Development as Urban Imaginary: Post-colonial Planning and Heteroglossic Cities of India

Abstract

Contemporary India’s tryst with development continues to revolve around cities, and the latter remain the locus of India’s development narrative. But instead of seeing the city as already constituted or as a backdrop for economic activities, the present article proposes to implicate the city as a producer and product of social relations as well as a site of resistance and conformity. While doing so, it moves away from conventional modernist paradigms of imagining the city as the highest rung of development geography or the Marxist/subaltern studies formula of reading the city as a space of unredeemable inequality leading to the insurgency of the marginalised. What is proposed here is that the idea of city is emergent which expresses itself neither through its official representations nor through the radicalism of dissent but through multiple unstructured articulations of everyday life as well as the contingency of power and resistance. This is corroborated by drawing upon the experience of Thyagaraya Nagar (T. Nagar) which provides a representative Indian urban experience and where social and political relations spill out of institutional planning templates.

Planned Productions of Vernacularized Dwellings and Settings in India: A Settlement in Baroda Designed by Balkrishna Doshititle

“…For example, according to Ferguson (1990), the post-colonial state offers a development framework where people's sentiment can be sympathized but not defended by the state science, as a development machine. As Tripathy (2018) says, it comes as no surprise that in the first few decades after India's independence, there was a discernible anti-urban sentiment. As he says, these lost decades have been crucial for creating and sustaining the idea of village as authentic India and the representation of the city as a fake social space and everything decadent that ailed India.…”

Between Madras and Chennai: Narratives of belonging in a postcolonial city

“…It is by losing and finding herself amongst a million people that “Deborah was well on her way to becoming a Chennaivaasi” (2012: 74). To belong to Chennai, one goes through trial by fire, finds order within chaos, and locates the idea of the city at the “interstice of what is the norm and what is deviation” (Tripathy, 2017: 251). But even as Chennai remains geographically distant from the West, it is not too far in quotidian discourses.…”

“…These authors offer up the city to their readers as a site of identity formation as well as countercurrents subverting the same. That said, while scholarship around Chennai's developmental expressions boasts of a decent body of social sciences research (Srivathsan, 2004;Hancock, 2008;Arabindoo, 2016;Tripathy, 2017;Gerritsen, 2019), that interest has not found resonance among literary critics.…”