Designing (Post)Colonial Knowledge

Imagining South Asia

Priya Jha, Rajinder Dudrah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000369236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Over the past 20 years we have seen critical design studies emerge as a springboard for scholars, activists, and those working in the creative industries. Design studies has enabled critics to link the relationship between constructions of knowledge and the emotional commitments that both practitioners and audiences bring to the making and uses of design work. A critical focus on these practices can reveal issues such as the distribution of power and emotional evocations and experiences in and through different designs.

At the same time, the use of design studies has drawn on diverse fields such as art history, architecture, public policy, and Geographic Information Systems. This collected volume, the first of its kind, engages with these fields of critical inquiry with ideas and debates in post-colonial studies, and in media and cultural studies. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines material culture and its relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on South Asia. The chapters pose questions about colonial history, colonial and postcolonial cultural practices, and the aestheticization of South Asian art, design, and media forms as they inform identities in a deterritorialized global culture.

The sites of the investigation by the contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity of design studies and share the insistence on emphasizing the vernacular: Indian fashion design, lithographic design in Muslim princely states, and Indian floor drawings live alongside museum exhibitions, shopping malls, and film spaces.

This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Memories of violence: Of emotional geographies and planning in post-Partition Delhi, 1948–62

Aprajita Sarcar

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the messy streets of post-Partition Delhi. The author engages with a relatively understudied facet of the Partition: its impact on the everyday life of a city. Through physical sites which carried imprints of former inhabitants, to letters that refugees wrote to express their anxieties, the article constructs identities that were forged in the everyday life of Delhi. Questions of ownership, self-making, and governance help answer how the trauma of riots was negotiated in mundane paper trails. The essay is divided into two parts. The first half describes the emotional topography of the city, with an eye on the aspirations of the refugee. It describes the emotional city the refugee encountered. The second half addresses the way the refugee talks back and creates her own emotional landscape. The first master plan of the city enacted in 1962 provides the context for this conversation.

The photograph of Figure 1 is totemic for Partition refugees. The symbolic relevance of the photograph would not have been possible without the Purana Qila. Disrupted families were gravitating to the Qila, in ways that were resonant with its history. The Qila represented the city of Delhi in ways the colonial city could never comprehend. Particularly for the refugees, its location within the walls of Shahjahanabad, meant a shelter within a syncretic city, which lived in the past. This relevance of the Qila shows that Partition did not stop with the mass migration of more than a million homes. It continued in the search for life thereafter. Families uprooted, bodies thrust open, memories pulled apart, pieces traveling from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ And yet, the soul kept searching, for its dreams, with the stains of blood that seeped through it, as if, in the pieces, was the whole. The vigour with which Partition was being negotiated was most visible in sites that were already drawing the larger number of refugees: cities. Cities were perceived as being more accommodative of the new comers, more willing to relent some space for them. These sites of colonial modernity were now going to be tested for their tenacity: their ability to assimilate strangers, to render legible those who wished a new life.

Figure 1. Margaret Bourke White, Partition series, Life Magazine, 1948.

This essay is a recollection of how the refugee negotiated the affective structure of post-Partition Delhi. Relying on administrative files of the period (48–62) and historical newspaper reportage, the ‘evidence structure’ is necessarily anecdotal. The thick descriptions of how individuals performed their negotiations with the state, renders visible, the affective registers that were at work. By the affective city, I mean the emotions, feelings that are associated with institutions which constitute the routine, mundane everyday life. I address the messiness and ambiguity that refugees engaged with in ways that helped them create a ‘normal’ everyday, humdrum life. I ask where and how the Partition created this messiness in administering order in the city, and how the everyday city reflected that. Following de Certeau’s () construct of everyday life as a political site, I follow how the everyday life that displaced individuals created for themselves grew out of patterns of life that were available to them in the city. This life offered intellectual and material resources to help them rebuild their lives.

Much has been written about the violence that was unleashed. Scholarship has moved away from framing Partition as a ruptural ‘event,’ and has shown its repercussions, which were felt for decades. (Zamindar) Historians have meticulously shown the way the trauma of Partition created narratives (Hasan), many of which described the process of recuperation, which was underway once the riots ceased to terrify, when bloodshed refused to soak through to the inner core of dreams. These narratives and the actors therein were eventually subsumed or ‘silenced’ under institutionalized ‘nationalist’ commentaries (Jalal; Butalia). However, in a bid to conceptually link Partition to the process of ‘nationalization’ by creating a political and moral ‘community’ (Pandey), historians forgot the city. The conception of the ‘ideal citizen’ of the postcolonial state as exclusionary and selective meant that it often did not have space for the refugees. The refugee made herself visible through the everyday power regimes of the city: at times aligning with, at times opposing statist forces. The relationship that the refugee had with the postcolonial and post-Partition state was a tenuous one. Brought together by the sheer animosity of the ‘event’ of Partition, there was not one behemoth of a nationalized moral community but several affective communities, who were moulding their ways of being to demands of the state. The refugees became a community in this process of negotiations. As scholars, we need to understand how the refugee community negotiated an existence within stratified systems, which were already in place before their entry into the city. This conceptual linkage is missed because of the relatively scant attention that has been spared on linking the Partition to the emotional architecture of the pre-existing city.

In this sense this essay is similar to the article by Adeem Suhail and Ameem Lutfi which ‘locates the city at the center of diverse political geography and cultural lineages’ while interrogating Partition through narratives of Baloch residents in Karachi (Suhail and Lutfi). While Suhail and Lutfi add to the existing scholarship by bringing the Baloch peoples of Karachi and their experiences into the ‘Archive’ of South Asian historiography (Pandey), I contest the very idea of a moral community as being constitutive of the nation. I contend that the emotional geography of the urban city produced several registers of affect, and that the struggle of creating a homogenous moral national community would be continuously disrupted by the heterogeneity of the refugee community in the city.

The essay is divided into two parts. The first half describes the emotional topography of the city, mostly through reports and advertisements that appeared in Hindustan Times of 1948, with an eye on the aspirations of the refugee. It describes the emotional city the refugee encountered. The second half addresses the way the refugee talks back and creates her own emotional landscape. The first master plan of the city, enacted in 1962 provides the context for this conversation.

Partition drove the conceptual wedge between the so-called ‘Old and New’ Delhi deeper. The binary was built into the planning of future parts of the city. The Old city presented a dilemma for colonial presence after 1857. The Mughal imprints over Shahajahanabad could never be removed, even as efforts to eviscerate them were continuous (Liddle). Old Delhi, for the late colonial government held connotations of chaotic and disease-ridden living, while parts of the city built after 1857 were deemed safe, efficient, rational and functional. Thus, most of the state-sponsored housing projects initiated between 1935 and 1941 were in the interstices of the walled old city and the imperial capital (Hosagrahar). The notions of disease, hygiene and sanitation played very important roles in administering of Delhi, and especially in maintaining the distinction between the publics of the new and the old parts of the city, something the Partition riots reinforce.

“Ishwar Dass was sentenced to three months R.I. for the theft of marble slabs from the shrine of Shahmardan Dargah, Aligunj, by the Special Magistrate, New Delhi, yesterday. Five other accused were acquitted. Ishwar Dass, with the help of four others was caught red-handed while removing the marble slabs from the Shahmardan Durgah on December 31, in a jeep. It was alleged that the action of the accused wounded the feelings of the Muslim community to whom the shrine belonged. The accused produced no defense.”¹

The dargah was part of the emotional topography of Delhi as of 1948. The city was marked by violence of an immense scale, which left its marks on places. Places carry memories of violence. This report reconfigured a religious place as a site of communal conflagration, thereby becoming a law and order problem. Simultaneously, the Shahmardan Durgah become a tangible ‘property’ that signified the sentiments of a particular community. Removing slabs from the structure was aimed at hurting not only Muslims, but the shared, synchronous history that the site may have carried. The state, however, was not interested in undoing the symbolic damage. It managed the problem of a communal attack on the physical precincts through the register of crime.

Mosques continued to be sites, which produced bureaucratic anxieties, well into the 1950s, evident in the case of the mosque inside Lady Irwin Hospital. The mosque appeared in bureaucratic paper trail with a letter dated 29 April 1956. Someone from the Delhi administration had threatened the Imam of the mosque with closure.² The first response of the Imam was to contact the local bureaucrat, who made it his business to understand why the Health ministry might take this decision, upset the normalcy of a mosque sequestered in a hospital precinct, and cause ‘first class problems.’ The hospital authorities complained about ‘outsiders’ visiting the mosque. The openness of a religious site was at odds with the hygienic distance of a medical one. The hospital authorities decided to opt out of demolition, but wanted the mosque to be solely for the Muslim residents of the hospital. There was one glitch: there was no signing authority.

“It seems that the original lessee of the site of the mosque was the Jamiat-ul-Quresh, of which no trace remains after Partition. The Sunni Majlis-e-Aukaf seems to have stepped into the management of the mosque sometime in 1954 without securing permission of the Chief Commissioner or getting a fresh lease in their name.”

This paper trail regarding a mosque in a hospital frames the emotional landscape of Delhi in 1956. Still recoiling from the violence of Partition, the city and its people created different ways to negotiate the impact of the riots: buildings were part of the larger architecture of affect in ways that glued the tension of Partition onto the city. Conflict produced different modes of negotiating governance and structures of power. The intriguing ownerless mosque inside the hospital precinct, rested on an emotional landscape ridden with anxieties. The use of the phrase ‘first class problems’ shows that the Chief Commissioner’s office was relentlessly putting forward a façade of peace, unbroken even in departmental correspondence. Words like ‘riots’ and ‘violence’ were too painful to be peddled about in letters to ministries. The demolition of the mosque or its closure could bring back the highly tenuous emotional topography ascribed to Partition. This denial to name, not only hints at the depth and scale of the violence that hit Delhi, but also shows the emotional work the officials were performing to create a mental and temporal distance from that violence. The effort was to render the Partition riots as aberration, rather than the norm of everyday life. The mosque begs the question of how a violent frenzy leaves its imprints on place. And more importantly, how do places respond to and change these imprints?

The postcolonial state took the conceptual separation between the Old and New cities very seriously. The emotional topography of Delhi is marred by this duality. Certain sites like mosques or the Red Fort and the Purana Qila transgressed the separation by their sheer grandeur and beauty. They were at once, the symbol of sovereign power and erstwhile glory. Nehru reclaimed that imperial legacy of the Red Fort on 14 August 1947. The need to separate the two cities, continues to exist till today. Here I not only mean the physical segregation of erstwhile Shahjahanabad and Lutyen’s Delhi, but also the metaphors they represent. Maintaining the conceptual distance between New and Old Delhi constitutes an important aspect of the bureaucratic gaze. Even as late as 2015, a road named after Aurangzeb was renamed after an atomic scientist-ex-president.³ The change was made due to a discomfort with a street in Central Delhi invoking Mughal legacy. This is evident in the manner it was carried out: in stealth and in the middle of the night.

The mode of governing refugees had collapsed into the administrative category of the urban poor. Or rather, certain sections of the population of refugees were naturally given to these categories, being seen as the reckless poor who were given to petty crimes, like robberies and rioting. It was this lot of ‘newcomers’ who were not welcome into the new capital of the nation, or were grudgingly allowed space to begin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Memories of violence: Of emotional geographies and planning in post-Partition Delhi, 1948–62
• 2 Absence of the ‘un-exchangeable’ monument: Cinematic design and national identity in a time of partition
• 3 ‘Architectures of happiness’: Designing the Malltiplex in India
• 4 From deframing the oriental imagery to the making of the alternative other: Remapping the spaces of encounter
• 5 From craft to couture: Contemporary Indian fashion in historical perspective
• 6 Transnational homespun, citizen-art and Hindu-Muslim Gandhi ashrams: A working note on, against, and toward spirituality
• 7 Evolving sense of visualizing the divine in popular Islam in Pakistan: An ethnographic case study
• 8 Counter-epistemologies of the global South: Indian floor drawings re-envisaged
• 9 Printing princely modernity: Lithographic design in Muslim-ruled princely states
• 10 Designing a visual palimpsest through film: A critical examination of Jodhaa Akbar and the nationalist narrative
• Index