[Reader-list] ifellows: participants and presentation abstracts

[Vivek Narayanan]

Apologies for the long length of this document! Those in Delhi are most 
welcome...

Vivek

PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTATIONS IN THE SARAI-CSDS INDEPENDENT FELLOWSHIP WORKSHOP, August 24-27, 2005


Wednesday, 24 August

10.00-11.30
The Grid, the Relay, and the Reality

1.  Karen Coelho, “Tapping In: Urban Water Conflicts as Citizenship Claims in Chennai”
Karen Coelho is an urban anthropologist who received her Ph.D from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in November 2004, and now works as an independent scholar in Chennai.  Her work continues to focus on understanding neoliberal reform of the state through ethnographic approaches. 

The invisible grids that undergird urban infrastructure services remain largely mysterious, imagined through a combination of scientific extrapolation, guesswork, narrative histories and popular knowledge. Yet they provide powerful frameworks for defining the orders through which slum communities are conceived and located in municipal services.  This presentation juxtaposes the mythologies of grid-like orders against the contentious and politically negotiated realities through which the urban poor access water in Chennai.


2.  Muthatha Ramanathan, “Tracing Spatial Technology in the Rural Development Landscape of South India”
Muthatha Ramanathan is currently at the University of Washington, Seattle pursuing a PhD. In Geography. The Sarai independent fellowship has funded the early stages of her dissertation fieldwork. She has a B.Sc and M.Sc in Geography and during the course of her education has dabbled in political ecology, cartography, geographic information systems and digital image processing.

The purpose of my research is to develop a critical understanding of the increasing use of remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies in the natural resource management based rural development sector in India. Using theoretical insights from Science and Technology Studies and Development Studies, and the case of an NGO employing these technologies for planning in a few villages in interior dry Karnataka, I proposed to ask the following two questions: 1) What are the NGO’s motivations for employing these technologies? 2) How has the employment of these technologies altered practices of knowledge production, and undertake a detailed participant observation of the planning phase. My report and presentation will comprise a set of learnings about the following inter-related aspects: 1) NGO’s motivations for employing these technologies, which I will attempt to situate with findings of other studies that have focused on similar issues. My purpose here is to develop an understanding of different assumptions about these technologies and their use for planning/development related work. 2) Details about the content of the technology, i.e. Concepts embodied in the database software commissioned by this NGO and details of the NGO’s approach to rural development. 3) Some insights from having attempted a participant observation of the daily use of these technologies. 
I will also share reflections on my methods.


3. B. Mahesh Sarma, “Contending Techno-Paradigms of Contested Public Space: The Politics of CNG”
Mahesh Sarma is a researcher and Phd fellow at  the Centre for studies in science policy, JNU.  His PhD projects aims to interrogate india's developmental project by examining its innovation trajectories.

CNG conversion in delhi, is a signpost for a changing city. The process in a way is a beginning and an end. It is the beginning of a new sensibilities, a beginning of a new way of doing things. It also marks the beginning of the end of the messy, cumbersome democratic process and its replacement with neat clean technocratic solutions. If this reflects a new sensibility, wherein techno-solutions inconvenience some millions, it can’t be helped. My research began with some questions. Why did Delhi, pick up CNG, was it  a clean fuel, who constructed and sold it as a clean fuel? What role did civil society organisations play?  And, in this decision making maze, where does  legislature and executive lie? My research has barely scratched the surface. I can observe that CSE fully plugged for CNG; it was a beautiful campaign, neatly executed. I have documented, the failure of the legislature and executive. I am in the process of documenting the role of the media. I have observed conflicts between normative and real positions. And have now more questions than i have started with.


11.40-1.10
Re-imagined Communities

1.  Nitoo Das, “Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry Communities” 
Nitoo Das teaches English in Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her Ph.D. from JNU was on "Fabrication of History: Construction of the Assamese Identity under British Colonialism (1826-1920)". Her recent research interests include gangster rap, online poetry and blog culture.

For my independent fellowship with Sarai, I worked on a project entitled, “Hypertextual Poetry: A Study of MSN Poetry Communities”. In these months of working on the hypertextual nature of poetry posted on certain online sites run by MSN, I have tried to understand why so many people feel the desire to write poetry. I had started off by asking myself questions like: Why were they doing it? What allowed them the freedom to use words with such abandon? What was the mechanism that permitted them to flow with their feelings? My first questions were also about the disguising and the opening up the self. About a simultaneous masking and an unmasking. The other compelling reason was the need to know whether poetry on a computer screen read differently from poetry on a page. My research attempted to come to grips with some of these issues.

My presentation will be divided into two portions. I will begin by looking at the hypertextual aspects of the poetry in these groups. Ideas like recurrence, simultaneity, annotative links etc, which I have talked of at length in my postings, will be investigated. In the second half of my paper, I will focus on examples of the actual running of these sites. These examples will look at: (i) The readers playing with posted poetic texts, (ii) The questioning of the poetic voice, (iii) The construction of a sense of community through re-enactments of real-time rituals and (iv) The architecture of the sites to see how the poetic text may replicate the structure of the medium within which it resides.


2. Kiran Jonnalagadda, “An Investigation of how Form Affects Discussion and Community in Online Discussion Spaces”


3.  Anannya Mehta, “The Viewership of Non-Commercial and Independent Film in Delhi”

Over the last few months – spoke to many regular watchers of non-commercial films in Delhi –interviewing them and as a result also making friends with many of them. I had started out by asking myself why do people come for these film screenings? If the motivation behind these regular visits to film societies is more than just the watching of the film itself?
What is it that people take back?
Finally what is role of these places within the life of the city? In an attempt to understand these question I also asked myself if there was theoretical, context through which I could make sense of this culture? If these sites by which I mean the film centers and film clubs construct a politics of its own?
My presentation at Sarai will be divided into small parts – I will share my answers to the questions asked above. While doing this I will also re –tell a memory based history of film viewing from the 1970’s to the present. In the presentation I shall share very briefly from a dairy I kept during these months, along with my own diary entries I will share some biographies of those who come to watch non-commercial films.


2.10-3.40
Stardust Histories
 
1.  T. Vishnu Vardhan, “The Impact of Mythologicals in Telugu Cinema”
T. Vishnu Vardhan is a research student in the University of Ulster, Ireland & CSCS, Bangalore, Comparative Film Studies Programme.  He did his Master’s from CIEFL, Hyderabad.  He is also working as a Research Associate in the CSCS EIP programme and is also Coordinator of the MA (Online) Cultural Studies.T. Vishnu Vardhan (thvishnu_viva at yahoo.com) is a research student in the University of Ulster, Ireland & CSCS, Bangalore, Comparative Film Studies Programme.  He did his Master’s from CIEFL, Hyderabad.  He is also working as a Research Associate in the CSCS EIP programme and is also Coordinator of the MA (Online) Cultural Studies.

In my postings I took readers through various aspects of Telugu  mythologicals which surfaced in my research.  I posted about the importance of language in mythologicals, viewers’ expectation from mythologicals (in terms of language), the aspect of nativity in Telugu cinema, mythologicals and genre, changing role of mythologicals from 1930s to 1980s.

In my presentation I will reflect on the question: Why did mythologicals die in Telugu cinema by 1970s?  This is the same question which, I asked few people from the industry and also Telugu cinema viewers.  Nobody has an exact answer for the question.  But these are the few popular responses.

1)	A certain package of filmmakers and actors (like K.V. Reddy, Kamalakara Kameshwara Rao, N.T. Rama Rao, Savithri, S.V. Ranga Rao, Gummadi, etc) who were known for their mythologicals, passed away/came of age/stopped acting.  And nobody can replace these people either on the screen or off the screen.

2)	The production of mythologicals is very expensive and the industry was not in a position to spend such a huge amount on these films and thus by the 1980s they die.

3)	The plots of mythologicals were exhausted and there is nothing new to show to the spectators.

4)	The tastes of the viewers have changed.  They cant take-in anymore the same plots culled out from Ramayana and Mahabaratha.  Also the language of the mythologicals is too high for the audience and they do not any more enjoy the long padhyalu (kind of poems).

Either stating one or more of the above reasons most of my respondents became nostalgic about the age of mythologicals, especially those made between 50s and 80s.  And this period is also considered as the golden age of Telugu cinema both by the industry and the ‘cinema going public’.

Further, this is the period during which a kind of star system emerges (which is different from an ordinary film star).  A star system, which can mobilize people beyond the film theatre and can determine capital in the industry.  N.T. Rama Rao, who is the first star to enjoy such star system in Telugu, apparently became the first non-congress Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.

Coming back to the question of WHY DID MYTHOLOGICALS DIE, what I am going to present is a bit controversial and is unsaid till now.  The mythological died because of the new star system.  How this is so is what I will be presenting at the conference in SARAI.
 

2.  Abhishek Sharma, “The Colorisation of Mughal-e-Azam”
Abhishek Sharma, a graduate of NSD, is an Independent filmmaker and project Developer.
[Filmography : Light Wala ( 2003 ) : a documentary film based on the work & life of Light designers in India . Produced by NSD as a part of research project ; 9/11 - The Last Fall ( 2003 ) : a short - fiction film based on 9/11. It is the first Indian film on this subject & has been selected by Central Library of Washington as part of the new emerging Cinema in India .Produced by Fourth Wall Productions .]

The Colorization of Mughal-E-Aazam traces the following aspects of the revamped classic-   a) Origin of the Idea- How did the Idea of colorizing this film originate? As the legend goes, it was K.Asif himself who wanted to make this film in color. Mr. Deepesh Salgia of Sterling Investments, finally gave shape to that dream by spending over 2 years and over Rs. 5 Crores in the restoration and olorization works.   b) Restoration- For Iris interactive, it was the most challenging job to work on the 44 year old Negative. They cleaned each and every frame (around 300,000 in total!), getting rid of fungus, scratches and dust particles, in order to make it look as fresh as new.   c) Colorization- The Indian Academy of Arts and Animation developed an Indigenous software to colorize for the first time in the history of cinema, a vintage film, for a 35mm theatrical release. The process used Key Frames in every sequence to inject natural colors corresponding to the hues generated by original black, white and grays.   d) Digital Sound- Mr.Uttam singh under the supervision of Naushaad Sahab, digitally re-recorded the Soundtrack of the entire film. For the first time a classic was recorded in Dolby 6.1. The process gave birth to a powerful soundtrack with surround sound facility.  It is a feather in the cap of Indian cinema.   e) Second coming- The story of Mughal-E-Aazam has a tragic end but the film itself is used to happy endings. Once again it rocked the nation. Youngsters loved it and old folks went nostalgic. The colorized version scored an impressive 13% return on investment. It was also acclaimed by critics all over the world.  


3.  Prashant Pandey,”Documenting the Contemporary History of the Making of the Hindi Film Song”
An alumnus of AJKMCRC Jamia, Prashant Pandey travelled to Bombay to pursue this independent fellowship right after his M.A. course in mass communication came to an end.  Prashant is passionate about hindi film music and a sometime lyricist himself.


3.55-5.25
Performing the Local

1.  Archana Jha, “Nautanki Shahar mein: Audyogik Nagri Kanpur mein Lok Manch Kala ke Vikas wa Patan ka Anveshan” (Nautanki in the Industrial City of Kanpur: A Historical Study)


2.  Sunil Kumar, “Aa Mata Tujhe Dil ne Pukara: Khani Dilli ki Jagaran Partiyon ki” (Jagaran Tales in Delhi)
Sunil Kumar works as a teacher in Delhi.

In this study I wish to underline how an ethnomusical event changes into a so-called global celebration, and what its practitioners have to face during that change.  I have observed a gender- and class- struggle behind this event.  I also wish to raise the question of the forces that are trying to shape these expressions and their directions for their own needs.


3.  S.M. Irfan, “Awazein FM Radio ki” (Voices of FM Radio)
Based in Delhi,  Syed Mohd Irfan is commonly known as Irfan. He is an independent writer-producer-broadcaster.  He had never worked for any goverment office or for any media house on the pay roll.  He was born and brought up in eastern UP(Gurma Markundi,Distt Mirzapur).  After completing his post-graduation from the University Of Allahabad, he started pursuing an alternate media future.  Travelling and meeting people are his most passionate activities.  While presenting various edutainment radio shows on AIR’s FM Gold 106.4 MegaHz, he is also lending his voice for many stage shows,radio and TV programmes, including on the National Geographic Channel, the History channel and Discovery.  He is busy building an archive of rare folk songs (those that were played and sung by 60s and 70s youth in UP and up to some extent in Bihar), which are available on legacy format i.e. gramophone records of various sizes.

In 2003, Delhi had its first encounter with Commercial FM broadcasting.  Until then there were only two FM Radios run by All India Radio. Though this new idiom of broadcasting had already added a lot in listeners experience, soon after the new FM players came it simply revolutionized the listening practices. A new breed of voices came in and the packaging and whole idea of communication changed.  For now this was not meant for greater common good. It was and is for making profit.  In the "come-what-may" style they talk in, there are no ‘moral’ boundaries to the programming.  To attract their listeners they are ready to go up to any limit(lessness).These three commercial fms are owned by three big media houses: 91 FM Radio City belongs to Star TV, Saadhe Tiranve Red FM 93.5 is owned by India Today Group and Radio Mirchi (98.3FM) is being run under the flagship of The Times Of India.  Two more FM radios are on air, one is serving IGNOU’s educational stuff and another one is doing programmes for Jamia Millia Islamia.  Barring these two, the rest of the five Fms are almost 24x7.  The oldest FM can be tuned 102.6 MegaHz(AIR’s Rainbow) and AIR’s other classic channel is FM Gold 106.4MegaHz.
There are around a dozen of FM radio players currently in queue and people shall soon be deluged by MUSIC,  gossip and non-stop chatting.
AWAZEIN FM Radio KEE is an effort to look into the lives, liking and disliking of Radio Jockeys.
>From some 200 hours of recordings I’ll be presenting an edited and digitally mixed and mastered SOUND COLLAGE.


5.45-6.15
Lecture-demonstration:
Urmila Bhirdikar, “The Relationship between the Production and Consumption of Thumri and Allied Forms: The Female Impersonator – Bal Gandharva”
Urmila Bhirdikar teaches English at The Mahindra United World College of India, Pune.  She is a student of music, and her research areas are music and female impersonation.

In my paper I introduce the Marathi Sangit Natak in the late 19th and early 20th century as simultaneously embedded in the tradition of theatre and music and searching for respectability and ‘modernity’.  I propose music as the prime location from which some of the implications of these contestations can be looked at.

I discuss the practice of music composition in this theatre as the point of entry and lead it into understanding the eclecticism of this theatre in tune selections and the forms of citations it produces through this.

In the second section I introduce the production and circulation of thumri and allied forms through early gramophone records and the expansion of the field of citation of new tunes for the music of Marathi plays.

Through a detailed analysis of the songs of the women singers and Balgandharva’s songs I discuss the further implications of this for the development of the discourse of respectability as well as the representation of women through the practice of female impersonation.

I also discuss along with this some effects of the popularity of the gramophone records on the musical practices in Maharashtra.

In my presentation I will read part of the paper and play recordings of some of the women singers and Balgandharva and his contemporaries.  



Thursday, 25 August

10.00-11.30
Plotting Economic Geographies

1.  Vandana Swami, “An Allegorical, Historical Journey into the Archives of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway”
Vandana Swami is a graduate student in the Sociology Department, State University of New York, Binghamton.  She is working on her Ph D thesis that explores the relationship between the construction of railways in colonial india and the transformation of the spatial ecology of the area, focussing on the district of Khandesh to discuss these changes.

The arrival of modern industrial railway technology in a predominantly agrarian landscape under the sway of colonial power brought about many significant and deep-rooted changes in the area known as the ‘Bombay Deccan’ . In this paper, my central question pertains to a critical analysis of these changes in the context of railway construction in Khandesh during the mid to late 19th century. I wish to examine the complex nature of impacts that were experienced in Khandesh during this time-period through the lenses of environmental history of colonial India, arguably a severely under-researched and neglected field of history-writing in India.

Based on the archival records I have located, I would focus on how the forests of Khandesh became one of the primary suppliers of timber logs for railway construction in this area. I would discuss the strategies through which forests of Khandesh became the target of colonial governmentality and through this, also talk about how the colonial state consolidated its own power and control over this region.

Another important area of concern for me, even though it would figure only as an underlying concern in this particular paper  is the question of ‘nature’.
Steering clear from specialist definitions of ‘environment/ecology/nature’ and ‘environmental history/ecological history’, I wish to propose a dynamic understanding of categories of environment, ecology and nature . I argue that the current environmental crisis that our society finds itself in has historical roots that need to be examined. We need to ask ourselves the question: what has been the nature of human interaction with ‘nature’ over time?

2.  S. Ananth, “The Culture of Business: The Informal Sector and Finance Business in Vijaywada”
S.Ananth has been a lecturer at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada since 1993 and is concurrently engaged in his doctoral research.

The first part of the paper traces nature, dynamics and cultural practices of the finance business in Vijayawada while the second part of the paper traces the origin, history and business practices of the largest unique, unofficial, illegal ‘stock exchange’ of Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh – the Vijayawada Share Brokers Welfare Association which flourished during the early 1990’s. The paper analyses the functioning of the various types of finance business in the formal as well as the informal sphere. The paper argues that a large number of practices in Vijayawada (many of which may not be considered to be strictly legal within the ambit of the law) are considered to be everyday practices and their acceptability by people of the region is historically rooted. These perceptions are especially visible in field of borrowing lending practices (finance sector) and in the stock market culture of the region. This paper attempts to fill the gaps in the existing literature on the practices in urban finance businesses. It borrows concepts from cultural studies and attempts to reinterpret business practices.


3.  Prasad Shetty, “Stories of New Entrepreneurship”
Prasad Shetty studied architecture and specialised in urban management. He has taught at the KRV Institute of Architecture in Mumbai where he also coordinated the research and consultancy wing. He presently works as a researcher and an urban development consultant and is also a member of the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT).

Contemporary reconfigurations in city economy are most evident when one finds classified government documents or bank cheques being produced in a neighbourhood slum. The rising demand for cheap labour and state’s embracement of global restructurings have significantly contributed towards these reconfigurations, which began with a systematic dismantling of the formal industry and labour subsequently giving birth and nurturing a new breed – the entrepreneur agents. Their tasks included: organising material and labour and give the cheapest bid for production like the Pepsi bottle cap manufacturer or the bank cheque printer; creating demand and selling, like the Amway Agents; felicitating resources and managing crises, like the computer-wallas, or even chit fund operators who arrange quick finances; and brokering knowledge and skills like training people in computer handling, public speaking etc. In this paper, through a documentation of forty such entrepreneur agents, I aim to construct the context for imagining the contemporary city as a city of entrepreneur agents.

The full paper is available at: http://www.crit.org.in/members/prasad/Stories%20of%20Entrepreneurship.pdf


4.  Faraaz Mehmood, “A Study of Changing Banking Practices in Udaipur”
Faraaz Mehmood is an MBA from Udaipur,Rajasthan. He is interested in economic journalism, and is currently treating an unnamed private sector bank as a transit lounge.


	
11.45-12.45
Imprinting Identities – 1

1.  Uddipan Dutta, “The Growth of Print Nationalism and Assamese Identity in Two Early Assamese Magazines”
Uddipan Dutta did his M.A (linguistics)from Delhi University in the year 2001. After that, he has been engaged in various research projects in North East India. He currently works as a Research Fellow in Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, Guwahati.

“A language is a dialect which has an army and a navy” is commonly heard in the linguistics classroom as there is no linguistic parameter to differentiate a language from a dialect except the power relationship. But language- dialect difference is often invoked in the imagination of a nation. The advent of print has the most significant influence upon the arbitrariness of the concept of language as well as nation. Speakers of the huge varieties of a ‘single language’ might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. Print has taken the role of selecting, codifying and finally making a particular variety the standard variety in many of the world’s languages, and thereby enabling the people to imagine to be the members of a particular speech community and later on to assert its identity in a geographical space. The processes of standardization of language, growth of nationalism and the development of the print culture go in parallel and operate through a rather complex dynamics. The issue “whether Assamese is a ‘language’ or a ‘dialect’” and the advent of printing press to influence this issue was quite important for the growth of Assamese nationalism within the British India and later within the Indian Union. Arunodoi, the first Asssamese magazine/ newspaper was published in 1846 from the Mission press Sibsagar by the American Baptist Missionaries. Jonaki, on the other hand was the journal brought out in Calcutta in the year 1889 by Ax1omiā Bhāxa Unnati Xādhini Xobhā2, the students’ body with an ideological slant for a linguistic nationalism. It is the endeavour undertaken by the native middle class grown up with English education. The embryonic form of Print Nationalism founded in the pages of Arunodoi gets matured in the pages of Jonaki. The present study is an attempt to recount this journey from the unconscious to the conscious by reading through the pages of these two magazines. Another important aspect of Assamese nationalism is fear of and hatred for the outsiders in the collective unconsciousness of the people. We can trace this fear and trauma to the massive migration leading to a drastic alteration of the demography of the region in a period of not more than 150 years. We can also see how well this massive migration was prognosticated in the pages of Jonaki. 


2.  T.P. Sabitha, “Early Women’s Magazines in Kerala and the Construction of Femininity”
Sabitha T. P. is a lecturer in English at Hansraj College, Delhi University, a translator, and a poet in Malayalam.

("FEMININE FORMS: IDEAL WOMANHOOD AND EARLY WOMEN'S MAGAZINES IN KERALA")
My work for the Sarai project has been on women’s magazines in Kerala from 1886 to1926 and the ways in which different kinds of femininities (sometimes contrary to each other) are discursively produced, circulated and determined in this period. 1886 is the year in which the first magazine – Keraliya Sugunana Bodhini – that is primarily intended for women readers comes out. I have chosen to end my study in 1926 because that is the year of publication of Vanitakusumam, the first overtly political women’s magazine that addresses the question of women’s “rights”, thus taking it into a different discursive realm from the earlier magazines which are mainly engaged in an educative and moral agenda (similar to that of conduct magazines in Britain).
In my presentation I will concentrate on two aspects of my work, viz., the logical and ideological types of arguments that are mobilised in order to advocate or oppose certain modes of education for women, which then further endorse or construct certain notions concerning ideal femininity that are themselves culturally and historically determined. Some of these argumentative forms are: the idealist, the rational humanist, the rational-scientific, the pragmatic, the moral and the aesthetic. After dwelling on these kinds of arguments and their various intersections, I will look at the ends to which they are employed. I then intend to trace the chronological changes in these arguments and look at the points at which they metamorphose into related, but discursively different modes of arguments. In the last part of my presentation I will attempt to identify the indigenous and colonial sites from which these seem to originate, thus trying to understand the location of gender in a larger framework of colonial modernity that is specific to Kerala.


1.45-3.15
Imprinting Identities – 2

1.  Himanshu Ranjan, “Hindi-Urdu Kshetra ke Ek Sanskritik Kendra ke Roop mein Ilahabad ka Vikas aur Hastakshep” (The Development of Allahabad and its Intervention as a Cultural Centre of the Hindi-Urdu Belt)
Himanshu Ranjan is at present a freelance journalist.  He was previously attached with the Hindi daily "Amrit Prabhat" and worked there in different capacities-- as magazine editor, assistant editor etc. From his university days, he has been involved in socio political and cultural activities, on and off the campus.

The centrality that Allahabad possessed in any sphere of the national perspective is an established fact, politics and culture being specifically the two. Renaissana and Nationalism in the husk culture of the United Provinces (i.e. Hindi-Urdu belt) were delayed ones and the same can be attributed to the emergence of Allahabad as a cultural centre which projected itself as the most burning platform for nationalism as well, comparatively late in the twentieth century. Due to historical reasons and compulsions together with the orientalist-colonial manoeuvres the elite politics of India in the mid-nineteenth century took a communal turn first of all in this very belt that polarised the entire plurality of the country into two religious communities of the Hindus and the Muslims. Consequently, the communal divide expressed itself in the congruence of the religious and linguistic primary fervours of nationalism. Muslim separatism manifested itself through the Aligarh Movement which fought for the Muslim cause and, to begin with, that of the Urdu language also. Benaras and Allahabad happened to be two of the most ancient centres of Hinduism which, as priviledged constituencies, organised and promoted the Nagari and Cow-protection movements to the end of the nineteenth Century. Being the safer and exclusive constituency for Hindu religious activities patronised by the Raja of Benaras, excluded from the administrative engagements of both the Mugal period and the colonial one and having less impact of the composite culture of the two religious communities, Benaras superceded, in the first instance, in carrying out the aforesaid movements. Literary magazines and vernacular newspapers supporting the movements were being published from both the centres and also from smaller centres and towns like Kanpur, Mirzapur, Lucknow (the biggest centre of Muslim culture and Urdu after Aligarh movement-wise) etc. But a good number of litterateurs, journalists and literary institutions were there in Benaras only.      Madan Mohan Malviya, one of the giant personalities of the movements belonged to Allahabad, and being the most efficient activist and organiser played leading role in both the centres and made a link between the two. Malviya won the Nagari battle and in the very dawn of the twentieth century he managed to shift the business partly to Allahabad, his own home city, in an elaborated form, keeping in reserve a greater cause for Benaras of establishing the Hindu University there in the second decade. With the rapid growth of literacy, education and press, Allahabad developed a variety of means and ways to promote the causes of national language, national culture and national movement. Newspapers, in Hindi and English both, journals and literary magazines were launched. The Indian Press started the publication of the most reputed Hindi literary magazine the 'Saraswati' in 1900 which proved to be a launching pad for the new generation of Hindi litterateurs under the editorship of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi who took charge in 1903 and served on the post upto 1921. Dwivedi is said to be the maker of modern Hindi. He standardised the language and through the writings of his own on various subjects and encouraging the new writers for the same, he contributed to the cause of national awakening. Besides, with publications on different subjects and disciplines in Hindi, English and Bengali, the Indian Press made its contribution in expansion of education and learning. It was the first publisher of Tagore's books, and returned its copyrights to him without taking any money when he was arranging the same on a larger scale for a greater cause of establishing Shantiniketan.      But the HIndi movement of Malviya, in its true sense, was advanced through Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, established by Malviya himself in 1910. It was the further extention of the work done through Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Benaras. Purushottam Das Tondon, another pioneer of the Hindi movement, assisted Malviya in establishing and running the institution. Annual conventions for the promotion of Rastrabhasa Hindi and publications of further researches in Hindi were its main business. The difference between the approaches of the Sammelan and the Indian Press is noteworthy. The former worked strictly on the Hindu-Hindi plank of Malviya and the Benaras school, while the latter was a bit liberal Dwivedi himself was a straunch Rastrabhasa promoter but had a tolerent attitude towards Urdu. In principle he advocated for the promotion of all the provincial languages and worked partly on the same line which was further explored and advanced by Gandhi just after his exit.      Gandhi was a different man. He had nothing to do with the Hindi-movement, and not the least with the Hindu-Hindi agenda. Rastrabhasa was not his sole concern.He was the architect of Indian nationalism in its true sense and appeared on the scene when diverse undercurrents were conglomerating but not finding the way out. He did nothing but led them all towards mass-movement. Congress gained the real ground and under his leadership it became the umbrella encompassing the various nationalist ideologies and men of different orientations. But Gandhi himself was a make of his own. With his peculiar moral vision he had a 'national-popular' appeal. Rastrabhasa Hindi (later Hindustani) became the vehicle of nationalism, which beyond its local and regional roots and stem, acquired an All India character and role as a link language for the entire population of different languages and cultures of the country. In Gandhi's vision, this Rastrabhasa never thought of ruling the people, but represented the people's revolt against the ruling imperial language English. He tried his best to control the sectarian and communal tendencies of the Sammelan but ultimately failed.      The spatial expansion of Hindi on national scale inflicted a feeling of intense ambition not only in the Sammelan men like Tondon and co., but also in academic scholars. The oriental-revivalist trends had already helped in creating a grand myth of the Hindu civilization. The two scholars - Dhirendra Verma and Rahul Sankrityayan - represented the spatial and temporal dimentions of the restructured 'Akshayavat' of Hindi. Verma's book 'Madhyadesh' still stands and provides the ground for advocating 'Hindi Pradesh'. Ram Bilas Sharma, a straunch marxist, picked it up and submerged it in his nationality-discourse. Rahul was also a marxist and a man of mass movement, but his orientalist scholarly investigations left little room for realistic accommodation with the present state of affairs. He had great many right deviations in his thought and action, walking on the foot-steps of his party CPI which, through its crude and mechanical nationality-discourse, endorsed the two-nation theory of the Muslim League and paved the way for the partition of the country. But the historic contribution of Rahul lies on a different plane. It was he who first of all and possibly the last one, till today, advocated the case of the so-called regional dialects of Hindi and their right to grow freely on nationality-line. Hindi has been claiming for the entire territorial space of the Hindi-Urdu belt and its historicity as well, for itself. About two dozen languages, many of them having great literary traditions, are doomed to be treated as mere dialects of Hindi and to submerge their identities in the so-called 'national' interest. Gandhi also advised for the same kind of sacrifice. Rahul developed his thesis on Russian line of nationality - discourse for languages which could not be mechanically applied in the Indian context, particularly on that very historic stage. After all the centrality of the emerging nation-state was also a hard historic reality.      Being the headquarter of the Congress and the centre of nationalist movement for decades, Allahabad witnessed all such developments in the arena of culture also. Besides, Allahabad has also in its credit the growth of Hindi literature from Dwivedi-yug to Nai Kavita, through different literary movements. This growth was not beyond the aforesaid development line of Hindi language. The composite impact of modernity, secularism and that of socialism also, was an intrinsic undercurrent which did litle on its own, but controlled the entire phenomenon and checked the deviations and deformations to be worse.


2.  Jitendra Srivastava, “Ek Shahar ke Roop mein Gorakhpur ki Pehchan mein Gita Press aur Kalyan ki Bhoomika” (Role of Gita Press and Kalyan in the Making of Gorakhpur’s Identity)


3.  Anurag, “Laghu Patrika Andolan: Abhivyakti ke Naye Aayam, Ek Padtal” (Little Magazine Movement: New Dimensions of Expression)


3.30-5.30
Assembling the Textured Narrative

1.  Rochelle Pinto, “Manuel in the City: A Semi-Fictionalised Illustrated Book on the Arrival and Absorption of Goan Migrants to Mumbai”
Rochelle Pinto is Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore. She completed her PhD. thesis, 'The Formation of a Divided Public: Print, Language, and Literature in colonial Goa', from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 2003. 

("ENCOUNTERING THE CITY THROUGH PRINT")

This project has emerged from two impetuses linked to research that I did for my PhD thesis on Goa. The first is the realisation that it is impossible to tell a history of nineteenth and twentieth century Goa, without recounting a history of migration. The second was the realisation that very little of my research was accessible outside of a non-academic audience. Neither within standard literary histories, nor within popular representations among Goans in India, is the experience of migration recorded. The encoding of migration through nostalgia, and through the retrieval of oral history has largely been the preserve of Goans outside the nation. For those who live within India but outside of Goa, links to Goa are still alive, and often negate the need for a historicising of migration, except in familial contexts.

There are aspects of migration and the inhabitation of urban space, however, that indicate that the existence of a migrant community outside of Goa enabled interventions within Goan politics, and the development of  new relations towards Goa and its history. One of the most striking features of the milieu of migrant Goans, is the degree to which their existence in the city of Bombay was threaded through with print. 

The print market of Bombay allowed a class other than the Goan elite access to print. The migration of elite and non-elite groups to Bombay had changed the terms of their encounter. Within Konkani newsprint, non-elite Goans had expressed their disappointment with the Goan bourgeoisie who, outside the sphere of benevolent feudalism that bound both into close dependent relations of landlord and tenant, had completely abandoned any economic responsibility towards them. The notoriously more systematic British colonial state also provided a socio-political grid which formed the ground for a hostile encounter between both classes. Elite Goans began to accept and contribute to the criminalised representations of non-elite, especially working class Goans, in reports of the police, medical, and municipal establishments under the British colonial state. 

This presentation attempts to communicate the nature of print and of urban experience that was a source for the construction of a fictional narrative.

2.  Vasudha Joshi, “History and Storytelling about Kolkata and Howrah: Integrating Narratives and Database”
Vasudha Joshi is a former TV journalist turned independent documentary filmmaker.

3.  Soudhamini, “Madurai: Mythical City – Representations Old and New”
Soudhamini is a film-maker from Chennai who has always worked in the field of culture, and in the cusp between non-fiction and fiction. She has an M.A. in English and is a graduate in Film Direction from FTII, Pune. Her best known work to date is Pitru Chayya, inspired by the music of Carnatic maestro M.D.Ramanathan.

(including 6-minute video excerpt)
Insights gained and introduction to the video material being submitted to the sarai archives.
   1. Culture as shoring up – against natural calamities and against the gradual erosion of time.
   2. What does one store – the essentials. history and personal emotion. History + emotion = culture.
   3. Night vision –  looking at the chaos of the contemporary  (all contemporary is by definition chaotic, being in-process) without imposing  inherited structures. The  prehensile  – seize the night.
   4. Between points b. and c. a rupture.
   5. The researcher as sensor not censor. Mythic speech not mythic structure. 


4.  Vijender Singh Chauhan, “Beeti Vibhavari Jaag Ri: Dilli ke City-scape mein Dik wa Kaal” (Time and Space in the Cityscape of Delhi)
chauhan.

यह देखो यादों का एक चौराहा
लेकिन रुको
इस रास्‍ते से उस पर न दौड़ो
किसी और याद से जा टकराओगे
और याद का याद से टकराना
दुर्घटना भर नहीं है
यह बिग-बैंग है
यहीं से शुरु हुआ ब्रह्मांड और समय
माफ करना
आंइस्‍टीन तुम्‍हें कविता में घसीटना
अच्‍छा तो नहीं लगता/पर
मुझे तुम ही सबसे विश्‍वसनीय 
गवाह दीख पड़ते हो
बताओ इन्‍हें कि तुम 'याद' भर हो
हर सत्‍य 'याद' भर है
और यह शहर है यादों का जखीरा

This work is a literary construct of pre-dawn Delhi as city. Its not 'real' Delhi nor it is 'beautiful' Delhi. It is imagined reality of 'dark' Delhi. A dead migrant from Purvanchal narrates it from mortuary.  Images of memory, imagination, dreams and experiences in Delhi' cityscape are not essentially in plane and straight geometry. From the perspective of time Delhi's cityscape is an inverted pyramid whose present weighs heavily on its past. 

Methodology includes poetic observations and documentation of pre-dawn Delhi. Images, Imagination, Memory and Experiences were major tools used. Interviews of migrants, locals and visitors were conducted. Touch, smell and sounds of city were also included in the works though with not much success.


5.50-6.20
Lecture Demonstration:
Sumangala Damodaran, “Protest Through Music: A Documentation and Analysis of the Structure, Content and Context of the Musical Tradition of the IPTA”
Sumangala Damodaran is a teacher of Economics at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. She has been involved with the protest music tradition in Delhi since the early 1980s as a singer and used to belong to a group called Parcham that was based in Delhi and performed in various parts of the country for about two decades. 

I have documented many of the songs that were written and sung as part of the repertoire of the IPTA in Hindi and Bengali in the 1940s and some part of the 1950s. I have done this through collecting old recordings, wherever available and also requesting some of the singers of the time to sing some of the songs for me briefly, to get a sense of the tunes and manner of singing. I will present my research through an oral presentation of the major genres as I have been able to categorise the music into, with recordings to illustrate them. I will also attempt to address some major questions that constituted the starting point for this research project. These questions essentially have to do with the relative importance of form and content in the songwriting of the time, on whether the music that was created experimented with different forms and broke/challenged canonical traditions or not, and so on. While a more elaborate analysis of the questions can be done only with further research, particularly in other languages as well, my presentation will only briefly address the questions.

Friday, 26 August

10.00-11.30
Anatomy of Urban Fantasies – 1

1.  Sovan Tarafder, “A Brief History of New Urban Leisure in Kolkata”
Sovan Tarafder is a journalist working in ABP's editorial section and his area of interest is visual culture. He is specially intrigued by the space of the urban and is doing his Ph.D on the interlinks between Bangla film and the city-space of Kolkata.


The buzzword in the present socio-politico-economic space in Kolkata is Development. This has virtually emerged as the concept that has followers cutting across the rival political camps. While the city of Kolkata has been mesmerized by the tune of developmentality, the contemporary city-space has strategically been placed onto a future perfect that promises wealth and glory. 
Now being developed means in effect being more modern and more urban in accordance with the paradigm of development followed by no other than Jawaharlal Nehru. His statement – We want to urbanize the village, not take away the people from village to towns” – would fit nicely into the lips of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the present Chief Minister of West Bengal. The new urban leisure is engaged with development in terms of new displacement. The essence of development according to the Human development Reports of UNDP is the ‘enlargement of people’s choices’. The entertainment sector in Kolkata has developed visibly in terms of the enlargement of choices. 
However, the discourse of development / urbanization / modernization here has gained a self-validating authority that is predicated on the logos of development and that visibly steamrolls all the counter-discourse that seeks to problematize the project.
The urban appropriates the rural, and then simulates the rural within its own space only to defamiliarise the urban to its inhabitants. In the process, it gets itself reinforced.


2.  Lakshmi Kutty, “High Rise Hygiene: Narrativising Mumbai’s New Urban Culture”


3.  Prayas Abhinav, “Publicity Promises in the Public Space in Ahmedabad”
Prayas Abhinav is a writer and artist living in Ahmedabad.  He works in health communications and is presently with CHETNA (Centre for Health Education Training and Nutrition Awareness) in Ahmedabad. He has written a cute script for a short-film and is now searching for a producer.

The objective behind my project was to study the advertisements in Ahmedabad’s Public spaces. Do a visual and literary interplay involving the hoardings in Ahmedabad and how we are pulled/romanced constantly by them.

This work tells a personal story of living in a city in confusion, query and irony. The multi-media approach to this project reflects on my wish to create a richer, fuller experience of this story.

There are elements of recording, memory, commentary and romance in these works. I have used the language and stance of the rational-commercial interest in developing the city and of the popular opinions and criticisms of the advertising industry.

My voice in this process talks of the experience – of constantly facing the hoardings, being wooed, rationalizing their existence, and at the same time feeling irritated, resentful and uncomfortable.

My story is this complex and confusing experience and I hope the narrative which emerges from my work conveys this.


11.45-12.45
Anatomy of Urban Fantasies – 2

1.  Mario Rodrigues, “The Political Sociology of Golf in South Asia”
Mario Rodrigues is Special Correspondent of The Statesman based in Mumbai and is in journalism for nearly 25 years. He has contributed to a few books and is also the author of the controversial “Batting for the Empire – A Political Biography of Ranjitsinhji” (Viking Penguin).

•	The first point: why golf? Because it is more than a game today. It has become a multi-million dollar industry and a driver of economies impacting on business, politics, diplomacy, military matters, lifestyle, real estate and tourism.
•	Focus on India: The golf boom in recent times is intrinsically linked to the liberalisation and globalisation of the economy which has opened the country up for investment by global and domestic capital.
•	Golf & Militarism: Spread on the wings of British imperialism, golf became the favourite sport of despots and military juntas all over the world. This is true especially in the Asian context, especially in Pakistan, Burma and the former military dictatorships of Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. In India too the sport is dominated by the military which controls over 70 per cent of the golf courses.
•	Excesses and illegalities of golf projects: Over the last decade golf has also become a much reviled four letter-word connected with excesses and illegalities concerning illegal acquisition of large tracts of land, forcible displacement of tribals and traditional residents, desecration or alternation of the natural environment, excessive use of pesticides and depletion of water resources. The Global Anti-Golf Movement was formed in 1993 to oppose golf projects in South-East Asia especially.  Such excesses and illegalities have been replicated in India at controversial golf projects in Srinagar, Chandigarh, Gurgaon, Lonavla and Mumbai.
•	Finally, a look at the plight of caddies and a exposition on the theme of golf being positioned as a gentleman’s game: Do Indian CEOs cheat at golf?

2.  Pankaj Rishi Kumar, “Ponytails-Rings-Punches: Female Boxers in India”
Pankaj Rishi Kumar a is a documentary filmmmaker. A graduate from FTII with a specialisation in Film Editing, he started making his own films in 97. His films have been screened at festivals all over the world: KUMAR TALKIES (98), Pather Chujaeri (2001) MAT (2003) 3 Men and a Bulb (2005).  His current film on women boxing is a work in progress.

(video presentation) The female boxers in India operate from isolated and invisible pockets. The objective of the film is to document the voice and journey of a community of female boxers towards self-articulation of their hopes, dreams, desires and struggles. This would be reinforced by a realisation that it is ‘ normal ‘ to be strong, physical and athletically talented.


1.45-3.15
Trajectories of Work and Experience

1.  Nagarik Mancha, “Factory Closures, Plight of Workers and Urban Space”


2.  Syed Khalid Jamal, “Work Culture in Fast Food Chains”

A new work can be seen in the work cuture of fast food joints. It intends to blur the line between work and leisure.This culture is informal, youthful and is both, aggressive and pro-active in its presentation.

The ingredients of this culture are: English, preferably with an accent, positive body language,"attitude", use of technology and use of mass media. The motto of this culture is to MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.

My research broadly studied:
Smile.
Relationships
Mobility.

I will read out, in bits and parts, from training manuals, in house publications,test papers,and newspaper clippings to demonstrate the work culture in fast food chains.

3.  Kuldeep Kaur, “The Hospital Labour Room as a Space for Unheard Voices”


3.30-5.00
The City and its Strangers

1.  Subhalakshmi Roy and Bodhisattva Kar, “Messing with the Bhadraloks: Towards a Social History of the Mess Houses in Calcutta, 1890s-1990s”

Subhalakshmi Roy teaches Bengali literature in Prafulla Chandra College, Calcutta. Bodhisattva Kar is a Ph D student at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The two got married during the course of their Sarai-CSDS Independent Research Project!


2.  Abdus Salam, “Strangers in the City: the Lives and Longings of Bangladeshi Immigrants in Guwahati”



3.  Debkamal Ganguly, “The Culture of Crime Pulp Fiction in Bengal”
Deb Kamal Ganguly graduated from the Satyajit Ray Film & TV Institute, Kolkata.  He is a TV professional and has worked in internationally acclaimed short films and documentaries as editor, associate director, script writer. Apart from his  Sarai project, he is presently working on silent Indian cinema as a fellowship project from the National Film Archive of India.

In the presentation I would like to highlight the central theme  of my research i.e. the juvenile crime fictions of a pulp writer in Bengal, Swapankumar. He has written extensively in  the post-independent period, and I would like to show that his stories are a part of an ‘alternative’ historiography considering the general historiography of crime narratives in Bangla. Moreover these stories  work as an inverse thesis to the dominant rhetoric of ‘clue-puzzle’ in Bangla crime tales. Some of the narrative characteristics of Swapankumar’s stories would be discussed and some relevant predecessors (mostly from colonial period) of Swapankumar, in terms of narrative strategies,  would also be introduced. In this process, it would be intended to show how these crime fictions, starting from the indigenous popular tradition in Bat-tala publication in colonial Bengal up to the writings of Swapankumar in post-colonial period, cut across the dominant discourse of colonial/national ‘modernity’. Those distinct departures undertaken by the crime tales from the notions of ‘modernity’, have created a zone of ‘un-reason’ beyond the scope of instrumental rationality.


5.30-6.00
Presentation / Performance:
Mahmood U. R. Farooqui, “Tale Tellers: Dastangoyee – The Culture of Story Telling in Urdu”
Mahmood Farooqui is a Delhi based writer and performer and sometime historian.

The Dastan-e Amir Hamzah published by the Nawal Kishore Press, Kanpur between 1880 and 1910 in forty-six huge volumes is the most outstanding achievement of Urdu prose. The printed versions of this Dastan emerged from a centuries old tradition of oral narration, Dastangoi. Unlike folk-storytelling, Dastangoi was considered a high profession. Since the times of Akbar the dastango had been inducted into the court. They were included among the retainers of nobility; and poets and writers consulted them as lexical authorities. As listening to dastan recitals became a popular pastime for all classes, from Ghalib’s soirees to the streets of Jama Masjid, the dastango acquired a mass audience before it got printed. That it came at a time when Urdu fiction was still in its infancy and that the fact that it was anti-novel in its intention and effect has caused it to be criminally marginalised in criticism and discussion within the world of Urdu letters itself.

My presentation will include a demonstration of the Art of Dastangoi, as I grope my way around the methods of those masterly performers, from the Tilism-e Hoshruba as well as a very brief talk about the extract that I have chosen to recite.

A separate full length paper would be circulated alongside a glossary of the characters.

Saturday, 27 August

10.30-12.30
Affects and Effects of Neighbourhoods

1.  Meera Pillai, “Foodcourts and Footbridges: Conceptualising Space in Vijaywada Railway Station”


2.  Sudeshna Chatterjee, “Children’s Friendship with Place: Investigating Environmental Child Friendliness for Children in New Delhi”
Sudeshna Chatterjee is an architect and urban researcher. She has worked with the Habitat International Coalition as an advocate of child rights to secure the human right to an adequate standard of living for children in South Asia. Sudeshna is a partner in the architectural practice Kaimal Chatterjee & Associates in New Delhi, and is pursuing a Phd in environmental design at N C State University in Raleigh, NC. She is a visiting faculty in the Department of Urban Design at School of Planning and Architecture, and mentors dissertations for advanced architecture students at the TVB School of Habitat Studies. Sudeshna’s research interests include humanizing cities, and understanding the processes involved in making cities friendly for children and youth in the developing world. 

("NIZAMUDDIN BASTI IN THE LIVES OF ITS CHILDREN: A SOCIO-SPATIAL STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHILD FRIENDLINESS IN A CONTESTED LOW-INCOME DELHI NEIGHBOURHOOD")

The central objective of this empirical study was to understand under what conditions children come to think of places in their living environment as “friendly”.  A firm believer in the Einsteinian dictum: “Thinking without the positing of categories and concepts in general would be as impossible as breathing in vacuum” (Einstein, 1949), I had developed a theoretical framework in a peer-reviewed paper titled “Children’s Friendship with Place: A Conceptual Inquiry” (Chatterjee 2005). In this paper, I had argued that in order for child-friendly cities to have any real meaning for children we need to explore the conceptual possibilities of place friendship in the tradition of similar studies in place attachment and place identity in childhood After reviewing the literature on friendship, I developed a framework for envisioning child-friendly places by deconstructing six essential conditions of friendship (Doll 1996): mutual affection and personal regard; shared interests and activities; commitment; loyalty; self-disclosure and mutual understanding; and horizontality. These concepts, when translated into environmental terms with the help of literature from the fields of environment-behavior, environmental psychology and children’s geography, help to define a child-friendly place from a socio-physical perspective (Chatterjee 2005).

I conducted my fieldwork, in Nizamuddin Basti, a low-income historic settlement in central New Delhi with a large child population, to understand how  children develop place friendship. My eclectic ethnographic strategies included an initial semi-structured interview with a carefully constructed sample of thirty-one 11 and 12 year old Muslim children from different forms of families, and backgrounds (Bihari-, Bengali-, Bangladeshi migrants, older settlers from UP and Punjab, and some native Nizamuddin villagers). This interview was designed to get nominations from children about places in their local area, which allow them to fulfill the dimensions of place friendship.
As there were six dimensions to place friendship that I wanted to explore, the first six questions probed if there were places in the children’s everyday environment that 1) demonstrated environmental care and provided space for them to participate in the caring of the environment, 2) offered opportunities to the child to engage with the environment on an everyday basis, 3) allowed the child to learn and gain competence by engaging with the environment, 4) allowed the child to control the environment in any given time on his/her own terms, 5) facilitated creation and nurturing of secret places, and 6) allowed the child to freely explore and express herself/himself in the environment. I further probed the meaning of each of these interactions under each category of friendly places, and went on field trips with children to record their on-site narratives describing their feelings about places.

Though this is a work in progress with considerable hanging out still happening every week in the basti, my data suggests that Nizamuddin basti inspite of being a contested urban settlement that has accumulated several different negative stereotypes related to poor Muslims, and environmental degradation typical of Indian slums, provide a sustainable habitat for poor Muslim families, and a culturally rich socio-physical environment that children find friendly at many levels. My presentation at Sarai, will give a flavor of the findings through a powerpoint presentation, and touch upon the analysis of two dimensions of friendly places. In my analysis I adopted a postmodernist culture-studies approach to the study of Delhi as a child friendly city.


3.  Madhavi Desai, “Women and their Spatial Narratives in the City of Ahmedabad”
Madhavi Desai has an M. Arch from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is an adjunct faculty at the School of Architecture, CEPT, Ahmedabad, India since 1986. She has had earlier research fellowships from ICSSR, and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in MIT, USA. She is the co-author of Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity: India 1880 to 1980, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.  She is also the author of Traditional Architecture: House Form of Bohras in Gujarat, English Edition, Mumbai, and the editor of Women and the Built Environment in India, Zubaan, New Delhi (both forthcoming). Currently she is engaged in researching for a book on Women Architects in India and Sri Lanka with Mary Woods from Cornell University.

The city of Ahmedabad is used as a convenient setting for a test case of the study of this nature. The basic premise of the research project is that though the city is theoretically available to all citizens, women are not fully able to physically and culturally participate in it. After introducing the three major parts of the city, I will be focusing on the various issues studied by me. Basically I have looked at the two ends of the urban scales: the individual being (female) on one hand and the city planning process on the other. Focussing on the middle class, this research attempts to document the spatial activities and experiences of women in Ahmedabad in the traditional as well as the modern sections. The research methods used include observation, questionnaires/interviews and map interpretations as well as library research. One of my objectives was to look into women’s notions of what a city is in terms of their image and descriptions. I largely failed to achieve this. Somehow most women said they could not draw and were also unable to give detailed description of their urban image. Like Sudeshna’s concept of “child friendly city”, this work moots a “women friendly city”. There is hardly any literature available on the subject in the subcontinent context. I hope this study, however limited, will be useful to women’s groups, city municipality, designers and city planners.


4.  Kaiwan Mehta, “Reading Histories – Migration and Culture: The Politics of Mapping and Representation of Urban Communities”
Kaiwan Mehta has studied architecture, literature and Indian Aesthetics and is currently enrolled for a masters in Cultural Studies.  He is a lecturer at the K Raheja Institute of Architecture, Mumbai and the Consulting Editor for Architecture – Time, Space and People, the official journal of the Council of Architecture, India.  He has published work and presented papers on architectural documentation, representation and teaching history at national and international platforms.

("A HISTORY OF EVERYDAY")

History searches for the heroic in the everyday. Conceptually the everyday subverts the heroic. Quoting Blanchot, “the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification(s).”

As I have worked on this project, my negotiation with the everyday has become more and more apparent. This project has toyed with various ideas and exercises, much like a rag picker! One has struggled with History, Urban Communities and Representations. One has walked and held innumerable conversations and the power of observation is the greatest tool. As I mentioned once earlier too, it feels like Alice, one is swimming through reality sights and story weavers continuously.

This paper will narrate some experiences during this passage. It will try an attempt a single narrative to connect some experiences and observations that came up on the way. I will also attempt at a summary of some ideas like communities and neighbourhoods – representing the locality and writing histories.

1.30-3.00
Tracing the Margins

1.  Tasneem, Fatima and Marya, “Death and the Bazaar: A Look at the Death Care Industry”


2.  Prem Kumar Tiwari, “Dilli ka ek Pravasi Gaon: Sahipur, Shalimarbagh” (Sahipur: A Migrant Village in Delhi)



3.  Sabir Haque, Nidhi Bal Singh, and Leena Rani Narzary, “The Eastern Yamuna River Bed: Ecological Imbalance and Future Implications”


The research aims to study the new developments that are being planned in the Eastern Yamuna River bed and document the displacement of the peasants who are pushed to the fringes in the name of development, therefore The first part will consist video recording of interviews of farmers who were displaced from the Yamuna riverbed. They are the eyewitness to the changes that Yamuna has gone through over the years because of human interventions or so- called development along the eastern bank of the river. Meher Singh and Mahavir Singh Tomar are two victims of such development. They will unfold the stories of atrocities faced by them when they were forced to evcuate the land that they had spent their life on so that “ The Akshardham Temple” could take its shape.

The second segment will revel the gradual process of changes that were made in the Master- Plan of Delhi by DDA that have led to the canalization of river Yamuna. For this we have a video recording of Mr. Dunu Roy, Director, Hazards Center who explains these changes in a chronological manner. We will also try and bring out what the constructions on the western banks have done to the river.

In the third segment we conclude by providing a picture of how history is getting repeated on the eastern banks. DDA has plans for developing the eastern banks of the Yamuna. But are these plans actually for the betterment of the river? Are constructions like Akshardham Temple, Common Wealth Games Village or a Bio-Diversity Park developing the riverbed or constricting it to a narrow drain? 


4. Gurminder Singh,   “Samaj par Langar ka Arthik wa Samajik Prabhav: Ek Adhyayan” (A Study of the Langar and its Social and Economic Impact)

Gurminder Singh was born in Hapur, Utter Pradesh, and educated at Delhi University and H. S. Gaur Vishwavidyalaya, Sagar, M. P.  He has worked with the National Literacy Resource Centre, and the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration –Mussoorie.  He now works with the National Basic Education Resource Centre, Bhopal, Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samithi, as a researcher. He is working with Dr. Jean Dreze.


My research is in Delhi, within the  area covered by the Sikh Gurdwara Act.  The major Gurdwaras are almost all controlled directly by the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee. Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee was the body set up by the Delhi Gurdwara Act of 1971 to manage Gurdwara and Gurdwara property within the union territory of Delhi. Delhi has around three hundred Gurdwaras but twelve of the Gurdwara in the Delhi are under the control of DSGPC, they are under the Local Singh Sabha.

At the present time the media has begun to cover urdwaras; so there has been an increase in the visitors to langar. In Delhi's historical gurdwaras, there is no such thing as lunch hour and dinner hour. It’s always mealtime here. Food, stay, water, bathing in the Gurdwara are free of cost for everyday. In the Langar hall, men and women play an equal role. 

In Delhi more than 40 percent of Langar's  takers are from a poor background. Many people come to Delhi for hospital treatment; they avail of the Langar. Delhi also has large numbers of homeless people; many people who eat at the Langar are physical handicapped. 

How the money for Langar is arranged: people give the donation-- “Dan.”  Some gurdwaras receive more money than their expenditure but some gurdwaras have more expenditure but receive less money.  On balance, the DSGPC receives more money than its spends, but Singh Sabha Gurdwaras experience a financial crunch because they only receive money for their programmes from their local constituencies. 


3.15-5.15
Contextualising Trauma

1.  Shivam Vij, “The Nature of Ragging in Hostels”
Shivam Vij has another eight months before he graduates from St. Stephen's College and starts working as a journalist. He runs the popular ZEST mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups and is a co-initator of The Stop Ragging Campaign and its website, www.stopragging.org.

Any discussion on ragging concentrates on the individual fresher who is being ragged. “For some it may be fun but for others it may not be okay.” This approach to ragging inevitably leads to victim-blaming. My research has sought to shift the focus on the ragger, or rather the ragging community: what does ragging achieve in the hostel space? What are the codes of the hostel community? Why is it important for the community that the fresher accept the discourse of ragging?

Sociological analyses of ragging, on the other hand, sees ragging as either resulting from social conditions (sexual repression, school discipline, etc) or as performing social functions. Such an approach sees ragging as merely a “rite of passage”, and becomes indifferent to the sheer violence of ragging. The functionalist approach seems to explain away the phenomenon. My paper, on the other hand, seeks to shift the focus to the reactionary ideals of the ragging community.


2.  Swara Bhaskar and Moyukh Chatterjee, “Of Riots and Ruins: Space and Violence in Vatva, Ahmedabad”

Moyukh Chatterjee  is doing his MA in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics; Swara Bhaskar finished her MA at the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences at JNU.

(SAINTS AND SAFFRONISATION: MEMORY, VIOLENCE AND INTER-COMMUNITY RELATIONS IN VATVA, AHMEDABAD")

Our research in Ahmedabad is situated in an industrial area on the outskirts of the city called Vatva. This project emerged from our experiences in June 2002 as volunteers in the relief effort post the Gujarat Carnage of 2002. We worked in the Qutb-e-Alam Dargah Camp in Vatva. While writing our proposal for application to the fellowship we had planned to focus our research on 'Space and Violence'. The area we had proposed to study was one of the many sites of violence during the 2002 carnage and was now informed by a post-violence ‘compromised’ peace. We had planned to examine the manner in which the memory of violence is recorded in the physical transformations of space in a violence affected area. We proposed to study the communalisation of space or alternatively the construction of communal identity with the aid of spatial technologies – like 'ghetto-isation' and communal coding of built structures. Our proposal suggested a re-examination of the experience (of minority and majority communities) of 'shared spaces' and the fate of these shared spaces during and after a riot.

With this plan we returned to Ahmedabad in 2005, looking for signs – of reconciliation between neighbours; of spatial practices that betrayed a memory of violence; of time-smoothed narratives of betrayal or hope that are made possible only by forgetting – instead we stumbled upon the memory of a ‘golden age’ of religious syncretism and communal harmony. Was this a classic example of nostalgic memories of an unproblematic past, helping the communities to deal with the declining relations of the present and the uncertain future?

We discovered an oral history that revealed a 700 year old relationship between the residents of the colonies we were studying. It was a shared history that suggested a legacy of peaceful coexistence until recent times. We then traced the trajectory of these declining relations through the frame of Industrialisation and Urbanisation, trying to locate the link between these phenomena and the Communalisation of social relations. We also made an attempt to examine the role of external forces- political parties (Bajrang Dal mainly) and reform movements (Swadhyay Parivar) in shaping the relations between our three protagonist communities- Muslim, Bharwaad and Vaghri.

As we explored this possibility of understanding the trajectory of declining relations between neighbours of different religions, our fieldwork encompassed four colonies Navapura, Saiyidvada, Vaghrivas and Bharwaadvas-located in what was once Vatva Gaam, now industrial wasteland. We conducted interviews, filmed the streets with the local cricket team, took photographs blanched and polarised by the dry summer sun, and approached not very forthcoming organs of the State for official information.

We’ve pieced together from the memories of these three communities, living in contiguity with each other- a story of neighbourhoods transformed by borders; of old ties of the Panchayat and participation in each other’s religious festivals- uprooted by the anonymity of forced Industrialisation and Urbanisation; and, of the death of a shared past, with a certain common labour history, of struggling migrants – to the present state of ghettoised existence, the only thing that they now share.


3.  Syed Bismillah Geelani, “The Kashmiri Encounter in Delhi”
Syed Bismillah Geelani is a Kashmiri student studying in Delhi University. He has been in Delhi since 1996. It was in December 2001 when his brother was arrested and framed in the parliament attack case and he suddenly found his identity changed from Kashmiri student to a brother of a terrorist. Bismillah writes stories and also political features in Urdu and English.


4.  Hilal Bhat, “Shrine as an Anodyne in Strife-Torn Kashmir”