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Dhaka: Aspirations of the Concealed Tabassum Zaman

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Dhaka: Aspirations of the Concealed Tabassum Zaman DHAKA: ASPIRATIONS OF THE CONCEALED TABASSUM ZAMAN B.A. (Hons.), University of Dhaka M.A., University of Dhaka A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY CULTURAL STUDIES IN ASIA PROGRAMME NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2014 DHAKA: ASPIRATIONS OF THE CONCEALED TABASSUM ZAMAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2014 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety. I have duly acknowledged all the sources of information which have been used in the thesis. This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously. ----------------------------- Tabassum Zaman 9 April 2014 i Acknowledgements I dedicate this thesis to the most important trio in my life: my parents – Ammu, Abbu and my son, Ehan. Abbu, you are the reason for my being in academia in the first place. Losing you, I lost all enthusiasm to pursue higher studies and almost thought of giving up. Then it was my dream to make you proud and happy and to do justice to your undying faith in me that helped me collect myself and keep at it. I hope you are watching me complete this journey today. Ammu, who became a proxy mother in my absence to my son, this thesis is dedicated to your hard work and endless sacrifices. It is for you that I have been able to juggle my work and parental duties without major mishaps. Thank you Ehan, my sunshine, for being in my life. You were a blessing in disguise. I remember complaining so many times for not being able to get any work done when you were around until I realised that you were the only reason for the discipline I needed to carry on with this daunting task. I might have started this journey on my own, but without you, I would never have pushed myself so diligently to meet those harrowing deadlines that I did, eventually completing this thesis. A big thank you is in order to all my teachers who played an equally important part in making me who I’m today. I have had the best teachers one can ask for in one’s lifetime. I thank all my mentors from the bottom of my heart for leaving a part of them in me and inspiring me to strive for the best. Being in an uncertain and a transitional phase, as I was making my first forays into Cultural Studies from my comfort zone, English literature, I could not have asked for a better supervisor than Professor Chua Beng Huat, who was sensitive to my queries, needs and often blatant ignorance. With his atypical insights, he has always intrigued me to rethink what I readily accepted as unproblematic and made this journey at once enlightening and enjoyable for me. I owe so much of my own scholastic refinement as well as that of the main premises of this thesis to his relentless “So what?”s and “What do you mean?”s. Thank you for creating that ii critical space for me to discover the old anew. Thank you also for being so patient with my prolonged procrastination and problems, which were plenty, while pushing me when I lagged behind. I feel blessed to be able to work with you, Prof. Firdous Azim and Syed Manzoorul Islam, you truly are my guardian angels. A mere “thank you” would be too inadequate to acknowledge your love, affection and unconditional support for me. Yet, not knowing better, I want to thank you for having the confidence in me and showering me with your care and love whenever I needed them. You have truly been the pillars of strength and encouragement for me. You are the reason why I continue to be in academia. I look up to you and aspire to imbibe what you have taught me over the years. I am fortunate to have you in my life. My heart felt appreciation goes to all my informants and resource persons who have shown interest in my project and given me their precious time and advice. A big thank you also goes to Faisal Amin, my unofficial research assistant, for helping me out during my field work with all the “dirty work.” Thank you Safia Azim and Al Amin for sharing your wonderful photographs with me out of sheer benevolence. A big thanks to Tim Bunnell and Tania Roy for your interest in my work and providing me with your invaluable feedback during the formational period of this thesis. I want to extend my earnest gratitude to Ms Raja, my problem solving genie at NUS, who helped me through all the administrative nightmares and saved me from possible blunders. Last but not the least, I’m blessed to have the circle of family and friends who have been beside me through thick and thin. Sumona, Dipu Bhai, Antu, Babu and Sonia, thank you for going that extra mile, for being what you are and probably more than what you could be to hold the fort in my absence. It is for your collective effort that I’m able to write this note today. I would also like to thank all my students and colleagues at BRACU and friends at NUS who have made this entire journey worthwhile and even possible. A very special thanks to all my friends in Singapore, who made this little, sunny island my home away from home and such a welcoming iii and accommodating place to be. Jaime Koh, I cannot imagine Singapore without you. I’m indebted and grateful to you for lending that “fresh pair of [critical] eyes” that I was badly in need of. Thank you also for being my most dependable encyclopaedia of Singapore at all times and above else such a dear friend who has always been a shout away. A big thank you to all fellow post-grads, friends in all shapes and forms and everyone else who have seen me through bouts of PhD blues, and have helped me beat it by extending constant moral support (actually and virtually) and encouragement. iv Summary This thesis explores the quotidian imaginative practices of city dwellers in the social urban context of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Driven by a desire to understand the psycho-social and cultural associations – the invisible properties – of the city in the context of everyday life, the city of the mind has been deployed as a speculative method. With that the study embraces both the lived and imaginary properties of the city that remain equally understudied and marginalised in urban discourse in general. The central focus of the research has been to see what the roles of the city of the mind are in the everyday negotiation of the hard city and to what extent and capacity imagination gets employed to reconstruct the dwellers’ experiences in locating themselves in the urban world. The empirical content of the study – personal narratives, authoritative discourse on the city and popular cultural texts – offers a critique of the traditionally circulated idea of the visible and tangible city as significantly limited and helps deconstruct it to make way for a broader and nuanced understanding of the city, which in turn embraces the most contradictory trends and diverse patterns of thinking about the city. Together, these trends uncover newer realities where the city of the mind is found to be an embedded urban social practice and popular cultural products and practices as alternative sources of knowledge production about the city. v Table of Contents Declaration i Acknowledgements ii Summary v Table of Contents vi List of Tables viii List of Figures ix Chapter One: Preamble 1 1.1. Why The City of The Mind? 4 1.2. Whose Imaginative Practices? 7 1.2.1. Original Locals/ Dhakaiyas 8 1.2.2. Long-Term Residents 11 1.2.3. Migrants to the City 12 1.3. Why Dhaka? 13 1.4. A Brief Note on the Administrative Units of Dhaka 19 1.5. Scope of the Research 21 1.6. The Main Arguments at a Glance 25 1.7. Research Questions 27 1.8. Chapter Outline 27 Chapter Two: Conceptual Moorings 30 2.1. The City as Imaginary 30 2.2. Telling the City Anew: Reading One City through the Images of Another 36 2.3. Imagination in Urban Context 49 2.4. Power and Possibilities of the Mundane and the Popular 51 2.5. Units of Analysis 52 Chapter Three: Stories So Far: Existing Research 55 3.1. Early Scholarship on the City: The Social Drift 56 3.2. The Intimate City of Everyday: The Cultural Drift 62 3.3. The Imaginary City in Different Contexts 64 3.4. Making Sense of the City 69 3.4.1. Imageability 70 3.4.2. Lived Stories and Praxis: Making Sense through Binaries and Differences 73 3.4.3. The City as an Emotive Site 74 3.5. Research on Dhaka 75 3.6. Contextualising the Present Research 84 Chapter Four: Modi Operandi: The Nuts and Bolts 89 4.1. Timeline and Duration 89 4.2. How I did What I Did 89 4.3. Notes on the Informants: Demographics 92 4.3.1. Occupational Profile 93 4.3.2. Educational Profile 94 4.3.3. Spatial Distribution of the Informants 96 4.4. Selecting Minds: Prelude to the Interviews 99 4.4.1. Selecting Minds: Phase Two 103 4.5. Being the Voyeur 105 4.6. Content and Discourse Analysis 106 vi 4.7. Difficulties Faced 108 Chapter Five: The City of the Book : The Formal City 110 5.1.
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