Listening in to others:
In between noise and silence
Tripta Chandola
Faculty of Creative Industries
Queensland University of Technology
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
2010
2
Keywords
Delhi
Slums
Urban Studies
Ethnography
Contested Spaces
Sensorial Studies
Listening
Noise
Othering
3
Statement of Originality
I, Tripta Chandola, certify that the ideas, finding, analysis and conclusions presented in this thesis are entirely my own work, except where otherwise acknowledged. I also certify that the work is original and has not been previously submitted for any other award.
Signature:
Date:
22nd September, 2010 4
Abstract
Since the launch of the ‘Clean Delhi, Green Delhi’ campaign in 2003, slums have become a significant social and political issue in India’s capital city. Through this campaign, the state, in collaboration with Delhi’s middle class through the
‘Bhagidari system’ (literally translated as ‘participatory system’), aims to transform
Delhi into a ‘world-class city’ that offers a sanitised, aesthetically appealing urban experience to its citizens and Western visitors. In 2007, Delhi won the bid to host the
2010 Commonwealth Games; since then, this agenda has acquired an urgent, almost violent, impetus to transform Delhi into an environmentally friendly, aesthetically appealing and ‘truly international city’. Slums and slum-dwellers, with their ‘filth, dirt, and noise’, have no place in this imagined city. The violence inflicted upon slum-dwellers, including the denial of their judicial rights, is justified on these accounts. In addition, the juridical discourse since 2000 has ‘re-problematised slums as ‘nuisance’. The rising antagonism of the middle-classes against the poor, supported by the state’s ambition to have a ‘world-class city’, has allowed a new rhetoric to situate the slums in the city. These representations articulate slums as homogenised spaces of experience and identity. The ‘illegal’ status of slum-dwellers, as encroachers upon public space, is stretched to involve ‘social, cultural, and moral’ decadence and depravity.
This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of everyday life in a prominent slum settlement in Delhi. It sensually examines the social, cultural and political materiality of slums, and the relationship of slums with the middle class. In doing so, it highlights the politics of sensorial ordering of slums as ‘filthy, dirty, and noisy’ by 5 the middle classes to calcify their position as ‘others’ in order to further segregate, exclude and discriminate the slums. The ethnographic experience in the slums, however, highlights a complex sensorial ordering and politics of its own. Not only are the interactions between diverse communities in slums highly restricted and sensually ordained, but the middle class is identified as a sensual ‘other’, and its sensual practices prohibited. This is significant in two ways. First, it highlights the multiplicity of social, cultural experience and engagement in the slums, thereby challenging its homogenised representation. Second, the ethnographic exploration allowed me to frame a distinct sense of self amongst the slums, which is denied in mainstream discourses, and allowed me to identify the slums’ own ’others’, middle class being one of them.
This thesis highlights sound – its production, performances and articulations – as an act with social, cultural, and political implications and manifestations. ‘Noise’ can be understood as a political construct to identify ‘others’ – and both slum-dwellers and the middle classes identify different sonic practices as noise to situate the ‘other’ sonically. It is within this context that this thesis frames the position of Listener and
Hearer, which corresponds to their social-political positions. These positions can be, and are, resisted and circumvented through sonic practices. For instance, amplification tactics in the Karimnagar slums, which are understood as ‘uncultured, callous activities to just create more noise’ by the slums’ middle-class neighbours, also serve definite purposes in shaping and navigating the space through the slums’ soundscapes, asserting a presence that is otherwise denied. Such tactics allow the residents to define their sonic territories and scope of sonic performances; they are significant in terms of exerting one’s position, territory and identity, and they are 6 very important in subverting hierarchies. The residents of the Karimnagar slums have to negotiate many social, cultural, moral and political prejudices in their everyday lives. Their identity is constantly under scrutiny and threat. However, the sonic cultures and practices in the Karimnagar slums allow their residents to exert a definite sonic presence – which the middle class has to hear. The articulation of noise and silence is an act manifesting, referencing and resisting social, cultural, and political power and hierarchies. 7
Table of Contents
Listening in to others:...... 1
Keywords ...... 2
Statement of Originality...... 3
Abstract ...... 4
Table of Contents ...... 7
Acknowledgements...... 12
1 Introduction...... 14
Slums in the Indian context...... 14
Tropes of engagement...... 18
Locating the research: The Karimnagar slums...... 21
Slums and the scope of sensorial research ...... 23
Intersensoriality...... 25
Methodological inroads...... 27
Thesis structure ...... 34
2 Methodology ...... 37
Introduction...... 37
Outline...... 38
Ethnography and its practice...... 39
Conducting research in slums: Negotiating anxious space...... 41
Profile of the researcher: Ethnographer’s profile...... 44
The ethnographer’s tools: Research design and methods ...... 46
Cultural translators and key informants ...... 54
Cultural translators, research collaborators and personal relations...... 55 8
Surveys...... 61
Participant observation...... 64
Reflections on negotiating anxieties ...... 67
The ‘other’ in ethnographic tradition ...... 67
Researching the ‘other’ ...... 70
Revaluating research frameworks...... 75
Voices from the field...... 77
Intersecting networks and issues of representation...... 79
Conclusion...... 85
3 On slums...... 89
Introduction: The demolition ...... 89
Agenda: Containing the others...... 91
Clean Delhi, Green Delhi: Invisibilising slums ...... 92
The Karimnagar slums ...... 98
The three camps of the Karimnagar slums: The markets...... 107
Materiality of the Karimnagar slums ...... 112
Living the space: Ownership, education, and basic amenities...... 113
The Karimnagar slums and their immediate neighbourhood...... 122
Deviant sites...... 124
Sanitised spaces: Cities without slums...... 128
Gurgaon: Elite walled neighbourhood ...... 131
Sainik Farm: Legitimate middle-class ‘slums’ ...... 133
Conclusion...... 137
4 World of senses...... 142
Introduction...... 142 9
‘It’s not their fault – it’s how they live’ ...... 142
Gated communities: Enclosed self, walled slums...... 146
Maintaining distance ...... 150
Investigating senses...... 151
The five senses: ‘Mingling of modalities of mingling’...... 154
The mingling of modalities of mingling: Sensorial practices in the Karimnagar
slums ...... 155
The sense of senses ...... 165
Feeling the senses: Sensorial revolution ...... 168
Interplay of senses: Intersensorial approach ...... 172
Sense of self: ‘Dirty, congested and dangerous’...... 173
Conclusion...... 176
5 Immediate–extended–imagined ...... 178
Introduction...... 178
Ordering of the senses...... 179
Immediate–extended–imagined ...... 179
Sensorial ordering and negotiations...... 180
The Hindu cosmos: A matter of sensual ordering...... 182
Sight over other senses: Sensorial hierarchisation in Western epistemological
traditions...... 188
Identity and ‘othering’: Movements along the immediate–extended–imagined
sensorial realms in the Karimnagar slums ...... 193
Real vis-à-vis recorded lives ...... 198
Managing self: Extended immediate, shifting imagined...... 202
Discussion ...... 209 10
Conclusion...... 215
6 Sonic practices of space ...... 217
Introduction...... 217
Soundscapes: Life of a space experienced by listening ...... 217
Acoustemology: Decoding space, sonically ...... 219
Soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums: Scope of an acoustemological inquiry..221
Listening in to sound...... 224
Soundscapes as cultural systems...... 225
Listening into the everyday...... 230
Flows: Listening into the water route...... 235
Water routes as volatile networks ...... 239
Water networks: Water tankers as sites of sensual ecstasy...... 244
Spaces as social experience and flows of spaces in the Karimnagar slums...... 247
Conclusion...... 250
7 Sonic articulations: In between noise and silence...... 252
Introduction...... 252
Noise: ‘Sound out of place’...... 253
Noise as a ‘function of not noise’ ...... 254
Between noise and silence ...... 258
Listening into traffic: Sirens as noise...... 265
Amplification as noise: Sonic combat and encroachments...... 268
Landscape of auditory technologies...... 270
Rejection of city sound: Phases of auditory technologies ...... 272
Practices of amplification: DJ-ing...... 278
Conclusion...... 283 11
8 Honking: Legitimate noise...... 286
Quieting the city: Noise Regulation Rules 2000...... 286
Noisy ‘others’...... 290
Noisy self: Honking in Delhi ...... 291
Horn OK please...... 292
Honking practices...... 295
Localising honking: An ethnographic insight...... 297
Cultures of honking: Legitimate noise...... 302
Conclusion...... 303
9 Conclusion: A discussion of listening practices...... 305
Introduction...... 305
Listener and hearer...... 306
Noise ...... 308
Silencing, silence and unlistening...... 312
Gossiping...... 316
Discussion ...... 317
Concluding remarks ...... 319
10 Epilogue ...... 320
References...... 336
12
Acknowledgements
This thesis would have been abandoned a long time back had I been left to my own devices by Bhuwan Bhaskar and Jo Tacchi during my darkest hours. It is to them that
I owe this completion: for Bhuwan Bhaskar, in whose large hands I finally felt that
‘nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands’; and for Jo, not solely in a supervisory role, who is second to none and expects nothing else – deservedly so.
Many thanks to Jo Tacchi and Christy Collis for being patient supervisors, providing invaluable and in-depth comments, and coping with the grammatical assault I unleashed upon them.
There are others who have in their own way helped me reach this milestone: Parvati
Sharma, for Jungpura days and ways, and for making J. Alfred Prufrock and Charlie
Bucket such important parts of my life; Siddhartha Luther, for his violent silences and sudden acts of loud kindness; Rrishi Raote, for being his namesake, a saint, oldest mate, and having a Lazarus-like faith in me; Indira Ramesh, for her limitless warmth and wisdom which she generously bestowed upon me; Adya Thakur, aka mentos, for her unwavering confidence in me; Seema and Swaroop, for always having a spare room for me; Sophea Lerner, for the many sound conversations;
Patrice Riemens, for always being an email away; Geert Lovink, a philosopher, guide, and friend; and, Harsh Vardhan Chandola, who will succeed in irritating me even when I am 80 and enlightened – as only younger brothers can.
I have come to think of Brisbane – a city in which I have unwittingly spent more time than I ever anticipated – as my second home, and I must thank the people who 13 made me feel this way: Allison Milner and Rohan McCarthy, for companionship in the early days and long, invigorating inebriated conversations; Mr Barnes, for Bluey and the perfect cup of tea; Haydn Rippon, for the silent company into long, late nights and the many right arguments; Marie Denward, for much-needed friendship, warmth and support in the last days of writing; Greg Hearn, for listening to my tales and half-baked theories; and, lastly, the colleagues at the cave who politely ignored the fact that I was squatting at work.
Lastly, Aashish Kaul, a very special friend, for his eternal quest to write the perfect story, perfectly. 14
1
Introduction
This thesis explores a prominent slum settlement in New Delhi through its soundscapes, sonic cultures and politics. In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to the study of senses. Simultaneously, this thesis responds to the call by scholars across different disciplines including anthropology (David Howes 2003,
2004, 2006; Constance Classen 1993, 1997; Stoller 1997, 1989), history (Smith
2004, 2008), ethnomusicology (Feld 1990, 1994, 1996) and sound art (Hegarty 2007) to feel the ‘senses’ while also making a modest effort to fill the notable absence of
‘Third World scholars interested in auditory perception’ (Erlmann 2004: 4). The thesis is interdisciplinary in its approach, drawing upon bodies of work in sensorial studies, anthropology of the senses, history, sociology, urban studies and slum studies. I locate this interdisciplinary research squarely within the growing body of work that studies the world through a focus on the senses.
Slums in the Indian context
New Delhi is India’s capital city. Twenty per cent of its entire population lives in the slums. The Slums Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act (1956) of the Indian
Parliament defines an area as a slum when the buildings:
(a) are in any respect unfit for human habitation; or (b) are by reason of
dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangement and design of such buildings,
narrowness or faulty arrangement of streets, lack of ventilation, light or
sanitation facilities, or any combination of these factors, are detrimental to 15
safety, health or morals, it may, by notification in the Official Gazette,
declare such area to be a slum area.
Slums are ‘encroachments’ on land acquired for the use of government or other spaces under the jurisdiction of the state, such as forests, parks and sanctuaries. This implies that slum-dwellers are seen an ‘encroachers’. This act of encroachment is illegal, and illegality is the ‘dominant perception in law of slums and slum-dwellers’
(Ramanathan 2001). In Delhi, the existence of slums is said by some (see Dupont
2008; Ramanathan 2001, 2006) to be a demonstration of the failure of the public policy of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). Instituted in 1957, DDA is responsible for promoting and securing the development of Delhi1 and drafts the
Master Plan for Delhi (MPD),2 which sets policies and plans for land acquisition, distribution and usage policies undertaken.
The main agenda of the MPD is to ensure ‘overall development through large scale acquisition of land, and development of resources’.3 The existence of slums, at the most basic administrative level, is articulated as the failure of the DDA, through its specific planning in the MPD, to ‘meet the demand of the poorest section of the population’, who ‘had no option to but to occupy vacant lands, essentially public land’ to construct ‘makeshift housing – or JJS [Juggi-Jhopdi Settlements, which literally translate as “hutments”]’ (Dupont 2008). Such accounts hold that it is in fact
‘Delhi’s Master Plan that gave birth to its evil twin: the city of slums’ (Baviskar
2006). It is interesting to note, however, that the language employed to locate the
1 http://www.dda.org.in/about_us/about_dda.htm. 2 http://delhi-masterplan.com. 3 http://delhi-masterplan.com. 16 slums and slum-dwellers in legal terms, as highlighted by the above quote, is not limited to the act of encroachment only; it is extended to identify these spaces as a threat to the ‘safety, health or morals’ of society. In such ways, slums and slum- dwellers are framed as unsafe, unhealthy and immoral (Ghertner 2008; Bhan 2009).
Slums, of course, have always been of concern to the state of Delhi. However, until
2000 the problem of slums in Delhi was articulated as a failure of the state to provide for its migrants and the violence directed against slum-dwellers was not so intensive.
This was supported by the state and the middle classes, who constitute 45 per cent of
Delhi’s population. The following initiatives and developments have had a significant impact on it.
The Bhagidari system,4 instituted in 2000, is a participatory governance scheme in which middle-class representation is encouraged through bodies such as the Resident
Welfare Associations (RWAs) and Market Traders Associations (MTAs). Middle- class representation has now become very important when it comes to determining the policies and practices instituted in local areas, as well as at the broader state level. This initiative on the part of the state government not only acknowledges the power of the burgeoning middle class in Delhi, but also reiterates it by directly involving it in governance initiatives. Participation in this scheme, however, was only extended to ‘legitimate citizens’. It does not involve slum-dwellers, or other urban poor populations, as they are not recognised as ‘legitimate’ citizens.
4 http://dcsouth.delhigovt.nic.in/bhagidari_scheme.htm. 17
Through the Clean Delhi, Green Delhi Campaign, initiated in 2003,5 the state aspires to transform Delhi into a ‘world-class, truly international’ city, which offers an aesthetically appealing, sanitised experience of the city to its ‘citizens’ and visitors.
In this scheme, anything that is seen as a pollutant – environmental, social, aesthetic or sensual – has no place in the city. In 2007, Delhi won the bid to host the 2010
Commonwealth Games.6 Since then, this agenda – to clean the city of all its pollutants – has acquired an urgent, almost violent, impetus to transform Delhi into an environmentally friendly, aesthetically appealing and ‘truly international city’.
Delhi aspires to become a world-class city in the global context. Over the last decade, this aspiration has had ‘a decisive impact on the direction followed to transform … land use and reshape the urban landscape’ (Dupont 2008). Within this agenda, middle-class supported issues around the environment, ‘aesthetics, leisure, safety, and health’ (Baviskar 2003) have become very significant.
Within imaginations of a refurbished urban landscape, the relations between slum- dwellers and the middle classes have undergone a dramatic transformation. This is revealed through the vocabularies used in academic and mainstream discourses, which further consolidate the position of slum-dwellers not only as ‘illegal’, but also as a ‘nuisance’ (Ghertner 2008). Ashis Nandy (1998) notes that, while the official city cannot survive without its unintended ‘others’ – the slum-dwellers – for many wealthier residents, represent the borderline between urban and rural, East and West, modern and ‘obsolete’ (1998: 3). Wealthier urban residents want to maintain a
5 http://delhigovt.nic.in/environment.asp#1. 6 http://www.cwgdelhi2010.org/Template3.aspx?pageid=P:1247. 18 distance from slum-dwellers, as they have already made the transition to modernity.
The language and the frameworks within which slum-dwellers are located borrow from policies pertaining to urban planning and land usage, which themselves relate to middle-class aspirations and political ambitions to transform Delhi into a ‘world- class city’. All of this helps to sustain a broader rhetoric of slums and slum-dwellers as ‘others’ vis-à-vis the city, the state and the middle classes. The rhetorical distance is effectively evoked to justify demolition drives (see Chapter 3) and unsatisfactory resettlement plans and policies as the ‘logical policy choice for progressive city governments’ (Mayne 1993: 175). There are many similarities in the ways that slums in modern India and slums in other places and in modern history are constructed in the wider imagination.
Tropes of engagement
In ‘The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities 1870–1914’,
Alan Mayne (1993) highlights the rhetorical schematic through which the position of the slums and slum-dwellers during this period was located in the bourgeois cultural imagination. Introducing his work, spanning the three cities of San Francisco,
Birmingham and Sydney, he makes a bold intellectual departure from the manner in which slums are more usually discussed, and constructs new tropes of engagement in order to state that:
Slums are myths. They are constructions of the imagination … I do not mean
that slums were not real. They were, after all, a universal feature of big cities.
Their reality, however, lay in the constructions of common-sense conviction,
and in the certainties of public knowledge which common-sense 19
understandings sustained, rather than in the material conditions of everyday
living. To discuss slums is to deal with words, with discourse, with signs, and
with the concepts they communicated, rather than with the social geography
of inner cities. (1993: 2) (emphasis added).
The ‘words, discourse, and signs’ representing the reality of the slums were loaded with bourgeois meanings, which served to obscure and distort ‘the varied spatial forms and social conditions to which it was applied … into one all-embracing concept of an outcast society’ (1993: 2). In this thesis, I share Mayne’s intellectual anxiety regarding the construction of slums in the popular imagination. To overcome and move past such constructions, I attempt to present an analysis of the specific construction of slum-dwellers as ‘others’ that involves the voices, imaginations and constructions created by the slums and slum-dwellers. My intent is to reveal some of the ways in which slums cannot be considered or imagined as homogenised spaces of experience or identity, and to show that slum-dwellers have a very definite sense of self. Moreover, they identify the city and its middle classes as their ‘others’, using similar vocabularies and frameworks to those used by the mainstream to ‘other’ slum-dwellers. It is towards this intellectual goal that ‘words, discourses, and signs’ other than those presented through the dominant academic and mainstream rhetoric are explored; the dominant praxis is heavily ‘encoded’ with bourgeois sentimentalities and sensibilities, which fail to allow enough scope for other voices.
Mayne (1993) identifies three sequences – ‘Time’, ‘Smell’ and ‘Territory’ – through which slums were scrutinised to ‘impose bourgeois logic’ (1993: 166) and which led to the ‘identification of slumland as an alien and debased territory’ (1993: 181). This 20 thesis adds another sequence: sound – or, specifically as a sequence of ‘othering’, noise. The rhetorical power of these sequences lies in the distance they could establish between the bourgeois, ‘protestant’ morality ethics vis-à-vis the slum- dwellers and the slum-dwellers themselves, who were represented within the ‘moral version of poverty, with its careful distinctions between virtue and viciousness and its talk of character, appetites and temptation, corruption and degradation’ (Gandal
1997: 4). The last decade of urban development, imagination and aspiration in Delhi highlights a similar trend towards categorising slums as ‘alien and debased territory’
(ibid), by employing vocabularies and frameworks of slums as an environmental, social and aesthetic ‘nuisance’ (Ghertner 2008). In Delhi, along with the other sequences that Mayne identifies – ‘time, smell, and territory’ (Mayne 1993: 166) –
‘noise’ has assumed significant importance to further define (and determine) the city’s aesthetic appeal and experience. The introduction of the Noise Regulation
Rules 2000 and the recent government campaign in Delhi to reduce the high prevalence of beeping of vehicle horns, the ‘No Honking Campaign’, highlight this trend. Even though the middle classes themselves are affected – as they too are perpetrators of such ‘noise’ – the enforcement of these rules reveals that they are not compelled to follow these laws. They have the social and cultural legitimacy to break them. I have discussed this at length in Chapter 8 through examining honking practices and cultures in Delhi.
Identification of ‘noise’ as an environmental and aesthetic pollutant has allowed the middle classes to further segregate, exclude and discriminate against the urban poor, including slum-dwellers. In this thesis, by adding ‘noise’ to Mayne’s sequences, the intent is not to consolidate yet another category of discrimination; rather, it is to 21 explore everyday life in Karimnagar slums and the slum-dwellers’ relations with the middle classes through sonic cultures. Such an approach highlights the production, performance and articulation of sound as social, cultural and political act strongly situated in these corresponding positions. A sensual exploration of slums invites such analysis.
In this thesis, I acknowledge that the extension of control and hierarchies through sound – and specifically noise – is not limited to relations between the marginalised slums and the mainstream city. It has a strong historical and political tradition, in which sound has effectively been employed by dominant groups to discipline and restrain disempowered groups (Smith 2007).
Locating the research: The Karimnagar slums
I conducted my research in the Karimnagar slums in South Delhi. It is a slum cluster made up of three slums, known as camps: Lapatagunj, Gandhipuri and Puranihaweli camps. However, in everyday usage, the three camps are referred to collectively as the ‘Karimnagar slums’, after the legal lower middle-class neighbouring settlement,
Karimnagar , with Lapatagunj camp being the closest physically to Karimnagar . The position of the urban poor in Delhi has always been precarious. Slums – where many of them find shelter and housing – are illegal, and consequently the identity of slum- dwellers is constantly under scrutiny by officials and legal neighbours, and therefore under threat. They ‘remain at the sufferance of the state and its agencies’
(Ramanathan 2006). As slum-dwellers, the residents of the three camps have to negotiate many social, cultural, moral and political prejudices in their everyday lives.
Their mobility in the city is limited, there are areas where their entry is prohibited, 22 and they do not have adequate social, cultural or political capital or agency with which to participate in the mainstream life of the city.
Slum-dwellers provide the cheap, menial labour that runs the city. A significant proportion of residents of the Karimnagar slums, both men and women, work in nearby middle-class households as domestic maids, gardeners, drivers and guards.
They work for low wages, with no job security in highly exploitative conditions.
Many of the slum-dwellers are denied their judicial rights and the benefits of citizenship. They often endure random demolitions of their homes, with forced (and often distant) resettlement. There is legal, social, moral and often physical violence involved in the ways in which they are addressed and treated. In Delhi, the last decade has witnessed an increase in this violence against slum-dwellers. Central to this has been the systematic ‘re-problematization of slums as nuisance’ (Ghertner
2008) in the urban experience, discussed in detail in Chapter 3.
In the middle-class, mainstream media, as well as in the state’s articulation of the issue, slums are represented as homogenised spaces of experience. All slum-dwellers are perceived and portrayed as dirty, filthy, noisy and lacking any cultural framework. In these discussions, there is little or no engagement with the everyday life of the slums, and slum-dwellers have no authority or mechanisms through which to exert their sense of self. In fact, in mainstream representations they are categorically denied a sense of self.
23
Slums and the scope of sensorial research
At the most fundamental level, this thesis highlights the practices, diversity and complexity of everyday life in the Karimnagar slums. In many ways, a sensorial exploration has allowed me to explore the nuances and negotiations of the everyday in slums which are otherwise ignored, or alternatively – and to a great extent inaccurately – imagined by the mainstream. The materiality of the Karimnagar slums, with their lack of space, population density and limited infrastructural facilities, necessitates an intense sensorial engagement amongst its residents, and is significant in organising their social, cultural and political systems. I discuss this at length in Chapters 4 and 5.
The body of work on slums in India is extensive. It variously situates slums within the discursive praxis of post-coloniality (Appudurai 2006; Nandy 1983), environmental concerns (Ali 1998), urban planning (Ramanathan 2001, 2006, 2005), legality (Ramanathan 2006; Ghertner 2008), relations with broader state and national politics (Tarlo 2003; Dupont 2008) and a developmental perspective (Davis 2006).
These works, though significant, tend not to include the everyday life and voices of slum-dwellers, since their entry point is through the agency of state, nation, legal systems and policies. To these studies, which serve to highlight the construction and
‘othering’ of slums in historical and urban policies, I aim to add insights into the experiential reality of the slum-dwellers at an everyday level.
Moreover, I hope to avoid the ways in which it is often otherwise necessary to somewhat arbitrarily group together slums and slum-dwellers as a single category of examination. Equally, I aim to show a reverse positionality to the one more usually 24 presented, with the slums and slum-dwellers as inquisitors of the city, of the middle classes. I do this in order to show how they express and exert their ‘sense of self’
(Feld 1996; Rice 2003).
A sensorial engagement with the everyday reality of slums highlights its diversity, revealing a ‘sonically ordered sense of self’ (Rice 2003), and allowing for frameworks and vocabularies that situate the middle classes as the ‘other’ of slums and their residents. The thesis attempts to reveal some of the complex ways in which the slums are constructed as the ‘Other’ of the city, and noise is constructed as the
‘other’ of sound, to complicate these processes of ‘othering’. Just as the slums are the
‘other’ to the city, the city is the ‘other’ to the slums – and the sound of the ‘other’, for both the slum-dwellers and the middle classes, is articulated as noise. It is through these insights that in this thesis I propose that production, performance and articulation of sound is an act strongly situated within its social, cultural and political context and positionalities.
A strong sensorial language is being employed to delineate slum-dwellers as ‘others’, with the ‘lower senses’ (Howes 2005: 11–12) categorising them as noisy, unsightly, smelly and thereby unwanted in the city, in order to accomplish the agenda of creating a sanitised experience of the city within schemes such as the Bhagidari system, ‘Clean Delhi, Green Delhi’ and the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Slum- dwellers are denied a right to the city on account of being ‘unpleasant or dangerous’
(Howes 2005: 11–12). This thesis, then, is a timely intervention to highlight the politics of these constructions and their complexities, by engaging with the sensorial regimes and practices of the slum-dwellers – most usually considered by the 25 mainstream as the ‘other’ – and the manner in which they employ their own politics and constructions to in turn ‘other’ the middle classes.
Intersensoriality
Even though this thesis investigates the everyday life of the Karimnagar slums, and the relations between slum-dwellers and the middle classes through sonic cultures and practices, I do not disregard the importance of other senses – vision, touch, smell and taste. I attempt to be highly cautious about the Western visual versus non-
Western oral divide (Classen 1993; Howes 2004; Smith 2008), especially as the research is situated in Delhi slums, which in the middle-class and mainstream media rhetoric are strongly articulated as an illiterate, uncultured, smelly, noisy and filthy
‘other’.
Constance Classen examines the ‘sensory models of three non-literate societies’
(2005: 160). She shows that our ideas about what constitutes the five senses are socially constructed. Through ethnographic research, she explores the importance accorded to heat (in Tzotil cosmology), odour (Ongee) and colour (Desana) in essentially non-literate societies, making the point that if these were to be evaluated within the Western visual versus the non-Western oral divide framework, all of these societies would have given prominence to aurality compared with the other senses.
The fact that, within their own contexts, they emphasise different, context-specific, sensual orders helps her make the point that: ‘When cultures are approached on their own sensory terms rather than through the paradigms dictated for them by outsiders, what we discover are not world views or oral/aural societies, but worlds of senses.’
(2005: 162) By focusing attention on worlds of senses, Classen challenges the 26 validity of the concepts underpinning the idea that if a culture is not visually ordered, then it is surely aurally ordered.
It is through a growing understanding and appreciation of the sensorial complexities and negotiations that take place in everyday life in slums that this thesis acknowledges the interplay of different senses (Howes 2003, 2005; Smith 2007).
Through such an acknowledgement, it tries to explore interrelated and multiple sensorial experiences as a way in which to understand cultures while maintaining, as a methodological decision, a focus on sound. I have tried to bring into the analysis the interplay of senses in the Karimnagar slums and the manner in which this organises the everyday, determines interactions and permits mobilities (see Chapters
4 and 5). There is a need to acknowledge the hierachisation of senses in a broader social-cultural context in order to understand their interplay and negotiations, as
‘such sensory rankings are always allied with social rankings and employed to order society’ (Howes 2005: 163).
In this research, I have focused on sonic cultures in three ways. First, as a middle- class woman researching in the slums, I had to maintain a certain sensorial code of conduct and decorum. Methodologically, this implied that I could not initiate in- depth conversations about specific sensorial practices, especially smell and touch.
The proximity which my gender allowed with the intimate, private space of women in the Karimnagar slums would have allowed me to find ways to have these conversations with them; however, on account of strict gender roles and demarcations in the Karimnagar slums, I definitely could not involve men. Second, it would have been socially and culturally inappropriate to initiate discussions about 27 interactions between slum-dwellers and the middle classes through senses such as smell and touch. Lastly, and most importantly, sound emerged through my research as a very important category of identity and experience. The materiality of the
Karimnagar slums, the limited ‘visual opportunity’ (Rice 2003) there, and the restricted mobility of slum-dwellers – especially women – accentuated the importance of sound as a cultural system and hearing as a sense used to ‘make sense of a place’ (Feld 1996: 97). Also, in my discussions with both the middle classes and slum-dwellers, even though their social and cultural interactions were limited, the sonic presence of the ‘other’ could not be ignored.
An exploration of the everyday in the Karimnagar slums, and slum-dwellers’ interactions with the middle classes, would be equally possible through any of the sensorial experiences of sight, taste, smell and touch. These senses highlight nuances and negotiations specific to these sensorial alignments; therefore, this thesis acknowledges these possibilities while categorically situating itself in the sonic cultures.
Methodological inroads
I used ethnography as a methodology to conduct this research. While doing this research, I had to encounter two methodological concerns which had a significant impact on determining the shape this research took: first, the anxiety of researching the ‘other’; and second, listening in to ‘others’. Here I discuss one of my earliest ethnographic experiences, which highlights these anxieties as well as the prejudices slum-dwellers have to negotiate in their everyday live, especially in their interactions with the police and healthcare facilities. This incident allowed me insights into the 28 relationships between slum and mainstream and officialdom, its complexities and politics.
I was also exposed to the potential of sonic networks in Karimnagar slums, and the permissions of production and performance of sound as a social-cultural act – especially vis-à-vis ‘others’, which opened the possibility of sensorially exploring these relations in depth. Indeed, as discussed in Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9, it was revealed in the ways in which sounds were variously defined as sound, noise, nuisance, comfort and threat, depending on these relations.
After a day’s fieldwork in Bhumiheen camp, I was walking along the main road dividing Puranihaweli and Gandhipuri camps to head back home. It was a late, cold
January afternoon. The vehicular traffic at this time of day was heavy, as it is throughout the day. An auto rickshaw,7 which was turning into this road from the main Karimnagar road at a high speed, lost its balance momentarily, hit a young boy playing on the road, and promptly sped away. The young boy, seven or eight years old, was not bleeding heavily but had bruises and suffered a fainting spell. I rushed towards the scene, asking about his name, family and address in the Karimnagar slums. There were some efforts made to follow the auto rickshaw that had hit the boy, but they were promptly given up as the young boy showed signs of movement.
He was still inarticulate, obviously in pain and unable to reveal any personal details.
By now, most of the residents had lost interest, with only a few remaining behind.
These minor accidents are a common occurrence in the Karimnagar slums. I was
7 An auto rickshaw is a three wheeled taxi, common in many parts of Asia and across developing world (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw) 29 advised by a few men to ‘let it be’; the boy, they said, would be fine. However, he was in definite need of medical help, and I could not walk away. I was still new to the Karimnagar slums, and unaware of their geography and materiality. I did not know the location of the nearest hospital, or whether I should spend precious time finding his family or rush straight to seek medical help. I tried to inquire about his family and where he lived, but no one seemed to have any knowledge and a few people openly expressed displeasure at my ‘intervention’.
I was not sure about the implications of my actions. Instead of acting hastily, rushing the boy to the hospital, I took him to Astha Ghar, a community organisation and school in Bhumiheen camp, where I was still exploring possibilities for research collaborations, and where I had established initial contact with Zarina, who later became a cultural translator, key informant and friend.
Zarina and Kareena, another community worker in Astha Ghar, attended to the young boy immediately with basic first aid. He was still delirious. We conferred about what to do. I suggested taking him to the hospital immediately. Zarina was cautious, though: ‘We know nothing about his family. We just can’t take away the boy without informing. Also you don’t realise it is a hit and run, there could be police involvement. We need to think through it.’ I relented. She proposed approaching the local mosque in Gandhipuri camp. They used loudspeakers for their daily prayers, aaazan. She intended to request the mosque’s manager to announce the accident and ask his parents to come forth. The manager, however, refused. He was under strict orders from the police to use the loudspeaker only for religious purposes and not to turn it into an announcement facility. Also, he did not know the 30 boy. He could not take the risk. By this time, the boy’s condition was fast deteriorating. He was losing speech and could not walk. I suspected a head injury. I insisted on taking the boy immediately to a hospital in the nearby Mastaan-pura area.
Zarina and Kareena were hesitant; they did not want to be involved in police inquiries. I said I was going to take the boy to the hospital anyway. Zarina and
Kareena conferred for a brief moment and decided to accompany me.
At the hospital, there was a slight hesitance on the part of the receptionist and attending nurse about admitting the young boy. He had been in an accident and was a slum-dweller. The implications, they said, could be complicated if the boy had suffered major injuries – especially as his parents were not involved. The receptionist took me aside to warn me that his parents could try to implicate me in the case, insisting that I was responsible for the injuries and try to ‘get money out of me’. I asked to see the attending doctor. I explained to him the urgency of the boy’s need for medical attention and assured him that in case of a police inquisition I would be totally supportive. The boy was admitted, and a call made to the nearby Ujara-bihar police post, under whose jurisdiction the Karimnagar slums fall. The boy was treated. Fortunately, he did not have any serious injuries. ‘Only a case of shock exacerbated by dehydration and malnutrition which most slum children suffered from anyway,’ the doctor explained. While waiting for his treatment and the arrival of police officers, Zarina and Kareena repeatedly told me they appreciated my ‘good
Samaritan’ efforts, stating that not many people would take the risk of bringing the boy to the hospital. ‘What is the risk of bringing a young boy who has been hit by a vehicle to the hospital,’ I asked?
31
Zarina: A lot of people would worry about the consequences. They think
instead of being thankful the parents will try and implicate them in the case or
something. ‘Others’ are convinced that slum-dwellers stage these ‘accidents’
to get money out of middle-class people …
Kareena: But, you know what, if you hadn’t come along the boy would not
have been given immediate medical attention. They would have made us fill
many forms, asked questions, waited for the police before even touching him
… your being able to talk to the doctor in English was a great help. Now the
police are going to come and ask all kind of questions.
The politics of identity determining the everyday engagement of slum-dwellers with mainstream institutions – hospitals and police – had never been so dramatically evident to me. By now we had been in the hospital for almost an hour. They were keeping the boy under observation and the police were yet to come. I started to get nervous. My interactions with the police until then had been almost negligible, though I had my own threat perceptions of engaging with them as a single woman.
These were formed by mainstream media and urban folklore about the harassment of single middle-class women. Even though my urban, educated and middle-class identity had helped facilitate the interactions with the hospital authorities and the attending doctor, I was no longer confident about interacting with the police on my own. I called my partner (Bhuwan), informed him about the situation, and asked him to come to the hospital at the earliest opportunity. He and the police arrived almost simultaneously.
32
I briefed the police personnel about the events, but not without Bhuwan at my side.
Even though he was not present at the scene, the police personnel constantly turned to him to ask questions about the event, my background and my research purpose. I was at once enraged about this discrimination and relieved that Bhuwan was there.
They did not ask Zarina and Kareena any questions. No complaint was filed. They asked Bhuwan if it was okay for me to accompany them with the boy back to the slums. Bhuwan gave his consent. He was to follow us, and I would leave with him henceforth.
By the time we reached the Karimnagar slums, the incident was common knowledge.
Unlike a few hours back, when I could not gather any information about the young boy, there were residents who offered detailed information about the boy. He was a resident of Gandhipuri camp; his parents were away – his father worked in a factory in Tuglakabad and his mother as a domestic help in one of the apartments; his uncle and aunt were responsible for taking care of him during the day. One of his neighbours offered to take him home. We did not have to ask anyone or even venture into the slums. I turned to Zarina and Kareena, who had accompanied me, bewildered – why wasn’t this information offered to me earlier?
Zarina : Well, I think it was just too soon after the incident. But, most
importantly, I think as an outsider people were not sure about your intentions.
If anyone offered the information, would you give their names to the police
as witnesses? Would you expect them to accompany you? But now they
knew that police was involved and do not want the case to be taken further.
33
R: How did they know?
Zarina : They just do.
For months afterwards, residents from different parts of Gandhipuri and Bhumiheen camp would approach me either to acknowledge my efforts or just inquire about the events. Over the next few years, during my research in the Karimnagar slums, I learnt to listen into its networks by following the subtle or overt shifts in sonic performances in the presence of ‘others’ – from within the Karimnagar slums, the middle classes or government representatives.
In the initial fieldwork phase, in spite of being cautious about mainstream representations of slums, I realised my research entries into the Karimnagar slums were informed by these very same ideas. A few ethnographic encounters highlighted the manner in which I was considered an ‘other’ – a middle-class, urban, educated woman. I reworked my research frameworks. I established a dialogic relationship with the residents based on trust and respect. We – the residents and I – acknowledged that our backgrounds, cultures and practices were different. And, in some sense, we in fact represented the ‘other’. Once I unlearnt to engage with slums through a middle-class vocabulary, I encountered a very strong sense of self in both the slums and the slum-dwellers. This was most pronounced in their sensual practices – through which I engaged with their sonic cultures. I had to learn to listen in to the slums without imposing my middle-class informed sensibilities on to their sonic cultures. To do so, I had to immerse myself in their social, cultural, spatial, sensual and sonic cultures. 34
Thesis structure
The remainder of the thesis is organised as follows:
In Chapter 2, I situate my study within ethnography as a methodology and discuss the different methods, interviews, surveys, participant and non-participant observations I employed during this research. I also discuss the methodological anxieties of conducting research in a space that is socially, culturally and politically
‘othered’. Slums in the Indian context, and specifically in Delhi’s urban experience and imagination, have been consistently ‘othered’ by the middle classes as sites of social, cultural, aesthetic and moral depravity and decadence. As a middle-class, educated researcher, I encountered these anxieties, which I discuss at length in this chapter.
Chapter 3 maps the state, mainstream media, and middle-class rhetoric within which slums and their residents are denied claims to citizenship, juridical rights, and a sense of identity and experience, collapsing slum reality into a homogenised experience of decadence. It discusses the position of slums in the context of the ‘Clean Delhi,
Green Delhi’ campaign, the Bhagidari system and preparations for the 2010
Commonwealth Games. The presence of slums in the city is increasingly articulated as a sensual assault, coming in the way of transforming Delhi into a ‘world-class’ and ‘truly international’ city. In this imagined city, slums – as ‘dirty, congested, and dangerous’ spaces – have no place. I also detail the everyday materiality, its infrastructural bearings and the experience of living in the Karimnagar slums, the research site.
35
Chapter 4 discusses the complex everyday materiality of Karimnagar slums through its sensorial ordering, practices, and politics. It highlights a strong sensual sense of
‘self’ amongst slum-dwellers through which they not only identify middle class as
‘other’ but also maintain proactive social, cultural, sensual, and spatial distance from it.
Chapter 5 introduces the framework of Immediate-Extended-Imagined sensorial realms to map engagements between groups and communities within Karimnagar slums and its relation with the middle classes. This framework is proposed to highlight the politics through which disempowered groups, both within Karimnagar slums and slums as a whole vis-à-vis the middle-classes, maintain their sense of self through a constant negotiation of these realms.
Chapter 6 explores the sonic practices of space in Karimnagar slums which highlight the multiplicity of soundscapes and importance of sound in ‘making sense of a place’
(Feld 1996: 97). The scope of sonically engaging with space is determined by the individual, group, or community’s relative position in the Immediate-Extended-
Imagined sensorial realm. It highlights the importance of sound in organising space, socially, culturally, and politically, within Karimnagar slums.
Chapter 7 discusses the varying articulations of noise, across diverse communities in
Karimnagar slums and with its sonic engagement with middle classes, to emphasise that ‘it is an issue less of tone or decibel than of social temperaments, class background, and cultural desire’ (Schwartz 2004:51) firmly situated in social, cultural, and political hierarchies. 36
Chapter 8 undertakes a discussion on honking practices and cultures in Delhi within the context of Noise Regulation Rules. The chapter makes an argument for honking as middle class created ‘noise’ which is legitimised within several social, cultural, religious, and political frameworks. Even though middle classes come in the purview of these laws, their enforcement reveals that they are not compelled to follow these laws. They have the social and cultural legitimacy to break these laws while the position of urban poor and slum-dwellers in the city is constantly, especially in the last decade, determined by the adherence to these laws. A failure to do so is often argued as a justification to deny them rights and citizenship.
To conclude, Chapter 9 contextualises the positions of listener and hearer within the framework of the discussions in the previous chapters. It, then, identifies different sonic strategies, noise, silencing, silence, gossip, and unlistening employed by diverse groups to either reiterate or subvert sonic, and corresponding social, cultural and political hierarchies. 37
2
Methodology
Introduction
The protagonist in The Ethnographer – a short story by Borges – is an anthropology student at an unnamed American university (Borges trans Hurley 1999). He has, we are informed, ‘nothing singular about him’ (1999: 345). At the insistence of his mentor, he sets out to learn the ‘esoteric rites of the West’: he goes to live on the prairie with a group of Native Americans. On his return, his mentor assures him that
‘he would have his dissertation, and the university authority would see that it was published’ (1999: 345). The protagonist spends two years on the prairie, learns to unlearn his urban research ways, and finally knows the tribe’s secret doctrine.
However, once he has returned to his university, he refuses to reveal the secret – forgoing the promising career he could earn by the revelation. By way of explaining this decision to his rather indignant professor, he states that ‘the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person had to walk those paths himself.’
Towards the end of the tale, Borges informs us that the ethnographer is ‘married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale’ (1999: 345).
This brief text, The Ethnographer, played a pivotal role in initiating a self-reflexive exercise in evaluating my own position as an ethnographer. At different times in varying contexts, I have been humbled and equally perplexed by the insights – political, cultural, and personal – shared with me by the ‘subjects’ of the study. I have, in the same vein as the protagonist of Borges’ text, had several moments of crisis during my research: boundaries between ‘research material’ and ‘secrets’ 38 became blurred. The overwhelming question of whether I had ‘walked the path’ tormented me consistently. I often thought about whether to categorise interactions as interviews, discussions, data or conversations of a personal nature. These different categories of interactions established my own shifting position as an ethnographer, a friend or an unwelcome intruder. Sometimes, these categories collapsed.
Outline
In this chapter, I will discuss the anxiety of conducting research in slums and the profile of the ethnographer that influenced the research designs and methods employed. The chapter also discusses the issues involved in negotiating anxieties about researching in slums. The section highlights some of the voices, and some of the experiences of conducting the research, that informed these anxieties and their representation.
I conducted research in Karimnagar – a slum settlement in New Delhi – between mid-2005 and early 2008. Slums in the Indian urban landscape, as discussed in
Chapter 3, have a peculiar character: the cheap labour they offer is desired – indeed, almost essential to sustain the city’s colossal mechanism – but their presence is considered detrimental to the city’s aesthetic appeal. There is a systematic construction of the slums and slum-dwellers as ‘others’ (Baviskar 2006; Ramanathan
2002; Sharma 2005; Liang 2005; Bhan 2009; Srivastava 2009). In the urban experience, slums are ‘anxious’ spaces. The slum-dwellers in their everyday lives constantly have to negotiate and circumvent their ‘othering’ – legally, socially, culturally, politically and morally. In the process, they create and sustain their own
‘others’: the city and city dwellers. At the core of my practice of ethnography in
Karimnagar was the fact that, in order to produce an ethnography (Hammersley 39
2007), I constantly had to negotiate the anxieties generated by my position as a middle-class, educated woman – that is, a city-dweller – vis-à-vis the slum-dwellers.
Ethnography and its practice
Ethnography as a research methodology allows the everyday practice of observing and categorising (Certeau 1984) to evolve into a consolidated, systematic study of structures, cultures, people and phenomena. The sustained practice of ethnography – through fieldwork – with a focus on cultural interpretation (Fetterman 1989: 28) produces bodies of knowledge that expand the knowledge of a system, place or culture. Hammersley (2007) lists significant characteristics of ethnography as a methodology, which in essence accord it an epistemological depth. These include: research being conducted ‘in the field’ within the unmediated and unstructured immediate context of the researched; extensive insistence on data collection from a range of sources, but with an emphasis on participant observation and interviews as main sources; highly fluid and unstructured form of interactions and interviews so as to allow for the evolution of categories of interpretation and evaluation rather than premeditating them by incorporating them in the data collection process; insistence on in-depth studies instead of large-scale numbers; and interpretation of these insights within local and broader contexts.
Fieldwork, in the form of intense engagement with the space, its people and culture, lies at the core of ethnography as a methodology. It allows the researcher to experience the space and its culture holistically. The merit of ethnography, most importantly, is in the dialogic experience, interpretation and insight it permits through engagement between the researcher(s) and researched in intimate settings. In contrast to surveys and structured interviews, ethnographic methods allow the 40 researcher not only to document what the people do or say, but also develop insights into how and why. Ethnographic engagement allows scope to experience sensations – sight, smell, touch and emotions – that encapsulate and convey a way of life of and with a people (Adler and Adler 1994; Stoller 1997).
Such a sensual exploration of everyday life in the slums and the city-slum interactions, through sonic cultures, was my main research focus. The ethnographic approach allowed me to initiate and sustain long-term relationships with the residents to intimately and interpretively explore the cultures of production, consumption and articulation of sound in their immediate context. The demands of ethnographic research, which necessitated prolonged presence in the slums, gave me the opportunity to not only document the sonic experiences of slum-dwellers but also immerse myself in its sonicity. The research insights equipped me to draw inferences about cultural systems organised through sound in Karimnagar (Fetterman 1998;
Spradley 1980).
Ethnography as a research methodology and epistemological framework, however, is not devoid of politics. By the 1980s, ethnographic methods and ethnography’s representation had come under severe scrutiny as being imperialistic and patronising
(Clifford 1998; Marcus and Fischer 1999; Said 1979). This led to the significant reflexive ethnographic turn which Marcus and Fischer (1999: 34) called the ‘crisis of representation’: the manner in which ethnographic texts represented ‘others’ was intensively debated and scrutinised to institute newer ethnographic modes and methods. These discussions significantly informed the practice and analysis of ethnographic data for this research. 41
Conducting research in slums: Negotiating anxious space
This thesis aims to expose the everyday of the slums, to ‘make the invisible visible, and as such has clear social and political resonances’ (Highmore 2002: 2). The intent is to chronicle the ordinariness of the space of slums and lives of slum-dwellers outside of the praxes of aberration, spectacle and romanticisation, to situate them as an integral element of the urban fabric and experience of the Indian city – in the specific instance of Delhi. However, the mainstream media representation of slums draws heavily from ‘dominant perception in law … which is of illegality’
(Ramanathan 2002: 6). The ‘imputation of criminality’ (Ramanathan 2002: 6) is extended to reflect on their social, moral and cultural character. These skewed representations (and perceptions), which the slum-dwellers have to negotiate in their everyday lives in interactions with state representatives and systems, make slums anxious spaces. On the one hand, slum-dwellers are aware that if they are not representative of slum living (poor living conditions, lack of education and other basic facilities), they will not be beneficiaries of grants and schemes under various government projects. On the other hand, they have to negotiate with stereotypes and prejudices in their everyday lives because of these representations, which makes them circumspect when it comes to interactions with middle-class city-dwellers.
These representational politics and negotiations had methodological consequences for both the residents and me, which in turn shaped this research.
There is a systematic construction of the slums as ‘other’ within the urban fabric and experience, as will be discussed in Chapter 3. In many accounts – academic and mainstream, electronic and print media – an edgy nervousness is palpable while discussing this subject-matter. B. Hema and Shagufta Jamal’s Environmental 42
Perception of Slum-Dwellers, for example, lists ‘people‘s [slum-dwellers’] lack of conscience in occupying unauthorised land at almost no cost’ along with their
‘unethical social-cultural habits and values’ (2004: Jacket) as a significant contributor to environmental pollution. The agenda of Environmental Perception of
Slum-Dwellers is to explore the perceptions slum-dwellers have of their immediate environmental setting in order to inform ‘urban development policies’. However, at the outset, the authors impose perceptions by positioning slum-dwellers as unethical, unhygienic and lacking a conscience.
The discursive extension of the squalid living conditions of the slums to suggest depravity is a very powerful rhetorical tactic employed by the state, middle-class, and the mainstream media. It has strong resonances with Jacob Riis’s work on slums written 120 years ago, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of
New York, which ‘inspired a range of government policies that viewed slums as bleak wastelands that transformed their residents into paupers and criminals and therefore had to be radically changed or eradicated’.8 Exploring Riis’s work in The
Virtues of the Vicious, Keith Gandal (1997) states that in the New York of the 1920s slums were either sites of spectacle or missionary redemption. In both instances, these spaces were evaluated through the middle-class Protestant ethic, within which the decadence of the life in the slums – and thereby the character of the slum- dwellers – was highly questionable.
The mainstream media representation of slums in India is bound within similar rhetorical devices. It is, however, only in post-liberalisation India that this rhetoric
8 http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_slums.html.
43 has acquired particular vehemence. Kalpana Sharma (2005)9 documents this ‘shift of focus, from one that is inclusive to the one that is exclusive’ (2005: 148), noting that
‘urban reporting has come to consist of the interests of the consuming classes, those who have benefited most from the post-liberalisation economy in India, from the growth of the consumer culture, from globalization’ (2005: 148), promoting a new
‘concept of citizenry’ in which slum-dwellers are ‘deprived of their citizenry by virtue of their economic misfortune’ (2005: 152).
The intent appears to be to obliterate the presence of slums not only from the landscape of the city but also every other discursive praxis that could potentially situate the slums and slum-dwellers within the scope of the city or its materiality: juridical rights, citizenship and representation.
To an outsider, the everyday experience of the Indian city – its ‘urbanness’ – is characterised as much by its new infrastructural indulgence as by the conspicuous presence of the slums and slum-like-settlements. The middle-classes no longer want the experience of its everyday to be collapsed into that of the slums, which are representative of everything they are not: poverty, ignorance, filth and dirt. The rhetoric of the middle class as represented in mainstream media maintains a distance from the ‘other’ by denying a familiarity with the everyday life of the slums. The discussions on and about slums oscillate between crisis and celebration, with an ominous silence about what happens in between these moments as if these do not exist; this effectively denies the everyday nature of the slums.
9 A journalist of repute in India who has worked extensively on the issues of slums. 44
Profile of the researcher: Ethnographer’s profile
Ethnographic research is a dialogic experience between the researcher and the researched. The position of the researcher – encompassing their background, class, caste, religion and gender, amongst other factors – plays a pivotal role in shaping the research design, fieldwork methods and representation of ethnographic data. The researcher is thus a valid and necessary subject of study or reflection (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983) – especially, as in the context of this thesis, in ethnographies that involve ‘others’ (Marcus and Fischer 1999; Fine 1998; Denzin and Lincoln 2000).
I am a middle-class, educated woman who has lived in Delhi since 1995. Slums do not form a part of my everyday reality. I first engaged with slums in early 2004 to identify Karimnagar as a potential site for research for a Department for International
Development (DFID)-funded ‘Study of Emergent Technologies and Poor
Communities’ with Dr Jo Tacchi. The research agenda of that project was to explore the communication pattern and trends amongst poor communities and the role of different emerging technologies. It was part of a larger four-country comparative study. In each country, two sites – one urban and rural – were researched.
Karimnagar was the urban site for this research.
Until then, my experience of and exposure to the slums in Delhi was through a primarily middle-class, educated, urban lens. This implied that, while I was aware of the rhetoric of displacement and resettlement vis-à-vis the slums in popular mainstream media and academic discourse, I had never experienced the space at first hand. Though conscious of the discursive practices which ‘othered’ the slums and slum-dwellers, I was still reluctant and hesitant when it came to setting my terms of 45 engagement, primarily because of my limited knowledge of the space. Even though I did have experience of interacting with residents from slums in the immediate intimacy of my home, in the capacity of domestic help (as is true for most middle- class households in India), I had no knowledge of their immediate everyday environment and context. I had conveniently categorised all slums in Delhi as a homogenised space, accepting the rhetoric of lacks, displacement and resettlement.
I conducted research in the Karimnagar slums for the DFID project over a period of eighteen months. It was while conducting this research that my interest in further pursuing research amongst the slums’ residents was consolidated. This research experience highlighted the problem of middle-class, mainstream representations of slums in different media and cultural contexts. It also highlighted the dense and complex everyday materiality of slums, which has significantly influenced how the slum-dwellers imagine and interact with the city. These insights determined the course of my doctoral research. I decided to explore the everyday materiality of slums through a research lens focusing on sonic cultures.
The intent of doing this was twofold. First, as with other representations of slums, the experience of the space – from a distance – is relegated to noise, smells and dirt.
Indeed, the density of population and limitation of space in the slums account for amplified sounds, and the lack of proper sewage systems result in stagnant water and dirt. They are indeed appalling to a sanitised, middle-class sensibility; however, within the slums, these – noise, smells and dirt – are a significant part of everyday life. These sensual experiences play a significant role in grounding reality and negotiating everyday politics in the slums. 46
Second, in most mainstream media, slum-dwellers are not involved or acknowledged as cultural producers; thus these accounts – even the favourable ones – inadvertently become a commentary on slum-dwellers, limiting the capacity of slum-dwellers to represent themselves in their own voices. The position of slum-dwellers as sound producers cannot be contested. Their contribution lends a particular characteristic to the soundscape. Through exploring the sonic cultures of the slums with slum- dwellers as distinctly identified and acknowledged producers and consumers, it was possible to map the manner in which slums examined and engaged with the city, without relying on dominant mainstream vocabularies.
With this background, in early-2006 I initiated my research towards my doctorate in the Karimnagar slums. My prior research experience and engagement with the residents of the Karimnagar slums allowed me to make informed choices about which methods to adopt. I also had the advantage of having an already established respondent base.
The ethnographer’s tools: Research design and methods
The fieldwork design and methods were mainly fluid and unstructured (Hammersley
2004), determined by time of the day, location and gender, amongst other factors. I employed fieldwork strategies that were most relevant in the given context. These included surveys, interviews and group discussions. However, participant observation in order to engage with the particular setting of the slums, and their people and systems, was the main fieldwork strategy in order to evolve an in-depth understanding (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983, 2004). 47
Researcher as a tool
In the first phase of my research, I established contacts with residents with whom I had engaged as part of the DFID study. My plan was to initiate preliminary research towards my doctorate with these groups while steadily expanding my research base by seeking access to their immediate and extended networks. However, after the initial few interviews, I had to rework my strategy on two accounts. First, the transition from one research framework to another (as determined by the agenda of individual study) with the residents was not as smooth as I had anticipated. Most of the residents were comfortable with the research vocabularies we had established.
They were highly circumspect about the new research project and the task of convincing them about it was proving counterproductive to the research itself.
Second, a lot of the residents with whom I had a long-standing engagement had assumed a protective, almost paternalistic, attitude towards me. While this extended the much-desired comfort and security zone to me, it was proving difficult to establish relationships outside of the networks these residents approved. Every new relationship that I initiated in the Karimnagar slums came under scrutiny. It was limiting the scope of my research.
The nature of the DFID work and my doctoral research fundamentally differed, even though both were located in ethnographic practices. At the core of the DFID research
(very simplistically articulated) was the aim of understanding income, expenditure and technological consumption to establish links between technologies and poverty.
The project had a definite agenda. On the other hand, my doctoral research had a very loose structure. I had decided to explore a topic of interest (Fetterman 1989;
Spradley 1980) without a definite research plan or trajectory, expecting ethnographic 48 engagement with the slums and their residents to steer it forward (Spradley 1979,
1980; Jorgensen 1989; Hammersley 1990; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995; Burns
1997).
Learning to listen
The first phase of the research was a humbling experience, during which I had to learn how to conduct research in and about sonic cultures. In that sense, the problem was not the inability of the residents to engage with my new research questions. It was the limitations of my ability to articulate my research agenda and aims – a methodological concern of sensual scholarship raised by Stoller (1997).
Stoller (1997: xii) concedes that his call for a ‘sensual awakening’, requiring a recalibration of the scholarly mind with its body, which has been ‘long separated’ and where ‘sense long severed from sensibility’, is by no means an easy task.
Between the insistence on Cartesian rationality and the post-structuralist agenda of deconstructing ‘epistemology of rationalism’ (1997: xiii), the place of the ‘body in social thought’ has still been asleep on two accounts: (1) the fact that the body is still considered as a ‘text that can be read and analysed’, stripping off ‘its smell, tastes, textures and pains – its sensuousness’; and (2) the use of ‘bloodless language’ to reformulate the body, which ‘reinforces the very principle they critique – the separation of mind and body, which … regulates and subjugates the very body they would liberate’ (1997: xiv–xv). To this end, he calls out to the ‘fin de siecle scholars’
(1997: xii) to ‘tack between the analytical and the sensible, in which embodied form as well as disembodied logic constitute scholarly argument’ (1997: xv). Most importantly, he urges them to be humble – humility, he insists, is critical to sensuous scholarship, enabling ‘the sensuous scholar to confront the terrifying eternity of the 49 social universe with the lightness of a caress, with the smile of humble comprehension’ (1997: 137).
By insisting on humbleness as a much-needed perspective and personal trait, Stoller
(1997) highlights the phenomenal task that lies ahead in building a robust epistemological, academic and intellectual tradition for sensual scholarship. Senses as ethnographic objects are tenuous and delicate. Senses as ethnographic agendas are complex and overlapping. Senses as ethnographies, not surprisingly, demand humility. It is not merely a matter of ‘describing the way things look or smell in the land of others’ (Stoller 1989: 9). A sensual scholar needs to surrender to the world of senses – their meanings, their connections, their articulations and aspirations – humbly and patiently, without preconceived notions and prejudices. A sensual scholar needs to have the sensibility to sense the senses as they are sensed in its context. In short, making sense of senses is not an undertaking without its moment of sensorial-intellectual-methodological numbness, deafness and blindness.
The scope of sensorial scholarship, though assuming increasing importance over the last decade, is still yet to be fully explored and accomplished (see Classen 1993). At once, it challenges the legacy of Cartesian, Western epistemological tradition; allows avenues to explore different histories and realities, differently; accords a voice to silent minorities and forgotten histories; and explodes spaces beyond the cartographic moment into an enriching multi-dimensional experience. This thesis is a humble contribution to widen the scope of the sensual scholarship and methodology.
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Listening to learn
In the initial phase, I conducted interviews to explore the everyday soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums. In these accounts, they were referred to as ‘something’ that has been present ever since, almost ‘like a blanket which one gets into the habit of covering oneself with irrespective of the weather. Something which stops making you feel cold or warm, sad or happy.’ (F, 40)10.
At that stage, I was inclined to attribute this understanding to a ‘lack of sonic sensibility’, or an in-depth engagement with it. It was only in the later phases, with the assistance of cultural translators (who I will discuss in the following section) and methodological maturity, that I evolved a nuanced understanding of sonic cultures and their articulation in Karimnagar .
The questions pertaining to sound that I raised with the residents in this phase were essentially determined by my middle-class sonic sensibility, and I was thus unable to understand the sonic sensibilities. For instance, to explore the everyday association with sound amongst residents, I initiated discussions about traffic, with a focus on
‘honking’. The movement of vehicular traffic in the Karimnagar slums creates a pronounced sonic background of persistent honking. I naively assumed that the residents of the Karimnagar slums would engage with traffic sound and honking in the same manner as I – who resided in a sanitised, middle-class residential area – disdainfully, as a nuisance, especially when prominent in the early or late hours of the day.
10 I will follow this pattern of using F and M to indicate the gender, Female and Male, respectively followed by age for respondents. Otherwise I will give the respondents a pseudonym. 51
Over the course of my research in the Karimnagar slums, I immersed myself in the sonicity of the slums to understand the articulation of sound, noise and silence in this specific context. These, not surprisingly, do not corroborate with middle-class understandings. These articulations are highly ambiguous, emanating from specific social and cultural experiences of spaces. While engaged in a conversation about honking, an old woman who lives alone (her sons have shifted out of the slums but she is remaining there in the hope of acquiring the resettlement plot when the demolition happens. I have discussed these aspects at length in Chapter 3) mentioned that every night her neighbor’s son ‘drives in through on his bike honking all the way’; this, she said, ‘made her feel safe’ as, for her, this assures her the presence of someone young in case of a crisis. Inquiring whether this honking disturbs her sleep, she said, smiling: ‘It is this honking which makes me sleep, peacefully.’ For the young girl in the neighbourhood, this same honking was an indication of
‘rowdiness’, not because of the sound itself, but because of the ‘young male driver’.
However, this is not to say that all residents falling within the abovementioned age groups relate to sounds in exactly the same way.
The first phase of my research in the Karimnagar slums, then, was a process of listening into its soundscapes and broadening my sonic experience to understand better the varied articulations and associations of sound. The initial temptation to disregard the lack of sonic conversations as lack of sonic sensibility was a shortcoming on my behalf as an outsider, a researcher– an inability to decode the sonic codes. It was while I was sonically educating myself that I was confronted with the questions that framed the research to follow: How is it possible to make inroads 52 into a labyrinth of a soundscape other than your own? How does one locate a sound, a noise, a silence within this sonic culture and attempt its biography? How can an individual, personal experience of sound be incorporated into a broader generalisation about a culture, place and people?
During this phase of research, I also attempted to situate the sounds of the
Karimnagar slums historically, by populating a sonic map of Karimnagar from
1970s onwards, when initial settlers had started to move in. I posed a rather direct question to the initial settlers: ‘How did the Karimnagar slums sound when you shifted here?‘
Male, 45: When we came here, it was all very empty. There were only
jungles, bushes, and lot of them. The buildings across the road were there but
not as dense as they are right now.
R: What about the sounds?
Male, 45: They were hardly any buildings, either here or around it.
Compared with this response from an initial settler who had moved in the early
1970s, the accounts of those who shifted in the 1980s was far denser:
Female, 50: When we got here (my brother was already here and he called us
and made the initial arrangements), there was a lot of construction going on.
There were many factories in the basements and the houses, mostly garments.
It was in this period that the number of people increased dramatically.
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Listening into everything
The constant evocation of visual elements to refer to sounds exasperated me: I wondered whether I was asking the right questions or whether I ought to shift the focus of my study to something else. There were moments when I was inclined to, as mentioned before, attribute this to a lack of sonic sensibility within the Karimnagar slums. It was only in the later phase of my research, when I had acquired a certain sonic sensibility, that I realised the limitations of my methodological design and approach. The inability to tune/listen into the Karimnagar slums was because I was approaching visuality and aurality as distinct, watertight categories to experience and evaluate the materiality of the space (Smith 2008; Classen 1993, 1997; Stoller 1997;
Howes 2005). The methodological approach, in the initial phase, was one of replacement: I was aiming to replace the visual with the aural.
Aurality and visuality are not distinct, mutually exclusive categories of experience and examination (Smith 2004 & 2008; Howes 2005; Bull and Back 2005; Erlmann
2004). The visually inclined accounts of the Karimnagar slums’ sonic past by its residents contained very important aural references which I only fully explored in the second phase of my research. The mention of factories and construction sites to recount the Karimnagar slums’ sonic past, which in the initial phase had exasperated me, in fact provided important sonic references for further listening. It was in these factories and construction sites that the residents found their main source of income.
The persistent humming of machinery lent a sonic temporality to the everyday. After the factories were relocated in the mid-1990s, due to the Delhi government’s drive to curtail sources of pollution – noise amongst others – the residents recalled the place feeling ‘eerily silent’. This silence was not literal, as even without the machineries 54 the soundscape of the Karimnagar slums is very loud. This silence was the social and cultural articulation of exasperation at a ‘loss of livelihood’ and the anxieties that surrounded it.
Cultural translators and key informants
To expand the research networks in the Karimnagar slums, in the second phase I collaborated with two young women, Parul and Zarina, who then became cultural translators as well as key informants. Parul is 24, unmarried and educated. She is a resident of Puranihaweli camp in the Karimnagar slums, and belongs to a politically influential family. Zarina, on the other hand, is 35, married, educated, and works as a community worker with a prominent civil society organisation in the Karimnagar slums. Initiating women across the three camps in the Karimnagar slums into micro- finance is one of her main portfolios. She lives in a lower middle-class settlement across from the slums.
The decision to expand my research base in the Karimnagar slums by collaborating with women was both a personal and methodological one. After my initial inroads into the Karimnagar slums in 2004, the gendered demarcation and experience of the space were starkly evident. Future interactions with the space – ethnographic and otherwise – were significantly determined by negotiating this demarcation. In the
Karimnagar slums, the mobility of young women is highly restricted. They do not have the social and cultural sanctions to form associations with men outside the family. Owing to my position as an outsider, I had the advantage of engaging with men in spaces otherwise restricted to the women in the Karimnagar slums: barber shops, markets and office spaces. However, from the start, it was evident that I could form a long-term research relationship either with women or men as a group, but not 55 with both: complex politics of control and subversion mediate the everyday interactions between these groups. Sustained engagements with one group immediately put me under scrutiny amongst the other. I did not want to breach the trust of any group on ethical and methodological grounds (Punch 1998). Women therefore formed my main respondent base in Karimnagar .
By choosing to work with women in the Karimnagar slums, I had immediate access to their private spaces. The conversations with them were relaxed and uninhibited – though not without politics and scrutiny, as I will discuss later. The interactions with men, on the other hand, required constant negotiation. Some men perceived my position as an educated, urban, middle-class woman as a threat. On more than one occasion, female members of the family were required to seek men’s permission to interact with me. I did not want to constantly negotiate, explain or justify my position; nor did I want to place myself in a vulnerable position11 – emotionally, intellectually or physically.
Cultural translators, research collaborators and personal relations
Parul and Zarina expanded the scope of my research base and experience in the
Karimnagar slums. Zarina has been working in the three camps of the Karimnagar slums for the last ten years. She is very knowledgeable about the history of the space and its politics. Through her work portfolio, she has established and sustained long- term relationships with women across the three camps over a lengthy period. She introduced me to diverse groups across the camps while educating me about the
11 As a matter of clarification, this is my instinctive reaction in spaces which are very overtly masculine. I explain this so as not to have this statement suggest that men in slums are necessarily violent. 56 politics between different groups, communities and spaces. Parul, on the other hand, allowed access to a localised network of families in Puranihaweli camp. Through her, I met Meena and Diya, who later became key informants as well as close friends.
Zarina guided me through the precarious politics of representation in the Karimnagar slums. More than being a key informant, she was a key collaborator in the research.
We often engaged in long discussions to understand certain processes and politics in the slums. In the initial years of her marriage, she lived in Puranihaweli camp of the
Karimnagar slums. She was very well acquainted with the everyday reality of the slums, and treated it with a balanced and nonchalant objectivity, though she was not lacking in empathy. With her, I could articulate my fieldwork anxieties freely and, more often than not, her insights helped resolve them.
I often attended the micro-finance meetings she facilitated with different women groups in the Karimnagar slums. One of the main challenges I encountered while conducting DFID research was to discuss income and expenditure patterns openly.
As discussed later, most people were highly circumspect about discussing these with me. However, while visiting groups with her, I realised that in spite of my presence the men and the women freely discussed the income and expenditure patterns, divulging in detail the nodes, networks and systems (formal, informal and at times also illegal) in which they had either invested or within which their savings circulated. I had a discussion with her about it:
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Researcher: When we go together, the residents do not hesitate to discuss, even in front of me, the details of their investment, savings, money. Why is that?
Zarina: What do you mean? What do they say, when you ask them about it?
Researcher: They do not lie. I am not saying that. I am just saying they do not discuss it as openly. I was inclined to think that probably most of these people, especially women, do not know enough about these issues. However,
I have noticed with you they not only discuss it openly but also seek your advice with future investments, etc.
Zarina: Has anyone in the Karimnagar slums asked you how much money you make in a month?
Researcher: Yes.
Zarina: And do you always tell them the exact amount? And about other sources of income, presents, or savings?
Researcher: No … I usually avert the question.
Zarina: Why?
Researcher: Well, I get a lot more money than an average family in the
Karimnagar slums – at least, I think. It makes me highly uncomfortable …
Zarina: Because you are conscious about how you will be perceived, right?
Researcher: Yes.
Zarina : It is the same with residents of the Karimnagar slums, only a bit more difficult. They have to constantly divulge details of their income, etc., to representatives from state agencies or NGOs to establish their poverty levels to make them eligible for benefit schemes. Most residents are aware that if they do not portray the kind of poverty the agents expect to encounter, 58
they will not be included in the benefit schemes, and thereby there is unease
about discussing these matters with outsiders (as yourself) openly. With me,
they are relaxed. They know I have lived in the slums. They know that I feel
the same about the need to secure money. When you are with me, they trust
you because they trust me.
Zarina’s collaboration allowed me to develop a broad, generic understanding of the everyday reality of slum-dwellers and their negotiations with different formal and informal systems. Interactions with Parul, on the other hand, gave me an opportunity to follow, intimately, the everyday lives of a small group of women. Parul’s mother is a local politician who exercises significant control over fifteen families who reside along the street from their house. She is the elected representative from amongst her community responsible for liaison with the local authorities, police and municipal leaders on their behalf. These families constitute her electoral base. The status
Parul’s family enjoys in this area is compounded by the control her family has over a water tap. Even though the tap is communal, the layout of the pipeline system is such that it is located in their house. In Chapter 6, I discuss the importance of water networks in Karimnagar slums’ sonic practices. In the afternoons, the water tap becomes a site of social and cultural interactions. With Parul’s introduction, I established an acquaintance with most of the residents and was able to interact with them during the water-filling sessions. These interactions, over a long term, gave me an insight into the social, cultural and moral rhetoric and politics which organise everyday life – especially of women – in the Karimnagar slums.
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Meena and Diya are sisters-in-law who live next door to Parul. In Chapter 9, I discuss them at length. I was acquainted with them but in this phase expressed my desire to Parul to establish stronger research relations with them. In short, I wanted to conduct in-depth interviews with them, and asked Parul to set these up at a convenient time. However, in the weeks to follow when she had not scheduled an interview, I approached them directly and organised a time. When I informed Parul about it, she was indignant, insisting that ‘they had nothing worthwhile to contribute’:
Parul: Diya is mad – what will she tell you? She will only confuse you. I will
have to explain everything to you all over again.
This reaction took me by surprise, as Parul had always been supportive. I discussed my approach with her, firmly establishing that it was non-judgemental and I could not eliminate possible interviews if she did not approve. I continued with my interviews with Meena and Diya, even though it caused strained relations with Parul for a while. I established firm relationship (research and personal) with Meena. It was only much later that it became evident that Parul and Meena’s families were involved in a long-standing feud to control the communal tap. Both the families employed subtle social, cultural and moral rhetoric to garner support in their favour amongst the community members. While Parul’s family highlighted Diya’s estranged marital status, Parul’s unmarried status - with suggestion of a possible romantic liaison – was repeatedly raised as a matter of concern by Meena’s family.
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Collaboration with Parul as a cultural translator and key informant was very challenging. It brought to the forefront the ethical dilemmas of conducting ethnographic research: Would her engagement with me facilitate hostilities within the group? Ought I to discontinue my research relationship with her? Should I align with one group more than another? Moreover, I shared stronger personal bonds with
Meena than Parul. It would be naïve for me to suggest that while conducting research
I remained detached and emotionally distant. Was I appropriating Parul’s privileged position to further my research, I wondered?
The friend-researcher role, in this specific context, generated conflicts that, while productive for the broader research agenda, were emotionally exhausting (Whyte
1994). I was aware that I could no longer abandon one role in favour of another – in fact, I did not want to exercise the option. While the conflicts between Parul and
Meena’s family highlighted politics of negotiation – socially, culturally and morally
– at an everyday level I refused to be a participant or take sides. During my research engagements with both families, I categorically refused to discuss one with the other.
I set it out as a ground rule, and henceforth was able to maintain relations with both families without any confrontation.
Parul and Zarina remained the main cultural translators during the course of the research. I extended a monthly allowance to Parul while Zarina insisted on a research-barter: we exchanged notes, conducted interviews and surveys for each other, and contributed constructively towards each other’s research endeavours.
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The list of key informants, however, varied across the research span of 24 months in the Karimnagar slums. The selection of the key informants was not structured: it depended on personal rapport, mutual interest, availability and respect. With every key informant, I discussed at length and in plain language my research agenda, scope, ethical clearance and the possibility of using data and information revealed towards publications. In addition, I reiterated that my position in most situations would be, as far as possible, non-judgemental and unbiased.
Surveys
After the initial phase, I used surveys throughout the entire duration of my research in the Karimnagar slums. Through the surveys, I did not want to generate quantitative data specifically. Instead, surveys proved to be an effective ‘ice-breaker’ strategy to initiate in-depth interviews and group discussions about and around sound cultures. In the initial phase of research, as discussed in an earlier section, I could not effectively sustain conversations about sonic cultures in the Karimnagar slums owing to my limited sonic understanding. As a result, more often than not the respondents lost interest.
As the following points show, surveys significantly contributed to the research – a reason why I did not discontinue the practice even after I had tuned into the soundscape of the Karimnagar slums:
1. Most residents were acquainted with the format. At one time or another,
most had responded to a survey. It was less challenging to ask (and for the
respondents to address) specific questions than to initiate unstructured 62
conversations about sound. Moreover, it allowed a screening period both to
the researcher and participants, to enable either party to exercise the choice to
further engage with the research or to terminate the interaction.
2. The nature of the questions generated interest amongst the residents, as they
were very different from the usual surveys. I did not include questions about
size of the family, ownership of the house, benefits availed, etc. – the
stereotype of a survey which most state agencies or NGOs follow. Most of
the questions in the survey were brief and to the point, while allowing for
open-ended discussion if the respondents felt so inclined.
3. Surveys were an effective means to engage men as participants in the
research. As the interactions with them were defined by specific questions, it
did not lead to any hostilities or breach of trust amongst the women.
Mostly Zarina or Parul accompanied me while I was conducting the surveys. Their presence – especially Zarina’s – encouraged residents to participate in the surveys. It was also a way for them to introduce me into their immediate and extended networks. Zarina and Parul conducted surveys independently as well. Based on their experience, they would identify individuals amongst the residents with whom we could conduct in-depth interviews.
Over the span of 24 months, 300 surveys were administered in the three camps in the
Karimnagar slums. The breakup of respondents in each camp is as follows:
Puranihaweli camp – 125; Lapatagunj camp – 100; and Gandhipuri camp – 75. I tried to maintain a gender balance while conducting the surveys. However, this was not always possible. For instance, when Parul was conducting the survey alone, she 63 did not feel comfortable approaching men. Also, during certain hours – mid- afternoons and evenings – it was difficult to engage men. Therefore, 68 per cent of the respondents were women while the remaining 32 per cent were men.
The surveys were designed around three main thematics: radio listening patterns; soundscape associations; and consumption and control over auditory technologies.
The survey questions constantly evolved. We – Zarina , Parul and I – would confer once a month to discuss the surveys: experiences, obstacles and responses to questions. The fieldwork experience would then be incorporated into the next version of the survey. Across the three themes, the breakdown of the three different surveys is as follows: radio listening patterns (160); soundscape association (65); and consumption and control over auditory technologies (75).
The surveys proved to be an effective ice-breaker and screener, and provided significant directions to steer the research towards. In my initial proposal, I wanted to explore city–slum relations through radio consumption. However, the initial interviews did not suggest a strong listening pattern. I initiated a survey on radio listening cultures, and the surveys highlighted a steady decline in radio listening culture in the Karimnagar slums along with the plausible reasons. I conducted interviews, group discussions and participant observation around the main indicators that were highlighted by the surveys. After this research exercise, I was compelled to rework my research plan in the Karimnagar slums: radio listening patterns I had speculated about in my proposal had undergone a significant change and I was not inclined to explore the existing radio cultures.
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The ‘soundscape association’ survey served two purposes: (1) it allowed me to initiate conversations about sound without losing participants’ interest; and (2) it significantly helped in my sonic education. The survey highlighted sounds by residents across gender, caste, community affiliation and spatial location, registered at different times of the day. It allowed me to further pursue, ethnographically, sonic temporality and materiality in the Karimnagar slums. Also, the survey format allowed me to raise questions about sounds that were otherwise considered sensitive, and conversations about them were generally avoided. These were specifically significant in discussing such diverse sonic articulations as noise or silence, which I will discuss further in Chapter 7.
The results from the ‘auditory technology’ survey were very important to ground the study. I conducted this survey with 25 families. I identified three adult members of the family (men and women), and asked the same questions about ownership, usage and consumption patterns of each: it gave me a macro-level understanding into politics and negotiations around auditory technologies in the household across gender, age and familial roles.
Participant observation
Hanging around (Whyte 1994) the three camps in Karimnagar was the most important aspect of my fieldwork. Even though interviews, surveys and cultural translators enriched my experience and understanding of slums so as to ‘classify and organize individuals’ perception of reality’ (Fetterman 1989: 50), it was participant observation that allowed immersion in the particular settings, systems and people’s lives (Spradley 1980; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995; Fetterman 1989). 65
On a regular fieldwork day, I visited Karimnagar without a prepared set of questions or interview schedule. More often than not, I spent the initial part of the day in a tea- kiosk or shop, where I was already acquainted with the owners. Depending on the time gap between my visits, updates were exchanged: personal, professional, family events or any other developments. The progress of my research was of key interest and, more often than not, these discussions involved giving a brief summary of the developments up to that point. On occasions when residents who were not acquainted with my research were present, it would involve drawing out the background, agenda, and scope of my research. After the initial year, it was not an uncommon practice for the shopkeepers to summarise my research for me. The direction these conversations took was unmediated. Quite often, discussions would steer into directions not directly related to my research, but which allowed me to develop a broader understanding of what people were doing and why (Spradley
1980; Jorgensen 1989). During these discussions and sessions, I consolidated relations with my acquaintances while forming newer ones.
In Karimnagar , my position oscillated between participant and non-participant observer, depending on the context and whether I could engage with tasks, conversations or social activities; however, I was always ‘there – to observe, to ask seemingly stupid yet insightful questions, and to write down what is seen and heard’
(Fetterman 1989: 19). During the course of my research, I attended weddings, funerals and birth ceremonies; visited residents in hospitals; sought medical or other needed advice for them; and helped some to complete forms. These activities were not solely dictated by my research intent or agenda; however, they allowed me to 66 engage with people’s lives intimately. I also went shopping for electronic goods, household items and vegetables (for myself), watched movies, socialised along with my family (husband), and participated in annual religious functions with some residents from Karimnagar .
In the initial phase, I had explored the possibility of renting a room in Karimnagar as a ‘research space’, not to live there but rather to have a first-hand experience of the networks and systems in the slums (see Malinoswki 1922; Goffman 1961; Whyte
1981). However, the systems of ownership and renting are very volatile and contested in slums, as will be elaborated in Chapter 3; along with my obvious middle-class background, this would have resulted in factions and fissures that would have been counter-productive to the research.
After the initial phase, residents were far less circumspect about my ‘being there’ and
‘hanging around’ (Whyte 1981, 1998; Jorgensen 1989; Spradley 1980) without any fixed agenda, interview schedules or survey questionnaires. Participant observation allowed me to evolve open-ended and creative research relationships and processes
(Jorgensen 1989) with the residents of Karimnagar. Most importantly, it allowed for dialogic associations between the residents and me. I was as much a subject of research for the residents as they were for me. The uninhibited discussions around their lives in the slums and mine in a middle-class context informed me better than anything else of the connections and intersections between the two.
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Reflections on negotiating anxieties
The anxieties I had to negotiate while conducting research in Karimnagar were on three main accounts: (1) researching a space constructed, articulated and represented as the ’other’; (2) evolving praxis to deal with my middle-class identity and background vis-à-vis the ‘otherness’ of the slum-dwellers; and, informed by these,
(3) the anxiousness of representing the slums and slum-dwellers in my thesis.
I was aware that if I proposed – methodologically and intellectually – that the slums and slum-dwellers are not the ‘others’, I would be substantiating to the larger middle- class, mainstream rhetoric of ‘invisibilising’ the slums by not acknowledging their ordinariness. The construction of the slums as ’other’ is not only a rhetorical tactic. It has a significant impact on the manner in which the slum-dwellers are allowed to interact with the city. The evocation of the city as an absolute whole vis-à-vis the slums is not to indicate that the city itself – as a site of qualitative research – is devoid of ‘tensions, contradictions, and hesitations’ (Denzin and Lincoln 1998: 31).
This thesis does not invoke the city as a homogenised entity; however, for the sake of narrativisation, within the scope of this thesis the usage of the city is symbolic to refer to the larger hegemonic structures perpetuated by the middle class.
The ‘other’ in ethnographic tradition
The discovery of the ‘other’, and its exploration, was significant to the development of early ethnography (Vidich and Lyman 1998). The documentation of the ‘other’ either as ‘natives’, ‘exotic non-Western cultures’, or later as ‘indigenous “Other”’ – in the instance of American Indian – and ‘Civic Other’ – in the case of ‘Ghetto, the
Natural Area, and the Small Town’ (Vidich and Lyman 1998) drove ethnographic 68 endeavours until the ‘post-modern challenge’ in ethnographic studies (Marcus and
Fischer 1986; Fine 1998; Vidich and Lyman 1998). The foundations of the older ethnography, Vidich and Lyman argue, have been undermined by the ‘social- historical transformations of society and consciousness in the modern world’ (Vidich and Lyman 1998: 72). Emphasising the need to reorient ethnographic agendas, methodologies and modes of representation, Marcus and Fischer (1986) notice that:
The culture of the world’s peoples need to be constantly rediscovered as these
peoples reinvent themselves in changing historical circumstances, especially
at a time when confident metanarratives or paradigms are lacking: as we
noted, ours is an era of ‘post-conditions’ – post-modern, post-colonial, post-
traditional. This continuing function of ethnography requires new narrative
motifs, and a debate about what they might be is at the heart of the current
trend of experiments with the past conventions of ethnographic realism.
(1986: 24)
Marcus and Fischer introduce interpretative anthropology as a tool that will facilitate the understanding of the manner in which ‘different cultural constructions of reality affect social action’ (1986: 25). The debate which Marcus and Fischer mentioned has since consolidated into a robust methodological and intellectual discursive field in itself. The ‘other’ still dominates the discussions; however, it is not within the
‘voyeuristic or paternalistic’ (Vidich and Lyman 1998) scope driving the older ethnographies, but as engagements about construction and representation of the
‘other’ vis-à-vis the self. Within this ‘post-modern turn’, as identified by Marcus, we are in a new historical moment, where simplistic, ethnographic cultural translations 69 will cease to be accepted. The age of the final authoritative readings of any cultural situation seems to be over. Reflexive, experimental texts that are messy, subjective, open-ended, conflictual and feminist-influenced will become the norm. Marcus
(1998), however, does not shy away from stating that this reflexivity incorporated in the ‘messy texts’ will not necessarily offer any definite models:
Messy texts are neither models to follow nor the much-awaited products of a
new paradigm, nor empty conformity with radicalizing fashion. Rather, they
represent the substantive, deep effects of post-modern debates on personal
styles of thought and work in established disciplines. They are testing
ground-always a mix of strong engagement by authors with ‘what goes on’
among particular subjects of study and of an equally strong reflexive
engagement with their own self-making as scholars – in which qualitative
social science is being remade in the absence of authoritative models,
paradigms, or methods. The concern of such texts, far from being predictable
and narrow, are as broad and diverse as the concerns that have shaped
traditions of qualitative social science itself. (1998: 404)
In this new turn, the ‘other’ is no longer an apolitical, distanced object of inquiry.
The construction and representation of the ‘other’ is a volatile and fluid process intimately – indeed, almost incestuously – associated with the identification and definition of the self.
In India, the perceptions of ‘self’ internalised by the consuming classes’ post- liberalisation prosperity (Sharma, in Rajan 2005) have increased their uneasiness in 70 acknowledging and articulating the presence of slums. The notions of self are
‘knottily entangled’ (Fine 1998: 135) with that of the ‘other’ – only when there is an
‘other’ can you know who you are (Hall 1991: 16). For the burgeoning Indian middle class it has become increasingly paramount to exacerbate the distance – social, cultural, moral and political – with the slums and slum-dwellers. Yet the middle class and the slums are part of the same urban experience and fabric. In fact, as is evidenced in Chapter 3, there is an intimate overlap between the everyday of the middle class and slum-dwellers because the slum-dwellers provide extensive domestic help to the middle class.
The discussions in The Landscape of Qualitative Research by Denzin and Lincoln,
Vidich and Lyman, and Fine, Punch and Marcus, among others, emphasise a careful examination of the ‘other’ in these discursive fields (Vidich and Lyman 1998).
However, what seems to be dominant in these discussions is also an urgent need
(methodological and intellectual) to question the identification of the self against which the ‘other’ is located.
Researching the ‘other’
Denzin and Lincoln (1998) insist that ‘No single method can grasp the subtle variations in ongoing human experience’ as ‘Any gaze is always filtered through the lenses of language, gender, social class, race, and ethnicity. There are no objective observations, only observations socially situated in the worlds of the observer and the observed.’ (1998: 24) My middle-class identity and background framed the initial engagements with residents in the slums of Karimnagar , second only to the gendered 71 experience of the space. These had a significant impact on the research praxis, strategies and methodologies subsequently adopted.
It was a common practice for me, while conducting the research, to plan walks along the roads in the Karimnagar slums and adjoining areas with children from a local school run by a prominent NGO. My research relationship with the NGO was not formal. I had proposed the walks to facilitate one of the NGO’s projects to start a local newsletter. Through these walks, it was proposed that the students would be able to document local stories and incidents more effectively. The walks were exploratory. With a group of around ten to twelve young adults, I would walk around the slums. Discussions about the space, personalised accounts of experience of the space, and conversations with other residents characterised the walks.
During one such walk, an old woman sewing an intricate pattern caught the students’ fancy. They initiated a conversation with her about the kind of pattern, the material used and the time taken to finish one design. I joined in the conversation, inquiring further about the scope and spread of small-scale industries in the area. Two men soon joined us, although they were not actively participating in the discussions. They would fill in information that the woman could not provide – for instance, the location of the export house that outsourced the patterning. At some point during the conversation, I asked the men a direct question about the penetration of small-scale industries in the slums and the immediate benefits to the residents; did it, I inquired, help to alleviate the status of the poor in the locality? The men – who had until then been cordial – became highly indignant and agitated when I asked this question. The younger of the two accused me of collecting data for the benefit of the NGO: 72
They (the NGO) are only interested in showcasing poverty so they can get
funds from the big companies from abroad. They are not bothered about us.
What do you know about us? They want more and more people in the camps
to become dependent on them so that they can have us as figures in their files
… What do you know about poverty, anyway?
I was ill-prepared for a retort, and my immediate reaction was to clarify my lack of affiliation to either the specific NGO in question or any in general. This I acknowledged – during the process of interpreting the ethnography (Marcus 1998) – as the anxiety of my‘self’ being identified as the oppressive ‘other’ in their narrative.
Once assured of my non-affiliated status, the older of the two men said, by way of explaining the outburst: ‘We are really tired of people coming and asking the same questions over and over again … how poor are you? How much do you earn? How much do you spend? Do you like being poor? How do you manage, etc?’ These men said they found it ‘exhausting and humiliating’. The conversation from there steered to the scope of my research – the politics of sound, cultures of radio listening – and one of them asked, ‘but … what is the real use of your research? How will it help the community? Is there any scheme in offering?’
This incident methodologically, intellectually and emotionally paralysed my research engagements with Karimnagar – partly because I was unable to situate the hostility and anger I had encountered. I became circumspect about my own intentions regarding the choice of a slum as a research space. How could I, I ruminated, discuss the slums as ‘others’ when my own reaction to being ‘othered’ – as the oppressive 73
NGO agent – was so vehement? More importantly, this was one of the first conversations – of many to follow – in which an ‘other’ of/to the slum was clearly articulated; the lack of methodological and intellectual tenacity – at that point in my research – to accommodate ‘other-of-the-other’ added to my anxiety. In order to contextualise my anxiety, I evaluated my experience at Karimnagar vis-à-vis my prior ethnographic engagements, evaluating how engagements with outsiders were framed by ‘schemes’.
Before undertaking ethnographic research in Karimnagar , I had conducted a year- long ethnography in Bhakhalaa Place, South Asia’s largest secondhand electronic hardware market and a hub for software piracy. Owing to the nature of male- dominated trade practices in Bhakhalaa Place – electronic retail, repair and piracy – the space has a very masculine character. While conducting research in Bhakhalaa
Place, I had to negotiate the masculinity of the space. The shops where I usually interviewed people were located in narrow lanes, and the shops themselves congested places populated predominantly by men. My presence necessitated making an unhindered space for me – which, more often than not, was disruptive to the shop’s activities. However, after the initial hesitation, the gender politics in these interactions lessened – for most, I was also a potential customer. In addition, the conversations often were around trade practices. Once the ‘trust’ was established, most men freely engaged in detailed discussions – even those of an illicit and illegal nature. During this period, I also established a relationship of mutual exchange, bringing them CDs of the latest Open Source software while they offered substantial discounts on the purchases I made. Though I had to negotiate fieldwork anxieties of
‘masculinity of space’ in BhakhalaaPlace, I did not encounter a moment of 74
‘methodological and intellectual paralysis’ of the sort I found in Karimnagar . In order to resolve this moment of crisis, I attempted to contextualise the interactions of my-‘self’ vis-à-vis the ‘other’ at a market complex and a slum settlement.
I withdrew into a methodological and intellectual inquisition about the self and the
‘other’. While I was highly conscious and critical of the construction of the slums and slum-dwellers as the ‘other’, I acknowledged the methodological and intellectual limitations of my evolving praxis which could accommodate the self of the slums.
Though opposed to the ‘othering’ of the slums, I realised that by consistently denying a sense of self to the slums, I was not only contributing to the ‘otherness’ of the slums but also consolidating it.
I did not encounter similar fieldwork anxiety in Bhakhalaa Place – even though in many ways it is the ‘other12’ – as this space in the everyday rhetoric is not othered. In the absence of the predominance of this rhetoric, it was possible for me – methodologically, intellectually and emotionally – to accord a self to BhakhalaaPlace as the ‘other’. However, in the case of Karimnagar – even though conscious of the rhetoric – I realised it was exactly within this rhetorical discourse that I was situating my research, and therefore the research engagements. By internalising the position of the slum as ‘other’, I had denied the slum and slum-dwellers the space and scope to have a self. The implications of this were evidenced in the boundaries of the research engagements I had envisioned in Karimnagar . In this setting, while I had identified my position and gaze as an observer filtered through my middle-class identity (see
Denzin and Lincoln 1998), I had denied the slum-dwellers any possibility of being in
12 Many of the trade practices in Bhakhalaa Place are ‘illegal’ – piracy, etc. However, this legal ‘othering’ does not involve in its language social, cultural and political othering. 75 the position of the observer, relegating them to being only the observed. In this schematic, their gaze was inconsequential – if not entirely absent.
The research paralysis induced by the incident mentioned earlier was largely generated for these reasons. The research strategy I had evolved did not have any space to accommodate the voice and gaze of the slum-dwellers, and thus denied any active agency of participation to them.
Revaluating research frameworks
At this methodological crossroads, Michelle Fine’s Working the Hyphen:
Reinventing the Self and Other in Qualitative Research allowed a starting point for me to reinvent my own research. ‘Much of the qualitative research,’ Fine argues,
‘has reproduced … a colonising discourse of the “Other”’ (1998: 130); this, she contends, arises from a lack of engagement – overt or subtle, conscious or unconscious – with the Self as a researched category or within the capacity of the researcher. She sets the intellectual and methodological background for politics of hyphen and the means to work it:
Self and Other are knottily entangled. This relationship, as lived between
researchers and informants, is typically obscured in social science texts,
protecting privilege, securing distance and laminating the contradictions.
Despite denials, qualitative researchers are always implicated at the hyphen.
When we opt, as has been the tradition, to simply write about those who have
been Othered, we deny the hyphen. Slipping into a contradictory discourse of
individualism, personalogic theorizing, and decontextualization, we inscribe 76
the Other, strain to white out Self, and refuse to engage the contradictions
that litter our texts.
When we opt, instead, to engage in social struggles with those who have been
exploited and subjugated, we work the hyphen, revealing far more about
ourselves, and far more about the structures of ’othering’. Eroding the
fixedness of categories, we and they enter and play with the blurred
boundaries that proliferate.
By working the hyphen, I mean to suggest that researchers probe how we are
in relation with the contexts we study and with our informants, understanding
that we are all multiple in those relations … Working the hyphen means
creating occasions for researchers and informants to discuss what is, and is
not, ‘happening between,’ within the negotiated relations of whose story is
being told, why, to whom, with what interpretation, and whose story is being
shadowed, why, for whom, and with what consequences. (1998: 135)
This reinvented research praxis introduced space – intellectually, methodologically, emotionally and practically – for the role of the researched and researcher, observed and observer to indiscriminately interchange; the singularity of research strategy, methodology and perspective was abandoned in favour of multiple sites of connections and communication, permitting many ‘messy texts’ (Marcus 1998) to be written. In allowing my‘self’ to be a site of research, I encountered the ‘selves’ of the slums and slum-dwellers. These engagements not only exposed a well-defined ‘self’ of the slums – which is rarely acknowledged and very occasionally represented – but 77 also the ‘others’ that this self consciously articulated, internalised and invented (Hall, quoted in Fine 1998) to construct its own position. In this discussion, there is a danger that the self and ‘other’ might appear in binary oppositions as stipulated by
Hall, which Fine argues ‘reproduces and detours away from the investigating what is
“between”’ (1998: 134). The insistence of this thesis remains focused on what is
‘between’ the self and ‘other’; however, it is equally urgent to accord a well-defined intellectual and methodological position of the self to the slums and slum-dwellers.
The self of the slums and the selves of the slum-dwellers were not only constructed in terms of their own ‘others’, but also were aware of their othered position in the larger mainstream discourse, which was an important filter to decide their position and determine their ‘others’.
Voices from the field
After overcoming the research paralysis, I consciously situated my research in the contextualised-consequentialist model of the ethical stance assumed during the fieldwork. Setting the broad premise of this model, Denzin and Lincoln (1998: 38) elaborate:
The contextualized-consequentialist model (House 1990; Smith 1990) builds
on four principles (principles comparable to those espoused by Lincoln and
Guba): mutual respect, noncoercion and nonmanipulation, the support of
democratic values and institutions, and the belief that every research act
implies moral and ethical decisions that are contextual. Every ethical decision
that is affects others, with immediate and long-range consequences. These
consequences involve personal values held by the researcher and those 78
studied. The consequentialist model requires the researcher to build
relationships of respect and trust that are noncoercive and that are not based
on deception.
The consequentialist model elaborates a feminist ethic that calls for
collaborative, trusting, non-oppressive relationships between researchers and
those studied (Fonow & Cook, 1991, pp. 8–9). Such a model presumes that
investigators are committed to an ethic that stresses personal accountability,
caring, the value of individual expressiveness, the capacity for empathy, and
the sharing of emotionality. (Collins, 1990: 216)
Methodologically, intellectually and emotionally, assuming this stance in a formalised manner allowed me to discuss my fieldwork anxieties with the participants, involve their voices actively in my research and its writing, and explore the ‘betweenness’ (Fine 1998) in the construction of self and ‘other’ as a concern of research strategy but also within the broader context of the city and the slums.
In this section, I will discuss the negotiations of fieldwork anxiety, and constructions of self and ‘other’, making the ethnographer the authorial voice. This voice is both
‘muted and clear’ (Fine and Weis 1998: 14) at different times. It is muted when reproducing large segments of ethnography and interviews through which slum- dwellers ‘speak for themselves’ (1998: 14) so that their ‘marginalized voices surface’
(1998: 14). It is clear in that I vehemently (Fine and Weis 1998) oppose the singular homogenisation of the slums in the urban fabric and I am not apologetic about, or 79 alternatively burdened by, my middle-class identity – either to the city or the slums – for presenting the multiplicities of experiences.
After the sabbatical that the moment of research paralysis imposed, I made new entries into the space, acknowledging that the everyday reality of the slums would not constitute part of my everyday and vice versa. This, however, did not mean that either the slum-dwellers or I – with my middle-class background – could not evolve dialogic praxis within which we could attempt to understand, respect and appreciate the realities we represented. Furthermore, as a researcher and beneficiary of these research relationships, I considered it my responsibility to actively work towards this goal. It became very important for me to listen and hear their voices while involving them in the research as collaborators and participants who informed the direction of my research instead of being passive subjects.
With the projected homogenised materiality of Karimnagar camps deconstructed – methodologically and intellectually – the complex processes involved in sustaining the multiple selves became evident. As with the ‘other’, the self was constantly constructed and negotiated within the social-cultural-political-moral hierarchies in the Karimnagar slums.
Intersecting networks and issues of representation
I have already discussed the access granted to me by virtue of my gender. Though it was easier to establish research relationships with the women, this by no means implies that the politics of my engagements with them were devoid of politics of 80 representation of my own ‘middle-class’ and their ‘slum-dweller’ identities. I shall elaborate on this aspect via a case study.
Geeta is a widow who lives in Lapatagunj camp with her thirteen-year-old son. I first met her in 2004 while conducting research for the earlier DFID project. The agenda of the project meant I had to inquire at length about the income, expenditure and consumption patterns of each household. Such inquisitions are very common in the
Karimnagar slums, undertaken at the behest of either state agencies or other non- governmental organisations. They often relate to the promise of some associated direct ‘benefit’ (loans, subsidies, etc.). While conducting the research, my reasons for collecting data of this nature were constantly questioned. Not surprisingly, considering the precarious relationship the ‘slum-dwellers’ have with the state, there is an apprehension about the state interventions. Though I would constantly reiterate that the data I was collecting was for purely academic purposes, there would be persistent requests for extending some kind of ‘help’ – mostly monetary – to the families.
As a research participant, Geeta offered significant insights into the gender politics and their direct association with income and expenditure patterns in the Karimnagar slums. She lives in a two-room, meticulously decorated house, which is part of what initially was one household. The initial settlers, over the years, sold off parts of it to two other families to meet their financial commitments. When I initiated my research in Karimnagar , three families – including Geeta’s – formed this cluster. There is a common entry to all the three houses and, owing to the lack of space, the interactions between the families at an everyday level are very intense. During the conversations, 81
Geeta always evoked her ‘widow’ status, and often analyzed situations, income and expenditure patterns, and her everyday interactions through this prism. Her narrative was always clouded by the difficulties she had endured being married to an alcoholic and her subsequent struggles when he passed away. Though her living conditions
‘appeared’ to be comfortable and her son was being educated in a private English medium school – a rarity in the area on account of the financial burden the family had to bear – she always denied having any regular income and evaded questions about her financial support systems. A few months each year, she set up a roadside kiosk to sell home-cooked foods; apart from that, she never mentioned having any other source of income.
A chance encounter revealed to me the complexity of the gender politics and the networks of financial systems in the Karimnagar camps. On Geeta’s street, a medical clinic is run by a middle-aged man. He is not a ‘slum-dweller’, and in casual conversations he would constantly reiterate this status to set him apart from those who I was ‘researching’. On one occasion, I approached him to conduct an in-depth interview to understand the availability and accessibility of medical services and information. Before this meeting, he had always been cordial and mild. However, during this particular interview, when I raised questions about his own practice in the
Karimnagar camps, interactions with the residents and educational levels, he burst into a agitated retort about the ‘slum-dwellers’:
… the people you want to help, [who you] are working for [the slum-
dwellers] are not worth it. They are lazy and irresponsible. They are different
people during the day and become something else at night. The same people 82
who are cordial and respectful during the day will not hesitate to rob you.
Some even would not stop at attempting to molest you …
I was not prepared for such a retort, so I politely cut the interview short and left. For days I could not find plausible reasons for his agitation. Then I realised that though working in the ‘slums’, he wanted to maintain an identity as an ‘outsider’. Socially, culturally and morally, he did not want to be mistaken for a ‘slum-dweller’. I decided to approach him again for two reasons. First, I was interested in understanding how interactions at an everyday level are negotiated between him (an outsider) and the residents (‘slum-dwellers’) if they are framed in the language of the ‘other’, And second, I wanted to learn more about the economy of medical practice in the
Karimnagar slums. I announced myself at his clinic when he was not expecting me.
After the earlier interaction, he seemed slightly more cautious and lamented the lack of medical facilities available to those living in the ‘slums’. Around this time, Geeta came into the clinic. She did not notice my presence at once. She and the medical practitioner were discussing rent arrangements, and subsequently the medical practitioner handed some money over to her. Interested in this transaction, I inquired about it. Geeta, realising I was there, tried to evade the topic. However, the medical practitioner mentioned that he had to pay Geeta a monthly rent for using this space.
Geeta had never mentioned that she owned any other property in the ‘slum’ except the house in which she lived. Sensing her discomfort, I did not pursue the matter further. After that, Geeta was always very reticent in my company.
In another incident of the similar kind, I went to Meena’s (her neighbour’s) house during a hot Delhi summer afternoon. During these times, the heat is so oppressive 83 that most people withdraw into their houses, especially when the power situation permits the operation of water coolers. By this time, I had been visiting these families for a year, and had established relationship outside of the strict ‘researcher– researched’ praxis. Meena, her daughter-in-law and I were sharing lunch when we heard some men call out for Geeta. The spatial layout of the cluster is such that all conversations, if not carefully contained, can be overheard. We could hear a transaction being negotiated. The men wanted to purchase some liquor bottles and
Geeta was quoting a price for them. Overhearing this conversation in the presence of
Meena and her daughter-in-law was very uncomfortable. In the last year, neither
Geeta nor any of her neighbours had even hinted at Geeta being involved in the illicit liquor trading business. Meena, who usually withheld any comments about Geeta, said:
We know she does it. We don’t approve it. My late husband was strongly
against it as such activities invite all kinds of people at different hours. But,
well, she is all by herself. She does not have anyone to look after her. Her
husband was an alcoholic. He always beat her up. Her in-laws constantly
tried to appropriate whatever little she had.
Over the next few years, I maintained my research and a personal relationship with
Meena’s, Geeta’s and Shishir’s (the third family in the cluster) families; however, we never discussed Geeta’s networks and systems of generating income. In the last year or so, once so every often she has hinted that she has sources of income which she cannot disclose but I have never pursued the issue. Geeta’s is not an unusual case. It 84 falls within the schema of politics of representation and trust as elaborated by Zarina in an earlier section.
There were many instances in the Karimnagar slums where individuals and families did not offer information about their income and expenditure patterns, and I sometimes discovered some unrevealed sources or networks accidentally. On some occasions, the individuals being interviewed – especially women in the households – did not have knowledge. Apart from these situations, however, there is a prevalent threat of being brought under scrutiny by state agencies if involvement in networks other that the ‘legitimate’ ones is uncovered. Lastly, these threat perceptions were heightened by my own middle-class identity. My position was constantly under scrutiny, vacillating from being a state agent to representing a non-governmental charitable organisation with the potential to extend substantial ‘help’.
Geeta, I realised, could not discuss the finances with me at length; this was not because she wanted to hide anything, but rather because there were only so many vocabularies available to her to discuss these matters with ‘outsiders’. She was expected, within these constructions, to constantly evoke the narrative of
‘widowhood’, ‘lack of income’ and ‘fragile social support’ to garner support and
‘help’ from different agencies. The financial systems in the Karimnagar slums cannot be evaluated through the strict prism of income and expenditure; multiple nodes and networks are involved at formal, informal, illicit and interpersonal levels. The navigation through these networks to optimise them is very significantly dependent on the social, political, cultural and moral agency the individual, family or group can exercise within this space. Geeta’s status as a widow within the Karimnagar camps 85 allowed her concessions to engage in illicit liquor trade, an engagement socially denied to women. However, the same status and her involvements made her highly vulnerable when negotiating with outside agencies – particularly the police.
Conclusion
After six years of research engagement with the Karimnagar slums and their residents, it would have been naïve and methodologically counter-productive to not attempt an evaluation of my own position as an ethnographer. On one level, I represented the ‘other’ – indeed, I was the ‘other’. In the initial stages of my research, as discussed earlier, this predicament limited the scope of interactions between slum-dwellers and myself. The materiality of the Karimnagar slums is dense, precarious and constantly evolving. The involvement in these networks is significantly determined by the social, cultural and moral position one enjoys. As a middle-class ethnographer, my position was uncertain. The production of knowledge of and about the space, given these constraints, could not have been achieved without establishing an economy of trust. The trust, I speak of here is not limited to the slum- dwellers revealing their ‘lives’ or ‘secrets’, as was the concern for Borges’ protagonist; it also involves extending respect to the ‘matter of choice’ for the lives led by the residents with whom I was interacting. In addition, it meant allowing my identity, experience and everyday reality to be open to interrogation without apprehensions of whether ‘they’ could relate to my ‘middle-class reality’. This trust was only established over a period of time, when both the parties involved had tested and tried the limits of the other. Once this trust was established with individuals, families and communities in the Karimnagar slums, it also meant that I, as an ethnographer, could not be judgemental about certain practices which were prevalent in the slums. 86
Once I was visiting a research participant’s house. Though an interview was not scheduled, I visited her because I needed to take a break. This was a usual practice.
During breaks, we usually updated each other about our lives, marriage, holidays, and so on. After a while, three of the research participant’s relatives from the village paid a visit to her. The research participant introduced me as a friend who was working in the Karimnagar slums. Tea and snacks were organised. The conversations that followed related to the family’s intent to ‘purchase’ a newborn baby from someone the research participant knew. The rates were being negotiated. Soon the relatives left. The research participant sensed my discomfort while the conversation was taking place:
RP13: Did it disturb you? Haven’t you ever heard of babies being sold?
R14: I have, but I have only read about it. It has never been discussed in front
of me. Can’t I do anything about it?
RP: Like what? Stop the sale of the babies? Why?
R: Well, it just does not seem the right thing to be able to sell and buy babies
like this.
RP: The women who are selling [the babies]…not all them are doing it as
matter of choice. There are many compulsions. There are women who have
made a business practice out of it, mostly the women who are migrants from
other states. That is also because they need the money to feed the rest of the
family. What can you do? You can inform the authorities, the police, but do
13 RP = Research Participant 14 R: Researcher 87
not think they already don’t know. They do. They will take some action while
you are pursuing it and then? What will happen to the women?
R: But what happens to the children? There should be some way to ensure
that they are not sold for child labour or prostitution. Is that not a possibility?
RP: It is, a very strong possibility. However, childless couples or those
desiring a son also adopt many of these children. They give them love,
affection and care their own parents would have never been able to afford.
What about that? (F, 42)
I was aware that I could not ignore the matter while at the same time I did not have enough arguments against it. Needless to say, I was methodologically, morally and intellectually conflicted. My middle-class, educated sensibilities demanded that I take action. I could not, however, report the matter straightforwardly, even though I was aware of it. I did not have enough knowledge about these networks. However, I could not ignore the matter either. I asked the research participant whether it would be permissible for me to discuss practices with a social activist working with women in the area without revealing any details. She agreed. When I asked her whether I could use our conversation as part of my thesis, she only relented after I assured her that in the narrative I would not mention any names or locations within the
Karimnagar slums, or discuss the communities involved.
As an ethnographer, I realised that certain cultures and practices, however dehumanising they might appear to be, need to be situated within the larger matrix of the materiality of the space. Being a ‘widow’ in a ‘slum settlement’ allowed Geeta to sustain her livelihood through an illicit liquor trade. These networks would have 88 been very difficult for her to penetrate, if not entirely accessible, if she were living in a legalised colony. It is due to the networks that the slums allow, owing to their illegal nature, that trade practices around the sale of newborn babies can be undertaken. The clientele for these trades – whether illicit liquor or newborn babies – predominantly comprises the lower-middle and middle classes.
In this thesis, I have explored the complexity of the everyday materiality of
Karimnagar slums through sonic engagements to highlight a strongly constituted sense of self. This is significant on account of the rhetoric of the middle class, the mainstream media and the state, which denies the slums and their residents any sense of identity and experience, collapsing slum reality into a homogenised experience of decadence. In the next chapter, I will discuss these constructions and representations further. 89
3
On slums
Introduction: The demolition
On 31 March 2008, some 1,000 slum dwellings were razed to the ground in the
Karimnagar slums15. In India’s urban geography and memory, slum demolitions are not uncommon occurrences (Baviskar 2001, 2003, 2006; Ramanathan 2001, 2005,
2006; Dupont 2002, 2008; Ghertner 2008). The agenda and execution of this demolition appear to be in line with the errosion of any recognition of the rights of slum-dwellers, as other agendas take precedence. The narrative of this demolition highlights the complex mechanism through which the position of slums and slum- dwellers is consolidated as the ’other’ vis-à-vis the state, the city and the middle classes. A description of this demolition reveals the internalisation of ‘marketing of fear’ (Caldeira 2000) by the state and the affluent elite to justify enforcement of exclusionary urban planning policies.
A notice of planned demolition was circulated amongst the residents of the
Karimnagar camps through pamphlets and announcements in the last week of March
2008. It was announced that this would be a partial demolition to remove shops, houses and other constructions along the main road. The scheduled date for the demolition was 3 April. When the announcements were made, resident groups, political organisations and NGOs convened to work out a course of action to impede the demolitions. One of the resident groups, in collaboration with a leading NGO in
15 In order to maintain the anonymity of the site and the respondents I am not referencing news items. 90 the area, filed a petition to demand a stay order for the proposed demolitions. The hearing of this petition was scheduled for 2 April.
On the evening of 31st March, the residents of Karimnagar began noticing a growing police presence in the area. When residents inquired about their presence, the police personnel informed the residents that the demolition had been scheduled for the next day. Early in the morning on 1 April, an area of 3 square kilometres around
Karimnagar was cordoned off by police forces including anti-riot squads. For the next few hours, the demolition squad systematically razed the defined slums and shops to the ground.
The authorities, known as Land Owning Agencies (LOA), are required to notify slum-dwellers in advance of any demolition or eviction, since slum-dwellers are accorded the right to life and to livelihoods, as Harsh Mander, a long time activist, describes:16
In the landmark Olga Tellis case in 1985, the Supreme Court affirmed that the
right to livelihoods was inherent in the right to life, and that if the State chooses
to evict pavement and slum-dwellers, it must do so only in conformity with
procedures established by law, including sufficient notice and rehabilitation.
But these obligations have been gravely diluted by recent judgments that are
increasingly hostile to the urban working poor. The Delhi High Court held in
the Okhla Factory Owners Association case in 2003 that displaced families are
not entitled to any resettlement, as this would burden the State exchequer. The
16 http://www.karmayog.org/urbandvlp/urbandvlp_14129.htm. 91
SC went further in the Almitra Patel case in blaming – even stigmatising – the
victim by declaring that ‘rewarding an encroacher on public land with an
alternative free site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket’.17
The authorities later claimed that the demolitions at Karimnagar were peaceful.
Agenda: Containing the others
Unlike other demolitions, the primary agenda of demolitions in the Karimnagar slums was not only to evict illegal squatters; rather, it was connected to the High
Court ruling in favour of Mr Harsh Singh, former president of Kamal Apartments’
Resident Welfare Association (RWA), who had filed a petition in 2005 seeking ‘a solution against encroachment of roads and services by slum residents’. Unable to provide resettlement for the slum residents, the ruling extended an alternative solution until land could be identified and allocated to relocate the residents: a 2.5 metre high, 2 kilometre long wall has been constructed where the slum dwellings were demolished, which is along the outer boundaries of the cluster of the three camps. As the local media present it, through this act of enclosure the authorities consider that they will be able to curtail the movements of the slum residents on the roads, parks and other spaces shared by the slum-dwellers and nearby middle-class residents, providing respite to the latter. Newspapers reported that the other middle- class colonies supported Mr. Harsh Singh’s petition, with people claiming a loss of value of their properties, complaints about the smell and congestion due to the presence of the slums, and reporting the DDA’s claim that the wall would, as a
17 http://www.karmayog.org/urbandvlp/urbandvlp_14129.htm.
92 temporary measure, offer protection to flat owners neighbouring the slums. News reports also report local middle-class residents call for a higher wall, with fewer entrances and exits, as a means to control the movements of slum-dwellers.
The wall is justified by the state authority on the grounds that it will protect the ‘flat owners’ (the middle-class population) in the area – implying that slum-dwellers pose a threat to this section of society. Yet the slums have coexisted with the middle-class settlements in this area for over twenty years. There are no recorded incidents of violent outbursts and attacks perpetrated by the slum-dwellers towards the middle- class population, according to a search of police records and media reports. Instead, the middle-class homes offer employment opportunities to slum-dwellers as domestic servants, cooks, guards and drivers18 (Sharma 2005, 2008; Baviskar 2006).
A significant proportion of the slum’s population works in this way, and in discussions it became clear that they would be unlikely to jeopardise their livelihoods by violence or any other form of direct conflict with their employers. Following the demolition and prior to the erection of the wall, I conducted interviews with both slum-dwellers and residents of nearby middle-class settlements to understand the perception of ‘threat’ in the everyday context.
Clean Delhi, Green Delhi: Invisibilising slums
Most of the middle-class residents expressed relief at the demolitions and the prospect of the wall being erected, stating that ‘now we will not have to see the slums everywhere.’ The demolition and erection of the wall provide a clear
18 http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2009/01/01/seabrook. 93 illustration of the desire to contol the presence of the slum-dwellers, who are acknowledged in the vicinity only in their roles of domestic servants, cooks, drivers and guards. This is reflective of the systemic shift in the position of the Indian middle class, both economically and politically (Baviskar 2003, 2006; Sharma 2005;
Ghertner 2008; Dupont 2008). This transformation has constituted a new middle- class sensibility and aspirations for a sanitised urban experience – spatially, environmentally, socially and culturally. This shift, together with its manifestations in reconfiguring urban spaces, finds resonance in the rise of the City of Walls
(Calderia 2000) in Sao Paulo. The threat from the slum-dwellers in Karimnagar was not based on collective memory or experience of acts of violence and vandalism; rather, it was on account of the assault – aesthetic, social, cultural, and moral – to their middle-class sensibilities by being ‘dirty, congested and dangerous’.19
In 2000, the Delhi government initiated the Bhagidari system,20 literally translated as
‘participatory system’21 – a citizen–government partnership program designed to involve the middle class in achieving the aspiration of a ‘clean, green, hassle-free, world-class capital city’,22 in order to turn Delhi into a ‘truly international city’.23
Under this scheme, the Delhi government invited Residents’ Welfare Associations
(RWAs) and Market Traders Associations (MTAs) to collaboratively and proactively work with government agencies to address issues of governance. Sanjay Srivastava
(2009) suggests that the Bhagidari system ‘produces its own version of urban
19 http://www.metamute.org/en/Demolishing-Delhi. 20 http://delhigovt.nic.in/bhagi.asp. 21 http://www.hindu.com/2001/02/02/stories/14022184.htm. Bhagidari system in action: http://www.hindu.com/2001/02/02/stories/14022184.htm In praise of Bhagidari system: http://theultimatecreation.com/GKC/sector/Bhagidari.pdf. 22 http://www.howardwfrench.com/archives/2005/09/27/new_delhi_a_makeover_for_indian_city_disjointed_in_time. See also Sheila Dixit, Chief Minister of Delhi, discussing Commonwealth games as an opportunity for Delhi to develop at the Urban Age India Conference, 2007: http://www.urban-age.net/10_cities/07_mumbai/_videos/CLF/02_CLF_SD_video1.html. 23 http://www.rediff.com/cms/print.jsp?docpath=//election/2003/nov/20inter.htm. 94 citizenship and space’ – which, he contends, ‘marries the idea of the consuming – perhaps “McDonaldised”’ (Ritzer 1993) – citizen to ‘a transparent and responsive state machinery’ in which state and ideas of citizenry are ‘tightly entwined through the ideas of legality, cooperation, criminality, transparency, and the right and responsibilities of citizen with respect to the city’ (1993: 343). Indeed, the demolitions and subsequent walling of the Karimnagar slums showcase the effectiveness of the collaboration between states and its citizens (slum-dwellers and the city’s poor, over the last decade, have consistently been denied claims to citizenship (Sharma 2005)) to transform the spatial and moral landscape of the city.
The demolition and subsequent walling of the Karimnagar slums demonstrate this trend – a RWA filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to seek respite from the
‘nuisance’ (Bhan 2009; Ghertner 2008; Batra 2004) created by the Karimnagar slums.
Batra (2004) makes the connection between the politics of pollution, the creation of
‘global’ Delhi and a situation in which ‘poor working people have typically been seen as ‘“encroachers” [on] public land, “stealing” resources like land, water, electricity etc., meant for the legitimate “citizens” of the city and polluting its water and air’.24 Over the last decade – and with Delhi hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2010 – these discourses have assumed an urgency, with the middle class desperate to claim its ‘world-class’ city. The Bhagidari system, with its collaborative notion of governance, has endowed its ‘citizens’ – the middle class – with social, legal and moral legitimacy to organise urban governance, landscape and lifestyle; aspirations
24 http://www.cpiml.org/liberation/year_2004/December/commentary4.htm.
95 for a ‘Clean, Green Delhi’ are no longer a distant desire but a definite right. Within the Bhagidari system, ‘occupants of legally defined neighbourhoods’ (Srivastava
2009: 345) are categorically posited as citizens vis-à-vis the ‘others’ – slum-dwellers and migrant labourers. This ‘endorses and creates realms of illegality and exclusions’ around ‘the trope of consuming family’, endowing it with ‘the right to separate itself from the processes of labour through seeking the removal of labourers as a “threat” to its life-ways’ (2009: 345).
The agenda of a ‘world-class city’ does not have any place for slum-dwellers and the poor. Their claims to citizenship are denied (Sharma 2005) on the grounds that they do not suit the ideal of the ‘aspirational middle-class consumer citizen’ (Bhan 2009:
141) in terms of social, moral and aesthetic citizenship. The right to live in a ‘Clean
Delhi, Green Delhi’ is viewed as a legitimate claim – ‘tax returned and rightfully earned’, as a nearby middle class retired Government official remarked. The ‘dirty, congested and dangerous’25 (Baviskar 2006) slum-dwellers are a nuisance in this schematic (Ghertner 2008). Bhan concedes that a central aspect of this is the
‘increasing aestheticization of poverty and urban space’ (2009: 141), which increasingly determines the position of the slum-dwellers in the city through values prescribed and invoked by the middle class as essential to their being: ‘hygiene, environment, progress and growth-centric government, market participation, planning and order, aesthetics, notions of a “world class city” and leisure’ (2009:
141).
25 http://www.metamute.org/Demolishing-Delhi 96
The violence inflicted upon the slum-dwellers by brutally denying them judicial rights and representation is justified on several accounts. The juridical discourse since 2000 has ‘re-problematized slums as nuisance’ (Ghertner 2008: 57), which has become ‘the primary mechanism by which slum take place at present’ (Ghertner
2008: 57). The rising antagonism of the middle classes against the poor, which is supported by the state’s ambition to have a ‘world-class city’, has evolved new ways to situate the slums.
Ghertner conducts a discourse analysis of court documents in slum-related court cases and concludes that ‘the basic statement that “slums are illegal” is very recent juridical discourse … due to interpretation of nuisance law’ (Ghertner 2008: 57).
Following a number of court cases, starting with Ratlam Municipal Council v
Vardichan in 1980 through to Almitra Patel v the Union of India in 2000, Ghertner maps the manner in which the judgments ‘radically altered the discursive terrain of nuisance law’ (2008: 60) and the progressive disenfranchisement of the slum- dwellers. While in the former case, the judgment passed vested responsibility on the municipal authorities for nuisance arising from the slums,26 the latter solely vested the responsibility in the slums and slum-dwellers:
Nuisance, it is stated, originates from overpopulation and slum growth; not
from the government’s failure to provide municipal services, nor its failure to
provide low-income housing as guaranteed in the Delhi Master plan …
26 ‘The grievous failure of local authorities to provide the basic amenity of public conveniences drives the miserable slum- dwellers to ease in the streets, on the sly for a time, and openly thereafter, because under Nature’s pressure, bashfulness becomes a luxury and dignity a difficult art … Providing drainage systems … cannot be evaded if the municipality is to justify its existence’ was the Judge’s explanation in this case (See Ratlam Municipal Council v Vardichan in 1980) 97
[proposing] a new solution: ‘waste generated by slums’ can be dealt with ‘by
preventing the growth of slums’. (2008: 61)
This shift in the articulation of slums and slum-dwellers as nuisance and its cause being portrayed as the increase in slum-dwellers rather than the neglect of the state is epitomised by the rhetoric in this judgment (Almitra Patel v the Union of India):
Rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternative site is like
giving a reward to a pickpocket … The department of slum clearance does not
seem to have cleared any slum despite it [having] being in existence for
decades. In fact more and more slums are coming into existence. Instead of
‘Slum Clearance’ there is ‘Slum Creation’ in Delhi. This in turn gives rise to
domestic waste being strewn on open land in and around the slums. This can
best be controlled at least, in the first instance, by preventing the growth of
slums.27
Such attitudes have been internalised, and are consistently evoked, within the larger state’s urban planning policy and middle-class discourse to ‘essentialise one quarter of the city’s population living in slums as criminal, illegal, filthy, and nuisance causing’ (Ghertner 2008: 61), while also legitimising the brutal, inefficient and arbitrarily conducted demolitions.
Usha Ramanathan (2001) situates slum demolitions in Delhi in a broader context of its urban policies, imagination and aspirations. She states that ‘there is an imputation
27 http://www.elaw.org/node/1420. 98 of criminality’ (2001: 6) in the language through which slums and slum-dwellers are defined in law. This perception, she notes, is not limited only to the matter of illegal encroachment of land, as is evident from the characterisation of a slum in a planning commission document: ‘Socially – slum is a way of life, a special character which has its own set of norms and values reflected in poor sanitation, health values health practices, deviant behaviour and social isolation.’ (Quoted in Ramanathan 2001: 6) It is through these juridical frameworks that demolition drives are accounted for in the city. However, in evaluating the pattern of demolition drives in the city, she contends that:
It is slum clearance which is the objective of the exercise, and not the
improvement of the conditions of life of the slum-dwellers. The low priority
accorded to the provision of basic services in the relocation site reinforces the
belief that it is the exiling of the poor population which is the purpose of the
demolition exercise. (2001: 14)
The Karimnagar slums
Karimnagar is a settlement in Delhi. It shares proximity to Madini Pura Industrial
Estate, which is one of the 28 industrial areas of Delhi prelisted in the Master Plan of
2001. It is also close to the Bhakhalaa Place complex, South Asia’s largest electronic hardware market. The nearby middle-class residential areas are Hanuman Vihar, a middle-class, predominantly Bengali, residential settlement, and Maulvi Gunj, an upper-middle class/middle-class residential area with several apartment blocks. The lower middle-class areas in the vicinity are Mastaan Pura, one of the seven identified cities during the Mughal era, and Ujara-Bihar. 99
The kind of housing is crucial to distinguish middle-class and lower middle-class settlements. Middle-class people live in high-income houses (HIH) or middle-income houses (MIH), while lower middle-class people live in a lower income house (LIH),
Janta flats28 or semi-pucca permanent houses (Kumar, in Basanez et al. 2005: 163).
Possession of such assets as a car, television, refrigerator and telephones – fixed and/or mobile – are the other criteria. On the basis of this classification, Kumar reckons that in Delhi, ’20 percent of the population would be considered in the lower middle class. In total, about 48 per cent of the people living in Delhi would be considered as those belonging to the middle class’ (in Basanez et al. 2005: 163). The middle class in Delhi constitutes a significant proportion of the city’s population and, as discussed in the previous section, wields significant social, cultural, moral and political power.
Karimnagar is a resettlement colony. It is a lower-middle class settlement. Refugees migrating to India after Partition in 1947 and later following the Bangladesh
Liberation War of 1971 were allotted land in this area towards rehabilitation at very minimal or no cost. Between Karimnagar and Mastaan Pura lie the ‘Karimnagar slums’, or ‘the slums of Karimnagar ’, as they are popularly known. These formed the research site for this project.
Even though, in popular usage, the ‘Karimnagar slums’ are referred to as one large slum settlement, in fact the area comprises three slums – or camps as they are
28 Janta literally translates as ‘people’. The Janta Housing Scheme was launched in early 1996 for the economically weaker sections of society, and as many as 20,000 applicants for Janta flats were registered. See http://www.dda.org.in/housing/janta_housing.htm. 100 sometimes known – falling within three different municipal jurisdiction. The three camps are distinct from each other in their population base, community and religious affiliation, and their main economic activities. The three camps are: Lapatagunj camp; Gandhipuri camp; and Puranihaweli camp.
Settlement in Lapatagunj and Puranihaweli began in the early 1970s, while organised settlement in Gandhipuri camp only started around the late 1970s. These three are identified as squatter settlements and slums by the Slum and Juggi-Jhopdi (JJ)
Department, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD).
Along with these three camps, which are identified as slums by the Slum and JJ
Department, there is one other camp: the ‘Resettlement camp’. Even though it is in close proximity to the other camps, it is not technically a slum. Residents of
Gandhipuri and Puranihaweli camps whose houses were demolished in 1992 were allotted plots in the ‘Resettlement camp’ as a stop-gap arrangement before being shifted into a proper resettled location; that shift never took place. The living and material conditions of the Resettlement camp are like those of the other camps; not surprisingly, in popular, everyday reference it is therefore included in the
‘Karimnagar slums’ conglomerate. During my research, I interacted with the members and residents of this camp; however, I did not include it in my broader, more systematic research plan as I was keen to concentrate only on slums and not
‘slum-like’ settlements, the politics of which are distinctly different.
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The cumulative population of the Karimnagar slums is half a million people, spread over an area of 5 square kilometres with approximately 600 families living on every hectare of land.
The ration card: Name, number and identity of slum-dwellers
The ration card sets the trajectories for slum-dwellers to explore and inhabit the city.
A ration card is a ‘document issued under an order or authority of the state government, as per the Public Distribution System, for the purchase of essential commodities from fair price shops’.29 It is issued by the Food and Supplies
Department of the Delhi Government for buying basic food necessities – grain, oil, sugar – at subsidised prices from public distribution shops. The financial status of the household determines the kind of card, and thereby the subsidies, available to the family. The categories are: Above Poverty Line (APL); Below Poverty Line (BPL); and Destitute (homeless and pavement dwellers).
A ration card is an entitlement document for the slum-dwellers, which also serves as legal document – like an identity card, family identity and local residence proof.
Ration cards are important as proof of name, family members and date of entry into the city – a basic requirement to get any subsequent entry into the world of formal work, or for any claim to citizenship. The ration card is incipient to the chain of production of a series of documents to gain entry into different networks of social welfare and work, through identification requirements.
The ration card is important for slum-dwellers for several reasons: it establishes their claims to citizenship in the city; it serves as an important identification document,
29 http://india.gov.in/howdo/howdoi.php?service=7 102 which is essential during the police verifications; it determines their claims to resettlement plots and their sizes; and it forms the basis for ‘real estate’ transactions in the slums.
For instance, when a house is sold to someone in the slums of Karimnagar , it is the malba – the rubble compromising mainly of bricks and mortar – that is sold. Also critical to this transaction is the year printed on the ration card, which establishes the year from which claims to citizenship in the city can be made. When a ‘house’ is sold in the Karimnagar slums, the price is determined by the year marked on the ration card – a document that is passed on to the new owner. For slum-dwellers, this document is of utmost significance, for it is this document that determines the availability and the size of a resettlement plot in the case of demolition of the slum settlement. For those holding a ration card prior to 1990, the assigned size of plot of is 18 square metres; for those holding a post-1990 ration card, it is 12.5 square metres. Any real estate transaction in the Karimnagar slums is motivated by the security of resettlement in a projected future, rather than the promise of the present.
This document records the coordinates of a slum-dweller. The procurement of this document, which is so critical in establishing one’s entity in the city, often requires circumventing the system, as well as falsifying and assuming alternate identities.
Settlement patterns
Karimnagar as a collective space has two identities, almost schizophrenic in their bearings, one legal and another illegal. The land of Karimnagar once belonged to the
Gujjars of the Tuglagabad Fort area. The Gujjars were tribes mainly from Rajasthan 103 and Haryana, who reared cows and buffalos for milk and milk products. Historically, the Gujjars were a strong force. One of their main income generators besides milk and milk products was land. The land where Karimnagar is now located was on the outskirts of Delhi. However, as the city started growing and small industries started to emerge, this land became more and more important. The development of the
Bhakhalaa Place market complex and the emerging Madini Pura Industrial Area was significant in increasing the property values in this area. At that point, in the early
1970s, the Gujjars started selling off their lands and settlements, and the ’legal’
Karimnagar started coming up. This land was later taken over by the government and planned accordingly. For this, the Gujjars received compensation from the government. No one seems to be sure about the ownership or the legalities of the land on which the slums are located (as opposed to the legal part of Karimnagar ).
However, this land had remained uninhabited for a long time with occasional settlements by the nomadic population called the ‘Banjaras’.30
The area around Karimnagar is a resettlement colony, where land was either given to refugees (at Partition in 1947 and after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, as mentioned previously) for free or sold at a nominal rate. The neighbouring colonies are of the same nature. Haphazard buildings and projections mar the landscape of the area. The area’s strategic proximity to the Madini PuraIndustrial Area also defines its character as an urban ghetto with a high density of migrant labourers from other states. This is the legal Karimnagar. The area is divided into fifteen streets. It is along the streets that addresses are then marked. The limitations of space have resulted in
30 The Banjaras (literally translates as ‘nomads’) are a tribe of people who are constantly on the move earning a livelihood by doing many odd jobs but essentially being labourers on construction sites. The Banjaras, historically, were a tribe associated with holding small-time fanfare events and shows. 104 the development of a formal terminology to negotiate through the area; here interconnections between streets are referred to as combinations like ‘house’ in ‘five and a half street’ or ‘shop’ in ’sixth and a quarter’ street.
Opposite the fifteenth street, across the road, is illegal Karimnagar – the ‘slums of
Karimnagar ’ as they are termed in popular usage. However, amongst residents of
Karimnagar and the slums, more immediate legal markers are used to refer to the three camps. While the Lapatagunj camp and Gandhipuri camp are the slums of
Karimnagar , Puranihaweli camp is the slum of Delhi Development Authority (DDA) flats, as this camp is opposite these flats.
Lapatagunj camp was one of the first slums in the area: as mentioned, settlement here started from the early 1970s. Most of the initial settlers were migrant labourers who rented in legal Karimnagar . At that time, the rent was quite reasonable, INR 8–
12 per month (Jiyo Devi, Local head), until the development of Madini Pura
Industrial Area offered livelihood options. With the setting up of small-scale and other industrial units here, the rents shot up dramatically from INR 8–12 to INR 20–
25 per month as Karimnagar became the outpost for this industrial area. It was then that the people started to move in and set up their makeshift houses in the non-legal area.
The period between the 1970s and the late 1990s was favourable to the current and prospective slum-dwellers: government had assured resettled land plots of 12.5 square metres; and the Olga Tellis case of 1985 had categorically identified slum- dwellers’ right to live, safeguarding them against evictions, which ‘contributed to 105 their sense of security’. However, the ‘real reassurance for this sense of security … came from no major evictions taking place after 1977 until 1997–98’ (Kundu 2004:
260).
In this scenario, most of the initial settlers did not mind shifting their base from legal
Karimnagar to the slums, given the economic hardships they could avoid along with the promise of a resettled plot in the future. For this particular group of slum- dwellers, their shift from lower middle-class status to that of slum-dwellers is interesting in terms of understanding notions of social security. Most of them did not mind giving up the immediate social status in anticipation of a secure long-term one:
‘the initial three-four month stay has been extended into 23 years’, remarked one of the respondents at a tea shop. The lost lower middle class-status is reclaimed in different manner in the narratives: while Jeeta Devi, a politician of repute in
Lapatagunj camp, eloquently speaks about her efforts to set up the place, Rajiv, a resident of Lapatagunj camp, was confident about the space he had secured for himself in the resettled colony, whenever that happened. However, Shanti, a first- generation migrant to Lapatagunj camp (this was the family’s first home in the city), does not make any claims of these sorts, as there was no loss involved.
The settlement patterns in the other two camps were similar, except that Gandhipuri camp was the last to be settled on account of a lack of basic amenities – water and electricity. Unlike the other two camps, Gandhipuri camp does not share close proximity with any LIG-MIG settlements, which made it almost impossible for the residents to tap into their networks for these resources as Lapatagunj and
Puranihaweli camp could. A significant proportion of the Bengali population in 106
Puranihaweli camp is from the previously displaced slum community from the neighbouring middle-class residential settlement of Hanuman Bihar, while
Lapatagunj and Gandhipuri camps have a displaced slum community from nearby
Bhakhalaa Place, demolished in 2001 to make way for a spiritual park (Mahadevia
2008).
One of the main reasons why most of the slums’ residents live there is economic feasibility. The earliest settlement patterns, especially in Lapatagunj and
Puranihaweli camps, indicate a shift from lower middle-class area into slums. There were several motives for this, economic reasons being one of them: residents could save money on rent, electricity and water; as slum-dwellers, they did not have to pay taxes; and livelihoods were easily accessible from nearby factories. However, along with these rationalisations, the shift into the slums was seen as a strategic move to acquire resettled land in due course. The migration settlement patterns, such as a shift from a village or a smaller town into the slums, are motivated by economic considerations as well. These are the two main settlement patterns in Karimnagar slums. Along with economic viability, these shifts are also influenced by social, cultural and political considerations.
Most of the residents of the Karimnagar slums hail from small towns or villages – primarily from the states of Uttarpradesh, West Bengal, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya
Pradesh and Maharastra, where the social, cultural and moral climate is rigid, conservative and restricted, based on strictly demarcated and defined caste, class and gender roles with prescribed responsibilities. In this context it is not possible for men and women to break social and cultural barriers and undertake jobs outside of their 107 prescriptive caste, class and gender roles. Slums, however, offer a possibility to negotiate these barriers and roles. For instance, many residents of the Karimnagar slums – mostly women but also men – work in middle-class households as cleaners or cooks, an economic undertaking they would not have been able to pursue in their hometown or village on account of social-cultural pressures. Also, for many upper- caste men and women, it allows a move beyond caste hierarchies and roles and enables them to take jobs otherwise not allowed; these include, but are not limited to, being garbage pickers, working in leather factories, or working as cooks and domestic servants.
This is not to suggest that Karimnagar slums have no caste, class and gender hierarchies. The compulsion to earn a livelihood, along with the distance, social, spatial, cultural, moral and psychological factors carried from their native homelands, allows the residents of the Karimnagar slums to negotiate around such issues.
The three camps of the Karimnagar slums: The markets
The three camps, Lapatagunj, Gandhipuri and Puranihaweli, are distinct from each other – though this is not necessarily obvious to an outsider. An open drain separates
Lapatagunj camp from Gandhipuri camp, while a main road divides Gandhipuri and
Puranihaweli camps. The distinctions between the three camps are highlighted by their markets. Each camp specialises in certain markets, which lends it a particular materiality while revealing the community, religious and caste affiliations specific to each camp.
108
All the camps lie alongside a main road connecting south Delhi to southwest Delhi.
Most of the LIG and MIG31 settlements are located across this road. Most of the local markets of Karimnagar slums are strategically situated alongside this road, as they cater both to the local Karimnagar as well as the LIG-MIG population.
Lapatagunj camp is closest – spatially, socially and culturally – to legal Karimnagar and the Madinipura Industrial Area, where ‘sweatshop’-type production houses thrive. These sweatshops provide an important occupational engagement for the residents of this camp. The camp is divided into three communal affiliations: lower caste communities who are professional cleaners/sweepers; fortune tellers from
Maharastra; and fruit sellers from Uttar Pradesh, comprising both Hindus and
Muslims. The fruit sellers do not set up their stalls in the camp, but in a daily haat – vegetable market – that is held across the road. There are a few tea stalls catering to the workers in the production houses. Within and outside the camp, the two communities of cleaners and fortune tellers are socially and culturally ostracised on the basis of caste, and implied cultural decadence and moral bankruptcy. Even the social workers operating in this space do not venture into these areas until and unless absolutely necessary, evoking ‘alcoholism, crime and dirt’ as the main hindrances.
The lack of markets in this camp is attributed to the presence of these communities:
Even if we wanted to set up shops, no one would come. It is the better for us to
explore into other territories. (M, 40, tea stall owner)
31 LIG: Lower Income Group and MIG: Middle Income Group, classification done by Delhi Development Agency (DDA). 109
Gandhipuri camp, on the other hand, has a thriving market specialising in meat products and plastic goods – sheets, containers, and so on. A significant percentage of Gandhipuri camp’s population is Muslim, a group that traditionally deals in meat products – which explains the concentration of this business in the area. The density of the plastic market is remarkable to Western and middle-class sensibilities; it is an important element of Karimnagar ’s materiality and demands some discussion.
Two kinds of housing that are prevalent in Karimnagar : pucca (concrete) and kaccha (makeshift). The materials used for pucca houses are bricks, cement and iron.
The kaccha houses, on the other hand, use bricks, wood, bamboo and plastic sheets, which are used to shield the houses from both the sun and the rain. Plastic is affordable and durable. Also, in situations where demolitions – part or complete – are undertaken, plastic sheets are easy to shift from one location to another, makeshift, one. The plastic containers – usually having the capacity to hold 20 litres as a minimum – are very important aspects of the landscape of the Karimnagar slums. A shortage of running water means residents have to constantly evolve ingenious ways to store water. The plastic containers serve this purpose while also being used for storage of other kinds as well. Each household has at least one, if not more, of these plastic containers. These containers are also often used to hold up a wall or boundary. They are also in demand to serve the needs of the production houses in legal Karimnagar , as well as the storage needs of LIG-MIG residents, as water is scarce in these areas as well.
The plastic market of Gandhipuri camp is a very profitable business. Most of these shops, however, are not owned by the residents of the camp – which explains the 110 camp’s high poverty levels; it is the poorest camp of the three. ‘Outsiders’ – as they are referred to – own most of these shops. Outsiders are families who have shifted to legal colonies in order to escape the stigma of being a slum-dweller:
A few years back all the shops were demolished. Those whose shops were
demolished were entitled to resettlement and a lot of them got plots either in
Kondli or Narela.32 However, as the pressure of the authorities started to ease,
most of the families came back and once more built their shops. Most of them
sold their resettlement plots, bribed officials for fake I-cards [ration cards] to
become eligible for resettlement in the next lot of demolition as well. They have
shifted out of the slums into legalised colonies but they still want to retain control
over this space on two accounts: first, the business is profitable over here; and
second, they will be able to claim resettlement plots yet again. (Male, 32,
shopkeeper, Gandhipuri camp)
A few households were resettled in the Resettlement camp. Even though the residents of this camp are technically resettled, and thereby legal, their everyday life still involves negotiations through the slum-dweller lens. This camp, as mentioned earlier in the chapter, was not part of my research site.
Puranihaweli camp is the most prosperous camp in the slum cluster. Its population base is distinctly divided amongst Bengalis (immigrants from West Bengal and
Bangladesh after the Bangladesh Liberation war) and non-Bengali settlers. The latter comprise families mainly from Uttar Pradesh, but also from Haryana and Rajasthan.
32 Two resettlement colonies in Delhi. 111
There are limited interactions between the two communities at an everyday level. A further discussion of these interactions will be undertaken in subsequent chapters.
Puranihaweli camp has several market pockets specialising in different commodities.
On the main road, the vegetable market is held daily. This market caters to the local as well as a significant LIG-MIG33 population. As the vegetable market shares proximity with the slums, the prices of the vegetable are considerably lower than in other middle-class areas, attracting customers from this area. It is not easy to set up a stall in this area. One has to bribe local police personnel, acquire consent from local politicians and other important parties, and pay rent to the shopkeeper in front of whose shop the stall is set up. These shops alongside the road specialise in bamboo and woodwork. Most of these shops are owned by people from Uttar Pradesh, a northern state in India, where shopkeeping is a traditional professional for many communities. As mentioned earlier, these shops cater to the architectural needs of the local residents, as bamboo is an essential architectural feature of houses in all camps.
It also provides bulk orders to other slum areas in the city.
Puranihaweli camp is also distinct from the other camps in that it has a thriving market within the camp. This is called the Bengali Market. It is an organised and formal market controlled by the Bengalis, who form a significant proportion of the population of this camp. This market is further demarcated into specialised units offering specific commodities catering to the needs of Bengalis within and outside the camp. There is a specialised fish, jewellery and cloth market. One of the nearby
33 LIG: Low Income Group. MIG: Middle Income Group
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MIG settlements, Hanuman Bihar, has a high population of Bengalis, who patronise this market at an everyday level, contributing to the prosperity level of the Bengali community within Puranihaweli camp.
Materiality of the Karimnagar slums
Besides the peculiarity of the markets, the material fabric of the Karimnagar slums is strikingly uniform. Most of the housing types, as mentioned above, vary between the pucca and kaccha. The construction of these, however, depends on the location.
Most of the constructions on the main road are up to three to four levels, used both for residential and commercial purposes. These are usually pucca constructions that use bricks, concrete, plastic, bamboo and wood for framing purposes. The tallest of these constructions, despite having three floors, is no more than 7 metres. As these lie on the main road, which is just over 3 metres wide, though congested with the markets around, they give a sense of space compared to the interiors of the slums.
The inside of Karimnagar is a very different reality. Most of the constructions inside the camps cannot be strictly categorised as pucca or kaccha, reflecting an ingenious usage of materials and optimisation of space. The streets are narrow, no more than
1 metre to 1.3 metres, in most instances. The tallest of the constructions inside of the camps is just over 3 metres. The houses are not only incestuously woven into each other but are in each other. The lack of space and the density of population necessitate architectural innovations, with a house’s roof serving as makeshift rooms for others, or several households having to share a common entrance. Drains, flowing or blocked, mark the trajectories on the space. With the exception of
Puranihaweli camp, none of the other camps has a dense concentration of a market, 113 though there are intermittent shops, dealing in a variety of merchandise, spread across the camps.
Living the space: Ownership, education, and basic amenities
It is not possible to generalise about the slums of Karimnagar in terms of categories of uniform levels and conditions of living and poverty. Such conditions are not only symptomatic of economic status; they also imply poverty of social, cultural and political capital, limiting the access of the slum-dwellers to the city. The slums settlement is a classic example of urbanisation of poverty (see Davis 2006). It is cluttered and crowded. The houses are woven into each other, often more like rooms of a larger house than houses in themselves, with a common entrance. Jeeta Devi, a local politician of Lapatagunj camp, feels this lack of space is compensated for by a strong sense of social cohesiveness prevalent in slums:
Across the roads, there live people with so many rooms in the house that
parents do not have an idea about their children. The children are in their
room while the parents in theirs. While the parents think that the children are
in their rooms studying, the sneak out and indulge in all sorts of things,
alcohol and other addictions. At least in Karimnagar , people know what their
children are doing. They can control them.
Ownership
Regarding ownership, most of the people own the houses in which they live but the land belongs to the state, thereby sale deeds involving rights over land cannot be 114 consolidated. The prevalence of cheap, mobile material to construct houses assumes importance in this context. During demolitions, most residents systematically deconstruct their house – its bricks, bamboo frames and plastic sheets – to shift to a new location. When a house is sold, the party is only charged for the material and labour, not the land. Renting is not a very common practice in the Karimnagar slums.
In such cases, the tenants are usually members of extended social networks.
Patterns of ownership: The case of Rajiv’s unit
I met Rajiv in early 2004 with Dr Tacchi for DFID’s Role of ICTs in Poverty
Alleviation project. He was one of our initial key respondents, and subsequently his family members were also respondents. My relationship with the family continued during my PhD research as well. Rajiv ran a tea shop in Lapatagunj camp with help from his wife and three sons. During the research period, Rajiv succumbed to a long- term illness, and his wife took over the shop and expanded the business. His two sons got married to two sisters, they each had a child in the first year, and finally one of them shifted out of the parental home on account of discord between his mother and wife.
Rajiv shifted to the settlement with his family and was one of the first-generation residents. He and his wife spoke nostalgically about loss with reference to their experience before and after a near-fatal accident, which drastically altered their lives.
Rajiv had a confirmed job in Dubai as a chef but a month before he was due to leave; he had a road accident which left him bedridden for almost two years, after which he never fully recovered.
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Rajiv’s family lives in Lapatagunj camp along the main road separating legal
Karimnagar from its illegal counterpart. He and his family live in a room that opens into the tea shop, also on the main road. This unit has a common entrance, and two other families are part of it: Geeta, the widow; and ‘Shelesh’s parents’, as they are referred to.
Geeta is a single parent who is raising her son without any support from her family.
For her, living in slums represented a drastic shift in her social status and cultural contexts. She had moved into Lapatagunj camp with her husband in 1985 twenty years earlier. They shifted to the city to work as migrant labourers from a village in
Rajasthan where women are allowed few or no social, cultural or political rights.
Rajiv and his family are a family affected by the financial burden caused by his accident which, owing to his frail health, also limited his ability to explore alternative employment avenues. Ironically, it was because of the accident that Rajiv was given a separate settlement by his extended family to ensure that he could run an independent business, as other sources of income were limited.
Shyam’s parents are an elderly, highly respected couple in the community; this is because they insisted on a professional education for all their children – including two daughters, which is not very common – to ensure they could shift out of the slums, as they have. They now live there alone.
The entire household within the same unit has independent toilets. Barring Rajiv’s household, the two other households have a spare room that is not rented out. Geeta’s 116 house is well decorated and arranged in artistic fashion, with various posters of film stars, god(s) and some collage made by her son. She has a TV, fridge and radio. She is one of the very few families in the Karimnagar slums where each member has a room to themselves. Her son studies in a private, English medium school outside of the slum.
Individuals, groups and communities in the Karimnagar slums are exempted from certain social and cultural restrictions on account of their disempowered position.
Geeta is a case in point, as discussed in Chapter 2. Her involvement in trading illicit liquor – something which is not socially permissible for women – was allowed on account of her being a widow.
The Rajiv unit is one of the better-off conglomerations of families in the Karimnagar slums. Rajiv’s household also has a servant – Raju, a young boy of ten to twelve years who stayed with the family, due to family abuse and an alcoholic father. His relationship with Rajiv’s household is a classic case of the patron–servant system prevalent in the slums, as well as in other social, cultural contexts in the country. In this system, a young boy or girl from a poor family is taken in by a more secure one.
In return for his or her services, the family provides shelter, food and sometimes education. Raju lives with the family, occasionally visiting his own family to give money to his mother. The settlement has a lot of tea shops/shacks where young boys like Raju are employed. Some of them are from the same settlement, while others belong to neighbouring ones.
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Compared with this unit, Shanti, a widow living in an inner area of Lapatagunj camp, is highly impoverished. She belongs to the first generation of residents of the settlement and does not have any claims in the imagined resettlement. Shanti lives in one room of a larger unit, sharing it with eight other residents. They all belong to either the same village or district, and are related. This unit is dominated by single women: Shanti is a widow; her elder daughter has left her husband; and another relative – only eighteen years old – is also a widow. On account of being a widow,
Shanti is also allowed certain exemptions. She does not have to pay the cable TV monthly rental. However, she categorically denies deriving any pleasure from TV viewing: ’It belonged to my late husband and there is no way I am going to part with it.’ Her narrative, as discussed in the previous chapter, was consistently shrouded by the rhetoric of lack while in conversation with ‘others’ – in this instance, me – who could potentially be representative of state or NGO extended help.
Education and employment
Most residents of the Karimnagar slums are semi-literate. Even though most children
– boys and girls – attend primary school, the dropout rates are high. This is for several reasons: inability to cope with academic pressure; the compulsion to start contributing to the household income, especially for boys; and restrictions on mobility for girls. There are no schools, government or private, in the Karimnagar slums, but there are two government schools 1 kilometre away in Ujara Bihar, which are attended by most children of the Karimnagar slums. Attendance at private schools is very limited, as most families cannot bear the costs. Puranihaweli camp has a school run by a prominent NGO; however, the students mostly come from the camp itself or nearby lower middle-class areas such as Mastaan Pura. This is on two 118 accounts: the first is the limited interactions between the three camps and the restrictions on mobility, especially for women. This I will discuss at length in subsequent chapters. Second, this school is affiliated with the National Institute of
Open Schooling34 (NOS) which, while allowing students flexibility in terms of age and curriculum, has an exam schedule and results that do not correspond with other universities, making it difficult for its students to seek admission in other institutions.35
Factories, construction sites, middle-class households and other informal sectors provide employment options to slum-dwellers. Owing to limited education and skills, along with social and cultural prejudices that restrict their access, slum-dwellers find it difficult to find employment in formal sectors. Their job tenures are insecure and not bound by contract, which increases the chance of harassment and exploitation.
Basic amenities: Electricity, water and toilets
After a 2004 ruling,36 the three private power companies were obliged to give legal electricity connections to slum-dwellers. Since then, almost all connections in the
Karimnagar slums have been legalised, with very few instances of tampering with middle-class connections. Even though the power supply is erratic – especially during summer – the situation has improved dramatically since 2005 when the ruling came into practice. The legalisation put an end to the exploitation of the residents by middle-men (and women) – usually the local, influential politician of the camp –
34 http://www.nos.org/ 35 See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/delhi/Open-school-students-stranded-/articleshow/833037.cms.
36 http://www.hindu.com/2004/03/31/stories/2004033107110400.htm.
119 who collected money to bribe the officials, and more often than not pocketed the money the slum dwellers paid for their supply, leading to power being cut due to non-payment.
Puranihaweli and Lapatagunj camps have water supplied from drilling into pipelines that provide water to the nearby legal colonies. The supply is erratic, and often there is a long wait because the number of taps is limited, and usually there is insufficient water to meet the demands of the entire population. However, the situation in
Puranihaweli and Lapatagunj camps is considerably better than that in Gandhipuri camp, which does not have a single outlet as such, for it does not share proximity with any legal pipeline networks.
There are households in Puranihaweli and Lapatagunj camps that have a personal water connection, which essentially means that they have borne the expenses for drilling into the pipeline, and providing the hardware (taps, pipes, etc.). The tap is usually outside the house, with control over its supply maintained by the family in question with an extension of a tap-like knob in the house. The households that have control over water connections exercise significant social and cultural power – in
Chapter 6, these networks will be mapped to highlight the politics of space and sound in the Karimnagar slums.
During the hours when these taps have water, the materiality of Karimnagar slums witnesses a dramatic change. From corners and nooks, small girls, young boys, old women and pregnant women emerge armed with all sorts of water storage equipment
– plastic bottles and cartons, buckets and other vessels. And it is at this moment that the power play is visible: it becomes clear who holds important positions in the 120
Karimnagar slums. Those households with taps are the centre; this is where the crowds collect. Some of those seeking water are regulars – that is, those who are allowed to fill water based on some mutual understanding. They come and wait patiently for their turn while others – those who do not have such an arrangement – wander. The whole scene is quite chaotic: fights break out, especially between children, while ‘scavenging for water’, as it is referred to colloquially.
Most households in the Karimnagar slums do not have a private, independent toilet.
A family that can afford a toilet is usually socially important, with economic stability. Others have to use public toilets, which are very poorly maintained. The use of these toilets is not free. Each camp has two public toilets with some mobile toilet units.
Lack of adequate water and sanitation infrastructures is the most pressing concern for slum-dwellers. These are often invoked by middle-class residents to insist that slum- dwellers are ‘filthy, dirty and smelly’; however, in these narratives, infrastructural limitations – or even the failure of state agencies, MCD, to extend these services in the slums – are rarely acknowledged. These are simply articulated as symptomatic of the lifestyle choice of the slum-dwellers.
Mike Davis, in Planet of Slums, identifies its origin of ‘global sanitation crisis’ as lying:
… as with many Third World urban problems … in colonialism. The
European empires generally refused to provide modern sanitation and water 121
infrastructures in native neighborhoods, preferring instead to use racial
zoning and cordons sanitaires to segregate garrisons and white suburbs from
epidemic disease. (2006: 139)
In India, a rigid caste system with practices such as untouchability only reiterates the social and cultural distance, consolidating the position of those whose sanitary conditions and habits are outside the pure and chaste Brahaminical order as ‘other’ – in this instance, the slum-dwellers. This, however, does not mean that caste hierarchies in the Karimnagar slums are absent.
Even though it falls under the MCD’s purview to maintain the public and mobile toilet units, their upkeep is far from being to a hygienic standard. The lack of water, density of population and callousness of MCD officials37 leave these toilets poorly maintained and blocked for months, sometimes even years. Moreover, these facilities are charged for: one visit to the public toilet costs INR 2. Residents of the
Karimnagar slums who can exercise the options – mainly men and children – take to defecating in open spaces. This very private, sensually low act is condemned by the middle class and has led to unleashing violence on slum-dwellers (Baviskar 2005) in instances exemplified by the ‘three slum-dwellers who in 1998 were ”shot for shitting in public places”’ (Davis 2006: 139).
37 See http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/what-are-you-doing-about-public-toilets-court-asks-civic- body_100185327.html; http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/uncategorized/this-delhi-student-doesnt-mind-battling- alone_10090764.html; http://www.igovernment.in/site/Court-blasts-Delhi-seeks-report-on-public- toilets/http://ccs.in/ccsindia/ecatalyst/december08/Shahana.pdf
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The Karimnagar slums and their immediate neighbourhood
Slums are contested spaces. In the mainstream media representation, they are considered to be plagued with the persistent residual problems of modernity and urbanity: dirt, crime, filth, disease and unhygienic conditions. Jiyo Devi, the local politician from Lapatagunj camp, vehemently denied such categorisation, replacing poverty with happiness levels:
There is only 1 per cent of poverty level in the slum settlement. Everyone is
well educated and have access to basic facilities. The cumulative income of
the families is very high, as most [all] the family members work in
production houses [sweat shops]. If some people are poor that is because of
other social problems, addictions, gambling … etc.; otherwise, everyone is
’happy’ and no one is ‘poor’.
The evocations of the people living in the slum regarding the slums were mixed.
Within Rajiv’s unit, for Geeta – even though the initial move into the slums was a downward shift in her social status – it is a matter of pride for her to maintain an independent establishment in the city without relying on either her family or in-laws.
Shelesh’s parents do not want to shift in spite of the fact that their son has managed to shift into a middle-class locality. Their daughters also have managed to move out of the slums. They, however, do not live in Delhi. Even if they did, Shelesh’s mother remarked she would ‘still not live with them as in Indian culture girl’s parents cannot be a burden on their daughters.’. One of the reasons is the promise of the imagined resettlement, but also a sense of community that is presumed to be missing in sanitised middle-class settlements. 123
However, Shanti’s narrative was shrouded with the rhetoric of absence:
We live in slums; there are no facilities over here. You people live properly –
do something for me.
From the outside, the space is problematised within social and moral categories.
Kanta Sharma, head of the Community Initiative at the Astha Ghar School told me that the residents of the DDA flats have a problem with the slums in the neighbourhood because they feel ‘unsafe’ due to the density of ‘anti-social’ activities in the area. In a park shared by the DDA residents and the slum-dwellers, their presence is considered to encourage drug usage and prostitution. The DDA residents have offered monetary support to Astha Ghar if the Community Initiative can improve the situation. Kanta Sharma remarked:
The people living in the DDA flats are ‘respectable’ people. Some of them
are even high government officials; obviously they will feel intimidated by
the presence of the slum-dwellers.
Ajay Sharma is resident manager of Karimnagar Arya Samaj38 Centre – this centre runs vocational classes, and allows space for discussions and meetings for its members, amongst other activities. Even though the centre is located in Lapatagunj camp, because it is a religious organisation and is funded by contribution and donations of its members, it has a proper structure with all the basic facilities.
Sharma and his wife, who run this centre and are responsible for its general upkeep,
38 A religious sect in India; see http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/37454/Arya-Samaj. 124 maintain a staunch, almost stoic, distance from the slums, insisting that this involvement is transferable and their next stint will not be in the slums. He, in a similar vein as the medical practitioner discussed in Chapter 2, laments the lack of social, cultural and moral values amongst slum-dwellers, categorically holding them responsible for their own condition, especially on account of their ‘laziness’.
Johnnie runs a restaurant in legal Karimnagar with his brother. He vehemently opposed the idea of living in slums, adding – not without a hint of pride – that it is very rare to find people from Kerela (his origin) living in slums. For him, it was not about poverty levels, as he acknowledged the fact that not all people living in the slums were poor. It was about compromising with ’living’ conditions and avoiding working hard enough to sustain a lifestyle in a ‘decent’ place – slum-dwellers do not pay rent and are not taxed. However, he held inefficient governance responsible for the slums being in the state they are:
If the government allows for the slums to come up; they should take adequate
effort to maintain it also.
Within the Karimnagar slums, poverty was identified as lack of education, lack of technical skills, lack of employment opportunities, a proliferation of medical problems and the sense of being ‘unsettled’ and under the constant threat of eviction.
Deviant sites
According to Foucault (1967), slums are the heterotopias of urban materiality:
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which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in
which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of
this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate
their location in reality.39
Slums are representative of classic problems of cities – a lack of space, density of population, infrastructural limitations – only in an amplified way. Owing to these factors, everyday living in slums necessitates renegotiations with established, approved social, cultural and moral frameworks, and these often evoke a sense of threat, fear and disgust amongst the middle classes.
Through heterotopias – the spaces between real and ideal space – Foucault (1967) illustrates the manner in which ‘the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space’. The construction and representation of space are located within a set of relations – social, cultural, political, moral and legal – predominant in any given context. Heterotopias are embedded in social, political and moral oppositions of public–private, pleasure–work and knowledge–experience. They are the spaces of the ‘other’ and for the ‘other’. In these spaces, the ‘normal’ is transcended for an alternative, phantasmagorical experience where the constructs of identity, sexuality, reality and morality are contested and inverted. Foucault contends that the heterotopiascan be classified into two broad categories: crisis and deviance. While heterotopias of crisis are reserved for individuals who are ‘privileged or sacred or forbidden’ (Foucault 1967) in the form of temples or brothels, the heterotopias of
39 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. 126 deviance are where ‘individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed’ (Foucault 1967). Rest homes, psychiatric wards and prisons are heterotopias of deviance.
Slums, then, as they are represented in middle-class rhetoric, are these heterotopias of deviance in the urban experience and imagination. Within this schematic, the violence perpetrated on the slums and slum-dwellers by the state on behalf of the middle classes through acts of walling, demolitions and resettlement is not only justified in the name of development but considered humanitarian and moralistic by those in power.
In an interview, Sheila Dixit, the Chief Minister of Delhi, categorically stated:
We do not want to have a city with slums … We‘re working toward this goal,
which is something that has to be achieved both on humanitarian grounds and
in terms of the beautification of the city40.
Dixit justified the ‘urgent’ spate of demolitions using a twofold logic: ‘First, slum- dwellers have no place in a modern city and must often be moved so that new infrastructure can be built; second, destroying slums is a humane act.’ The
‘humaneness’ of the act is supported by the fact that the conditions ‘they are living in are appalling, really appalling … [they] live in inhuman, unhygienic conditions.’41
40 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/01/news/delhi.php. 41 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/01/news/delhi.php. 127
Dixit’s concerns regarding the slums and slum-dwellers match the mainstream middle-class aspiration to a ‘Clean, Green Delhi’, as discussed in Chapter 1. This schematic categorically places the slums outside of the scope of modernity (Nandy
1983), which is employed as a justification for the brutal demolishment as well as the unorganised, inefficient resettlement in the peripheral areas of Delhi.42 Baviskar
(2003) contends that ‘urban development, like other modes of state-making, attempts to transform the relations between populations and spaces, in the process of displacing and impoverishing large sections of citizenry’ (2003: 97). The infliction of this violence, she continues, ‘is not only about reproducing the state nationally and internationally and securing resources for capitalist restructuring, but it also includes interventions aimed at improving environmental quality of life for Delhi’s bourgeoisie’ (2003: 97). In the language employed by the state departments and in middle-class expression, this violence – ‘the project of disciplining the poor’ (2003:
92) – is legitimised by the elite aspiration for a ‘world-class’ city with First World infrastructural amenities and a ‘clean, green’ environment: settings for a modern, developed city. These discourses further invoke (ever so subtly) the ‘moral responsibility’ of the state departments and the middle class to liberate slum-dwellers from ‘appalling, really appalling … inhuman, unhygienic conditions’.43
Nadeem Bhat, writing for Newstrack, a news portal which claims it ‘takes into consideration the views and opinions of the population at large’ and also claims to work ‘for the upliftment of the weaker sections and groups’, chronicles the living conditions in one of the slums in Delhi. This news piece is representative of the
42 http://www.karmayog.org/urbandvlp/urbandvlp_14129.htm.The scope of this thesis does not permit a detailed analysis of the resettlement politics and policies in Delhi. 43 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/01/news/delhi.php. 128 middle-class articulation of the slum and slum-dwellers. It is also indicative of the manner in which slums are represented in the mainstream media. Even though a careful reading of this news piece suggests that the author intends to raise alarm about the living conditions in the slums, he invariably portrays slum-dwellers as apathetic to their conditions, socially inept, morally corrupt and dwelling in the heterotopia of deviance:
The quality of their life is below standard and in no way better than the
animals they domesticate …
The level of ignorance is unthinkable and you will find people indulging into
almost all heinous crimes, as if they have got a right to do them and it comes
to them as a routine. The community people exhibit an aggressive behavior,
there is high infant mortality rate, domestic violence is a norm, safe drinking
water is just a dream, diseases are but inevitable. Spouses consider wife
battering as their right, children take labor as their duty and parents assert
their right to make them work, women keep conceiving till it stops naturally
… Living in such conditions is a challenge and the communities have neither
regrets nor reservations. They are truly downtrodden.
Sanitised spaces: Cities without slums
Teresa Caldeira’s study of Sao Paulo’s ‘newer gated communities’, or condominios fechados, maps ‘how the urban and political form is inextricably linked, and the ways the built environment serves as an arena for political contest and democracy’s 129 reproduction of social inequality’.44’ In her work, she unveils the manner in which urbanisation and democratisation processes since the mid-1970s in Brazil have reconfigured the experience, imagination and layout of cities.
Caldeira’s work (2001) is based on the changing politics of inclusion and exclusion of the city’s periphery. She explored the manner in which newer democratisation policies brought significant changes in urban planning, altering the city–periphery hierarchy and relationship. In essence, her main interest area was to explore the dynamics of slow social movements and increases in violence after democratisation.
Gradually, since the 1970s, the periphery of the city which earlier illagally housed workers became legal. Over time, the workers were priced out and the periphery became the home of gatted communities for the wealthy – shifting the workers into the centre, which had become associated with danger and violence. In an interview with Warren Perry, she chronicles how in the 1970s the ‘population on the periphery’, called for infrastructure and basic rights – to water and electricity, as well as the right to be taken into consideration by the city’s administration: ‘They wanted urban citizenship.’ (Caldeira/Perry 2000: 123). Because of these demands, which the administration could not ignore, the periphery was empowered: ‘it was urbanized … and ultimately incorporated … into the city’ (Caldeira/Perry 2000: 123).
In the new constituted geographies, the position of the urban poor radically changed:
the periphery became legal, property value increased, and the fact that the
periphery was urbanized was another reason for property values to increase.
44 http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2009/01/occupying-slum.html. 130
This coincided with a huge economic crisis, which meant that in some cases
the middle classes could no longer afford to live in the centre – so you had
this movement of middle classes to what had shortly before been peripheral
areas. Now you had this periphery that had risen in market value to the extent
that it was no longer affordable to workers, and these workers then had to
find other housing solutions – usually in the form of slums … in Sao Paulo,
you had the rich in the centre, the middle-class surrounded the rich, and the
poor were on the periphery. But with all the subsequent transformations, this
mapping in which you can plot social class onto this concentric diagram
disappeared … the rich started moving to the periphery, because they began
to think that the centre was becoming too dangerous and violence was
increasing … the construction of American-type suburbs [started] in Brazil in
the 1980s and 90s especially. And those were all constructed in the form of
gated communities. (Caldeira/Perry 2000: 126)
The construction of a walled slum in Delhi – Karimnagar being the only one in the city – is an indication of a similar concern of the part of the middle classes with keeping themselves separate, only in this case it is the slums that are ‘gated’. The organisation of the middle-class apartment blocks and private houses shares similarities with that depicted in Sao Paulo in City of Walls in terms of the ways in which these spaces are highly suspicious of the entries and movements of the
‘others’ – the urban poor – in these neighbourhoods. Looking further afield, urban developments in the form of ‘satellite cities’ around Delhi are increasingly gravitating towards creating ‘walled neighbourhoods’.
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Gurgaon: Elite walled neighbourhood
Gurgaon45 is one of the most prominent satellite cities of Delhi. The development of this area coincided with the increasing prosperity of the middle class following liberalisation in the 1990s. While middle-class residential areas in the city had an organic growth pattern, the area in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi, allowed developments in its architectural and urban layout that clearly incorporated the aspirations and ambitions of the burgeoning middle class for segregated experiences.
Somini Sengupta investigates one such ‘walled neighbourhood’ – Hamilton Court – for The Herald Times.46 Hamilton Court is a typical apartment block, exclusively developed for the middle classes, ‘complete with a private school within its gates, groomed lawns and security guards’.47. Across the road are the slums of Chakkarpur, where the maids, cooks, drivers and guards who work in Hamilton Court live. The manner in which the residents of Hamilton Court position themselves vis-à-vis the
‘outside’ world in this article resounds with middle-class arrogance and ‘antagonism of urban middle classes to the poor’:48
‘Women and children are not encouraged to go outside,’ said Madan Mohan
Bhalla, president of the Hamilton Court Resident Welfare Association. ‘If
they want to have a walk, they can walk inside. It‘s a different world outside
the gate … The guards at the gate are instructed not to let nannies take
children outside, and men delivering pizza or okra are allowed in only with
45 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurgaon. 46 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/09/asia/09gated.php. 47 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/09/asia/09gated.php?page=1. 48 http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2009/01/01/seabrook. 132
permission. Once, Bhalla recalled proudly, a servant caught spitting on the
lawn was beaten up by the building staff.’49
The regulation of these movements – located in the architectural planning and a discourse of fear – is akin to Calderia’s mapping of the connections between
‘architectural developments and social control and control of space’ (Perry 2000:
133) vis-à-vis the servants:
This suburban dream of living in secured enclaves depends entirely on the
services of working class people, basically on maids and guards. The
relationships are totally ambiguous. Having servants is traditional for the
Brazilian middle classes; it comes from the slave tradition and has continued
ever since. The elite have always had servants and the middle class have
always had servants. The intimacy of the servants in the household is
absolutely incredible, because these are the people who take care of the
whole house, the children, and basically everything else … Yet, the servants
are carefully kept apart. (Perry 2000: 135)
However, the organic pattern – and history – of urban development within the city
(Bhaviskar 2004; Srivastava 2009) limits the possibilities of creating these ‘gated communities’; the space – quite literally – limits the scope of this endeavour. The
Master Plan for Delhi – which sets out the basic fundamentals for land distribution, planning and control (see Chapter 1) – exemplifies the state‘s anxiety about controlling spaces and social order through architectural planning (see Ramanathan
49 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/09/asia/09gated.php?page=2 133
2001; Dupont 2008; Tarlo 2003; Bavisakr 2003). However, in the context of this present debate, ‘organic’ patterns and histories of development are not unequivocally evoked to suggest a generic trend. Rather, it is used as a lens to contextualise urban development in areas like Karimnagar , which in the initial phases of urban development were identified as the peripheral (Caldeira 2000), and thereby were placed outside of the ‘planned logic’.
Sainik Farm: Legitimate middle-class ‘slums’
Another interesting illustration of the ways in which urban planning has been manipulated based on the interests of the middle classes and the wealthy comes in the form of a different kind of walled or gated community, which cynically draws on the rhetoric of slum-dwellers and their rights (or lack of them). Sainik Farm is an illegal residential settlement in Delhi. Unlike the crowded and densely packed residential units of Karimnagar , this is the site of large mansions on spacious green plots:
A large tract of land was left in Delhi to maintain the greenery. However the
rich and powerful bought tracts of land there ostensibly to farm but built huge
mansions there. Delhi High Court declared 99A B, 102 ,106 Mehtas‘ A B C
as illegal but most have refused to move out. At present at least one Cabinet
Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar maintains his residence there.
134
There are a number of other politicians living in Sainik Farms. And
supposedly, according to the Sainik Farm’s Resident Welfare Association,
Sainik Farm is on the verge of becoming legalized.50
Even though the settlement is illegal, neither the space nor its residents have been ostracised in the same way as slum-dwellers. In a recent court hearing seeking regularisation of the settlement, the lawyers representing the Sainik Farm residents equated their position with that of slum-dwellers, insisting that ‘the government was discriminating against them by not regularising their colony’.51 The court, however,
‘told the residents of Sainik Farm that they were not equal to slum-dwellers and were not entitled to regularisation’.52
In Karimnagar , the urbanisation of the periphery (Caldeira 2000) in the mid-1970s necessitated a reconfiguration of space. The proximity to industrial units – including
MadinipuraIndustrial Area53 – attracted migrant labourers from all across the country. However, the increased urbanisation of this area also meant that there was a substantial rise in the real estate rates, which the migrant labourers could not afford.
These urban poor – as in the case of Sao Paulo – had to explore other alternatives; this – amongst other developments mapped in Chapter 1 – was one of the main reasons for the development of the slums in Karimnagar . Even though most of the labour used by the industrial units in Madini Pura Industrial Area is provided by the slum-dwellers for low wages, their presence is still undesirable, as Mr H. A., General
Secretary of the Madini Pura Industries Association, points out: ‘Another disturbing
50 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainik_Farm. 51 http://news.indiainfo.com/2009/01/15/0901150249_sainik.html. 52 http://news.indiainfo.com/2009/01/15/0901150249_sainik.html. 53 http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/businessline/2001/10/10/stories/12101801.htm. 135 feature [is] the slums in the vicinity housing about 80,000 slums dwellings. In addition to polluting the area, the slums further threaten the ground reserves of the area.’
The choice of isolating their lives from the ‘others’ – slums and slum-dwellers – is not available to the middle classes within the city; however, they still want to insist on the distance (Nandy 1983), which is being instituted by creating ‘walled neighbourhoods’ in reverse. Instead of their own neighbourhoods, they are walling the slums to highlight the distance. Jeremy Seabrook maps the process of urbanisation in India, the position of the middle class and the new vocabularies through which the poor are framed, contextualising the instance of ‘containing the others’ in Karimnagar – one of its kind in the urban development in Delhi – with a prophetic spectre of setting precedents for controlling such spaces:
An aspiring middle class is only too ready to call those who serve them
usurpers, free-loaders, the cunning transients of unbelonging. Maidservants
working in five or six houses, rickshaw pullers, builders of the concrete
fortresses of the rich, vendors, sweepers, drivers and cooks have morphed
into thieves and criminals. On cue, newspapers tell of servants cutting the
throat of an elderly employer for the sake of her jewellery, the looting of the
belongings of the lone man whose children are in the US, the ransacking of
the home of those who have given them shelter. More rarely reported are
stories of the inadequate diet, the 15-hour working day, the burning attic and
the draughty verandah, the young girl dismissed when pregnant with the child
of the head of the household. It is not that their services are no longer 136
required; but they must cease to impose the ‘eyesore’ of their meagre
dwellings and the distressing signs of their neediness.54
As discussed earlier, the slum-dwellers are an important aspect of the household economy and space of the middle classes. For low wages, the middle classes employ the slum-dwellers as maids, cooks, drivers and guards. The research conducted in the middle-class residential areas around Karimnagar revealed a complex articulation of slums within the desire–control–violence matrix: slums are desired for the services they offer but the middle class aspires to control their movement within the city lest they taint it; the scope of the violence inflicted on slum-dwellers is to maintain a precarious desire and control. Most of the middle-class residents do not want the slums to be shifted, as it would severely impact their household economy. However, they do not want slums and slum-dwellers to be part of their immediate sensual and experiential space (Baviskar 2003).
In my interviews with the residents of the middle-class settlements in Karimnagar , I raised the contradiction of interacting with slum-dwellers in the intimate proximity of their houses while demanding their eviction from the neighbourhood. I asked,
‘How is it OK for them to cook and clean for you, drive your expensive cars but not live next to you?’ Most of them did not articulate it as a contradiction. The slum is unequivocally evoked as a site where morality, sociality and cultural practices are abandoned for a decadent and degrading lifestyle. How is it, I asked further, that this degradation will not permeate their households where the slum-dwellers spend most of their day? None of the middle-class residents I interviewed had a first-hand
54 http://www.newint.org/columns/essays/2009/01/01/seabrook. 137 experience of the slums. The space of the slums in the collective imagination is articulated as almost having a life of its own. As Mrs A, General Secretary of the
Resident Welfare Association of a nearby apartment complex, told me:
When they are in our houses, they are in a civilized, organised space. There
are rules and norms. They don’t see our children swearing, husbands beating
their wives, women getting drunk … for them, I tell you, it’s a relief to be
here. They learn about respect and decorum while working in our houses. We
can only hope that they take some of it back to the slums, instilling values in
their children. They are not bad people – at least individually – but when in
the slums, they become something else. There is no other way to survive in
the slums but to become what it is: a dump.
Mrs A has three people from the slums working at her house, as a maid, driver and guard.
Conclusion
Slums and slum-dwellers are positioned as the ‘other’ in urban experience and imagination within a complex matrix of legal, social, moral and cultural discourses invoking degradation and opposed to the administrative ambitions of the city and the state. Evidently, even though the issue of land is central to many discussions about slums, it is often not about the ‘illegal encroachment’ per se, but about who is illegally encroaching; the rich have the social, cultural and moral legitimacy to not only encroach upon government land but also the means to engage in expensive, drawn-out legal battles to demand regularisation, as the Sainik Farm example 138 illustrates. There is, evidently, a larger project of ‘disciplining the poor’ (Baviskar
2003: 92) which is ‘shaped by contradictory processes as planners, politicians, and municipal officials brought different agendas to bear upon the issue. Particular historical circumstances created conditions for negotiation and accommodation as well as repression and violence.’ (Baviskar 2003: 92) In these discussions, there is little or no engagement with the everyday life of the slums.
In Maximum City (2004), a reflective non-fictional account about Mumbai, Suketu
Mehta engages with the everyday of the slums to explore, besides other issues, sectarian political division, criminal Mumbai underworld operations and the impact of the 1993 bombings. Evidently disturbed about the living conditions in the slums, which torment his own middle-class soul, he questions ‘one of the Jogeshwari women if she wouldn’t rather live in a decent apartment than the slum she lived in now, with open gutter outside and the absence of indoor plumbing’. This question was asked in the context of the resettled building planned for the slum-dwellers.
They had categorically refused to shift. The woman replied: ‘There’s too much aloofness. A person can die behind the closed doors of a flat and no one will know.
Here … there are a lot of people.’
Exposed to this level of engagement with the slum, which more than anything else his middle-class sensibilities cannot fathom, he observes rather philosophically:
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. We tend to think of slum as
an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery. What we
forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, they form a community, and 139
they are attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built
for themselves, the village they have recreated in the midst of the city … ‘I
like this place,’ said Arifa Khan of her home and her basti. ‘This is mine. I
know the people here and I like the facilities here’. Any urban redevelopment
plan has to take into account the curious desire of slum-dwellers to live
closely together. A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the
people of Jogeshwari, is an empty room in the big city. (2006: 60)
In most mainstream media and print representations, slums are presented as sites infesting the urban fabric, slum residents all very eager to insidiously take over the city. When considering the policies and processes of marginalisation of spaces in the city, along with the over-arching, structural inadequacies, it is important to consider the active participation and processes of these spaces in maintaining certain distances. This marginalisation, as mentioned before, is not to be constantly evaluated and examined only through the language of disempowerment and lack.
In Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (2004), Robert Neuwirth, an investigative journalist, explores the lived realities of the slums in the wake of inefficient government policies and practices. He studied life in squatter settlements by living in four of them (in Mumbai, Kenya, Istanbul and Brazil) for a few months each. His narratives of the lives in these slums abound with a definite sense of ownership, engagement and pride. He details the manner in which social groups and communities worked ingeniously to facilitate income in these settlements. Waqar
Khan’s interview from Dharavi, Mumbai resonates the engagement with the space.
Waqar Khan shifted into the settlement when he was just thirteen, surviving by 140 selling bananas. Now, at 40, he runs his own business making men’s shirts. His first residence was ‘a simple shed’, but Khan now ‘boasts a modern-looking store and an upstairs residence: all illegal, of course, but that’s the norm here’. The Karimnagar slums abound with similar success stories. Mahesh is a bamboo artist, he insists. He came to Delhi from a village in Rajasthan in search of better employment opportunities in the late 1980s when he was still a teenager. For several years, he worked as an apprentice to a bamboo craftsman in Puranihaweli camp. Now he has two shops and a three-storey house in Puranihaweli camp. He also has a house in a lower middle-class area in Delhi, but prefers to live in the slums for ‘business and community reasons’. During the tsunami, he volunteered to hold workshops in stricken areas to make cheap, reliable, mobile bamboo homes. His efforts were recognised internationally and he travelled to Thailand and Sri Lanka. ‘It felt very good to be able to make a contribution during those difficult times,’ he reflected.
The discourse of slums and their marginalisation is problematic because it simplifies the complex choices, oportunities and manoevrings around restrictions associated with the spaces slum-dwellers inhabit. It leaves unexplainable any expressions of a sense of pride in achievements or spaces, or why anyone would ‘choose’ to live in such a space. The slums and similar spaces are relegated to being passive agents within the fabric of the city and city life. It is important to consider the structural inequalities, flawed urban policies and imagined realities about these spaces that contribute substantially to the process of marginalisation. However, it is equally important in terms of everyday reality, public discourse and theoretical constructs to consider the boundaries that the slums themselves consciously set up against the city and city life. 141
In the following chapters, I will discuss the complex everyday materiality of the
Karimnagar slums through their sensorial ordering, practices and politics. The thesis emphasises a strong sense of ‘self’ amongst slum-dwellers, through which they not only identify the middle class as ‘other’, but also maintain a proactive social, cultural, sensual and spatial distance from this ‘other’. 142
4
World of senses
Introduction
In this chapter, I will discuss the manner in which the middle classes employ sensorial vocabularies and frameworks to identify and distance the slum-dwellers as
‘other’. The chapter will also discuss the manner in which bodily performances, in their broadest sensorial sense, organise everyday life in slums, are negotiated and disciplined to institute private and public sensibilities, and are employed as a lens to identify ‘others’.
The intent of this chapter is to emphasise intersensoriality (Howes 2005) in understanding a system, culture and community; it does this by involving senses other than sight. In the later chapters (Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9), I will emphasise the specific sense of hearing and sound as a cultural system to explore everyday life in the slums and the slum-dwellers’ interactions with the middle classes.
‘It’s not their fault – it’s how they live’
Mr A.S.’s visiting card is adorned with many titles. He is the President of Bhakhalaa
Place Computer Association; Secretary of a nearby Resident Welfare Association
(RWA), Tiranga Apartments; and on the advisory board of the Member of the
Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the area. Tiranga Apartments is one of the apartment blocks in the middle-class residential area adjacent to the Karimnagar slums. Apartment block residential areas are developed either by Delhi Development 143
Authority or private stakeholders. Individuals are allotted apartments by these agencies, and – depending on its level of prosperity – each block offers shared resources such as parks, pools, libraries and so on which are maintained by the
RWA. Members are elected from amongst the residents of the apartment block and, as a governing body, a RWA is responsible for addressing issues of general upkeep, maintenance, security, cleanliness, and so on. Since the institution of the Bhagidari system55 in 2000, and the government’s insistence on engaging citizens in local governance, RWAs have assumed significant political authority as well. These bodies not only make decisions about matters pertaining to their own apartment blocks or areas, but also have an increasing influence on the local area’s politics, development plans and policies. The MLA elect has to work in close collaboration with RWA groups as they constitute important political pressure groups and vote banks.
Tiranga Apartments is one of the closest apartment blocks to the Karimnagar slums. I met Mr A.S. on several occasions, sometimes in his home but mostly in his RWA office: an empty garage in the block, elegantly refurbished to accommodate him. On every visit, I had to go through a complex security system to be permitted into the apartment block. Details such as my address, phone numbers, the resident I was visiting and my reason for the visit were all recorded. Only after the appointed security guards cross-checked these details with the resident being visited – in my case, Mr A.S. – was I granted permission. Initially, I had to park my car along the road; however, after the first few visits, Mr A.S. gained special permission for me to
55 In 2000, the Delhi government initiated the Bhagidari Scheme – a citizen-government partnership program. Under this scheme, the Delhi government invited Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) and Market Traders Associations (MTAs) to collaboratively and proactively work with government agencies to address issues of governance. For a detailed discussion, see Chapter 3. See also http://delhigovt.nic.in/bhagi.asp. 144 park it inside the boundaries of the apartment block. ‘For safety reasons,’ he insisted.
The security system was painstaking, repetitive and frustrating. One of our first conversations was about this system:
R (Researcher): Isn’t this system a tad unnecessary? How do you ensure that
anyone who comes in gives the correct details? I may have given the wrong
address, etc. Don’t the residents, or more so their visitors, complain? I would.
I am already.
Mr A.S.: For the larger good, national safety and security we need to take
these measures. We cannot be seen as being slack. If we cannot take
responsibility for our own houses, how are we supposed to contribute to the
nation? Charity begins at home. The residents understand, and even
appreciate these efforts, though we did face some opposition in the
beginning.
R: In what way does the security system at Tara Apartments fit into the
broader scheme of national security, pride and safety?
Mr A.S.: When we joined hands with the government [through the Bhagidari
system], we took it upon ourselves to be equally responsible for the state, city
and country. These are dangerous times: terrorists, bombs, thefts, burglaries,
murders. We need to be wary. We cannot allow just anyone into our
apartment block.
R: Who are the people who are denied entry? 145
Mr A.S.: If the gates are left unguarded, anyone can walk into these
apartments: hawkers, beggars, thieves, slum-dwellers, who knows?
R: But don’t the residents of Karimnagar slums who work as domestic helps
come into your apartment every day, anyway?
Mr A.S.: Yes, they do. But only after we have thoroughly investigated and
verified them. It is mandatory for every family employing domestic help from
the Karimnagar slums to initiate intensive police verification and submit this
report to the RWA. Only after evaluating the police report which verifies the
position of the slum-dweller, their background, family history, etc. do we
give the permission. This is necessary to provide a safe and secure
environment to our children: the future of this country!
My conversations with Mr A.S. were often shrouded in the broader rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism. He constantly reiterated the role of his RWA in transforming Delhi into a ‘world-class city’. Every effort undertaken within the apartment block served a larger national agenda:
We are working with Mrs Dixit (the Chief Minister of Delhi) to make Delhi
into a city everyone is proud of and visitors envious of. We are with her to
make Delhi clean and green by 2010. We as citizens need to take
responsibility for that goal.
Slums, Mr A.S. continued, were one such responsibility. In my interviews, conversations and informal interactions with him, the Karimnagar slums figured prominently because of their proximity and my research interest. In his reckoning, 146 there was no place for slums in a world-class city. Slum-dwellers would be removed along with the slums. Who, I inquired, would then provide cheap, manual labour to run not only the middle-class households but the city?
Mr. A.S.: Slums are no places to live, not for humans. The living conditions
are deplorable. The dirt, the filth, the smell, the noise … the way they live is a
shame to human dignity. Living in those conditions pollutes your senses …
how can you maintain a level of social and moral integrity if you live like
that? We have to, as responsible citizens, relieve them of their misery.
When I put forth the idea that the association with dirt, smell and noise in slums might not necessarily evoke similar reactions amongst slum-dwellers, and that ‘such living conditions’ do not directly translate into a lack of social-moral cohesion, Mr
A.S. philosophically ruminated: ‘It’s not their fault. It’s how they live.’
Gated communities: Enclosed self, walled slums
Resettlement and demolition of slums are part of the resolve to relieve the slum- dwellers of their ‘misery’. I told Mr A.S. about the recent resettlement schemes that allotted land to slum-dwellers as a way of rehabilitating them. These were located
50 kilometres from the city, disrupting their established livelihood patterns and making it difficult for many – mostly children and women – to travel daily to work, which of course has serious implications for the collective household income. Mr
A.S. acknowledged these disruptions and their effect, but he maintained that it was for the better good of ‘these people who live worse than animals’; also, he added, ‘a world-class city cannot have slums’. 147
After the demolitions of 31st March 2008, I interviewed RWA members from different apartment blocks in the area. Even though pleased with the order that the
Karimnagar slums be enclosed by a high wall, most of them categorically stated that complete demolition would have been preferable. They recounted, at length, the miseries they and their families had to endure due to their proximity to the slums. Mr
B.S., a retired government official, said: ‘My daughter is supposed to get married in six months. I will not be able to hold the wedding here. How can I expect my daughter’s in-laws and senior government officials to cross a slum to bless my daughter?’ Another lady lamented about the trauma she had to endure every day, encountering the filth, smell, dirt and noise of the slums: ‘Is this the civilised world we want for our children? What will they learn?’ An RWA representative of another apartment block, a 45-year-old doctor, was very critical of the order passed. In his reckoning, the wall ought to have been ‘at least 8 foot tall: so as to block them completely’.
The middle-class reaction to slums generically, and the Karimnagar slums specifically, was by no means homogenous. And it would be a misrepresentation to state that I did not encounter sympathetic voices and strong supporters who were very critical of the policies concerning the slums and treatment of slum-dwellers; they, however, were a small minority. RWAs strongly influence the popular, everyday policies put in place to engage with slum-dwellers, as well as playing a significant role in determining their long-term future. The ‘slum issue’ amongst the
RWAs is articulated within different frameworks. A few RWAs reiterated Mr A.S.’s rhetoric, framing it within the language of benevolence: the resettlement policies, at the most basic level, were a service towards humanity; these relieved slum-dwellers,
‘ignorant of their own situation’, of their miseries. The most common representation, 148 however, was one of threat. The presence and proximity of slums threatened the very fabric of the sanitised social, cultural and moral being for which the middle classes as ‘honourable, legitimate, tax-paying citizens’ worked hard, and which they deserved. They deemed it their right not have to live next to the ‘filth, dirt, smell and noise’ of slums. They, however, were ambiguous, or simply evasive, about slum- dwellers offering cheap menial labour as domestic servants. ‘It is not as if we don’t want them to work,’ an active RWA member commented. ‘Obviously, we do. But do we really deserve to live next to them? They can travel to our places from resettled colonies – we do not mind that.’ He did not want any further discussion when I tried to raise the issue of resettled colonies, more often than not, being located on the outskirts of the city, requiring its residents to spend valuable time, money and energy commuting to work.
In all of these diverse articulations and framings, there was a definite lack of engagement with the everyday life of the slums. They were denied any agency whatsoever. Most of the people with whom I spoke had never been inside the slum and expressed obvious surprise when I mentioned that I spent many hours in the
Karimnagar slums. A few came forth and advised me to exercise caution. The lack of social and moral systems in Karimnagar slums was evoked interchangeably with their ‘deplorable living’ conditions; amidst the ‘filth, smell, noise and dirt’ of the
Karimnagar slums, symptomatic of infrastructural shortcomings, the possibility of having complex social, cultural and moral systems is considered an anomaly. The culture with which they were associated was one of ‘laziness’. One RW member said: 149
How can anyone enjoy living in such conditions? They are just lazy. They
don’t want to do anything. And for that, they are even ready to live in such
hell. They have got used to living like that. They don’t want to work.
In the discussions about their ‘laziness’, the intensive labour contribution of slum- dwellers to the middle-class households was consistently ignored. If they were so socially and morally corrupt, lazy and malicious, how come the middle-class households let them into their private homes, I inquired of the RWA members I interviewed. They responded by elaborating on the ‘disciplining and sanitising’ effect their company and culture had on uplifting the slum-dwellers from their misery. Also, slum-dwellers’ entry into middle-class houses is highly restricted and scrutinised, and they are expected to follow a prescriptive code of conduct. The domestic servants from the Karimnagar slums are subjected to intense scrutiny every time they enter or leave the apartment blocks. They have to sign or stamp their names in a well-maintained register, reveal the contents of the bags they are carrying, if any, and are not allowed to have any visitors during working hours. If they are given anything to take back home by their employers, such as old clothes, furniture, sweetmeats, medicines, etc., they need to have a signed authorisation from the employer, without which they cannot leave the premises. The policies adopted by
RWAs in organising the immediate space – instituting complex security systems, police verifications of every domestic help, highly scrutinised movements of slum- dwellers within the apartment blocks – place them within the tradition of ‘gated communities’ in urban spaces based on ideas of fear, threat, security and vulnerability from the imagined other (Calderia 2000; Forster 2004; McKenzie 2003;
Helsey and Strange 1999; Atkinson and Blandy 2006). 150
Maintaining distance
For the middle class, the proximity to the Karimnagar slums remains a persistent and pressing concern; however, in the last decade, with active engagement from RWAs, practices have been instituted to increase the distance – social, cultural, moral and spatial – with them. The walling of the Karimnagar slums is one such instance. The wall, more than 1.5 metres high, does not do much to enclose and contain the slums.
Within a few months, boundaries beyond the wall were extended, shops were set up, and the line was effectively crossed. More than anything else, this wall is symbolic of the distance – immediate, extended, and imagined – between the middle classes and the slum-dwellers. In a way, it is supposed to highlight the sensuous distance the middle class wants to maintain from the slums by enclosing its smell, filth and noise.
The aspirations of the middle class fall within the agenda of the ‘Clean Delhi, Green
Delhi’ campaign to reorganise the urban landscape. Central to its agenda is a sanitised experience of the city within which a strong sensorial language is being employed to situate the ‘other’ – in this case, slum-dwellers, with ‘lower senses of smell, taste, and touch’ (Howes 2005: 11–12) – thereby categorising them as noisy, unsightly, smelly, and so on. These tropes, over the last decade of urban imagination and planning in Delhi, have assumed significant importance in denying ‘others’ a right to the city on account of being ‘unpleasant or dangerous’ (ibid).
In this thesis, I investigate the politics and negotiations of everyday life in the slums through an ‘exploration of sonic sensibilities’ (Feld 1996). This is significant on two main accounts: first, it exposes the multiple and complex levels of sonic hierarchies, articulations and negotiations within the slums to organise their social, cultural, 151 moral and political systems; and second, it gives the slum-dwellers a well-articulated
‘sonically ordered sense of self’ (Rice 2003: 4).
The sonic culture in Karimnagar challenges broad generalisations that suggest all sounds from slums are noise and all slum-dwellers are noisy. It thereby opened up avenues to explore the city–slum relationships outside of the hegemonic tropes within which slum-dwellers are situated on the fringes – socially, culturally, legally and politically – and denied vocabularies to constitute a sense of self vis-à-vis the middle classes. Within this sonically constituted sense of self, the slum-dwellers have the agency to identify, construct and consolidate their own ‘others’.
Investigating senses
Blindness
In a nameless city, the residents find themselves succumbing to an affliction without any apparent reason or warning. In the middle of the day, people lose their sight.
They find themselves suddenly blind. The affliction soon assumes an epidemic proportion. Though it is never categorically stated, the affliction is taken to pass from one person to another through touch. The blindness that people experience is ‘not dark but a brilliant, impenetrable white’ and, by this virtue, is subsequently referred to as the ‘White Sickness’. Blindness as a collective experience begins to unleash chaos in the city while also making those who can still see wary of contagion. In order to limit the impact, the blind are held hostage in a disused mental asylum at the edge of the city. What follows is a systematic collapse of systems: administrative, infrastructural, social, moral and ethical. Vagaries of all kinds are resorted to by people to negotiate the world through their blindness; filth, jealously, rage and violence abound, but so do love, magnanimity and tenderness in its own ‘blind’ way. 152
Human nature is stretched to its limits; the residents – both the blind and those who can still see – not only question the existing norms but also set newer ones. The blindness does abate – slowly and gradually – but only after a catastrophic encounter between the blind, who escape the asylum, and the non-blind. One of the main characters of the book is the doctor’s wife, who escapes the predicament. Her husband does not; to be close to him, she feigns blindness. Bearing the burden of witnessing almost-apocalyptic events, she ruminates towards the end as people recover their sight: ‘Why did we become blind? I don’t know, perhaps one day we‘ll find out. Do you want me to tell you what I think? Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind. I think we are blind. Blind but seeing. Blind people who can see, but do not see.’ This is the plot of Jose’ Saramago’s sixth novel, Blindness, published in 1997.
It is not without a sense of irony that I chose to include a discussion about the debates on sound as an important sense to mediate ‘various forms of social organizations and hierarchies’ (Smith 2007: 42) with Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, a narrative whose central theme is sight or the loss of it. Blindness – even though indirectly – allows the framing of questions which profoundly determine the course of the research and the shape this thesis has taken. Is the hegemonisation of vision over all other senses an agenda of the ‘expansionist new monarchies of the sixteenth century’ to ‘slowly, unevenly, and erratically (depending on the state in question) impose a general perspectivalist vision of space and neutral conception of time upon the territories they incorporated and annexed’ (Tuathail 1996: 9)? And is this merely an imposition of the elite to construct a notion of reality to tame the ‘wild’ (Tuathail
1996: 3), or has the imposition been internalised to the extent that any other sensuous reality is an impossibility? What are the intellectual and methodological frameworks within which the ‘sensory dimension of history’ (Smith 2007: 8) can be explored 153 without becoming ‘hostage to seeing history through eyes rather than trying to understand the olfactory, tactile, auditory, or gustatory aspects of the past’ (2007:
20)? Are there ways in which senses other than sight can be situated in broader social, cultural and political contexts without constantly locating them within the discursive praxis of vision and visuality? Is it possible to explore the past and articulate the present sensuously?
The reflections of the doctor’s wife in Blindness – ‘I think we are blind. Blind but seeing. Blind people who can see, but do not see.’ – makes ‘seeing’ a political act.
By introducing two narrative strategies – the suddenness with which people lose sight as a punctum of reality, and the simultaneous collapse of infrastructural and moral systems with the onslaught of blindness – Saramago compels the reader to question the validity of a reality based on seeing. Is what is seen – taken as reality – meant to be so by those in power? Is it the indoctrination of the system to not see what the powerful don’t want to be seen? How closely does the systems of morality rely on externality of sight? Through slight – though ingenious – tactics, Saramago involves senses other than sight: touch and smell. It is through touch that the affliction is spread – or so it is believed – though the case of the doctor’s wife is a clear anomaly. Once the systems, especially the administrative and infrastructural, start collapsing, the blind are associated with the ever-increasing smell of filth and decay. Though the state tries to control these sensory assaults by limiting the afflicted, these provide a tactile power to the afflicted to subvert the system. In doing so, Saramago displaces the power of authority, knowledge, experience and reality 154 from the eyes to the rest of the body. The body, with all its sensorial elements, becomes the means to frame reality as well as to challenge it.
The five senses: ‘Mingling of modalities of mingling’
In Les cinq sens, Michel Serres (1986) explodes the tactility of the body as a site of sensorial indulgences and intersections while making the body itself a prominent sense. Serres philosophically and cognitively complicates the concerns which
Saramago poignantly wove into a fantastic tale. His philosophical agenda – which he discusses with Raoul Mortley:
is devoted to a defence of the qualitative, the empirical, to a defence of the
non-reducibility of the empirical to the logical. I would go so far as to say
that a form of knowledge has been lost, an empirical form, blotted out by the
linguistic and virtually algebraic revolution … an attempt to reconstruct
philosophy in another terrain … another terrain, not the one we’ve been using
for the last half-century, which is that of language.
Serres’ intent, then, is to discursively shift the reliance on hegemonic structures of language – its structure and meaning – to perceive and generate knowledge; instead of an external system, he exposes the body as a sensarium in itself, and each sense ‘is in fact a nodal cluster, a clump, confection or bouquet of all the other senses, a mingling of the modalities of mingling’ (Connor 1999). In doing so, he collapses the
Cartesian dualism between the mind as a ‘thinking, non-extended thing’ and the body ‘as an extended and non-thinking thing’. In his schematic, the body is as much thinking, extensible and perceptible as the mind. 155
By including bodily joy, or ecstasy, as the sixth sense, Serres celebrates the sensorial whereby the ‘body becomes itself in playing with, or transforming itself’ (Connor
1999). In this context, he opens a significant intellectual and methodological framework to attempt an anthropology of senses. By evoking the body as a sense itself, he allows vocabularies to frame discussions about the interplay of senses in organising everyday social and cultural practices – as evidenced in the Karimnagar slums – while also categorically disrupting the hegemonic, sight-biased tropes to produce and articulate knowledge.
The mingling of modalities of mingling: Sensorial practices in the
Karimnagar slums
The everyday in the Karimnagar slums is negotiated through complex sensorial practices. The lack of space, density of population and limited infrastructural facilities indeed contribute towards the slums being unhygienic, with little or no sanitation. However, the living conditions do not immediately translate into a lack of social and cultural codes and cohesion, and celebration of decadence, as perceived by middle-class sensibilities.
The body
Runa is a 22-year-old young woman who lives with her family (parents, older brother, a younger sister, eldest brother’s wife and paternal grandmother) in
Gandhipuri camp. Her family shares a two-room slum dwelling covering an area of
20 square metres. One of the rooms serves as a living area, kitchen and bedroom. She works as a ‘full-time’ domestic servant in a nearby middle-class household. She starts her job at 6.30 a.m. every day. Her responsibilities include cooking, cleaning, washing, minding the children (aged eight and ten) after school, tending to the 156 garden, and other household chores. She can read and write in Hindi and has a basic knowledge of English. Her ‘education’, according to her, was an important factor in securing her the ‘full-time’ job. Most women working as domestic servants from the
Karimnagar slums operate in shifts: on average, they work in four or five households each day, depending on the chores. A ‘full-time’ arrangement, compared with a shift system, is coveted as it offers a steady income and involves relatively fewer negotiations. If, for some reason, a domestic servant loses a shift, it is a heavy blow to the overall income. Runa finishes her job at 8 p.m., after serving dinner. She works seven days a week and is only allowed to take two days off in a month. Her monthly income is 3500 INR, 75 USD: a significant proportion of the entire household’s income. It was on her days off that I interacted with and interviewed her.
Runa starts her day at 4 a.m., even though she does not have to be at work until 6.30.
‘It is because I want to do everything, getting dressed, ablutions, bathing, etc., without really bringing notice to myself,’ she explained. ‘It is very difficult to do these things when everyone is up, especially the male members of the family.’
Moreover, Runa’s family has to use communal toilet facilities: ‘The toilets are 500 metres from the house. Early in the morning, they are not so crowded and dirty. I don’t like walking to the toilets in the middle of the day when everyone knows where and for what you are going. I feel embarrassed.’ It is a common practice amongst women in Karimnagar slums to start their day at dawn to finish their cleansing, bathing and ablutions. Her public bodily behaviour and performance are under constant scrutiny. She is required to dress in a ‘decent’ manner at all times;
‘revealing and modern’ clothes, skirts, trousers and jeans are not permitted. When venturing out on her own, she walks with bowed head and slow movements. Abrupt and loud movements, talking and laughing too loudly, hugging and shaking hands 157 are not approved. On the streets, conversations with strangers – especially men – are not allowed. Even with male relatives or family friends, she is supposed to maintain a low-key demeanour. ‘How I conduct myself reflects on the family. If I am too loud or wear awkward clothes, people will start talking that I am getting too modern. They will say I am a woman of loose character. My reputation, and thereby my family’s, will be at stake,’ she elaborated as a way to explain these sensorial codes.
One of her neighbours, Priya, who attends a nearby co-educational college – a very uncommon occurrence in the Karimnagar slums – took to wearing jeans to college.
Runa described at great length the social duress under which Priya and her family were put. Young boys from their area follow Priya to college, stand around the gates, and pass obscene comments about her in front of her ‘college friends’. ‘She is very intelligent and her family is very supportive to let her go to college, but it is so difficult. She is under watch all the time. People just assume that she must have a boyfriend or be involved in other illicit activities because she wears jeans. It is so unfair,’ Runa commented. We were having this conversation in her mother’s presence. Runa’s mother works as a cleaning lady in a nearby office. It was through her employer’s network that Runa got her current job. She is considered quite
‘liberal’ for allowing Runa to work.
‘I am all for women’s empowerment and liberation,’ she said to reflect on the situation. ‘I allow her [Runa] to work. I want her to earn her own money, be responsible for herself. And I see no shame in working as a domestic help. When she first started, a lot of people were very critical. But I stuck to my guns. And believe me I have no problem with how Runa or anyone dresses or speaks or behaves. But, we live in a very close-knit society; we cannot afford to antagonise them. The culture 158 here expects women to behave in a certain manner – why do things otherwise? The thing is, here it is not only about the individual, and everything is a family affair. If my daughter behaves in a certain manner, it reflects on values she has got from the family. It is a matter of maintaining the family name and reputation, and especially so for women. That is the only reason I ask Runa and her sister to exercise caution.’
Being framed as ‘loose and modern’ implies adopting the morally and socially depraved lifestyle of the city: sexual relations before marriage and multiple relationships. For a young woman to be identified as such in the Karimnagar slums poses serious problems for a prospective marriage and reflects badly on the family.
In many instances, a family can be socially and culturally ostracised on account of their daughter’s ‘modern’ behaviour.
Runa elaborated on how these sensorial codes are instituted: ‘Since I was ten or twelve, my mother started watching after me, shouting at me, and constantly correcting me. I was supposed to wear only certain kinds of clothes, not laugh too loud, run around, or sing in the streets. I did not understand it then. I used to be angry. I was no longer allowed to play with boys – my mother would constantly tell me not to slap them on their back or allow them to touch me when I was playing with them. Of course, I do understand their importance even if I don’t agree with most. It is frustrating but, well, do we have a choice? My sister is three younger than me; I was responsible for her. I had to run around her, shout at her, pull her dresses around, and take her away from her friends. It isn’t easy but we have to do it. It is all about control.’ 159
The bodily movements, behaviours and performances of young women in the
Karimnagar slums are highly regulated. The body is constantly under scrutiny for private–public lapses, which in turn have significant social, cultural and political consequences. Runa’s everyday life is organised around strict sensorial codes of conduct. The particular materiality of the Karimnagar slums – especially the lack of space and density of population – gives immediacy to everyday activities.
Distinctions between private and public spaces as highly demarcated and distinct entities do not exist in the slums. The private is performed in public and public is an integral part of organising the private. However, that does not imply that everyday negotiations in Karimnagar slums are devoid of strong private and public sensibilities. Inherent to the agenda of the sensorial codes of conduct(s) is to maintain the precarious balance between these public and private sensibilities; the body, with all its sensorial elements and engagements, becomes the site where public and private are performed and demarcated.
‘Others’, sensorially defined
Bengalis (immigrants from West Bengal and Bangladesh after the Bangladesh
Liberation War) are a prominent community in Puranihaweli camp. The social and cultural interactions between Bengalis and non-Bengalis (communities from northern states, mostly from Rajasthan and Haryana) are limited and sensorially ordained.
Parul, with whom I collaborated as a cultural translator during the course of my doctorate research, is a resident of Puranihaweli camp. As a research collaborator, she introduced me to different families and communities in the camp, conducted surveys and set up in-depth interviews. After the first few weeks, I observed that
Bengali women were not included in any of these interactions. Until then I was not 160 aware of the limited social-cultural interactions between the two communities or the reasons for this, and as I was keen to engage with Bengalis as well, I inquired about the reasons for this reticence. I was aware that Parul did not have the social permission to conduct interviews with men outside the community. With women of other communities, however, her interactions were uninhibited. I assured her that if she was facing any methodological or language concerns, they could be resolved.
After a few hesitant efforts at conducting interviews with Bengali women, Parul informed me about the reason for her discomfort. These interactions were not socially and culturally approved: ‘My mother is not very comfortable about my visiting them. Bengali women, mostly, are very “fast and loose”.’ She, along with her family, was worried that increased and intimate interaction with Bengali women would encourage people to categorise Parul in the same manner, as ‘fast and loose’.
An old lady, Parul’s next-door neighbor, elaborated as a way of justifying the social and cultural discrimination:
Those women wear revealing clothes, openly interact with men, are loud, do
not mind hugging and kissing in public, they are always touching each other
… it is not acceptable amongst respectable people like us.
I initiated and sustained research relations with Bengalis (men and women) on my own and with Zarina , another cultural translator. Amongst the Bengali women, the non-Bengali women from other northern states, especially Haryana and Rajasthan, were considered ‘uncouth, undignified, and uneducated’:
They stand together throughout day and evening huddled in groups, like
sheep. They all start sniggering if they see a man and woman walking or
talking together. In their understanding, men and women can only have ‘one’ 161
kind of relationship outside of marriage: sexual and illicit. They are so
backward. Women are not allowed to do anything in that community. We, on
the other hand, are liberated. We earn our own money, support our families,
manage shops, run our own businesses and to do so, we have to interact with
strangers, men and women alike. What’s the big deal with it, anyway?
One of the ladies running a busy cosmetics and clothes store commented on the difference between Bengalis and non-Bengalis.
The permission to engage in excessive bodily performances – loudness, physicality and mobility – available to women in the Bengali community was condemned amongst non-Bengalis, and deemed representative of ‘low’ social and cultural behaviour. In the same vein, the ‘limited’ sensorial privileges available to non-
Bengali women – restrictions on mobility and scope of interactions with men and women outside the community – were criticised as being symptomatic of the community’s backwardness, lack of rights and education amongst women.
Vicky is Parul’s eldest brother. He owns a shop on the main road along Puranihaweli camp. The nature of his business is fluid and dynamic, constantly changing to suit the latest trends. In the three years I have known him, he has shifted his business from running an STD56 booth, CD rental shop and cosmetic store amongst others. In our interactions, the conversations often steered around Parul: her performance, future prospects and capabilities. Vicky vehemently maintained – stating it repeatedly – that he was very liberal and believed in women’s empowerment and
56 Standard Trunk Dialling Booths, corresponding to public booths. 162 their ability to ‘stand on their own feet’. Within this background, I initiated discussions with Vicky about restrictions on women’s mobility within the camps and into the city. If their mobility at the most basic level is limited, I asked, how are they to overcome bigger hurdles of lack of education and entrepreneurship? He responded with rhetoric devices similar to Runa’s mother:
Gandhipuri camp is not a safe place for women. It has no water – it is filthy
and dirty. The young men have no jobs, they are not interested in looking out
for a proper occupation. Instead they sit around STD booths and CD shops,
playing loud, obscene Hindi music only with the intention of teasing women.
How can I allow my sister to venture there? If anyone misbehaves with her,
passes any comment about her, to her, it is my responsibility to go and sort it
out. In the past, not with Parul but with other women, it has led to fights, etc.;
there is no point of encouraging such things. It gets too complicated. And,
where in the city should I let my sister go? In the malls? With all the things
young people do – kissing, hugging, smoking, drinking – and that too in
public, what is there for her to learn? She is safe here. There is a lot to be
learnt here.
The interactions between the three camps, Lapatagunj, Gandhipuri and Bhumhiheen, are restricted, gendered and sensually ordained. While in Puranihaweli camp, women’s mobility into Gandhipuri camp is restricted on account of the ‘filth and noise’; the women of Gandhipuri camp are advised to exercise caution when visiting
Puranihaweli camp due to the excessive ‘sensual’ privileges – loudness, physicality and mobility – in which women indulge, reflecting their ‘loud, loose, and fast’ 163 sensibilities. Even though highly restricted and following a strict sensorial code of conduct, the water routes necessitate interactions between Gandhipuri and
Puranihaweli camps at an everyday level. On the other hand, interactions with both
Puranihaweli and Gandhipuri camps are very limited for residents of Lapatagunj camp. Amongst the residents of Puranihaweli and Gandhipuri camps, Lapatagunj camp is articulated as a site of social, moral and cultural decadence. A long-time resident of Gandhipuri camp commented:
Men and women smoke and drink together; they are very public about
everything – touching, singing, sometimes even changing in front of
everyone. Most families openly involve in prostitution, sell drugs and
alcohol. That is no environment for decent people.
The sensorial practices of Lapatagunj camp, as articulated by residents of the other two camps, are indulgent and decadent, as residents do not maintain a very strict gender code. The uninhibited sensual interactions between men and women are considered socially, morally and culturally depraved.
The limited interactions between Lapatagunj camp and the other two camps are not only sustained by Gandhipuri and Puranihaweli camps’ determination to maintain a distance; residents of Lapatagunj camp also exercise a definite agency to maintain an active distance from the other two camps. The residents of Lapatagunj camp align themselves socially, culturally and morally with the legal part of Karimnagar , with which they share everyday practices and cultural history. A significant number of
Lapatagunj camp’s residents shifted from legal part of Karimnagar into Lapatagunj 164 camp to avail themselves of the benefits of slum living, both in the short term (saving on rent, electricity and water) and the long term (resettlement). As a young man, resident of Lapatagunj camp, commented while in conversation with a group at
Rajiv’s tea stall:
We are not original slum-dwellers. We all come from decent families. Our
culture is very different, not like Gandhipuri and Puranihaweli camps. In
these places, you find men and women fighting in the open, shouting at each,
they are so loud and uncouth. We are not like that.
Compared with the restrictions women have on their bodily performance and sensorial conduct, men in the Karimnagar slums do not have to follow such strict codes. Most of their most private performances – cleaning, bathing, and so on – are performed in the public. Bodily contact between men and women, by way of hugging and shaking hands, is limited or non-existent, but amongst men it is a very common practice to be overtly physical. While conducting my research, I could not raise direct questions about men’s bodily performance and sensorial conduct as I could with women, on account of my gender. Instead, the discussions I had with men about their sensorial performance(s) were vis-à-vis the ‘others’ – mostly middle-class employers.
One of the biggest concerns about their sensorial performance and perception was olfactory. On many occasions, most of the men stated, they were singled out for
‘smelling like a slum-dweller’. Older women, widows and women living away from their husbands enjoy similar bodily and sensorial excesses to men. It is not uncommon to find men and older women dominating public spaces, by way of 165 occupying a conspicuous space in the street, and strictly supervising the sensorial performance(s).
Indeed, in the Karimnagar slums, where intense immediacy in everyday activity abounds, the body becomes the site where social, cultural, moral and political negotiations are marked and resolved. The body defines public boundaries and private articulations. Through the strict sensorial code, there is a definite agenda for disciplining the body: defining its limits, boundaries and extent. It is a political act.
The disciplining of the body and sensorial conduct vary across gender, religion and community; however, gender is the most prominent category through which these codes are defined.
The sense of senses
Introducing their The Senses and Society series, Bull, Gilroy, Howes and Kahn
(2006) state the obvious: ‘The senses are everywhere.’ (2006: 5) They do this with a rhetorical vengeance, insisting that the appearance of the series ‘is a sign of the sensual revolution in the humanities, social sciences and the arts’ (2006: 5). While discussing my research agenda, I was often asked a seemingly innocent question – though one resonating with the claims of the editors of The Senses and Society: ‘But is it not obvious? The senses – we taste, touch, smell, hear, see … why does one need to argue for it?’
Indeed, the senses are everywhere. However, the need for a revolution to locate them in the broader intellectual and theoretical contexts is symptomatic not only of the secondary status accorded to the senses, but also of the prejudices dominating the construction of knowledge within the humanities, social sciences and arts traditions. 166
The insistence in these traditions that culture be located in ‘the verbocentrism of the linguistic model, the ocularcentrism of the visual culture model, and the holism of both the corporeal and material culture models – in which bodies and objects are often treated simply as physical wholes and not bundles of interconnected experiences and properties’ (Howes 2006: 115) can be charted back to the ‘imperial expansion and territorial acquisition’ (Tauthail 1996: 16), beginning in the sixteenth century within ‘Western forms of see(d)ing territory’ (1996: 84). This can be seen in situations where:
The eye is the pen and also a penis substitute (the eye that can penetrate
territorial interiors). Imperialism, as we have noted, is an act of geographical
violence. It begins with the erection of epistemological systems that represent
those spaces beyond the familiar and domesticated as blank and virginal. It
proceeds to take possession of these spaces and fill them with its own seminal
knowledge. Finally, it justifies its possession of these spaces in the name of
its own systems of authority: the King, Empire, Race, Man, and Science. By
seminating and in-sight/site/citing a ‘world’ of territories made in its own
image, European science comes to recognize and realize itself. But
imperialism is more than a gendered epistemological phenomenon. It is an
economic, social, and cultural phenomenon, a practice that operates
throughout a social system and not simply those spaces designated as
colonial. (Tauthail 1996: 85)
Tauthail intends to ‘recall and respect its [geopolitics’] complex and often unacknowledged genealogical history … [which] is a set of contextual explorations 167 of the problematic imperfectly marked by “geopolitics”’ (1996: 14). In doing so,
Tauthail aims to deconstruct geography as an apolitical body of knowledge; instead, he insists that the imperial aspirations that significantly determined the course of geography’s development as an epistemological field, as well as the manner in which geographical explorations and interventions construed the knowledge domains within which ‘self’ and ‘other’ were situated, were located in the regimes of modernity. For
Tuathail, geography is at ‘the intersection between power, knowledge’ (Dodds 1998:
77), and he shows ‘how it rests on a particular elitist and conservative European train of thought’ (Sidaway 1997: 777), which has ‘supervised the production of visions of global political scene. Rather than innocent sites of declarative facts and constitutive statements about the world, these signs mark the site of space/power/knowledge production systems.’ (Tuathail 1996: 52)
In the context of this thesis, Tauthail’s problematisation of geography allows for a framework within which the heirarchisation of senses – with pre-eminence accorded to sight – and hegemonisation of knowledge through that lens, can be applied in a specific context. As outlined earlier, one of the main concerns in the thesis is to explore the city–slum relationship; though not quite in the imperialist tradition, this relationship is situated within the discursive praxis of land and territorial rights
(Ramanthan 2001; Dupont 2008; Baviskar 2006), taming the ‘wild’ – in this case, slum-dwellers, and constructions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ within new regimes of modernity in the Indian context. As in the imperialist agenda of territorial extension, the contestation and control over territory in the Indian context – especially in the context of the city–slum relationship – has only set in motion new sensorial meanings and boundaries by ‘a privileged community of “wise men”’ (Tuathail
1996: 41) – dominant middle-class rhetoric in the Indian context – to establish 168
‘textual tropes and discursive contours of hegemonic centres of knowledge and learning’ (1996: 41) in order to normalise certain senses while denouncing others in the immediate realm of experience and interaction.
In arguing for a sensorial revolution, much has been said about the hegemonic dominance of sight ‘courtesy of Renaissance, scientific, and Enlightenment developments’ (Smith 2007: 19), in which sight was associated ‘with both scientific rationalism and capitalist display’ (Howes, quoted in Smith 2007: 19); the
‘expansion of the visual field by means of technologies of observation and reproduction – from the telescope to the television’ (Howes, quoted in Smith 2007:
19) only empowered its position. The systematic privileging of eye/sight/vision within different epistemological frameworks – philosophical, scientific, imperialist, cultural and historical – has been lucidly demonstrated by various scholars (Classen,
Howes, Connor, Smith) in their call for a sensual revolution.
Feeling the senses: Sensorial revolution
In their works, Stoller (1997), Howes (2003, 2005), Classen (1993) and Smith (2004,
2008), amongst others, have constantly reiterated the importance of the senses to organise, coordinate and regulate societal, cultural, emotional and political practices in different contexts, both historically and in contemporary times. These studies corroborate the insistence in this thesis that the absence of senses in historical accounts does not imply a lack of sensorial engagement with the world across cultures; it only necessitates a broader intersensorial approach along with a sensibility to touch, hear, smell and taste clues that would inform about the sensorium. Indeed, the senses are everywhere; only a sense to sense those senses needs to be inculcated. 169
While making a strong case for a sensual revolution and a sensorial investigation of the past, Smith (2007), Classen (1993) and Howes (1991, 2005) are equally insistent on following a balanced, inclusive methodological framework to conduct sensorial research. In his call for an intersensorial approach, Smith – though critical of the
Great Divide theory propagated by Ong’s and McLuhan’s work, wherein the binary divide between Western-literate and ‘tribal’ oral-aural societies is insisted – states that, though the idea ‘is to suspend the unhelpful binary aspects’ (2007: 16), he wants to incorporate ‘their insights concerning intersensorality under modernity’ (2007:
16). He further states that he wishes:
to take full note of the undeniable importance of the ocular to the modernity,
empowered as it was by the developments noted by Ong and McLuhan. I do
not wish to assume that all of the other senses were wholly subordinate or
that, conversely, the premodern era downplayed the importance of sight in
favour of the non-visual sense. (2007: 17)
Smith further warns those pursuing sensorial histories to ‘be very careful about which voices and which values they listen to in the process of uncovering the past’
(2007: 14), as the ‘primacy of the context’ must be stressed ‘if we are to avoid becoming hostage to the rhetorical sensory hierarchy sponsored by a given class of a particular place and time’ (2007: 15). He reiterates Corbain’s (1995) sentiment that
‘we must understand the actual ways in which people understood the senses, their relation, and their social meaning, and to do that demands that we listen to multiple voices from multiple contexts and discourses’ (2007: 15).
Another important consideration while conducting sensorial research is the caution exercised while approaching the sources – especially in a historical context. The 170 heirarchisation of the senses – with dominance accorded to sight – was part of the elitist agenda to exercise dominance through distance by denouncing senses whose meaning could not be articulated within hegemonic tropes; the knowledge that was henceforth generated and documented reflects a bias towards this tendency. As Smith
(2007), reflecting on Corbain’s methods, states:
Some evidence concerning the primacy of vision comes from sources that are
historically suspect because they were promoted by elites for elites.
Frequently, the descriptions we have of the use of the senses were established
by – and left by – the elites, which likely reflects their preferred
understanding of reality, but not reality in its full, multivalent, contingent
texture. For us to assume that vision was triumphant is also to assume the
accuracy and innocence of the discourse that describes it. Instead, what we
need is more and better evidence to see to what extent elites quietly engaged
the proximate senses and where French peasants and workers were more
visual than elite rhetoric would suggest. (2007: 15)
It is within this methodological insistence that this thesis – focused towards a broader sensory understanding – emphasises on the need to seek new materials to excavate a sensual past or situate sensory hierarchies in the present, but also to look, hear, touch, smell and taste existing material in a new perspective. Through these attempts, the aspiration exists that a richer social-cultural understanding across different contexts might be arrived at, sensually. Paul Stoller (1992), reviewing Howes’ (1991) The
Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of Senses, list the manner in which the ‘sense question’ can pave way to ‘1) a more radically 171 phenomenological approach to anthropological field study; 2) a more sensorially evocative body of ethnographic writing; and 3) a more rigorous framework for the analysis of culture-in-society’ (1992: 909).
In a historical context, and cautioning against framing ‘understanding of the history of senses along the unstable and withered axes of great divide theory’, Smith (2007) states that too much emphasis on it:
runs the risk of using the senses to ‘other’ the very people of the past we seek
to understand and, in fact, were frequently the victims of ‘othering’, courtesy
of the aggressive deployment of sensory stereotypes, by their more powerful
contemporaries. Without careful and precise contextualization and
historicization that pays attention to the senses as well as relative cultural
constructs, we are in danger of reinscribing an historical conceit that makes
the past simply more sensual just because it was the past. (Smith 2007: 17)
The central theme in this thesis is sensual ordering to accentuate the distance between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Instead of situating the sensorial exclusively as the hegemonic domain of the elite by either celebrating it (in the instance of sight) or denouncing it (with most of the other senses), in this thesis I explore how senses other than sight are articulated to constitute a sense of self through which ‘other(s)’ are identified in a broader social, cultural and political context. 172
Interplay of senses: Intersensorial approach
The senses are located within (and loaded with) the social, cultural and political matrices of a context. To deny hierarchisation of senses in ‘specific’ contexts is not only naïve but also suffers from the dilemma that this romanticises them as the
‘other’ (Smith 2007). The senses – their heirarchisation, perception and articulation – are socially, culturally aesthetically and politically constructed. In every context, a different regime of sensual hierarchy exists (Smith 2007; Classen 1993; Howes 1991,
2005). To reach an in-depth inter-sensorial exploration of the senses of a culture, a more broadly nuanced understanding of the socio-cultural-political negotiations needs to be undertaken.
David Howes (2005) critically interrogates Lawrence Sullivan’s use of synaesthesia to explore sensorial cultural performances, a model derived from the information theory approach. While Howes acknowledges that this model recognises the ‘unified nature of human sensorium’ (Pinney, quoted in Howes 2005: 162), he mentions its insistence on ‘oneness of meaning’ (2005: 163) as a serious limitation to enhanced understanding of the human sensorium. Towards this end, he states that:
more attention needs to paid to such issues as: (1) the weight or value
attached to each of the modalities, instead of assuming equality and
interchangeability; (2) the sequencing of perceptions, instead of assuming
simultanaeity; and (3) the way the use of different sense may give rise to
different meanings, instead of assuming redundancy. (2005: 164)
An intersensorial approach, in his reckoning, allows a framework to avoid
‘redundancy’ by acknowledging a ‘mingling of senses’ (2005:164), but not necessarily in a synaesthetic way. The manner in which senses work either 173 harmoniously, in conflict or in confusion (2005: 164) depends on the hierarchical order in which they are organised within a specific context. Howes maintains that
‘such sensory rankings are always allied with social rankings and employed to order society’ (2005: 164). It is therefore important to situate the heirarchisation of senses in the broader social-cultural context to understand their interplay and negotiations.
Sense of self: ‘Dirty, congested and dangerous’
At the core of practices and processes of sensorial heirarchisation, as discussed in an earlier section, is the intent to accentuate distance from the ‘other’. Within this framework, ‘others’ are denied vocabularies to articulate their ‘experiential truth’
(see Feld 1996) into consolidated bodies of knowledge, which could disrupt, challenge or even coexist with dominant tropes. The mainstream middle class and state employ similar strategies of sensorial heirarchisation both to deny slums a sense of self, and to utilise the rhetoric of ‘dirty, congested and dangerous’ to justify demolitions and resettlements.
In middle-class framings, the infrastructural lacks of living in the slums are immediately translated as a lifestyle and character reflection of slum-dwellers being
‘dirty, congested and dangerous’, as characterised by their ‘filthy, smelly and noisy’ orientations. The sensorial exploration of the everyday in the Karimnagar slums, in the same vein of challenging the hegemonic structures and revealing a multiplicity of experience and knowledge, highlights the complexity of social, cultural and political systems which are, more often than not, denied (or overlooked) in middle-class rhetoric. 174
The sensorial alignments, restrictions and permissions across different groups and communities in Karimnagar reveal a strong sensually constituted sense of self vis-à- vis which ‘others’ are identified and constructed. With regard to slums (and slum- dwellers), involving sensorial tropes to emphasise their sense of self is important, as it is something that is often denied in mainstream discussions. As was evident from the middle-class sentiments represented by different RWA members, the slums are constantly evaluated through the parameters set by them.
By undertaking a detailed discussion on sensorial alignments between the three camps, the intention was certainly not to lend a romanticised, gendered and repressed sensuality to the space of the Karimnagar slums. Indeed, gender is an important category of sensual organisation; however, the gender experience also dominates the narratives on account of women being my main respondent base – the politics of which were discussed previously. Instead, the aim was, first, to highlight a strong sense of self articulated through sensually ordained ‘experiential truth’, and second, to establish the sensual vocabularies needed to identity and construct ‘others’ amongst slum-dwellers. Not only do these vocabularies have a strong resonance with the rhetoric invoked by the middle class to justify segregation, exclusion and discrimination of slums (and slum-dwellers), but they systematically identify the
‘middle class’ and their sensual practices – namely, ‘fast, loose and loud’ mannerisms – as ‘other’. In the narratives from the Karimnagar slums, across the three camps, this sensorial behavior was condemned and seen as symptomatic of
‘social, moral, and cultural’ depravity. Women were required to follow a strict sensorial code to avoid such performances. 175
Slums as ‘dirty, congested, and dangerous’ sites, where residents live in perpetual
‘filth, noise and dirt’, represent a middle class-perpetuated representation formulated on superficial engagement with this space and its residents. Almost all the middle- class members I interviewed from neighbouring areas had never ventured into the slums. They had no ‘experiential’ knowledge of how the everyday in slums is sensually organised and lived. They refuse to really see the slums; they are sensorially blind to the nuances of the everyday life of slums. The evident infrastructural limitations which lend slums their peculiar materiality of ‘dirty and congested’ are stretched to involve social and cultural implications of being
‘dangerous’.
An everyday engagement with the sensorial regime in slums, such as that undertaken through this ethnographic research, reveals otherwise. The lack of space, density of population and limited infrastructural facilities, as mentioned earlier, lend immediacy to everyday interactions. The sensorial regime, accordingly, demands rigid disciplining to maintain the sense of the private–public divide and a sensorial distance from the identified and Imagined ‘other’, which necessitates ingenious optimisation of space and its resources. A two room slum serves as a kitchen, living room, bedroom, study, and sometimes even washing room. Such conditions demand that a high level of cleanliness and orderliness be maintained within the house to avoid ‘confusions, delays, and infections’, as a young woman living in Gandhipuri camp explained. She continued:
It is really dirty outside; we don’t have regular, running water, the drains are
always crowded. We can do nothing about it but we have to assure that how
we live is clean. If we don’t manage space properly – everything, every little 176
thing in the house has a place, has to be in its place otherwise it leads to all
kinds of confusions and usually fights in the morning, especially when people
leaving for work have to get dressed.
Everyday living in the Karimnagar slums necessitates constant innovation and ingenuity in optimising limited space and resources. A box doubles as a storage unit and a divan; a chair is remodelled to be used as a staircase when needed; a clothesline is also used as a curtain to further demarcate space, and so on. Rebecca
Tuhus-Dubrow, a contributing writer at the Boston Globe,57 undertakes a detailed examination of what cities can learn from slums. In this, she explores the ‘limited conception of slums, in that movie (Slumdog Millionaire) and in the public mind’.
She observes that, ‘given the reality that poverty exists and seems unlikely to disappear soon, squatter cities can also be seen as a remarkably successful response to adversity – more successful, in fact, that the alternatives governments have tried to devise over the years. They also represent the future.’ Drawing upon the works of
Neuwirth, Turner and Fitcher, and Hernando De Soto, she makes a strong case for lessons that can be learnt from the slums in urban planning, space utilisation and harnessing a sense of community along with affective environmentally and ecologically viable everyday solutions.
Conclusion
The sensorial is an important trope through which slum-dwellers articulate their
‘experiential truth’ to consolidate their sense of self. It significantly informs the social, cultural, moral and spatial mobilities, performances, permissions and
57 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/01/learning_from_slums. 177 restrictions enjoyed by a group or community. It also institutes a strict sensorial code of conduct.
In this thesis, I have mapped sensorial meanings and politics within immediate– extended–imagined realms to widen the scope of intersensorial research (Howes
2006; Smith 2007; Classen 1993), which I will discuss in the next chapter. This approach allowed situating the senses in the ‘material-sensual’ culture (Howes 2006) while exponentially expanding the tropes through which the everyday materiality of slums and the city–slum relationship can be explored in wider traditions. 178
5
Immediate–extended–imagined
Introduction
The intent of this chapter is multifold: (1) it highlights the politics of the everyday in the Karimnagar slums, and life as a slum-dweller, by following Rupa’s life history;
(2) it introduces the immediate–extended–imagined (IEI) framework to explore the negotiations between sensorial conducts, permissions and limitations, and the everyday in slums; (3) it discusses the manner in which the sensorial frameworks were employed by different groups to exert their identities and identify ‘others’; and
(4) it discusses the historical and intellectual traditions that systematically have privileged sight over other senses.
Through these varying and complex discussions, this chapter aims to emphasise the connections, intersections and negotiations between sensorial, social, cultural and political processes in a specific context – the Karimnagar slums. Here, sonic engagement is one such negotiation, which I will discuss at length in the following chapters. The immediate–extended–imagined framework is, however, not exclusive to sensorial exploration; as the discussion in this chapter will highlight, the IEI framework and its negotiations are informed, and thereby influenced, by overlapping sensual, social, cultural and political factors.
179
Ordering of the senses
The ordering of senses as ‘high’ or ‘low’, representative of a community’s social- cultural positioning, representation and imagination (Howes 2005), varies from one context to another (see Corbain 1986; Feld 1996; Classen 1996, 2001; Smith 2008).
These ‘sensory rankings are always allied with social ranking and employed to order society’ (Howes 2005: 164). To expand the scope of understanding sensorial articulation, heirarchisation, and its politics of ‘othering’ and ordering, deriving from an intersensorial approach, in this chapter I introduce the immediate–extended– imagined framework. This framework assists in mapping the interplay of different senses, and their attendant conflicts and confusions (Howes 2005) between dominant and subordinate groups, ‘whether they are conceptualized in terms of gender, class or race’ (2005: 164) or in terms of other categories such as caste, religion or community affiliation.
Immediate–extended–imagined
This chapter introduces the framework of immediate–extended–imagined (IEI) sensorial realms, which opens avenues to contextualise sensorial heirarchisation within different traditions, and to culturally explore practices and politics of sensorial engagement. In this framework, I identify the immediate sensorial realm as the one in which a community aligns its senses with its social, cultural, political and historical positions. Informed by these decisions, definite sensorial practices are instated to organise everyday life. In the extended sensorial realm, interactions between communities with diverse and different sensorial alignments and practices unfold. In this realm, each community’s immediate sensorial realm conflates, conflicts or colludes with those of other communities. Depending on the social, cultural and political position of a community vis-à-vis the ‘other’, this realm necessitates 180 negotiations of one’s immediate sensorial realm. It is in the extended realm that sensorial hierarchies and ordering, and the politics of sensual ‘othering’, unfold. It is also in the extended sensorial realm that interactions between diverse communities unfold. Each community and group has its own sensorial ordering. However, interactions necessitate a sensorial immediacy between these groups, which often challenges or disrupts a group’s sensorial ordering. More often than not, the sensorial ordering and conduct prescribed by the dominant group reigns supreme.
A community’s aspirations to maintain, and insistence on maintaining, its sensorial order, corresponding to its social-cultural position, in its immediate sensorial realm, and especially in interactions with others, draws the scope of its imagined sensorial realm. This is not fantastical, unrealistic ambition; rather, it is influenced by social- cultural interactions, backgrounds and hierarchies between different communities, as well as by media representations and folklore.
To illustrate the scope of these realms, I discuss the sensorial negotiations of Raj, a resident of Gandhipuri camp, with his immediate (slum) sensorial ordering vis-à-vis the middle class-prescribed extended sensorial realm.
Sensorial ordering and negotiations
Raj is a 28-year-old young man living with his family (paternal grandmother, parents and three younger sisters) in Gandhipuri camp. He is one of the few slum-dwellers with an undergraduate education. He completed his humanities degree in 2004. After doing a series of odd jobs, he was employed as an office assistant in a small publishing house in the nearby middle-class Ujara Bihar area. By 2007, he was promoted to the post of assistant office manager. In this role, his responsibilities involve managing correspondence, inventory and general upkeep of the office. Even 181 though his spoken English is not fluent, he can read and write English. His family is one of the most prosperous in its community in Gandhipuri camp. He exercises a very dominant role in determining his family’s everyday and long-term organisation.
Often, he engaged with me in long discussions about the future he planned for his sisters, seeking information and sometimes advice. All his sisters were attending college and he had decided on the courses for them. ‘Eventually they will have to be married and run a household, but I want them to have a choice and option to be financially independent, if the need arose,’ he explained. On one occasion I found him particularly enraged because his middle sister was using one of his deodorants. I did not immediately understand his point of contention:
Raj: If I allow them to attend college they are beginning to think they can
assume a fancy, decadent lifestyle. Today they want to wear perfume, next I
know they will wear make-up and ‘loud’ revealing clothes and have
boyfriends. We are decent, respectful people; they cannot indulge in such
liberties.
R: I don’t understand, Raj – what is the problem? You use deodorant, don’t
you? It’s yours after all.
Raj: See, I work in a proper office unlike many others here. I am not a driver
or a guard. I have to interact with respectful, educated people every day. I
have to.
R: Why? 182
Raj: There is a general idea that all slum-dwellers are dirty and they smell.
Well, some do because of the general conditions here and their lack of
hygiene. I don’t want anyone to single me out as a slum-dweller because I
smell in a certain way. Everyone uses deodorants and perfumes in the office.
In Raj’s immediate sensorial realm, olfactory practices such as using deodorants and perfumes was sensorially prohibited in order to maintain a categorical distance from their identified sensorial ‘other’, the middle class. Yet in his extended sensorial realm, which necessitated prolonged interactions with the members of the middle class, he used deodorant so as to maintain a sensorial balance in the extended realm by avoiding sensorial stereotyping of slum-dwellers as ‘filthy and dirty’ in the imagined sensorial realm.
This sensorial negotiation highlights gendered and class hierarchies. In the engagements between genders (as with Raj and his sister), and slum-dweller and middle-class members, it is the men and the middle class, respectively, who exercise a dominant social and cultural power, significantly influencing the sensorial alignments. While Raj, owing to his gendered, empowered position, could prohibit olfactory actions of his sister in the immediate sensorial realm, he had to take the same actions in his extended sensorial realm on account of his relatively disempowered position as a slum-dweller.
The Hindu cosmos: A matter of sensual ordering
The Hindu cosmos is sensually ordained: ‘it is the world perceived by the five senses and analyzed by the mind’ (Pattanaik 2003: 36). The explosive sensoriality which
Serres exposed in Les Cinq Sens (1986) – wherein the body is not only a site of sensorial indulgences and intersections but a prominent sense itself – to highlight 183 schemas of knowledge production outside of the hegemonic trope (and domain) of language is very evident in the way Indian society was organised through principles of Manusmrti.
Manusmrti or The Laws of Manu is ‘an encompassing representation of life in the world – how it is, and how it should be lived’ (Manu, Doniger and Smith 1991: xvii), prescribing detailed instructions for the members of the five castes (Brahmins,
Kshatyrias, Vaishas, Vaishaya and Sudra) to conduct their social, political, religious and spiritual life. The rule it lays sets a severe sensorial regime and disciplining amongst the five castes in the immediate–extended–imagined realms, discussed at length in the previous section. It enumerates ‘a number of instances or events or persons as the sources of impurity’ (Kshīrasāgara 1994: 14), which include – though are not limited to – impurity based on birth, death, occupation, character, sex, physical unsoundness and mixed marriages. It prescribes different sensorial restrictions based on the kind of impurity: food of the lower castes, Sudras, is forbidden; touch with the lower castes, eunuchs and the physically unsound (dumb, deaf, mad) is forbidden. Detailed instructions for what a Brahmin, the twice-born man, ought not to eat (garlic is to be avoided), touch (lower caste, menstruating women), see (corpses) and hear (women and lower caste members crying), so as not to influence his senses, are prescribed. Through complex sensorial negotiations, the caste, class and gender hierarchies and roles were sustained in the immediate– extended–imagined sensorial realms.
184
Through a detailed analysis of Puranic58 and historical texts, C. Mackenzie Brown proposes that in Hindu traditions ‘what is of critical importance in scripture is not only its content or meaning, artha, but also its sound, sabda’ (1986:75). Controlling the recitation of Vedic texts allowed Brahman priests to exercise “lucrative monopoly” (Winternitz quoted in Mackenzie, 1986:72) in Mackenzie Brown’s reckoning, which is just one aspect that helps us to understand the complexity of the oral tradition. He highlights the nuances of learning process within the Vedic tradition. The teacher-student relationship was not a detached one, mediated by texts, but involved complete immersion – sensorial, social, emotional, and intellectual – ‘it is not simply that one should learn from the words spoken by the guru but also that one should learn in his presence (guru-samnidhau)’ (ibid: 73). However, he concedes that there was not a watertight distinction between the artha and sabda, and in fact there are several instances in Puranic texts to illustrate that written word was given meaning to ‘benefit all people’ (ibid:76). This he reckons is in contrast to how the
Vedic knowledge was safeguarded and considered the ‘exclusive prerogative of the priestly class’ (ibid). He then evaluates the emergence of the ‘cult of the book’; this transformation was situated in the Bhaktic traditions and the latter rise of Buddhism which in their essence and practice insisted on the inclusion of all castes. The written word, then, allowed to disrupt the Vedic-Brahmin hegemony as ‘when scripture was purely oral, it was given by the Brahmans to others; in its written form, it can now be given by others to Brahmans’ (ibid:78). Mackenzie makes significant points about the perpetuation of oral traditions even when the ‘cult of the book’ had been consolidated, challenging Ong’s generalization that it is writing which made possible
‘the great introspective religions traditions as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and
58 The Puranas are a class of literary texts, all written in Sanskrit verse, whose composition dates from the 4th century BCE to about 1,000 A.D; see more at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Religions/texts/Puranas.html 185
Islam’ (Ong quoted in Mackenzie Brown, 1986: 84). Mackenzie Brown argues that
‘there is no question that the Vedic and early Buddhist traditions were either primarily or exclusively oral’ (1986:84). He sets forth the idea that to understand the nuances of the Hindu tradition a comprehensive sensorial framework involving sight, sound, touch, and taste needs to be emphasized.
He highlights Diana Eck’s (1985) work on Darsan – seeing - to highlight these complexities. Darsan is the act, performance and experience of being in the presence of a divine image. Eck, he states, lucidly brings to the fore the way in which Darsan
– an attribute of sight, seeing – is also closely related with touch. In Taste of India,
Sylian Pinard (1996) takes the intricate, interconnected sensorial experience within the Hindu cosmology a step further by bringing out the limitations of Eck’s insistence on visuality to make a strong point that gustation, to show how taste is also significant. Pinard highlights the importance of prasada – the offerings made to the deity, which then is distributed amongst the devotees after being blessed – in the experience of attaining Darsan; these include careful attention paid to the food items, flavours, and the time of the day when the offering is made and consumed amongst others. Pinard draws upon various Darsan ceremonies to highlight these nuances to make a statement that visuality is just one aspect of this experience, compelling others to think that ‘if visual revelation is not the only route to liberation… this forces us to rethink the alleged centrality of sight in the Hindu tradition’ (1996:226).
In the context of this thesis, The Laws of Manu provides an illuminating account of the manner in which caste hierarchies were ‘animated through sound’ (Classen 1993: 186
121). This was done by prescribing strict rules around hearing and recitation
(speaking) of the Vedic texts. With regard to recitation of Vedas (the ancient Indian society was oral, and therefore Vedic knowledge was orally acquired and disseminated), some of the laws prescribed by The Laws of Manu are as follows:
99. Let him not recite [the texts] indistinctly, nor in the presence of Sudras;
nor let him, if in the latter part of the night he is tired with reciting the Veda,
go again to sleep.
107. For those who wish to acquire exceedingly great merit, a continual
interruption of the Veda-study [is prescribed] in villages and in towns, and
[the Veda-study must] always [cease] when any kind of foul smell [is
perceptible].
108. In a village where a corpse lies, in the presence of a [man who lives as
unrighteously as a] Sudra, while [the sound of] weeping [is heard], and in a
crowd of men the [recitation of the Veda must be] stopped
111. As long as the smell and the stains of the [food given] in honour of one
ancestor remain on the body of a learned Brahmana, so long he must not
recite the Veda.
114. The new-moon day destroys the teacher, the fourteenth [day] the pupil,
the eighth and the full-moon days [destroy all remembrance of] the Veda; let
him therefore avoid [reading on] those [days]. 187
116. Let him not study59 near a burial-ground, nor near a village, nor in a
cow-pen, nor dressed in a garment which he wore during conjugal
intercourse, nor after receiving a present at a funeral sacrifice. (Chapter IV)60
A reading of these laws suggests that the sound of the Vedas, representing knowledge, was socially, spatially, sensually, temporally and corporeally guarded. It also categorically defines who is allowed to listen to these sounds. Sudras (members of the lower caste) and women were denied this right, and by that logic the right to access and contribute to the body of knowledge. The performance of recitation also was sensorially determined. The twice-born man, a Brahmin, was advised against reciting the Vedas when in the proximity of a lower-caste person or after having eaten food that was too strong in its smell and taste (garlic) or when the surroundings smelt foul.
The sensoriality of the Hindu cosmos, and the manner in which a nuanced understanding of it prevailed is explored by Schechner (2001) who juxtaposes two texts – Aristotle’s Poetics and Bharata-Muni’s NatyaShastra – ‘a Sanskrit manual of performance and performance theory’ (ibid: 27). Drawing upon diverse sources, and employing his own performance artistic background, he proposes the concept of
‘rasaesthetics’ which ‘is not something that happens in front of the spectator, a vision for the eyes, but "in the gut," an experience that takes place inside the body specifically engaging the enteric nervous system’ (ibid). Even though situated in the context of performance arts, his detailed enumeration of rasas – emotive, engaged experiences without which a performance is incomplete, as listed in NatyaShastra, - as ‘sensuous, proximate, experiential. Rasa is aromatic. Rasa fills space, joining the
59 Here implying the reciting of the sacred texts. 60 http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/manu/manu05.htm. 188 outside to the inside’ (ibid: 29) allows us to contextualize the performance of everyday life in Hindu cosomology as being sensorially ordained and experienced.
The rampant prevalence of Untouchability61 in contemporary India, even though it has officially been abolished and its practice deemed as ‘an offence punishable in accordance with law’,62 is a deplorable instance of how sensorial regimes are disciplined and regulated (Howes 2005) to sustain social hierarchies.
Sight over other senses: Sensorial hierarchisation in Western epistemological traditions
One of the main agendas of sensorial scholarship is to insist on the diversity and distinctiveness of sensorial experiences, historically and culturally (Smith 2007;
Classen 1993, 2005; Stoller 1997; Howes 1991, 2003, 2004, 2005). People experience senses (hearing, touching, smelling, taste, and seeing) differently, and sensorial alignment, the importance accorded to the various senses – varies across cultures. This, the sensorial scholars insist, is an important aspect when it comes to understanding past as well as cultural specificities, differences and interactions
(Smith 2007; Classen 1993; Stoller 1989, 1997; Howes 2003, 2005, 2008). By emphasising an intersensorial approach (Howes 2003, 2005; Smith 2007), which explores interrelated and multiple sensorial experiences as a way to understand cultures, the sensorial scholars, anthropologists and historians highlight the importance of senses other than sight, which has been accorded predominance in
Western epistemological traditions (Classen 1997, 2005; Classen et al. 1994; Howes
2004, 2005; Smith 2007). In historical accounts and intellectual traditions, senses such as touch, smell and to an extent hearing are either systematically absent or
61 http://www.ncdhr.org.in/ncdhr2/dalits-untouchability/dalits-untouchability. 62 http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/fullact1.asp?tfnm=00%2020. 189 conceptualised as ‘low’ senses (Howes 2005), implying that these were prevalent in inferior, less developed cultures and societies. The absence or specific categorisation of these senses, however, does not mean they were insignificant; instead, a sensorial reading of history situates the prominence accorded to sight in an imperialist and elitist agenda to dominate and manipulate the colonial ‘other’.
In Sensory History (2007), Mark M. Smith, an historian of the senses, explores sensory experiences across historical periods and cultures to highlight the importance of touch, smell and hearing in shaping cultural practices and politics. He argues that his approach was intended to maintain a distant (see Howes 2005) and ‘cold, clean, objective’ (Smith 2007) position by the imperialist vis-à-vis ‘others’. Smith argues that the interactions between colonisers and colonised were an intersensorial experience not limited to visual experience, and that these played a significant role in racial stereotyping. He sensorially explores Columbus’s encounters in the Caribbean islands. According to Smith, ‘the nakedness of the islanders both “attracted and offended the Europeans’ sense of touch”’ (Smith 2007: 14): it was celebrated as pristine and innocent. However, their sensorial and other cultural practices evoked fear as well. The nakedness, unrecognisable speech and body piercings were in stark distinction to European sensorial alignments, and were thereby categorised as irrational and lowly, and ‘invited possession: they were made captive and raped’
(ibid).
At the core of imperial expansion which celebrated the European male eye as the source of ‘verifiable, quantifiable truth’ (Smith 2007: 26) was ‘a sense of individualism – the idea of a self, demarcated, and with boundaries – which in turn, helped establish and elaborate gender and class distinctions’ (2007: 26). The idea of 190 the self was consolidated by accentuating distance from the ‘other’. While imperial exploration opened vistas into the new, unfamiliar and exotic as a spectacle (Smith
2007), it also accentuated the anxiety of maintaining a distance from the ‘other’. The perceived sensorial indulgence of the Caribbean islanders, by the way of touch, was seen as a carnal celebration outside of European rationality. It excited the Europeans’ curiosity, but also threatened them, leading the Europeans to institute a disciplining sensorial regime for the islanders, which involved denying their sensorial practices and alignment as a means of experiencing and articulating truths about themselves
(see Feld 1996).
These discourses impacted the sensorial regimes that were instituted to engage with the ‘other’. The degradation and denouncement of the senses other than sight was normalised by celebrating rationality (Howes 2003, 2005; Smith 2007, 2008), which was ‘supported in various ways by the “scientific” theories of the day’ (Howes 2005:
11) and by the invention of technologies of gazing (telescope, microscope, perspective painting), which ‘served to empower the vision’ (Smith 2007: 23). In this scheme of things, while the West, as the dominant group, was associated with
‘higher senses’ of sight with strong foundations in rationality, science and truth, the natives – as ‘others’ – were further distanced by being associated with ‘so-called lower senses of smell, touch, and taste’, which were prescribed to be irrational, dangerous and unpleasant (Howes 2005: 165). The hegemonic tropes through which societal-cultural norms were organised allowed for those in power to indulge in the
‘spectacle’ of the ‘other’ while maintaining an ‘objective’ distance (Smith 2007).
Owing to the distance maintained so that the elite could have a ‘highly demarcated distanced notion of self’ (Smith 2007: 15), they did not have engaged, immediate 191 interactions with the ‘others’ to develop epistemological models to categorise and normalise senses other than sight, and nor was it part of their imperialistic agenda; the senses of the ‘other’ thereby were accorded a lower ranking (see Howes 2005).
The elite did not have any vocabularies to make sense of the manner in which other cultures were sensorially organised. These practices, therefore, were categorised as
‘dangerous and unpleasant’ (Howes 2005: 165). The ‘lower senses’, and thus the
‘others’, were denied vocabularies and frameworks through which they could articulate experience of organising their everyday lives through the ‘so-called low senses’ (Howes 2005: 165) into coherent bodies of knowledge, and hence were given a subordinate location in the broader epistemological tradition compared with
Western rational and scientific knowledge. These anxieties were replicated in the heirarchisation of senses that ensured the hegemonisation of knowledge through sight that was ‘safe, distanced, and true’ (Smith 2007: 24).
Within the IEI framework, the interactions between the immediate sensorial realms of dominant groups and ‘others’ in the extended sensorial realm during the period of imperial expansion were highly restricted, and a strict code of conduct and decorum was prescribed – especially for the manner in which ‘others’ were required to behave so as to not disrupt the delicate sensorial, and thus the social, order. There was a definite agenda when it came to disciplining the sensorium (see Howes 2005; Smith
2007) so as to contain the ‘other’. The dominant group’s engagement with the immediate realm of ‘others’ was within the hegemonic structures, so that the dominant group rarely engaged with it, and if an engagement was unavoidable it was articulated as ‘unpleasant and dangerous’ (see Smith 2007; Howes 2004, 2005;
Classen 1993). As mentioned earlier, the ‘others’ were not allowed any epistemological, social or cultural legitimacy to prescribe their immediate sensorial 192 practices in the European-dominated extended realm. In discussing the importance of
‘scent, sound and synaesthesia for material culture studies’, Howes (2006: 162) speaks of the ‘sensuality of material culture’ which ‘is also projected in (colonial) architecture’ (2006: 168), and which highlights the politics of interactions in the immediate–extended–imagined realms between dominant groups and ‘others’:
A good comparative example would be the nineteenth-century European
fashion for balconies versus windowless walled domestic compounds in
many parts of Africa. The architectural form of the balcony allowed the
bourgeois subject to gaze but not to be touched while the walled compound
inhibits sight and fosters tactile engagement. The latter arrangement is
important to a people such as the Wolof of Senegal, for whom touch is the
social sense and vision the sense of aggression and transgression. (2006: 168)
In the dominant group’s immediate sensorial realm, everyday performance was organised around minimising experiences and explorations through the sense of smell, taste or touch (Smith 2007, 2008), while testimonies and histories about the immediate sensorial realms of the ‘others’ are conspicuous by their absence. And, as in the above example, the sensorial domain of the ‘other’ was totally ignored, compelling them to reorganise their sensorial practices in their extended sensorial realm according to the codes of sensorial conduct prescribed by the dominant imperial group.
Classen, in Worlds of Sense (1993), provides an overview of senses in history and argues that, across cultures, ‘sensory models are conceptual models, and sensory values are cultural values’ (1993: 136). He calls for a sensorial revolution to approach different cultures on their own sensory terms rather than through the 193 paradigms dictated for them by the West, through which ‘what we discover are not world-views or oral/aural societies, but worlds of senses’ (1993: 138). Through his ethnographic research among Songhay community in Nigeria, Paul Stoller (1997) insisted on a ‘sensuous scholarship’, as it is:
representationally and analytically important to consider how perception in
non-Western societies devolves not simply from vision (and the linked
metaphors of reading and writing) but also from smell, touch, taste and
hearing … all of which cry out for a sensuous description, [and] are central to
the metaphoric organization of experience; they also trigger cultural
memories. (1997: xvi)
Scholars across different academic traditions have loudly responded to these calls, as evidenced by the burgeoning body of work in the world of senses (Classen 1997,
2005; Bull and Back 2003; Howes 2004, 2005; Smith 2004, 2007). These different studies expose a definite sensorial practices in the immediate sensorial realms of the
‘other’, highlighting a distinct sensually ordained sense of self (Feld 1990) and generating an understanding of one of the important frameworks of ‘othering’.
Identity and ‘othering’: Movements along the immediate–extended– imagined sensorial realms in the Karimnagar slums
In the following section, I will map the immediate–extended–imagined realms which slum-dwellers negotiate vis-à-vis the city and with different/diverse groups, communities and spaces within the Karimnagar slums. These sensorial realms, and the respective positionalities thereby instituted, are informed by the corresponding social, cultural and political contexts.
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By following Rupa’s narrative, I will highlight the sensual, social, cultural and political frameworks within which the lives of slum-dwellers are constantly defined, mapped and meditated, and their immediate–extended–imagined positionalities determined.
Village to City
As I write, I have known Kanta for three years. She is a 50-year-old widow presently living with her 30-year-old son and her daughter-in-law. In the time I have known her, she has changed her name and religion twice, and her locality thrice. She hails from Firozabad, an industrial town in Uttar Pradesh. This town is famous for manufacturing glass bangles. In 1979, at the age of twenty, Kanta married a man from the same town. He worked in a glass bangle factory. The working conditions in the factory were oppressive and the pay minimal. In 1980, when she had been married only for a year, he decided to migrate to Delhi in search of better opportunities, leaving her behind with their first-born child, a son. Although her husband did not have an extended family to support, he wanted to ensure a better environment for his children. A few of his relatives who were settled in Karimnagar assured support:
I was young and had been brought up in a fairly well to do family. If we
were never rich, we were never poor. Even my husband’s family was well
settled. Still, the promise of coming to the city, leading a city life, was very
exciting for me. I used to imagine we would live in one of those proper
houses and have a garden. I had obviously seen a lot of movies …
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Though it has been more than twenty years since she has lived in the city, she evokes it in an eloquent, romantic manner. For her, the nostalgic landscape is not the village or the hometown, as is often evoked by the residents of Karimnagar slums, but the imagined sensoriality – in the way of uninhibited mobility and interactions with her husband in public places – promised by the ‘city way of life’. Her narrative reflects the conflict between the nostalgia for the imagined city and her life in the immediate materiality of the slums. Her husband worked in Delhi for two years before coming back to bring Kanta to Delhi in 1982. By then, her husband had managed to save
INR. 3000, a substantial amount then, and had a steady job and rented accommodation in the legal part of Karimnagar . Though it was not as she had imagined, Kanta was elated to be in the city. Recalling those days, she says:
There was so much happening around all the time. Though, I have to admit,
where we were staying, at times, did feel like back home. Factories, narrow
lanes, over populated, etc. However, it was still different. I could do things I
could have never done back home. We [her husband and herself] went out to
markets, temples, and, twice, even to watch movies all by ourselves. I went to
the market to do the shopping and I had friends. We led a city life with no
restrictions and limitations.
Such limitations had included restricted mobility and the very rigid gender, class and caste sensual alignments and restrictions dominant in her town.
By 1984, they had been living in Karimnagar for two years. In these years, Kanta had two more children in a quick succession: a son in 1982 and a daughter in 1983. The 196 pressure of maintaining a growing family on Kanta’s husband’s factory-worker wages was bearing heavily on them. By this time, the slums across the road had developed considerably. Bhumhiheen, Gandhipuri and Lapatagunj camps had been established and these were duly recognised as three distinct slums, Juggi-Jhopdi (JJ) clusters, by the government agencies. Many families who lived in rented accommodation were shifting into the camps. Basic infrastructural facilities, water and electricity, were available – even though intermittently and mostly illegally.
City to Slum
The shift from legal Karimnagar to Puranihaweli camp implied a step down the social ladder; however, during that time the stigma associated with slum-dwellers was not as negative as in the present. Moreover, the political parties and legal system favoured the rights of the slum-dwellers. In the historic Olga Tellis case, 1981, pavement and slum-dwellers in Bombay challenged Bombay Municipal Council’s decision to evict them in court. Such an action was argued to be in violation of their right to live in the city, even though on the pavements and in the slums, which allowed them a livelihood. If evictions were to be ordered, they demanded, it was to be preceded by adequate resettlement plans.63 Though the pavement-dwellers were evicted, this case is significant because the Supreme Court acknowledged the ‘right to livelihood’ for slum/pavement dwellers as a part of ‘right to life’, which the state owes it to its citizens. The case is problematic on many accounts, as it is often evoked to deny resettlement to slum-dwellers, but it also secured the rights of tenancy for the slum/pavement dwellers, who cannot now be evicted summarily.
63 http://www.escr-net.org/caselaw/caselaw_show.htm?doc_id=401006.
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Within this broader social and political context, Kanta’s family decided to move into a Juggi-Jhopdi in Puranihaweli camp. This way they could save on rent, electricity and water. The resettlement of slums policies and projects were being drafted and popularised; Kanta and her husband considered this move to be a stop-gap arrangement until they were allotted a plot in a resettled, legal colony. The dream to finally be part of the city would come true: this move, for Kanta’s family, was considered only short term. Kanta’s elder son, Aakash, is a reticent 30-year-old man who looks and acts much older than his age. He owns and runs a grocery shop in
Puranihaweli camp. Though he was brought up in the Juggi-Jhopdi clusters, he has not been able to reconcile with what the ‘imagined’ life could have promised.
Through subtle suggestion, he holds his parents responsible for his predicament:
They must have thought, well, let’s shift to the JJ clusters and soon we will
have a plot in resettlement colony. It never happened, did it? Now my father
is dead and my children are growing up here. I don’t mind staying here. I
actually like it. But I know that if I were staying in Karimnagar ,
opportunities would have been different. It’s my children, I feel bad for.
They will always be ‘slum-dwellers’. I send them to public schools but how
does that make a difference when they want to go to play in the nearby
park? They are shooed away.
Though Kanta’s narrative is informed by the juxtaposition of her life in the slum versus the imagined city life, the sense of the injustices associated with being a slum- dweller, pervasive in her son’s narrative, is missing. After almost a decade in 198
Puranihaweli camp, it was evident to Kanta and her family that this was the only arrangement available to them. By then, they could not afford to shift into a legal colony. The socio-cultural associations formed here were too strong to be disrupted.
Also, a departure meant that they would have to give up any chance of a resettled plot in the future. Around this time, a tragedy struck Kanta’s family. Kanta lost her husband to tuberculosis in 1991. That incident more or less sealed any chances of shifting out of Puranihaweli camp for Kanta’s family:
I had three children to look after. My oldest was thirteen, the youngest only
eight. I had never worked. Aakash’s father had always been a very
responsible husband and father. My connections with the family back home
had become very weak. I could not expect them to take care of my family.
What could I do? The only thing I knew was here, the camps. I was safe here.
I knew nothing would happen to me or my children. Somehow we will
manage.
Until then, beyond the everyday, immediate sensorial engagement of being a slum- dweller, Kanta states that she did not understand the reality, implications or consequences of being a slum-dweller. One of the immediate tasks she had to undertake after her husband’s death was updating her family’s ration card.
Real vis-à-vis recorded lives
Kanta’s husband had procured a ration card – validating his citizenship in the city of
Delhi as a slum-dweller – in 1980. Until her husband passed away, the ration card was the document that ensured a regular supply of oil, sugar and rice at cheap prices. 199
After her husband’s death, to continue availing herself of the benefits, she had to update the details. It was then that she stumbled upon fictions, versions of her life, unknown to her until then. As explained in the earlier section, every ration card needs to record details: number of family members, date of birth, date of expiry. On a closer reading of the ration card, Kanta realised that the details of the family members in the card, meticulously recorded, had been entered even before the family members existed. The ration card listed five children (two daughters and three sons), each with their name and date of birth. In 1980, when Kanta’s husband had got the card, she only had one child, a son. Her children’s names were decided long before they were born. The manner in which Kanta speaks about encountering these details, unravelling the truth behind them, lends her narrative a compelling intrigue:
Here I was, a widow at 40, with no education, no experience of dealing with
the real life, three children to take care … and what do I find? That my
husband, a man I loved, a man who was my shield against the whole world,
had fabricated – almost decided – my life even before it existed. I started
suspecting him. Imagine, after he was dead! I could not sleep at night
thinking that these people who were listed, named in the ration card, actually
existed … that when my husband was living alone in Delhi for five years, he
had another life … a wife, children, etc. I always was a bit jealous [Kanta
blushes beautifully while stating this] but then, my husband would placate
me. He would reassure me of his affection. But when he was dead, can you
imagine? I was tormented. I felt cheated. And the man who had cheated me
was dead. I was fighting imaginary ghosts while struggling to make ends 200
meet for myself and the children. Thankfully, it all turned out to be a figment
of my overactive imagination.
After months of agony, Kanta compromised her self-respect and started asking people – relatives and friends – about her husband’s life in Karimnagar before she joined him. Prepared for the worst, Kanta put together the details. Finally, the mystery of the ‘fictitious’ family in the ration card unfolded. As it turned out, at the time of getting the ration card, Kanta’s husband was still living in Karimnagar .
There was a collective drive in Karimnagar slums to issue ration cards. The political parties at that time supported the slum resettlement schemes. Anyone who had a ration card establishing residence in one of the camps would be eligible for resettlement plots – whenever the demolition happened. Though Kanta’s husband was not a resident of the slums, he was advised to register himself as one so as to secure his future in a legal-resettled colony. One of his relatives – a cousin’s brother’s wife – encouraged him to include his wife and children’s names as well for them to be eligible for the claims as well. There was, however, a slight technical issue. Kanta’s husband did not have his wife with him and certainly had no children by then to convince the survey officer:
My husband’s cousin’s brother – whose wife had suggested adding the names
– already had a ration card. His wife offered to accompany my husband as his
wife tugging along her children for the survey. She had five children. When
they went for the survey, the officer asked my husband names of the children.
Bhabhi – brother’s wife – sensing his awkwardness, told the names of her
children. When our children were born, the same names as listed on the ration 201
card were given to them. Sometimes I wonder, if I had three daughters, would
I have to give them a boy’s name as mentioned in the ration card?
Kanta’s narrative highlights the negotiations of slum-dwellers between real and recorded lives, present and imagined future. Documentation – ration cards, Voter ID cards, which enrol people in electoral rolls permitting them to cast a vote – define and determine the locatedness a slum-dweller can find in the city. More important than the subsidised goods that the ration card allows is the promise of being a
‘legitimate-respectable’ citizen of the city. By residing in the city – as happens for the lower, middle and upper classes – the slum-dwellers do not become citizens of the city. Citizenship of the lower, middle and upper classes is not subject to scrutiny like the lives of the slum-dwellers, and members of these classes do not need a ration card to secure a job, or to buy or rent a house.
On the contrary, for slum-dwellers, the ration-card – along with the Voter ID card, validates their presence in the city, as well as determining whether they will be able to settle in the future. The Voter ID card allows slum-dwellers to assert their political presence, which allows them currency to negotiate benefits with local politicians for their vote. Interestingly, to acquire either one of these documents, the other is needed. This predicament facilitates and sustains networks of people who falsify identities and sell ration cards. With such identities comes legitimacy in the city. In accordance with the most recent government ruling, in 2000, slum-dwellers are no longer being issued with ration cards, which means that their presence in the city is under constant scrutiny – making them highly vulnerable to harassment by 202 authorities, middle-men and local political groups – and also making their future in the city uncertain.
Managing self: Extended immediate, shifting imagined
A few months after her husband’s death, Kanta had to start exploring revenue- generating avenues as the family savings were fast being depleted. The option of working as a maid in one of the nearby middle-class households was an easy one; many women from the camps – mostly married – worked as maids to augment their family incomes. The option, however, was not appealing to her:
I was 40. I had a fairly secure life. A life of dignity. To lower myself to the
state of cleaning someone else’s floor and utensils would have stripped me of
that dignity. A lot of people had advised my husband to let me work as a
maid to add to the income. He had adamantly refused. He wanted me to have
a good life. Also, the kids were young. Who would have looked after them
during the day when I would be working? I decided to exercise the option if
nothing – absolutely nothing – else worked out.
Prepared for the worst, Kanta was pleasantly surprised by the avenues that opened for her within the slums owing to her widowed status:
If I were a widow in my hometown, I would have had to follow strict rites
and rituals to express the bereavement, at least for a year. Here, it was
totally different. The neighbours, members of the community – the people
who back home would have imposed the restrictions on me – encouraged 203
me to explore different options. Not only that, they also helped me in my
endeavours.
Maintaining one’s ‘dignity’ and exercising ‘choice’ – prominent in Kanta’s narrative
– outside the rhetoric of poverty, lack and disempowerment is not usually accorded to slum-dwellers. The widowed status opened avenues and channels for her that had hitherto been closed. The space of the slums is not a site of restrictions, oppressions and limitations in Kanta’s narrative. Instead, it is a site of liberation from age-old traditions and norms.
In their decade in Puranihaweli camp, Kanta and her husband had set up a half kaccha (temporary) and half pucca (permanent), four-room tenement on two levels.
After discussions with the well-wishers, Kanta realised that the only asset through which she could secure a stable source of income was her house. Though some had suggested selling the juggi and returning to Firozabad, Kanta knew that back in the village she and her children would not be able to adjust under the constant scrutiny of the extended family – amongst other concerns, one of the main issues of adjustment would be the sensorial ordering and restrictions in her hometown. Here in the Karimnagar slums, even though not part of the mainstream city-culture, she and her family members were permitted sensorial freedoms not allowed in Firozabad.
These included interactions between men and women, relative mobility for women and possibilities for the male members to undertake jobs looked down upon amongst her community members. When I mentioned about her daughters ‘restricted’ movement within Karimnagar slums and in the city, she remarked: ‘Of course, these permissions are relative. We haven’t broken all our bonds, but it still allows us to do 204 things we would either not be allowed to do or would have to fight for back home.’
After much speculation and consultation, Kanta decided to shift with her children into the one room on the first level. In the room facing the street, Kanta opened a small grocery store, while the other two rooms were open for sub-letting.
After leading a highly secured and restricted lifestyle in the city, Kanta – after ten years – found herself making her mark in the exclusively masculine domain of running a shop and hosting tenants. Her entry into these territories while her husband was alive would have been next to impossible. Instead of sub-letting rooms to families, she decided to let them out to young, unmarried men.
The lack of strict property rights implies an increased threat of encroachment in the
Karimnagar slums; it is one of the main reasons why families stay in the Karimnagar slums even when they have bought a house in a lower-middle class settlement. As discussed earlier, identities through ration cards issued prior to 2000, which are still valid to make claims on resettled plots, can be bought in the Karimnagar slums.
Owing to these fluid networks, it is not an uncommon occurrence in the Karimnagar slums for many individuals or families to make claims to a resettled plot through a ration card on which the address in the Karimnagar slums is recorded. In such instances, in case of a resettlement the claims are nullified. The threat of her property being encroached upon would have been higher if she had allowed a family to rent, as it would be easier for them to procure a ration card. A young, unmarried man was not so much of a threat. Moreover, a family usually has far more established social and cultural networks, which make it difficult to displace them.
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Kanta’s decision to let young, unmarried men into her house was not questioned; instead, it was supported by the community members. If a young, unmarried woman or a married woman whose husband was away had taken this step, the woman would have been ostracised and labeled ‘immoral’. However, Kanta’s widowhood put her above and beyond these social norms, as well as possible romantic or sexual liaisons.
By 2001, ten years after her husband’s death, Kanta’s two sons, Aakash (21) and
Pankaj (20), were running a profitable business from the grocery shop she had initially set up and Aakash was married. ‘At that time, I felt I had no regrets,’ she recounts. ‘ My life was complete. I was looking forward to spending time with my grandchildren.’ However, a ‘harmless’ favour extended to one of her cousin’s sons shook the foundations of her ‘settled, complete’ life. The cousin’s son, a young boy of seventeen, had recently shifted into the Karimnagar slums from their hometown,
Firozabad. He was looking for employment in the city. Through extended networks, he was assured a gardener’s job in a nearby middle-class household. The position was coveted, as it left enough spare hours in the day for him to take another job. The only hurdle in getting the job was getting through the police verification. He did not have any identification. I have discussed these issues at length in Chapter 3. When
Kanta heard about the young boy’s predicament, she offered to procure other related documents, such as a Voter ID card, for him by establishing him as the third son listed in her ration card. Subsequently, the young man got the job.
However, this soon became a contentious issue with her oldest son and his wife, leading to altercations every day:
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My daughter-in-law somehow got it in her head that my cousin’s son will
now claim part of the resettlement plot. She accused me of favouring my
relatives over my children. Can you imagine, after all I had done? Initially
my son tried to explain to her otherwise. It is not as simple to make a claim to
the resettlement plot, even though possible. But soon he was singing the same
tune – it got unbearable. I decided to move out of the house. It wasn’t an easy
option. I used some savings and my sons and I decided on a monthly
allowance from the grocery shop for our [Kanta and her daughter’s] upkeep.
Kanta shifted to Lapatagunj camp.
Slum to slum
Over the last five years, Kanta has lived across the three camps in Karimnagar . In each of these places, her experience was different owing to the position she had in each slum’s social context. In Puranihaweli camp – which was her original home – her position as the family matriarch was well established and acknowledged. She was respected for her courage in overcoming crisis and was constantly consulted on local matters of significance: marriage proposals, business deals and administrative issues, amongst others. She had a definite presence and ‘voice’ in this context.
However, the social and cultural boundaries of her immediate, extended and imagined realms changed dramatically when she moved to Lapatagunj camp following the altercation with her son and daughter-in-law.
Kanta, along with her daughter, moved to the two-room tenement she had bought.
Her youngest son stayed back with his brother. While Kanta had an established, 207 secured and respected position in Puranihaweli camp, in Lapatagunj camp she was relegated to being a ‘poor widow who had been thrown out of her house’. In speaking to her and about her, the language of ‘lack’ was constantly evoked, much to
Kanta’s distress. She was expected to behave like a ‘widow’: helpless, meek and dependent. She tried to set up a grocery store in one of the rooms in Lapatagunj camp, without any success. She did not have the social-cultural-political legitimacy or patronage from community members to set up the shop. She was consistently denied a ‘voice’ here. She could not penetrate the established networks of power and hierarchy. Slowly and steadily, the immediate became an intimidating zone for her.
She recalls her experience in the following manner:
K: I would lie awake at nights. I used to be so scared for myself and my
daughter. The boys were uncouth and loud here. They played loud songs all
the time and abused openly. Though I had not imposed any restrictions on
my daughter in Puranihaweli camp, I had to control her movements here …
R: How was it different? People say the same thing about Puranihaweli
camp … about it being unsafe for women, etc.
K: There I knew people. I knew they would not say anything to my
daughter. We did not understand their language. We could not fight back.
Kanta’s disempowered position in Lapatagunj camp and her inability to penetrate the established networks ‘silenced’ her position. Unable to evolve vocabularies through which she could engage within this context, she shifted to Gandhipuri camp. The shift to Gandhipuri camp was not easy, as the only ‘transaction’ she could afford at that time dictated that she undertake a Muslim identity. Though she was not expected 208 to convert, officially or religiously, the threat perception of living amongst Muslims
– a community which was always considered the ‘other’ in Puranihaweli camp – was high. She, however, decided to take her chances. To her surprise, her experience of living amongst Muslims in Gandhipuri camp was liberating, and she redeemed the status she had enjoyed in Puranihaweli camp:
My house in Gandhipuri camp was next to the road unlike LapatagunjPlace
where it was in one of the inside lanes. It felt nicer to be closer to the main
road; it was safer. I could hear things, people coming and going out. Within
the Muslim community not many women are allowed to work or go out on
their own. When I proposed to set up a small store in my house, the decision
was supported by everyone. This way the women did not have to wait until
their husbands, sons or brothers got back to fetch things from the market. It
was nice. Women would come; we would sit around the whole day, chat,
watch movies, etc. I liked living there. If my son had not pleaded for me to
come back, I would not have left that place. I still go to meet some of them
once in a while.
On account of being a Hindu and a widow, Kanta was allowed to set up the shop – a liberty not otherwise available to the women in the community. In the immediate context, Kanta could exert her presence; in this way, her engagement with the space was totally different from that of Lapatagunj camp. She did not find Gandhipuri camp ‘intimidating’ or ‘terrifying’.
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After three years, Kanta and her sons reconciled. She shifted back to Puranihaweli camp with her sons and daughter-in-law.
Discussion
The life of a slum-dweller, as evident from Kanta’s narrative, is a constant negotiation across multiple matrices. These negotiations are detrimental for the slum- dwellers in setting out the boundaries of the immediate, extended and imagined sensorial realms.
In this thesis, I explore the everyday life in Karimnagar slums as it is ‘animated by sound’ (Classen 1993:121) and sound’s politics. Through this sensorial exploration, I further evaluate how the slum interacts with the city and vice versa. The intent of this sonic exploration was not to set the divide between middle-class/literate/visual and slum-dwellers/illiterate/oral, replicating Western and non-Western epistemological hierarchies. Instead, researching sonic cultures allowed an exploration and identification of the slum’s immediate sensorial realm outside middle-class representations.
In the Karimnagar slums, sound is an important element to organise and negotiate everyday life on account of the density of population, lack of space, linear (and limited) visual landscape and restricted mobility – especially amongst women. This, however, is not to suggest that other senses – sight, smell, taste, touch – are not significant, or that hearing is the most pronounced sense. The ‘sonically ordered sense of self’ (Rice 2003: 8) of the slum-dwellers in the immediate sensorial realm revealed practices and politics through which the slum-dwellers proactively 210 maintained a distance from middle class, which they identified as their ‘other’ by evoking different sensorial regimes in the extended and imagined sensorial realms.
The exploration of the everyday in the slums, and interactions with the city through sensorial frameworks, highlighted the processes through which slums categorically and proactively ‘other’ the middle class and the city. The ‘sonically ordered sense of self’ (Rice 2003: 8) of the slum-dwellers allowed them an agency to identify, construct and negotiate with their own ‘other’ – an agency that is often denied to them. In the mainstream media, slums and slum-dwellers are represented through a middle-class lens and middle-class vocabularies. These forums do not allow scope for voices and realities from slum to be involved unequivocally.
In-between immediate–extended–imagined
For Kanta, the realms of the extended and immediate constantly changed depending on the position she enjoyed in her imagined social context. The shift from the small town to the city allowed her to consume the city within the extended realm. In the imagined realm, this shift allowed Kanta to aspire to a dramatically different city experience. Kanta’s positionality vis-à-vis the city in the imagined realm allowed her to move beyond the restrictive immediate realm of the small town. In Firozabad, her position in this context’s immediate sensorial realm was mapped within strict gender roles, which permitted limited scope of social, cultural, political, and moral mobilities and engagements to women. The reality of becoming a slum-dweller, however, renegotiated the scope of immediate, extended and imagined sensorialities within the urban fabric. The city as a space was obliterated from the immediate sensorial realm only to be evoked as romanticised, hyperbolic instance in the imagined. 211
The change of status from a married woman to a widow opened up possibilities in the extended sensorial realm which did not exist before, broadening the horizons in the imagined realm. As discussed in the previous section, Kanta’s widowed status, instead of limiting her mobility, allowed her entry into hitherto masculine, and thereby inaccessible, zones. When Kanta found herself in the middle of a family altercation, she decided to move out of her house. This choice to explore beyond her secured immediate sensorial realm was only made possible because of the broadened extended and imagined realms, which opened for her owing to her undertaking a masculine role in the family.
These changed positionalities had a significant impact on Kanta’s sensorial regime and performances. In Puranihaweli camp, when her husband was still alive, she led a sensorially secured life. Her mobility was restricted. She did not engage with strangers – men or women – from other camps. Until she had to explore living in other camps, she had never visited them. In her narratives, Kanta constantly reiterated that she had assumed a ‘masculine role’ after her husband’s death. Her position in the imagined realm vis-à-vis other groups and communities in
Puranihaweli camp underwent a change after this incident: she was no longer situated within the strict gender roles that limit sensual, spatial and social mobilities for most women in the Karimnagar slums. Not without limitations, she was allowed social and cultural legitimacy to expand the scope of her extended sensorial realm.
This recalibrated her sensorial performances in the immediate. She could exert her presence, sensorially, in the public far more assertively. She was no longer required to exercise the same sensorial caution as other, women restricting her mobility, interactions and engagements. 212
Sensorial interplay in immediate–extended–imagined realms
The self is articulated through complex sensorial alignments that determine interactions amongst different communities in the Karimnagar slums. These articulations are negotiated through the positionality of a group or community within its immediate–extended–imagined realms. In two major ways, the exploration of sensorial politics augments the need for a framework such as the immediate– extended–imagined: first, the collective experience and identity as slum-dwellers within which all its residents, in spite of the social, cultural, and moral differences, are bound; and second, the materiality of slums, which accords an urgent, unavoidable immediacy to everyday interactions.
The immediate–extended–imagined framework for understanding sensorial realms allows the researcher to highlight the social, cultural and political complexities of everyday life in the Karimnagar slums, and thereby to challenge representations of slums as homogenised spaces of experience, as in middle-class discourse. The sensorial alignments in the Karimnagar slums are complex and precarious. From an outsider’s perspective, shaped by Western and middle-class informed sensibilities, these are not apparent, owing to the immediacy of everyday interactions and lack of sustained interactions with slums.
The imagined positionality of most communities in the Karimnagar slums vis-à-vis
‘others’ is defined by the collective identity as slum-dwellers and the immediacy of interactions that the materiality of space imposes on them, in the extended realm.
Most communities identified ‘others’ in their imagined realm, which in turn suggested their position: simultaneously maintaining a distance from communities 213 whose sensorial behavior is considered symptomatic of stereotypical slum-dwellers – filth, noise, dirt – as represented in middle-class rhetoric, and also remaining apart from those whose sensorial performance is seen as a emulation of middle-class lifestyle – loudness and physicality. These strategies informed the sensorial performance in the immediate realm as well as the scope of interaction in the extended realm. Within this framework of immediate–extended–imagined, a strong sensually articulated sense of self of slum-dwellers is evident, and the middle class is identified as a distinct ‘other’.
The city–slum relationships unfold within a constant negotiation of sensual hierarchies and politics – there is a sense that what can be empowering in one power matrix is displacing in another. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, slum-dwellers offer cheap manual labour to middle-class households. These jobs involve a sensual immediacy (seeing, touching, hearing and smelling) in the extended realm; however, to sustain the narrative of ‘otherness’ in the imagined realm, newer sensual hierarchies are introduced. For instance, women from the slums who work as domestic maids in middle-class households often have a separate set of utensils
(cups, plates) that they are allowed to use. While it is acceptable for middle-class households to consume the food prepared by a slum-dweller, they cannot resign themselves to using the same utensils which have been contaminated by slum- dweller’s touch, which is seen as ‘lowly and dirty’. The middle-class households perpetuate the notion of ‘otherness’ in their immediate realm by prescribing such practices in the extended realm, in which interactions unfold. In this realm, the slum- dwellers have to comply with these hierarchies, disempowered as they are – socially, culturally and politically. However, they follow a strict sensorial decorum in their 214 immediate realm to ‘other’ the middle class. It is a common practice amongst women who cook in middle-class households to bathe (even though water is a scarce commodity) before they start cooking for their own families in the slum. The physicality witnessed in the middle-class households – for example, in the way of couples hugging – is prohibited in the immediate realm of the slums. Children – especially daughters – are advised to refrain from such behaviour, as it is considered a sign of moral and social deprivation. In their own immediate, extended and imagined realms, slum-dwellers and the middle class constantly calibrate the meanings of senses to sustain their distancing from the ‘other’. Through similar sensorial disciplining of touch, both slum-dwellers and the middle class maintain their distance from the ‘other’ in the immediate realm.
The sensual self of slums
Slums are legally defined as ‘encroachments on Government land’ (Ramanathan
2001: 1), and slum-dwellers are thereby ‘encroachers’ (Ramanathan 2005: 298). On this account, they are spatially and legally segregated from the mainstream, middle- class culture. Over the last decade, this predicament of slum-dwellers has been stretched, through vehement rhetoric and practices, to discriminate against them – socially, culturally, politically and sensually.
In the Indian context, a certain representation of slums is perpetuated through mainstream print and electronic media. These media are dominated by a distinct middle-class voice and perception (Sharma 2005; Baviskar 2006; Bhan 2009). Slum- dwellers, as producers of content, are conspicuous by their absence in this industry on account of their lack of education and limited skill sets. Even reportage that is supportive and sympathetic of slums evaluates their situation through middle-class tropes. Their everyday is either romanticised or lamented for its lacks. 215
This sensorial exploration of the Karimnagar slums, across the immediate–extended– imagined realms of negotiations, allows vocabularies to engage with its everyday reality and allows the slum to establish its own sense of self outside of hegemonic tropes.
Conclusion
The materiality of the Karimnagar slums does not allow its residents to assume a strict sensorial distance like the one the middle class can impose on slum-dwellers in their extended realm. Nevertheless, slum-dwellers maintain a distance from the middle classes by following a strict sensorial code in their immediate realm which rejects middle-class sensorial practices. Loudness and physicality, two significant sensorial tropes in aligning these regimes, are strictly prohibited amongst many communities – especially for women – in the immediate realm. These are articulated as ‘low’ sensorial performances (see Howes 2005) by the slum-dwellers.
For communities within the Karimnagar slums, the extended sensorial realm is overlapping and intersecting, and the legitimacy of sensorial mobilities and performances available in this realm determines the position of a group or community vis-à-vis ‘others’. Space and spatial mobilities in the Karimnagar slums, then, cannot be strictly viewed within Cartesian dimensionality, strictly demarcated private–public domains or concepts of territoriality. Central to sensorial politics in the Karimnagar slums are spatial mobilities, practices and interactions – as the extended realm - within the slums and with the city. Space is a constantly negotiated and calibrated concept through which sensorial politics, hierarchies and conducts are aligned. This determines the position of a group or community. In this thesis, I have explored these relationships through sonic engagements. 216
The immediate–extended–imagined framework allows for an exploration of the sensorium without limiting itself to the visual–aural divide. It opens avenues for understanding ‘the ways in which the senses are ordered by and underpin cultures, and gain an awareness of the extent to which sensory models shape our lives’
(Classen 1993: 7). The three distinct realms of experience and engagement – immediate, extended and imagined – make it possible to map the different sensorial ordering (depending on position of the group or community, hierarchies and intercommunity interactions) that informs and organises each of these realms. It allows vocabularies to evaluate the interactions – social, cultural, political and sensorial – between the dominant and subordinate groups outside of the hegemonic, dominant tropes by identifying distinct sensorial politics in the immediate realm. For members of the subordinate group, a strong sense of self (see Rice 2003) – otherwise denied to them – is evident.
In the following chapter I will demonstrate the manner in which sonic practices of space in the Karimnagar slums highlight the multiplicity of soundscapes and the importance of sound in ‘making sense of a place’ (Feld 1996: 97). The scope of sonically engaging with space is determined by the individual, group or community’s relative position in the immediate–extended–imagined sensorial realm. It highlights the importance of sound in organising space and organising in space – socially, culturally and politically – within the Karimnagar slums. 217
6
Sonic practices of space
Introduction
As discussed in earlier chapters, central to the everyday experience of slum-dwellers is a constant negotiation with space. At the most fundamental level, their position vis-à-vis the city, state, and middle class are defined spatially: they are ‘encroachers’ on Government land who occupy space, illegally, otherwise imagined for a middle class consumption (Ramanathan 2005: 2908). The ‘illegal’ status is stretched to evoke rhetoric of social, cultural, sensual and moral corruption, which is effectively employed to institute policies to segregate, exclude and discriminate against slum- dwellers. The lack of space and density of population in the Karimnagar slums institutes spatial practices through which social, cultural and political power and hierarchies are exercised.
In this chapter, I will discuss ‘ways in which sound is central to making sense’ (Feld
1996: 97) of space in the Karimnagar slums, and the manner in which this knowledge plays a significant role in the power politics that unfold in the slums.
These have implications when it comes to determining spatial mobilities and engagements of different groups and communities.
Soundscapes: Life of a space experienced by listening
‘Every sensory system makes its own unique contribution to our awareness of place and location’, and soundscapes are a ‘resource that allows inhabitants to connect to 218 dynamic events, both man-made and natural’ (Blesser and Salter 2009). However, within intellectual endeavours, sensorial explorations of space is still limited, though gaining momentum, on several grounds. Stoller (1989) attributes this tendency within academia to preference for ‘dry first principles’, which are ‘generally more important than mouth-watering aromas’ (1989: 7). As discussed in an earlier chapter, a visual, gendered and Eurocentric insistence and bias exist in organising senses, especially within Western epistemological traditions (Classen 1997, 2005; Classen et al. 1994; Falk 1994; Howes 1991, 2004, 2005; Bull and Back 2003; Smith 2007;
Feld 1996). Feld (1994) loudly called for a reworking of the sensorial regime to evocatively represent experiential truths by ‘glimpsing, hearing, touching other realities’; his agenda was far from purely academic. It has strong political ambitions to disrupt the hegemonic representation of ‘other people’s histories’ by the imperial authorities in ‘one language, in one voice, as one narrative’ by ‘giving their voices places to speak and shout and sing from’ (1994). Bull and Back (2003) responded to his call in The Auditory Culture Reader by presenting ‘series of provocations toward deep listening’ (2003: 3) that ‘becomes a powerful concept when activated by an informed consciousness which intends to understand how the world becomes present through its sounds’ (Rice 2005: 199). In Bull and Back’s reckoning, this can help overcome the serious limitations an ‘importance on the visual has placed … on our ability to grasp the meanings attached to much social behaviour, be it contemporary, historical, or comparative’ (Bull and Back 2003: 2).
Steven Feld’s (2005) contribution to the volume Empire of the Senses, ‘Places
Sensed and Senses Places: Towards a Sensuous Epistemology of Environments’, explores the manner in which ‘places make sense, senses make place’. In his works, 219
Feld, attempts to develop a sensibility for places through senses other than vision:
‘But what of places as heard and felt? Place as sounding or resounding?’ (2005:
182). He historically constructs the manner in which the ‘work of senses of place has been dominated by the visualism deep rooted in the European concept of landscape’
(2005: 182). The concept of landscape is situated between artistic and literary representations of visible world and the concerns of academic geography. Both these notions are grounded in the ‘objectivity accorded to the faculty of sight and its related technique of pictorial representation’ (Cosgrove, quoted in Feld 1984: 8).
Feld further evaluates the development in the field of aural scholarship and recounts the contributions of McLuhan (auditory space) and Schaffer (soundscape). However, he states that these works, significant in their own respects, have had very limited impact on serious academic scholarship in the field, as they essentially were situated within the ‘visual-auditory’ divide. These works, according to Feld (2005), could not bring about the complexities and the interplay of sensory experiences. The main concerns which emerge strongly in Feld’s work are the treatment of aural cultural practices and auditory senses within the visual–auditory divide – portrayed in terms of an either/or situation – and the detached understanding of senses other than the vision as being relevant only within the ‘non-Western cultural “others”’ (2005: 184).
He calls for a revaluation of the sensory ratios, which according to him must
‘scrutinize how tendencies for sensory dominance always change contextually with bodily emplacement’ (2005: 182).
Acoustemology: Decoding space, sonically
It is to towards this that Feld (2005), ‘adding to the vocabulary of sensorial-sonic studies’ (2005: 183), introduces the concept of acoustemology, which is ‘the ways in 220 which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth’ (2005:
185). Feld’s conceptual framework of acoustemology provides a relevant referential point for the present study. His approach allowed the research to move beyond the either/or ‘visual–auditory’ divide towards a comprehensive ‘and also’ approach while examining the materiality of the connections and interactions between space and sound.
Drawing upon his research among the Kaluli people, Feld emphasises the importance of hearing for ‘locational orientation’, as in these rainforest regions they ‘hear much that they don’t see’ (2005: 186). Sound has navigational capacity, which is central to
‘the experience of place … [to] be grounded in an acoustic dimension’ (2005: 185).
This, Feld argues, is ‘because space indexes the distribution of sound and time indexes the motion of sounds’ (2005: 185). The materiality of a space determines the specific manner in which sound echoes, reverberates and diffuses as it travels in time, its ‘comingness and goingness’ (2005: 185) thereby lending a place its specific sonic peculiarity. In that sense, ‘auditory space is the dispersion of sonic height, depth, and directionality’ (2005: 185). Through this conceptualisation, soundscapes are in fact maps through which a space can be decoded: they have information about the space’s materiality by way of echoes and reverbs, the density of the space in its resonances, and profiles of its producers in the sonic variety. If heard into, it also conveys significant information about the relationship between different producers in its ‘trajectories of ascent, descent, arch, level, or undulation’ (2005: 185).
The Kaluli people make sense of their place through the information carried in the soundscape. The importance of this is further accentuated in this context as ‘the 221 presences of forest places are sonically announced even when visually hidden’
(2005: 186). While acknowledging the importance of hearing in navigating the rainforest, Feld emphasises the ‘multisensory character’ of its acoustemology, which is ‘suggested by the complexities of everyday practices linking sensory experience of rainforest to artistic processes in visual, verbal, musical, and choreographic media’
(2005: 187). These multisensorial sensibilities are important as, ‘in the tropical rainforest height and depth of sound are easily confused’ (2005: 188) – even when they are significant in making sense of a place.
At the most superficial level, the Bosavi and Karimnagar soundscapes have nothing in common. One is a tropical rainforest while the other is a dense slum settlement in the city. However, a deeper engagement reveals the importance of taking Feld’s acoustemology into the Karimnagar slums to understand their sonic practices.
Soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums: Scope of an acoustemological inquiry
Residents in the Karimnagar slums ‘hear much that they don’t see’ (Feld 2005: 186) and ‘sound are easily confused’ (2005:188) – in much the same manner as in the tropical rainforest, owing to its materiality which has been discussed at length in
Chapter 3. The density of population, lack of space and specificity of the material used for construction, as well as the ingenuity with which lack of space is negotiated, accords the space of the Karimnagar slums a highly porous, fluid and dynamic character.
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Most of the materials (plastic, bamboo and wood) used have very low sound absorption qualities, reverberating most of the sounds and producing a din of unarticulated sounds. In this sonic context, sounds are easily confused and difficult to decipher. They lose their origin and initial purpose. For instance, the sound of the temple bells, which otherwise evokes associations of ‘peace and tranquillity’ is referred to as an ‘irritant’, even amongst the residents of the space; this is because, from its space of origin (the temple) to the point of articulation/association (camps within a radius of 3 kilometres), this sound echoes and reverbs with other sounds.
The architectural layout of the Karimnagar slums limits the scope of ‘visual opportunity’ (Rice 2003: 6) to engage with the space; this lack of ‘insight is replaced by the prospect of insound’ (2003: 6). Sound is thus an important sensual reference through which space is experienced in the Karimnagar slums. However, as discussed in Chapter 3, space is multisensorially experienced – just as it is by the Kaluli people in the tropical rainforest. By according preference to hearing over other senses in this thesis, I do not aim to suggest that the other senses – smell, taste, touch and sight – are less important. While discussing the importance of ‘scent, sound, and synaesthesia for material culture studies’, Howes (2005: 161) lists the significant works that have explored the ‘socialization of olfaction’ (2005: 167), including
Corbain (1986), Classen et al. (1994), Rasmussen (1999) and Pandya (1993). The collection of articles in Empire of the Senses (Howes 2005), along with the detailed discussion Smith (2007) undertakes while charting sensory history, emphasises the importance of other senses in understanding a place (Feld 1996: 97; Classen 1993).
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Tom Rice (2003) undertook an acoustemology of sound and self in the Edinburgh
Royal Infirmary. This project stated with his involvement in ‘Red Dot Radio, also known as the Edinburgh Hospital Broadcasting Service’ (2003: 4) to gather feedback from the patients about the radio programming. Soon, however, he realised that radio sound was only a ‘minor concern’ amongst the patients, who were instead
‘preoccupied by the very busy and distinctive hospital soundscape’ (2003: 4). Owing to their ailments and hospital regulations, patients had limited mobility, so it was
‘through experience of the sonic dynamics of hospital that patients became familiar with and understand the environment and practices in which they [were] caught up’
(2003: 9). These experiences ranged from fright on hearing machines monitoring the patients, which constantly reminded everyone of their vulnerability, to being constantly ‘under observation’ (2003: 8) as the sounds of nurses reminded them, even when they were not in sight.
Rice’s study enlivens the space of the hospital mediated through technology and restricted performances of sound, with insistence on silence and compulsions to hear
– especially in public wards – by highlighting the manner in which its ‘sonic structures … play an integral role [for its patients] in the creation of reality of the place, and in the way they perceive themselves to exist with it’ (2003: 9). He further draws a link between practices of hearing and ‘subtle articulation and exercise of power’ (2003: 9) by the patient’s intimate involvement in the hospital’s soundscape – through the machines and monitors to which they are linked and their inability to not listen to other patients. The patients have no control over this, and often cannot engage with it owing to a lack of specialised knowledge. Also, the awareness that they were being constantly listened into made most patients feel disempowered. 224
When evaluated through these rubrics, the soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums emphasise the significance of sound ‘in human experience in terms of both knowledge and imagination’ (Rice 2003: 8). It allows us to unveil the ‘complex meanings’ endowed by the slums’ residents in such a way that the ‘soundscapes become a symbol, a sonic articulation’ of their position (2003: 8). An evaluation of the ‘interplay of sounds’ (Feld 2005: 185) as being central to making sense, to knowing and to experiential truth (2005: 185) in the Karimnagar slums highlights the politics of soundscapes on several accounts. First, sounds in the Karimnagar slums are not composed of ‘meaningless scraps of sound’ (Rice 2003: 8); instead, their production, performance and interpretation are strongly situated within the position enjoyed by an individual, a group or community in the immediate–extended– imagined sensorial realms. Second, the sonic practice of space in Karimnagar is an extension of these positionalities. The experience of space in Karimnagar slums is a highly embodied experience – mobility and movement in this space are sensually ordained, with ‘hearing and interpretation of sounds’ being ‘vital to orientation in a social, as well as a material and spatial sense’ (Rice 2003: 9). Finally, sound is experienced, organised, produced and performed to construct and order a strong sense of self (2003: 9).
Listening in to sound
In this thesis, I have put the Karimnagar slums on the sensuous map by mapping the manner in which soundscapes are a ‘sensuous reaction of people to place’ (Howes
1991: 167). I listened to the space, into the place; listened into what people listened to and did not – consciously, subconsciously, covertly and overtly; I heard them 225 listening in to others; I listened in to what they heard as others; I heard them listening to themselves. In short, the sensual exploration of and in the Karimnagar slums was through sound, hearing and listening.
In the following section, I will introduce sound as cultural systems in the slums. The process of generating these maps was collaborative: the residents and I would populate a map in accordance to what we were listening into. In the initial phases, however, I drew many impressionistic sonic maps to better tune into the soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums.
In the maps discussed in this section, I have used a biography of water routes as cultural systems. Through using these maps, I intend to emphasis the following:
• the multiplicity of soundscapes in Karimnagar ;
• the diverse listening of the soundscape, which was suggestive of the
corresponding social, cultural and political position;
• the manner in which these listenings and articulations limit or permit
engagements with a space;
• the manner in which sound is distinctively employed by groups, individuals
and communities to constitute a sense of self (Feld 1996).
Soundscapes as cultural systems
While pursuing research towards this thesis, I undertook walks in Karimnagar to acquaint myself better with the materiality of the space, the architectural layout and the density of communities in an area. I marked out public spaces, markets, religious 226 institutions, and so on, and maintained a dossier of the sounds I heard. I also mapped these walks – sonically and spatially. In doing so, I was consciously aware of the dangers of imposing Cartesian anxieties (Tuathail 1996) and being ‘hostage to seeing’ (Smith 2007: 20) when it came to the sonic practices and politics within
Karimnagar. I kept – as Kahn (1992) insists – an ‘eye on how at any specific moment the culture of visuality impinges upon the realms of sound and hearing as we speak about them’ (1992: 3). Sound, Kahn argues, ‘functions poorly’ within ‘visually disposed language’, which treats it ‘as an object’ as ‘it dissipates, modulates, infiltrates other sounds, becomes absorbed and deflected by actual objects, and fills a space surrounding them’ (1992: 2–3).
David Howes (2005) introduces Empire of the Senses as a celebration of ‘sensual revolution’, which has managed to ‘recover a full-bodied understanding of culture and experience’ (2005: 1). Responding to Michel Serres’ claim ‘that the revolt against the domination of language will have to come from senses’ (2005: 4), he acknowledges the peculiar predicament in which the field of sensory studies finds itself. The agenda of these sensual explorations is to move beyond the limitations of
Western epistemological systems bound up in ideas of rationality, language, syntax and sight – with all these elements reiterating each other. However, the only means by which it is possible to explode the sensoriality of history and culture is through language, which Serres maintains ‘denies in its use what his language maintains, namely the emptiness, abstraction and rigor mortis of language’. He acknowledges that the ‘limitations of language are unavoidable as long as language is the medium of communication’ (in Howes 2005: 4). This, however, he does not regard as a major intellectual obstacle. In his reckoning, an understanding of sensorial experience as 227
‘cultural systems’ (2005: 5), instead of insisting on individual experiences of seeing, hearing, touching or tasting, will avoid the ‘expansion of language into a structural model that dictates all cultural and personal experience and expression’ (2005: 4).
According to Howes, implicit in Serres’ call to understand senses as cultural systems is an emphasis that senses, even when not ‘entirely articulated through language’
(2005: 3), are practised as ‘cultural bearers’, and ‘it is something one lives’ (2005: 3).
This approach allows us to identify broader social, cultural and political meaning in sensorial ordering, alignments and negotiations that are ‘hierarchized and regulated so as to express and enforce the social and cosmic order’ (2005: 3). Also, sensorial explorations of cultures expose the fallacy of using Western models of language, systems and perceptions to evaluate non-Western contexts. The scepticism with which certain scholars approach ‘sensual cultures’ is on account of the ‘imaginary divide’ between rationality and emotionality; senses suggesting the latter as their awareness, in these schools of thought, entail ‘a loss of critical awareness and precipitates a slide into a morass of emotion and desire’ (2005: 6). This, Howes argues, can be eliminated if we hold that ‘the mind is necessarily embodied and these senses mindful, then a focus on perceptual life is not a matter of losing our minds but of coming to our senses’ (2005: 7). Constance Classen (1993), making a strong case to discover the world (or worlds) through the senses, argues that in each culture a specific sensorial hierarchy reigns, as does a particular manner in which different senses relate to each other. In her reckoning, ‘to deny the importance of the interplay of senses … where sensory perceptions are so closely related that it is scarcely possible to separate one from another, would be non-sense’ (1993: 136). The 228 sensorial investigations are significant, for ‘sensory models are conceptual models, and sensory values are cultural values’ (1993: 136).
The maps I drew in the Karimnagar slums sonically populated the space and spatially situated the sounds. They explored soundscapes as cultural systems, partly as a response to the call made by Classen (1993), Feld (1996) and Howes (2005), through which social, cultural ordering was instituted and power structures and hierarchies exercised.
It is in this context that, even though Schafer’s (1994) problematic of formulating ‘an exact impression of a soundscape than of a landscape’ (1994: 6) was encountered and considered, the analytical concepts employed by him to study soundscapes failed to provide a robust framework of inquisition. These concepts are the keynote (a ubiquitous and prevailing sound of a soundscape though which is not necessarily always heard); signals (sounds in the foreground, consciously listened to, and having a collective meaning); and soundmarks (sounds unique to a soundscape and often respectively regarded). Central to the exploration of a soundscape through these analytical concepts is a hierarchisation of sounds. The danger of listening into the soundscape of the Karimnagar slums through these analytical concepts was twofold: first, categorising sounds into watertight categories of noise, silence or music; and second, imposing my listening into the Karimnagar slums, influenced by my middle- class sensibilities, on to these categorisations.
Moreover, Schafer (1994) uses these analytical concepts towards ‘opening ears and stimulating clairaudience’ (1994: 6) to encourage a positive soundscaping. The 229 imposition of this model, which was conceptualised to study soundscapes in a
Western context and has been transposed to a non-Western scenario, the Karimnagar slums, does not allow for enough scope to accommodate its sonic politics and negotiations (see Howes 2005). Also, with its insistence on eliminating ‘boring and destructive sounds’ (Schafer 1994: 3), this framework has the potential danger of unwittingly supporting the middle-class agenda of slum removal within its ‘Clean
Delhi, Green Delhi’ aspiration. As evidenced in Chapters 2 and 3, within this aspiration a sanitised, sensual experience of the city is desired, within which the slums as ‘filthy, dirty, smelly and noisy’ have no place. Also, ‘keynotes, signals and soundmarks’ are situated in the ‘visual–aural’ divide (Feld 2005: 185), by insisting on an aural experience distinct from its visual orientation, which denies sound its inherent potential as ‘moving, locating, and placing points in time’ (2005: 185).
By exploring soundscapes as cultural systems (Howes 2005: 4) in this thesis, I have insisted on the production, performance and articulation of sound as an act resounding with the corresponding social-cultural politics and hierarchies. In this schematic, categorising sounds into definite experiences only limits the potentiality of exploring the multiplicities and complexities of soundscapes. Also, sound as a cultural system and sensual experience of hearing highlighted the ‘potential of acoustic knowing’ (Feld 1996: 97) amongst individuals, communities and group to interpret their experiences (1996: 97) into everyday practices, and to have a
‘sonically ordered sense of self’ (Rice 2003: 8). I will undertake a detailed discussion on politics of sonic articulations in the next chapter.
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This thesis categorically does not situate itself within the traditions of music, which strip sounds of ‘its associative attributes’ (Kahn 1992: 2) as a ‘minimally coded sound existing in close proximity to “pure” perception and distant from the contaminating effects of the world’ (1992: 2). Moreover, the traditions of music in the Indian context have their own politics and hierarchies, and following them would only have distracted attention from sounds as cultural systems in the context of this thesis.
To populate the maps of sounds as cultural systems, I followed varied strategies.
Often I let a sound – in that moment – direct me through the space; sometimes I followed the sounds, which I had to learn to hear from listening into Karimnagar ; at other times, I followed people sonically.
Listening into the everyday
I used short survey questionnaires followed by in-depth interviews to understand how residents sonically organised and negotiated their everyday reality. I meticulously followed the everyday sonic associations and negotiations of four families across the three camps by interviewing men and women separately, conducting group discussions as a family, and using short survey questionnaires to identify sounds articulated by family members through the day. I extrapolated these insights into broader, generic trends by analysing them within/through other research findings in the Karimnagar slums.
Mapping everyday sonic associations, temporal and spatial, amongst residents of the three camps highlighted different soundscapes – produced, consumed and articulated 231
– by men and women within the slums. In the soundscapes inhabited (and consumed) by men, the sound of traffic, television, radio, CD players and altercations figured prominently, while women sharing the same physical space lived amidst the sounds of children crying, pots banging – either in preparation of food, cleaning, or filling them with water – televisions and drunken fights.
Rupa is a 40-year-old woman living with her family in Gandhipuri camp. She, along with her family, has been living in Gandhipuri camp since 1980, when her husband came to Delhi from a village in Uttar Pradesh to seek better employment opportunities. Her family consists of her 45-year-old husband, two sons aged 21 and eighteen respectively, the eldest son’s wife, a daughter aged sixteen and a relative from the village who is not their tenant but contributes towards household expenditure. Rupa’s husband, Ranjeet, is employed by a security company and works as a security guard. Her eldest son is employed as a peon in one of the companies where Ranjeet had been a security guard for few months. Her second son, at the time of the interviews, had started an internship at a car workshop to learn the trade of mechanic. Her daughter, after failing to pass her matriculation exams, is studying at home to re-sit the exams next year. Her daughter-in-law, aged eighteen, helps with the household chores. Their relative, 23, is working at a courier company in
Bhakhalaa Place. On most days when I visited the family, I met Rupa, her daughter, and her daughter-in-law, as the men of the family were away during the day doing their respective jobs. I managed to arrange interviews and meetings with the men on holidays, Sundays or their weekly day off.
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The everyday life of the women in this family was organised around domestic sounds, with water sounds being most dominant. Rupa’s daughter and daughter-in- law mapped the space they inhabited through the sounds of cooking, children crying, men coming back from work, preparations for filling water, religious sounds – temple bells and Aazan – calls of street sellers, communal-religious singing of women’s groups, and television. The men, on the other hand, for the same hours in the day mapped it through radio, television, traffic and loud fights. The difference between what was being listened to and how by the men and women of the household was emphasised during interviews when all family members were present.
During one such discussion one late evening, Rupa’s husband, while talking about his work schedule, mentioned how he longs to spend ‘quiet afternoons’ in
Gandhipuri camp to get away from his hectic, loud workspace. At the time of the interviews, he was working as a security guard for a shop in Lajpat Nagar – a prominent marketplace in Delhi. On hearing the phrase ‘quiet afternoons’, Rupa’s daughter retorted: ‘It is the afternoons which are the nosiest around here. There are times when it is so loud and chaotic I feel like banging my head. You cannot get to do anything during that time.’
For Rupa, her daughter-in-law, and daughter afternoons were the loudest time of the day. They had to organise containers to fill water, which meant diligently being
‘plugged’ into different networks to know about the timing for water or the arrival of the water tanker. On the other hand, Rupa’s husband, who insisted that he found the afternoons he spent at home during his weekly day off to be quiet and peaceful, spent this time listening to the radio or watching television in one of the three rooms of their slum. Even though aware of the water situation – and the ordeal the women of 233 the household had to undergo to fetch it – Rupa’s husband had no reason to ‘tune’ into these soundscapes.
In a similar vein, Rupa found her husband’s habit of switching the radio on first thing in the morning very frustrating – she regarded it as intrusive and irritating: ‘Here we are trying to get everything organised for the day – the food, clothes, water, toilet visits, etc. – and he sits over there on the cot, sipping his tea, getting to know what’s happening in the world without any care for what’s happening next to him.’ In his defence, her husband remarked that he was not the only one who listened to the radio; there were others as well. However, for Rupa it was not the sound of the radio, per se, but the social legitimacy and luxury of to her husband being able to listen to the radio that frustrated her. She, along with the other female members of the family, also listened to the radio and CD player, and watched television; however, for them it was a secondary activity – always associated with ‘doing some household work while listening to the radio or watching television’. The legitimacy with which
Rupa’s husband could listen to the radio for leisure was not available to the women.
Traffic sounds – very prominent in Karimnagar slums, owing to the slums’ proximity to a main road with heavy vehicular movement – also evoked contentious sonic engagements amongst men and women in the slums. In Rupa’s household, her husband – who had to leave early every day, spend eight to ten hours standing (or sitting, if the shopkeeper was in a generous mood) outside a shop in a crowded market along one of Delhi’s most congested roads – found traffic noise irritating. He said it ‘increased his blood pressure’, while for Rupa, her daughter and daughter-in- law, traffic sounds evoked movement, stability and a sense of exploration. Her 234 daughter-in-law, who grew up in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, associated the experience of living in a big city with the traffic sound: ‘I know I am in the city when
I hear the airplanes passing by, trucks honking, the cars passing by, and motor bikes going through. It was different in my town. It would get so quiet during the night – here, nothing ever stops.’ Rupa’s husband has to engage with traffic every day – not as a distant soundscape but by having to negotiate it to and from work, being engulfed by it during the entire day, organising his work according to it while the women in the household have no everyday interaction with it, allowing them to not only unlisten – a sonic strategy I shall detail in Chapter 9 – to it when they want but also be able to romanticise it, much as Rupa’s husband had been able to unplug from the water sounds in the afternoon, celebrating his quietness and solitude.
Through these distinctions, a highly gendered sonic topography of the Karimnagar slums emerged which corroborated with the social and cultural mobility and position available to men and women. Men and women organise and navigate their everyday lives, sonically, by tuning into certain sounds while unlistening the others, depending on the social and cultural legitimacies available to them. More often than not, men do not engage with domestic sounds, even when they do not leave the slums for work.
Women, on the other hand, have multiple tropes through which they shift between the multiple domestic soundscapes in the Karimnagar slums. The social and cultural mobility of men and restriction of mobility for women provide probably the most important trope through which associations with soundscapes are consolidated in the
Karimnagar slums. Men and women employ different strategies – silence, unlistening, gossiping, silencing – to navigate through the multiple soundscapes, either to control, subvert or circumvent them, as discussed in a later chapter. 235
Flows: Listening into the water route
Water is scarce in Karimnagar. None of the three camps has a regular supply of potable water. Lapatagunjand Puranihaweli camps – owing to their proximity to water supply networks which cater to the middle-class settlements – have a few taps which meet the needs of the residents; the supply to these taps, however, is highly regulated and is available for only an hour early in the morning and in the late afternoon. Gandhipuri camp has no taps or access to any other source of water; the residents of this camp have to store, which also explains the prominence of the plastic market here. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) supplies water tankers to the Karimnagar camps on a need basis. It is primarily the responsibility of the women in the household to arrange and store water.
The water soundscapes play a very important role in the everyday life of the
Karimnagar slums. It is around these that everyday life, especially of women, in the
Karimnagar slums is organized. The soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums witness definite, if not dramatic, sonic transformations with water flows. These involve preparations for filling water – arranging plastic containers, forming queues, announcing the arrival of water; movements across the camps to fill water containers; filling containers; and carrying the water back. The sounds of water – taps flowing, filling the plastic and other containers – mingle with footsteps, calls, shouts, fights and whispers. These find a distinct place in the broader soundscape of the Karimnagar slums, populated by amplified music, poorly reverberated sounds and traffic sounds, amongst others.
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Even though the taps in Lapatagunj and Puranihaweli camps are communal, control is exercised by individuals, groups and communities – particularly if taps are in the vicinity of their houses. In order to use the taps, residents who do not have access to them have to enter into a ‘deal’ with the householder. The successful negotiation of a deal depends on the social-cultural standing of the individual/household in question.
It is usually extended as a social favour, though it is not uncommon for certain individuals/households to pay a monthly rental to the ‘owner’. Depending on the position of the ‘filler’ – as they are called – their turn in the queue is marked.
For most women, the route and routine of fetching water provide the only legitimised mobility available to venture into other camps; they, however, are strictly prohibited from doing so alone, and refrain from ‘hanging around’ for longer than is necessary to fill water containers. There is no fixed hour for the water supply in the afternoons; it can start any time between 1.00 and 4.00 p.m. Under the restrictions within which the main ‘fillers’ operate, ingenious strategies have to be employed to announce the water. The queue for water starts forming around midday. The usual practice for people – depending on their positions – is to leave behind their containers and announce it to the caretaker. The caretaker is usually an individual from the household who is closest to the tap.
Around midday, taps become the site where multiple soundscapes intersect. Here, groups start forming, slowly and steadily. The women who live in the vicinity gather around hours before the water supply is available. It is around the taps that everyday information is exchanged, gossip relished and fights resolved. The stillness of the mid-morning is slowly and steadily taken over by the melody of pots, containers, 237 conversations, street-criers, music and mobile ring tones. The street becomes the theatre where the performance of the everyday unfolds.
For the non-residents – fillers – the involvement and participation in the tap soundscape is detached, mediated by diverse networks and technologies. The fillers, as mentioned above, do not have the sanction to ‘hang about’. They are only allowed to reach the taps when the supply has started; however, given that the water supply does not have a fixed timing, alternate ways to announce it are practised. The most common amongst these is recruiting a contingent of children who are sent shouting along the way to announce the supply of water. Others involve shouting across from one area to another, with the residents of that household/shop carrying on the message. This, however, is not a very reliable means as often the location of the tap is misconstrued, leading to confusion with significant effects – no water for many households. Another affective way is to give ‘missed calls’. Calls – especially on a mobile – which are not answered are called ‘missed calls’. Most mobile phones record the details of these calls – number, time of the call, etc. In a few instances, fillers had negotiated arrangement with one of the residents in the vicinity of the tap to give them a ‘missed call’ when the water supply started. However, at the time of my research, this was the least practised method to announce water. The access to technologies – mobiles included – to women in Karimnagar is highly restricted. Even though a lot of households own a mobile phone, the ownership lies with the men. In the afternoons, most men are on jobs outside Karimnagar ; this limits the possibility of using this as a method for most women. Those who do receive the missed calls tend to do so on their husband’s, brother’s, or friends’ mobiles. Also, it was not considered a very reliable system. On many occasions, the residents supposed to 238 inform the fillers forgot to give missed calls, leading to families spending a day, or sometimes more, without water.
As mentioned above, the interactions of the ‘fillers’ with the residents of the tap area are highly regulated. It depends on the social-cultural position the filler enjoys. Rita is a 21-year-old resident of Gandhipuri camp. During the course of this research, she was awaiting marriage proposals to be finalised. Her studies were discontinued after school to help her mother run the household. It is Rita’s job to fill water for the entire household every day. She has to travel to Puranihaweli camp. Every day she makes the journey with her neighbour and best friend Rinku. The two of them make elaborate preparations for the trip every day. For them, Bhumiheen camp is an adventure. It has shops in the Bengali markets unlike any other in the camps. It sells fashion accessories and romance magazines, and there are eateries. Once in a while, they manage to take a detour into the market.
Rita and Rinku are very meticulous about their appearance when they visit
Puranihaweli camp. They do not want to come across as too ‘loud’, but do not want to be considered ‘shabby’ either. Even though they visit Puranihaweli camp every day, they do not have any friends amongst the residents in their tap area. In fact, initially, when I had tried to attempt conversations with them in Puranihaweli camp, they were very reluctant. It was only during a chance meeting with them on their way back home that conversations took place. All subsequent meetings with them took place in and around their home in Gandhipuri camp. Much later, when I inquired about their reluctance, they had this to say:
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R: Why did you not want to talk to me while filling water in Puranihaweli
camp?
R&R: It had nothing to do with you. You know that, don’t you? We did not
want to be seen talking to ‘strangers’; the women there – especially Parul –
she has a very loose tongue, who knows what she would talk about us?
R: She seems quite alright to me, actually. She has never said anything about
you to me.
R&R: You don’t know anything about her … she is not good. Anyway, the
women in Puranihaweli camp are very ‘fast’.
R: Fast?
R&R: They go out with boys, sometimes even alone. We don’t want to be
like them.
As I intensified my research around the water route in Karimnagar , several anecdotes suggesting Parul’s immoral character were narrated to me by the ‘fillers’ in Gandhipuri camp. She was almost a legend of sorts; post-filling discussions in
Gandhipuri were dominated by what Parul was wearing, whom she was talking to, what she was saying, and so on.
Water routes as volatile networks
Parul is a 23-year-old woman. I first met her when she was going on 20 in early
2004. During that project,64 as mentioned previously, she had assisted me in conducting interviews and questionnaires. Parul belongs to a prominent political
64 DFID-funded study of ‘Role of ICTs and Poverty Alleviation’. 240 family in Puranihaweli camp. Along the ten streets around Parul’s house, there are only two taps in Puranihaweli camp – which her family controls. She was the main caretaker of these taps. Even though the deals were negotiated with her mother – who is the head of the household, since Parul lost her father when she was five, Parul exercises substantial control and influence regarding access to the taps in the afternoons. Most of the residents I interviewed in and around Parul’s house stated that they tried to maintain cordial relationships with Parul – sometimes even giving in to her whims – due to the control she exercises.
These narratives offered an insight in the manner in which soundscapes – politics of listening and permissions of speaking – are played out in Karimnagar . Parul evidently exercises significant authority, even to the extent of determining the interactions around the tap area. Just as Parul (like other young, unmarried women) is categorised as immoral in Gandhipuri camp, the fillers from there are regarded as uncouth and unworthy. The residents of Puranihaweli camp exercised caution about what was being discussed in their presence least they give in to the ‘natural tendency of gossiping and make a mountain out of a molehill’. One of the Puranihaweli camp residents specifically remarked that the ‘fillers’ from Gandhipuri camp smelt strange.
When I asked in what way, she said, ‘damp, dirty, something wrong about them’. In
Puranihaweli camp, on more than one account, the residents of Gandhipuri camps were ‘othered’.
An incident involving Parul highlights the intricacies of the sonic politics. One afternoon, while Parul was regulating the tap area, a young man called upon her.
They were friendly and chatted for around half an hour, after which he left. Many 241 residents and fillers witnessed this scene; within a matter of hours, everyone along this water route was aware of the ‘meeting’ and speculations were abuzz about the nature of their relationship. Everyone was sure of a romantic involvement and allegations of varying kinds were made about her upbringing, her character and the freedoms available to her. Even before Parul’s mother reached home in the evening from the nearby office where she works, she was informed about the meeting as well as the romantic possibilities it insinuated. Without giving Parul an opportunity to explain, her mother lashed out at her – verbally and physically – in public as soon as she got back. Finally, when she was calm, Parul told her that it was a distant family friend’s son who had made the visit to pass some message from the village. By the next afternoon, everyone along the water route knew of Parul’s predicament. While the residents of Bhumiheen camp were sympathetic towards her – acknowledging the misunderstanding – the fillers maintained that Parul did have an immoral and illegitimate relationship. The sonic hierarchy limiting the interactions with fillers that is maintained in Karimnagar is circumvented by gossip networks. Fillers play an important role in this; they are the ones who actually make the journey, carry the information, and disseminate it in different sonic networks laden with their articulations and interpretations on their way back.
Gossiping in Karimnagar is not limited to harmless, social bantering; it has serious social, cultural and political implications. For months after the aforementioned incident, Parul’s family came under intensive scrutiny; Parul’s mobility was restricted even further, and she was sidelined from social engagements. It was
Parul’s mother’s political influence that ensured that the family was not ostracised.
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On the water route, tap areas are potent nodes where networks and soundscapes collide; here sounds – such as song, music, conversations, brawls, weeping, footsteps, street cries – enter into soundscapes other than their own in different ways uninhibitedly, slightly or vigorously, depending on their social-cultural-political importance and interpretations. In some instances, they drown into the soundscape, ever so slightly losing their call; in others, they become the soundscape, compelling the competing soundscapes to quieten for a moment or so.
Aruna is a 25-year-old petite, confident woman. I first met her not in Puranihaweli camp, where she resides, but in the office of a nearby organisation that provides free legal counselling to Karimnagar residents. She was seeking advice regarding her divorce and child custody. During the period of my research, I volunteered in this organisation once a week to help the counsellor with filing and other administrative needs. As we discussed her case, it became evident that the separation was acrimonious and on more than one occasion her husband had been physically abusive. Mrs Dave, the counsellor, advised her to take immediate action – a report was filed in the nearby police station and the women’s cell. Over the next few weeks, her husband – who did not live in the Karimnagar slums – was restrained from visiting Aruna and their daughter in Bhumiheen camp. The husband was incensed by this decision. Soon afterwards, unknown to Aruna or her family, he started making visits to the prominent tap areas along Aruna’s water route; everyone knew him as
Aruna’s husband. While spending time at the tap areas, he started telling ‘stories’ about Aruna, including but not limited to her involvement in prostitution rackets and the ways to solicit her. The multiple conflating soundscapes in the tap areas were exploded by the sonic sensation this information generated. The events to follow 243 took a very unfortunate turn. Aruna was persistently harassed by rowdy men, who propositioned her when she moved around the camps, making even the most basic of movements unsafe for her. Eventually, Aruna’s family took serious action and her ex-husband was put behind bars for three months. This did not mean that ‘stories’ about Aruna stopped circulating in and around her neighbourhood; however, people started questioning their validity since her husband, the main perpetrator, had been jailed. For most, this was a definite sign that he was lying. Aruna was not very optimistic about this turn of events. She expressed her distress about having to shift from the Karimnagar slums in the near future. When I inquired about the reason for the move, considering that her family lived in the slums and she had a strong support network, she said it was on account of her daughter:
Right now she is young, she doesn’t understand. There are people who will
come outright and say my husband was wrong, he was spreading rumours,
etc. but that doesn’t stop the rumours and gossip. People will keep talking
even years later. I don’t want my daughter to grow up listening to stories
about how I was abandoned by my husband for being a prostitute. I find
peace in the fact that he is in the prison but he will be released soon; I, on the
other hand, am caught for life in this story he has created.
After their separation, Aruna’s husband was well aware that he would not be welcome in Aruna’s family home, nor those of neighbours or relatives. However, he managed to tap into the volatile water route and networks, through which he knew he could harm the reputation of Aruna and her family, as it is one of most important 244 means to transmit information, gossip and news in the locality. He was aware that here, people – even those who did not approve of him – would listen to his stories.
Water networks: Water tankers as sites of sensual ecstasy
The water routes in the Karimnagar slums are multilayered, complex and volatile.
They strategically intersect with other networks and are sustained by a constant flow of people, for whom it is imperative to make this journey for their everyday water supplies. These factors accord potential to these networks for transmitting/carrying a sound, an utterance, beyond its immediate realm.
When water tankers are summoned, the multiple water routes, networks and nodes conflate into one sonically and visually loud event. The need to summon tankers is indicative of a dire water supply situation in the Karimnagar slums. The desperation levels amongst the residents regarding meeting even basic water needs are aggravated. Even though those in power try to contain information about the tankers, it percolates through networks in two ways. First, the intersecting, multiple soundscapes in the Karimnagar slums makes them highly porous, and each instance of sound is potentially very volatile. It is very difficult to contain sounds: they can be disguised, they might even shift in their resonances, but they definitely cannot be suppressed. Second, the preparation needed to draw water from the takers is elaborate – which means it cannot be performed in the privacy of one’s house. It requires collecting plastic containers into which water is drained, and pipes through which water is drained, and then carrying them to the main road to the place where the water tanker arrives. The total population of the three camps – Lapatagunj,
Gandhipuri and Puranihaweli – is 150,000 according to official records; however, as 245 a significant proportion of the population does not get recorded – on account of lack of official documentation such as ration cards – the unofficial population of the three camps is believed to be between 200,000 and 500,000. On average, a household has eight members.
The multiple soundscapes, with their peculiar noises, murmurs, hisses and ramblings, collide into a sonic colossal performance. It, at once, is an instance of several sonic negotiations – indulgence, domination and subversion. Water tankers are beckoned on when the tap supply in the camps consistently falls short; in summer, water tankers are required to meet the demands of the residents at least once a week.
It falls within the jurisdiction of the MCD to supply the water tankers to the camps.
Officials in the MCD are contacted by local politicians or representatives of organised groups from the camps to dispatch the water tankers; however, only those who share a rapport with the MCD officials are given information regarding the exact time and date of the water tanker’s arrival in Karimnagar . This information is disseminated into favoured networks while alienating others – employing surreptitious sonic strategies. Even though it is the responsibility of the women of the household to fetch water, the control over this information is exercised by the men of the community, reiterating the gender hierarchies in Karimnagar soundscape. Ever since mobile phone networks intensified in Karimnagar , they have been the preferred means to disseminate this information; however, social-cultural networks remain the most important way in which this information is sonically disseminated, circumvented and negotiated.
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Unlike the water routes and networks, where hierarchies can be maintained and movements monitored, the appearance of the water tanker allows for circumventing these hierarchies and unrestrained movements. However closely the information about a water tanker’s arrival is guarded, it percolates into the networks on account of the multiple intersecting networks, mobile nodes, porosity of the space and the performance it demands. While women are critical to the water routes and networks, children hold centre stage with the water tankers. At the specified hour, the water tanker parks along the main road of the camp which it is required to provide water to.
Several hours prior to its arrival, children are sent along with plastic containers and pipes to form a queue. The arrival of the water tanker, however, renders these queues null and void. These water tankers have a tap and a main inlet on its top. Though the idea is to queue and fill water in turn from the tap, it is usually the main inlet that is sought after – here the children come in handy. The children are sent to climb over the tank and put in a pipe into the main inlet from which then the water is filled into the buckets. Women and young girls are not allowed to climb the top of the tanker, as it is considered indecent, while men are too big to find a grip on the water tanker’s sides. While the children climb the tanker to put in the pipe, the men and women coordinate through shouting and calling to fill their containers. As the water in the tanker reduces, the commotion around it gathers momentum – building towards that moment when all hierarchies and restrained movements lose their ground. It is a sensual explosion, in which prescribed codes and decorum of touch, smell, sight and sound collapse. On several occasions when I was in the slums, the intervention of police or local politicians was required to resolve the fights that routinely break out during these times, to restore balance to the sensual order.
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Spaces as social experience and flows of spaces in the Karimnagar slums
By reading the city as text, where ‘ordinary men’ are scribes, walkers, ‘whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it’
(1984: 93), Michel de Certeau privileges sight as the sensual anchor to experience as well as produce space and its dynamics. Indeed, de Certeau’s city is Western, visual and masculine; however, in his readings he resolutely acknowledges the agency vested in the common people – the silent majority (1984: xvii) – to displace the rationality of urban space, ‘brutally lit by alien reason’ (1984: 104). The hierarchical and semantically ordered ‘surface of the city’ (1984: 104) transforms into ‘liberated spaces that can be occupied’ (1984: 105) by these movements. Beyond its cartographic moment, space transforms into an experience that is not singularly visual in its orientation. It is populated by the calls, murmurings, voices, tastes, smells and touches; in short, it is a sensual experience in which each sense – hearing, smelling, touching, seeing, tasting – defines, broadens or limits the scope of how the space is practised, consumed, articulated, experienced and represented. Space transforms into a ‘social experience’ (1984: 103) through the ‘mingling of the modalities of mingling’ of the five senses (see Serres 1986).
In the Indian context, specifically in the case of the Karimnagar slums, it is difficult to articulate space as compartmentalised pockets, each maintaining their own homogeneity. According to the 2001 census, the population of all the three camps together was recorded as 370,665, spread over an area of 41.85 acres. In terms of distribution of space, this means 900 people per acre. The density of the space does not allow for segregated spatial entities. Porosity of the city, which Benjamin and 248
Lacis (Benjamin trans. Jennings 1996) evoked for Naples, defines the essence of everyday reality in the Karimnagar slums. The walls are literally built in each other and the roofs share an incestuous relation with the others of their kind. The architecture has a perplexing unpredictability to it. One never knows when one room will open into another courtyard or kitchen. Everyday, personal lives are constantly performed in the public eye. However, this is not to imply that there is no sense of privacy, and no claims or authority over space. The manner in which these are exercised has distinctly evolved within the materiality of the site. The associations with space are not within the strict conceptual framework of propertied claims, but are constantly negotiated within the existing socio-cultural fabric. In the popular narratives, a displaced sense of claims to property and its ownership emerge. The ownership is not established in the present, temporally and geographically, but projected in a distant future where the demolition of the existing slum settlement will entitle slum-dwellers to land in a legal resettlement colony.
The exploration of sonic practices of space in the Karimnagar slums furthers the embodied, temporal and interconnected understanding of how space is created, consumed and projected. This embodied experience provides a framework to articulate everyday life in the slums (as well as city–slum relations) outside the hegemonic, illegal–legal matrix. The everyday reality of slums, ‘animated through sound’ (Classen 1993: 121), reveals a complex interplay and overlap of identity and space which significantly determines the mobilities and positions within the immediate–extended–imagined realm.
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It is within these theoretical frameworks of understanding space that the slums, in the given context, can be understood as a representative not of the ‘marginalised’ spaces in the city, but rather of the process of marginalisation of spaces in the city. The lived realities and association of the slum-dwellers cannot be understood simply within the prism of ‘mobility’ and ‘movement’ across ‘one-directed abstraction of time and space’ (Simonsen 2004: 45). This, however, does not imply that the slum- dwellers do not have an intricate relationship with the city or the urban experience.
The cities inhabited, created and consumed by slum-dwellers have to be understood as ‘a site where multiple spatialities and temporalities collide’, and where ‘the city contains living and moving bodies, but they are not bodies moving through space- time, they are performing it and making it’ (Simonsen 2004: 45).
The city and the slums constantly evaluate (and pre-empt) trajectories of interaction with each other through similar cultural constructions and categories. From the narratives in the Karimnagar slums, it emerges that the slums’ residents view the city in the same manner as the city represents them: as a space of moral bankruptcy. The residents who venture into the city are advised to exercise caution. If the slums are the ‘other’ for the city, city is also the ‘other’ for the slums. However, as the city dominates and determines the tropes through which city–slum relations are evaluated, slums are denied a sense of self, and the practices by which they exercise a deliberate distance – social, cultural and spatial – from the city are denied vocabularies, and hence an agency.
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Conclusion
Space in the Karimnagar slums is not only sonically consumed, but sonically constructed and represented as well. The sonic interaction amongst communities is determined by the relative positioning of the self in the immediate–extended– imagined sensorial realms vis-à-vis the ‘other’. Sonic articulations are significant in determining social, cultural, sensual and spatial engagements with ‘a’ space. The sonic practices of space highlight these negotiations. The water route is an important instance of how sounds flow from one network to another, their potentiality and the definite manner in which they limit and permit mobilities: social, cultural, political and spatial. Rita and Rinku, the fillers, have to navigate the journey from Gandhipuri to Puranihaweli camp sonically, strictly within the prescribed code of conduct corresponding to their position in the immediate–extended–imagined sensorial realm vis-à-vis the residents of Puranihaweli camp. In their imagined sensorial realm, most of the residents of Gandhipuri camp maintain a distinct social, cultural and moral distance from those of Puranihaweli camp. In the immediate sensorial realm,
Gandhipuri camp residents – especially women – are cautioned against adopting behaviour-sensual practices such as those of Puranihaweli camp. In the extended sensorial realm, where the immediate sensorial realms of Puranihaweli and
Gandhipuri camp intersect, the performance and interpretation of sounds become important means to maintain the balance. Priya’s and Aruna’s instances expose the manner in which the sensuous, sonic, spatial, social, cultural and political cannot be treated as watertight, exclusive domains of experience. In their case, all these categories collapsed, not without significant implications, to challenge their position in the immediate sensorial realm while threatening to shift it in the imagined realm.
Aruna categorically stated that as soon as she could she would attempt to shift from 251 the Karimnagar slums on account of controversy, as in the imagined realm it had the potential to shift her position from being ‘single, chaste, and strong’ to ‘immoral and promiscuous’, which could have a detrimental effect on her daughter’s immediate– extended–imagined sensorial positionality.
In the following chapter, I will discuss articulations of sound as noise and silence within the Karimnagar slums, and explore the corresponding spatial, social and cultural engagements this permits. By exploring practices of amplification in the
Karimnagar slums, I will also highlight the manner in which sonic encroachments and extensions are vital for reiterating one’s social, cultural and political position in the slums. 252
7
Sonic articulations: In between noise and silence
Introduction
Along with being ‘palpable, impacting physically on the body as vibration’ (Bailey
2004: 26) – a composition of frequencies – sound is an act (2004: 26). As I have argued throughout this thesis, its production, performance, articulation and representation are situated in its social, cultural and political context. The importance of sound for organising society and culture in different contexts has been emphasised as part of the: ‘foundation of experience’ (Feld 1990: 103) amongst the Kaluli people; an ‘auditory domain, including natural sounds, language and song, as cultural systems in their own right’ in Umeda (Gell 1995: 233); as significant in the way it worked to ‘locate and identify place, class and, increasingly, national identity in the early modern period’ (Smith 2008: 45); and as an ‘aural architecture’, both expressing and supporting culture (Blesser and Salter 2006: 363).
The manner in which everyday life in the Karimnagar slums is ‘animated through sound’ (Classen 1993: 121) to create a ‘sonically ordered sense of self’ (Rice 2003:
8) has been demonstrated in earlier chapters by exploring sonic practices of space.
Central to these sonic practices and processes is the articulation of sound as noise, music or silence, which I will discuss at length in this chapter. In the Karimnagar slums, the significance of sonic articulations is not only to ‘make sense of a place’
(Feld 1996: 97) but also to determine the scope of mobilities – spatial, social, and cultural. It is, as will be demonstrated, significant in defining one’s sonic space by 253 identifying ‘noise as an index of identity and difference, their interactions and contests’ (Bailey 2004: 31).
In this chapter, I will discuss the varying articulations of noise across diverse communities in the Karimnagar slums, as well as its sonic engagement with the middle class, to emphasise that ‘it is an issue less of tone or decibel than of social temperaments, class background, and cultural desire’ (Schwartz 2004: 51) firmly situated in social, cultural and political hierarchies. Categorising a group, community or space as noisy is an instance of exercising sonic power; however, noise – amongst other sonic strategies – is also effectively employed by disempowered groups to subvert these hierarchies. Noise, in that sense, is a very powerful sonic trope to both exert and disrupt power hierarchies. Besides, this noise – an intersection, conflation and collision of multiple soundscapes – opens avenues for sonic engagements and interactions that are otherwise improbable.
Noise: ‘Sound out of place’
The soundscapes of the area that encompasses the Karimnagar slums, the legal lower middle-class settlements and middle-class residential areas are dense. These are characterised by a multiplicity of soundscapes: heavy vehicular traffic with persistent honking; markets along the Karimnagar slums and the legal lower middle-class settlements that advertise through ‘aural billboards’ – calls and signals; sounds from the many temples and religious centres – bells, sermons, religious songs; a range of regional and Bollywood music; everyday sounds – conversations, calling out, movements, and so on; social, religious and political processions or celebrations, amongst many others. As discussed in previous chapters, this sonic density renders it 254 impossible to engage with this soundscape either through Schaffer’s categorisation of noises as ‘sounds we have learned to ignore’ (Schaffer 1994: 3) or Bull’s highly demarcated private–public sonic engagements (2000). Delhi’s soundscape – especially its honking – has been extensively documented in the Western sound art context,65 journalistic reflections66 and personal encounters.67 These vary from amusement, bewilderment and exhaustion to enhancement, or simply amazement – brazen loudness as a descriptor being common to all of these. It would be a matter of
‘methodological deafness’ (Gell 1995: 233) to deny Karimnagar ’s (its slums, lower and middle-class settlements) soundscapes their loudness and brazenness; instead, in this thesis I will explore ‘noise as a significant chunk of the soundscape with determinate and resistant powers and thresholds’ (Bailey 2004: 23).
Noise is an important trope/anchor of sonic articulations to ‘make sense of a place’
(Feld 1996: 97) and express one’s sonic self (see Rice 2003) within the Karimnagar slums and in slum-dwellers’ interactions with the middle class. The articulation of sound as noise or silence is dependent on the source of the sound, the position of the producer and the contextual relation with the producer in the immediate–extended– imagined realm.
Noise as a ‘function of not noise’
In my interactions with neighbouring middle-class residents of the Karimnagar slums, my task of researching sonic articulations and engagements was by no means
65 http://www.staalplaat.org/site/2009/06/05/d8-yokomono-pro; http://www.youtube.com/user/freehed#play/all; http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings%20page/articles%20pages/soundcities.html. 66 http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/10/news/adfg-driving10. 67 http://static.rnw.nl/migratie/www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/region/asiapacific/tswi-080412-silence-redirected.
255 an easy one. The middle-class listening to the Karimnagar slums was expressed as a homogenised sonic experience articulated as noise. More often than not, the discussions would steer towards the slum-dwellers’ social, cultural and moral bankruptcy. Instead of inquiring about their perceptions of slum sound, I started to raise discussions about which slum sounds they noticed at different hours and how they ranked them. Loud music, crudely amplified; uncouth, loud language; sonic performances of everyday activities in public – fights, conversations, calling out – were consistently mentioned as the ‘noisiest’ sonic behaviours.
I established contacts with a young, working couple in their mid-twenties through a mutual friend. They were eager to participate in the research and invited me over for lunch. They live in an apartment block close to the Karimnagar slums. It is owned by the young man’s parents, who have shifted back to their hometown, Bangalore. Both their offices are close, and they enjoy the accessibility of cheap resources – vegetables and labour. The couple’s attitude towards living in the vicinity of a slum settlement was ambiguous: their opinions did not resonate with the popular anti-slum sentiment, but they supported their RWA’s collective drive against the slums:
Anuj: We don’t particularly mind. It is not the best place to live but, well, it
has its advantage. And especially right now, when both of us are just starting,
the money we save does come handy.
R: But you do support your RWA’s agenda to have them demolished?
Sarika: In the longer run, it will be better for everyone. Won’t it? The cities
will be without slums and slum-dwellers will have proper houses. 256
R: Given the economic condition of the state, it only means slums will not be
in the city but there surely will be slums somewhere.
Anuj: We cannot do much if the state decides so, can we?
Anuj and Sarika’s engagement with the Karimnagar slums was very superficial within the prescriptive code defined by their RWA. Indeed, they had no reason to engage with the space. Also, the proximity to the slums did not translate into them either adopting a vehement anti-slum or activist position. We talked about their perceptions of and engagements with slum sound. For Anuj, the most ‘frustrating, nerve-racking’ aspect of Karimnagar slum sound was the ‘loud, crudely amplified music’. Anuj is passionate about music, especially Indian classical, Old Bollywood songs, and 1960s and ’70s rock:
Anuj: I will appreciate music anywhere. However, the way they play in the
slums it kills it, man. The speakers are blaring, the amp is not tuned in
properly … for some strange reason, they think bass is the key to music. It
angers me so much …
R: So it is not particularly the loudness you mind?
Anuj: Not loudness, per se, but the particular kind of loudness … which
doesn’t make sense …
R: How is this loudness different from Blues (a popular club in Delhi which
regularly features rock nights)? That is pretty loud and it is very small …
Anuj: That is music. This is not. 257
R: Maybe it is for them – this is how they enjoy their music. Maybe this is a
Blues experience for them.
Anuj: How can badly amplified, blaring noise be music for anyone? They
totally ruin it …
Anuj’s engagement with slum sound was through the lens of music. He (or his wife) did not associate social, cultural or moral values, or the lack of thereof, with the sound of slums. However, they still categorised it as noise and denied it any musical credibility. Why, when he did identify the sound as music, I asked Anuj, could he not think of it as being musical enough:
Anuj: It is lack of education and exposure. They don’t know what real music
is … it is a cheap technology, cheaply used.
Anuj’s categorical vehement denial of slum sounds – even while being identified as instances of music – as musical finds a place in Paul Hegarty’s philosophical ruminations in Noise/Music: A History on Industrial Noise Music as a genre, and through it the construction and articulation of noise as ‘the overall practice … playing out power, through challenging institutions, the listeners’ moral expectations and, in concert, often establishing a threatening ambience’ (Hegarty 2002: 119). The slum rendition of music – through its amplification practices, essentially – is listened into by the middle class as a challenge, a threat to their own social, cultural and moral codes woven into what they acknowledge as music. As Anuj constantly reiterated, it was not the loudness that was a matter of concern; instead, music genres
– Bollywood songs, rock, Indian classical – that were seen as legitimate were 258 preferred loud. Central to this articulation is the issue of power, which Hegarty discusses – though in a different context:
Noise, then, is neither outside of language nor music, nor is it simply
categorisable, at some point or other, as belonging exclusively to the world of
meaning, understanding, truth and knowledge. (Hegarty 2004: 86).
Hegarty, in a way, demonstrates how power in society is exerted through music as
‘organization of noise’ (Attali 1985: 11). For Attali, in different socio-economic circumstances, new sounds were marginalised, categorised as noise, for they threatened to challenge the established status quo. Through music, in his reckoning, sounds of power can be heard:
More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion
societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music
is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of
life, the relations among men. (1985: 6).
Attali vests power in sound to organise societies as well as to disrupt hegemonic structures. In the interactions within the Karimnagar slums and between the middle class and the slums, noise is an important trope through which the ‘other’ is identified, reiterating Hegarty’s insistence that ‘noises come from specific places and specific conceptualisations’ (2004: 86).
Between noise and silence
Until the mid-1990s, the legal Karimnagar settlement had a thriving small-scale industrial area. It provided the main economic base for most families in the
Karimnagar slums – especially in Lapatagunj camp, which is across the road from 259 the legal settlement. In the 1995 Supreme Court case MC Mehta v Union of India,68 the ‘closure and relocation of polluting industries in Delhi’ was ordered.69 This order was passed towards lessening pollution – air, water and noise – in Delhi.
Environmental journalists Alley and Meadows comment that ‘the ruling appeared to be as much about depopulating the city [of its urban poor] as it was about improving air and water quality’.70 The court noted that:
The city has become a vast and unmanageable conglomeration of
commercial, industrial, unauthorized colonies, resettlement colonies and
unplanned housing with a total lack of open spaces and green areas. Once a
beautiful city, Delhi now presents a chaotic picture. The only way to relieve
the capital city from the huge additional burden and pressures is to
deconcentrate the population, industries and economic activities in the city
and relocate the same in various priority towns in the NCR [National Captial
Region].71
It was towards this end that, by 1998, most of the industrial units had been closed and relocated from Karimnagar . This was a serious blow to the economic mainstay of many families in the Karimnagar slums. Most of them were not given any compensation, and the relocation to the outskirts of the city meant that everyday commutating to the new sites was very lengthy and not viable. In my conversations with residents of the Karimnagar slums, especially Lapatagunj camp, the ‘sound of the industries’ was constantly referred to:
68 http://www.ielrc.org/content/e0409.pdf. 69 http://www.cceia.org/resources/publications/dialogue/2_11/section_2/4451.html. 70 http://www.cceia.org/resources/publications/dialogue/2_11/section_2/4451.html. 71 http://www.ielrc.org/content/e0409.pdf. 260
Before the factories were shut we awoke and slept with the sounds of
machinery. We knew when it was morning, time to work, time to take a
break, time to go home … the initial few months, actually a few years, were
very disorientating … we felt lost in a way. The silence was painful … it was
like mourning. (Anil, 46, Male, Lapatagunj camp)
The sound of the industries provided an important sonic backdrop for Lapatagunj camp residents, even those who did not engage with it. These sounds organised the everyday temporality of the slums, as well as referencing a major part of the livelihoods of slum-dwellers. It provided for a sonic reference to make sense of their place in the city and in the slums:
That constant humming of machinery … that was what it meant living in the
city, for me at least. I had left my family, my village, and my friends to earn
money … when I was working in the factory I did not miss them so much. I
was totally lost, I was making money, and I was looking forward to getting
them here … but when the factories stopped, it was suddenly silent. I felt
very alone. I had no job, my being in the city did not make sense … the
silence was deafening. I took to drinking. (Pankaj, 38, Male, Lapatagunj
camp)
Pankaj still lives in Lapatagunj camp, now with his wife and two young children. He works in an office in Bhakhalaa Place, a nearby market complex. In his narrative, silence was noise – deafening, emotionally oppressive and nauseating. The industrial 261 sounds were his anchoring and justification in the city. Without them, he lost his bearings. The distinction between categories of noise and silence as experiences of sound was complicated, and often collapsed in the narratives from within the
Karimnagar slums and about them.
Noise ‘in any hierarchy of sounds … comes bottom, the vertical opposite of the most articulate and intelligible of sounds, those of speech and language and their aesthetic translation into music. In the official record such expressions “make sense,” whereas noise is nonsense.’ (Bailey 2004: 24) In his review of noise music, especially
Japanese noise music, Hegarty (2004) identifies noise as ‘that which always has to be excluded – the exclusion having always already been and (not) gone, in order that the
Law exists’ (2004: 89); it also, in his reckoning, ‘has to contain judgment: it is
“unwanted”’ (ibid). But what if, he asks, ‘you actually do want to hear something that is noise – in the shape of unorganised, unpredictable, violent (sometimes in terms of volume) sound?’ (ibid); Hegarty’s question compels us to speculate on how one conceptualises silence vis-à-vis this sonic predicament.
Anuj proactively engages with sound as noise specifically ‘in terms of volume’: ‘it is music, the genius, the legends … when I want to really feel at peace within, I listen to Dark Side of the Moon on really high volume. It is liberating. I am transported to another place.’ In this noise – in terms of volume – he found his ‘silence’, his peace.
However, the loud rendition of music in slums was noise for him, which disrupted his noisy silence, ‘tormenting [his] musical soul’. On the other hand, the absence of industrial sounds created a silent noise for Pankaj. Both instances of sonic disturbances are evoked as oppressive and articulated as noise. 262
Noise is not always and singularly about loudness. It is ‘not always a nuisance, neither is it always loud or excessive’ (Bailey 2004: 24). Noise is a social, cultural and political act – in its production, performance and articulations. ‘Loudness’ as a specific characteristic to identify the noisy ‘other’ is a consistent rhetoric in the narratives from the Karimnagar slums – the physicality of middle-class residents is loud; uninhibited interaction between men and women is loud as well. For middle- class residents, the public performance of everyday activities is loud, as is the amplified soundscape. In both instances, noise is a matter of social and cultural specificity and subjectivity (Bailey 2004; Schwartz 2004; Smith 2008). As mentioned earlier, the soundscape of Karimnagar , including its slum and middle- class residential areas, is characteristically loud. However, that does not immediately translate into all loud soundscapes being characterised as noisy. Only those soundscapes that do not allow an avenue for sonic engagement – either as a coercive action (to impose silent zones) or collaboratively (to have a collective agency to identify sounds as noise or silence, and organise music) – are articulated as noisy.
Other soundscapes are loud and violent in terms of volume or organisation of sound or its performance, but they are not noise, as is evident from Anuj’s articulation with two loud soundscapes: slum noise and music in a pub.
Similarly, silence is ‘not necessarily an absence of sounds, but rather an act’ (Bailey
2004: 26). If the ‘other’ is identified as noisy, as with the slum-dwellers, then in this schematic, silence is ‘the sound of authority’ (2004: 26). For the middle-class residents, Karimnagar slum sound – as instances of loud music, uncouth behaviour, a lack of culture and social-moral depravation – challenges their middle-class 263
‘taxpayers-earned legitimacy to demand silence, peace and quiet’, as expressed by a retired senior bureaucrat residing in a nearby apartment block. It is not so much the loudness of slum sound that is the issue; rather, it is a matter of not being able to silence (that is, control) the noise sufficiently.
In narratives from the Karimnagar slums, middle-class settlements, parks and residential areas are articulated as ‘silent’, symptomatic of oppression, danger and intimidation. In the immediate sonic context, silence signifies a lack of movement, community affiliations, social networks and associations. Silence implies social, cultural and moral isolation and independence – it is suggestive of challenging traditional social-cultural values:
When I walk through the apartments [behind the slums], it is always so quiet.
Nobody talks to each other; they live in their own worlds, doing what they
want to … they have no care for elders, children … they are so isolated.
(Aruna, Female, Puranihaweli camp)
Many families who can exercise the choice of not living in the Karimnagar slums, on account of having residential units in lower or middle-class areas, continue to live in the slums for the ‘vibrant culture’ and ‘social and moral cohesiveness’ that the ‘quiet, isolated lifestyle of middle class is devoid of’. It is for these reasons that Shelesh’s parents and Mahesh, discussed in Chapter 2, have decided to continue living in the
Karimnagar slums even though they have options to shift into middle-class and lower middle-class settlements, respectively.
264
Absence of sounds in this context is an act of social isolation, symptomatic of collapsing social-cultural-moral value systems. The women in Karimnagar have restricted mobility. Their journeys into the city are only permitted if they are escorted and usually must be for a specific purpose. Avenues for voyeuristic indulgence are limited to them; however on occasions when a group of women has been given permission to venture there, their experience has been less than enjoyable. I interviewed two groups of women who had visited a nearby mall and cinema hall, and travelled on Delhi Metro on different occasions. Both the groups found the experience disorientating. They were unable to engage with the ‘noisy’ soundscape.
It was not a matter of loudness, per se, but concern about language, which can
‘become mere noise or nonsense as one tongue among many’ (Bailey 2004: 24):
All the announcements are in English … and even when they speak in Hindi,
they speak so fast. First, we did not realise it was a computer speaking on the
Metro … it was strange and funny. For days we kept trying to speak like that
… The next stop is New Delhi … (Seema, Female, 22, Lapatagunj camp).
The articulations of sound as noise and silence in these narratives, both from the
Karimnagar slums and the areas around them, complicate this relationship. Noise is a generic categorisation of unfamiliar soundscapes that does not allow an interface to engage with it or control it for a group or community. The conceptualisation of
‘noise as merriment; noise as embarrassment; noise as terror’ (Bailey 2004: 24) is strongly situated within the respective positionalities within the immediate– extended–imagined matrix, and is at once marginalised sound, sounds of power and resistance. 265
The middle-class engagement with the sounds of the Karimnagar slums is predominantly through noise as instances of loud music, uncouth language and public performances. In all these instances, slum sound as noise threatened their imagined positionality. Even though middle-class groups, through RWAs amongst other groups, are pushing the agenda of reducing pollution – air, water and noise – within the larger ‘Clean Delhi, Green Delhi’ agenda, the slum sound still exercises its loud presence. It challenges their notion of sanitised middle-class aspirations. It is also a cause of threat – the everyday sounds of slums are heard as noise of corruption, decadence and criminality.
Listening into traffic: Sirens as noise
The narratives from the slums reflect a highly complex sonic experience, engagement and articulation in the immediate, extended and imagined sensorial realms. At a macro level, sound is determined by the position of a slum-dweller within the urban fabric. However, the boundaries of the imagined realm are stretched or limited by the position the individual, group or community enjoys in the immediate and extended realms, which in turn influences the sonic experiences and articulation.
The articulation and experience of traffic sounds is an instance highlighting these complexities. In the Karimnagar slums, traffic sounds are constantly evoked as
‘soothing’, often by women. It is through traffic sounds that a connection with the city in the extended and imagined realms is maintained. Uninterrupted traffic sounds reiterate normality, a motion which reassures slum-dwellers that nothing is disrupted 266 by accidents, demolitions, blockages, etc. The traffic sounds allows different groups across sections in the Karimnagar slums to temporally and spatially organise their days. The absence of the traffic sound is articulated as symptomatic of the city connection being severed. The traffic sound is important, also, because it contains sonic codes for residents of the slums, announcing emergencies and eventualities.
Police and ambulance sirens are the two such instances through which everyday space and a connection with the city are maintained. It further highlights the complexity of the intersections between the immediate, extended and imagined zones negotiated with regard to their status as slum-dwellers. Police and ambulance sirens are constantly evoked as threatening, discomforting and noisy, as ‘the sound of siren is the sound of power’ (Shera 2008). Katherine Shera, exploring ‘the anthropological phenomenon of sirens’ across centuries and cultures decodes ‘multiple layers of meaning embedded in its voice’: ‘it is the sound of power; a syntax of civil obedience; sound which reconstitutes civil dis-obedience’. She draws upon mythological sirens through which she reflects on emergency sirens in contemporary societies.
In the Karimnagar slums, the sirens are decoded as a ‘sound of power’. Such sounds are representative of two agencies in front of which, owing to their status as slum- dwellers, the residents of the Karimnagar slums stand most vulnerable. While in their negotiations with police there is a possibility of harassment owing to their illegal status, without a robust healthcare system, medical emergencies and eventualities are one of the main reasons for financial burdens and debt.
267
Over the last few years, according to the residents, there has been an increase in the number of police patrolling the area, on account of the threat of communal riots, demolitions, and so on. The police sirens have come to dominant the soundscape, which ‘disturbs’ them immensely. The police personnel interviewed, however, saw this differently. According to them, in the last five years the patrolling has decreased.
It is only during tense situations, religious conflicts, elections and festivals that patrolling is undertaken and sirens are used. The police have to follow a strict code while using the sirens. They can only be used in crisis situations. Apart from these situations, sirens are only used when a crime is reported from the area. The instances of police using sirens has not increased over the years; the increasingly ‘noisy’ and
‘disturbing’ articulation of sirens in Karimnagar slums is not on account of quantity or loudness, but rather the increasing disempowerment of slum-dwellers conveyed by this ‘sound of power’. Slum-dwellers find themselves most vulnerable while dealing with the police forces. The sirens signify a sense of insecurity, and thus are constantly evoked as ‘noise’ within the soundscape of the Karimnagar slums.
The sound of sirens in the Karimnagar slums ‘never delivers good news and, moreover, we never really know what the matter is: is someone hurt? Has someone lodged a complaint? Has there been a fight? Someone has been arrested. We always know something is wrong. It makes everyone uneasy.’ (M, 42, Bhumiheen camp)
Shera’s reckoning that ‘sirens [are] endowed with a social ability, almost unparalleled in contemporary secular life, of altering in the space of a moment the behaviour of an entire community’ resounds with the power and influence police and ambulance sirens exert on the everyday lives of slum-dwellers: in one instance, in the 268 case of police sirens, it evoked associations of helplessness and disempowerment.
Everyone immediately comes under suspicion from the authorities.
However, these sirens, by virtue of announcing their presence in advance, are also an important sonic reference to resist power, enabling residents to constitute ‘voices of civil disobedience’:
No one can move around the slums like those who live here. It has many
lanes and by-lanes. There are no addresses and streets just appear and
disappear, if we are going to catch a criminal, for instance, the sirens are
actually useless; they just inform of our presence we can get there … (Shera
2008)
A sub-inspector posted in the nearest police station exasperatedly mentioned this, adding that ‘without leads there is no way we can find our own way in these camps’.
In this way, the space of the slums and the density of its soundscapes do provide at least some protection from external forces of power.
Amplification as noise: Sonic combat and encroachments
In the intense soundscape of the Karimnagar slums, where sound plays an important role in navigating space and determining mobilities, sonic combat (Blesser and Salter
2009: 12) and encroachments assume a significant role in establishing one’s identity and exerting power. Blesser and Salter, in Spaces Speak, are You Listening?, make a case for the manner in which ‘auditory spatial awareness’ manifests itself through a
‘complex amalgam of spatial attributes, auditory perceptions, personal history, and 269 cultural values’ at least in ‘four different ways’ (2009: 11). They (1) influence social behaviour, (2) allow people to orient in and navigate through space, (3) affect the aesthetic sense of a space, and (4) enhance experiences of music and voice. Blesser and Salter further concede that these four aspect correspond to four aspects of aural architecture: ‘social, navigational, aesthetic, and musical spatiality’ (2009: 12).
The articulation of sound(s) in and from the Karimnagar slums across a broad spectrum of noise and silence highlights these negotiations. The slum sounds are not conceptualised as noise solely in terms of their volume (Hegarty 2004). The association of the slums’ residents with illegally encroached space, which is further stretched to assume social, cultural and moral depravation, lends it its specific articulation as noise. Their music isn’t musical enough; the social sounds – conversations and exchanges – are not cultured, so they pose a threat to middle-class residents’ imagined sanitised, demarcated experience of urban space.
The city soundscapes – malls, metros, cinema halls, sirens – are evoked within a similar vocabulary of ‘oppression, disturbance, and annoyance’ as noise amongst the residents of the Karimnagar slums, as these represent cultural practices that challenge their imagined social-cultural-moral cohesiveness. It is a threat to their order.
By exploring restaurant soundscapes, Blesser and Slater highlight a ‘feedback system involving both physical and cultural acoustics’ (2009: 11) that in this instance is positive. They demonstrate how different diners attempt ‘control of the local soundscape’ by adopting a different ‘speaking and listening strategy, which are both components of cultural acoustics’: as the background noise increases, owing to 270 activity on account of the number of diners increasing, diners modulate their voices, tonalities and volume to ‘preserve intelligibility’. ‘Unwittingly,’ they state, ‘each table is in sonic combat with other tables over who has control of the local soundscape’ (2009: 11).
In their reckoning, soundscapes are ‘a resource that allows inhabitants to connect to dynamic events, both human-made and natural. Soundscapes are an arena for a power struggle among those who share the space. Because sound is a valuable means for making connections among people and events, and because soundscapes are a limited resource, soundscapes are intrinsically political. Those who control the soundscape control the world.’ (2009: 7)
Amplification practices in the Karimnagar slums are an instance of sonic combat and encroachment through which sound is employed to exert one’s identity, extend territory and endow sounds with culturally specific interpretations.
Landscape of auditory technologies
Auditory technologies play a significant role in the Karimnagar slums’ soundscapes.
Within the framework of this thesis, auditory technologies include, but are not limited to, radios, television, mobiles, mechanised horns, amplifiers, speaker- boxes,72 CD players and loudspeakers. In domestic spaces, the most prominent auditory technologies are CD players, televisions, amplifiers and speaker boxes. The radio, as a stand-alone unit, is conspicuous by its absence in Karimnagar households.
72 These are large speakers that are locally manufactured. In popular usage in the Karimnagar slums, they are referred to as speaker boxes. 271
The CD player units, more often than not, serve multiple functions: CD player, VCD player, tape player and recorder, and radio.
The consumption of auditory technologies in the Karimnagar slums cannot be articulated within the framework of creating distinctive personal soundscapes by using specific technologies (see Bull 2000) to navigate public spaces. In the
Karimnagar slums, the notion of private and public as highly demarcated spaces does not hold valid on account of density of population and lack of space. The multiplicity of soundscapes and limited visual experience heighten the dependence on sonic markers to ‘make sense of a place’ (Feld 1996: 97), leading to a complex interplay of creation and negotiation of personal–public soundscapes. Unlike the experience in
Western contexts, as exemplified in Sounding Out the City, personal soundscapes are not created (or desired) as a strict contrast and demarcation from/within the public soundscapes (see Bull 2000). The creation of personal soundscape in the Karimnagar slums is not an aspiration to an individual, internalised, isolated experience (see Bull
2000); instead, the projection and externalisation of personal soundscapes so as to exercise a definite sonic presence within the multiple soundscapes is a strong determining factor. Central to this agenda is the exercise of one’s sonic identity and the extending of social, cultural and political territoriality – it is thus not surprising that the loudest noise-creators in the Karimnagar slums are individuals, groups and communities who enjoy a corroborating strong position – socially, culturally and politically. This is, however, not to say that only dominant groups in the Karimnagar slums exert their sonic presence by being able to project their personal soundscapes.
Within the multiple soundscapes in the Karimnagar slums, the disempowered and marginalised groups (women, amongst others) employ tactics of noise, silence and silencing to subvert or circumvent these sonic hierarchies. I will discuss these at 272 length in the following chapter, while situating the position of listener and hearer in the broader context of the soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums. Here, I concentrate on sound amplification and its presence in the slums over the years, as well as its use to claim sonic space and identity through these strategies.
Rejection of city sound: Phases of auditory technologies
The nature of auditory technologies lends soundscapes their particular sonic characteristics. In the Karimnagar slums, amplifiers and speaker boxes are currently the two main auditory technologies that dominate the soundscape and lend their specific – ‘loud, distorted’ – character to the soundscape; the use of these auditory technologies further discerns and unpacks the local sonic politics. Amplification is an important strategy to create one’s personal soundscape and extend one’s sonic territoriality.
An overview of the shifts in the consumption patterns of auditory technologies in the
Karimnagar slums reveals a systematic, proactive engagement with ‘mainstream soundscapes’ in the slums, either in rendering those sounds with their own sonic cultural preferences or rejecting them. This further emphasises the ‘sonically ordered sense of self’ (Rice 2003: 8) of the slums. Here, ‘mainstream soundscapes’ are identified as sonic television, film and radio content produced with mainly the middle classes as the target audience.
I conducted research in the electronic market in legal Karimnagar , which caters to the local population as well as the residents of the Karimnagar slums. The customer base from the Karimnagar slums comprises mostly men, owing to the restrictions on women’s mobility. I conducted interviews with a shopkeeper, Mr D. Kumar, to map 273 the consumption patterns of auditory technologies in the camps over the last two decades in order to understand the evolution of Karimnagar ’s soundscape.
Mr Deepak owns the shop and has been in the business for the last twenty years. His shop has a range of consumer electronics: radios, transistors, Chinese FM radios, amplifiers, speaker boxes, loudspeakers, professional amplifiers, mini TV sets, DVD players, VCD players, and all-in-one units (cassette/CD/radio players). He does not stock branded goods, as he claims ‘there is no market [for them] in this area’; almost all of his goods are sourced from China.
In the mid-1980s, he set up the business selling transistor radio sets, which were very popular then. His customer base has changed over the last twenty years, with technological advancements. Chronologically, he mapped the auditory technologies that dominated the soundscape: tape recorders (early 1980s), CD players (early
1990s), VCD players supporting mp3 format (late 1990s) and currently all-in-one units (DVD/VCD/radio players), Chinese radio sets, amplifiers and speaker boxes.
R: What is the customer base for these products?
Mr Deepak: People still buy transistor sets, though they account for 5 per cent
of the business. My main business comes from all-in-one players and
amplifiers. Also, Chinese FM radio sets are in vogue. Migrant labourers, locals
(Lower Income Housing residents), and slum-dwellers are my main customer
base.
274
There is a stark distinction between the consumption patterns of transistor sets and
Chinese FM radios. The former are usually stand-alone radio units on FM, AM, short-wave and medium-wave frequencies. In contrast, the latter are 1 inch radio sets on which only FM bandwidth stations can be tuned into. Migrant labourers form the biggest, and often only, customer base for transistor sets while Chinese FM radios are very popular amongst local (LIG) families. The consumption of radio amongst the migrant labourers in the Karimnagar slums is limited; however, on their visits to the village they take along transistor sets which are still popular in the interior, especially in areas where FM bandwidth is limited.
The slums form a very important customer base in the electronics market.
Emphasising the importance of revenue generated from this area, Mr Deepak recounted the warranty-policy revision which almost all shopkeepers in the area agreed upon so as not to antagonise this customer base. The Chinese electronic goods do not come with a warranty. These goods are manufactured in China, and assembled in India. The lack of working knowledge of these systems locally, and their low retail prices, make it unprofitable for retailers to set up repair infrastructures for these goods: ‘the Chinese have taken over the markets; where once a radio-set would last in a family for years, now people change radios and CD players ever so frequently – sometimes even monthly,’ Mr Deepak commented. The shopkeepers do not extend warranties with the Chinese electronic goods to the locals; however, in the case of slum–dwellers, they have to make an exception:
We had to relent. Unlike the locals, most of the slum-dwellers invest in
comparatively more expensive goods – for instance, amplifiers and speaker 275
boxes. They would have shifted to the other local electronics market in the
vicinity – Bhakhalaa Place – so we decided to cut a deal with them. We took a
collective action, all the shopkeepers, to pressurise the wholesalers into a
replacement policy for at least some of the goods. So, really, it was a win–win
situation. (Mr Deepak, shopkeeper, electronics market, Karimnagar)
In the early 2000s, the presence of private FM channels and cheap, locally produced radio sets made them popular amongst the slum-dwellers. Unlike the AIR channels, private FM radio stations played mainstream Bollywood songs, which significantly contributed to their popularity. Over the years, however, the popularity of radios and fascination with private FM channels in slums saw a steady decline. This was on account of several concomitant developments: the influx of cheap Chinese electronics goods in the Indian markets; the extension of software piracy networks facilitated by falling costs of the hardware (CDs); and the increasing emphasis (and compulsion) in the programming and advertising campaigns of private FM radio stations to reach out to the middle-class section of society.
The interviews and conversations with the residents of the Karimnagar slums about an obvious, pronounced lack of radio consumption highlighted the increased disconnect with the content that had been felt over the years. In the initial years, private radio FM stations were a cheap and accessible source of Bollywood music; however, as the number of private radio FM stations increased, the focus of the content of these stations was geared to involve advertising campaigns that often related to real estate, restaurants, insurance and other services and commodities predominantly consumed by the middle class. The main audience base for private 276
FM stations is the middle class, and the content is therefore geared to reach out to them. The availability of cheap hardware (CD players) and software (pirated music
CDs) allowed the residents of Karimnagar to exercise control over their choice of music ‘without having to listening to the talk’, as a young man in Lapatagunj camp commented.
Lawrence Liang – an activist lawyer who spearheads the copyleft/open source debates in the Indian context – offers an insight into sustenance of piracy networks, which he relates with the entity of the ‘transgressor’ necessitating a newer journalistic praxis to examine the old one (in Rajan 2005: 155). He states:
The figures of illegality pose fundamental questions to our neat categories of
the liberal public sphere where citizens interact through constitutionally
guaranteed rights, as the exclusive mode of understanding the world of law
and legality. The status of these transgressors as the ‘not quite’ and yet ‘not
quiet’ citizens, creating their own avenues of participation in the multiple
worlds of media, modernity and globalisation, demands that journalists ask
fundamental questions of the relationship between law, legality and property
(tangible and intangible), on the one hand, and that which we call the public
domain, on the other hand. (2005: 171)
The proliferation of cheap, readily accessible auditory technologies allowed the residents of the Karimnagar slums – ‘not quite’ citizens – to be ‘not so quiet’ and exert their presence sonically. These technologies democratised the soundscape in and around the slums by empowering their position as producers in equal right. The 277 insistence of the residents on selecting their music and exercising control is symptomatic of the manner in which the city is ‘othered’ in two ways: first, it is a refusal to consume and engage a soundscape which met with the needs and aspirations of mainstream middle-class culture; and second, it means producing – though this is not without its own conflicts and politics – their own soundscapes vis-
à-vis the dominant ones.
By the mid-2000s, amplifiers and speaker boxes were the most sought after auditory technologies amongst the slum-dwellers. Mr Deepak’s contextualisation of these technologies further grounded them as important – almost crucial – elements of
Karimnagar ’s soundscape:
More often than not, people from the slums negotiate to buy the entire
system: player, speaker boxes and amplifiers. It is usually young male
members who are the main customers. The choice of players and speaker
boxes is usually from within the lowest range – goods which would suffice
the basic functionalities; however, when it comes to amplifiers, they demand
the ‘strongest’ one. So many times I have tried to tell them that without
proper or corresponding speaker boxes, the powerful amplifier is useless but
to not avail … well, what can I say beyond a point, it is their choice; for me –
first and foremost – it is a matter of business but, really, I do try to tell them.
(Mr Deepak, Shopkeeper)
On average, an adequately priced system deal (player, speaker boxes and amplifiers) would cost anything from INR. 3000 to INR. 5000 (US$50–100) – not an 278 insubstantial amount of money in the context (an average monthly income of a financially stable family in Karimnagar slums is INR 5000–8000) – of which the biggest proportion is spent on the amplifiers. Another equally lucrative business practice for Mr Deepak and other shopkeepers in the market is to rent out ‘systems’ for special occasions; depending on the duration, power, usage, etc., the cost of these rentals is as much as 1000 INR. (US$20) per day.
Practices of amplification: DJ-ing
After his father’s death, Ajay, Rajiv’s third and youngest son, had to look for a job that would support the family income. In Chapter 3 I undertook a detailed discussion about Rajiv’s family to elaborate on ownership patterns in Karimnagar slums. A few of his older brother’s friends had recently set up a DJ unit and Ajay was hired as an assistant. DJ shops are a recent phenomenon in the Karimnagar slums. DJ – or disc jockey – set-ups typically involve hiring out audio equipment – players, speaker and amplifiers – to residents of the Karimnagar slums and nearby LIG areas for specific occasions, such as marriages, birthday parties or engagements. They also offer a selection of music to be played on these occasions, with the DJ controlling the console. In the beginning, Ajay’s role in this set-up was to cart audio equipment to the venue. Gradually, he picked up the trade and was assigned the role of setting up the equipment as well. At the time of the research, he was working overtime to learn how to mix music and control the console so he could graduate to being a DJ. He mentioned that his interest in music and his extensive knowledge would come in very handy in his progress. Over a period of four months, I interviewed and interacted with Ajay and his colleagues to understand the topography of amplified 279 sounds in the Karimnagar slums. By then, their business was thriving, with possibilities for expansion.
Even though many households in the Karimnagar slums own ‘music systems’ – players, speakers and amplifiers – hiring a DJ for an event has become a mandatory, even though excessive, expenditure. I interviewed Ajay’s boss, Rahul, to understand the trend better:
Researcher: Why has DJ-ing gained such prominence in the Karimnagar
slums? It raises the costs significantly, doesn’t it?
Rahul: During festivals, marriages or other events, it is never really about cost.
It is about how well you do it. It is during these events that people get to flaunt,
show off their money. Over the years, things keep adding to the list of things
which are necessary to show that you belong to a decent, well-to-do family.
R: Like what?
Rahul: In the time of my parents, marriages were a fairly simple affair – get a
pandit (priest), a few relatives, home-cooked food, some decorations and lo,
the wedding was organised, but these days you have to hire a separate space,
tents, caterers, decorators, a car, print wedding cards … to this now DJ has
been added.
R: But why DJs? I mean, at the scale the weddings are done here, a personal
music system will suffice, won’t it? Why spend the extra money? And it is not
cheap, is it? 280
Rahul: No, it isn’t. On an average for eight hours with decent equipment and a
varied collection of music, it costs anything up to 5,000 –8,000 INR (US$100–
150) – not a small amount by any standards. A personal music system would
suffice, but that is not the way it is done by other people …
R: Other people?
Rahul: The rich, the middle-class ones. It is not about sound but status, you
see.
During his involvement with the DJ unit, Ajay’s demeanour went through significant changes. He was allowed the indulgence to buy new, slick clothes and invest in
English music CDs: ‘If I have to become a successful DJ,’ he said, ‘I will have to play the part. I don’t understand the English songs but at some parties they like it, even if they don’t have a clue about it, especially at birthday parties. And I cannot look shabby, can I?’
The trend to hire DJs for events was considered necessary, even though it was also regarded as a nuisance, an indulgence, an unnecessary expenditure; it was a sonic strategy to emulate the middle-class way of life across different sections in the
Karimnagar slums. However, the business expansion of Ajay’s unit, as well as rapid proliferation of other units, suggested that DJs were to become an important aspect of the Karimnagar slums’ soundscape. A survey of existing and emerging DJ set-ups in the Karimnagar slums indicated that other media units – CD retail and rental shops
– were either investing in acquiring the latest audio equipment or entering into 281 partnerships with DJ set-ups to diversify their business. A CD retail and rental shop on its own was beginning to be seen as a dead investment with no future.
I interviewed a shopkeeper in Gandhipuri camp who was on the verge of expanding his business to include DJ equipment and staff. It was a financially draining prospect for which he had to seek assistance from his wife’s brother, an idea that did not particularly appeal to him:
R: Why are you doing it, then? Isn’t your business doing well right now?
Vikas: It is and I know it will have its lean period in the beginning but once it
picks up, I am confident I will break even and start making treble the profits.
R: What makes you so confident? The DJ units are mushrooming here …
Vikas: I have the most extensive collection of local, regional and religious
music from all over – Uttarpradesh, Maharasthra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan
and Haryana. If I have a DJ unit as well, I plan to offer the music of their
region as a bonus, no costs; at least I will sell it that way. That will ensure me a
steady customer base.
There is a strong demand for regional and religious music in the Karimnagar slums.
These could be popular Bollywood songs sung in local languages, soundtracks of popular regional films, and religious songs rendered in the tune of popular
Bollywood songs. The business model followed by Vikas, and by other CD retail and rental shops, is to both sell and rent these CDs as it makes financial sense for both the owners and the customers:
Vikas: It is not only about money, you see. It is important but not the only
reason. This is such a dynamic industry: every week we have new titles – 282
regional and Bollywood. The customers like to listen to them, try them, and get
new ones. It works for us as well. We have a steady customer base.
Peter Manuels (1993), in his fascinating study Cassette Cultures: Popular Music and
Technology in North India, has traced transformations in India’s music industry with the advent of cassette technology in the early 1980s. These led to subsequent cultural upheaval in production, consumption and circulation of music in India. The cassette technology became more accessible to the masses because of its low-cost production and mass circulation. It allowed for local, regional and folk music traditions to find their own voice:
Cassettes … led to decentralized grassroots control of a significant sector of the
mass media; they have stimulated the revitalisation and creative syncretisation
of a wide variety of traditional musics; they have created opportunities for
innumerable singers and artists to be represented on the mass media, in a
manner inconceivable in the context of film music industry; finally, they have
facilitated the dissemination of a far greater diversity of topical themes than
were present in film music, thus contributing to the ability of diverse Indian
communities to affirm, in language, style, and text content, their own social
identities on the mass media in an unprecedented manner. (Manuels 1993:
194).
The technological changes in the years since cassette technology have only amplified the magnitude of diverse and distinct multiple music traditions and practices in India.
The consumption of diverse musical sounds in Karimnagar slums reaffirms its social, 283 cultural and communal multiplicity, systematically challenging the homogenised representation in mainstream media. Also, it reaffirms the distinct identities communities here maintain and sonically express.
Conclusion
When I asked a young, bright, college-going girl (aged eighteen), who had the television set on a very high volume, about it, she said: ‘If I don‘t play it, somebody else will. I come from college and switch the television at a very high volume. This way everyone can listen to it and they get interested in what is being played. It leads to discussions and chat … which are always a very nice way to spend the evening.’
When I inquired about the television shows she followed, they were listed as shows covering the sensational, tabloid news reports, popular soaps and regional dramas.
In another incident, a woman aged around 35 (I did not meet her as she was visiting her village when she was being discussed) was said to be ‘very irritating’ and
‘infuriating’ as she constantly kept humming the sermons she listened to in her religious gatherings. Although all the women present – around six of them – categorically mentioned that they enjoyed and appreciated the religious sermons, even those she hummed, they found her humming particularly irritating as they did not like her much. In this instance, owing to personal disagreements, the ‘sound’ of the woman in question was a matter of encroachment even though the sound itself was acceptable and appreciated.
In a rather fascinating discussion, a group of young women (eight of them in the fifteen to nineteen years age group) informed me about what I am referring to as 284
‘audio romance’. The story goes as follows: a boy and girl much besotted by each other do not have the social or cultural space to interact or express themselves. So they play specific songs to convey messages to each other. Mostly, they play love songs for each other. At a specific hour in the afternoon, either the girl or the boy will take the lead and play their favourite song to express their emotions. However, it is not always about love songs. When they have a fight or when one of them is upset about something, it is evident to everyone as they play sad, depressing songs – sometimes even addressing a very particular problem. This ingenious means of romancing is evidently unknown to the elders, who have not managed to decode the language. The girls I spoke to, however, were happily basking in the glory of being aware of this secret modus operandi.
There are no simplistic frameworks to articulate slums in the urban experience of developing cities, and likewise for their sonic cultures and practices. The loudness does not immediately translate into noise. The sonic experiences in the Karimnagar slums and about them reaffirm the social, cultural, moral and political listenings of sound.
Amplification tactics in the Karimnagar slums, while listened into by an outsider as
‘uncultured, callous activities to just create more noise’,73 serve a definite purpose in shaping and navigating the space through its soundscapes. They allow residents to define their sonic territories and the scope of their sonic performances, and they are significant to exerting one’s position, territory and identity. The residents of the
Karimnagar slums have to negotiate many social, cultural, moral and political
73 In conversation with Anuj. 285 prejudices in their everyday lives. Their identity is constantly under scrutiny and threat. However, the sonic cultures and practices in the slums allow their residents to exert a definite sonic presence that the middle class has to hear. Lastly, silence and noise are not two extremes of sonic instances. Their articulation is an act manifesting social, cultural and political power and hierarchies. In Chapter 9, I will demonstrate how sound in its various forms is important in subverting hierarchies. 286
8
Honking: Legitimate noise
Quieting the city: Noise Regulation Rules 2000
In 2000, Noise Regulation Rules were added to the Environmental Protection Act
(EPA) of 1986, which deals with ‘every dynamic issue in relation to environmental protection’.74 The need for exclusive regulations and rules to tackle noise pollution was felt, as the EPA could not adequately address the noise issues – especially after it was raised in the context of the use of loudspeakers and amplifiers by religious groups and institutions. A Resident Welfare Association in Kerala filed a petition against a neighbouring church’s use of loud musical instruments and amplifiers for causing excessive noise pollution. The High Court passed an order to the effect that the police should ensure that the church turned down its music. The church appealed, evoking Article 19(1)A of the Indian Constitution, which extends freedom of speech and the right to expression, stating that its right to practise religion was being infringed. The Supreme Court declined the appeal by evoking Article 21 of the
Indian Constitution, which guarantees life and personal liberty to all persons. Even though the Supreme Court acknowledged the right of any individual, group or community to practise religion, it noted that it had to take into consideration ‘public order, morality, and health’. It further held that:
74 http://www.indiatogether.org/2003/nov/law-noise.htm. 287
Undisputedly, no religion prescribes that prayers should be performed by
disturbing the peace of others nor does it preach that they should be through
voice amplifiers or beating of drums. In our view, in civilized society in the
name of religion, activities which disturb old or infirm persons, students or
children having their sleep in the early hours or during daytime or other
persons carrying on other activities cannot be permitted.75
It was within a similar legal praxis that bursting of firecrackers during Diwali, one of the biggest Hindu festival in India, was banned after 10.00 p.m. The Supreme Court stated that ‘the restriction did not breach anybody’s right to such freedom [of religion], noting that Diwali is mainly associated with pooja (worship) and not with firecrackers, that no religious text prescribes firecrackers and it is considered a festival of lights and not noises’ (Knights 2008: 54). A writ filed by Anil K. Mittal in
1998 called for the ‘existing laws for restricting use of loudspeakers and other high volume noise producing audio-visual systems, be directed to be rigorously enforced’.76 The petition was filed in response to the rape of a minor (thirteen-year- old) girl, whose cries for help went unheard in the din of loudspeaker and amplified music being played on a religious occasion. The girl committed suicide by setting herself alight. This petition vehemently opposed the use of loudspeakers, amplifiers, high-quality hi-fi systems in public places during religious festivities and social gatherings. It asked the government to put into action strategies to enforce the Noise
Regulation Rules by setting up the necessary infrastructure, acquiring equipment and making it mandatory for firecracker manufactures to list the chemical composition on the pack, amongst other things. The Supreme Court passed a ruling favouring the
75 http://www.nlsenlaw.org/air-noise/case-laws/supreme-court/church-of-god-full-gospel-in-india-v-kkr-majestic-colony- welfare-association-air-2000-sc-2773. 76 http://www.elaw.org/node/1515. 288 petitioner’s claims, but only after it ‘undertook a relatively lengthy comparative analysis of the legislation prevailing in other jurisdictions’ (Knights 2008: 54) to conclude ‘that the problems associated with noise prevalent in India were quite distinct from that of more developed states and necessitated an India-focus approach’
(2008: 55).
Indeed, in its judgment, the Supreme Court – while upholding its judgment – acknowledges the limitations of enforcing the Noise Regulations Rules owing to density of population, lack of infrastructure and social-cultural conditioning. It further states:
India has passed through the stage of being characterised as a developing
country and is ready to enter and stand in the line of developed countries.
Yet, the issue of noise pollution in India has not been taken so far with that
seriousness as it ought to have been. Firstly, as we have stated earlier, there is
a lack of will on the part of the Executive to implement the laws. This has
contributed to lack of infrastructure essential for attaining the enforcement of
laws. Secondly, there is lack of requisite awareness on the part of the citizens.
The deleterious effects of noise pollution are not well known to the people
and are not immediately perceptible. People generally accept noise pollution
as a part of life, a necessary consequence of progress and prosperity.77
Through the Noise Regulation Rules 2000, the government aims to institute sonic practices and behaviours that will lead to a reduction in noise pollution. Under these
77 http://www.elaw.org/node/1515. 289 rules,78 the state government can categorise areas into industrial, commercial, residential or silence areas/zones for the purpose of implementation of noise standards for different areas. Measures to abate the noise emitted from vehicles and vehicular movements can be taken by the state government, a loudspeaker or a public address system will not be used except after obtaining written permission from the authority and the same will not be used between 10.00 p.m. and 6.00 a.m., and lastly, any person found violating these provisions will be liable to be punished for it as per the provisions of these rules and any other law in force. It categorically states that ‘a common nuisance is not excused on the ground that it causes some convenience or advantage’.79 In Environmental Jurisprudence in India, Abraham (1999) follows the developments from the 1970s to the early 1990s to highlight that the constitutional changes enacted have ‘led to a virtual creation of a fundamental right to a clean environment in Indian law’ (Abraham 1999: 1). As discussed in earlier chapters, the next decade – especially in Delhi – witnessed the extension of environmental jurisprudence and nuisance laws to institute policies, laws and vocabularies to dramatically alter the urban landscape of Delhi towards a ‘world-class city’ experience and projection. It is towards this goal that curtailing noise pollution has been involved as a prominent agenda in the Master Plan of Delhi 2021:
The plan identifies that the only remedy to decrease noise pollution levels is
to relocate public, semi-public and commercial activities along with major
transport routes. It calls for planting trees in such a way that they act as
natural barriers to prevent the spread of noise to adjoining areas. The Master
Plan 2021 has paid attention to subtle nuances also … it has pointed out that
78 http://www.dpcc.delhigovt.nic.in/act_noise.htm. 79 http://www.dpcc.delhigovt.nic.in/act_noise.htm. 290
even air-traffic causes noise pollution which is strong enough to disturb
ecological balance and cause physiological disturbances. Hence the master
plan claims that there is an equal urgent need to formulate a precise policy to
tackle noise pollution from all the sources.80
Noisy ‘others’
Within the agenda of ‘Clean Delhi, Green Delhi’, in which environmental jurisprudence and discourse (Mawdsley 2004; Ghertner 2008) have been strategically employed to oust the poor from the city and deny them any rights to it, the Noise Regulation Rules 2000 allow for yet another framework through which the state and middle class can reiterate their rhetoric. The demolition and walling of the
Karimnagar slums, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, amongst other concerns, was prompted by neighbouring middle-class residents’ desire to restrict and control noise from the slums.
For the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Delhi government wants to present a city with a sanitised sensuous experience. It is within this broader agenda that the government has decided to shield the slums that it could not demolish or relocate with bamboo screens during the Games.81 Within this vehement aspiration for ‘Clean
Delhi, Green Delhi’, noise is not just unwanted sound; it is a political construct to identify and locate the unwanted – the poor, slum-dwellers and migrant labourers – as noisy, which further justifies their violent exclusion from the city.
80 http://www.indiahousing.com/delhi-master-plan2021/index3.html. 81 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/commonwealthgames/6043719/New-Delhi-to-hide-slums-with-bamboo- curtains-during-2010-Commonwealth-Games.html. 291
Noise has become an important sensorial trope to distance the ‘other’, as discussed in
Chapter 7. In its sensorial reorganisation of the urban experience, the manner in which the middle class positions itself in the imagined sensorial realm not only aspires to limited, highly prescriptive and silent interactions with the ‘others’, the slum-dwellers, in its extended sensorial realm, it also wants to significantly restrict the sonic performance of ‘others’ in its immediate sensorial realm by silencing them.
Noisy self: Honking in Delhi
In this section, I will discuss the urban soundscape of Delhi through its loud traffic sounds and practices. It is the persistent honking that lends Delhi its peculiar sonic character. It is equally celebrated and criticised in different accounts – especially from those who are not accustomed to Indian soundscapes. Private vehicles (cars and two-wheelers) form a significant proportion of the vehicular traffic in Delhi; these are mainly owned by high-income groups (Geetam Tiwari 2003: 447). While reflecting on transport and land-use policies in Delhi, Tiwari (2003) argues that these policies are ‘designed to address the concerns of people in high-income groups who are dependent on private motorized vehicles’ (2003: 446), ignoring the needs of low- income households that ‘reside in juggies, slums and low-income, unauthorized, residential settlements’ and are the ‘captive pedestrians’ (2003: 445). Critically evaluating the government’s policies in these matters, he states that even though
‘policy makers are concerned about growing congestion and pollution … the transport policies continue to encourage use of private vehicles’ (2003: 449).
According to the most recent Delhi Economic Survey (2008–09), ‘Delhi‘s vehicular population had reached 56.27 lakh82 by 2007–08, as against 30.33 lakh in 1997–98
82 A lakh is 100, 000. 292
— an annual compound growth rate of 6.42 per cent. Private vehicles constitute 94 per cent of the total vehicular strength;83 by extension, Delhi’s traffic soundscape, and its peculiar honking practices, can be identified as the immediate realm in which the middle class performs its sonicity.
In recent years, there have been efforts to abate this specific instance of noise pollution, though without much success. In the following section, I will discuss these efforts, their impact and everyday associations with honking to highlight, (1) that vehicular traffic and honking are the main reasons lending a ‘noisy’ character to the
Delhi soundscape, (2) that it is the middle class which is mainly responsible for this
‘noise’, and (3) that honking, even though identified and criticised as ‘noise’, does not have the same segregating, exclusionary and discriminatory currency as that associated with the slum ‘noise’.
Horn OK please
New Year’s Day has been declared ‘No Honking Day’ in Delhi. This initiative was undertaken by an environmental group, The Earth Savers Foundations, in collaboration with the Delhi Traffic Police. Ravi Kalra, the man behind this mission, elaborated on its intent:
People honk for no reason. The traffic light signal‘s not even turned green but
we start honking … We see a huge traffic jam on the road, still we honk. So
83 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/city/delhi/Delhis-flyovers-cant-cope-with-rising-traffic/articleshow/4961488.cms. 293
people don‘t realise because this has become like a cancer in this system. So
this has to go away and then the real definition of honking must come back.84
The efforts of authorities, organisations and individuals to abate noise pollution highlights the magnitude of the problem, especially with regard to honking; however, it also establishes that the culture of honking in the Indian context is deeply embedded in its social, cultural and political context and cannot merely be attributed to bad road manners.
Honking is an integral aspect of driving in India: much has been said about the traffic noise marred by incessant honking of the Indian cities, especially Delhi. From a typically Western, sonically sanitised perspective, the consistent honking would manifest as a cacophony of amateur drivers who refuse to follow the rules. The honking, however, is not without its merit in the Indian context. It has its own peculiar language, through which conversations, honkingly, take place. With different kinds of honks, people convey different messages. There is specific kind of honking to suggest that one’s scarf is sticking out of the car door, another to ask the way, yet another to inform about the half-closed boot or door. There is definitely an angry, rude honking to say ‘get out of my way’ but that is not the only kind of honking. Each instance of honking contains a coded message about navigating the traffic, something that can be articulated if you are part of the cultural context; otherwise, to a sonic outsider, all honking is disturbance and noise.
84 http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2457655.htm. 294
Truck art – as it is loosely referred to – is a popular practice in India. Commercial vehicles – trucks and auto rickshaws – have various signs, figures and messages painted on them. ‘Horn OK Please’ is one of the most common phrases/messages painted on the vehicles. ‘Horn OK please’85 has a dedicated Wikipedia entry and it is described – quite aptly – as follows:
The purpose of the phrase is to alert a driver of a vehicle approaching from
behind to sound his/her horn in case they wish to overtake.
‘Horn Please’, meaning please blow horn, do not overtake without blowing
horn and though they have added ‘Please’, as per typical Indian culture a
request is also considered as an umbrage so to make the request more polite
they have added ‘OK’ (which literally means I am OK you are OK or okey-
dokey). During the olden days, it was difficult to achieve higher speed in few
seconds. Hence ‘horn please’ is used to ask the driver in the front to find out
whether it is OK to overtake, as it takes effort to reach that speed once the
driver at the back makes an attempt to overtake and he has to break to avoid
collision with any vehicle coming in the front. But now it has become a
fashion to write. Even Auto-rickshaw writes that. And this has spoiled the
habit of the drivers and they honk without reason.
And usual habit of the Indians, they honk all the way. Even every teacher of
any driving school tells the student to blow horn at every crossing instead of
asking him to slow down, be alert and pass. It was even advised by them to
85 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_OK_Please 295
honk every now and then so that, the future drivers will practice honking and
do not forget to honk.
Today in India, people are become immune to honking. Now in Indian roads
ambulance with blowing siren also use horn to get the way to overtake. But
no one responds to it.
The discussions on the signage ‘Horn OK Please’ and honking as a standard driving practice in India are intense. Tim Sullivan has written in the LA Times about his experiences of learning how to drive in Delhi. Of honking,86 he writes:
In India, horns are serious driving tools. They caution absent-minded drivers,
drive away wandering cows and let you ask permission to change lanes. On
the back of nearly every Indian truck is a painted exhortation to overtaking
vehicles: ‘Horn Please’ … I was, it seemed, driving as if I knew what I was
doing. I was shifting lanes expecting other drivers to make way and nosing
the Maruti into tiny openings. I was edging ahead of roaring buses and
forcing my way through the anarchic scrums that fill intersections when
traffic lights aren’t working. Perhaps most tellingly, I was using the horn far
more than the turn signal.
Honking practices
Honking is an important aspect of navigating the traffic, finding one’s own space and conveying one’s presence. Another source – which describes itself as ‘guides to everything India’ – prepares the visitors for the driving/honking experience in India:
86 http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/10/news/adfg-driving10. 296
It is said that to drive in India you need three things – a horn, brakes and
courage. The horn is the most used of the three followed closely by the
brakes. The most common things you‘ll see painted on the back of a truck or
vehicle in India is the Phrase- ‘Horn OK Please’ … so much so that it has
earned itself a page on Wikipedia. The purpose of the phrase is to alert a
driver of a vehicle approaching from behind to sound his/her horn in case
they wish to overtake. Today in India, people are so immune and oblivious to
honking, that it really serves no real purpose anymore. But if an Indian were
to drive a vehicle without a horn they would be lost.87
The many discussions on practices of honking in India fail to explain its prevalence. it seems that honking has always been part of the Indian soundscape; however, it is only in the last few years that honking has been identified as a pollutant and deterrent, with noise pollution gaining prominence. In the broader context, this development is situated within the ‘Clean Delhi, Green Delhi’ initiative to make
Delhi ‘a more environmentally sustainable and livable city’. The purpose of this agenda is not only to improve the conditions of the city for its native citizens but also to make it more comfortable for the ‘visitors’ – that is, people from the Western world. However, attempts to abate noise pollution within strict Western conceptions and definitions have not been very successful. Commenting on the manner in which soundscapes evolved in the Western context through the eighteenth century,
Schaffer states that the heightened emphasis and development of the ‘visuality’ in the city has brought about significant changes. Prior to that, he states, movement and
87 http://www.indiamarks.com/guide/You-know-you-re-on-an-Indian-Road-when-/1853. 297 mobility across the city were guided by ‘aural billboards’: everything was cried out.
He states that, during this time, the cityscape was marked by ‘the lack of signs, particularly signs with printing’ (1994: 10). Though navigation across the city following the visual signs is prominent in Delhi, in essence it is characterised by its acoustics and the aural maps one draws.
Other factors enhance the prominence of the aural maps and markers – honking, in this instance – in the Indian context. The Centre for Science and Environment, a prominent environmental research and activist organisation based in Delhi, conducted intensive research on noise pollution, regulations to control it and its impact in the country. ‘Commitment to development’ in developing nations as India,
Bangladesh and Nepal, according to the centre, has aggravated the situation as the governing bodies in these countries have ‘mostly under-estimated the health impacts’ of promoting development. Dense populations, high-level activity on the roads and low levels of literacy are other reasons for the persistent usage of ‘honks’ as aural markers in this context.
Localising honking: An ethnographic insight
During the weeks preceding ‘No Honking Day’, I conducted some ethnographic research around three prominent traffic signals in Delhi. My intention was to understand the reactions, articulations and responses of those who negotiated with honking at an everyday level: the traffic policemen. Though most of the traffic signals in the city of Delhi are digitally controlled, it is a common practice to have traffic police (TP) personnel at major intersections. In case of a breakdown of the traffic signalling system, these traffic police are required to manually control the traffic. Along with that, they keep a close watch for offenders – speeding, jumping 298 the signal, smoking while driving, and so on. I approached the traffic police officers at the three locations and asked three questions: Why do people honk? Who honks?
And how does it affect them? I conducted my research in India Gate, South
Extension and Sarvpriya Vihar.
India Gate – and the area around it –is popularly referred to as the Lutyens Delhi.
The Parliament House, along with several other government offices, is located in this area. South Extension is a rich neighbourhood in the city of Delhi with a thriving, busy market. Sarvpriya Vihar is a residential neighbourhood in the southwest part of
Delhi. The identification of these spaces was strategic; these three spaces represent different social, cultural and political zones of the city. While India Gate is the epitome of power and politics, South Extension is a busy, bustling market and
Sarvpriya Vihar is a residential colony. Not surprisingly, the honking cultures in all of these spaces were markedly distinct.
India Gate is a highly secured area constantly under scrutiny. It has broad, open roads and several traffic police are posted here. This is a designated ‘silent zone’ in the city. Of all the three spaces, the traffic police had the ‘easiest’ time during their posting in the India Gate area. The two personnel interviewed made the following observations:
TP1: We don’t get much honking here. Actually, there are very few traffic
rules violation in this area because (a) this is a high security area, everyone
knows we’ll be around, and (b) there is really no need. The roads are broad,
there is not much population around here. Only the important people live
around here … 299
TP2: … actually that makes it difficult. If there are any defaulters, it’s them and we cannot do anything to them. The posting around this area is called the
‘punishment’ posting because the chances to make ‘over the top’ money [it was not referred to as bribes, but pocket money] are very rare.
TP1: But it’s because of these reasons … broad roads, important people driving around, no honking, very less traffic that this area witnesses the most horrific accidents involving very powerful people. Then the pressure mounts on us …
TP2: I don’t know what is the issue with honking. It can be irritating. I have headaches, etc., but it also makes our job easier …
R: How is that?
TP2: … because people honk incessantly, we know what to expect. We know what’s coming … a truck, bus, car, auto … in crowded places it becomes easier to man and control the traffic that way …
R: Do you fine people for honking? That is a traffic rule violation, is it not?
TP1: Yes, it is. But tell me how do you regulate and fine people who are honking? On an average at a busy junction during peak hours, there are at least 30–50 vehicles, if not more, how do you think we should go about finding out who is honking? 300
TP2: If authorities want people not to honk, they should make the cars
without horns. If people have horns and they can use to clear the roads, etc.,
why will they not use it?
The conversations with the traffic police at India Gate were relaxed, stretching over a period of 45 minutes; I was also offered tea. Compared with this fairly relaxed setting, the interview held at the South Extension traffic signal was edgy and had to be spanned over three visits on different days. During one of the visits, the traffic police had to manually coordinate the traffic. From behind the wheel, I had witnessed the scene many times of lone traffic police personnel managing the traffic.
During these times, I was nothing less than disparaging about their ‘skills’. The movements of the vehicles permitted seemed erratic, guided solely by the whim and fancy of the police officer. However, witnessing the traffic police officer regulate the traffic at that close quarter revealed a very systematic method to the madness. The traffic police, though bearing the brunt of ‘honking’ most intimately, was not at all dismissive about it, like the other two police officers interviewed at India Gate:
TP (SX): Look around, there is always so much happening on the streets here.
There is a huge construction happening there, pedestrians are crossing the
road, there are all kinds of vehicles from buses, cars, to cycles … people are
listening to the radio, they are talking, there is so much of noise every around
… people need to be reminded, to tell others if they are going wrong … most
people honk if they think that the other person is on the wrong. The traffic
situation in Delhi is really bad but without honking it would be worse … 301
R: How is that?
TP (SX): At least with the honking, people know … without it everyone
would be banging into each other. Anyway, I don’t understand why there is
such a huge issue about honking on the roads … look around, well, listen,
there is so much more noise created by other things … construction work,
loudspeakers, truck engines, processions, weddings, generators … so many
things, why single out honking?
The responses of the traffic personnel posted at the Sarvpriya Vihar – the residential colony – were more localised than those from the officers at the other two spaces.
Here, honking was attributed to a range of reasons:
TP (SPV): People honk for all kinds of reasons … not always when it is
required. People use horn when they are having a fight, when someone is
blocking their way, young boys – mostly – honk to show off the cars, tease
women, they get the woman’s attention by honking and then they will say
something … another important reason is women drivers.
R: Women drivers honk more, you mean?
TP (SX): No, no … women don’t honk that much. It’s usually the men –
young boys, truck and bus drivers, men driving fancy cars … but you see,
women are such bad drivers … they create jam situations … the car will stop
in the middle of the road, they will just stop erratically to ask for directions
… what choice do men have – at least in this situation – but to honk [I gave 302
him a ‘I am a woman and a good driver’ look] … I am sure you drive very
well madam.
The range of reasons listed by the traffic police personnel was varied and diverse.
However, a couple of things stood out starkly: none of them thought of honking as a menace; in its stead they listed the benefits of honking in managing and navigating the traffic in Delhi. Also, honking did not singularly emerge as the main ‘noise’ on the roads.
Cultures of honking: Legitimate noise
In light of these conversations, it was interesting to follow a discussion thread on an online forum88 inviting people to share their street experiences of ‘Why do you honk?’ The respondents, middle-class men from across different cities in the country, listed varied reasons why they honked or why they thought others did. These ranged from ‘venting out frustration; being bored; congested roads; anger; to attract women’s attention’ to ‘honk because they can’. Though some of them expressed their irritation at the culture of honking, none mentioned it as a menace. It is accepted as part of the broader culture of driving in India.
While discussing the issue of noise pollution, its regulation and the way ahead, the
CSE – Centre for Science and Environment89 - white paper90 suggests that, at its core, the problem lies with ‘enforcement’. According to them, ‘a fine of two hundred is just not enough in the 90s to prevent the violators from resorting to noise nuisance.
Under this section the fine should possibly be increased to an exorbitant amount that may in a way help in preventing people from indulging in activities leading to
88 http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/street-experiences/37274-why-do-you-honk.html. 89 http://www.cseindia.org/ 90 http://www.cseindia.org/programme/health/pdf/conf2006/a4noise.pdf. 303 production of high noise levels.’ However, while evaluating the Motor Vehicles Act
1989, in which horns figure prominently, Dr Kacker, former director of AIIMS91 and an ENT92 expert, said:
The law states that every motor vehicle shall be fitted with an electric horn
and any multi-toned horns that produce shrill, loud or alarming noises are not
permissible under law. Anyone travelling on Delhi roads knows how far
removed the actual situation is; it is very easy to locate cars that whistle
various multi-toned horns on the roads. Do we call this a failure of law or a
failure in enforcement? Now we all know that the entire problem lies with
improper enforcement, laws are mostly there but the authorities are still not
thinking in lines of enforcing them with resolute power. But the onus also lies
with the general public. Even doctors, in spite of being totally aware of
harmful effects of high levels of noise, do not keep away from continuous
honking of horns on the roads.
Conclusion
Honking, and by extension creating ‘noise’ in public spaces, is legitimised by several social, cultural, religious and political frameworks. Even though the middle classes come within the purview of these laws, their enforcement reveals that they are not compelled to follow them. They have the social and cultural legitimacy to break these laws while the position of the urban poor and slum-dwellers in the city is
91 All India Institute of Medical Sciences. 92 Ear Nose Throat specialist. 304 constantly – especially in the last decade – determined by adherence to these laws; a failure to conform is often used as a justification to deny them rights and citizenship.
The above discussion about the peculiarities of honking practices and the nonchalance with which the Noise Regulation Rules are ignored highlights the arrogance of the burgeoning middle class. In its imagined sensorial realm, the middle class has a legitimate right over the city that is reflected in the manner in which its members perform, sonically, in their immediate-extended sensorial realms of driving and honking. Honking, as the online discussion suggested, is celebrated as a means to extend one’s territoriality in the dense sonic space, and for its aggressive, masculine overtones. Even while being acknowledged as ‘noise’, it is justified through these arguments and does not suffer the same predicament of its loudness corrupting the social and moral fabric of the city as the sound of the slums is perceived to do. 305
9
Conclusion: A discussion of listening practices
Introduction
In A King Listens, the position of the king, literally and figuratively, depends on
‘listening into’. Here, ‘the palace is all whorls, lobes: it is a great ear, whose anatomy and architecture trade names and functions: pavilions, ducts, shells, labyrinths. You are crouched at the bottom, in the innermost zone of the palace-ear, of your own ear; the palace is the ear of the king.’ (Calvino trans Weaver 1993: 38) This ability to hear into the palace, which gives the king his power, leaves him restricted to his throne – if he moves, even briefly, there is a danger he will miss something significant – maybe sounds of rebellion or deceit. He listens not only because he is
‘condemned to listen’ as ‘we have no ear lids’ (Schaffer 2003: 25), but because he has to keep his ‘ears open’ (2003: 25) to maintain the status quo and his power.
Central to the production, performance and articulation of sound as social, cultural and political acts, and the subsequent sonic hierarchies that are instituted, as discussed in the previous chapters, is the sanction and legitimacy to keep our ‘ears open’ (2003: 25). Listening, then, is not only a matter of auditory compulsion but a political act, which determines the position of the listener and the hearer in a context.
In this chapter, I will discuss these positionalities within the context of the
Karimnagar slums and their relation with the city and the middle class.
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Listener and hearer
Paul Carter (2004), in Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space’, explores different types of hearing by presenting the idea that ‘listening is engaged hearing’
(2004: 43). He sets categorical distinctions between hearing and listening, stating that while ‘a detached auditor, whose prosthetic ear is the microphone’ (2004: 44) only hears, the ‘Listeners listen with both ears, monitoring their own mimetic responses to what is said and heard’ (2004: 44). He places hearing and listening as evidences of distinct cultural and scholarly practices, and is of the opinion that ‘to be
“heard” socially depends upon mastering a feedback loop between listening and speaking’ (2004: 43). The lack of recognition of being in this loop is, according to
Carter, the reason for the lack of scholarly work on ‘sound’, as anthropologists ‘even when hearing cultures, may not listen to them’ (2004: 43).
Carter’s conceptualisation shaped this study on two accounts. First, as a researcher studying a soundscape outside of my immediate sensorial realm, it made me aware of when I was ‘in the loop’, and when my ears were closed (see Schaffer 2003). In short, Carter helped me to listen into my listening into the Karimnagar slums.
Second, once conscious of my own middle-class informed listening into the
Karimnagar slums, I was able to raise questions outside of this sensibility – Who’s listening? What are they listening to? And, what are they ignoring or refusing to listen to? (2003: 25) I could do this without imposing (or at least being aware of the effects of) my own sonic prejudices.
Listening is not a sonically neutral act, as is highlighted by the sonic practices and politics in this thesis. For this reason, I did not undertake to categorise sounds in the 307
Karimnagar slums as noise or silence lest I impose my own sonic translations on to them. Instead, I listened into listening practices in the slums, which revealed sonic practices that are complex, and within which the positions of listener and hearer are situated. The positions of listener and hearer are politically informed, and thus are significant in determining the permissions of sonic production, performance and articulation available to a group, individual or community. They are, more often than not, extensions of social, cultural and political positions.
The listener sonically dominates, owing to their social, cultural and political legitimacy (and choice and power) to keep their ‘ear open or closed’ (Schaffer 2003:
25). The listener can keep their ‘ears open’, proactively engage with a soundscape and allow it multiple articulations. By deliberately closing their ears to a soundscape, the listener denies it any scope of articulation or engagement whatsoever. Often, this sonic strategy is adopted by the dominant groups to identify all sounds of the ‘other’ as noise, as discussed in Chapter 7. The listener dominates a soundscape by having the legitimacy to articulate sound as acceptable sound, noise or silence. The listener can dominate a soundscape by determining the nature of audible utterances, the sanctioned time and place for it, and the decibel levels. Alternatively, the listener can extend their control by demanding silence.
Listening is proactive, engaged hearing, while hearing is disempowered listening.
The hearer does not necessarily possess the social, cultural and political currency to categorise sounds as valid and acceptable in a context. The listener–hearer relationship is a ‘monologue of power’ (Attali, trans Massumi 1985: 9), where the hearer cannot participate in shaping or altering sonic acts and their articulations. 308
This, however, does not imply that a hearer has their ‘ear closed’, only that its listening is systematically unheard, especially within the context of the listener– hearer relationship.
In the context of the discussions in the previous chapters about the sonic practices of space (Chapter 6) and politics of articulations of sound as noise or silence (Chapter
7), in this thesis the sonic city–slum relationship can be presented as one of listener– hearer, while within the Karimnagar slums, ostracised groups such as Totas (to be discussed below) and women are the hearers. As evidenced in these discussions, the sonic practices and their politics are highly fluid and dynamic. Different groups effectively employ these positions to either reiterate or circumvent their socio- cultural positions.
The most prominent sonic strategies are noise, silencing, silence, gossip, eavesdropping and unlistening. In the following section, drawing upon the research, I will highlight the manner in which different groups employ these strategies.
Noise
The Totas form a prominent community in Lapatagunj camp. This community hails from Maharashtra, and has South Indian lineage. They are fortune-tellers who use parrots as an aide; thereby the name ‘Tota’, which literally translates as parrots. This is their livelihood. P. Nagaraja (2003), in South Asian Folklore, details the manner in which fortunes are told using parrots by this community:
309
These fortune-tellers go around the streets announcing their presence, or wait
along footpaths or in front yards of busy buildings like temples or offices.
Usually wearing a Maharashtrian cap, the parrot astrologer carries a cage of
parrots and a bag of cards, a book, and a few remedies for misfortune, such as
stones or talismans … The fortune teller ‘reads’ the figure and the fortune in
a peculiar Marathi dialect mixed with syncretic forms of other South Indian
languages in a catchy shrill voice and emphatic pronunciation. For
‘elaboration’ upon the reading he ‘consults’ the book he carries with him.
Usually clients are offered ‘remedies’ for evil eye or other misfortune, first in
the form of a prescription and later from the various objects in the bag. (2003:
231)
The interaction of this community with others is limited in Lapatagunj camp. They are ‘uncouth, loud, and immoral’ in the articulations of the dominant groups. Women and children are not allowed to interact with them. I was also advised to exercise caution when interviewing them. In the dominant narratives, the main reason for their ostracisation was their loud habits, coarse language, and ‘emphatic pronunciation’. These, along with their magical powers, make them highly vulnerable to scrutiny.
Members of the Tota community, aware of these prejudices, have their own reasons for maintaining a distance:
We are fortune-tellers. Whether you believe in it or not, we have the ability
to predict the future. In some cases, even avert misfortunes. The parrots are
not just props. It requires years of practice to master the skill. We are a very
closed community because we have to pass this knowledge from generation 310
to generation to keep the tradition alive. We cannot compromise with that.
We cannot share our secrets with those who are not part of the group. Most
people think we do nothing but sing, dance, and drink – yes, we do – but all
of this is part of the learning process. We also sing and dance because we
want to. There are others in these camps who are involved in far more
deplorable activities than us – selling drugs, prostitution, alcohol – but they
are not targeted. It’s us. We enjoy what we do and, yes, we do make money.
If they don’t want to talk to us neither do we.
The position of the Tota community in Lapatagunj camp, in relation to other dominant communities, is that of the hearer. The Totas are excluded from social and cultural interactions. By eliminating the scope of a dialogue, the Totas are denied a voice.
The sonic practices of the Totas, however, complicate this positioning. The dominant groups in the Lapatagunj camp have established a very strict sensorial code of conduct to interact with the Totas. As hearers, any sonic production and performance of Totas is articulated as noise by other dominant groups.
Within the Tota community, it is a common practice for families to collectively invest in auditory technologies, which is also a common practice throughout the
Karimnagar slums (Chapter 7). Members of the Tota community often play folk music. Commenting on ‘noisy Totas’, a senior member of the local administrative body for Lapatagunj camp said:
It is irritating. It gives us headaches. Sometimes they continue playing the
music late into the night as well. But, what can we do except warn them at
times? We cannot call the police that Totas are disturbing us … they will not 311
listen to us anyway. For them, we all are one. And, how can one regulate it?
There is no way you can say, there, that is the person who is responsible for
it; you cannot keep targeting the entire community. If we can identify one or
two persons we might take action. But if it’s the entire community we are
against, who we know is not going to single out people, we cannot do much.
The voiceless Tota community in the existing hegemonic structure assumes a ‘loud’ character owing to the peculiarities of sound production, performance and articulation. It is quite a common practice in the Karimnagar slums for communities to play loud music, as discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. However, not all music is categorised as noise, nor all its producers regarded as uncouth.
In conversation with the members of the Tota community, I raised the issue of the
‘loud’ music:
We are surely not the only ones who play loud music. We are a very close
community. Unlike other communities in the camp we do not tell on each
other, fight with each other … we are like a big family. We like to do
everything together and that includes singing and dancing. Also, some of
the music we play is important for our children to learn the trade.
For the members of the Tota community, playing loud music is not only an act of deliberate resistance, it is a community-building exercise. Loud music as noise consolidates the position of the Tota community on two accounts: first, the collective production and consumption of the music represent a strategy to reiterate the sense of solidarity amongst the community; and second, it allows them to extend their territoriality beyond the social, cultural and moral landscape where their interactions are limited. While the loud music as noise gives the Tota community a sense of 312 solidarity, confidence and security, it challenges the authority of the dominant group by compelling them to hear the presence of the Totas, even if the dominant group wants to ignore them.
The collectivity of soundscapes from the slums, including those of the Totas, is articulated as noise by the middle classes. The dominant groups in both instances – communities who ostracise the Totas within the Karimnagar slums and the middle classes who ostracise the entire slum settlement – refuse to listen into their soundscapes and afford them acceptable sonic meanings. While the sonic production and performance of disempowered groups – in this case, Totas and slum-dwellers – allow them to have a distinct sonic presence, its articulation as noise by dominant groups only aggravates the processes of ‘othering’ through which they are further discriminated against, segregated and excluded.
Silencing, silence and unlistening
Meena is Diya’s sister-in-law. Since 2004, Diya has been living in her paternal home, along with her son, following an altercation with her husband’s family. This eventually led to a breakdown of communication between the two families and any chance of reconciliation between Diya and her husband are slim. Her parents initially supported Diya and acknowledged the mental and physical torture she had to endure in her marital home. However, with the passing of years, her presence is seen as a financial burden and a matter of social shame for the family. This leads to frequent altercations between her, her brothers and parents. Meena is married to Diya’s eldest brother, who constantly abuses Meena, emotionally and physically. Even though both Meena and Diya are sympathetic and supportive of each other’s predicament, 313 they can do little for each other. Neither of them gets any support from the family.
Both employ different sonic strategies to negotiate their disempowered position.
They both are hearers.
Diya has, over the last few years, assumed a ‘loud’ temperament. She openly criticises her parents, laments their failure to initiate reconciliatory dialogue with her husband, and bemoans the limited resources made available to her. This sonic performance usually happens in the street. In her house, she is denied such permissions. When I first tried establishing acquaintance with her, I was constantly informed that she was ‘mad’. Every time I would approach her to initiate a conversation, her neighbours – mostly women – would join the conversation, uninvited. They would talk over Diya’s conversation and offer testimonies of her life, totally ignoring her presence. She is consistently silenced. Her sonic productions and performances were denied any validity, and thereby an acceptable articulation, because of her projected madness. Even though she was heard, she was not listened into. Her loud behaviour, which openly challenged the dominant familial roles, was articulated as a sign of definite madness. She has no history of clinical insanity.
Meena, on the other hand, assumed a different sonic strategy to negotiate her position. In the initial years, she tried to engage her in-laws and her neighbours to address her abuse. Her ‘loudness’, she mentioned, would only lead to more abuse.
Eventually, she stopped having any sonic interactions with others. By maintaining a silent sonic presence, she not only refuses to acknowledge and engage with the sonic hierarchies established by her family, she does not allow them any scope to either validate or negate her sonic performances. She listens to herself, she said, and finds 314 peace in it as she knows no one else knows what she is listening into. Indeed, her family is much intrigued by her silence, often articulating it as an act of defiance; however, the instances of abuse against her have decreased as her silent demeanour is considered ‘threatening’, according to her mother-in-law.
Slum-dwellers who have sustained engagement with the middle classes, as domestic servants, drivers, guards and gardeners, have to follow a highly prescriptive code of conduct in the extended sensorial realm. Sonically, they are silenced and expected to performance silence. This is most exaggerated in the case of drivers, who share intimate space with their employers and often overhear their conversations, interactions and engagements. Men from the Karimnagar slums who work as drivers in middle-class households have a sonically dominant position in their immediate sensorial realm, yet they are disempowered in their extended sensorial realm by their inability to either engage or define sonic practices. Moreover, in this realm they have to take orders from middle-class women, which further challenge their position. In this extended sensorial realm, men have to sonically perform unlistening, which in their immediate sensorial realm women – as hearers – tend to rely on as a sonic strategy.
The discussions in previous chapters have highlighted the limited sensual, spatial, social and cultural mobility available to women. The soundscape of the Karimnagar slums abounds in its multiplicity. In their sonic interactions with men, specifically, women as hearers do not have the legitimacy to engage or influence sonic practices.
Men, enjoying the liberties they have, use abusive language, and discuss sensitive 315 matters of financial, social and moral importance openly and loudly. They rely on unlistening as a strategy to negotiate this predicament.
A young woman who shifted into the settlement after her marriage found the use of abusive language increasingly disconcerting. In her immediate sensorial realm, she was not used to men openly expressing abuse in front of women and found it very offensive. When she confronted her husband, he severely reprimanded her for listening into his private conversation. She has been in the settlement for the last eight years now, and she can both perform and pretend to perform unlistening as the situation demands:
There are times when you just stop listening, you zone out but at other times
it is convenient to pretend that you are not listening, especially when
financial matters are discussed. This way at least I can keep some tabs on
him.
Unlistening as a sonic performance is employed by different disempowered groups across the Karimnagar slums to maintain sonic balance, which men working in middle-class households have to assume as well. Even though disempowered groups
– women in the immediate sensorial realm and men in their extended sensorial realm
– perform unlistening and silence and are silenced, they attempt to subvert these social hierarchies by relying on gossiping and eavesdropping as sonic strategies.
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Gossiping
The potential of gossiping as a sonic strategy and a key part of soundscapes, to subvert dominant social and cultural positions has been illustrated through the example of fillers along the water routes in Chapter 6. It is a very volatile strategy that can have a very detrimental impact, as evidenced by the example of Aruna in the same chapter.
Within the soundscapes of the Karimnagar slums, gossip allows women as hearers to assert their sonic selves, otherwise denied to them, as most of these networks are controlled by older women. While the younger women in the Karimnagar slums are under constant scrutiny and are required to maintain a strict sensorial decorum, age allows the older women permission to forgo these restrictions. In certain instances, they tend to assume a very ‘masculine’ decorum. Bodily noises, which the younger women have to find ingenious ways to mask, are nonchalantly performed in public by older women. They abuse as obscenely and as loudly – if not more so – than the men. During the day, in the absence of the men, these older women, matriarchs, control the sonic networks. There is usually one matriarch in a community who exercises absolute control. She has an extensive network of listeners who inform and update her about the sonic performances of others. These are then articulated – either validated or denied – within the gossip networks.
In one instance, a family settled in Gandhipuri camp permitted their daughter
‘unprecedented’ freedoms, including college education and mobile phones. These freedoms implied ‘mobilities’ denied to others. The matriarch did not approve of the freedoms given to this girl, believing it ‘would only encourage other girls also to waver from the path and assume loud, uncouth practices’. This young girl was under constant sonic scrutiny. Not so surprisingly, the girl was apparently heard having 317 romantic conversations over the phone. A communal meeting was called for, the girl and her parents were summoned, her phone records were validated, and it was established that the girl was having an ‘affair’. The parents were strictly reprimanded for this digression and threatened ostracisation if they did not impose restrictions on their daughter. She had to give up her education and, obviously, no longer had access to the mobile phone.
The slum-dwellers, men and women, working in middle class households also use gossiping as an effective sonic strategy to subvert and challenge their disempowered position in the Extended sensorial realm. They do this by re-sounding the very private and intimate sensorial practices and conversations they unlisten to in the
Extended realm, in their Immediate sensorial realm. Such information finds its way into diverse sonic networks owing to the volatile, intersecting gossip networks. Even though these gossip tactics do not have the same impact as gossip within the slums, on many occasions they have managed to create tensions and rifts amongst middle class families by transferring information from one network to another. The middle class, well aware of these gossiping tactics, try to maintain the sonic distance by conversing in English, a language most slum-dwellers do not understand, in the presence of their domestic servants.
Discussion
Exploration of sonic practices, politics and negotiations in the Karimnagar slums and in slum-dwellers and the slums’ interactions with the middle classes allowed a nuanced understanding of these relations. This examination was particularly 318 important for three reasons. First, it exhibited a strong ‘sonically ordered sense of self’ of the slum dwellers. Second, it initiated a discussion on definite sonic strategies employed by dominant and disempowered groups (both within the slums and slum dwellers collectively vis-à-vis the middle classes) to reiterate and circumvent social, cultural and political hierarchies. Finally, it has opened up possibilities for undertaking further exploration of ‘echoic mimicry’ (Carter in
Erlmann ed. 2004: 46) as a framework for mapping social, cultural and political interactions between communities, groups and cultures.
Echoic mimicry
Paul Carter (2004) formulates ‘echoic mimicry’ as ‘communication in the absence of anything to say’. According to him, it operates in the ‘ambiguous auditory spaces’ where the ‘sounds’ are contextually filtered to produce meanings, and which allow for points of interaction between different cultures. Carter sees these as embodying
‘not a shared language but the desire or necessity to communicate’.
He illustrates this by highlighting an instance from the records of R.A. Baggio in The
Shoe in My Cheese. Here, Carter emphasises Baggio’s frustrations about the non-
Italian and Australian pronunciation of his Italian name. Through such ‘confusion of mishearing’, Carter claims Baggio ‘extracts … a new identity for himself, one constructed echoically and mimetically’. These appropriations, Carter rightly points out, do not imply a ‘loss of agency or diminution of identity’ (2004: 48); instead, they allow for textured and layered sonic interactions, opening up the possibility of multiple dialogues.
319
In terms of making distinctions between listening and hearing as a concept and practice, Carter affirms that ‘listening, unlike hearing, values ambiguity recognizing it as a communicational mechanism for creating new symbols and world senses that might eventually be adopted’ (2004: 48). According to Carter, the ambiguity that sets the premise for listening as a conceptual category and practice is at the core of facilitating mishearing and misunderstandings. These, Carter states, ‘can be creative: in situations of cross-cultural encounter, where power is distributed unevenly, echoic mimicry can be a means by which the relatively weak resist silencing, preserving instead a degree of historical agency’ (2004: 48). Carter’s perception that hearing is a monologue ‘from which ambiguity is removed’ (2004: 48), while listening is dialogic, perpetuating a continuation through mishearing and ambiguous traces, opens up the auditory space to listen into multiple and missed sounds.
Concluding remarks
In this thesis, drawing upon ethnographic research, I have made an argument for the manner in which sound as a cultural artefact and hearing as a sense are significant in making sense of a place (Feld 1996: 97), as well as important in allowing individuals, groups and communities to articulate a sense of self (Rice 2003: 8). The different sonic practices discussed throughout the thesis highlight the centrality of sound and soundscapes to building community, exerting identity and extending territoriality. Listening and hearing, then, emerge as significant sonic acts and performances. Yet they are not neutral acts, as discussed throughout the thesis; the permissions enabling people to listen and hear are socially, culturally and politically determined and ordained. 320
10 Epilogue
In this epilogue, I discuss the reception of and debates around the film Slumdog
Millionaire93. It seems an appropriate way to end this thesis, in which I have explored at length mainstream-marginalized, city-slum relationships. This film raises pertinent questions about slums and their representations in Indian mainstream media, and in popular and academic discursive practices. I propose ways in which the state can, in fact, draw lessons from the slum experience for broader urban planning and organization. I also put forth the idea that re-settlement and demolition of slums from city boundaries is an ill conceived long-term strategy to deal with the issue of slums.
Representing the Slums: The Case of SlumDog Millionaire
The film is based on a novel Q&A by an Indian diplomat, Vikas Swaroop. It is about the life of a young boy from the slums in Mumbai who wins the highest prize in the
Indian version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ (Who Wants to be a Corepati?).
The book, when it was first released, did not attract much attention. The film and the book follow the protagonist’s94 life until his victory on the show; the narrative is interjected by subplots, which explain how a young boy from the slum knew the answers to the questions asked on the show. The quest to find the answer to this meta question lends the narrative – at least, cinematically – its drama and climax. Each
93 http://www.slumdogmillionairemovie.co.uk/
94 In the book, the protagonist is Ram Mohammed Thomas after a popular Bollywood film of 1970’s celebrating the secular sentiment. In its cinematic adaptation, the protagonist is Muslim called Jamal Khan.
321 question95 asked on the show forms a subplot of the narrative; these subplots highlight the protagonist’s experiences as a slum dweller, which enabled him to answer the questions correctly. These experiences range from racism; sectarian violence; child abuse; the deliberate crippling of child beggars to increase their profitability; robbery and murder; and a variety of other issues topical to contemporary India. In short, it is a story, magnificently adapted by Danny Boyle, about an underdog fighting the odds to lead a life only few from that section of the society can aspire to.
Slumdog Millionaire – the film – became a topic of intense discussion after the
Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan, popularly known as Big B96, made the following comments on his blog:
If SM [Slumdog Millionaire] projects India as Third World dirty under belly
developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots,
let it be known that a murky under belly exists and thrives even in the most
developed nations. Its (sic) just that the SM [Slumdog Millionaire] idea
authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a
Westerner, gets creative Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.
The commercial escapist world of Indian Cinema had vociferously battled for
years, on the attention paid and the adulation given to the legendary Satyajit
Ray at all the prestigious Film Festivals of the West, and not a word of
appreciation for the entertaining mass oriented box office block busters that
95 While the book retains the format of fifteen questions to win the million, the film has only nine.
96 A euphemism for his size and the command he reigns in Bollywood. His is the first family of Bollywood. 322
were being churned out from Mumbai. The argument. Ray portrayed reality.
The other escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for
Cannes and Berlin and Venice. But look how rapidly all that is changing.
Retrospectives in Paris and New York. Dedicated TV channels running Hindi
cinema on prime timings. Premiers at Leicester Square, the home of all
Hollywood royalty, thronged by hundreds on the street in cold biting weather.
Affable recognition at most corners of the universe… And a dear friend from
Los Angeles wires in that Hollywood is abuzz with India and the phenomenal
talent that exists there. We’re talking cinema still97!
Following this post, the national and international media closely followed the comments, allegations, and retorts of those involved in the discussion. The UK’s
Guardian newspaper covered the story98 to which Amitabh Bachchan publicly responded99. The Guardian article suggests that the reason for Amitabh Bachchan’s outburst against Slumdog Millionaire might be personal:
There may be another reason for Bachchan's words: he was the original host of
the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a show that resurrected
his career. However, rival Bollywood star Anil Kapoor steals his thunder with a
remarkable performance as the creepy host of the game show in Slumdog100.
97 http://bigb.bigadda.com/2009/01/13/day-265/
98 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/14/amitabh-bachchan-rubbishes-slumdog-millionaire
99 http://bigb.bigadda.com/2009/01/page/8/
100http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/14/amitabh-bachchan-rubbishes-slumdog-millionaire
323
Without responding to these suggestions specifically or engaging at depth with the reasons that he thought Slumdog Millionaire was problematic, Amitabh Bachchan instead made personal comments questioning the professionalism of the two journalists involved, almost prophetically suggesting what was to follow:
The consequences of Mr Ramesh’s and Mr Dhaliwal’s professional
incontinence have ramified to such an extent that these singular articles have
spawned an epidemic in the Asian press now reaching such a feverish pitch that
I can no longer make light of their content101.
In the national and international media, heated discussions and debates about
Slumdog Millionaire being “white man’s imagined India … a poverty tour102” prevailed. The runaway success of Slumdog Millionaire at various film festivals103 only intensified focus on it.
The consistent success of Slumdog Millionaire – at the Box office and in award circuits – initiated a debate, not usually witnessed, amongst the Indian film fraternity.
Actors, directors, and critics were constantly debating104 the extent to which
Slumdog Millionaire depicts reality; the matter complicated by Danny Boyle’s
‘Western’, ‘British’ identity. Slumdog Millionaire is not the first film in the history of Bollywood – either art house or commercial – which depicts the ‘deplorable’ conditions of the slums and exaggerates the clichés in personality, profession, or intonation of slum dwellers. It is not so much about the depiction of reality but the
‘reality’ as interpreted by an outsider, a Westerner which fueled this outrage. A
101 http://bigb.bigadda.com/2009/01/page/8/
102 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-fg-india-slumdog24-2009jan24,0,1162547.story?track=rss
103 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Slumdog_Millionaire_awards_and_honours
104 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slumdog_Millionaire#Critical_reception 324 particularly enraged critic, Subhash K Jha for the Indo-Asian News Service, wrote of the film and the filmmaker:
Boyle is constantly busy whipping up a hysterical banshee of sights and sounds
in Mumbai denoting the embittered angry generation of the underprivileged
class that grows up in the slums dreaming of the good Life.
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shoots Mumbai with a gun rather than a
camera. Every frame conveys the killer instinct. Every shot ricochets across
eternity solidifying sounds and feelings that are otherwise intangible.
Yup, this is a film on a mission. It wants to exploit the Mumbai slums as a
hotbed of tantalising images conveying the splendour of squalidity. And to
think every prominent member of the cast and crew went around proclaiming
'Slumdog Millionaire' would do wonders for Mumbai's tourism industry!
Yeah, right. It does as much for the cause of Mumbai as Roland Joffe's 'The
City Of Joy' did for Kolkata. That much-vilified film at least secreted a core of
humanism under its pretentious surface. 'Slumdog...' doesn't even pretend to
care for the city that it so unabashedly cruises in search of imperialistic
tantalisation105.
The film, cinematically, true to Danny Boyle’s style, was edgy, jarring, and constantly throwing the audience in un-chartered, uncomfortable territories.
However, nowhere did I think that the film was ‘romanticizing’ the slums or
105http://in.movies.yahoo.com/news-detail/42760/Slam-Mumbai-swarming-slum-of-sleaze-sex-crime-IANS-Film- Review-Rating.html 325 venerating its ‘squalid’ situations or poverty to reach out to the Western audience.
On the contrary I found the film living up to Danny Boyle’s expectation from the film to capture the dignity of slum dwellers:
They are a huge community of very dignified and warm people … They're not
portrayed as poor and desperate people in my film106.
It was the demand of the narrative – a story which Danny Boyle adapted from an
Indian author – to set the film in the slums. This in itself was not a mere coincidence.
The slums by the virtue of their density, diversity, and dilapidation allow for multitudes of experiences, and negotiations across caste, cultures and religions which frame the narrative. Sectarian violence does form an important subplot in the film but none of the critics mention that the film essentially is about the love story of a Hindu boy and Muslim girl who come together after the riots. The protagonist’s desire to be on the show ‘Who Wants to be the Millionaire’ is not to reap the rewards but to reach out to the love of his life – a Hindu girl in the control of a gangster – who watches the show religiously. In short, Slumdog Millionaire is a classic Bollywood film, effectively employing its hyperbolic clichés, directed by a ‘Westerner’.
Politics of Representations:
Slumdog Millionaire provides an interesting opportunity to examine the politics of representation, prejudices, and presumptive notions vis-à-vis slums and slum- dwellers within the mainstream media and everyday middle-class discourse. In regards to the discussions about Slumdog Millionaire, two things stand out
106 http://in.movies.yahoo.com/news-detail/36512/I-hope-film-captures-dignity-of-slum-dwellers-Danny-Boyle.html
326 noticeably: firstly, only a handful of film critics engaged with the film for what it is, a film; and, secondly, none of the vented anger and criticism is directed against the author of the book, Vikas Swarup, who penned the original story, compelling one to question whether the issue lay with the story itself or whether the real problem was about who was telling it.
Shubhra Gupta, a prominent film critic, reviewing the film writes:
The fact that it has a director (Boyle), screenplay writer (Simon Beaufoy) and
producer (Christian Colson) owing allegiance to the West could have made this
is a bloodless, distanced copy of a fun book, but one look at ‘Slumdog
Millionaire’, and you know that its spirit and soul is flagrantly, proudly Indian :
the Empire has been finally, overwhelmingly trounced.
It’s not about poverty pornography. It’s not about a White guy showing us
touchy Brown-skins squatting by the rail-tracks. In the end, it’s just about a
film, which sweeps you up and takes you for an exhilarating ride on the wild
side107. Jai Ho108.
Nikat Kazmi, another film critic of repute, is far more vehement in calling for treating the film for what it is. With incisive clarity she sets out the manner in which the film ought to be engaged with, without imposing it on intentions which were not part of its original design or intent:
107http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Movie-Review-Slumdog-millionaire/414049/
108 Jai Ho – loosely translated as ‘hail in celebration’ – is song from the film. Rahman, the music director, won a Golden Globe award for it, a first for an Indian. http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?651544 327
FORGET the twitter about aggrieved national sentiment. For, Slumdog
Millionaire is neither poverty porn nor slum tourism. No, unlike what the desi
nationalists' blogosphere claims, it is not a case of the infamous western eye
ferreting out oriental squalor and peddling it as the exotic dirt bowl of the east.
No, Slumdog Millionaire is just a piece of riveting cinema, meant to be
savoured as a Cinderella-like fairy tale, with the edge of a thriller and the vision
of an artist. It was never meant to be a documentary on the down and out in
Dharavi109. And it isn't. … Forget the Us versus Them debate. Just go for the
pure cinema experience110.
Comparing accounts of the film, one gets the sense that the anger inherent in Mr.
Jha’s criticism – and others who have spoken in the same tonality - is not directed solely towards the cinematic capabilities or aesthetics of the film. It is not a simplistic situation about ‘US versus THEM’ vis-à-vis Indian or Western perspectives; instead it stems from a deeper discomfort to deal with the ‘them’, the
‘others’ – the poor, unwanted, slum-dwellers – by the burgeoning middle-class of
India.
Several organizations and individuals have raised concerns about varyious aspects of the film on social, political, cultural, and religious grounds. A few organizations have raised serious objections to the depiction of sectarian violence in the slums. One in particular citing a particular scene in the film stating that it was ‘disrespectful towards Lord Ram, hurting the sentiments of Hindus111’. They went as far as filing a
109 The largest slum in Asia - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/world/06/dharavi_slum/html/dharavi_slum_intro.stm
110 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/moviereview/4018046.cms
111 http://www.indianexpress.com/news/saffron-outfit-vows-to-chase-out-slumdog-millionaire/417232/
328 police complaint against the film calling for its ban. RSS112, a prominent right wing organization, went as far as denouncing A.R. Rahman, the music director and a
Muslim himself, as mediocre113. Serious allegations have been made by groups and individuals over the payment extended to the children who acted in the film suggesting that the filmmakers were exploitative and opportunistic114. Across the country, protests against the film in the form of burning Danny Boyle’s effigy and blocking cinema halls have been reported for referring to slum dwellers as
‘Slumdogs115’.
Amidst all the controversy, debate, and rhetoric the film has attracted it was interesting to note that Vikas Swarup, the author, of the book, Q&A, was conspicuously absent from these discussions. He was neither accused of presenting the ‘grim reality’ of India or ‘exploiting the reality of slums to reach out to a wider, western audience’. His biographic sketch offers the following relevant information about Q&A116:
Q&A is his first novel. Published by Doubleday/Random House (UK &
Commonwealth), Harper Collins (Canada) and Scribner (US) it has been
translated into 36 languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hindi, Marathi,
Gujarati, Punjabi, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish,
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=71dce98b-2f98-4926-b5da-c767ee50c675
112 Rashtiya Swayamseva Sangh is the non-political, cultural wing of BJP, India’s largest right wing party.
113 http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=3de75460-03cc-412c-bd07-0c99475df635
114 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/30/AR2009013003897.html
115 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/27/riots-india-slumdog-millionaire
116 http://www.vikasswarup.net/index_files/page0008.html 329
Taiwanese, Thai, and Hebrew. It was short listed for the Best First Book by the
Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and won South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke
Prize 2006 as well as the Paris Book Fair's Reader's Prize, the Prix Grand
Public, in 2007. It was voted the Most Influential Book of 2008 in Taiwan.
Harper Collins brought out the audio book, read by Kerry Shale, which won the
award for Best Audio Book of the Year 2005. The BBC produced a radio play
based on the book which won the Gold Award for Best Drama at the Sony
Radio Academy Awards 2008 and the IVCA Clarion Award 2008. The film
version of Q&A, titled ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, directed by Danny Boyle, has
taken the world by storm and won more than 50 awards including four Golden
Globes and 11 BAFTA nominations117.
It was evident that the success, which came to Vikas Swarup, is because of the interest the ‘Western’ audience expressed in it. However, the book did not receive the wrath accorded to the film. The book was received with mild reception in India following its publication in 2005. After the runaway success of the film, the book was re-released as ‘SlumDog Millionaire118’ and still with this obvious connection – though the script writer, Simon Beaufoy, made significant changes to the narrative – the book has not been banned, or Vikas Swarup hailed as a traitor. By his admission,
Vikas Swarup categorically states the he wanted his book to be an out and out thriller:
117 http://www.vikasswarup.net/index_files/page0008.html
118 http://www.amazon.com/Slumdog-Millionaire-Novel-Vikas-Swarup/dp/1439136653 330
… I'm not one of those writers who wants to spend four pages describing a
sunrise. There are so many of them in India. I'm a sucker for thrillers and I
wanted to write one. I'm much more influenced by Alastair MacLean and James
Hadley Chase. I'm no Arundhati Roy119.
Elsewhere charting out the ideas behind his novel, Swarup clarifies:
I don't want to be branded as a writer catering to Western sensitivity. This is an
Indian novel, rooted in Indian tradition, written with Indian idioms. It is an
Indian story of Indian characters in the Indian milieu. There is no karma in my
novel. There is no dharma in my novel. I wanted the perfect marriage of plot
and prose120.
This justification was enough for Vikas Swarup to escape the criticisms left for
Danny Boyle, as should be. Neither the scope nor the intent of this body of work is to critically examine the clichés, peculiarities, and prejudices about slums and slum- dwellers represented in the film or book. The discussions - formal and informal – about the film, however, allowed for a critical engagement with the vocabularies through which slums are approached and articulated in the popular practices; an essential element of this thesis.
The main issue with ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ is not the representation of slums, flawed or clichéd; had it been only a matter of representation, critics would not have spared
Vikas Swarup, the author. The aggrieved and enraged response ‘Slumdog
119 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/16/danny-boyle-india
120 http://www.vikasswarup.net/index_files/page0024.html
331
Millionaire’ has elicited is deeply rooted in the discomfort the urban middle-class has in addressing the issue of slums and slum-dwellers.
In the mainstream public discourse in India, the discussions – formal and informal – about slums abound with reiterating the stereotypes about slums and slum dwellers within the categories of ‘social and moral deprivation and decadence, dirt, crime, criminal mentality, and squalidity’. It is within this representative framework that the responses to Slumdog Millionaire need to be situated. As mentioned earlier, the subject of concern was not the representation but a) who was representing and, b) what was being represented.
The depiction of slums in this film is without guilt or justification. It does not revel in messages of moral degradation, political exploitation, and social discrimination owing to the character’s affiliation in the slums; neither do these manifests in the characters as peculiar quirks. Instead, the characters are enterprising using their
‘slumness’ to their benefit rather than disadvantage. After watching the film, P.
Chidamambaram, Finance Minister of the country until a few months ago, said that the film’s theme “ … should inspire banks to provide loans to budding entrepreneurs from slums which are humming with business ideas121.” This confident portrayal of slum-dwellers who are not embarrassed about where they belong and are not seeking for redemption for being slum dwellers is a representation which is not available in mainstream discourse.
121http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pc-praises-slumdog-says-slums-buzzing-with-biz-ideas/414836/
332
In regards to the representational politics, the constant reiteration that ‘slums’ only depict a certain reality of India whilst there is so much ‘more’ – progressive and beautiful – hints towards latent anger amongst the middle-class for their own reality not being depicted. The burgeoning, ever prospering Indian middle class is not so much aggrieved at the representation of slums, per se, but their new-found arrogance is jilted for not finding representation in a film showcasing India in International forums. Lacking vocabularies except the one of absence and alienation, the Indian middle-class discourse finds itself unable to comprehend or articulate the complex language of slums as depicted in Slumdog Millionaire.
The lessons from the slums:
In this thesis I have discussed at length the systematic and systemic violence unleashed against those who are identified as a threat to the city’s aesthetics – socially, culturally, morally, and sensorially. The poor, the homeless, and slum- dwellers broadly form this mass of ‘unwanted’ citizens. I have discussed the processes and practices through which slum-dwellers are denied judicial rights to the city, and also a social-cultural-moral framework to situate their position. In recent years, as I have evidenced, the vocabularies to further segregate, alienate, and distance slum-dwellers has acquired an essentially sensorial tonality. The regular, and often random, acts of violence – by way of demolitions, walling, and resettlement, amongst others – are justified, more often than not, in the name of the broader agenda of transforming Delhi into “a truly international city”, especially since the city is hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2010, and preparing it for its
Western visitors. 333
I conclude this epilogue by highlighting some aspects of the everyday in slums in order to think about what lessons could be learnt from slums for broader urban planning.
The everyday life in slums is a constant negotiation within limitations. Consider this
Karimnagar s, Govindpuri slums has a population of 500,000 spread over an area of
5 Kilometers with approximately 600 families living on every hectare of land. The density of population, lack of space, the specificity of the material used for construction, the ingenuity with which lack of space is negotiated accords the space a highly porous, fluid, and dynamic character.
Design is not only a matter of aesthetic deliberation or indulgence, it is the demand of everyday life; every slum dweller is a designer in their own right. Beginning from conceptualising ingenious usage of limited space to arranging (and organizing) storage facilities in domestic spaces, strategic design tactics are employed by the slum-dwellers. The demands of multi-purposing and recycling objects and spaces plays a significant role in determining design innovations. These designs are simple and strategic with an inherent capacity to upgrade (or transform) as the situation demands. The negotiation of limitations in the everyday of slums does not accord it a stale and stagnant character, instead it compels the residents to assume the role of ingenious and innovative designers. Everyday living in Govindpuri slums necessitates constant innovation and ingenuity in optimizing limited space and resources. A box doubles as a shortage unit and a divan; a chair is remodeled to be used as a staircase, when needed; a clothesline is also used as a curtain to further demarcate space, and so on. 334
The design practices in (and of) the slums contain blueprints of innovation for the future. It is projected by many (Robert Neuwrith and Mike Davis) that in the future most urban, metropolitan cities will resemble slums with their overpopulation, limitation of space, and limited infrastructural facilities. From the design culture and practices in slums important lessons can be learnt in urban planning, space utilization, and harnessing a sense of community along with affective environmental and ecologically viable everyday solutions.
In essence, instead of considering slums as an aberration to the urban fabric there is a need to not only draw significant lessons from its everyday conditions, but also to integrate slums – socially, culturally, and economically. The manner in which cities, especially of developing countries like India, are evolving means that they will, sooner or later, have to negotiate the concerns plaguing the slums. These include overcrowding, poor sanitation, limited infrastructural facilities, and so on. The intense processes of urbanization in Delhi demands a robust and steady work-force.
The slum-dwellers contribute in significant ways to the work-force that runs the machinery of the city. Rather than adopting re-settlement schemes which relocate slums on the outskirts of the city, the state might rather adopt strategies to socially, culturally and sensorially accommodate and integrate ‘slums’ within the city fabric.
Re-settlement policies only result in displacing slums from the centre of the city to its outskirts. They do not address the fundamental issues of the slums, their living conditions, or their social-cultural position. In fact, more often than not, these re- settlement colonies also lack infrastructure and access to basic facilities.
Furthermore, these settlements are often on the outskirts of the city; this results in a 335 violent severing of community connections with an established social, cultural, and economic base. The re-settled residents often do not find adequate job and work opportunities. To commute to their former jobs, can involve travel for hours, and for women this is not socially and culturally viable.
The discussions in this thesis, and specific instance of reception and reaction to
Slumdog Millionaire, show how the issues of the slums and slum dwellers is complex. It is not limited to infrastructural concerns, squalid living conditions, or encroachment. It is strongly situated within strong social-cultural-moral-sensual prejudices and biases against the residents of this space. Their presence disrupts the sanitized experience of the city the middle-classes aspire for. Slums, and slum dwellers, are an integral part of the city’s ethos and contribute to its sustenance at very low costs. It is the responsibility of the state to provide for infrastructure, basic amenities, and access to resources to them, but there is also a need to integrate them within the broader urban fabric by systematically and systemically according them the status of legal, respectable citizens, which, in turn, assures them a right to the city
– socially, culturally, morally, and sensually.
336
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