A Place for Utopia

Urban Designs from South Asia

Smriti Srinivas

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295806129
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Indische & südasiatische Geschichte

Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope. From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging "Indian New Age" of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.

1

BIOCENTRIC EUTOPIAS
IN SOUTH ASIA

For each and every group and individual of us is yoked to his city’s car; and its future of good or evil journey, year by year, is the resultant of our many pulls. As we learn to co-ordinate these, City-designing will again have begun.

Patrick Geddes, Reports on the Towns
in the Madras Presidency, 1914–1915

AHICHCHHATRA, Allahabad, Bhita, Kannauj, Kausambi: I was driving around in a hired jeep in the dusty summer of 2001 on terrible roads visiting small settlements and cities in Uttar Pradesh, on a part pilgrimage, part archaeological journey. Some places (like Kannauj, associated with the seventh-century empire of Harshavardhana and described by the Chinese visitor Xuan Zang) I had encountered in school history books, but others seemed to be (now) in the middle of nowhere.

Take Ahichchhatra, for example, whose ruins are about six miles away from Aonla (about 55,629 people in 2011): we see a very large triangular mound in the midst of agricultural fields and even climb up on it, as nonchalant goats and children from the surrounding villages seem to do regularly (figure 1.1). Ahichchhatra is identifiable as the archaic capital of the Panchala region in literary sources and belongs to the period of urbanization in South Asia dating from the first millennium BCE onward. On the way back from the mound, we cross a procession of school children from the Sarasvati Gyan Mandir celebrating Indian Independence Day (figure 1.2) and, in the vicinity, a cattle and grain fair. We have lunch at the large Parshvanath Atishaya Digambar Jain temple complex near the ruins, which is an active pilgrimage site for those who know it. Life in these parts, with its ruins, rituals, and quotidian patterns, seems a world apart from the metro city of Delhi (over 150 miles away, about 16.3 million people in 2011) or even the nearby market city of Bareilly (approximately 31 miles away, about 903,668 people in 2011).

1.1Archaeological site at Ahichchhatra, Uttar Pradesh, 2001 (Photograph: Smriti Srinivas)

Metro cities, that is, cities with a population over 1 million, and especially the megalopolises among them (with over 5 million and sometimes over 10 million people), such as Karachi, Delhi, Bombay/Mumbai, Calcutta/Kolkata, Dhaka, Hyderabad, Madras/Chennai, and Bangalore/Bengaluru, have dominated urban studies of South Asia in the last two decades, a period when the field has also become a self-conscious project. However, it is clear that a fuller treatment of the “urban” in South Asia cannot merely rest on such large cities but must encompass a range of smaller cities and towns within the urban settlement hierarchy, like Aonla and Bareilly as well as the historical Ahichchhatra. These “middle” towns and “middle” cities, argues James Heitzman, with populations below 100,000, and those with more than 100,000 but below 1 million continue to be demographically significant for South Asian urbanization. In 1950, the total urban population of South Asia was about 71 million people out of a total population of about 454 million. About 39.1 million, or 55 percent of the urban population, lived in cities that had populations lower than 100,000. The total number of urban sites in South Asia with populations of at least 100,000 people was 91. In 1950, only two places in South Asia were among the world’s twenty largest cities—Calcutta and Bombay. In 2007, the urban population in South Asia reached approximately 477 million and accounted for one-third of the macroregion’s total population. Approximately 169 million people, about 35 percent of the urban population, lived in places classified as “small cities” or “towns,” with less than 100,000 inhabitants. The number of cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants had risen to 550. Fifty-six cities had at least 1 million inhabitants (including forty-six with between 1 and 5 million people) and ten “megacities” had populations greater than 5 million, including older centers such as Bombay and newer ones such as Dhaka (Heitzman 2008b).¹

1.2School procession from the Sarasvati Gyan Mandir near Ahichchhatra, Uttar Pradesh, 2001 (Photograph: Smriti Srinivas)

In addition to sheer demographic significance, these middle places raise social and analytical issues for urban historians and scholars of contemporary urbanization, including the erasure of spatial markers and archaeological heritages through rapid infrastructural developments, construction activity, or sheer neglect; the complex flows of culture, politics, and labor between metropolises and middle places; the layering of old and new sacred centers, networks, and ritual pathways; or the spatial persistence of cultural memories that marks urban lifeworlds in the region. These middle places challenge us to open up a space for other social-science templates of the urban.

In 1914, when the rate of Indian urbanization was beginning to rise again after the vicissitudes of colonial rule, the Scottish biologist-sociologist Patrick Geddes sailed for India (figure 1.3). He would spend a decade involved with urban issues and designed dozens of plans in the subcontinent for various cities and towns, many of them now relegated to historical amnesia. His contribution to urban planning continues to be difficult to evaluate, and some critical reviews of his work suggest that it reflected a fixed worldview and practice and was unavoidably imperial.² It is also possible that his faith in the powers of municipal councils or the ability of native rulers to transform their states was misplaced and he did not understand the constraints under which they operated within the British empire. His place within a comprehensive reading of colonial and postcolonial urban planning history is, however, not the focus here. Rather, within his numerous urban plans for South Asia, there are important discussions of the value and planning of small cities, middle towns, and middle cities. It is also possible to find in his work designs for the city that are located within a “bio-centric” philosophy of the urban (Geddes 1918, 2: 182), as well as its implications for citizenship. In this chapter, in addition to a number of his other reports and plans, particular attention is paid to Geddes’s Indore report, which was the longest, most considered, and best researched of his Indian plans. Although Indore now has a population over 1 million, for a large part of its existence it was a middle town or middle city; similarly, Madras and Bangalore (discussed in chapters 2 and 4), now large metropolises, were also middle cities during Geddes’s time in India.

1.3Patrick Geddes as “Guru,” c. 1922 (Reproduced with permission from University of Strathclyde Library, Department of Archives and Special Collections)

AN INDIAN PIONEER

In the preface of his biography of J. C. Bose (1858–1937), An Indian Pioneer of Science, Patrick Geddes says that he is asked if the title of the book means “a pioneer in science, who happens to be an Indian, or a pioneer of science in and for India. The answer is—Both” (Geddes 1920: v). Not only does he show (in what was essentially an early project in the sociology of science) how important Bose’s contributions were to modern Indian and global scientific work, but he reveals why Bose was attracted to the borderlands and intercrossing tracks between physics, physiology (animal and plant), and psychology. Obviously drawn to Bose through intellectual synchronicity and friendship (they first met twenty years before the book was written and became closer after Geddes came to India in 1914), what Geddes says about his friend could be said about him too: that he was a pioneer of social science in and for India, crossing tracks between biology and sociology in his study of cities. It has been argued that there were points of connection between Bose’s study of plant physiology and Geddes’s work; “Geddes incorporated the plant point of view within his approach to town planning to ensure cooperative evolution of humans, cities, and perhaps even of plants” (Khan 2011: 841). Geddes’s perspective, however, was vitalist in all senses of the term. What Geddes and Bose had in common was a concern with the full spectrum of life and death in nature, which for Geddes also encompassed the urban.

The biographical details of Geddes’s life are well known.³ Born in 1854, after initial years in Scotland, he studied biology under Thomas Huxley in London from 1874 to 1878 and was appointed lecturer in zoology at Edinburgh University from about 1880–1881 to 1888. He married Anna Morton (1857–1917), a sympathetic and supportive partner for several decades, and became known as a thinker, publicist, and social activist. He came to be active in a range of civic associations in Edinburgh’s Old Town, establishing residential halls for students, engaging in housing reform and architectural projects of restoration, helping set up the Old Edinburgh School of Art, and establishing his Outlook Tower—a laboratory and museum of history, geography, and knowledge. His eccentric, synthetic, and encyclopedic intellectual interests often made it difficult for him to acquire an academic position, but in 1888 he was finally appointed professor of botany at University College, Dundee, where he remained for about thirty years, in a largely summertime appointment that left him free to pursue his other vocations in Edinburgh and elsewhere.

His sociological turn happened during or after his London years and grew alongside his biological and urban interests and activities in Edinburgh.⁴ By 1906, he had given two lectures on the theme of civics as applied sociology before London’s Sociological Society (set up by Geddes and Victor Branford in 1903), traveled to Cyprus (to work on the Armenian refugee question in 1896) and to the United States on lecture tours (1899–1900), and organized an International Summer School at the Paris Exposition of 1900. His globalism, already evident in these activities and in his Cities and Town Planning Exhibitions displayed in London (1910), Edinburgh, Belfast, and Dublin (1911), and Ghent (1913), set the stage for his India work. His futurological urbanism—that shone in his Dunfermline design for the city’s development (1903–1904), carried out for Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Trust—also comes through in the words he was beginning to create for his urban vision (paleotechnic, neotechnic, kakatopia, conurbation, necropolis, eupsychic, civics, and many others). He was on the quest for “eutopia”: “Ou-topia means no-place, and so the impossible ideal. Eu-topia means the best of each place in its fitness and beauty” (Mairet 1957: 126).

In Cities in Evolution, his most comprehensive analytical urban work, he writes, “Eutopia, then, lies in the city around us; and it must be planned and realized, here or nowhere, by us as its citizens—each a citizen of both the actual and the ideal city seen increasingly as one” (Geddes 1949 [1915]: xxx). He argues that many of the old conurbations and city regions were linked to a “paleotechnic” order, fossil fuels, waste, depletion of energy, war, and kakatopia, while the pathway to a “neotechnic” order is based on the conservation of energy and resources, peace, life, and man and environment together foreshadowing the creation of eutopia, city by city and region by region. Eutopia is realized through local citizenship, the starting point of thought and work, in the efforts made in volunteering for peace, in engaging in attempts to renew Life, whether through gardens, hygiene, or housing. The renascence of the city and citizenship comes through a careful consideration of the past, present, and possible futures of both. Sociology, for Geddes, was the reunion of all social sciences as “civics” and as a science of cities.

On the eve of his sixtieth birthday in 1914, Geddes left for India. He was supposed to display his Cities Exhibition in Madras at the invitation of Lord Pentland, governor of Madras, but this valuable collection of several decades, sent by ship, was sunk in the war; Geddes succeeded in creating a smaller exhibition that was displayed in 1915. Up until 1914, most of Geddes’s thought had developed in a European context. From 1914 to 1924, working in India and Palestine, his designs were enriched by other locales and became a major contribution to the town planning movement in an internationalist way (Meller 1990: 201–203). His designs were also a translation and reinvention of the late nineteenth-century utopian tradition outside the imperium as an urban vision rather than a pastoral one.

GEDDES IN INDIA

The urban situation in India at this historical moment was significant: although the percentage of urban versus rural populations was small at the turn of the century, the scale of urbanization was such that the proportion living in cities was three-fourths of the entire population of Britain in 1901. While some Indian cities were quite large in the early nineteenth century (e.g., in 1823, Calcutta had 900,000 people; Banaras, 580,000), large cities were getting larger. New industrial cities were coming up (for instance, Jamshedpur, built by the Parsi industrialist Jamshedji Tata), and cities of about 100,000 or so were becoming important for Indian urbanization. The Indian sociologist G. S. Ghurye (who had encountered Geddes in Bombay) suggested that one of the most important trends in Indian urbanization was the development between 1881 and 1941 of large cities in every region of the country, with a smaller but still significant group of cities alongside. Local self-government became a venue for political action for Indian nationalists as well as British administrators, while plague, famine, and huge rural to urban migrations were important concerns. Cities were beginning to set up improvement trusts: Bombay in 1889 was the first; Calcutta and Hyderabad got their trusts in 1911 and 1912.⁵

Geddes traveled extensively in India: to large cities like Delhi and Calcutta in the north, provincial ones like Bellary in the Deccan, and temple towns like Madurai and Srirangam in the south. His India years are marked by an astonishing number of reports on various cities solicited by British administrators, Indian rulers, and citizens. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1947) draws from reports he made on cities between 1915 and 1919 and suggests that the total number (including those concerned with planning or extending cities and towns, in part or whole) was about fifty. His urban work falls into four stages: his Madras exhibition and reports on twelve little towns and one suburb of Madras in 1914–1915; early invitations from the governor of Bombay and native rulers of Baroda (1916) and Indore (1917), which resulted in other reports; smaller schemes planned during his appointment in Bombay, from a campus for Osmania University to the Lucknow zoo; and his last town planning report, written for the maharaja of Patiala in 1922 (Meller 1990: 236–284). His reports are “revelations” of the conditions of existing cities, the collapse of local governance, and the drastic surgery by Western specialists and suggest what could be done differently (Mairet 1957: 162).

Even in his early surveys, based on very brief sojourns, Geddes’s eye for detail and his appreciation of Indian city design is obvious. Visiting Tanjore (Thanjavur) in 1914–1915, he writes that “the beauty of this old city and of the grandeur of its temple [the Brihadeeswarar] will remain among the most vivid experiences of my visit to India” (Geddes 1915: 17). Comparing the temple to a great European cathedral, he remarks how the main edifice finds an “admirable contrast” to the small Subrahmanyaswami temple, “alike in scale and style.” Bemoaning the “lapse of modern taste” once we leave the temple, his eye falls on a “noble” pipal tree with its own “pial [platform]” outside the gate: “Here is an old element of town-planning which should be reproduced a thousandfold more frequently” (17). Again, on a visit to the old and sacred city of Kanchipuram, while insisting to the planner that he should inquire into the reasons that have prevented this city from deteriorati...