Architexturez South Asia
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‘Tropicality’ and wildness: experiential travel writing and ‘making up’ of land and people in nineteenth century Assam
No full textThe paper attempts to understand the genealogy of certain ‘spatial’ and conceptual dichotomies and categories pertaining to India’s North East. Representation of the geography, climate and simultaneously the dwellers of this space since middle of nineteenth century still reverberates in contemporary knowledge production about the region. These discursive practices for more than two and a half century had been (re)organizing and inscribing space, disciplining subjectivity. This problematic of representation was selectively incorporated into the biography of the ‘modern nation state’ in India that further accentuated the dichotomies and categories. The colonial dichotomy of ‘nature/culture’ staged, performed and articulated by the practices of representation enacted geographically determined social relations. These practices of representation operate not only at the level of discourse but also at the cultural, political, geographical and psychological domains. It would be crucial not only to understand the long sequence of representation but also to understand the material effects.</p
Inferring Road Networks and Socio-Political Change through Elite Monuments of the Golconda Kingdom
No full textIn the study of medieval and early modern South Asia, archaeologists, historians, and art historians have studied selected monuments in depth or surveyed regions for monumental ruins and other features, but have less commonly studied their datasets as a group to infer processes of socio-political change. Using the example of the Golconda kingdom of India’s Deccan plateau, this study describes the evidence of the kingdom’s physical presence across a wide area, and shows how by combining the distribution across space with evidence of changes over time, aspects of the kingdom’s socio-political evolution can be inferred, from the development of the capital to the kingdom’s changing relationship with its more distant peripheries. Some overlooked monuments, when placed in this context, critically suggest the early formative stages of central political authority; others point to a growing culture of elite wealth, patronage, and competition during the era of increased international trade.</p
Find A Loo: an app for sanitation governance
No full textBillions are faced with poor sanitation in developing countries, forcing United Nations’ to miss sanitation targets over the years. This is mainly due to the poor condition of sanitation in the global-south comprising mostly developing countries. International and national organizations are mainly focused on building sanitation infrastructure to target the Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 (i.e., eradicating open defecation by 2030). But the service delivery in terms of monitoring & maintenance along with other governance issues is often overlooked in most cases. How can we arrange sustainable monitoring of a global sanitation community? In this paper, we discuss how information and communications technology (ICT) may be used to address sanitation governance. We outline the necessary governance criteria found in our field-observations and then explore ICT options to address these issues. We conceptualized and created ‘Find A Loo’ – a mobile application designed to be a ‘good-governance’ enabler. We tested this application with the help of System Usability Scale (SUS) and Potential Capability Scale (PCS), where it appeared as ‘Good’ with an ‘A Grade’ score, based on evaluators’ satisfaction on usability and capability. Overall the evaluation affirms that the application is not only useful and ready to use, but also capable of helping in addressing governance issues in sanitation. This work will be of interest to policy & decision-makers, researchers, service providers, NGOs and people working in the sanitation space. Further, such a system lends itself to analytics that helps optimize the performance of sanitation infrastructure.</p
Constellations of weathering: following the meteorological mobilities of Bangla bricks
No full textUsing follow-the-thing methods and insights from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces the meteorological mobilities entwined within Bangladesh bricks. Following the extended lifecycle of the Bangla brick from sediment to clay, from clay to brick and from brick to sediment, and the role that monsoon weathering plays in these processes, reveals complex entanglements of mobilities and materialities. A more-than-human mobilities perspective highlights the myriad human and nonhuman circulations that constitute the brick, as well as the geological, atmospheric and hydrological dynamics that brickmaking sets in motion. Through the becoming and unbecoming of the brick, the paper explores how the mobile materiality of the monsoon is enmeshed within the building blocks of Bangladesh’s cities and the infrastructures on which they depend and how, in turn, the mobile materiality of the brick influences monsoonal environments. These intra-active entanglements trouble perceived dichotomies between society and meteorological forces and highlight the agentive role of weather systems in social worlds.</p
The Impermanent Settlement: Bengal’s Riparian Landscape, 1793–1846
No full textIn 1793, the East India Company (EIC) drafted the Permanent Settlement, a legal regime designed to stabilize property ownership and incentivize landowning zamindars to improve the agricultural productivity of their land by fixing their tax obligations in perpetuity. The EIC imposed this legal fiction of stability over the unstable riparian landscape of Bengal. As accretion and erosion continued to alter the size of zamindari holdings along riverbanks, the EIC’s bureaucracy was overwhelmed with petitions from landholders demanding reassessment of their settlement based on the material conditions of their property. Despite several regulations designed to bring alluvial land under the Permanent Settlement, the EIC was never able create a legal mechanism that could accommodate the fluctuations of the landscape; they refused to alter their foundational premise that once the landscape was permanently measured and ordered, it would bring monetary and moral improvement to the zamindars which, in turn, would increase their acceptance of EIC rule. Because of this gap between the law and the material conditions it governed, the ability of the Permanent Settlement to regulate the impermanent landscape of Bengal remained incomplete. By 1846, the EIC responded to this contradiction with a moratorium on all alluvial assessment, thus allowing them to maintain their legal fiction in the face of mounting environmental challenges.</p
“Waste” to “use”? Making of “Narela” in periphery of Delhi metropolis
No full textThis paper studies the process of urban development and expansion by using a theoretical lens of conceptualisation of waste. Applying from the literature on the political economy of land as a resource, urban planning and labour geography, I analyse the ways in which transformation of the value of land from ‘waste’ to ‘use’ or vice versa; as conceived by state agencies and planners; have implications on human lives, particularly working-class. The paper deals with the qualitative question(s) of how the planning policies transform urban landscapes by imagining the potential of space and in turn marginalises people, hence creating a huge pool of labour reserve to achieve greater surplus accumulation. In such conditions, I show that how this marginalised section, particularly working class, built their living environment. The research further reflects upon the labouring practices in the peripheral town of Delhi metropolis, which is largely built by gentrification of labour from the core of the city. The exploratory study is ethnographically inspired and deploys qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and Focussed Group Discussions to capture nuances of the field.</p
Rifah-e Aam Club, Lucknow: Public sphere and public space in urban India
No full textPublic space comes under threat, is contested as much as shared, an arena for power and hegemony, leaving little hope for interaction across social divides. At the same time, each reincarnation of our fragmented public sphere necessarily builds on historical precedent, inadvertently inscribing public space with fresh hope as it expands the scope of the term’s original promise. Over time, this process creates iconic infrastructure such as the Rifah-e Aam Club, the “Club for the public good” in Lucknow, North India. From the initial stirrings of associational culture under British colonialism through key moments of the national movement down to today’s goonda raj, or rule of thugs, this unruly space came to host the most unlikely republic of letters, reuniting a public across time and space that often seems irredeemably fragmented. It is when buildings like this acquire a life of their own that cities realise their creative promise.</p
War Cartography in the Survey of India, 1920–1946
No full textThe British Empire achieved its greatest cartographical reach during the interwar period. It was therefore forced to deal with unprecedented strains, as its already bulging territories led to an increased need for securing borders. Along with anxieties about the Afghan border on the North-West Frontier of India, there were growing tensions in the virtually unmapped colonies in Africa, Mesopotamia and East Persia. A critical knowledge of the history, aims and the organization of the Survey of India, reduced to the ‘Department’, in the 1920s, are crucial for understanding its complex role. The SOI’s mapping policy changed drastically, moving from the desire to have artistic excellence to correct, minimalistic up-to-date small-scale maps. This paper would like to show how the Empire’s mapping policy laid the foundations of urban and thematic mapping in India, as well as its modern boundaries. Against the backdrop of World War II, it became imperative for the Empire to follow a constructive policy of balancing and achieving what was technically desirable, against what was economically viable. Essential geodetic foundations of topographical survey work had been laid in the past, but any future surveys would have to be dealt with differently, keeping in mind the background of these changes in conditions, needs and methods of survey.</p
Traditional architecture translation of <i>Dhurung</i> Barn to Bawean’s Airport, East Java, Indonesia
No full textThe tropical architecture of island city, Bawean, has been known as a cross-cultural result. The archipelago environment is exposed to high solar radiation and wind, thermal potency and problems are accumulated with the noise problem of the building. Therefore, this study aims to provide the design proposal and analysis for the contemporary architecture with pioneer airport design as an object through re-interpreting traditional channel approach of Bawean architecture as a case. In the transformation process and its thermal interference in the design is evaluated by the Flow Design simulation program to evaluate the proposed design wind flow and a noise control evaluation. The concept of Bawean architecture, mainly the Dhurung Barn, is applied by implying its original form into the modern form without losing the conveyed meaning. The results of this airport design show the locality of shape, space, and zoning, and the formation of thermal and acoustic design integration.</p
The first dated evidence for Middle-Late Pleistocene fluvial activity in the central Thar Desert
No full textThe Thar Desert, located in western South Asia, marks a major global biogeographic boundary and a major adaptive threshold for the eastward expansions of modern humans from Africa across Asia. Examining the framework of palaeoenvironmental change in this region, both in terms of the regional manifestation of global climate change and the physical geography of the landscape, is therefore important to understand how modern humans first engaged with this significant shift in ecology. Here, we present evidence for the oldest chronometrically dated evidence for fluvial activity within this region, located at the Nal Quarry site in the central Thar Desert. We use luminescence dating of alluvial facies to demonstrate phases of fluvial activity at the site at ∼172–174, 140–150, 79–95 and 26 thousand years ago. This result substantially extends existing evidence for fluvial activity within the Thar Desert, as well as overlapping with evidence from the southern and eastern Thar desert indicating increased fluvial activity during the Last Interglacial (Marine Isotope Stage 5), whereas the cessation of fluvial deposition at Nal Quarry is contemporaneous with the onset of activity within the Ghaggar-Hakkra channel in the northern and western Thar Desert. Critically, the phases of fluvial activity identified at Nal overlaps with substantial behavioural change across South Asia, as well as the wider expansion of modern humans across the continent. This research illuminates a dynamic fluvial landscape that existed in the late Middle Pleistocene and early Late Pleistocene at a key threshold for modern human dispersals.</p