In 1996, I submitted the fruit of my Ph. D. Research to Oxford University Press for review and, currently, the Press is going through the manuscript a second time towards eventual publication. One chapter of my academic life is, I hope, finally over. I began that study, of a dalit [literally, oppressed] community in the environs of Delhi, in 1990 and it has lived with me ever since. Whilst doing research for that project, I traveled extensively into the living areas of the working poor. Much of what I saw was familiar to me, as it is indeed familiar to many people who see photo essays of South Asia: decrepit housing stock, inadequate drainage, elementary power sources and few modern amenities. As with other things, I took refuge in the library and the archive and I began to read whatever I could find about the problem of housing in India's capital. There was little published beyond sociological studies whose interest in quantitative matters obscured the social history of shelter. The archive, on the other hand, bristled with material, particularly the materials of the Delhi Improvement Trust, but also the private papers of individuals involved in housing matters. A book on the subject is still waiting to be written. The Faculty Research Grant will enable me to continue my research on the subject of housing in Delhi, from which I aim to produce a monograph.
Few today dispute the verdict of the International Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that housing is crucial to human development. In independent India, the need for universal housing was acknowledged by the Planning Commission of India and by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru's 1 April 1956 journey around Delhi to the homes of the poor drew from him the statement that "it is our bounded duty to take this matter in hand positively and effectively." His regime made various attempts to overhaul the urban cityscape, the fruit of which is the 1961 Master Plan of Delhi. The 1961 Plan represents a web of contradictions common to those uncovered by contemporary scholarship on the cities of advanced industrial states. If working people earn low wages, then they cannot afford to rent homes from landlords who seek to maximize their profits. The contradictions between "rent" and "wages" must be seen in terms both of the antagonistic interests of "landlords"/"tenants" as well as "employers"/"waged workers." Although there are good studies of the "Housing Question" within economic theory, I seek to study shelter as a problem of social relations imbricated in the totality of everyday life. The contradiction between "wages" and "rents" is often simplified into the "gentrification," a public policy initiative well-known in the US, Europe and India. Rather than confront the difficult issue of "rent/wages," public policy-makers seek to remove the poor from one area to another. The breeding places of disease, the infamous slums in which the workers are confined are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere. In our case, from the "removal of poverty" (garibi hatao of 1971), we are led to a "removal of the poor from Delhi" (garib dilli se hatao of 1976).
Struck by criticism that the 700,000 people resettled in 1975-76 had been moved by force, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced on 30 May 1976, that it is "anti national" to criticize state policy just because some people expressed "inconvenience." Gandhi's statement reminds us that the "Housing Question" can only be enunciated after democratic ideals attain a popular prejudice. Class segregation or segregation in general can be countenanced without contradiction if there is no notion of democracy (thus, pre-modern cities rarely confronted the problem of settlement by status). With democratic ideals, the issue of spatial separation of classes or "races" is brought on the agenda (of course, this does not mean that they are settled with ease). In British India, the "Housing Question" was not posed as a problem, given the authoritarian and totalitarian imperial state, until the formation of independent India (1947). To locate the "Housing Question" on the terrain of democratic thought is very important, since it does not allow the problem of shelter to be posed solely as an economic ("resources") or demographic ("population") problem, but as a moral problem. My project will pay close heed to the moral dimensions of shelter as enunciated within the project of nation building set in motion by the Indian state. My ethnographic materials, on shelter and space, will be grounded in a discussion of the contradictions not only between "rent" & "wages," but also between "inconvenience" & "slums." There is the issue of people being shifted without permission and of people being left to suffer in slums. There are problems of authoritarian "clearance" and of disdain for the lives of those who live in squalor. I wish to pose a question about the democratic development of space and to create, in conclusion, a new sense of how to appreciate the "Housing Question," not simply as an issue about shelter, but also about the inalienable rights of people to create their own destiny in opposition to congealed power.
Methods & Materials
Urban history appears to be the most natural framework for my study, but, on
reflection, urban studies too frequently abdicate the dynamics and limitations of
everyday life (for my purposes, the contradictions of "rent" and "wages" in their
complexity). Such history tends to become a history of architecture, of city planning,
of the municipality, of struggles between social groups, of culture (in its patrician
and plebeian forms) and of all other things except the conflictual social relations
which sustain the city. To enter the world of social relations is to engage, in my
opinion, with the as yet awkward tools of historical anthropology. First, there is the
need to scour the archives, both in Delhi and in London (I will, therefore, need to
spend two months over two summers in Delhi and one month over a Summer in
London):