[Reader-list] On Delhi

[Zainab Bawa]

Dear Pheeta, Taha and all,

Thanks for continuing the conversation. A few things which come to my mind
and I will put them down as I am still thinking:

I think there are a few crises that we are facing today, one of them that I
can immediately think of is a crises of conceptual handles - do old concepts
and categories apply to our present conditions? Even when we think of class,
does class exist in the same manner today as Marx spoke of? What class do I
bracket a poor landlord and a rich tenant? What class does the municipal
clerk belong to given that he also runs a cinema hall in some suburb of
Mumbai on land that he was given as a gift? Or for that matter, figures such
as junior municipal officers who run chit funds and are involved in
complicated financial circuits? How does the category of class account for
the several figures I meet each day who imbibe in them more roles than one
and who are involved with the city in ways more than one?

I think the second crises is that of our understanding of capital and its
relationship with the city. And here, I think Taha's point is very valuable
- how do we narrate land and money? Are land and money vulgar, naked and
ruining the city? I am surrounded by talks of speculation each day. People
talk of homes, of assets, of value and of property in various ambiguous
ways. My friends from rehab colonies ask me:

Is the house where you live in yours or have you rented it?

I answer: I lived in a rented apartment.

They say: Really? You should just go and get your own place.

I say: How can I? EMIs are very expensive to pay and bank loans are like
highway robberies.

They say: Still, you should manage. It is very important to have your own
place.

Here, the interpretation of house as place causes me to think about land,
about property and all those related categories and then also about the
relationships between real estate, land, property, cities and people.

I also think about the notion of justice that is implicit in Rana's piece
and the implications that our understanding of justice and of law have not
only for the city, but also for practice and for theoretical formulations.
About a year ago, I began to sit in on the hearings of a land acquisition
case in the Karnataka High Court. The case was filed by tenant traders
against the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRC). Some of the traders had
been served with notices for vacating the properties they had occupied and
some of the other traders were part of the case because they feared that
significant chunks of their properties would be acquired if the metro is
constructed overground on their road. In the beginning, I was agitated
during each hearing because the case would not proceed and it appeared that
the traders were most likely to lose the case. But as the hearings
proceeded, we found that the judges were as confused about new legalities,
about institutions such as BMRC which are both public and private, and about
the status of such public-private institutions. In the subsequent hearings,
the judges would openly articulate their confusions. But even as they
articulated their confusions, they kept gesturing to each of the contesting
parties to produce evidences in particular directions so that they may be
able to pronounce a judgment. My experience of these sittings has caused me
to re-think the notion of justice. In certain circumstances, the court may
not be a dispenser of justice, but that the judges act as arbitrators. What
makes their arbitration acceptable and legitimate is our belief that they
are operating on the basis of the constitution and other sources of law that
we accept as legitimate, absolute and neutral. Yet, the decision of the
judges is not final and binding. In the case of land and property, it
appears that even after the dispensation of justice and arbitration, there
are numerous factors which create/impede the articulation and fulfillment of
claims by various claimants. While judgments have been issued on this
particular case of the tenant traders, the traders have not given up. They
continue to expand their networks of outreach in order to fulfill their
claims.

I think a final point for today's amblings takes from the above and concerns
our own understanding of change and transformation. Certain narratives
produce the understanding of change and transformation in terms of a
revolution, the film Rang De Basanti comes to my mind here. But the question
is whether a revolution is the only means of attaining change and
transformation? I think here of Asef Bayat's interesting account of quiet
revolution of the ordinary. Bayat talks of how the 1970s revolution in Iran
was not, contrary to popular thinking, an expression of outrage of the poor.
The poor in fact had their likes for the Shah and they did not necessarily
identify with the revolution partly because they did not see how the
revolution would serve their daily needs. I also think of Solomon Benjamin's
recent piece in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
(IJURR) on "occupancy urbanism", AbdouMaliq Simon's writing on the
"periphery" in the Sarai Frontiers Reader - I continue to probe what change
and transformation mean and how they are achieved? There will perhaps be no
clear cut answer, but then surely, there will not be one answer only.

....

Zainab



On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Taha Mehmood <2tahamehmood at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Dear Rana and Dear All,
>
> Please forgive me for not making myself clear.
>
> The point is perhaps, not just limited to real estate, or necessarily
> to your text alone but perhaps my reference was to a broader issue -
>
> Which perhaps relates to creation of narratives about city like Delhi.
>
> The point being why in the last many decades we, the reader are
> prompted to approach the idea of Delhi through what seem like a ready
> made stock of characters and stock notions?
>
> Land being just one of them.
>
> Let me take this opportunity to expand my thoughts concerning
> representation of the idea of Delhi.
>
> Let me also suggest that there is of course nothing wrong in re-using
> previously used, previously crafted stock of characters or notions,
> that is perhaps indicative of smart thinking, but I wonder if there
> can be novel ways of describing a city, other than by simply deploying
> seemingly typecast notions and figures like- clogged roads, the figure
> of L'enfant terrible, DDA/ Property Dealer nexus, Nouveau riche and
> the figure of a cynical journalist etc
>
> There seems to be no dearth of literature on Delhi in the public
> domain which does not seem to have previously relied on these
> typification.
>
>  I wish to re-visit these types, more so, in order to think and
> reflect as to why is it that there seems to be rather limited range of
> descriptions of the Capital city? I am sure there are more than 'n'
> number of ways to read the idea of Delhi?
>
> Why, for instance, the notion of insight or a suggestion towards an
> uncanny element which must be a normative attribute of any form of
> writing; seems to be conspicuous by its  absence from recent
> literature on cities like Delhi? Although I do not know whether this
> should be normatively included in any and every form of writing on big
> cities.
>
> For the time being, though, let's leave these questions aside and let
> us re-visit some of the above mentioned notions, one by one, to
> ascertain for ourselves, how different people, belonging to different
> eras which were seemingly unconnected through time and space have
> attempted to create a memory for us, towards an idea of Delhi.
>
> 1. Clogged Roads-
>
>  1.i . A popular travelogue from Lonely Planet series describes the
> Roads of Delhi as thus-
>
> In a densely populated city such as Delhi, even road space is at a
> premium, not just for traffic but also for everything else....[which
> is ] shared by bicycles, cycle rickshaws, scooters, motor cycles, auto
> rickshaws, carts drawn by horses, bullocks, or the odd, camels, cars,
> taxis, vans, trucks, buses, and an occasional elephant.
>
> [ Horton, P,  Plunkett, R and Finlay, H. 2002 Lonely Planet. Getting
> around- Metro p. 81]
>
> 1.ii. When Mark Tully writes, No full stops in India, he describes the
> roads of Delhi in 1991, as thus-
>
> ...the streets of Delhi are nevertheless clogged up Japanese designed
> cars and scooters...for the less affluent there are only decrepit,
> outdated and fuel inefficient buses quite in capable of providing an
> efficient service even if the roads were cleared of them.
>
> [as cited in Waugh,D 2000. Geography an Integrated Approach p.619]
>
>
> 1.iii. While writing Twilight In Delhi in 1940, Ahmed Ali,  tells the
> story of Mir Nihal a merchant of Delhi who is grappling with loss of
> power post 1857 seige of the city by the British. Ahmed Ali decides to
> use the following words, to describe an event thus giving us a view
> how these Delhi roads could have appeared.-
>
> The procession passed, one long unending line of generals, and the
> governors and the tommies, and the native chiefs and their retinues,
> and soldiery like a slow unending line of ants.
>
> [Ali, A. 1994. Twilight in Delhi. p 105]
>
> 2. The figure of L'enfant terrible. aka Bade baap ki bigri hui aulaad.
>
> 2.i. Sanjeev Nanda appears to one, like a postmetropolis version of
> Duryodhana. Duryodhana a mythical character whose pride was
> instrumental in the creation of Inderprastha (Delhi ) in the first
> place. He was also the one, by the way, who snatched the city from its
> 'rightful' owners. Thus turning the then Delhi into a lawless city.
> Duryodhana's father was blind to his follies and in the end had to pay
> a price for this neglect.
>
> Like Inderprastha is often described as that which was imagined by an
> Asur architect called Maya, so does subsequent descriptions of the
> city seems to rely on prevalence of surreal structures. But we deviate
> here...therefore we come back to this character of Bade baap ki bigri
> hui aulaad aka Baba logs aka L'enfant terrible!
>
> Apart from Duryodhana, I can think of Aurangzeb, we may call him as an
> erstwhile inhabitant of the city, who also had scant regard for the
> rules and regulations of the day and was rather interested in doing
> what he thought 'fit' . In an urban context what he did was no
> different from what people in power do now to Delhi which is to
> demolish, erase and subsequently construct. Maybe if some future
> historian were to write a text on the history of urban Delhi then we
> may have more material to quote from.
>
> However it does not comes as a surprise that when Mohsin Hamid, for
> instance, writes about Lahore in his Moth Smoke, he chooses the name,
> Aurangzeb aka Ozi to represent decadence. Ozi by the way, was also
> involved in a hit and run accident in 1998 in Lahore, like Nanda in
> 1999 in Delhi, and he escapes law by coercing someone less fortunate
> than him to take the blame, like Nanda through his family tries to
> influence the key witness.
>
> 2.ii. Then in post Independence India we had Suresh Kumar.
>
> SK, as we all know, was the son of the Defense Minister of India.
> Although SK was not exactly killing people but yes, like Nanda, he
> appears  as a public hazard in the eyes of quite a few. I, of course
> refer to the infamous sex scandal which came to fore when Surya
> Magazine broke the story.
>
> Journalist Rajinder Puri, who in 1978, was the then campaign in charge
> of Janta Party had this to write about the incident-
>
> -A defense ministers son, in a defense dealers car, related papers in
> the backseat of the car and the car was used for a romantic rendezvous
> - was it right that the son of the defense minister should be so
> careless about affairs which could imperil the nations security ? That
> set me off !-
>
> [ http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/specials/proj_tabloid/puri.shtml ]
>
> 2.iii And who can forget Sanjay Dutt aka Sanju Baba but he belongs to
> Bombay doesn't he, so what!! for Delhi did we not have Sanjay Gandhi
> aka Sanjay Baba to haunt our collective imagination.
>
> In what Harsh Sethi cogently describes as an anthropology of power,
> Raj Thapar has this to write about Sanjay Baba in All These Years-
>
> -Sanjay, the son, was so deep in the game of  governance, if he
> wielded so much power over his mother, the story was far more
> terrifying that we had ever thought. Indira had over the last three
> years, given in to him in small ways, we had thought.
>
> [ Thapar, R. 1991. All These Years: a memoir. p. 399 ]
>
> There's also a section in the book where Raj Thapar writes about a
> small but significant incident which leads Nehru to ask Indira about
> her son's involvement in alleged incidents of car lifting from the
> diplomatic enclave which comes under the purview of Lodhi road police
> station.
>
> During his day, as we all know that Sanjay was deeply passionate about
> a range of interests- like borrowing farm lands from friends from
> Gurgaon to play spanner-spanner-in-the-works , or fly planes at
> fantastically low levels so that, being the dutiful husband he was, he
> could assist his wife by drying all the clothes hung in the backyard.
> And Yes, when he was free during evenings, he would easily drop by
> Trukman Gate in his Ford Jeep to evangelize about vasectomy to the
> illiterate hordes of Islam.
>
> And now! during the elections, we had to sit patiently when HIS son,
> blessed be his soul, Varun, started to evangelize on the fine art of
> plucking hands out of illiterate hordes of Islam if they were to
> behave improperly.
>
> It seems, In Delhi, every now and then, we pay homage to a myth, which
> not the myth of Rama but that of Duryodhana. To keep his memory alive
> a son has to be sacrificed in the public consciousness. His fall has
> to become a fable.
>
> It escapes me that what's so transformative or alluring or symbolic
> about this character that it needs to be mentioned, analyzed and
> written about again and again, every time one has to write about
> Delhi?
>
> 3.  DDA/ Property Dealer nexus.
>
> 3.i.  Who can forget Dibakar Banerjee's excellent film on urban
> transformations around Delhi called- Khosla ka Ghosla, which was
> released in 2006?
>
> The film was about Delhi, about the change in housing sector, about
> the promise of a new wealth and the desire to fulfill a long cherished
> dream of possessing land, of owning and building a house. And the film
> was a story of lives of all those characters which were caught in this
> conundrum.
>
> Did the character of Kishan Khorana, not signify- the corruption, the
> impropriety, the obscene wealth, the (ab)use of power, the way is
> which these lands are coerced from owners?  Did the character Asif
> Iqbal not point towards the methods or processes which are employed to
> acquire legitimacy of land?
>
> [ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0466460/plotsummary ]
>
> But was it any new or was it an old story excellently told?
>
> 3.ii. Or for that matter one could think of an eminently forgettable
> cinematic text like Jugaad, which was directed by Anand Kumar and
> released in 2009.
>
> The film story revolves around municipal corporation of Delhi's
> inspired 'sealing drive' and how an advertising agency owner tries to
> find his way through a maze of characters involving property dealers,
> corrupt MCD officials, to reclaim the land where his agency one stood.
>
> [ http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0677187/ ]
>
> 3.iii.  At one level real estate for housing is a simple game. It
> relates to the stock. Demand versus Supply.  If there more demand and
> less supply. There's bound to be speculation. Various people will
> enter the speculative market hoping to make a quick buck.
>
> Consider this piece on Delhi's housing  situation 25 years ago.
> Reading an essay written by Arun Kumar in EPW in 1982 on the eve of
> Asian Games in Delhi and then juxtaposing it stuff written on
> contemporary Delhi one is left with a feeling as if nothing much
> happened in all these years. That the city has not evolved. One
> wonders if that is the case?
>
> - Delhi along with other urban centers of the country have been
> experiencing a phenomenal boon in real estate prices since 1977. In
> the capital city the increase has been particularly steep.
> notwithstanding the existence of DDA, an official agency charged with
> the planned development of the Union Territory-
>
> Later in the essay Arun Kumar adds,
>
> DDA seems to be bending its rules to favor builders... in fact it is
> believed, that most conglomerates of brokers, builders and financiers
> in Delhi are overextended and are unable to make full payments to the
> DDA for the purchase made in previous years.
>
> [ Kumar, A. 1982. Economic and Political Weekly. Real Estate as
> Business. p 1984 ]
>
> 4. Nouveau riche
>
> 4.i. For someone like, Sumanta Banerjee  Nouveau riches of India about
> SIX years ago, in 2003 stood for, a 'small transparent cocoon'.
> Commenting on the then state of affairs, she says, 'that small
> transparent cocoon of the Indian Big Rich is bursting at the seams,
> with Ferrari's and BMW's, farm houses and malls, exclusive townships
> and wine picnics, mega bashes and show biz weddings.
>
> It's an incestuous world of a symbiotic relationship, between demands
> for luxury goods, and five star privileges, by a minuscule portion of
> India, and their supply by the handful of rich manufacturers and
> producers who are everlastingly creating newer and newer demands.
>
> [ Banerjee, S. 2003. Economic and Political Weekly. Better 'Nouveau'
> than Never. p 5145-5146 ]
>
> 4.ii Charles W Pratt. reviewing a Naipaul's book in The Rotarian in
> 1991 almost EGIHTEEN years ago has this to offer-
>
> -Because of industrialization, and the green revolution in rural
> areas, a new class of Nouveau riche persons are emerging, and these
> persons are exposed to the first time to university education,
> comfortable urban life, stylish living, and western influences-
> materialistic comforts...At the moment things are chaotic here.
>
> [ Pratt,C.W. Mar 1991. The Rotarian. Vol. 158. No. 3. p.4 ]
>
> 4.iii. An article contributed by Local Self Government Institute
> Bombay describes the 'new' recipients  of redistribution wealth in
> 1978-
>
> The nouveau riche in the country are generally exhibitionists. One can see
> them
> in the posh residential colonies of New Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta
>
>
> [ Quarterly journal of the Local Self-Government Institute (Bombay).‎ -
> Page 20
> by Local Self-Government Institute (Bombay), All-India Institute of
> Local Self-Government - Political Science - 1978 ]
>
> 5. The figure of a cynical journalist.
>
> 5.i  In 1983 -Jaane Bhi Do Yaroon- was released, where the trope a
> cynical journalist was used both in an ironical manner by the presence
> of two cynically naive photo-journalists who wanted to expose an
> instance of builder/politician nexus related to an urban development
> project and their calculative editor who makes a bargain in the end
> with the very builders/politicians who she was supposed to expose. But
> of course this was related to Bombay and not Delhi.
>
>
> 5.ii  Then in 1986, just three years later, a film called, New Delhi
> Times was released which had Shashi Kapoor playing the character of an
> oxymoronically cynical yet hopeful journalist called, Vikas Pande. In
> New Delhi Times, Vikas's job was to hold the proverbial mirror to a
> rapidly degrading Delhi political and social elite. He is
> disillusioned in the end because the power elite do little to back him
> up.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The point being what do these stock descriptions mean to us? What is
> this idea of a city that we are asked to conjure or to interpret? Why
> does it appear as if we are persuaded to consume this dominant notion
> about the city? What makes extremely perceptive professional writers,
> repeat stock notions about Delhi decade after decade after decade by
> re-packaging perhaps a torpidity of imagination as a novelty'?
>
> Does writing about Delhi in a particular manner by using readily
> available - types- not reduce, a remarkable city to, 'a predictable
> city'?
>
> Warm regards
>
> Taha
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-- 
Zainab Bawa
Ph.D. Student and Independent Researcher

Gaining Ground ...
http://zainab.freecrow.org

http://cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories-of-the-internet/transparency-and-politics