Session 180: HistoriCities: Other Histories of South Asian Cities

Organizer: Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, University of Chicago

Chair: Nikhil Rao, Dartmouth College

Discussant: William Mazzarella, University of Chicago

Keywords: South Asia, city, urbanism nationalism, cosmopolitanism, culture, historiography, Bombay, Hyderabad, Banaras, Paithan, Vijaganagara, Islam, Hinduism.

What are the limits to our conception of the city in South Asian History, both premodern and modern? This panel suggests that, in addition to shortfalls in empirical data, our understanding is constrained by hegemonic narratives which structure the ways in which we regard the South Asian city. These narratives—imperialist, anti-colonial, nationalist, regionalist and linguistic—bring the city into History but also obscure significant elements of the city’s history.

All four papers in the panel begin with the above mentioned historiographic gap and continue to pursue a shared concern: the many possible cultures of the city in South Asia. The specific topics range across five cities in South Asia from the 15th to the 20th century: middle-class conceptions of Bombay as an international commercial and industrial center—not especially concerned with nationalism—in the early 20th century; a cosmopolitan Islamicate culture in princely Hyderabad in the late 19th and early 20th century obscured in colonialist and nationalist urban histories; the linked imaginaries of Paithan and Banaras, centers of vernacular and cosmopolitan Brahminical cultures respectively, in 17th-century Maharashtra; and 15th-century Vijayanagara re-imagined by radical Śaiva artisans, performers and ascetics, who produce a critique of culture and power from the margins.

The panel seeks to use its thematic, geographical, and temporal diversity to offer other histories of South Asian Cities and thus generate a new conversation on the cultures of the city, by integrating in our frameworks practices of everyday life with high culture and discourse with practice.

House, but No Garden: Apartment Living and the Middle Classes in Bombay, 1930s–1950s

Nikhil Rao, Dartmouth College

This paper explores a middle-class modernity that emerges in 1930s–1950s Bombay in the context of the development of modern architecture.

The city at this time was a magnet for educated groups, who migrated in large numbers from the hinterlands of Bombay and Madras Presidencies, attracted by the demand for white-collar workers in the expanding petroleum, banking, and insurance industries. These migrants’ housing needs were met by newly minted Indian architects, who displayed their talents by building suitable apartment buildings in the new neighborhoods of Dadar, Matunga, and Shivaji Park. The conjuncture of large numbers of educated migrants and the first generation of Indian architects yielded debates about how the new arrivals could adjust to the demands of urban industrial living. Yet the hegemonic historiography either sees the city in this period as a staging ground for some of the key moments of Congress mass politics, or as the terrain on which capital and labor negotiated profits from the textile industry.

Based on a study of debates in the Bombay architectural scene and on interviews with middle class South Indian migrants who came to the city in the 1930s and 40s, this paper seeks to recover their experience of urban modernity. Theirs was a city where the primary concerns were the everyday ones of accommodation, employment, and transportation. The paper suggests that the cosmopolitan context of Bombay, combined with such urgent everyday concerns, yield the distinctive civic sensibility that has retrospectively been identified as the "Golden Age" of the Bombay of the 1950s.

Muslim Urban Modernity in South Asia: Late Princely Hyderabad City

Eric L. Beverley, Harvard University

This paper seeks to describe the unique contours of urban modernity in late ‘colonial’ Hyderabad city—the seat of a Muslim-ruled Princely State—which distinguished the Nizam’s capital from British Indian cities.

The rhetoric of Hyderabadi or Deccani difference served to legitimate the region’s polities in the face of north Indian encroachments in the medieval and early modern periods. This pre-history is foundational for an understanding of the relationship between modern Hyderabad city and hegemonic narratives of South Asian urbanism. Hyderabad city gradually extricates itself from the symbolic and political dominance of Mughal authority and is solidly established as an alternative Islamicate political and cultural space in the subcontinent by the nineteenth century. New histories of British colonial rule and eventually Indian anti-colonial and post-colonial nationalism, however, continue to cast their shadows upon modern Hyderabad.

An examination of the renewed importance in Hyderabad of global and subcontinental networks of Muslim cultural circulation during an era of European imperialism and pan-Islamic resistance serves to highlight a landscape of Hyderabadi cosmopolitanism invisible in colonialist and nationalist histories. Further, a consideration of contestations between the Nizam’s civic administration and the British cantonment authority in the twin city of Secunderabad over legal jurisdiction and the aesthetics of public space underscores the alterity of the princely capital among modern Indian cities. The paper suggests that the combination of Hyderabad’s Muslim cosmopolitanism and conscious divergence from colonial urbanism reveals a lost history of the city itself, shedding new light upon the history of the modern Indian city.

Cities of Knowledge: Re-imagining Paithan and Banaras in the History of Medieval Maharashtra

Ananya Vajpeyi, Independent Scholar

This paper problematizes the relationship between two medieval cities of scholarship—Paithan, in Maharashtra, and Banaras.

In regional histories written by colonial and postcolonial Maharashvians, Paithan is a proto-Bananas: a city of Brahmins, legal debates, Sanskrit texts, learned councils and juridical activity. It lends intellectual authority to the Yadava court in nearby Devagiri before Allaudin Khilji’s raids at the turn of the 13th century. From the 14th to the 16th centuries, Paithan’s brahmin elites relocated to the banks of the Ganges, setting up Banaras as the site of an "Oriental Renaissance," a scene described by Pollock in his work on Sanskrit scholars and institutions of the 17th century.

One of these scholars-in-residence in Bananas was Gagabhatta, whose ancestors migrated from Paithan, and who returned to Raigarh to perform Shivaji’s royal consecration in 1674 CE. In the figure of Gagabhatta, there was an invocation of the nexus between the two cities, one past and one present during Shivaji’s lifetime, and thus of a transregional conversation between Maharashtra and Banaras, vernacular and cosmopolitan worlds, the local king Shivaji and a global Hindu realm stretching north from the Deccan to encompass the Gangetic plains. Banaras and its precursor Paithan are troped in the historical imagination of Maharashtra as bastions of Sanskritic/brahminical learning in the predominantly Muslim cultural environment of medieval India. Both became symbols of a resistant Hindu intellectual power exceeding what we know empirically to have been the actual scale, political importance, or even the properly urban character of these cities.

A View from the Margins: Vijayanagara as Seen by Śaiva Viraktas

Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, University of Chicago

How does a medieval cosmopolitan city appear when described from the margins of the city? My paper addresses this question by recuperating radical Śaiva re-imaginations of Vijayanagara, a city described variously in historical and archaeological accounts, as a center of administration, trade and manufacturing, garrison town and most significantly, cultural and intellectual center, especially of Hindu civilization in an Islamic South Asia. Such a description is based on the military successes of the polity and achievements of high culture patronized by the Court, notably monumental architecture and classical literature. While Vijayanagara’s cosmopolitanism is clearly understood on the basis of these achievements, two other significant factors have been ignored. First, Vijayanagara was home to at least four social groups with radically incommensurable conceptions and narratives of the self and community, including Islam. Secondly, the City also generated critiques of state power and of culture produced at the Court. I focus on one such critique, offered by the Viraktas—literally, detached—a group of Viraśaiva artisans, performers and atypical ascetics, who are described in Kannada Śaiva narratives as having an ambivalent and conflictual relationship with king, Devaraya II (1424–1446 CE). This Virakta critique includes re-imagining the city spatially with depictions of everyday life, a critique of kingship, conception of a Viraśaiva self and community, which is articulated in universal terms; significantly, this critique does not remain marginal but produces influential cultural and institutional imaginations. This process, I argue, provides a richer understanding of culture and power as well as the cosmopolitan culture of a medieval city.