Pirate Modernity

Ravi Sundaram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134130511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Using Delhi's contemporary history as a site for reflection, Pirate Modernity moves from a detailed discussion of the technocratic design of the city by US planners in the 1950s, to the massive expansions after 1977, culminating in the urban crisis of the 1990s. As a practice, pirate modernity is an illicit form of urban globalization. Poorer urban populations increasingly inhabit non-legal spheres: unauthorized neighborhoods, squatter camps and bypass legal technological infrastructures (media, electricity). This pirate culture produces a significant enabling resource for subaltern populations unable to enter the legal city. Equally, this is an unstable world, bringing subaltern populations into the harsh glare of permanent technological visibility, and attacks by urban elites, courts and visceral media industries. The book examines contemporary Delhi from some of these sites: the unmaking of the citys modernist planning design, new technological urban networks that bypass states and corporations, and the tragic experience of the road accident terrifyingly enhanced by technological culture. Pirate Modernity moves between past and present, along with debates in Asia, Africa and Latin America on urbanism, media culture, and everyday life.This pioneering book suggests cities have to be revisited afresh after proliferating media culture. Pirate Modernity boldly draws from urban and cultural theory to open a new agenda for a world after media urbanism.

1
A city of order

The Masterplan

In July 1996 the Supreme Court of India began a series of far-reaching judgments affecting the city of Delhi in response to petitions by the environmental lawyer M.C. Mehta.¹ The issue was industrial pollution; a year earlier the Court had ordered the Central Pollution Board to issue notices to thousands of “hazardous” industries, demanding their relocation outside the city. In the 1996 order the Court decided that the industries be relocated outside the city by November.² The initial slot of units was around 168 in number, dealing with “heavy” industries, “hazardous and noxious” in nature, according to the Court. This judgment was only the beginning of a series of wide-ranging pronouncements; soon more industries were asked to move: hot-mix plants, “extensive industries” in residential areas, and brick kilns.³ By the end of the decade the pronouncements expanded to “undisputedly polluting” industries in “non-conforming areas.” This extended to “potentially polluting ones.” By 2000 tens of thousands of workers were affected, and mass protests ensued. As one writer put it soon after the events,

Suddenly all hell broke loose. Desperate workers were out on the streets alongside their employers, resisting the closures. There were roadblocks and violent protests as desperate workers, egged on by their employers – who themselves chose to remain in the background except in some cases – came on to the streets. For three or four days the city was in turmoil.

(Nigam, 2001)

Anger in working-class areas of the city was widespread, given the scale of those affected. In 1996 the Court had asked the Delhi Pollution Control Board to conduct a survey of industries which put the total at 126,218 units with 97,411 “non-conforming” units (Down to Earth, 2000).

The Court judgment was hailed by the national media and the weary middle-class elites as a “landmark”, and as the return of the rule of law in a city gone to seed under the assault of populist politics and “unplanned” growth. The Court now emerged as the authentic signature of a resurgent urban middle class for whom “legal activism” began to be seen as a way of producing a discourse on their city, long taken from them. The Court judgments were part of a series of spectacular pronouncements on the city which slowly moved to every aspect of everyday life, pollution, animals, and all forms of public behavior. Legal discourse now took on an uncontrolled master narrative on the city and its lives. In 2006 the court went even further, proclaiming that all commercial activity that was “non-conforming” would have to be “sealed” and forced to close. While in 1996 the affected were mostly workers in small establishments, now entire commercial areas, and shops and local establishments throughout Delhi were threatened with closure.

In both the 1996 and 2006 judgments the Court importantly referenced the 1962 Masterplan of Delhi as the Law of the City. The judgments followed the main document of 1962 with minor amendments by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in 1990 that largely preserved the original design. The 1962 Masterplan’s land-use plan had delineated commerce, industry, work and home, and further distinguished between normal and hazardous and noxious industries, the latter to be displaced from the city (DDA, 1962, pp.83–85, 1990, pp.100–112).

The Court’s judgments followed the pathogenesis of the plan’s spatial argument. In the years following the Court judgment of 1996 the Masterplan emerged as the originary archive of the legal city, referred to in popular conversation and newspaper debates. The normative-disciplinary words deployed by the Plan – “non-conforming,” “hazardous,” “commercial” – now entered a larger universe of discourse on the city. As if displaced from the technocratic discourse of planners, the plan entered a realm of the imaginary.

In returning to the plan the Court hit upon a lost urban archive of planning in the 1950s. In the phantasmatic recall of the plan, the legal discourse shed light on postcolonial urbanism’s urban design four decades earlier, based on a vision of order, the legal separation of work, commerce and industry, and proper civic citizenship.

Urban modernism in the 1950s, planning and dreaming

In March 1959 a significant gathering of India’s architects took place in Delhi to discuss the future of Indian cities and the urban form. Present in the gathering were all the emerging architects, young and old: A.P. Kanvinde, Charles Correa, Aditya Prakash, Habib Rehman, Satish Gujral. Also in attendance was the British architect Gordon Cullen and representatives of the regional city movement from the USA, Catherine Bauer, and the planner Albert Mayer then leading a US team working on the Delhi Masterplan. The shadows of Corbusier and Chandigarh were in the air and there was palpable excitement among young architects. Modernism had arrived with a flourish, and had official sanction in Delhi. In a short, passionate speech, the young Charles Correa cut across the debate among older architects about the Indian “style.” For Correa, architecture was about temperament, pure expression, a projection of the auteur, something that Corbusier’s “savage” buildings successfully accomplished in Chandigarh. As an example, Correa reminded fellow architects about Corbusier’s High Court Building in that city.

The main entrance – it is one of the greatest tour de force ever pulled off in architecture. To enter that building, to stand under the columns is to know what justice is – superhuman justice, justice without mercy, the state above and beyond the prejudices of the individual. This is architecture, the feeling of command…. One would question it on one point alone. One would say, is this justice? Is this a picture of justice? Should justice be beyond the individual, superhuman, monumental, beyond mercy?

(Correa, 1959, p.48)

While Correa distanced himself from Corbusier’s vision, there was a clear admiration for modernism’s auteur imagination, combining abstract freedom with the ability to imprint on built form. That mood reverberated through many speakers at the conference where architects spoke of the need for new materials and technologies, freedom from government regulation, and to develop new educational strategies of architectural expression and pedagogy.

The main event at the conference was the inaugural speech by Jawaharlal Nehru staking out his vision of the future urban form. Nehru’s own sympathy for modern architecture’s transformative potential was in little doubt; his enthusiastic patronage of Corbusier and the Chandigarh project was the clearest expression of that vision. In 1949 Nehru had visited the site for Chandigarh and exclaimed with considerable excitement, “The site chosen is free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and traditions. Let it be the first large expression of our creative genius flowering on our newly earned freedom” (Kalia, 1999, p.12). When he came to the Delhi conference, Nehru laid out his vision in clear, almost blunt terms. “The past was good when it was the present,” Nehru declared, “but you cannot bring it forward when the entire world has changed into a technological period” (Nehru, 1959, p.7). At any rate, Nehru suggested that many of the beautiful old buildings in India date back a few hundred years before colonialism, as India and much of its architecture was “static” when the British arrived, as was the rest of society. Nehru exclaimed that despite their beauty, he found some of the older Southern temples “repelling”:

I just can’t stand them. Why? I do not know I cannot explain that, but they are oppressive, they suppress my spirit. They do not allow me to rise, they keep me down. The dark corridors – I like the sun and air and not dark corridors.

(Nehru, 1959, p.7)

In the new urban age, almost echoing Viennese architect Adolf Loos’ older modernist slogan, Nehru asserted “function governs.” Design without function may reproduce “ghost-like” buildings if it simply harks back to an earlier period. The built form was not eternal; Nehru even suggested that new buildings could have specifications that allowed them to be “knocked down” after a few years to allow new ones to be built (Nehru, 1959, p.8).

In this short speech delivered in his characteristically open style, Nehru articulated all the manifesto elements of twentieth-century architectural modernism, its critique of the past, the alignment of form with function, the creative-destructive potential of the new materials, and an impression of urban life that was suitably abstract to realize these goals. In his frank distaste of dark corridors and the ghost-like qualities of buildings modeled on the past, Nehru let slip one of Western modernity’s classic secrets. As Foucault famously pointed out, the fear of urban darkness motivated a disciplinary order which sought to redistribute populations and environments to allow for the free circulation of light and reason. In turn, this redistribution led to new enclosures and hierarchies, nurtured by new surveys of populations and objects. This management of populations was of course pioneered by colonial technologies of government. In the postcolonial order this was supplemented by the larger question – what was the form of the new city? Nehru’s address to the architects’ conference offered no clear answer to this with its abstract modernist gesture.

One answer to the new form of the city was the idea of planning. For writers like Mulk Raj Anand and others grouped around the cultural journal MARG, planning offered a utopian dream site for the new nation, incorporating cosmopolitan virtues, internationalism, and an openness to new design. From its establishment after World War II, MARG emerged as a premier journal for discussions on architecture, design and art, with essays by prominent international and Indian writers. MARG was also a platform for progressive architects⁴ in Bombay to generate what they saw as a genuine cosmopolitan discourse on the arts. MARG was founded in 1946, and its founding issue was significantly titled “Planning and Dreaming.” In his seminal editorial which also functioned as a manifesto for the group, Mulk Raj Anand suggested that though power had not yet been formally transferred from the British, there was little time to wait. “We have to ask the meaning of our dreams,” said Anand, “the dust of centuries which has settled on our souls must be swept and constructive ideas fostered” (MARG, 1946, p.5). In this new effort architecture was the “mother art,” and the plan the utopian signature of sovereignty. MARG suggested that this was an urgent effort: “We have to be up and doing. As architects of the new India, this beautiful and glorious country of our dreams, we have to see for it that there are no loopholes in our plans for the future if we can possibly help it” (MARG, 1946, p.5). The old order was dying everywhere and a new world was emerging, and MARG suggested that the focus was going to be on the “man-centered cities, towns and villages” that would be built in sovereign India. Here Indians were at a great advantage.

Whereas in European countries a great deal of the jerry-built, tawdry, tasteless architecture, whereas reconstruction and rehabilitation may only superimpose a layer of beauty in this uniform smoky ugliness, here in India, where there has been no widespread building for two hundred years, we are talking of construction, not reconstruction. And we have to start on a clean slate and have to build our industrial civilization…. And we can summon the courage to think in terms of a grandeur such as may surpass all our achievements in the past.

(MARG, 1946, p.6)

This clean-slate model of construction would also derive from an enlightened (“non-slavish”) appreciation of the Indian past along with the new tools of transformation, architecture and planning. MARG carried articles on Corbusier and essays on urban planning, articles on art and design in India, an appreciation of house interiors, and book reviews. MARG clearly saw itself as transmitting international modernism through a local lens for a new postcolonial modernity, and shaping the emerging sensibility of urban cosmopolitan bourgeois elites. The pages of the magazine were filled with discussions on the new architecture, the Bauhaus, Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright Neutra, and new construction and design materials used in homes and interiors, steel, cement, glass, chrome, deployments of light and shade. There were reports on art exhibitions, pre-colonial and ancient art in South Asia, as well as book reviews. Beatriz Colomina has written that media is “the true site within which modern architecture is produced and with which it directly engages” (1994, p.14), and MARG exemplified this perfectly.

Despite its own self-designated position, the first MARG manifesto ended with a distinct caveat about its own future status:

Our love for the future and our faith in our ability to build it, our energism, however does not blind us to the many limitations which we suffer in the uncertainties and chaos of the present situation. And time alone will judge how far we are competent to act as self-appointed adm...