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Architexturez > South Asia (home) |
Focus: Hindutva Urbanism
Two articles by Manas Dasgupta in The Hindu, posted for a possible Public Discussion:
There is certainly a drive in our civic space[s] since the Babari Mosque 'vidhvans' [i], designed to re-structure space in a Hindutva image. Yet we have not seen a discourse in architecture that studies this, and parallels the "saffronisation" of South Asia discourse in related disciplines.
The articles point at the complicity amongst the various state institutions mobilised to Hindutva ends. Rampant processions are taken through our cities, government organisations and infrastructures are irrupted into, and captured.
- 2002-07-05, Ahmedabad: Muslims desert homes as Jagannath rath yatra nears
- 2002-07-04, Ahmedabad: Mosque Demolished
A regression into pre-modern idioms of governance in recent years has been noted in South Asia studies[ii] and we witness the same in civic and public space. That there are hardly any architecture studies of the phenomena doesn't surprise one, considering Architecture Studies in South Asia have traditionally missed the boat. Take for example the independence, dalit and other democratising movements; workers' and trade-union movements; the engineering, infrastructure and industrialising movements; amongst other forces that have transformed the built environment.
REFERENCES:
Outsider as enemy: The politics of rewriting history in India KN Pannikkar
Temple desecration and Indo-Muslim states Richard M. Eaton
Somanatha and Mahmud by Romila Thapar
Somnatha: The many voices of a history by Romila Thapar
NOTES
- ABA-NET in a private mail, 2001-10-04: "The 'destruction' of the Babari mosque was a vidhvans, a counter-destruction reoponding to a de-sacralizing memory. Verity, or the archaeological facts do not matter so much as salience, the kept-alive memories of a desacralization. These are calibrated acts, designed as activating-moments. We have been studying them in the Heterologies projects, and this is why the Heterologies civic buildings are also fortifications, they sometimes also work as havens similar to the church in the west [...] We understand counter-destruction as an anti-urban act, an act that reduces the city (which is fossilic, concretised via generations of processes of secretion, aggregation and so on) into a city-machine, operabilities that mobilise - a counter-city, or a city that has again become an unruly topology. A counter-destruction opens the city into another direction, a contained wilderness, a chaosmosis [Felix Guattari's term] perhaps of a machinic kind. Heterotopias also exist in a similar way (I think New York experienced one on 11th of last month), but they are localised, they can be contained. Counter-destructions bring-to a movement that will encapsulate, contain and dissolve.
- See for example, the debate "Crisis of Institutions", in Contributions to Indian Sociology (New Series), over the years.