[Reader-list] [Urbanstudy] On Delhi

[Zainab Bawa]

Dear Anant,
Thanks for the response.

I still believe there is a crisis of conceptual handles for not just
understanding the city, but also for narrating cities. In making the point
about class, the issue that I was raising is that one, while we need to be
thankful to Marx and Engels and other grandfathers for producing concepts,
the manner in which they conceived them cannot be simply lifted and applied
to our conditions. We can work with these concepts, and surely, they can be
liberating at some points in time and restrictive at others, but there is
also a need to probe into the categories which were used to arrive at these
concepts. I find that older categories may not apply in the same way today
because certain conditions around us have simply changed drastically. For
e.g., the nature of the economy now - it is simply not what the economy was
like a century ago or even until 1985. In saying all this, I don't mean to
say that the wealth of knowledge and information produced in the past is
trash and needs to be rubbished. There is a great deal to learn from that -
from the poetry of Marx to the beautiful writings of the factory workers -
all of this is extremely valuable and inspiring. But I cannot just directly
lift from there and put it into the present when the present is laced with
ambiguities, desires, anguish, fear, speed, etc.

The other issue is that of 'tropes' and Pheeta's point about who has access
to what aspects of the city and also the audiences to who you are narrating
the city (and what notions and access the audience has to the city). I am
somewhat very uncomfortable with this idea that you are writing for a
particular class of audiences and therefore you have to tailor your writing
accordingly. I am guilty of this myself on various occasions. But then I
wonder: when we talk of transformation, change and revolution in our
writing, then is there not a trace of responsibility on us about how we
write and who we write? Whether the act of writing itself can be
transformative and revolutionary, leave alone the Robin Hood revolution
outside? And therefore, even in my last posting, I have asked the question -
how do we conceive of change, of justice, of transformation - all these
conceptions inform our own actions, including the very mundane acts of
writing and talking and the way we write and talk.

The issue of whether the people who read us want to have access to those
aspects of the city that they otherwise would not know or want to know -
here the question again is about the issue of how we conceive transformation
and change.

The last issue which I want to flag concerns something which I have been
thinking about and writing about recently, and this relates to the issue of
tropes to write about the city. I have pointed this out in my previous post
- we are embedded in the city in more ways than one. And sometimes, it is
strange and yet wondrous how we get involved in issues and how we act and
react to circumstances. Let me illustrate my point here a little. A couple
of months ago, I was talking to Radha. Radha works as a domestic maid and
was moved from her squatter settlement about 4 years ago. She has been given
a house in one of the 14 rehabilitation and resettlement colonies in Mumbai
city. I was talking to Radha to figure out how she felt about the move,
about displacement and what value did she see in the house she received as
compensation. Here is what she said:

"We were moved from A about 4 years ago, given a house in Z. Initially, it
was scary and uncomfortable. Then, at some point, I took some loans from my
employer and from my paternal aunt and rented out a small place in A. I did
not want my children's schooling to suffer with the rehabilitation. So, we
came back to A. After all, everything we do is for our children. How I feel
about having a house? It is good no? Better than living in a squatter
settlement where there is uncertainty and fear of getting evicted every now
and then. Yes, we did not pay rent or maintenance in the squatter settlement
and now we have to do all of that in our rehab house. At least, the
children's future is secure now. We have rented out our house in Z. I visit
the house once every year, in the summer holdiays."

I assumed from everything that Radha told me that in a way, she is not
terribly displeased about having a house. I was about to leave when Radha
asked me:

"Why are you asking these questions to me?"

I said: "I am interested to know about your life, how your life gets
affected by rehabiliation and resettlement. Maybe, someday, I will try to
make recommendations based on all the stories I hear."

And then she said: "Why did you not come earlier, when we are being evicted?
At least we would not have been moved!"

For a moment, all my conclusions went for a toss. Radha is
still ambiguous about the loss and the gain. While on the one hand she talks
about her house as asset, on the other hand, her memory and emotions of A as
her original place defy a very simplistic understanding of value and of real
estate and asset. Radha, in some measure, corresponds with the figure Rana
described meeting in the hotel who has the money and yet, who works with
certain customs and traditions. It would be somewhat short-sighted of me to
conclude that Radha is happy with the housing she has got and she is secure
now. Radha is invested in the city in various ways. I spoke to her
sister-in-law, Charu, some days later and Charu did not have the same things
to tell me. Charu was also anxious about her stay in Z, and yet hopeful that
some day, they will return back to A. It is these ambiguities and
aspirations which prevent any simple trajectories and understandings of
mobilizations, change and revolutions. And it is these ambiguities and
aspirations that I find essential to pay attention to in order to understand
trajectories and cities.

As for tropes, you can continue to use them if you feel that transformation
will only happen with some Robin Hood coming and saving the city (and then
the question is whether the city really has to be saved, from who, and by
who?). Even our man, Mr. Sreedharan, who is helping with building metro rail
systems in cities talks about collapse of cities and how cities will crumble
if there is no metro rail? Maybe Sreedharan is Robin Hood then ... Saviour
to our cities ... Who knows ...

Still in love with the dreadful and yet inspiring cities,

Zainab



On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 9:34 AM, anant maringanti <anant_umn at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>



-- 
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