Architexturez South Asia
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Pop-up infrastructure: water ATMs and new delivery networks in India
No full textOver the last decade, thousands of water ATMs have been installed across the Global South. In India, these vending machines increasingly augment both formal and informal networks of water supply and delivery. This article examines media reports on water ATMs in India in order to survey some of the variance across different water ATM technologies with respect to cost, capacity, and fit with infrastructure networks. It then examines how water ATMs are socially and politically positioned with respect to existing, promised, and incomplete infrastructure projects where they are installed: slums, hospitals, commuting routes, railway stations, rural villages, religious sites, and in 'smart city' initiatives. The analysis considers how water ATMs frustrate the distinctions between formal and informal infrastructure that are often used to describe differences in water networks. The article develops a novel approach to water ATMs as 'pop-up infrastructure' in which the movement of matter is operationally independent from, and only contingently reliant on, existing water delivery networks. Despite their unique aspects, water ATMs produce new common borders among social, material, and political relations to water. These relations are often contested and suggest important areas for future research on water ATMs.</p
Debt and inequality: Comparing the “means of specification” in the early cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization
No full textTo transform debts into permanent inequalities, David Graeber (2011:14) argues that creditors must possess the “means to specify” what they are owed. Therefore, changes in the technologies used to specify can transform social relations, warranting a deeper investigation of what are effectively the “means of specification.” Seals and sealings from the early cities of South Asia and the Near East are a touchstone for comparing changes in the means of specification. I examine seals and sealings from Mesopotamia, where a managerial ruling class held power, and the Indus civilization, where urbanism thrived under relatively egalitarian conditions. Seals and sealings did not inevitably fuel inequality. In Mesopotamia, it was only after millennia of control by exclusionary and often violent political institutions that the ruling class used the means of specification to establish interest-bearing debt, a form of “extractive reciprocity” that transferred value to creditors in an ongoing social relation. In the Indus, where there was no such ruling class, seals remained readily accessible and widely distributed, sustaining “balanced reciprocity” (Sahlins, 1972:194) in intensifying urban settings. While changes in the means of specification can create permanent inequalities, they can also help delay the completion of transactions until equitable conditions prevail.
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Walking with the unicorn: Pre-Prabhas Assemblage in Gujarat
No full textThe present paper tries to situate the Pre-Prabhas assemblage within the context of indigenously evolved regional Chalcolithic cultures of Gujarat through a study of changes in lithic technology – tool and bead manufacturing – along with ceramics from the sites of Somnath/Prabhas Patan, Datrana and Janan also situated in Gujarat. The study reveals that Datrana IV gives evidence of transition from Mesolithic to Chalcolithic, which is absent at Somnath and Janan. This leads to a tentative proposition that the appearance of Pre-Prabhas assemblage at Datrana may predate Somnath and Janan, which would indicate that societal changes from Mesolithic to Chalcolithic, reflected through ceramic and lithic technology took place in north Gujarat prior to the other geographical sub-regions of Gujarat. This calls for intense field surveys within Gujarat to locate varieties of activity areas and the chronological placements of different ‘sites’.</p
Paithan Excavation: Historical, Archaeological, Geographical and Epigraphical Contexts
No full textThe importance of the Paithan excavation goes beyond the site itself and touches issues central to the history of India and the profound changes in politics, society and economic relations during the early centuries AD. That the transition from the Early Historic period to the Medieval was a crucial moment for India has long been noted (e.g. Kosambi 1956; Sharma 1965; Thapar 1968). Impacts were felt not only in established urban centres such as Paithan, but in marginal zones that appear to have been transformed by land grants and the foundation of Brahmanical temples (e.g. Kulke 1995b; Willis 2009: 159, following Bakker 1992). Yet while historians have done much to develop and modernise the study of India’s transition to the Medieval, archaeologists have made only modest contributions to the subject (a problem pointed out in, for eexample, Singh 2011, Hawkes 2014b). Unfortunately, the ways archaeology has been practiced in South Asia have not always been conducive to resolving the questions that historians have raised. Archaeology is essential, however, because many changes are outside the concern of Indic literatures and epigraphic texts and thus not recorded in them. The evidence from Paithan is accordingly crucial. It furnishes not only information about changes at the site itself, but provides a starting point for new programmes of research that can tackle salient issues at the regional and pan-regional level.</p
A Second Open Letter to Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad
No full textOn 26 December 2020, I wrote an open letter to Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) sharing concerns regarding the plan to demolish most of the dormitories demolished by Louis Kahn. To my pleasant surprise, the same day, I received an immediate, detailed and courteous reply from the Director of IIMA. However, the positivity of tone did not dispel concerns on substance, and therefore my reply constitutes a second open letter. I share below the reply received from IIMA and my response.
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Idea & EOI for Proposed Demolition Works of the Dormitory Buildings of the Louis Kahn Designed Campus
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The Colonial Home: Managing Objects and Servants in British India
No full textColonial domesticity in India was often a fraught exercise. Guidebooks such as Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner’s The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook offered advice on how a household may be run. This essay examines the above work to argue that domesticity was in fact political. It involved the organization of material objects in the English home in the colony, and the organization of native servant bodies. These were two sites of imperial anxiety. Steel and Gardiner present a cosmopolitan Englishness in the choice of material objects, where the English home was to be a space where products from multiple cultural origins may be found. Then, even when representing the docile bodies of the native servants, Steel and Gardiner implied a dangerous agency. Both objects and bodies, given how they determined Englishness, demanded control – which is effectively the advice of Steel and Gardiner.</p
From Centre-Periphery Models to Textured Urban Landscapes: Comparative Perspectives from Sub-Saharan Africa
No full textThe role of peripheries and satellite settlements around ancient cities is a critical issue in understanding past urban phenomena. The relations between core urban centres and other settlements have often been considered using centre-periphery models. The limitations of such approaches are now emerging as new evidence for interdependency, fluidity, and changeability between cities and their surroundings increases in quality and complexity. This paper reviews the relations between ancient capital centres in Africa and their peripheries, using Aksum and Great Zimbabwe as case studies. It attempts at reconciling indicators of interdependency between these sites and core urban areas that current narratives of urban settlement struggle to accommodate. The exercise opens new avenues to reconfigure spatial representations and understandings of centre-periphery relations at specific sites and begin to think about urban regions and textured landscapes.</p
Patrimonial Figure and Historic Sites in Banda Aceh and Demak
No full textIn Indonesia, there are no other striking notions for the cult of pilgrimage to venerated sites than the ancient concept of keramat; this concept is considered a spiritually pivotal notion on the relationship between place and society in Indonesia. This religious tradition has been well known since prehistoric times that is deeply rooted in the animistic beliefs of most people in the archipelago. This sustenance is driven with respect to the patrimonial power of ancestors. Until today, this tradition has been surviving in various forms, ways, fashions, and manners that confirm the syncretism of ancient and modern values system within the framework of peacefully growing harmony. What is the significance of this concept of keramat for cultural sociology and urbanism? This paper investigates and unfolds the relationship between keramat and Islam in the context of place, culture, and society. Theoretically speaking, this study attempts to frame this relationship within the concept and practice of collective memory that constitutes Anderson’s imagined community. Banda Aceh and Demak are chosen as case studies regarding their historical background as the sites where the teaching of Islam begun since the fifteenth century in the Southeast Asian archipelago.</p