Asian Futures and the  Paradoxes of Urban Life in India 
by Ravi Sundaram

The rise of East Asia poses a number of interesting problems for
those of us who approach the fin de siecle with some ambivalence.
In first instance, the great millennium of secure Western
hegemony, beginning with the violence of the Crusades, seems
finally on its way out. In this surely epochal transition, what
is interesting for us in India is the sense in which "Asia"
becomes the generalized trope for the East Asian  power. It is
important to recognize this violent abstraction - all the more
given the wide inequalities, and imaginary social maps within
"Asia" itself.

This situation is all the more apparent from  the Indian
sub-continent. Given the cultivated distance of  the 
West-centered local elites in India from  East Asia , the rise of
the latter as "Asia" has been viewed with a mixture of amazement
and bewilderment. Elite trepidation apart, nowhere are the
Indian-East Asian distinctions clearer than in the differing
urban imaginaries. The frenetic building pace in East Asia ,with
a giantist neo-modernist emerging landscape, revealed in detail
in Koolhaas' recent mediations, have no remote equivalent in
South Asia.  This East-Asian construction destruction dynamic
perhaps has certain equivalents in the Indian pasts - but nothing
equaling the scale of the transitions in East Asia.

I will like to look at some fragments of  the historical pasts of
urban life in India to help us reflect on the Asian divide.

Fragment One: Colonialism

British colonial power introduced a series a far-reaching changes
in the way urban life was experienced in India. The rupture with
the pre-colonial order, based on the Moghul heritage was
particularly significant. European style urban planning and large
scale construction was undertaken, notably in the two major
colonial cites Calcutta and Bombay. In the early stages, a form
of colonial hybridity was encouraged in the larger buildings -
curiously called "Indo-Saracenic." By the end of the  19th
century, even the "Indo-Saracenic" was given up in favor of a
more securely European historicist building - that which informed
Lutyens' construction of New Delhi. To be sure, Lutyens' work
inadvertently incorporated elements of Moghul construction, but a
premium was placed on the European colonial spectacle.  For their
part, pre-colonial cities had encompassed a wide variety of
experiences: pilgrimage sites like Benares and Ajmer, the
political capitals of Delhi, Lucknow and Lahore, the commercial
centers like Surat, Dacca and Cochin. With colonialism these
diverse experiences were subsumed under an invented category,
'the Asiatic city', stagnant, chaotic and not conducive to the
needs of Reason. Lutyens' New Delhi epitomized this attitude at
its best: the beautiful sites of the old Moghul city were in
effect marginalized and ghettoized, the access points to the
colonial spectacle (the Viceroy's house and the state buildings)
were subject to a careful process of spatial regulation. An
arrogant optics of domination  and control prevailed. The most
significant change was the actual experiences of urban life for
the colonized at the level of the everyday. Pre-colonial urban
life was informed by a certain fuzziness of identities, a sense
of mutual openness to the regular movements from Central Asia. To
be sure, cities saw violent political conflict but very few
conflicts operated on the format of modern conflict seen by the
sub-continent since independence in 1947. Colonial cities, by
segregating the European and non-European spaces  set in motion
an entirely new form of spatial organization hitherto unknown in
South Asia. If  this was not enough, the colonial census, by
offering a series of limited identity choices played the role of
congealing the fuzziness of  the pre-colonial order. Entirely new
communities came into existence, part invented, part
re-recognized, generating a conflictual space quite different
from that celebrated by Baudelaire in Second Empire Paris.

However, that the  most interesting colonial construction of
urbanity lay outside  the territorial map of the city. This was,
of course the railway. The railway was the embodiment of colonial
modernity  ans surely one of its most ambitious ventures.
Organized in a rational-purposive grid, the railway network
spanned the length and breadth of the sub-continent. Soon tens of
millions of people were traveling in the train, including many
from the rural areas. Train travel combined many of the features
of the modernist experience mapped by Baudelaire and Simmel :
those of loss and revelation, of speed and separation from home,
of anonymity and community. The colonial railway station here
represented particular investment in the creation of an new kind
of urban space on a national scale.  The railway stations in the
large colonial cities, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were
spectacular constructions, but more typically the colonial
railway station consisted of a platform and a building. 
Time-tables, tickets, and signs introduced the colonial subject
to the emerging world of print-capitalism. Time-tables had the
effect of rewriting the pre-colonial journey. The old Journey,
centered around trade and pilgrimage routes was always imbued
with a temporal ambiguity on the idea of the Return. This
temporal fuzziness was replaced in the new urban-railway
imaginary with a journey that was characterized by a certain
punctuality of arrival and return, a journey of speed and
transition.  The Urban had arrived in India.

It was a powerful moment in the history of South Asia. As such it
was celebrated by Marx - who argued that surely the railway would
be India's passport to modernity. Alas! It was not to be. Apart
from the tremendous violence wrought by the construction of the
railway system on the lives of the Indian people, what is
interesting for our discussion is that this great symbol of
colonial power and urban modernity, turned into something quite
different. Initially overwhelmed by the railway, the colonial
subjects went about transforming it. To be sure, this was done in
a piece meal, often unthought fashion, a form of what Michel de
Certeau has called "poaching" - chipping away at the larger
edifice to create imaginary maps within, enabling a process of
movement and agency. In the first place, the station was
transformed into the village street. Far from being the rational
space of movement, it was not uncommon to see entire families
sleeping, cooking and even defecating near railway platforms. The
noise, the disorder, the constant delays and the network
breakdowns could not be further from Marx's high-modernist
enthusiasm for the railway. Even Gandhi, that critic of the
railway par excellence, simulated a space within the train (the
Third Class compartment) which the 'people' could identify with
,and critique colonial power.

To some extent, the railway became a crucial reference point in
the everyday imaginings of Indian, something that Lutyens'
spectacle - cold, distant and imposing, could never achieve.

Fragment 2, Post Coloniality I - Nationalism and the Absent City

There was little doubt that the coming to power of Indian
nationalism in 1947 would herald a significant transition in the
imagining of space. Given the strong rural context of nationalist
mobilization against the British,  the city was seen more as a
seat of power and less as reference point for emancipatory
hopes.

Nehruvian nationalism's great investment was in the ideology of
development. Development of course meant an ideology of
"catching' up with the West based on a state-centered
accumulation strategy. But what is relevant for our discussion
here was Nehruvianism's promotion of its own spectacle - the dam,
the power plant and the steel mill as necessary reference points
for Indian modernity. This was vision informed by technological
monumentalism and a particular form of speed culled from Soviet
planning and the TVA in the US. Around the dam sprung the various
townships , part company town, part technocratic enclaves, an
"urbanity" without a soul.

Of course it may be pointed out that Nehru himself was a
city-person, who often took a keen interest in promoting
individual architects. One of the by-products of that period was
Le Corbusier's Chandigarh,  the new capital of the Indian state
of Punjab.  Chandigarh was Nehruvian nationalism's great attempt
at monumentalism. Le Corbusier's city distinguished itself by a
complete contempt for the historical building styles and urban
cultures of India -  espousing a soi disant  radical stance (all
localities had numbers, not names), it cut itself from the local
population in whose name the city was conceived. Chandigarh was
invested with an abstract temporality, evoking one of the more
noumenal visions of Nehruvianism - the urgent  desire  for
modernity. Here was a vision of order,  an Ideal City where the
chaos and uncertainties of the Village would be banished. 
Perhaps Chandigarh signaled the fatal utopianism of the
developmental idea - that the world as a tabula rasa, had to be
re-written, kicking and screaming, into a new Time. If
nationalism's vision of the future had been projected in the form
of a temporal Not-yet, Chandigarh changed that into a Now.

Chandigarh stood out as one of the more bizarre, if painful
legacies of a European avant-garde's engagement with the
non-Western world. But Chandigarh apart, the vast majority of
urban construction tended to reproduce some of the worst excesses
of International Style, lacking the even finesse of the colonial
period, where there was at least a premium on the public
perception of the building.

Ironically, at this very moment the cultures of the two great
colonial cities - Bombay and Calcutta were thriving. Shored by a
series of radical movements in politics and culture, both cities
displayed a vitality that contrasted with the drabness of
official nationalist discourse. Calcutta in the 1960's was a
dynamic city of left movements, writers, poets and a rich
literary culture. Bombay was the great center of the film
industry - the world's second largest after Hollywood. The city
also played host to a number of radical art movements. What was
important in the emerging publics in Bombay and Calcutta is that
for the first time in contemporary Indian history the notion of a
city and the certitude of an urban culture was taken for granted.
As writers and critics dealt with experiences of loss and
revelation, of energy and despair, of freedom in the city and its
schizophrenic existence the outlines of a very specific Indian
engagement with "modernism" began to take shape.  As popular
cinema figured Bombay as the typical space of both urban movement
and loss, the city entered the imaginative space of everyday life
for millions of people.

Fragment 3 .  Post -Coloniality II After Nationalism?

If anything the Nehruvain imaginary in India was never securely
tied to the territoriality of the city itself. Nationalist power
operated  through a combination of republican democratic politics
and a panoptics of control. Power was concentrated in an
enlightened upper-caste elite of modernizer/politicians, where
legitimacy was secured periodically through elections. A sui
generis constutitionalism, rather than the City (as in the West)
was the preferred basis for regulating citizenship. The idea of
Speed was preserved through development.

By the late 1970's the crisis of state-centered nationalism
brought about a series of long transitions. In the first place,
the idea of state-centered development was in disrepute, paving
way for a liberalization of controls and opening up for foreign
investment. Politically, new movements of backward castes began
asserting themselves by the 1980's challenging the security of
the upper-caste political elite. By the early 1990's many regions
were ruled by backward caste political coalitions. The old
panoptics of power began to shift. The state, no longer the
secure kingdom of upper-caste /meritocratic hegemony, has
witnessed a series of conflicts, which continue to this day. The
crisis of state-sponsored nationalism has in effect sealed the
fate of the Village as an imaginary reference point of identity.
What has come in its place is a confusing mix of identity
assertions, some often violent and undemocratic, and trying to
re-write the troubled trajectory of modernity in India. But what
is common to many  of the movements a reference to urban cultures
- some of the small town, others of the new emerging
techno-cities, which animate their imaginative space.

Globalization has led to a huge increase in urban consumption and
its representative markers. The rapid spread of satellite and
cable television has given prominence to a new culture of
spectacular consumption. At the everyday level, newer forms of
mechanical reproduction (notably inexpensive means of making
music tapes) have spawned a huge music industry - India is now
the second largest market in cassette tapes in the world. As the
markers of consumption transform large areas of urban life in
India, the representational difference from the Nehruvian
nationalist period could not be more. This is also a violent
urban space, where the large spatial and income inequalities
co-exist with the discourses of consumption . Bombay and Delhi
are not yet Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but the Brazilian path
of high consumption and inequality are surely one of the possible
futures of contemporary urban India.

Globalization has also brought the suburb to India. The suburb in
India is part elite retreat from the crisis-ridden city, part
techno-paradise, living in a mode of simultaneous time  with the
West.  A new and emerging part of the suburb concept is the
techno-city, part influenced by the neo-modernist East Asian
impulses, part an effort to create a sanitized space for
techno-elite habitat. With private security, direct links to the
West through electronic space, techno-cities have been held out
as India's passport to the 21st century. The key impulse behind
the techno-city is, of course, Speed. It is the urge towards what
Paul Virilio has called the "industrialization of real time."
But, contra Virilio, this is by no means a seamless process,
fraught with counter-strategies and the rhizomic space of the
everyday in urban India.  In the Indian case, these are problems
of living in a republican democracy where the more authoritarian
imaginaries of a Mohatir Mohammed or a Lee Quan Yew cannot easily
succeed. A case in point - a recent proposed site for a
"Singapore City" in the suburbs of Delhi had to close after land
occupations and protests by local residents. Less than an
actualized reality the techno-city is emblematic of a certain
elite exhaustion with the older City, seen as contaminated by
subaltern strivings and civic chaos.

Asian Futures

But what of "Asia" ? In the pasts of the continent, a case could
be made for an existential solidarity of "Asia" against  Western
imperium. In the Now ,"Asia" has ceased to be itself.  As East
Asian cities thrive and perhaps prosper, their South Asian
counterparts are enveloped in  a cycle of crisis, violence and
elite re-location. To be sure, South Asia too has seen an
explosion of consumption strategies, varied cultural practices in
the cities and a certain dynamism. Yet, consumption practices and
new "hybrid" styles have been easily appropriated by right-wing
urban movements, civic chaos threatens old notions of order and
justice. And the futures?  Perhaps in about ten, twenty years new
urban constellations will emerge  in Asia with little reference
to the secular history of the Western city  - an entirely new
phenomenon with distinct narratives of trans-nationality.  And
the "Asian" city? That concept died with colonialism, an
reference point invented to distinguish Western uniqueness than a
serious engagement with the rich cultures of Asia. There was no
"Asian" city, and there never will be.

Ravi Sundaram Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies 29 Rajpur Rd, Delhi-110054, India E:mail
rsundar@del2.vsnl.net.in

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