[Reader-list] [Urbanstudy] On Delhi

[anant maringanti]

2009/8/3 Zainab Bawa <bawazainab79 at gmail.com>

> 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?


Zainab,  If you are asking whether we can take an essay by Engels on the
English factory working class and learn from it how hawkers in Mumbai live -
the answer is of course not. But what are you concluding from that ? That
the way in Engels wrote about class cannot teach us anything about how to
think about or write about hawkers at VT or the way they navigate the urban
terrain ?  Concepts and categories are not ever available as
prefabricated objects. They are constellations of ideas, they bear all sorts
of scents, traces and tentacles. You have to work with them to appreciate
them, reshape them and allow them to shape your thinking.

To me what you describe above as 'crisis'  - is a problem of intellectual
currency. Marx is not included in Vogue 2009 winter collection. He hasnt
been for some years. May be he will be on the cover page next year. I cannot
tell. I would be curious to know. But it doesnt feel like anything remotely
like a crisis where class has become an irrelevant concept.

To some extent what Taha is pointing to is precisely this. Writers have to
work with available tropes to make sense to readers and yet aspire
to transcend those very  tropes. What intellectual, aspirational, emotional
resources the writer mobilizes to do that may vary from writer to writer -
but isnt city writing  as much about discovering the city as it is to be
discovered by the city? Revealing oneself so that the city reveals itself.
?

The generations of writers and film makers that Taha documents worked from
within tropes of the city as the site of corruption and degradation
an imagination of Indian cities as inefficient, corrupt, bloated, resource
consuming. In the post war period, they located indian cities in a sort of
diagram framed by colonialism as one axis and feudalism as another
axis. There is  a strange ideological continuum here from the World Bank
to Chinese Communist Party.
In that spectrum urban writers and creative artists responded in a number of
ways ...from the peculiar jeena yahaan marna yahaan kind of resignation to
lets go back to the village...from inciting revolution to modeling ideal
citizens.


Taha identifies an important trope. This identification only confirms what
Gyan Prakash from one end and the World Bank from the other end have said -
within Indian nationalist imagination cities have been seen as 'bad'. There
is a decisive shift occurring now. I am not convinced by this line of
thought. Identification of trope is only the beginning of the story. What
did the writers and artists do with it ? That cannot be judged from within
the trope. To do so is like taking one piece of a jigsaw puzzle and trying
to judge the entire shape. On a hunch, though I would say that by and large,
regional language literatures have been a lot more assertive in seeing
cities as avenues for liberation. Those writers had much less guilt about
their own location to deal with.

In any case, I am glad that these emails landed in my mail box - I am not
subscribed to sarai reader. The point to me is not whether or not the city
is dark and depressing. Rather, if a writer renders a dark impression of the
city, the question to ask is  precisely what aspirations is he or she
enlisting - what possible worlds is he or she conjuring up?
anant