Day 351: This Unquiet Land

That evening in July 1999, the assault on Tiger Hill began from a Bofors gun position; individual guns had been ranged so as to directly fire at the three flanks of the mountain. An intricate fire plan prepared by the 41 Field Regiment provided covering fire to the soldiers of 8 Sikh and 18 Grenadiers who were stealthily moving up escarpments and sheer cliffs from three different directions. Usually, six guns were deployed to provide covering fire to every infantry unit. In Kargil this was increased to eighteen guns. Kargil has often been called a classic gunner’s war and the Bofors gun was its mainstay. The gun could fire three rounds in twelve seconds, and it had a range of thirty kilometres in high altitude terrain; 250 of them were deployed at the front line and 250,000 rounds were fired during the fifty-day war. During the Tiger Hill operation alone, 9,000 shells were used. The artillery points had become both the first tier of attack and defence in the war. Field gun positions were now veritable forward posts, inviting attack on themselves as soon as the Bofors gun fired the first round; 80 per cent of the casualties on both sides were from mortar fire.

Writing in Artillery: The Battle Winning Arm about the peak period of the war, when each artillery battery fired one round per minute for seventeen days continuously, senior military analyst Major General Jagjit Singh (who started his career in the Royal Indian Navy and saw anti-submarine action during World War II) said, ‘Such high rates of fire over long periods had not been witnessed anywhere since World War II… The men at the guns had blisters on their hands from carrying and loading shells and cartridges. Very few of them got more than a couple of hours of sleep in every 24-hour cycle.’

With the advantage of height, Pakistani observation posts had a clear line of vision on Indian gun points. So assault positions had to be shifted as soon as they became vulnerable to counter-attack. As they moved, so would we, jumping on to the back of a Jonga jeep or just darting across the smoke-saturated road, unsure of where it might be safe to halt even for a second, trying all the while to keep pace with the magnitude of what was unravelling before our camera’s gaze.

Two hours into what would end up being a thirteen-hour battle, an enemy artillery shell landed close to a 122 multi-barrelled ‘Grad’ rocket launcher right outside the headquarters of the 56 Mountain Brigade, which had just taken over the sector. With forty rockets stacked upon the back of a single carrier, the Grad was a fire-breathing dragon that spat flames into the sky. In Russian, its name meant ‘hailstorm’, a fitting appellation, as it hailed destruction down upon the intruders.

Suddenly an enemy shell landed within spitting distance of the launcher. It was time to move to a new vantage point; the commander of the Grad immediately halted the operation so that the MBRL could be shifted. Four soldiers had already been killed in a counter-attack on a gun position earlier and he wasn’t taking any chances. Over the next twenty minutes the battle escalated. The town of Drass was carpet-bombed by Pakistan. A curtain of grey closed over the highway as the final acts of the fight to take back Tiger Hill began.

‘Run, Run, Run, Now, Now, Now, Run,’ shouted out an anxious voice behind us, and so we did, our bodies bent over, our hands forming a useless protective cover over our heads, our camera shaking and jerky, but still switched on and filming, trying to get some of this across to the news centre, our hearts pumping with adrenalin—it offered a temporary antidote against paralysing fear. At this point in the battle I got separated from Ajmal Jami, my cameraman. As Pakistani shells began to pound the area right around the rocket launcher, I took shelter behind a broken wall, and frantically worked the satellite phone. Suddenly, a long arm lunged out and pulled me back, unfailingly polite even in that life and death moment. ‘Ma’am, you’re standing next to an ammunition dump,’ said the soldier. ‘If a shell hits the target, this place will explode and you will be finished.’ He waved me towards the shelter of his own underground bunker.

‘I need to call my office in Delhi,’ I insisted, ‘and I have lost my cameraman, I can’t go down leaving him out here.’

He offered to find Jami for me and urged me to hunker down immediately before I got injured in the shelling. I still had the call to make but there was no way the satellite phone would pick up any signal underground. I sat with my legs inside the dugout and the rest of me leaning out of it, holding the phone outwards. ‘I can’t talk long; I’m calling from a bunker,’ I said, ‘just tell everyone, the assault on Tiger Hill has begun.’ We would spend the next few hours here, trying to make sense of the latest war between India and Pakistan.
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‘I sincerely hope that they (relations between Indian and Pakistan) will be friendly and cordial. We have a great deal to do…and think that we can be of use to each other and the world.’

In August 1947, Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, declared that Partition had resolved the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims and India and Pakistan could now live in harmony. Mahatma Gandhi echoed the sentiment. Both ‘fathers’ of their respective nations turned out to be grievously wrong.

The partition of India was a bloody and cataclysmic upheaval and the largest forced mass migration of people in the world. Between 1 and 2 million people were killed and an estimated 17 million were uprooted from their homes. The violent rupture proved impossible to heal.

In both countries, many families put locks on their doors but left most of their possessions inside as if they were going on a brief journey from which they would be coming back home very soon. My own family was among them. My grandfather, Krishan Gopal Dutt, a freedom fighter who went on to become Punjab’s finance minister in independent India, used to live in a palatial kothi called Pillar Palace in Sialkot, famous for its manufacture of sporting goods. My father was a child of eight when the mob violence spread like a forest fire across both sides of the Punjab province. My grandfather reached out to his friend Chet Ram, the then governor of Jammu, for help in crossing over to the newly demarcated territory of India. A truck with armed guards was sent into Sialkot on the pretext that the governor had to retrieve money from the Imperial Bank (which later became the State Bank of India) in Sialkot. On this truck, my grandfather, dressed only in his dhoti-kurta, left with his family. When he arrived in Delhi, he was penniless and homeless like millions of other refugees.

Decades later, as a college student, I travelled with my father to our ancestral home in Pakistan; its fifty rooms were too expensive to maintain for the family that now owned it—they occupied only one of its residential wings. We had arrived at the house without warning the new owners. Yet, although we were complete strangers, they welcomed us without any questions or suspicions—and having heard our story—handed over the keys of the kothi to us. As we wandered through empty rooms, past bare walls—‘the piano was in this corner, your grandmother slept here, that’s the fountain made from marble’—I understood for the first time, the anguish that my father, and millions like him, had felt at being displaced in a manner that was so violent, unforgiving and permanent. It was one of only two times I’d seen my father cry (the other time was when his wife died) and it came home to me, in that instant, standing in the abandoned old house in Sialkot, just how deep a wound Partition had carved into the psyche of both countries.

~~This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines -by- Barkha Dutt

Day 344: Japan: A Reinterpretation

“In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” Oscar Wilde wrote in 1889. “There is no such country, there are no such people.”

Japan had opened to the West just thirty years before Wilde made this observation. Europe was awash in what the French call japonisme. Degas, Manet, Whistler, Pissarro—they were all fascinated by the imagery of Japanese tradition. In 1887 van Gogh decorated Le Père Tanguy with prints of Mount Fuji and geisha in elaborate kimono. Gauguin made gouaches on paper cut to the shape of Japanese fans. This infatuation permeated society. It was reflected on teapots and vases, in the fabric of women’s dresses, and in the way people arranged flowers.

But what did japonisme have to do with Japan as it was? The Japan of the 1880s was erecting factories and assembling steamships, conscripting an army and preparing a parliament. There were universities, offices, department stores, banks. As Wilde elaborated, “The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them.”

Wilde was ahead of his time. We now have a word, albeit a contentious one, for the phenomenon he touched upon in “The Decay of Lying.” We call it Orientalism. Orientalism meant “the eternal East.” In his account of Japan Wilde left out only the quotation marks, for he was writing about the simple, serene, perfume-scented “Japan” of the Orientalist’s imaginings.

Orientalism was made of received notions and images of the people, cultures, and societies that stretch from the eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific. There was no dynamism or movement in the Oriental society. The Orient was fixed in immutable patterns, discernible through the ages and eternally repeated, like the mosaics in Middle Eastern mosques. It did not, in a word, progress. Deprived of the Enlightenment, the East displayed no rational thought, no logic or science. The Oriental merely existed, a creature ruled by fate, timeless tradition, and an ever-present touch of sorrow. The Oriental was “exotic” rather than ordinary, “inscrutable” rather than comprehensible, dusky rather than light. The Orient was the “other” of the West, and the twain would never meet.

Japan, farthest east from the metropolitan capitals and least known among explorers, became the object of extreme Orientalist fantasies as soon as Europeans arrived, in 1542. The first Westerners to record their impressions were missionaries, who took Japan and the Japanese to be a place and a people “beyond imagining,” as an Italian Jesuit put it, “a world the reverse of Europe.” Europeans were tall, the Japanese were short. Churches were high, temples low. European women whitened their teeth, Japanese women blackened theirs. Japan was an antipodean universe, ever yielding, ever prostrate. “The people are incredibly resigned to their sufferings and hardships,” the Jesuit wrote on another occasion, “yet they live quietly and contentedly in their misery and poverty.” Francis Xavier, who arrived in 1549, asked why the Japanese did not write “in our way”—from left to right, across. His Japanese guide replied with a question that would have done Francis some good had he troubled with its implications: Why did Europeans not write in the Japanese way, from right to left, down?

The observations of sixteenth-century Europeans were not pure invention. By tradition Japanese women did blacken their teeth. An air of resignation is as evident among the Japanese today as it must have been then. And Japanese locks—a peculiar obsession among these first visitors, noted again and again—are still opened by turning the key to the left, not (as in the West) to the right. But what makes these observations faintly ridiculous? Why did they produce the enduring idea of a place populated by mysterious gnomes? From our distant point of view it was a simple failure of perspective. The early travelers made no connections: That is, the Japanese were not permitted, if that is the word, their own history, a past by which their great and small differences could have been explained.

Orientalism grew from empire. One of its features was the position of the observer to the observed: The one was always superior to the other. As Edward Said stresses in Orientalism, intellectual conventions reflected relationships based on power and material benefit. So Orientalism came into full flower in Britain and France, the great empire builders of the nineteenth century. Japan was never formally a part of anyone’s empire, but it was hardly free of the Orientalism associated with imperial possessions. Its relations with Europe were based on the same material interests and were marked by the same presumed superiority on the part of Europeans.

Today, of course, we call someone from India, Indonesia, Taiwan, or Japan an Asian rather than an Oriental. Our term is an attempt, at least, to acknowledge human complexity and diversity—and equality. To call someone an Oriental would give at least mild offense, because it would recall relations that no longer exist—at least not on maps. But this is not to say that the habits of Orientalism are not still with us, as any Asian can point out. Our Orientalism is remarkable only for its fidelity to the ideas of centuries past: Japanese society is “vertical,” while in the West social relations are “horizontal”; Westerners like competition, the Japanese compromise. When an earthquake struck Kobe in 1995 an American correspondent described the city as “an antipodean New York with more sushi.” Asians stoically accept natural calamities as part of the timeless order of things, he explained, so that “the Japanese of Kobe are ideal disaster victims.”

There was one peculiar aspect of Wilde’s idea of Orientalism. He observed that the image of Japan abroad in the last century was partly a concoction of the Japanese themselves. Wilde called the Japanese “the deliberate self-conscious creation” of artists such as Hokusai, whose woodblock prints were much the fashion at the height of Europe’s japonisme. This was exceptionally astute. We could easily make the same assertion about many of Japan’s leaders and thinkers throughout history. “Japan” has long been an act of the imagination among the Japanese, too, and to call some Japanese Orientalists is to stretch the term but slightly.

~~Japan: A Reinterpretation -by- Patrick Smith

Day 145: Book Excerpt: Forgotten Wars

On 5 November 1945 three ‘smart young men, unbadged, but with a sense of command’, were ushered into a military court in the great Moghul Red Fort of Delhi. The British may have thought that the date of the trial, the 340th anniversary of the gunpowder plot against the English Parliament, was appropriate. The venue, however, was not. Among Indians, the Red Fort still echoed with memories of the previous British show-trial staged there, that of the last Moghul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, after the rebellion of 1857–8. It was earth from the tomb of Bahadur Shah, who had died in exile in Rangoon, that Bose’s men had intended to convey in a silver casket on their ill-fated march from Burma to India in 1944.
The arguments between the prosecution and defence were hurled back and forth for days. The Indian public hung on every word. Court transcripts were published daily. One proclaimed: ‘This trial is far more sensational than the trial of Jesus Christ and many other trials around the world.’ Vallabhbhai Patel, general secretary of the Congress, got in a shrewder blow. The man who should really be on trial, he asserted, was Lord Linlithgow, the former viceroy, for sentencing 3 million Bengalis to death by famine in 1943. Points of fact arose: were the INA deserters actually executed and, if so, by whom? The British judge advocate general belittled the INA as a Japanese quisling army. The men who had joined it were either traitors or they were forced by bad treatment into its ranks. In rebuttal, the defence team argued that the INA was Indian-officered and led. Were the British quislings to the Americans simply because General Eisenhower was supreme commander in Europe? The accused exculpated their personal actions. Shahnawaz Khan said that he had sacrificed ‘my life, my home, my family and its traditions’ for his country. Dhillon is supposed to have said that the Japanese were ‘leaders of the Buddhist religion’ which was born in India. Indians should therefore work with the Japanese.
The most telling arguments, though, were those that brought international law into the scales. The British, the defence argued, had abandoned their status as a government in Malaya and Burma. Four years before in Singapore, as the garrison surrendered, Colonel Hunt had told captured Indian troops that they should ‘obey the orders of the Japanese in the way that you obeyed the British government. Otherwise you will be punished.’ Other evidence seemed to suggest that the Singapore commander, General Percival, had endorsed this position. So, said the accused, P. K. Sehgal: ‘In return for the loyalty of the Indians, the British representative handed them over to the Japanese like a flock of sheep. Thereby the British had cut off all our bonds of allegiance to the British crown.’ Buoyed up by the public reaction to this claim, the defence went on to argue that Bose’s Azad Hind government was an independent administration created by war. It controlled its own territories, even if they were only the sparsely populated Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It had an effective and autonomous army, and its government had been recognized by, among others, the government of Eire. The Azad Hind government enjoyed exactly the same status as the United States of America after the declaration of independence in 1776. The fact that Bose had failed was neither here nor there. The INA soldiers were officers of an independent army. The floggings and executions they administered in Burma and Malaya were perfectly compatible with the British Army Act of 1911.
What was striking about this line of argument was that it had been put together not solely by the three determined Congressmen among the defence lawyers, Nehru, Bhulabhai Desai and Asaf Ali, but by several hoary old Indian liberals who had been decorated by the British government and were widely regarded as loyalists by both British and Indians. If such men were arguing that the independent Indian nation already existed, how could it be otherwise? The three young officers were ultimately convicted, but only of the lesser charge of rebellion against the king-emperor. The sentences passed were never imposed. Wavell later acknowledged that the first trials should have been of men who could actually be convicted of brutality or murder. The three were later released from jail and given dishonourable discharges from the army. But the British Raj had already suffered a lethal blow. Its legitimacy, long questioned, was now seeping away. Even Ajit Rudra, a senior Indian officer who had once believed passionately that the INA had betrayed their loyalty to the king-emperor, had second thoughts. If the British had willingly released the Indian troops from their allegiance, how could they be classed as traitors?
The effect on soldiers and civilians up and down the crescent was electrifying. As the debate over the INA raged on, hundreds of thousands of Indian troops remained in Southeast Asia under British command. By far the majority were scattered over a demoralized and devastated Burma, suspicious of the BNA and doubting the intentions of the British. Nehru and other Congress politicians had already warned Auchinleck, the army’s commander-in-chief, that it would be impossible to use Indian troops to put down nationalist rebellions in fraternal countries. This hamstrung Dorman-Smith in his attempt to bring the BNA to heel over the next nine months. As Wavell reminded the cabinet on 17 October: ‘SEAC depends almost entirely on [the] loyalty and discipline of Indian troops’. Yet Attlee brushed aside his objections to the despatch of fresh levies of men from India in the face of new tasks confronting the British. It caused new difficulties as the British tried to rebuild their rule in Malaya. Indian troops were also in French Indo-China, attempting to reassert French authority in the face of communist and nationalist rebellions. And such was the drain on manpower that Britain had to risk sending 5 Indian Division from Malaya to Indonesia, where they would fight alongside British troops against the Indonesian nationalists in what was to be the bloodiest of the first wars of peace.

~~Forgotten Wars -by- Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

Day 141: Book Excerpt: From The Ruins Of Empire

For many Chinese in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, India was the prototypical ‘lost’ country, one whose internal weakness, exploited by foreign invaders, had forced it into a state of subjugation that was morally and psychologically shameful, as well as politically and economically catastrophic. For ordinary Chinese, there were visible symbols of this Indian self-subjection in their own midst: Parsi businessmen from Bombay who acted as middlemen in the British opium trade with China; Indian soldiers who helped the British quell the Boxer Rising; and Sikh policemen in treaty ports like Shanghai, whom their British masters periodically unleashed on Chinese crowds. In 1904, a popular Tokyo-based Chinese journal Jiangsu published a short story describing a dreamlike journey into the future by a feckless Chinese literatus named Huang Shibiao (literally, ‘Representative of Yellow Elites’) and a mythical old man. Walking down the streets of Shanghai, they see a group of marching people led by a white man.

Shibiao looked closely at these people, and they all had faces black as coal. They were wearing a piece of red cloth around their heads like a tall hat; around their waists, they wore a belt holding wood clubs. Shibiao asked the old man: are these Indians? The old man said, yes, the English use them as police … Shibiao asked, why do they not use an Indian as the chief of police? The old man answered: who ever heard of that! Indians are people of a lost country; they are no more than slaves.

Later in this dreamlike sequence, Shibiao sees a yellow-skinned man in a red Sikh-style turban; he turns out to be Chinese. The dream then quickly turns into a nightmare as Shibiao notices that everyone on the streets is wearing red turbans and that English is being taught in schools from textbooks designed by Christian missionaries. The story ends with Shibiao feeling profoundly disturbed by this vision of China subjected to India’s fate.
India, conquered and then mentally colonized, was also a cautionary tale for al-Afghani. But from the perspective of China, where despite its weaknesses a political-moral order based on Confucianism had endured, India seemed dangerously out of touch with its own cultural heritage. Indian philosophy and literature – which only Brahmans in possession of Sanskrit could read – had been a closed book to a majority of Indians; it was the European discovery, and translation into English and German, of Indian texts that introduced a new Western-educated generation of Indian intellectuals to their cultural heritage.
As the Chinese saw it, foreigners had ruled the country continuously since the Mughals established their empire in the sixteenth century; there was no native ruling class capable of unifying the country. The most progressive elements seemed to be members of the Hindu castes that had faithfully served the imperial Muslim court and then turned into officials of the British as the latter expanded their administrative structures across the subcontinent.
Rabindranath Tagore’s family, connected to the British East India Company right from the settling of Calcutta in 1690, was a prominent beneficiary of the British economic and cultural reshaping of India. His grandfather was the first big local businessman of British India, and socialized with Queen Victoria and other notables on his trips to Europe; his elder brother was the first Indian to be admitted by the British into the Indian Civil Service (ICS).
Born in 1861, four years after the Indian Mutiny and the establishment of new Western-style universities in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, Tagore was part of a new Indian intelligentsia – one that was exposed to a range of Western thought and was also influenced by the ‘social reform’ movements initiated by such men as Ram Mohun Roy (1774 – 1833), often called the ‘father of modern India’. Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha, a reformist society aimed at purging Hinduism of such evils as widow-burning and bringing it closer to a monotheistic religion like Christianity. Tagore’s father, Debendranath, adopted and then elaborated Roy’s syncretism in the organization Brahmo Samaj.
Just as many of China’s modern thinkers emerged from the regions near Canton and Shanghai, the parts of the country most exposed to the West, so the Bengalis of India’s eastern coast came to be natural leaders of what was later called the ‘Indian Renaissance’. Tagore himself grew up in a culturally confident and creative family, and was exposed early to European society and culture. This meant that he never partook of the strident anti-Westernism that began to overwhelm many of his Bengali compatriots in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Writing as late as 1921, when the tide of Indian nationalism was rising fast, he protested that ‘if, in the spirit of national vainglory, we shout from our house-tops that the West has produced nothing that has an infinite value for man, then we only create a serious cause of doubt about the worth of any product in the Eastern mind.’ He would later develop serious differences with Gandhi over what he saw as the xenophobic aspect of the anti-colonial movement. At the same time, Tagore could never be part of ‘Young Bengal’, a group of Western-educated Bengalis who sought to escape Asia and join Europe just as fervently as the Ottoman Tanzimatists and the Meiji intellectuals in Japan had. Committed to a larger vision of the divine in man, and the essential unity of mankind, Tagore became in fact one of the clearest observers and strongest critics of India’s Europeanization.

~~From The Ruins Of Empire -by- Pankaj Mishra

Day 47 : Book Excerpt : The Silk Road In World History

From the time Eurasians started using polished stone tools to plant and harvest crops and to keep domesticated animals, they began to split into two distinct societies divided by the Tianshan, Altai, and Caucasus mountain ranges. To the fertile south, people became farmers. But on the Eurasian steppe, people continued to herd livestock such as cattle, sheep, and horses. Their herds fed in the cool mountains in summer, where the grass was lush, and were shepherded in winter to warmer valleys and plains. Each group of nomads grazed its animals according to a fixed annual pattern. However, climate changes and political conflicts with other nomads or with agricultural societies to the south often forced nomads out of their normal rounds. The movements of nomadic populations and their livestock continually threatened the settled lives of farmers, whose crops could be quickly destroyed by herds. Sometimes these displaced people and their herds moved westward in search of more fertile grasslands in western Asia and eastern Europe.

Some time around 600 BCE, horseback riding had begun to spread on the Eurasian steppe, and by the 400s BCE, nomads on the north border of the agricultural zone had learned to combine horsemanship with archery to become masters of the horse as a military machine. It is about this time, when these cavalries emerged, that our story of organized trade and communication along the steppe thoroughfares begins, for it was nomads on the Central Asian steppe who brought West and East together.

In the fifth century bce, seven agricultural states in what is now eastern China were fi ghting each other for supremacy. In addition to fighting with each other, three northern states, the Qin, Zhao, and Yan, also had to cope with frequent incursions of nomadic cavalry. Nomads from the steppe raided villages and towns, looting millet and wheat, the major grains of north China, and silks, which were common in China but considered rare and precious among nomads on the western steppe. Sericulture, the process of raising silk worms and extracting silk yarn, had appeared in China in the third millennium bce; Zhou Dynasty folk songs of the early first millennium bce frequently refer to silk weaving and textiles.

The mounted archers of the steppe had the advantage of speed and surprise. In an effort to defend themselves, the three northern states built walls along the mountain ranges to divide the agricultural and pastoral zones. Realizing the advantage of the nomads’ tactics and horseman-ship, the state of Zhao, under King Wuling, reformed its army in the fourth century bce. His troops began to master the bow and arrow and began to dress in trousers and tight-sleeved robes as the nomads did. The members of his court heaped criticism on these reforms, since they considered the nomads “barbarians” and unworthy of any emulation.
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Nevertheless, the Zhao state’s adoption of its enemies’ military practices continued and improved its defenses.  Once the superiority of nomadic tactics and weaponry to the traditional horse and chariots and infantry was demonstrated, other northern Chinese states followed Zhao’s example.

Such reforms increased the need for horses. The agricultural societies did not have the knowledge or the pasture to produce good horses, especially military mounts. Only the vast grassland could breed large numbers of fast, hardy horses with great endurance. Obtaining such horses was not easy. During the third century bce, the Yuezhi, who lived in a region relatively near China, northwest of its western borders, between the northern foothills of the eastern end of the Tianshan Mountains and the Turfan Depression, had emerged as a powerful confederacy on the steppe. They maintained a friendly trading relationship with agricultural China. The minister and economist Guanzi (?–645 bce) in his treatise on the economics of the Qi state argued that jade supplied by the Yuezhi should be the most highly valued currency of the state. “Our ancestor kings attributed the highest value to jade, as it came from a long distance. Gold is the second, and copper currency is the third.”

~~The Silk Road In World History -by- Xinru Liu

Day 24

In India, the turn of the century has been marked by a violent expansion of the urban frontier, a making way and making space for the new Indian middle classes, through the smashing of the homes and livelihoods of the urban poor. Such forms of violent urbanization are evident in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. This is also the case in Kolkata. Here, the long-standing Left Front government, led by the Marxist wing of the Communist Party of India, has sought to aggressively remake the city as a “world-class” urban environment. Such urban development has followed the predictable formula of elite enclaves of residence and leisure, economic zones to attract mobile capital, and civic campaigns to insure beauty and order in the city. In the Indian context at least, Kolkata belies any argument about Leftist exceptionalism. Neoliberalism has been as much at home in this Marxist-ruled region as it has been elsewhere in the country.

Yet, it is also in Kolkata that the ambitious project of making the world-class Indian city has been repeatedly blocked. Faced with fierce peasant uprisings and electoral challenges by opposition parties, the Left Front’s efforts to claim land and space for urban and industrial development have been stymied. Such a blockade calls into question the primary instruments of state power: eminent domain, zoning strategies, geobribes. But the blockade is also a lived experience, a part of the texture of everyday urban life in Kolkata, where infrastructures of circulation – roads, highways, trains, buses – are constantly subject to demonstrations, marches, shutdowns, and curfews. The imagined dynamism of the world-class city, a space inserted into global circulations of capital, thus comes to be “gheraoed,” or “encircled,” by protest. The world-class city is made to stand still.

In this essay, I examine these practices of protest and also demonstrate how they ultimately embolden rather than erode the hegemonic icon of the world-class city. I am interested in the making of consent to the world-class city because I think it is important to understand this icon as more than a fetish, as more than a commodity-on-display or a commodity-in-circulation. Instead, following Walter Benjamin, I conceptualize the world-class city as a phantasmagoria, the dream world of postcolonial development. Yet, this phantasmagoria is also a “dialectical image,” containing within it the radical potential of disenchantment and critique. In particular, I am interested in how the blockade of the Indian world-class city conjures up what Benjamin (1935: 10) titled “the law of dialectics at a standstill.” As Robinson (2004:715) has noted, the methodology of a “dialectics at a standstill” makes possible an understanding of the phantasmagoria (of urban life) as “as a site which potentially exposes the range of alternative future and past possibilities for organizing social life.” It is in this spirit that I turn to the discourses and practices that constitute the Indian world-class city and pay careful attention to its blockade.
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The urban question has not featured prominently in the plans that have guided the many decades of development in postcolonial India. It is the liberalization of the Indian economy, enthusiastically adopted by the Indian state, in the 1990s, that cast attention on India’s cities. A bold new national urban strategy, the National Urban Renewal Mission, launched in 2005 and named to pay homage to India’s first postcolonial modernizer, Jawaharlal Nehru, makes the case for investments in urban infrastructure. Its founding documents predict a massive increase in India’s urban population – from 28 percent in 2001 to 40 percent in 2021. It also yokes India’s economic future to this urban sector, stating that “by the year 2011, urban areas would contribute about 65% of gross domestic product.” These predictions are repeated in a recent report on Indian urbanization issued by McKinsey & Company. The report claims that between 2008 and 2030, “urban India will drive a near fourfold increase in average national income” and “unlock many new growth markets,” from infrastructure to health care (McKinsey & Company 2010: 17).

~~[ESSAY] The Blockade of the World-Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism -by- Ananya Roy
from the book "WORLDING CITIES- ASIAN EXPERIMENTS AND THE ART OF BEING GLOBAL"