomen underwent a similar dehumanization and became fused with 
the key signifier of their labour, the smell of fish. Such 
conscious/unconscious objectification further erased and excluded those 
already in a stigmatized and marginalized position.

Ravi Sundaram pointed out that the idea of smell as a marker of change 
was actually quite an old concept and became sharpened by modernity, but 
this assertion needed to be more nuanced. The research would become 
stronger if it included some anthropological exploration of perceptions 
of the “other” and how smell played a role in constructing the other; 
and if it mapped the transitions between the changed/changing perceptions.

Levin clarified that discrimination on the basis of smell did occur in 
villages and semi-urban settlements, but the city seemed to be the site 
of maximum discrimination. It was alleged that in the pre-colonial era a 
missionary could identify a fisher village from a distance, through its 
smell. Levin added that as he walked through the fishing villages, his 
primary index in terms of spatial orientation was not visual but 
olfactory. With regard to the women's own sense of their bodies, he 
replied that he did not know, nor were their perspectives recorded in 
folk songs or the oral tradition, most of which was composed by men. 
Male fishworkers tended to spend their earnings on themselves, liquor, 
clothes, etc. Women were the mainstay of the household economically. 
Since many Muslim localities did not permit Hindus to enter, he had been 
unable, as a researcher, to access female Muslim subjects.

Panel 3/ Visual Cultures
/
Udita Bhargava and Meghana Singh/, Mass Communication Research 
Institute, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi; /udita_bhargava at hotmail.com/; 
_/meghna369 at hotmail.com/_ <mailto:meghna369 at hotmail.com>
“Digital Delhi”

The study analyzed various formats of the digital medium as these 
percolate and circulate within urban society. It aims to show how 
digital technology has entered social spaces, transformed these spaces 
and their inhabitants. It assesses the agility, mobility and efficiency 
that digital technology creates for producers, entrepreneurs and 
practitioners.

/Arpita Guha Thakurta/Jadavpur University, Kolkata 
/redefiningreality at rediffmail.com/
“Mrinal Sen's Calcutta: City as the Site for Regression and Radicalism”

This study explores the sociocultural zeitgeist of Calcutta as 
represented in the films of Mrinal Sen in the 1970s and '80s. It looks 
at Sen as a political radical and as a chronicler of urban angst, 
analyzing the aesthetic strategies deployed, and comparing the 
distraught, dissenting earlier films with the more tranquil, reflective 
mode of the later phase.

/Manoj Kumar/ Delhi University, Delhi /manojlenin at yahoo.co.in/
“/Nabbe ke Dashak mein /Jansatta/* *evam /Navbharat Times/ mein 
Prakashit Film Sameeksha ka Dastavezikaran evam Vishleshan” (The 
Documentation and Study of Film Reviews Published in /Jansatta/ and 
/Navbharat Times/: A Case Study of the 1990s)/

This research documents and traces the cultural perspectives, language 
and iconography of film reviews in /Jansatta/ and /Navbharat Times, /two 
leading national daily newspapers, as part of the nascent discourse of 
media studies taking shape in Hindi in the 1990s.

/Aparna Malviya/ Allahabad University, Allahabad 
/aparnamalviya at yahoo.co.in/
“/Lok Sthanon ka Bhavishya” /(The Future of Public Spaces)

This paper examined the socioeconomic usage of particular urban locales 
in Allahabad. The effort was to map the city as a dynamic zone which 
accomodated and assimilated community needs. It assessed the 
psychological impact of new urban cartographies upon those groups 
dependent upon that contested terrain for their material survival.

/Anupam Pachauri /Central Institute of Education, Delhi University
“/Paigham Sarkar Bahadur ka: Rajya evam Samaj ka Sarkari Ishteharon 
dwara Sanrachit EkPortrait”/ (The Ruler's Edict: A Portrait of the State 
and Society Reconstructed through Government Advertisments)

This study was a semiotic analysis of government advertisments/hoardings 
in particular urban sites. The aim was to explore the aesthetics and 
politics underlying the state-sponsored choice of particular texts and 
iconographies, and evaluate the impact of such messaging upon various 
specifically targeted publics.

Udita and Meghna's presentation was in the form of a short film, a 
compilation of interviews with people about their relationship with new 
digital technologies. The subjects were from across the socioeconomic 
spectrum, and had a range of responses to the questions. The research 
findings indicated that subjects from privileged backgrounds and were 
professionally trained in the use of this technology seemed to use it to 
create a discourse of aesthetics through creative projects. “It's not 
just about dabbling with switches,” says an upper-middle class part-time 
disc jockey and sound designer. A migrant from Rajasthan who came to the 
city some years ago and learnt to operate a camera, then opened a video 
rental business, learnt how to use the new technology on his own, and 
keeps up with new developments. He employs people from similar 
backgrounds and feels that the new technology has great emancipatory 
potential. A lecturer in a mass communication research institute spoke 
about the amateur/professional divide, and about negotiating the 
transition from analog to digital technology. Older professionals found 
this transition different and also have a different perspective: they 
consider that new technology tends to suppress creativity on some level, 
is removed from reality and “purity” of sound, and is too 
machine-intensive.

A subject who started out as a janitor and then trained himself to 
become a cameraman and has achieved professional success also commented 
on the “symbolic value” of an academic degree. The researchers said they 
had not expected such diversity of response. The varied opinions 
problematized the complacent assumptions about the “elitist” nature of 
technology, and a prevalent anxiety that technology would render things 
“all too simple”, and subdue creativity.

Arpita Guha Thakurta was the discussant for this paper. She asked why 
the researchers had chosen as subjects only those people for whom 
technology was a blessing, and not to those who had “lost out” or been 
displaced by technology. Also, the concept of the “digital other” needed 
to be fleshed out, as did the examination of the “social spaces” that 
digital technology had created and transformed. Meghna and Udita 
responded by saying they were not supporting or criticizing the use of 
digital technology, but studying its character as a sociocultural and 
socioeconomic interface.

Rakesh commented that the study seemed to be “stuck” between the studio 
and the camera. The researchers said they recognized this limitation, 
and that they had intentionally narrowed their field so that it did not 
become too unwieldy. Dipu remarked that the interviews should have been 
presented more fully, that their richness was not reflected. This was 
because of the
way the interviews were structured, the researchers could have engaged 
the speakers in conversation and created a dialogic format, rather than 
just present direct narration by the subjects. Khaled complimented the 
researchers on selecting subjects who were self-trained and did not have 
any link to technology earlier in their lives, but for whom technology 
had become a central focus as it was their means of livelihood. Ravikant 
pointed out that while the presentation did create a sense of the kinds 
of new skills that the subjects picked up through using new technology, 
it did not focus enough on the way the user/practitioner's self was 
transformed, as was his/her relationship to society at large.

Jeebesh's concern was a larger structural question: the analog movement 
had needed massive infrastructural support and investment, but with 
digital technology the costs were lower and dispersed. Today it was 
possible to enter the digital domain as a user. In this regard, what was 
the rationale behind creating and endorsing formal infrastructure such 
as media schools and mass communication institutes? Sabina Gadihoke said 
that formal academic training ensured that one “did learn a little 
extra”, but technology could always be used informally, for creative 
purposes. Using digital technology, so-called “untrained” people were 
innovating and exhibiting and subverting, continually, but there was 
still a need for institutes that provided formal grounding and taught 
media arts/technology as a professional and aesthetic discipline. Ravi 
Sundaram pointed out that the issue involved more than the breaking of 
hierarchies. Certain hierarchies and binaries did dissolve with new 
technology, but others would take their place; new hierarchies would be 
established that would still invest an academic degree with value. The 
debate was not about creativity or aesthetics, but about a fundamental 
change in the discourse of technological innovation in the field of media.

Prabhu Mohapatra's concluding remarks focused on the “network”, the key 
operating concept in any frame of urban research, a particular strand 
within the larger research question regarding ways of seeing the city. 
The “network” was a productive entry point into ways of rendering 
research on the city. The contemporary city had gone through a process 
of transition from the older traditional binaries between modernity and 
tradition, which formed the primary categories of analysis. The modern 
city was a set of networks; but one had to be careful about abandoning 
the earlier categories altogether. The “network” was not a radical new 
concept but another window through which to see. Taking up a category 
involved its fracture and further nuancing of perspective, including 
perspectives on the older categories. He defined a network as a 
relationship between several nodes. The nodes could be individuals, 
communities, clusters of communities, institutions, etc. The network was 
a dense congregation of relationships; all networks were deeply 
relational. The hierarchies and parallels within the relationships had 
to be constantly scrutinized.

According to Prabhu, the network was not simply a conduit or channel, 
but also embodied information within itself; it was not simply a 
connection but also embodied sets of resources that were accessible only 
through and within the network. The earlier categories carried within 
them a notion of stasis and fixity; a network was necessarily mobile, 
and certain practices had to be created within it to ensure its 
efficient activation. A network could also be looked at as a practical 
orientation to the world,. In addition, networks had a significant 
relationship to time; in effect, networks were “congealed time”, were 
“deeply temporal entities”. With regard to research methodology, the 
first fact that should be assimilated is that the urban is an entity of 
several kinds of contradictions. The city was double-edged; it was 
segmented as well as unified, and all research on the city has to be 
expansive as well as rooted. He remarked that historians were 
necessarily worried and consumed by time, the specificity of the moment, 
how similar/dissimilar the particular moment in time was to other 
junctures. History cannot be read or written as if it was a frozen 
entity. A sense of temporality had to be foregrounded, as did a 
commitment to the process of social mapping through time.

Arpita Guha Thakurta's presentation on the films of Mrinal Sen included 
clips from his well-known movie /Calcutta. /As discussant following the 
paper, Shwetal asked why the last sequence of /Calcutta/ was missing, an 
archival mystery. She also asked about the film as a form of social 
commentary; its gender perspectives and sensitivity, and whether there 
was a cinematic equivalent of /ecriture feminin.* */Arpita replied that 
film as a form could accommodate everything. Sen's films were 
consciously counter-realist, and adoped Brechtian modes and strategies 
to “break the attachment that realism demands.” She added that women are 
not more liberated today, but the forms of exploitation have changed, as 
compared with some forms seen in the films. Sen's characters are not 
posited as individuals—they are representatives of certain emotions, 
events and states.

Ravi Vasudevan remarked that he had not seen Sen's films of the '70s “as 
they are difficult to find”, but it was an interesting exercise to 
disaggregate the films into their elements and analyze which signifiers 
are highlighted as motifs. The standard critique of Sen is that he is a 
“pamphleteer”--how is this role distinct from a mode of public 
intervention? He is both melodramatic and Brechtian, using ironic 
compositions and standard syntax together, in his expressive imaginary. 
This is a distinctive attitude, far more subtle than a pampleteer's 
approach. Ravi asked if there was a history of debate with regard to the 
use of montage, editing patterns and structures that alert us to 
different ways of looking at the city. There was such a thing as too 
much expressive underwriting, the disembodying of certain conventions. 
But this was also useful as it made the spectator position 
himself/herself differently, while acknowledging that the film resorted 
to typecasting rather than psychological portraiture. Two themes that 
could be identified in the films were, first, a critique of patriarchal 
modes of regulation; and second, the question of how public and private 
spaces were accessed and shared. The hypocrisy of the Bengali middle 
class was another theme Sen explored with a distinctive cinematic 
imaginary.

Jeebesh remarked that he liked the Mrinal Sen films of the '70s, but not 
the later Sen films. He added that new film scholarship today paid very 
little attention to image. The mostly hand-held camera techniques of Sen 
were a contrast to the flow of images in popular cinema, Sen's shots of 
disconnect are his means of fitting into the polarities set up of 
Calcutta as a complex city. Sen manages to create sharp and deeply 
affective moments, such as the alienated event of “the unknown death”: 
this has social weight. It implies a social memory and subjectivity that 
is not dragged into narrative. Cinema should focus on this weight, the 
excess residue that leaves us a different trace of Calcutta, a quality 
that is not assimilated. For instance, there is a shot of a person 
running---a long, exploratory, expansive shot; the images should provoke 
the spectator to think about how the city is captured in the space and 
time of that run.

Ravi Sundaram supported Jeebesh's insistence that everything not be 
subordinated to narrative. The cinematic challenge was to show this 
through form, to resist integrating every complexity and tension into a 
unity. He pointed out that the Calcutta of that time was the centre of 
controversial, contested and active politics, expressed in public 
discourse. Cinema about those times naturally would show this larger 
scheme. Jeebesh added that the sensorial world of films should register 
a different order of experience, move outside the boundaries of 
intellect, should “haunt” the viewer. Close-ups of excesses and violence 
of any kind created a different sensory experience, technically. Aarti 
asked if images could be autonomous, and whether they could only be 
accessed through a particular language, a specific semiology. For 
instance, the Russian audiences who saw /Mera Naam Joker /would 
interpret this according to their own cultural narratives and history; 
but the larger question was whether there was something about the image 
of the joker that resists being assimilated.

Rakesh was the discussant for Manoj Kumar's presentation on film 
criticism in Hindi. He asked why the researcher had chosen two prominent 
dailies with good social standing, and disregarded other “good” 
publications, and also disregarded the tabloids. He acknowledged that 
the archiving/library system of Hindi media publications was not 
extensive, but there did exist resources which could be utilized. Anand 
commented that film critics were also mouthpieces and proponents for 
particular interests. The B and C-grade film circuits travel to 
provincial towns and villages, but there is no knowledge of which films 
are reviewed, and where. There might be some such archive in Mumbai. 
Lokesh pointed out the film news and interviews appeared in /Punjab 
Kesri/ on Thursdays; criticism was a main item but the supplements also 
focused on reviews, plot summary, gossip, etc. Ravikant asked how the 
researcher saw the relationship between film advertising and criticism.

Jeebesh remarked that the research brought out the difference between 
“cheap” culture and “high”, serious, reflective literature. It was 
necessary to interrogate the standard, deconstruct the ideological 
binary between “high” and “low” culture, and remain aware of what is 
reified and valorized through criticism. It also raised the larger 
question of the “social construction of taste”, and asks who constructs 
the idea of the artist, as well as the definition of art. These issues 
may not seem politically very important in public discourse today, but 
the social understanding of taste, the nature and place of the author, 
and the battle with the censor board over the freedom to create and 
exhibit and circulate “cheap” art---the debate needs to focus on these 
areas. Ravikant clarified that art cinema and Hindi literature have 
created a dominant standard of discourse in Hindi, and this exercises a 
“grip” that does not let us enjoy films for whatever they bring us. Such 
a standard is the enemy of pleasure. Shwetal added that film publicity 
and advertising often gives totally wrong information, and that the 
brand positioning of the publication decides the status of the movie and 
the politics of review. The errors are not noticed or corrected; 
instead, they are magnified and replicated, and thus the circuit of 
non-meaning gets reinforced.

Aparna's project, which included visuals, focused on the way public 
space was used in Allahabad, the various populations and communities who 
survived on the streets and used the street as their primary living 
space and also as the primary space in which and through which they eked 
out a livelihood. She also studied the way people used public gardens. 
She studied patterns of communication, sociality, the blurring and 
coalescing of public and private spaces through usage and settlement 
patterns; she also observed how the organization of space influenced 
attitudes, behaviour and language. She concluded that different publics 
need different spaces to be structured according to their needs. For 
those on the socioeconomic margins, migrants and labourers (who said 
they had no use for a park/garden, they would rather see space utilized 
for the construction of public latrines as they did not have even this 
basic amenity).

Levin, the discussant for this paper, commented that the state had tried 
to set itself up as the custodian of citizens' privacy; and that there 
was an implied statism in the project. The researcher needed to question 
the nature of the “public” as an abstraction; “public” was an embodied 
entity and changed over time; the changes needed to be mapped. In her 
study, only the middle class seemed to be putting forward legitimate 
claims to exclusive space; the research needed to be more sensitive to 
issues of deep social inequality and differential access to resources. 
Rakesh wished to know what was distinctive about public space in 
Allahabad, specific to local history. He also asked why the researcher, 
when speaking of encroachment on public land, had not mentioned the 
Sangam area, which had been taken over by mahants for their akharas.

Aparna responded that she had not wished to enter any debates about the 
alienation induced by urban life, nor was encroachment the focus of her 
study. Her intention was to point to the fact that people had no place 
to live their lives. Ravikant noted that he liked the “moral ambiguity” 
the paper was grappling with and the manner in which it described how 
people built their own relationships with the space they occupied. He 
cited the example of observing a Muslim in the Sangam area, who was too 
intimidated by Hindu presence to bring himself to take a bath at a 
mahant-dominated ghat; he moved off to a more general, more crowded and 
by implication a more secular ghat.

Jeebesh suggested that it might be productive for the researcher to 
conceptually separate “place” and “space”---there was a tension between 
the idea of a lived space, which had an ambiguous connection with a more 
general notion of place. The paper needed to push this ambiguity, work 
out how to deal with the specificities of specific zones. Dipu said he 
was not sure why the paper seemed to foreground the notion of an 
unmarked public space; the fact was that even public spaces had markers. 
At different times of the day, different people used the same space for 
different purposes, and thus radically altered its character. His 
impression of Allahabad, after an earlier visit, was of it being 
spacious and empty; but the paper claimed it was densely textured and 
inhabited, teeming with life; this strand of the narrative could be 
developed. Smriti asked if there was something disturbing about the 
image of the vegetable sellers outside a historic library in Allahabad, 
and asked whether such activity would have been permitted outside the 
Rashtrapati Bhavan, for instance. A different moral weight was being 
assigned to different activities; the vegetables were life-sustaining in 
every way, for vendors and customers, yet given less respect than books 
few people read and a building no one, including the state, cared to 
maintain. Osama remarked that the paper needed to establish some 
periodicity, without which the details and descriptions of people's 
lives remained snapshots. Aparna acknowledged that she had not been able 
to satisfactorily make a distinction between “space” and “place”; and 
that the library had great historical significance as it had been a 
central site in the freedom struggle, like the park where Chandrashekhar 
Azad was shot and killed.

The final presentation, by Anupam Pachauri, focused on government 
hoardings she mapped along the Ring Road in Delhi. She assessed the city 
as a political and sociological entity within which various publics were 
constituted by state discourse and where identities were contested. She 
cited the example of Jahangirpuri where a large number of Gujaratis 
live; the state had made provisions for the celebration of Janamashtami 
on a large scale, thus entering the realm of popular culture and 
celebration. In such a case, what belonged to the state and what 
belonged to the community? On one hand, the state was enacting the role 
of the “liberal parent” participating in the “moral development” of 
those in its charge, through sending out gentle messages to its 
citizens: “Don't litter”, “Don't urinate here”, “Speed Thrills But 
Kills”, etc. There was no threat of punitive action if the injunction 
was violated. Similarly, it urged citizens not to get trapped in various 
addictions, by using the obvious logic that children needed their 
parents. It was not clear who was being targeted in these advertisments. 
Some had clear intent: warnings against HIV/AIDS infection; women being 
urged to go for breast cancer check-ups; signage providing information 
about gastroenteritis, cholera and diarrhoea. Perhaps the state was also 
issuing invitations to citizens to be part of a collective 
sharing/responsibility, as when during Diwali, it ran successful 
anti-firework campaigns with children being the prime actors.

Ravikant opened the discussion following the presentation with the 
comment that the research had confined itself to the semiotics of state 
discourse; private/non-state discourse should also be included in the 
analysis. There was a convergence of these discourses. He asked why 
“multinational” advertisments were so successful, being professionally 
produced, in comparison to “feeble” government advertisments; the 
copywriters had been defeated, and there was no answer to the question 
of why the government advertisments were not taken seriously or simply 
ignored. Also, there were three levels of state discourse to be 
negotiated, including intra-level discourse: the ruling party, the Delhi 
state government, and the national government. How were these 
relationships negotiated semiotically? He urged the researcher to expand 
her project and look at other signs and texts, and the advertisments 
that appeared on the radio, television channels, and in print. Dipu 
suggested that the research critically analyze the thinking behind the 
signage: why is so much spent on hoardings in the areas of health and 
education. Is it to educate/raise consciousness about important issues, 
survival issues? Who is being addressed? What about signs that police 
the public? How does one connect this to the economics of signage, the 
colossal amounts advertising agencies earn from “multinational” clients, 
as compared to what they are paid by the government?

Rakesh stated that the advertisments were gender-biased; he also pointed 
out the paradox that it was a legal offence for the public to write on 
walls, but the state had invested itself with full rights to issue 
commands with authority, wherever it pleased. There was also a change in 
the logic used; for instance, the standard injunction to parents to not 
get minors married had changed to assertions of autonomy, with the young 
people of legal age stating in the sign that they were ready now to get 
married. Smriti commented that the iconography of the government signage 
was unconvincing, distorted and simplistic, hence did not attract the 
eye. The signage with regard to AIDS in particular was gothic and 
designed to arouse anxiety. She gave the example of the government 
jingle for vasectomy that was regularly broadcast on the radio but never 
present as a public sign, perhaps because this subject was not 
considered appropriate, or perhaps it was too difficult to visualize an 
acceptable signifier.

Sadan suggested that the researcher document her sources, formal and 
informal, her assistants and her interlocutors, more systematically.

The final hour of the workshop was an interactive feedback session. Ravi 
Sundaram remarked that the workshop this year had been planned keeping 
in mind that the stipendiaries needed backup from Sarai for their 
research projects. Hence the condition that students send in their 
papers in order for some preliminary feedback and dialogue, before the 
research entered its later stages. A lot of students worked on their 
own, without institutional support. Sarai was planning to include a 
conceptual essay on its website, with links on the available resources. 
Solly added that he would be hosting a proper urban studies list as 
well. Dipu asked the stipendiaries if, in their experience, there was a 
“disconnect” between the kind of research Sarai expects and what was 
expected by the academic institutions/universities in general. Shwetal 
remarked that it was “ingrained” in students to present the theoretical 
aspects of their work, not the practitioner focus. Ravi replied that 
formal academic training today doesn't encourage original practice. The 
preliminary workshop next year would include a session on narrative 
strategies and also, most crucially, on aspects and techniques of 
presentation, so that the students would not overrun the time allotted 
to them, which had happened repeatedly during the sessions.

Ravikant recalled a comment by Khaled earlier in the day, that research 
was “fun”, and asked if other researchers agreed. Jerry said that 
research was fun experientially, and it was actually a “beautiful” sense 
of freedom in knowing that the research did not have to conform to the 
academic pattern. Dipu suggested that if all the papers were circulated 
in advance, there would be more opportunity for them to speak to each 
other. Anupam asked if it was possible to put the students on a separate 
list, like the Reader List, so that they could share findings and also 
express anxieties about fieldwork, etc. Shwetal countered this by saying 
she was relieved when she learnt that she did not have to give web 
updates regarding her work. Ravi Sundaram clarified that the list is not 
about reporting to Sarai, it is about discussing issues with one's 
peers, and a way to bring about new collaborations. Most suggestions and 
useful entry points come from this source. Sarai is “interested in 
ideas, but not in being reported to.” Sadan, as organizer of the 
workshop and coordinator of the stipendship programme, also said that 
Sarai was not a funding agency, but was interested in building 
intellectual resources and rendering these in the public domain. He also 
inquired whether the CD reader that had been given to the stipendiaries 
as a resource/reference at the preliminary workshop, had been used, and 
to what extent; and also posed the general question as to whether the 
practice-based research emphasized by Sarai was “helping” the students 
academically, or whether it was a “hindrance”. Jerry said that “the best 
part” was that Sarai allowed him to do what he wanted to do, there was 
no pressure of the typical academic kind. Anupam remarked that she 
understood her academic practice better, through her stipendiary 
research; it allowed her to see what she had been unable to earlier see. 
Shwetal said that she felt she might be able to develop her research 
paper into a dissertation, in the future, as it had opened up a rande of 
new interests and interdisciplinary possibilities.