all that glittered

Most of you know that my father passed away late last year. Loss is always unexpected, but his death hit me particularly hard in a way that I couldn’t explain.

It’s taken me six months to put these thoughts together. My comics have always personal, but drawing this was intense in a way none of my work has ever been.

Mera Apna Sheher (My Own City), directed by Sameera Jain, deals with the idea of Delhi as a highly gendered urban landscape, “where the gaze, the voice and the body are at all times under surveillance”; it sets out to find, through the daily lives and adventures of a set of women in Delhi, whether a woman in the city, as she moves between anxiety and comfort, can ever be free. 

[…] The notion of women under “multiple surveillance” is at the core of Mera Apna Sheher, which turns the idea upon itself to see what the everyday in Delhi reveals. Leading the quest, with a pen camera in her bag, is Komita Dhanda—an associate professor at Lady Irwin College, who is in the mood to loiter. “Unlike men, women are constantly looking for a sense of legitimacy to be in a public space,” Jain remarked during a press interaction.

Starting out with more obvious public spaces like a tea stall, a corner cigarette-paan shop and a regular dhaba—places that are always crowded but generally off-bounds for a solo woman—Dhanda tries to melt in, to be one with the many, projecting an easy comfort in, and entitlement to, public spaces that are the domain of every middle-class, upper caste, young, able-bodied heterosexual man. Men’s reactions to her presence, recorded so unobtrusively that they seem incidental, range from passing amusement to jittery discomfort, tremors revealing the gender fault-lines beneath every level of the urban experience.

“The very presence of women in public in seen as transgressive and fraught with anxiety,” write academic Shilpa Pahadke, journalist Sameera Khan and architect Shilpa Ranade in Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, a book that shares with the film its central concern—women’s right to the city. “So long as women are able to convey the dominant narrative of gender—that they belong in private and not the public—they get conditional access to public space. To signal refusal to adhere to these codes often invites censures, sanctions and violence.” The book makes a spectacular case for women’s right to loiter, questioning why in India women must walk a straight line between one “sheltered” space and another. It dares readers to imagine an Indian city with street corners full of women. “A man may stop for a cigarette at a paanwalla or lounge on a park bench. He may stop to stare at the sea or drink cutting chai at a tea stall. He might even wander the streets late into the night. Women may not… She is either mad or bad or dangerous to society.”

The men in Mera Apna Sheher are constantly trying to make sense of Dhanda. She refuses to display any sign that she is either accidentally in a public space or is there out of a certain necessity: no hurried air, no tapping buttons on her mobile, no earphones, no files against the chest, no mangalsutra or sindoor. After completing the more elementary excursions, she decides to relax in a park—not exactly an unreasonable instinct. Sitting on the grass, she has a long phone conversation before she stretches out on her side, facing two men who are lying at a considerable distance, but close enough to be disconcerted. They start by ignoring her; then they try, visibly, to figure her out; finally they just sit up and stare at her, apparently with more bewilderment than sexual threat.

Jain has said in interviews that she and her team would often not monitor the camera, discovering some of the moments much later and being stunned by how well they captured the subtleties of gendered spaces.

In a scene towards the end of the film, Dhanda invites the Delhi danger. She stands by a street at night, in a busy-looking part of Delhi, perhaps to catch a bus or hail an autorickshaw—or just to linger. What happens next is a daily hazard for any woman who walks on Delhi streets, or worse, stops. A passing car pulls up slightly ahead of Dhanda. She ignores it. The car reverses slightly. She stays indifferent. The car comes closer. She takes a few steps back. The car almost closes in on her before she walks away, laughing, towards the film crew. Delhi girls who are on their own frequently strategise their street behaviour: waiting only at bus stops, keeping a serious expression on their faces, never looking back at slowing cars. A failure to project respectable purpose and attitude could lead to the assumption that they are soliciting—which is not only a dangerous impression to convey, but is also a culpable offense in India.

By TEJU COLE

1 I’ve been reading the later work of Derrida, in which the intensity about language remains but there’s also a turn towards the thorniest questions of ethics. There’s a remarkable passage in “The Gift of Death” (1995) that gets at something the news isn’t touching on:

“…because of the structure of the laws of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the mechanisms of external debt and other comparable inequities, that same ‘society’ puts to death or (but failing to help someone in distress accounts only for a minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions of children…without any moral or legal tribunal ever being considered competent to judge such a sacrifice, the sacrifice of the other to avoid being sacrificed oneself. Not only does such a society participate in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organizes it.”

2 I’m seeing a lot of writing about not calling refugees “migrants.” This is in reaction to those who say refugees are “only” migrants, that this “flood” of migrants flows to richer countries for economic benefit. And it’s true that there’s an urgency in the condition of refugees (no one growing up thinks this will be their fate: to be a refugee, at the crucial mercy of others), and what is specially awful about being a refugee must be recognized and acted on, and not simply reduced to money.

But here’s the thing: migrants should be welcome too. Migrants are welcome. Some of the refugees become migrants, once the immediate danger is past. Some migrants become refugees, caught in an unexpected vortex of malice. Don’t let yourself be spun into a language of hatred and exclusion, at this hot moment in which it’s deemed OK to support refugees but still condemn migrants.

I say refugee, I say migrant, I say neighbor, I say friend, because everyone is deserving of dignity. Because moving for economic benefit is itself a matter of life and death. Because money is the universal language, and to be deprived of it is to be deprived of a voice while everyone else is shouting. Sometimes the gun aimed at your head is grinding poverty, or endless shabby struggle, or soul crushing tedium.

And more than “refugee” or “migrant,” I say “people,” and say it with compassion because everyone I love, and everyone they love has at some point said tearful goodbyes and moved from place to place to seek new opportunities, and almost all of them have by their movement improved those new places. Because I reject the poverty of a narrowly defined “we” that robs me of human complexity. Because I don’t believe that radical inclusivity is going to destroy “our” way of living, when I generally don’t know what “our” you’re talking about, and when I think we can do much better than this malevolent way of living anyway.

Did all sixteen of your great great grandparents live, work, and die in the same town where you now live? If no, then you’re a child of migrants. If yes, then y’all seriously need to get out more.

“OK, but where do we draw the line?” is a question you create in your head to distract you from your human duty to the other. If the line had been drawn in front of you instead of behind, you wouldn’t even be here now, wherever here might be.

We have to begin finding ways of dismantling this form of society that actively and passively organizes mass death and then, at the faintest flash of humane behavior, throws itself into paroxysms of self-congratulation.

Delhi Modern: The Architectural Photographs of Madan Mahatta

Delhi as the national capital, went through a huge expansion and was refashioned into various ordered zones/divisions along the lines of the first modern urban planning in the country, (Master Urban Plan, DDA, 1962), under the supervision of US based planner Albert Mayer. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA), a single planning and controlling government body established in 1957, conceptualised its master plan to cope with the haphazard growth of the city, following the huge numbers of migrants that had streamed into the city during partition and after Independence. From the 1950s to 1980s, new areas were earmarked to be part of city’s modern plan. The separation of work and industry, the discourse against congestion, and the marking of legal and non-legal habitation in city was the central thrust of the plan.[1]  It ensued materialization of neatly charted architectural spaces like multi-storey factories in commercial spaces, housing complexes, skyscrapers, hotels, cultural and public buildings. Examples of these include, Gandhi Memorial Hall (1962), Indian Institute of Delhi (1968), Hall of Nations ( Pragati Maidan, 1972), India International Center (1962), The Escort Factory ( 1964), the Ford Foundation Building (1968) and the Asian Games Village (1984).

As huge public debates engulfed the views of the public around  issues of national importance such as the bullock-cart economy vs. modern economy, western modernity vs. non-western society, infrastructure/technology vs. uncouth citizens; a modern architectural plan with cosmopolitan appeal imprinted within the design of cost-effective (steel, cement and glass) high rise public buildings emerged as a visible sign of the nation’s aspiration for modernisation. Free from colonial influences and neo-classical architectural baggage, it was between the 1950s to the 1980s, that the first generation of Indian architects trained under Walter Gropius (Habib Rahman at MIT in Boston) and Frank Llyod Wright (Gautam Sarabhai), along with others like Achyut Kanvinde from Harvard and Charles Correa from MIT, who arrived in Delhi to be part of the challenge of constructing a new architectural language for sovereign India.

"There’s no world in which I would surrender the intimidating beauty of Yoruba-language poetry for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, nor one in which I’d prefer the chamber orchestras of Brandenburg to the koras of Mali. I’m happy to own all of it. This carefree confidence is, in part, the gift of time. It is a dividend of the struggle of people from earlier generations. I feel no alienation in museums. But this question of filiation tormented Baldwin considerably. He was sensitive to what was great in world art, and sensitive to his own sense of exclusion from it. He made a similar list in the title essay of “Notes of a Native Son” (one begins to feel that lists like this had been flung at him during arguments): “In some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the Stones of Paris, to the Cathedral at Chartres, and the Empire State Building a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.” The lines throb with sadness. What he loves does not love him in return."

Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”