Education In Confined Spaces
By Priyanka Dass Saharia
15 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org
As a student I always felt that out of the few basic things that Delhi University lacked was space, physical space. It struck me the most during my maiden visit to the campus of IIT in Guwahati. A sprawling university area cocooned in the valley of Brahmaputra, with the blue river meandering between the many small hills dotting the landscape, ultimately mushrooming into tiny eco-ponds in campus area. These water bodies are a reservoir of conserved species of flora and fauna. One could easily guesstimate how huge the area was that possession of a bicycle was crucial for even a dinner meal. Somehow, the physical expanse of the space and the surrounding natural environment struck me to be conducive for the overall living of the students in this part of the world. Maybe it was related to my three years of experience at St Stephen’s College, where a nominal space, preserved in battles fought with the municipality and university officers, seem naturally maintained for the sheer simplicity of being the same since ages gone by.
The physical space of a university added a huge dimension to the overall life of a student. The unfettered freedom to explore shaped one’ sensibilities and broadened one’s curiosity; for the sheer spirit of the soul to learn more, know more was enhanced by the knowledge that one could if one wished to. The element of choice gave way to the development of one’s inclinations to different things. I often remember the many evenings we spent at the cafeteria in the college listening to friends reciting Ghalib or negotiating over a new mandate from the administration and would often take a small retreat to the SCR lawns with our Styrofoam coffee cups for a longer session. I understood and started appreciating the importance of physical space in the life of a student.
The northern Ridge bordering the university area stands ignored and overlooked in the gleaming face of ‘world class’ capitalism, the Delhi Metro being its symbolic edifice. This ridge was known for its natural vegetation and wilderness in the 1930s when the university area was symbolic of green patches of precinct beauty. This ridge, which fast became a lovers den, is the northern extension of the Aravalli Range, also home to variety of wild birds, native grass species and medicinal plants. I remember my incredulity one afternoon when my friend from the History department announced that she was going for a nature walk behind the college to the ridge with a bunch of students and a professor who would be the guide. That was the beginning of my enlightened appreciation of the anonymous space that resided behind my college.
It’s interesting how the change of public spaces has not only changed the face of cityscape but also enabled new forms of civility. As a woman, I am fully aware and thankful for the egalitarian experience of travelling that the Delhi Metro has gifted me with but what is equally interesting is how the safety of women travellers was not a part of the agenda of the DMRC in its conception of the project in the very first place. This is just another beneficial unintended outcome of a motivated project aimed at engineering public spaces to fit the ‘world class’ aspirations of a ruling establishment. Feeder buses have tried their best to gentrify the space and substitute the local rickshaw pullers while there was much encouraged and lobbied sanctioning of fast food franchisees to try and put an end to the street food hawkers and vendors who would remain a blemished spot in the glossy picture that these aspirations of ‘world classiness’ had seen.
The fast ghettoization of spaces is just a side effect to the rising rents of resident spaces and fast fuelling desires of shaping this area into a sleeker version. The sharp contrast stands for all to see when a colony of low income dwellers, Chandrawal, bordering what we know as the Bungalow Road, was shrouded into anonymity by the mushrooming outlets of fast food brands. Today, we see this phenomenon in parallel to the construction of a Starbucks outlet, right in the middle of the old traditional market of textile and hardware of Kamla Nagar. The “Bourgeoisie Environmentalism” (Bhaviskar) that is fast eating into arguments of cleansing jhuggi bastis to improve environmental standards of the concerned area is an argument to be taken with a pinch of salt. Kathputli Colony was ‘cleansed’, over 3000 homes flattened, for this exact reason but it also entails a larger often untold part of the story where the DRMC in partnership with a private firm (Raheja Enterprise) sanctioned the area to the builders to build multi-storeyed flats, which would be auctioned at market prices and would never see the rehabilitation of the displaced and the homeless of the traditional puppet artists of the area as an additional baggage. So it’s ironic to see how these strong advocates of environment don’t despise commercialisation of the space in this form. This side of things raises a pertinent question – Is space solely a financial commodity, ensured for those who can pay and from those who can sell? “Space, which was a four dimensional unity of light, trees, air, water, earth and dwellings and fellow beings, has been shrunk to a singular metric of money” in Aamita Bhaviskar’s words and what is worse is how government policies don’t only facilitate it but ensure it. A new enslavement of public space is evident from these practices, where space is conjured up as a saleable commodity, measured along the axis of ownership and value, a value which only adheres to monetary terms.
On a different note, the inhabitants of these small and anonymous colonies at the hinterland add to the large pool of informal labour which subsidies the living of middle class and the elite sections of the heartland so perhaps with the new invasive practices of refashioning the socio-spatial geography of the city to suit a certain purpose, a certain motive, a certain vision, we need to question that very vision of its representation. The exclusionary discourse that is adopted often garbed in the illusive garment of ‘development’ needs to unearth for its deeper hidden agendas of a motivated section of people, invading over the rights of the politically vulnerable ones with a measure of impunity shrouded in paternalistic patterns in a boiling politics of the ‘civilised’.
Today the one private space in the university (Sociology department) is the small enclave behind the academic block where students often go for a bit of sunshine in the winters. Summer evenings see students huddled over an intense conversation or a short game of ball. It is not a wonder that often people feel a sense of respire when they come to this part of the city, which sadly is fast changing to conform to the rest of its counterparts. The tussles fought over parking space, construction of malls and residential complexes in the area tell a telling tale of dilemma of those caught between the thrill and tensions of a fast changing landscape fuelled by an equally riveting/revolting economic story. Several students like me feel trapped in the area now, often taking shelter in the library during the work hours and running back home to the cramped student ghetto that Vijaynagar is.
The section of the city population that feels the brunt of this urban exclusion is undeniably the poor on whose backs, monumental infrastructure has been built. As a student you only have to take a cursory look at the flyover construction connecting NH 1to Gopalpur behind the Majnu ka Tilla on the banks of a dried up, remnant of what used to be a part of Yamuna and is now a sewage disposal bin to understand the gravity of the danger that this invasive practice of gentrification and urbanisation poses to (not only) physical space but to intangible sensibilities of an individual who has living in the city to see the changes unravel.
Planning is a discourse, not only for its exterior pervasiveness but for its implicit function of institutionalising a systematic exclusion by its very processes and theory. Delhi’s planning has been always reflective of an old ethos of imperial power that the colonisers had left behind in their popular rhetoric of the architecture of Lutyens. Lutyens believed that grafting of the West was essential in completion of the picture of an aesthetically and architecturally rich modern India and therein lays the roots of the discourse which has been adopted by the post independent builders and planners of the city. In spite of the drafting of the DIT (Delhi Improvement Trust) in 1937 under Hume’s recommendation, the British remained reluctant to shell out money for restructuring old patterns to accommodate the people who were homeless due to massive decongestion drives. The pattern is reminiscent of the contemporary times when DRC has been overlooking the problem of rehabilitation of many sections of immigrants like the Chin refugees (Vikaspuri) or the Afghan Community (Lajpat/Mherauli). Stark clear is the fact that the rhetoric of development has always been domineered by the motives of the richer class who can appropriate profits and when one refers to the colonial hangover that is a popular disease of Indians, even today, nothing is more exemplary than the discriminatory attitude of the government towards the poorer and vulnerable sections of the city and their rights of life and living.
The spatial segregation of the cityscape in Delhi is symbolic of the state’s failure to handle the issue with a political will and deeper understanding of the complex realities and precipitating concerns of everyday lives of the poor ‘Delhi-wala’. The hegemonic imposition of a blueprint that is soaked in technocratic and capitalist aspirations unleashed by the forces of a neoliberal idoelogy is doom for failure into an unplanned squalor.
References:
1. Bhaviskar Amita, 2010 “Urban Exclusions” ‘Finding loss and renewal in the megacity Delhi’ Penguin Viking, 2010
2. Batra Lalit, 2010 “Out of sight, out of mind: Slum dwellers in ‘World Class’ Delhi” ‘Finding loss and renewal in the megacity Delhi’ Penguin Viking, 2010
3. Pieterse, J.N. 2001. Development Theory: Deconstructions/ Reconstructions. New Delhi: Vistaar Publications.
4. Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Priyanka Dass Saharia, Sociology, Delhi School of Economics
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