Spaces of Colonialism

Delhi's Urban Governmentalities

Stephen Legg

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405156325, 9781405156332
• eBook ISBN: 9781444399516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Examines the residential, policed, and infrastructural landscapes of New and Old Delhi under British Rule.

• The first book of its kind to present a comparative history of New and Old Delhi
• Draws on the governmentality theories and methodologies presented in Michel Foucault's lecture courses
• Looks at problems of social and racial segregation, the policing of the cities, and biopolitical needs in urban settings
• Undertakes a critique of colonial governmentality on the basis of the lived spaces of everyday life

Chapter One

Imperial Delhi

New Delhi was one of Britain’s most spectacular showcases of imperial modernity. It was commissioned in 1911 to facilitate the transfer of the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi and took 20 years to construct. It embodied the rationality of imperialism in its aesthetics (refined, functional classicism), science (a healthy, ordered landscape) and politics (an authoritarian, hierarchical society). As a node within a global, imperial network of sights, New Delhi represented Britain’s vision for an empire of legitimacy and longevity in the twentieth century.

The material reality of these utopic visions, however, did not prove acquiescent to imperial will. At the level of administration, bureaucracy and governance, Delhi’s colonial landscape was as much dominated by the older city to the north of the imperial headquarters. This was Shahjahanabad, the walled city that had functioned as the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1648 to 1857. As against the neo-classical monumentalism of the imperial capital, and the sterile, geometric spaces of New Delhi, ‘Old Delhi’ was depicted as an organic space of tradition and community. Urban life here was conducted in congested and winding streets between communities defined by historic location and caste. Temporal flows were dictated by calls to prayer and a thriving annual schedule of Hindu, Sikh, Jain and Muslim festivals. Bereft of extensive modern sanitation and infrastructure, Old Delhi was a haptic and sensory place of smells, sights and contact that bewildered and beguiled Western tourists and governors alike.

This, at least, is the popular conception of the colonial geography of Delhi; of dual cities. This is embodied in the now iconic aerial photo of the dividing line between the two cities (see cover image). This book will explore the extent to which the two cities were, in fact, governed as one and impacted upon each other in myriad ways. As a closer inspection of the aerial photo shows, the cordon sanitaire between the two cities was, in fact, traversed by multiple, well-worn tracks. Similarly, streets within the old city had been widened and cleared, whereas the plot of land within the walled city to the west had been demolished in the nineteenth century and was reconstructed in the 1920-30s. These spatial traces hint at the geographies of interaction and incursion between the two cities.

Rather than plotting an entire history of Delhi as the capital of the Raj (1911–47), three case studies will be used to explore the interactions between the cities. These will show that, in terms of residential accommodation, policing and infrastructural improvement, the two cities were intimately intertwined. While being very different projects, these landscapes of interconnection shared similar political rationalities of practice that must be explored. Likewise, each landscape presents evidence of a colonial government that sought security and profit for itself over the welfare and development of the Indian population, and thus demands some sort of critical commentary.

The writings of Michel Foucault provide a toolkit with which to explore the complementarity of these seemingly diverse practices of rule. The governmentalities that infused spaces of residence, policing and improvement allow an analysis that maintains their specificity but suggests continuities in the thought, vision, identity politics, technology and ethos that informed them. Secondly, the body of literature that has sought to extend Foucault’s writings to the colonial context suggests a number of ways in which colonial governmentalities can be articulated to critique imperial rule at the level of the everyday and the material. Having outlined these two bodies of literature, we will return at the end of the chapter to Delhi to set the historiographical and historical–geographical context for this empirical exploration of Foucault’s later works.

Security, Territory, Population

Governmental rationalities

Underwriting the majority of Foucault’s works are his ruminations on the concept of power, which became more explicit in his later, genealogical writings. Whereas the earlier, archaeological works had always been about power to an extent (see Chapter 2), the genealogical works of Foucault’s later career addressed power directly and with a distinct terminology, in relation to material, governmental, social and spatial formations. Foucault referred to ‘domination’ as a structure of force in which the subordinate have little, or no, space for manoeuvre (Hindess, 1996: 97). In opposition, ‘power’ referred to a structure of actions that bears on the decisions of free individuals, making power unstable and reversible. Between these two forces lie the relations of ‘government’, the conduct of conduct that aims to regulate the behaviour of individuals and populations. Such power – knowledge relations are integrated in particular institutions, from the state to the family or a system of morality. As such, Deleuze (1988: 89) suggests that in each historical – and geographical – formation, we must ask what belongs to which institution, what power relations are integrated, what relations occur between institutions and how these divisions change from one stratum to the next (over time and space).

It is this fragmented and shifting vision of power that recurs throughout Foucault’s thought, if not in the writings about him or much of his earlier published material. He identified modern forms of power that constituted, circulated and normalised without the central coordination of an ultimate sovereign. As such, there is not just ‘power’; there are types of power relation that depend upon the forces, knowledges, archives and diagrams they relate for their characteristics. Yet, Foucault did refer to the types of power that emerged in the modern era as ‘biopower’; powers over life that targeted both the individual body, through techniques of discipline, and the social body, through government of the population (Foucault, 1979b). This governmental regulation was exerted through various domains that were posited as autonomous to the state. These included the economy, society and the population, that last of which was targeted through ‘biopolitics’.

These power relations cannot be neatly separated. Rather than successions or substitutions of power relations, there are changes of mode, moods and moments (Dillon, 2004: 41). Foucault rejected interpretations of his early work that stressed temporal discontinuity: he emphasised the difficulty of clean breaks (Foucault, 1970: 50, 1972: 175, 1980: 111), suggested that different rationalities ‘dovetailed’ together (Foucault, 1975–6 [2003]: 242) and later suggested that different forms of power entered into a form of triangulation, but that ‘government’ power attained a pre-eminence over sovereign and discipline power (Foucault, 1978 [2001]: 220).

These forms of power also retain complex relationships with their outsides, seemingly excluding subjects from the political order, only to include them more completely in politics by their outcast state. Such relations include the figure cast beyond the protection of the sovereign’s law, the abnormal excluded from society through enclosure within disciplinary institutions or the uncivilised subject deemed incapable of liberal conduct.

Each chapter in this book will examine a particular landscape that was forged primarily through the forces of one particular type of power relation: the hierarchies of knowledge in New Delhi, disciplinary power and policing, and the biopolitics of urban improvement. These types of power relation will be addressed in detail in each chapter. Yet, throughout these forms of power, the persistent effects of sovereign power were felt. To foreshadow its consideration in the following chapters, sovereign power in the context of biopower will now be explained, in advance of a discussion of the translations of biopower to the colonial context.

Sovereign power

Sovereignty is an intensely territorial concept. From an original association with pre-modern empires, it came to refer to the post-Westphalian (1648) system of states within which there was one absolute authority who could legitimately exercise violence (Taylor, 2000, although see Elden, 2005 for a discussion of the complexity of the Treaty of Westphalia). International diplomatic relations determined that no state would intervene in the domestic politics of another without invitation, as the basis of mutual recognition of sovereignty. Within a territory, sovereignty could be exercised by the monarch or succeeding bureaucracies. Yet these superior powers, depended upon the consent of their subjects, which they offered up in return for certain rights and protections (Hindess, 1996: 12).

Foucault (1975–6 [2003]: 23–42) argued that this predominant institutional role of the sovereign had cast a juridical shadow over considerations of power relations in the post-medieval period. Juridical power attempts to prevent a type of action through the threat of legal or social sanctions and, as such, was still pitched as a concept that could be owned or possessed by the head of a hierarchy of rights and consent (Tadros, 1998: 78). This disregarded the new disciplinary mechanisms of power that had emerged (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of sovereignty, law and discipline). Foucault (1975–6 [2003]: 241) posed the sovereign as the body that only exercised its power over life when it extracted people, resources and taxes, or made a decision about killing; it had the right to take life or let live. Foucault encouraged us to look for power beyond the centre, beyond the realm of conscious decisions, as something that circulates and is not owned, and to begin our analyses with infinitesimal mechanisms, material operations and forms of subjection (Foucault, 1975–6 [2003]: 34). This would reflect the evolution of power relations towards an intrusive and self-formative biopower; a power over life itself.

Foucault’s suggestions have been read by many as a call to abandon analyses of sovereign power in favour of endlessly circulating, anonymous forms of normalisation. Yet others have shown how the paradox of sovereignty continues to play itself out within the framework of contemporary biopower (Connolly, 2004). The paradox refers to societies in which the rule of law is enabled and secured by a sovereign that is above the law itself. Drawing upon yet challenging Foucault, Agamben (1998) has insisted that the sovereign has always been concerned with biopolitics, and that sovereign power retains the right to decide on a state of exception. Thereby individuals or groups are proclaimed to be beyond the protection of the sovereign’s laws, and are thus exposed, as ‘bare life’, to violence without protection. Agamben has done a huge amount to reinsert considerations of violence and sovereignty into theoretical debates, yet his suggestion that exceptionalism and the (concentration) camp mark the nomos (the principles governing human conduct) of modernity surely presents an over-simplified and nihilistic approach to power relations. We can counter this simplification by continuing to address sovereign power in terms of resistance, complexity, its geographies and its varied imbrications with biopower.

First, an exceptionalist view of sovereign power provides little consideration of the possibility of resistance. Foucault (1975–6 [2003]) suggested that such resistance could occur at the level of counter-discourses that challenge views of society predicated on sovereign understandings of power, stressing society as a place of continuing war and bare life, not just peace and political life (see Neal, 2004). At a more embodied level, Edkins and Pin-Fat (2004) have suggested that resistance to sovereign power would target the attempt to divide life and the following production of bare life. The refusal of distinctions would challenge the act of counting and classifying, yet resisting bare life would mean accepting this status in an attempt to highlight the violent operation of sovereign power, as mobilised in non-violent noncooperation. However, these considerations of resistance are constrained by an overly prescriptive understanding of sovereignty that reduces it to the power of exception.

First, an exceptionalist view of sovereign power provides little consideration of the possibility of resistance. Foucault (1975–6 [2003]) suggested that such resistance could occur at the level of counter-discourses that challenge views of society predicated on sovereign understandings of power, stressing society as a place of continuing war and bare life, not just peace and political life (see Neal, 2004). At a more embodied level, Edkins and Pin-Fat (2004) have suggested that resistance to sovereign power would target the attempt to divide life and the following production of bare life. The refusal of distinctions would challenge the act of counting and classifying, yet resisting bare life would mean accepting this status in an attempt to highlight the violent operation of sovereign power, as mobilised in non-violent noncooperation. However, these considerations of resistance are constrained by an overly prescriptive understanding of sovereignty that reduces it to the power of exception.

Agamben empties sovereignty of much of the complexity of its practice and principles and reinstates a central model of power, over-emphasising the decision of the sovereign at the cost of the multiplicity of force relations operating in society (Neal, 2004: 375). The sovereign idiom of power conceals itself within capillaries of power and knowledge production. While sovereignty exposes itself in violence and terror, it can also be productive and generous in multiple, provisional and always contested ways (Hansen, 2005: 172). Starting with the writings of Jean Bodin from 1576, de Benoist (1999) has charted the variety of different forms of sovereignty. From an original basis in the ability to legislate, these forms have evolved through absolutist, revolutionary, nationalist, liberal and totalitarian regimes. Hansen and Stepputat (2005: 7) also used Bodin to sketch the non-exceptionalist characteristics of sovereign power that, besides the rights of law and war making, included office appointment, fiscal validation, taxation, language and land rights. In his book entitled State of Exception, Agamben (2005: 23) sought to stress the complex topographies of these exceptional spaces, but he operates within the definitions of the juridical order, not the actions these orders initiate in material or social space.

Sovereignty is a result of these actions, an ontological effect made real by ritualistic and performative evocations of power. Sovereign rights have been democratised such that citizens can now effectively wield them, although this also works to reinforce the adjudicator of these rights, which is often the sovereign power itself. Although still dependent on the ultimate ability of the sovereign to wield violence, this creates a much more fragile view of state sovereignty:

sovereignty of the state is an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory. (Hansen and Stepputat, 2005: 3)

This more complex and fragmented view of sovereignty forces a discussion of its geography that is foreclosed by Agamben’s insistence that the essence of sovereignty is the decision regarding exceptions. Walker (2004) has argued that this ignores the time-space specificities of sovereignty, reproducing Schmitt’s absolute spatialities in which exceptions are fixed on passive space. Rather, sovereignty is spatiotemporally specific in its practices and complex sites (see Gregory, 2007). The topology of sovereignty is, thus, not a space, but a dividing practice that seeks to impose authority, the law, and often violence (Dillon, 2004: 56).

Hansen’s and Stepputat’s logical progression from their interpretation of sovereignty was to seek out its historical specificity in particular territories. This involves studying historically embedded practices and cultural meanings of sovereign practice and violence, whether the latter is actual or borne in rumours and myth. Yet, to grasp these complex sovereignties means to fathom them in their articulation with modern forms of biopower. Although Foucault did argue forcefully for moving conceptions of power away from the sovereign, in his writings on discipline and sovereign power, he stressed their coming together (Foucault, 1975–6 [2003]: 39). As Dillon (2004: 45) has suggested, sovereignty co-evolves around the ‘terrains of existence’ of biopolitics and discipline, crafting itself around different grids of intelligibility.

The imbrications of sovereign- and bio-powers are gaining increasing attention. Hansen and Stepputat (2005: 9) have examined how the democratisation of sovereign rights and the creation of national citizenries were accompanied by the emergence of intensive and caring forms of ‘welfare’ cameralism that formed one of the earliest arts of government. Dillon (1995,2004) has long insisted that governmentality and sovereignty are not oppositional but complementary, relying upon each other and feeding their power-knowledge needs. While the norms of government and the exceptions of sovereignty are often juxtaposed, they actually depend upon and reinforce each other (Hussain, 2003: 20).

Yet, it would be a mistake to cast sovereignty as the villain of the piece against biopower’s heroic stance of making live and letting die (Foucault, 1975–6 [2003]: 241). Dean (2002a) has drawn attention to what Foucault (1979b) depicted as the ‘dark side of biopolitics’. Though sovereign power kills, it also ‘lets live’, and though biopower ‘makes live’, it can also disallow life, introducing killing machines at the level of the population and making massacres seem vital (Foucault, 1975–6 [2003]: 254, 1979b). While the sovereign right to kill has found itself increasingly restrained, biopolitics has increased its remit to manage life:

not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological danger’. (Deleuze, 1988: 92)

The publication of Foucault’s 1978 lecture course on Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, 1978b [2007]) will do much to set the context of his already published ‘Governmentality’ (Foucault, 1978a [2001]) lecture and to further complicate and imbricate the triangle of sovereign, disciplinary and governmental power (for a discussion of the following year’s lectures on economic liberalism, see Lemke, 2001). Here Foucault denies again that there is a clear transition from legal (sovereign) to disciplinary and then security (governmental) ages, but stresses that the techniques of the legal and disciplinary world were taken up by security mechanisms that seek to regulate populations (Foucault, 1978b [2007], 11 January). He also insisted on complicating the spaces associated with each form of power. Sovereignty did not just refer to empty territory, it concerned itself with the same multiplicity of people targeted by discipline and mechanisms of security. As such, in discussing the town plans that best represented the three forms of power, Foucault referred to Le Maître’s La Métropolitée of 1682 (also see Rabinow, 1982). This unbuilt, city plan organised different social groups in relation to each other and placed the capital city in a geometrically central position in the national territory. It was to be an ornament, displaying the best a territory could offer, and as such has many parallels to the utopian elements of New Delhi (see Chapter 2). Yet, the Indian capital also imbricated other types of power relation, creating a complex landscape of sovereignty, government and discipline.

Discipline

For his discussion of discipline, Foucault (1978b [2007], 11 January) turned to the seventeenth century new town of Richelieu which focused more on the distribution of individuals than social groups. The town not only had elements of symmetry, but also included dissymmetry, to allow smaller quarters to spatially express social status. Unlike the capitalisation of territory under sovereignty, here the question was of structuring space. Foucault (1978b [2007], 18 January) later stressed that while sovereign power forbade and prohibited, proscribing the city and displaying its strength, discipline focused on what one must do, rather than the forbidden, imposing an order from within. This transition was discussed most dramatically in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977) showing how sovereign violence was replaced with institutionalised supervision for the criminal. Spatial divisions, time tables, bodily regularisation and different forms of supervision were used to reform the inmates of these institutions. These techniques also swarmed through an increasingly disciplinary society in the hope of creating economically efficient yet politically docile subjects. Foucault did not seek out ideal types to represent disciplinary power. Rather, he traced out the generalities between different techniques that were used to respond to local objectives. This was in an attempt to detect the functions of disciplinary power, which he termed diagrams and most famously examined through the Panopticon (Deleuze, 1988: 72).

Disciplinary power will be discussed and empirically investigated in Chapter 3, the purpose here is to stress its links to other types of power relation. Despite discipline’s much-advertised departure from the power relations of sovereignty, this does not make the two incompatible. Foucault (1975–6 [2003]: 260) showed how the racist state, Nazi Germany in particular, brought the classic mechanism of death into perfect coincidence with the discipline and regulation of biopower. Two years later, in a controversial departure from the more dramatic ruptures between sovereign and disciplinary power suggested in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1978b [2007], 25 January) suggested that ‘… the panopticon is the oldest dream of the oldest sovereign’. As such it was both modern and archaic because the figure at the centre of the Panopticon exerted his, her, or its sovereignty over all the individuals in the machine of power: ‘The central point of the panopticon still functions, in a way, as a perfect sovereign’ (Foucault, 1978b [2007], 25 January). Sovereign and disciplinary powers could also be bridged by the state that took up mechanisms of discipli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Figures
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Archival References
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Chapter One: Imperial Delhi
• Chapter Two: Residential and Racial Segregation: A Spatial Archaeology
• Chapter Three: Disciplining Delhi
• Chapter Four: Biopolitics and the Urban Environment
• Chapter Five: Conclusions: Within and Beyond the City
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index