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The troubled passage from ‘village communities’ to planned new town developments in mid-twentieth-century South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

WILLIAM J. GLOVER
WILLIAM J. GLOVER*
Affiliation:
Department of Architecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–2069, USA
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Abstract:

This article begins with an examination of how rural and urban society in India were conceptualized in relation to one another at different moments during the twentieth century, arguing that rapid urbanization during the middle decades forced important changes in those conceptualizations. If in an earlier period analysts saw the world of the village dweller as radically separate from that of the urban dweller, then rapid urbanization destabilized this idea and forced analysts to entertain the implications of there being a kind of ‘sliding scale’ between the two. This discursive shift helped produce a new object of concern in mid-century urban sociology – that of the ‘villager in the city’. While this sociological object formed the core of numerous mid-century (and later) studies of existing large cities, it played a more determinate role as a priori grounds for planned new towns than it did for perhaps any other model of urban growth. The article argues that proponents of planned new towns favoured their conservative potential: namely, the new town promised to nurture ‘inherited tendencies and habits’ in first-generation urban migrants, rather than produce wholly new modes of urban subjectivity.

Type
Indian suburbs
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 108 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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2 New town developments that run the gamut from gated communities to ‘integrated townships’ have proliferated in recent years in both India and Pakistan. While little scholarship has been published on this phenomenon thus far, it has been the subject of scores of newspaper articles. For an example of the latter see A. Gentleman, ‘Real India seeps into gated villas: professionals protest as their luxury community fails to keep out dust, heat, and squalor’, Observer, 26 Aug. 2007, accessed 1 Jan. 2010 at: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/26/india.ameliagentleman/print; and S. Gupta, ‘Inside gate, India's good life; outside, the servants’ slums’, New York Times, 9 Jun. 2008, accessed 1 Jan. 2010 at www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world/asia/09gated.html. More scholarly works include Brosius, C., India Shining: Consuming Pleasures of India's New Middle Classes (New Delhi, 2009)Google Scholar; Schindler, S., ‘A 21st-century urban landscape: the emergence of new social-spatial formations in Gurgaon’, in Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers (Delhi, 2007), 499–508Google Scholar.

3 Jamshedpur is a planned industrial city in the Indian state of Jharkand built by the Tata Steel Company beginning in 1907. Chandigarh was built under Jawaharlal Nehru's guidance as the capital of independent India's newly configured Punjab province beginning in 1956; among other prominent mid-century modernist architects, Le Corbusier played an important role in its design. Islamabad is the capital city of Pakistan planned by Constantinos Doxiades beginning in 1958. Of these three, only Chandigarh has received ample attention by urban historians. On Jamshedpur, see Dutta, M., Jamshedpur: The Growth of the City and its Regions (Calcutta, 1977)Google Scholar. On Islamabad, see Yakas, O., Islamabad: The Birth of a Capital (Karachi, 2001)Google Scholar; Nilsson, S., The New Capitals of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, trans. Andréasson, E. (Lund, 1973)Google Scholar. Ravi Kalia has written three monographs on newly planned capital cities in India that foreground their progressiveness, including one on Chandigarh. See Kalia, R., Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City (New Delhi, 1999)Google Scholar; Bhubaneswar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City (Carbondale, 1994); Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Columbia, SC, 2004). The literature on Chandigarh is extensive. Interested readers might compare Vikramaditya Prakash's recent monograph on the city with Norma Evenson's earlier work. Prakash foregrounds the city he grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s, while Evenson wrote just as the city was being completed. See Prakash, V., Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle, 2002)Google Scholar; Evenson, N., Chandigarh (Berkeley, 1966)Google Scholar.

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8 Mill, ‘Maine on village communities’. The quoted passages in Mill's text are from Maine's original 1861 edition of Ancient Law.

9 Dewey, ‘Images of the village community’, 291.

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20 In light of the overall trajectory of my argument it is perhaps worth noting here that beginning in the 1950s, municipal ‘improvement trusts’ in India (and after 1947 in Pakistan as well) were replaced by municipal ‘development authorities’. As I argue above, this tracks a corresponding shift in theoretical emphasis from Social 1 to Social 2 as the basis for understanding society.

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53 See, for example, Marshall Clinard's work on neighbourhood revitalization with the Ford Foundation in Delhi during the 1950s and 1960s, as outlined in his Manual of Urban Community Development (Delhi, c. 1960). The Delhi experience is addressed in Clinard, Slums and Community Development: Experiments in Self-Help (New York, 1966).

54 P. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (Delhi, 2004), 57. Chatterjee was describing how disenfranchised groups of city dwellers have to negotiate a relation with the welfare state by asserting forms of community based on their area of residence as being formally akin to those recognized as belonging to enfranchised, civil society. My inversion of Chatterjee's subject and object here is meant to suggest that states, too, are often involved in the same project.

55 Mukerjee, Man and his Habitation, 224–5.

56 Nandy, A., An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in the Indian Imagination (New Delhi, 2001), 24Google Scholar. Other examples discussed by Nandy include the films of Satyajit Ray, R.K. Narayan's short story ‘Malgudi’ and Gandhi's adoption of the village and ashram as key sites for the unfolding of independent India's future.

57 Ibid., 23.

58 See Baviskar, A., ‘Between violence and desire: space, power, and identity in the making of metropolitan Delhi’, International Social Science Journal, 175 (2003), 89–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 131–47.