Engaging with Geography and Space

The neglect of critical geography, to which this collection is a much needed corrective, derives from the lineage of geographical departments in India. Post independence a ‘new’ generation of geographers focused on economic development and national integration (p.17). During this period regional development received particular focus based on priorities established by the Planning Commission (p.17). Research and pedagogy in Geography Departments therefore were predominantly focused on applied and economic geographical research. Critical geography of the sort that this collection explores was rarely if at all engaged with during this period. Since then however, scholarship began to change with evidence of interesting work on geo-politics of location, environmentalism, globalization in south Asia, and an atlas of men and women in India all of which point to an emerging trend in critical geographical research (p.18). This collection of essays is an important part of this emerging intellectual domain.

As one of the first of its kind to map an emerging field, the essays are disparate covering a wide range of topics, as would perhaps be expected in a collection covering research on a vast area as ‘colonial and post-colonial geographies’. Yet the essays coalesce around five broad themes: mapping cities and spaces, neo-liberal political economic formations, boundaries, territoriality, and the linkages between the global and local.

Geographers have long engaged with spatio-political formation of cities. M. Satish Kumar explores the conflict over space from the sixteenth through eighteenth century in Madras. Drawing on Lefebvre and Foucault, Kumar begins by exploring the divisions between ‘Black’ and ‘White’ town reflecting the separation between the colonialists with the native part of the city on the basis of color and religion (p.32). The bulk of Kumar’s essay though, deals with the manifestation of conflict between ‘left and right’ hand caste groups in space. These spatial divisions were based on the criteria of race, purity and pollution in Black town through a variety of symbols and idioms that were used as markers of territory (p.36). The conflict between the two caste groups centered on endowments to local temples, right to access temples, housing etc. Kumar traces conflicts in the form of riots from the mid seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth in which the colonialists attempted caste regulation by strict spatial segregation between the groups. For the colonialists Kumar notes that the “caste based demarcations were tolerated and reinforced … to ensure continuity in their commercial ventures of profit-making” (p.39). In a similar vein Stephen Legg explores the formation of New Delhi as a project of postcolonial modernity. Legg argues that attempts to deal with migration and growth of Delhi post Partition into rational divisions are well suited to examine the (dis)continuities with the colonial period (p.182). Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, Legg examines the plans for Delhi’s development by the Delhi Municipal Organization which was tasked with addressing the “question of citizenry in a city and society previously governed by a colonial form of bureaucratic authoritarianism that had done little to encourage social education or popular governmental participation” (p.195). In addition, Legg examines the proposals by the Delhi Improvement Trust which recommended that housing be a priority of national welfare. The means by which to achieve this ironically revealed more continuities with the colonial government (p.198). The Delhi Improvement Trust’s design influenced what became the Delhi Master Plan, which was used as a model for other towns throughout India. Both essays document spatial manifestations of colonial and postcolonial ideological investments in security, order, and modernity. Neo-liberal policies in India have elicited excellent work that seeks to document the geographical particularities of socio-economic reform. Sharad Chari explores this in his essay by an examination of ‘social labour’ in Tiruppur. Social labour, Chari says, is drawn from Marx and can “address the deficiencies of social capital while recognizing that capital is always a product of work, or of human transformation of nature and space” (p.142). Tiruppur’s industrial center that is engaged in the production of knitted undershirts predominantly for the export market responds to the seasonality of global production demands. While the changes in seasonality that directly impacts labour in Tiruppur, is a factor of North American and European markets, the owners use a variety of means with which to explain the fluctuations of the season and pass on the risks to the workers. Therefore Chari explains, “The implication is that places like Tiruppur don’t just offer cheap labour, they offer the benefits of a complete package of social relations, of which low wages and insecure worker’s rights are ingredients” (p.156). If social labour creates the conditions for accumulation, then Saraswati Raju’s essays embellishes our understanding of the links between capital and patriarchy by problematizing meta-narratives and considers instead ‘regional patriarchies’ (p.101). Raju examines vocational training for women in Delhi and Chennai and examines the manner in which gender and caste intersect (in diverse ways in the two cities) to demonstrate the different ways in which patriarchal structures impeded women’s lives. She compellingly argues that ‘institutionalized patriarchies’ permeate the domains of the home and state to generate a gendered geography of inequity even in circumstances of expanding labour markets (p.102). Yet, patriarchal structures in the case studies are shown to have ‘cracks in the system’ that ask for a more complex understanding of oppression and subversion than is assumed in the consideration of globalization. Chari and Raju’s essays point to the socio-spatial connections at different scales generated in neo-liberal globalization. The fluctuations of the global have direct impact on local and regional patterns of work and structures of patriarchy. Borders and boundary formation are sites of dynamic struggle and identity formation. Geographers have considered these issues in places that form the dividing line between nations where the mixing of cultures are juxtaposed against national and economic imperatives (Mexico and the United States, India and Pakistan and so on). Others have examined the creation of boundaries in efforts to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’ which has its legacies in the colonial enterprise. Alison Blunt’s essay in this collection adds to this work through an interesting consideration of boundaries that are not spatially proximate, but are nevertheless profoundly intimate. Blunt’s work focuses on the gendered geography of ‘home’ (India and England) at different scales of the Anglo- Indian community before and after independence. She is concerned about construction of place, belonging, and nationalism. Through an examination of archival documents and interviews Blunt explores the shifting nuances of identity that considers England the fatherland and India the motherland. It is in these identities that Anglo-Indian women embodied a ‘western modernity’ in dress and choice of nuclear family arrangements and their ability to mix freely with men (p.60). In her interviews with women she considers some of the contemporary shifts of marriage and family life of Anglo-Indians who marry outside the community and the negotiations of identity and belonging that ensue. In the contemporary moment Blunt points out that the Anglo-Indians recast themselves as Indian by nationality but Anglo-Indian by community (p.67). Juxtaposed with Blunt’s essay and her consideration of boundaries is Richa Singh and Richa Nagar’s exploration of boundaries between differently situated women who together create the Sangtin Yatra. Singh and Nagar deftly excavate the multiple positions and access to power held by differently situated authors of the collaborative book. They argue that the Sangtin Yatra explicitly contests representational practices where rural women are ‘solicited, cajoled, encouraged to speak’ so that ‘developed’ urban women ‘may speak to one another about ‘them’” (p.307). The authors reveal the hostile political responses from a national NGO to criticisms voiced in the Sangtin Yatra. The manner in which the book was authored by all sangtins challenged the innocence of knowledge production. While Blunt explores the politics of belonging among Anglo-Indians who negotiate home and nationality, Singh and Nagar explore the politics of alliances between unequally situated women. Both essays conclude that belonging and identity are troubled and persistently negotiated entities that traverse multiple social, political, material and spatial structures. Stuart Corbridge and Edward Simpson examine the spatial logic of militant Hindu nationalism through what they term as ‘traumatic spaces’ (p.71). The “movement and definition of space and territory” argues Peter van der Veer “are central elements in religious nationalism.”1 Militant Hindu nationalism has since its inception been a profoundly geographic enterprise. While in existence for over eighty years, it was only in the 1980s that Hindu nationalists began to garner popularity and power. One of their first successful campaigns initiated in 1983 sought to draw multiple strands of Hinduism under one umbrella. The campaign entailed four chariot processions for unity called Ektamatayajna that traversed the length and breadth of the country passing through sites of religious significance. In addition to the four main processions many other smaller processions joined in, literally mapping the country as Hindu (p.73). Against the backdrop of the processions, Colbridge and Simpson examine contemporary Hindutva’s efforts to claim India as Hindu through the dispute around the Ram temple in Ayodhya and the reconstruction efforts after the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat. The Ram temple in Ayodhya functions as a site of ‘trauma’ representative of besieged Hindus for whom, in the discourse of Hindutva, defence of the motherland and restored masculinity lies in the construction of the Ram temple (p.75). In Bhuj, the second traumatic space, remapping of space is through efforts to rebuild towns destroyed in the earthquake. In this reconstruction effort the new towns are renamed with Hindu names and sanitized from the presence of Muslims and Dalits (p.82). These traumatic spaces function not as discrete spaces but draw on the local to imagine the national. Territoriality is explored by Robert W. Bradnock by examining six-decade long dispute between India and Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir. Bradnock contests the notion that the significance of territorial sovereignty diminishes in globalization (p.83). The long dispute in Jammu and Kashmir is understood by the vested interests not only of both India and Pakistan but also of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since the Cold War the economic imperatives of neo-liberalism once again made Kashmir a central focus in discourses of security. Particularly since September 11, 2001 and the discourse of terror make India and Pakistan strategic in the US war with Afghanistan. US interests in India are also governed by efforts to present a bulwark against China. While for India, its ambitions for regional security and economic investment propel its alliances with the US. The production and reproduction of territoriality in both essays is understood at multiple scales. Both essays challenge the notion that territoriality may be becoming insignificant under globalization. The production of the global and the local has been a critical site of inquiry to which geographers have made significant contributions. The essays that address this broad theme in this collection are no exception. Swapna Banerjee-Guha considers Mumbai as a global city that responds to the political, economic and cultural imperatives of global flows. Banerjee-Guha traces the restructuring plans for Mumbai that are dictated by the logic of a liberalizing economy rather than one that addresses social issues for the majority of the population. She places these priorities in Mumbai as part of a global trend in cities across the world (p.217). Mumbai’s restructuring are governed by three aspects: India’s place in the global economy, the development of high-tech information base that is required of global cities, and lastly, the privatization of infrastructure development that signals the retreat of the state from social responsibility. Banerjee-Guha generates a helpful flow chart of these changes she is concerned with connecting the global flows to real concrete urban policy changes (p.221). Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery in their essay explore the lives of marginalized young men in Utter Pradesh and the impact of education in their lives. They engage in research on social strategies of educated un/underemployed youth and address the neglect of research on young men where most studies have focused on women. Examining the lives of three young men who have had access to education, they suggest that “Modern education acts as a type of discursive ‘scaffold’ on which people place their ideas about progress, culture and civility” (p.239). Their research on education points to connection between global transformations and the lives of local actors. Many of these changes point to change in the relationship between the young men and the land in which by the beginning of the twenty-first century those connected to land according to these men symbolized their backwardness.

In exploring the politics of global-scale climate exchanges Paul Robbins argues that local-scales costs are overlooked rationalized and assumed away (p.280). Robbins draws attention to the UN Convention on Climate Change in 1992 in Rio, Brazil in which the reduction of carbon emissions was a major goal. Under the Kyoto Protocol industrialized countries could engage in ‘green development projects’ in other nations (such as India and China) and if these projects resulted in ‘Certified emission reductions (CERs) then “that would count towards the industrialized countries’ commitments” to reduce carbon emissions (p.283). In a well documented critique of such a global exchange, Robbins contends that “such practices represent the production of exchange value, necessarily making complex and highly localized social and ecological systems (like forests) commensurable in a system of universal equivalence, money value or ‘credits’ of carbon produced, averted, or captured” (p.286). Forests and sub-agricultural zones are transformed from ‘waste’ becoming valued as carbon. Furthermore, the commodification of these resources through the global exchange adversely impacts the livelihood of people who depend on these forests which become inaccessible to them in the discourse of preservation that bans harvesting. “Therefore, these traditionally difficult-to-commodify use values become available for exchange only at the expense of the local communities that depend upon them (p.286). In the logic of colonialism the north passes the burden of sustainable development to the south (p.296). These three essays in unique ways unravel the connections between the global and the local. It is those at the margins who are neglected and forgotten generating a skewed geography of development and visibility.

The richness of this collection is in the vast array of subjects it deals with offering a panorama of critical geographical research. At the same time however, the vast difference in topics also diffuses the focus of the collection. As all edited work, essays are uneven in the way they engage with geography and space. These limitations notwithstanding this is an important collection that is accessible drawing together some of the most important work on colonial and postcolonial geographies in India.

Reference: 1 Peter Van der Veer Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): xii.

Rupal Oza is Associate Professor at The Women’s Studies Program and the Department of Geography, Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY), New York.