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Disastrous hydropower, uneven regional development, and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands
No full textSikkim, a small Eastern Himalayan state in India has twenty-seven hydropower projects proposed under the Indian Power Ministry's hydropower initiative that envisions the Himalayan region as the country's "future powerhouse" (Dharamadhikary 2008; Kohli, 2011). In 2011, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked Sikkim, the epicenter of which was located eerily close to two under construction dams and the Dzongu reserve, revered as sacred by Sikkim's Indigenous minority Lepchas. Drawing on interviews with Lepcha residents of Dzongu, and state geologists and disaster management officials, I center my analysis on their encounters with disasters and hydropower infrastructure. Building on decolonial theorizations and scholarship on Himalayan borderlands, I argue that disastrous hydropower forms on historical terrains shaped not only by geophysical conditions but also generations of uneven regional development, and the racialized colonial and postcolonial governance of the Eastern Himalayan frontier. In placing ‘disastrous’ as a prefix to hydropower, I follow my interlocutors who implicate state and private developers in producing disaster conditions in Sikkim even as they evade culpability by discursively shifting blame onto the region's “inhospitable terrain” (GoI 2008: 27). I demonstrate that despite key differences in their relation to state power both Dzongu Lepchas and Sikkimese technocrats, forward a materialist, place-based understanding of precarity, differential vulnerability, and uneven regional development. Centering Indigenous and regionalist critiques, I argue that the recent entry of hydropower development in the Eastern Himalayas, conceptualized by colonial authorities as India's “Mongolian Fringe” (Baruah, 2013), requires a closer attention to the entanglements of frontier-making and racialization in India. More broadly, I demonstrate how disastrous hydropower development in a racialized frontier region offers a productive entry into decolonial theorizing in the Indian context.
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The Unstable Coastline: Navigating Dispossession and Belonging in Colombo
No full textThis article explores how residents of a small coastal fishing enclave in Colombo live with cumulative waves of dispossession brought on by exclusionary projects of urban development. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I introduce the analytic of navigation to describe how people move, plan and live with both present and future threats of dispossession. Navigation offers a unique perspective on questions of agency and resistance in oppressive conditions. Rather than framing subjects as “resisting” projects of world‐class city‐making, this analysis shows that urban residents instead engage in complex and occasionally contradictory modes of living with uncertainty. I complicate existing understandings of the term “navigation” by describing how questions of nation and belonging are crucial to comprehending how people navigate. Ultimately, I suggest that expressions of belonging and obligation to an imagined community might not only be strategic, but instead reflect some of the broader social forces which structure possibilities for action.</p
The Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defence in Tehran
No full textThis paper examines the use of space and time at the Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defence (MIRHD) in Tehran, dedicated to the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88). Its goal is to disentangle the ways the notion of resistance—crucial to the nationalist narrative that underpins the museum as an ideo- logical artifact—is manifested through the organization of space and time within the museum, and how this idea of resistance is altered by visitors and social interactions that occur outside and in the museum. Temporality is important in the museum, because it displaces stories and data from a specific period of Iran’s revolutionary history into the current time, assigning to the war a specific political function in the present era. Space is equally important, and the paper will consider the message it carries both inside and outside the museum.
The museum proposes “resistance” as a fixed articulation of state ideology. This article proposes, how- ever, that it is refashioned by visitors as an “intimate struggle” through their striving for self-construction. This argument is made by connecting the narrative of the museum to visitors’ (mostly young Hezbollah affiliates) perception of it and to their social lives. More specifically, I argue that by memorializing and romanticizing popular mobilization and resistance during the war, the museum unintentionally assists the shift of resistance from a public or collective action that the state controls to an intimate act, one which connects individuals and the state through an individual-centered bond. Exploring this kind of intimate resistance is crucial to understanding the formation of revolutionary subjectivity in the present time as a creative process, not rigidly dependent on politics or religion but instead existing as a conver- sation between the past and the future self of citizens, which is at the same time dependent on and auton- omous from the state.</p
Surveying Empires: Archaeologies of Colonial Cartography and the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India
No full textThis paper demonstrates the important contribution material culture makes to histories of cartography. Focusing on the tangible and intangible heritage of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India, and West Bengal in particular, the material landscape legacies of the GTS are analysed and interpreted. This reveals new insights into how surveys of the GTS were undertaken in the nineteenth century, under George Everest, and the infrastructure that was created to underpin the British mapping of India. The trigonometrical stations built by the GTS were of different designs and construction, adapted in response to local conditions and circumstances. Today, this ‘survey heritage’ is at risk, yet provides a basis for understanding more deeply the materiality of mapping and survey practices used in mapping empires. The paper connects the three-dimensional ‘spaces of survey’ with the two-dimensional ‘space of the map’, and concludes by arguing for greater consideration of the verticality of mapping.</p
Religious theme parks as tourist attraction systems
No full textIn recent years, several religious theme parks dedicated to different faiths have materialised and gained popularity. Based on the study of Anandsagar, a religious theme park in the pilgrim-town of Shegaon in Maharashtra, India, this paper argues that religious theme parks are emerging tourist attractions that have significant implications for management of religious heritage and tourism. The qualitative data collected through interviews and participant observation is analysed using Leiper's conceptual approach of ‘tourist attraction’. Developed by Shri Gajanan Maharaj Sansthan, Anandsagar is a religious-recreational landscape spread over 350 acres and includes a 55-acres lake, an island housing a spiritual centre, and a plantation of more than 50,000 trees. Tableaux, large-scale sculptures, and installations in the park display mythological and religious stories alongside attractions, such as an aquarium, mini-rail, 3500- seats amphitheatre, and a 50-acre amusement park inspired by Disneyland. Charitable donations and volunteer workforce make it affordable and inclusive. Since the opening of Anandsagar, the numbers of visitors to Shegaon have increased more than seven times and development of tourism-oriented services including hotels, lodges, and restaurants has begun to transform the socio-spatial fabric of the town. Religious theme parks create new heritage attraction and redefine leisure/tourism connections in pilgrim-towns.</p
Introduction: Navigating Blue Infrastructures Along Historical and Political Ecological Realities
No full textThis introduction lays out the context of the “Urbanocene” within which the current book project locates its relevance. Arguing from the conviction that each city has its own narrative, it explains why it is significant to capture urban micro-political processes across long-term temporal scales by unveiling dominant, counter, and suppressed urban environmental narratives. The empirical context of Kolkata’s “blue infrastructures” is described in detail, including the conceptualization of the phrase itself across its technical, historical, and social dimensions, based on findings derived by combining archival and qualitative research methodologies. The historical urban political ecology (HUPE) framework, cross-fertilizing urban environmental history and urban political ecology, is formulated and introduced. The chapter establishes why HUPE can be considered a robust and comprehensive framework and methodological intervention for capturing urban environmental realities across multiple dimensions. The summary of chapters, which elaborate the application of HUPE to Kolkata’s “blue infrastructures,” demonstrates the relevance of the HUPE framework and its potentials to be implemented at scale.</p
An emotional plea for Al-Ahsa: a case study on how discourses of representativeness, climate and discord are strategized in the World Heritage regime
No full textAt the 42nd session of the World Heritage Committee (the Committee) in 2018 history was made: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s World Heritage nomination, ‘Al-Ahsa Oasis, an evolving cultural landscape’ (‘Al-Ahsa Oasis’), had received the worst possible draft decision from ICOMOS – that it ‘should not be inscribed’ on the World Heritage List. While the altering of draft decisions and ‘upgrading’ of nominations is now commonplace, Al-Ahsa Oasis was the nomination that broke the last barrier in this practice by achieving the ‘ultimate upgrade’ through its unprecedented inscription onto the List. In this article we explore the fall of the science-based compliance mechanisms that laid the foundation for this decision by the Committee. Drawing on participant observation at the session, audiovisual and statutory records, the Committee deliberations on Al-Ahsa Oasis are then dissected, drawing attention to how Saudi Arabia and its allies were able to write history by strategizing existing and emerging regime discourses on ‘representativeness’, ‘climate’ and ‘discord’.</p
The concept and planning of public native housing estates in Nairobi/Kenya, 1918–1948
No full textInterwar public housing estates for native citizens in Sub-Sahara African cities, represent hybrids of global and local urban concepts, housing typologies and dwelling habits.
The authors explain such hybrids via exploratory research note as a result of transmutation processes, marked by various (non)human actors. To categorize and compare them, Actor Network Theory (ANT) is applied and tested within an architecture historical framework. Nairobi/Kenya functions as pars pro toto with its Kariakor and Kaloleni estates as exemplary cases. Their different network-outcomes underpin the supposition that actor-oriented research can help to unravel a most essential, though neglected part of international town planning history.</p
The Black Town, Spaces of Pathology, and a Hindu Discourse of Citizenship
No full textThe British in 1869 inaugurated a brand-new machine to filter water at Pultah, a small town near Calcutta. A few years later, the urban poet Rupchand Pakshi wrote the poem ‘Dhonyo Sohor Kolkata’, an excerpt of which is cited above. The poem chronicles the wonder that the waterworks produced among Calcuttans as they watched machines sifting dirt and pumping filtered water into conduits that then supplied city-houses with clean water. Pakshi described the filtration process as buddhir koushol: a demonstration of human intelligence. But at the same time, he employed the English words ‘drainage’, ‘machine’, and ‘water’ to argue that the science of filtration was incompatible to the city's cultural geography. The three English words signalled that the filtration processes were indeed part of a larger colonizing culture.
Given clean water is a basic human necessity, why did Pakshi describe the filtration paraphernalia as a tool of colonialism? Pakshi's concern, I argue, fitted well within a broader climate of resistance that British civic improvements had shaped in nineteenth-century Calcutta. The British imported town improvements—both their plans and the apparatus—from Europe and enforced these on the city, without tailoring these to meet Calcutta's diverse cultural needs. For example, the British introduced subterranean sewers that required Indians to forego their caste and religious practices. Indian city dwellers, however, refused to give up their caste practices; Calcutta's cultural geography resisted the new improvements. To overcome resistance, the British initiated a process of ‘grafting’ that involved a brute force to homogenize space by eliminating cultural differences.
A British corporation, James Watt & Company, that designed and sold steam engines used the plans of William Clark, an English civil engineer, to construct the Pultah waterworks. With the paraphernalia imported from London, the waterworks were a technological and visual wonder.</p