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The Forgotten Magicians of the City a Case of Involuntary Displacement in New Delhi, India

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The Forgotten Magicians of the City a Case of Involuntary Displacement in New Delhi, India The Forgotten Magicians of the City A case of involuntary displacement in New Delhi, India. By Eleonora Fanari In the last decades, India has been focusing its agenda at a rapid and fast development, pursuing the dream of modernization and industrialization of its space. Urban development has been the primary ambitions of the national government since the independence, with a stronger accent, right after the liberalization reform policies of 1990, that started transforming the urban space into an “imaginary city” to be acclaimed and integrated in the global idea of “megacity”. However, although these changing ideas have been affecting a large part of the society in the last decades, many communities had been fighting to retain in its cradle the centenaries traditions, customs and beliefs, which represent their memory, history and identity. Among the ones fighting everyday against the government to ask for rights, identity and justice, there is the case of the Kathputli colony in the urban space of Delhi. Kathputli is a (un)famous colony, home of numerous artists, magician, puppetry, crafters, and snakes keepers, mostly coming from the Bhat caste of Rajasthan, a particular caste of puppeteers, or in Hindi, Kathputli. The Kathputli colony, considered today a slum area, is just one of the several settlements which have been menaced of eviction for the sake of development. This paper aims to analyze, throughout the ongoing dispossession of the Kathputli colony, the immediate effect of the relocation and replacement of poor slum dwellers, looking at the social and cultural consequences implicated in the changing of the urban space. The peculiar chosen case of the artist dwellers addresses the idea of identity, which raises a new discourse of urban development grounded not only on sustainability, rights and justice - which are the basics in a process of development – but on the space given to art, culture and education in the same journey of development. This paper wants to be a reflection on the meaning of development and a contribution to the urban studies in developing countries. Keywords: India, displacement, urbanization, kathputli puppetry, slum clearance, Delhi Introduction “The vans and bulldozer came first, rumbling along the main road; they stopped opposite the ghetto of the magician. A loudspeaker began to blare: “Civic Beautification programme…Prepare instantly for evacuation to new site… this slum is a public eyesore, can no longer be tolerated…while bulldozers moved forwards into the slum, a door was slammed shut…but not all the magicians were captured; not all of them were carted off…and it said that the day after the bulldozing of the magicians’ ghetto, a new slum was reported in the heart of the city.”1 It is reported in the famous novel by Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1980), the story of the magician ghetto, or as Rushdie calls it the “moving slum”. The magic infused in the novel has captured the attention of many readers worldwide, but only a few know that the magic that infuses the now canonical novel was actually the province of a living community in Old Delhi, and that the magician’s slum in which Saleem Sinai takes refuge with Parvati-the-Witch and Picture Singh (The Most Charming Man in the World) is an actual slum that was subject to “clearance” during the Emergency of the 1970s and which then, having managed to avoid being “disappeared” by Sanjay Gandhi’s/Major Shiva’s goons, re-appeared close to Shadipur bus depot. Rushdie’s magicians are the magicians of Katputli colony. The story repeats, and after 50 years of existence, the (in)famous Kathputli (puppetry) colony of Delhi is again menaced by the same magical power of a postcolonial city, which in the name of development order the eviction of its own inhabitants, to adjust to modern standards of a “global city”. As the novel suggests, the project of creating a global city out of the Delhi environment has something of the unreal; however the beautification project of the post-colonial Delhi is conceived as a necessary step to make-way for India’s entery into the global imagination of a modern country. As documented in the novel, forced displacement by development projects is not a new phenomenon, although it is only in the last decades that it came to be addressed as a problematic issue both at the national and international level. In India the problem of displacement is by no means a huge one, with around one million displaced every year by development projects, with a total of 60-65 million displaced people since independence2. In development debates, more than often, displacement has been associated with large dams, or activities such as mining. In last years much displacement is however taking place due to development activities in urban areas. 1 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Jonathan Cape, London, 1980, pg. 599-600 2 Walter Fernandes, Paying the Price for Someone else Development, in Agenda-Infochange. No. 12, 30 July, 2008, pp. 8-12 The projects developed in urban areas have changed depending on its political policies and political aims. From urban infrastructure projects such as road widening, construction of flyover, expansion of airports, etc. to more leisure services such as construction of shop centres, malls, cinema, theatre, etc. Right after Independence, the nation was focused on the making of a national identity, and displacement was considered even for the masses a needed action for the good of the nation3. In the last decades Delhi has been witnessing the implementation of such projects, which are adversely affecting the lives of millions. Most of the population touched by the phenomenon are those belonging to slums, which are often marginalized and have a little voice or bargaining power to influence such decisions. Slums along with their residents are generally treated as unwanted hurdles to the aspirations of the middle class of law and order, speedy transport and cleanliness, to create the dream of a high-tech imagined global city. Slums dwellers continue to be treated as “outsider”, because their way of living does not conform to the aspiration of the modern middle class, which consider these projects an undue path to catch up with the West and promote modernity. The present menaced eviction of the Kathputli colony is one of the first strategically planned in-situ redevelopment projects aiming to rehabilitate the public space, both to finance the urban project and to relocate the poor neighbourhoods. Beside this new strategic idea of slum clearance, the artistic identities of its inhabitants present a particular scenario, worthy of observations and analysis. The urban opportunity the government is failing to see and recognize out of this artistic space, underlines an urban project of social discrimination and exclusion hidden under different names and labels, to pursue a particular model of development aimed to fulfill the desires and the new necessities of the recent coming up of the new middle class. The in-situ resettlement project represents the creation of a new development strategy based on a new notion of the state power as the promulgator of growth, and a new concept of poverty totally distorted by the previous association with asceticism and nobility. This article explores, through the case of Kathputli colony, the creation of the national imagined India, and the relations between space, identity and buildings. India’s dream to become a national state is expressed by the creation of ‘imagined communities’ and ‘imagined worlds’, free of boundaries and cultural ties that are characterized by the formation of a new consumer culture embodied by the new middle class people pursuing the dream of modernity. The idea of the nation as imagined community, and the creation of a new culture and new identities creates tensions and anxiety among the two class of people sharing the same space; a small majority that is not able to accept in the mainstream society a large minorities characterized by their ethnicity, diversity and cultural peculiarity4. The politics of “slum clearance” which ends up being a real ethnic cleansing through an elimination of difference, is a product of that “anxiety of incompleteness” resulted by the gap between them and the other5. The article does also recognize this case of displacement both as an urban political project supported by the global idea of development, and as a failure of the country that has not been able 3 Prakash Chand, Implications of Industrial Relocation on Workers in Delhi, in Social Change, SAGE Publication, Los Angeles, 2012, 42(1), pg. 49–68 4 Look at the theory described in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, University of Minnesota Press, 1996 5 More information in Arjun Appadurai, Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization, in Development and Change Vol. 29, 1998, pg. 905-925 to include and guarantee a certain lifestyle to all its inhabitants. It also questions the advantages (or disadvantages) that this national project will produce not only to the excluded one but also in a society as whole. Displacement as a project of Urbanization The embodiment of India’s modernist ambitions has been diligently planned already since 1962, when the first Master Plan was produced with the help of American expertise6. Huge tracks of agricultural lands were acquired from the villages close to Delhi and vested with the Delhi Development Authority (DDA)7, which had the monopoly to transform these spaces into zones appropriated for a modern capital. The creation of New Delhi as the embodiment of the new middle class and the new idea of modernity was in opposition with the historical Old Delhi: “The Old City, in this view was seen as “slum, congested, filthy, obsolete, functionally lacking in exclusive land use zones, without any green spaces and socially and culturally stagnant”.
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