Rethinking Popular Practices in South Asian Cities
11/06/2009 - 12:30
11-12 June 2009
Convenors: Ajay Gandhi & Lotte Hoek
Venue: University of Amsterdam, Spinhuis 2.04. OZ Achterburgwal 185, Amsterdam
The reigning scholarly take on South Asian cities has preserved narratives that see the western city not as a historically variegated set of conditions but rather as a pure ideal against which the subcontinent elaborates itself. The failure to adequately account for the mass of people whose minds, bodies, and socialities are not over-determined by institutional forms is reflected in the reductive dichotomies through which the South Asian city is usually conceived: proletariat-bourgeoisie, subaltern-hegemonic, formal-informal, urban-rural, repression-resistance and modern-traditional. In this way, the defining institutions of urban modernity (the school, cinema, park, or market) are properly understood to belong to, and to be reproduced by, the bourgeois emissaries of western modernity and native inheritors of power after colonialism's demise.
The organizers of this workshop aim to bring together a group of ethnographers that depart from a different set of assumptions about South Asian urban modernity and popular culture. Instead of a prefabricated notion of a city that can be embraced when it meets a requisite set of criteria, papers in this conference will aim to address urban modernity amongst popular masses as an ethnographically accessible and empirically verifiable condition, visible in everyday practices and aesthetic dispositions. The workshop is motivated by a sense that a vast group of people in this region's proliferating urban spaces are engaging in forms of political action, imaginative leisure, and commercial practice that cannot be understood as uninflected by, or antagonistic to, modern or formal domains. Though these groups may awkwardly fit within the prevailing narratives of modernity, their visibility in wider society and reveals an embrace of, and increasing mastery over, state resources, urban space and mass culture.
We hope to initiate academic reflection on these issues by bringing together a small group of scholars to initiate discussions that will make a novel contribution to the broader discussion of urban modernity in South Asia. To do so, we have chosen a format in which papers are pre-circulated. Rather than presentations, there will be in depth discussions of the written texts.
If you would like to participate and receive any of the papers, please register: L.E.Hoek@uva.nl
Thursday 11 June
09:30-10:00 Introduction by Ajay & Lotte
10:00-11:15
Parvis-Ghassem Fachandi "The City Body: Outer and Inner Demons"
Introduction: Shankar Ramaswami; Discussant: Peter Geschiere
11:30-12:45
Ajay Gandhi "Nine Lives and Second Chances: Human-Animal Relations in Delhi"
Introduction: Kamran Ali; Discussant: Patrick Eisenlohr
13:45-15:00 Atreyee Sen "Violence, Victimhood and Child Vigilantism in a Hyderabad slum"
Introduction: Cressida Jervis Read; Discussant: Mohamed Waked
15:15-16:30 Sharika Thiranagama "People Alone: Making One's way in Colombo"
Introduction: Nicholas Jaoull; Discussant: Giselinde Kuipers
16:45-18:00 Shankar Ramaswami "Jalan (envy), ekta (unity), and talmel (togethering): Trajectories of Autonomous Relations in Proletarian Delhi"
Introduction: Lotte Hoek; Discussant: Thomas Blom Hansen
18:00-18:15 Lotte Hoek, Closing Thoughts
Friday 12 June
09:30-10:45 Nicolas Jaoul "The Making of a Political Stronghold: Territorial Stakes and Practices in the Dalit Movement of Kanpur"
Introduction: Ajay Gandhi; Discussant: Jan Breman
11:00-12:15
Kamran Ali, "Men and Their ‘Problems': Notes from Contemporary Karachi"
Introduction: Atreyee Sen; Discussant: Olga Sooudi
13:15-14:30
Lotte Hoek "Shootout at Shilpakala: Action film & Fine Art in the Making of Dhaka City"
Introduction: Parvis-Ghassem Fachandi; Discussant: Jeroen de Kloet
14:45-16:00
Cressida Jervis Read, "A Place in the City: Narratives of Emplacement in a Delhi Resettlement Colony"
Introduction: Sharika Thiranagama; Discussant: Alex Edmonds
16:15-17:30
Ajay Gandhi, Closing Thoughts and General Discussion