Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability

2. Is There an ‘Indian’ Urbanism?

An urban “community” in the full meaning of the word, appears as a general phenomenon only in the Occident. (Weber 1958, 80) Why has the law, and planning law in particular, been so pliable an instrument in the governance of cities? Indeed, if the law is understood historically as part of the ideological apparatus of the bourgeoisie in its desire for control of urban spaces, has it run its course in the Indian city or is it yet to achieve its true potential (see McAuslan 1980)? With this as my opening question, I would like to go further and ask what the rich materials of history, particularly of the colonial period, can contribute to an understanding of the problems of the contemporary Indian city. Is there a specifically ‘Indian urbanism’ with longer roots in the ways city space was conceived and used, and spatial practices determined? Is India imprisoned in the older sociological categories that were laid out by Max Weber in his study of the medieval Western city (Weber 1958, 80),1 or can one theoretically account for the apparent regeneration of some historical features of Indian urbanism in the contemporary city? While a critical and sophisticated body of work, largely by sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists (and the contributions to this volume are fine examples of this) have contributed to the analysis of, and generated new categories for understanding, the predicaments of the contemporary Indian city, equally complex historical understandings of cities in modern India, especially in the colonial period, have remained at a remove from these conversations. In bringing the two sets of methodologies/ 2 Is There an ‘Indian’ Urbanism? Janaki Nair* * I would like to thank Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan for inviting me to reflect on this theme for the AAS panel in Philadelphia, 2010. P. K. Datta, Mary John, and A. R. Vasavi also made comments on the first draft of this chapter, though all responsibility for this reworking remains mine. 44 Janaki Nair chronologies/discourses together in this brief discussion, my intention is to begin an inquiry into the prospects of law as an instrument for increasing not only the predictability of urban life and the legibility of Indian cities, beyond small enclaves of successful planning, but also principally in achieving a more just and equal urban order. This discussion is largely focused on the city of Bengaluru, but many of the claims about, and descriptions of, its historical trajectory will intersect with the experiences of most other Indian cities. Two simultaneous and apparently contradictorydevelopmentsintwenty-first-centuryBengaluruhaveprompted these reflections on the shape and governance of contemporary Indian cities. One is the establishment in 2008 of a new task force for Bengaluru, and the other is the passage of the Karnataka Town and Country Planning and Certain Other Laws (Amendment) Bill 2010, which regularizes unauthorized constructions in the state of Karnataka. Reading these recent developments together, I would like to ask two kinds of questions. One is about our understanding and characterization of law as it operated in the urban Indian setting, and the other is about the nature of institutional arrangements for city governance which are manifested in an apparently persistent and irreconcilable clash of interests between the corporate (economic) and the political realms. I will develop my argument in relation to these questions in five sections. I begin with a discussion of the hopes posed by the new initiatives in Bengaluru (Section 1); an examination of prevailing critiques and understandings of planning in the Indian setting (Section 2); and an exploration of Bengaluru’s own tangled histories of defining and permitting illegalities (Section 3). In the following sections, I turn to the more general uses of history in understanding modern city governance (Section 4); and finally discuss whether taking both this history and contemporary developments into account could yield an insight into the prospects of extending democratic practice and achieving equality (Section 5). Renewed Hopes and a New Future for Planning? In 2008, the newly-elected government of Karnataka, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), set up the Agenda for Bengaluru’s Infrastructure and Development Task Force (ABIDe), one of eleven new task forces that were formed at that time (Daksh 2009).2 Under its convener, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament (MP), former chairman Is There an ‘Indian’ Urbanism? 45 of BPL Mobile, and also former chief of the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI...