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Landscapes of the Delhi Durbar, 1903: Ritual and Politics Leo C

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Landscapes of the Delhi Durbar, 1903: Ritual and Politics Leo C THE SEMIANNUAL NEWSLETTER OF THE ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES VOL. 20, NO. 2­­ • SPRING 2012 • VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY Landscapes of the Delhi Durbar, 1903: Ritual and Politics Leo C. Coleman he landscape around Delhi, India, is Indian Princes, notables, and visitors. These marked out by old walls and gates were placed from four to seven miles away which once protected important from the Central (European) Camps, for “rea- settlements and royal centers, and sons of space and public health” as one colonial Tby the monuments of the various governments observer described it. that have occupied this capital city over centu- Of course, Indian participation, and pres- ries. The gates of what is called the “old city” of ence, in this ritual of colonial display was Delhi still stand, now breached by the modern indispensable for its spectacular effect, and city built up since the nineteenth century. The the officials of the Native States, which were old city, in its earlier incarnation as Shahja- an integral part of the British Indian political hanabad, was further protected by a low ridge structure, were encouraged to constitute their which bound the northwestern approach to the encampments as a kind of ethnological museum. city. The ridge also provided a redoubt, of sorts, Some, while keeping with the colonial logic of for the British when their occupation of North sumptuous display, mounted their own coun- India came under attack in the so-called Mutiny ter-display of modern technique and efficiency. of 1857. It was on the ridge that the British later The representatives from the state of Baroda, for built a memorial to the “defense” of the city. instance, were housed in a splendid teak-wood Now visitors are reminded by plaques in Hindi, bungalow, elaborately illuminated inside and Urdu, and English that “The enemy of the out with electric light, topped by a huge dome inscriptions on this monument were those who Delhi Mutiny Memorial plaque with new inscriptions some fifty feet high, with an electric beacon at rose against colonial rule and fought bravely for (1972) its top that could be seen for miles. Around the national liberation.” the coronation in England the previous sum- Baroda encampment, ceremonial archways and After the bloody trial of four months of mer of Edward VII as King of Great Britain and large reception tents were all fitted with elec- battle in 1857, the walls of Delhi could not Emperor of India. Away from the modern city tric signs proclaiming the long life of the King serve to protect the city from the depredations of Delhi, then fitfully expanding, throwing out Emperor and welcoming guests. The encamp- of reconquest. Large sections of the walls were suburbs and developing civic institutions and ment of Kashmir’s Maharaja, Sir Pratap Singh, dynamited in the following years, to make way infrastructures (Gupta 1981), the British built a was likewise fitted with electric lights, to a for railways and to clear defensible areas, as tent-city and a ceremonial amphitheater of lathe well as to provide space for new accommoda- and plaster, to accommodate the celebrants and tions. The sacred spaces of Indian sovereignty, provide a dramatic backdrop for their rite of Inside in the Red Fort or Lal Qila, were taken over as sovereignty over the Orient. Landscapes of the Delhi Durbar, 1903: barracks, and later transformed into ballrooms In keeping with colonial notions about Ritual and Politics .................................... 1-3, 12 and banquet halls for assemblages of Imperial utility and pomp—favoring the former and Preview Spanish Theater: notables. denigrating the latter—the Durbar settlements Text and Performance ........................................4 On New Years’ Day, 1903, under the direc- were not just decorative appendages to a mean- Representation and Social Change Symposium .5 tion of the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, one of these ingless ritual, but rather served as a massive great ceremonial gatherings was staged near demonstration of technical skill and thereby “All I Need to Know I Learned from Delhi on plains dotted with villages but, for the sovereign right. A power plant for producing Don Quixote” by Edward H. Friedman .........6-8 occasion, cleared, platted, and filled with tents. electricity was specially imported from England, What We Are Writing ....................................... 9 The event was called a Durbar, after the Persian and a network of underground wires piped 2012/2013 Warren Center Seminars .................. 10 term for a royal audience used by the Mughal clean, efficient electric power throughout the Emperors of Delhi, and it was held to celebrate tent-city. Meanwhile, camps were arranged for Graduate Student Fellows Lecture Series ............11 Letters • Spring 2012 • 1 Letters • Spring 2012 • 2 reported total of 120,000 candlepower. disdain I brought on myself by being on visit- As I develop materials to address such ques- Though the tents, electric lights, railway, and ing terms with a clerk who was living in E-class tions, I aim to expand our ability within politi- amphitheater installed for the Durbar were all quarters.” Such distinctions and discrimina- cal anthropology to understand political rituals taken down at the end of the event, the grid of tions, drawn from the pay-grades of civil ser- as more than sideshows, or mere reflections or roads and expansion of the city to the northwest vants, thus provided the lingua franca for much performances of political texts already set down. remained as traces on the land. The Durbar of the administration of Delhi throughout the Rituals, whether the personal and private or grounds combined the memory twentieth century, across changes the great public rites of political life, work with of British conquest with the orna- in regime—and indeed the same meanings and material conditions in ways ments of a longer, indigenous is true of almost any modern city, which are highly formal, set apart from and yet Imperial past and the technologi- though to varying degrees and necessary to everyday life, often though not nec- cal imperatives of the twentieth drawing on different repertoires essarily religiously sanctioned, and by definition century. It is not incidental that of distinction. It is the ritual orga- effective. Ritual collapses distinctions between Lord Curzon’s appointment book nization, in urban landscapes and cause and effect and intention and action, trans- for the event had bound inside political consciousness, of such forms space and time, and marks the physical the front cover a map of the posi- distinctions and discriminations world with its traces, its temporary occupations tion of British troops around Delhi that I am studying further as a fel- producing powerful sites of return, memory, during the battles of 1857, nor that low in this year’s Fellows Program and concern. The sites of memory which mark the Central Camp of the assem- at the Robert Penn Warren Center Delhi to this day, though recoded to remember blage on the Western side of the Leo C. Coleman for the Humanities. In particular, I different aspects of long-ago political struggles, Ridge was laid out in just the am embarking on new research on the are such because of constant and renewed ritual same spot where the occupying army had been politics of urban citizenship in contemporary attention to them, connecting them with great housed some 45 years before. global cities. transcendent and justificatory stories about who The events of the Durbar and the shaping of This year, the Warren Center Fellows are counts in the “we” of political communities. the city of Delhi through such political rituals, investigating “Sacred Ecology,” human rela- Political anthropology has become, over the in which particular cultural and technological tions with the land, and with representations past thirty years or so, predominantly the study resources are deployed to mark, transform, and and projections of landscape, in which the of how differences between groups of people make socially meaningful a set of relations in sacred, the supramundane, and ritual prac- are made and marked. Classically defined as space and time, are the subject of my book-in- tices affect both the real and the imagined the study of ordering institutions of a society, progress, “Delhi in the Electrical Age.” Based on terrain of human occupation. As a political and of behavior in contexts defined as about ethnographic research in contemporary Delhi, anthropologist and an urbanist, this topic power and control, and therefore political, this and historical materials about the experience of provides me with a framework for thinking subfield of cultural anthropology has more and the city and its transformation into a modern, through contemporary struggles over identity more focused on what the theorist Judith Butler techno-political space through electrification and citizenship in globalization. As global cit- has called the “ground of politics,” the making and planning, I tell a story about the modern ies such as Delhi grow in population, and also (and remaking) of the common-sense world of state, its urban techniques and technologies become important sites of residence for a ris- categories and distinctions in terms of which of rule, and how people are able to participate ing affluent class, how are spaces made and strategies can be formulated and tactics are effec- in politics and modernity in and through the remade to give expression to new communi- tive. Responding, indeed, to the constricted state’s rituals. We can trace a line from the plat ties and to exclude others? Comparatively, I range of conclusions possible in studies of coun- of the Durbar camps to the rigorously ordered, am also interested in how recent conflicts cils, committees, and local disputes, and more separated, and meaningfully marked spaces for over mosques and other religious buildings importantly under the influence of Foucauldian each rank or category of person that typified the at key sites in the United States represent definitions of power as “productive” (as opposed bureaucratic regulation of space in Delhi.
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