Heptanesian Archives

One of the most pathetic examples of the neglect of the city’s history is the Kala Ghoda area of South Mumbai. This sounds like a contradiction - in recent years Kala Ghoda has become synonymous with the heritage movement, with its museums and galleries, arts festivals and concerts, and recently restored colonial architecture. But if the conservationists had bothered to look behind their charming building facades and fancy street furniture, they would note that one of India’s most venerable and best-stocked repositories of historical documents occupies the back of the Elphinstone College building, in the Maharashtra State Archives (MSA). The MSA is a treasure-trove of government records, correspondence, maps, and all manner of big and small publications stretching back nearly four hundred years, from the Marathas, Portugese, British and postcolonial Indian governments.

The staff of the MSA are the real keepers of the city’s heritage, the Common Man who cannot afford the glossy coffee table books or steep entrance fees to the festivals and concerts celebrating Mumbai’s heritage. More knowledgeable than their better-paid counterparts in such places as London’s British Library or Delhi’s National Archives, these clerks and peons eagerly serve up the papers and files which are the historian’s raw material for narrating stories about the still mostly untold history of the city and its region. Everything from sewerage reports from Victorian Bombay, to the diaries and letters of Maratha ministers and chiefs, to early town planning schemes and maps for Bandra and Juhu may be found in the MSA. The tragedy is that once in your hands, many of these records crumble to pieces before they can be read, or have already been eroded over time by the elements.

In spite of the flourishing interest in researching and understanding the history, culture and politics of Bombay/Mumbai amongst various groups of academics and urban professionals - from anthropologists and activists to film-makers and architects - the career of the urban researcher in Mumbai is a precarious adventure.

The existing institutions charged with this task are, for the urban researcher, a veritable black hole, nowhere more so than the sprawling campus of the University of Mumbai. While Bombay University was in many ways the birthplace of the social science research in India - the old Bombay School of Economics and Sociology counted amongst its graduates the venerable G.S. Ghurye and M.N. Srinivas - it is nowhere on the map of the new urban research being conducted by NGOs setup in recent years to study and report on urban culture, design, governance and planning. And these NGOs themselves often function in dubious ways, setup by foreign academics for offshore influence peddling, or by the city’s elites to entrench their agendas with the BMC and MMRDA.

The unfortunate result of this situation is that coffee table heritage has replaced serious historical and social research. For example, a well-known work about the “cities within” glorifies the progressive role of the colonial era Bombay Improvement Trust in urban development. To the historian, this is something akin to calling the land-grabbing and corruption of the present-day Slum Rehabilitation Authority an enlightened civic governance. With the vacuum left behind by the collapse of genuine research institutions, critical and independent research in and on Mumbai must play second-fiddle to the whims and agendas of local socialities, foreign academics, and the racketeering of consultants and bureaucrats, all seeking to turn Mumbai into a “global city” through patronage of “urban research”.

Unfortunately, most of the best recent research on Mumbai is done by writers and academics based in wealthy private universities in the U.S. and U.K. One consequence of this is that these scholars are neither responsible to local institutions such as the MSA, nor does their work circulate back to those for whom it is an essential element in discussions about the past and future of Mumbai.

(Published in TimeOut Mumbai special issue on Bombayology Vol.3, Issue 24, 27 June to 9 August 2007)

For the past three weeks I have been involved in a seminar called “Learning from Mumbai” hosted by the Urban Age and the LSE Cities Programme. Though I had a traumatic arrival via Charles de Gaulle and Luton, the hospitality of Richard Sennett and the wonderful faculty and students at the LSE quickly put me back on my feet.

The past two weeks have been busy in writing, reflecting, and meeting new peers who work on cities within an academic culture where sociology and geography — rather than history and anthropology — approaches are preponderant.

I’ve also met with Matthew Gandy at UCL, who is finishing a film on Mumbai called Liquid Cities, and Keith Hart, who is in his last year at Goldsmith’s College and still in fine form. From Mumbai, Rahul Srivastava has accompanied me on many long walks and conversations in the streets of London about our days together in PUKAR.

Tomorrow is the final presentation, debate and reception for the Urban Age Mumbai seminar. If you happen to be in London, please come to the New London Architecture galleries at 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT to listen and respond to the three themes chosen by the contributors to the project volume on Learning from Mumbai: justice, prosperity, and belonging.

Anique Hommels, Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Socio-Technical Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.

While sharing a common intellectual genealogy, the contemporary disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and urban studies have followed divergent paths of development, and flourished in largely separated academic compartments. Anique Hommels’s Unbuilding the City argues for the complementarity of the approaches of STS and urban studies in explaining the phenomenon of urban “obduracy” and strategies for “unbuilding” the city. Linking together the concepts drawn from actor-network theory and constructivist studies of socio-technical change, the book contains three case studies of postwar urban development in the Dutch cities of Utrecht, Maastricht and Amsterdam.

How can we understand urban structures as more than simple technical or physical artifacts? How can we explain the history of cities and their power relations as socio-technical ensembles? Does the urban built environment embed the tacit knowledge of its original planners and builders, such that their norms and values continue to shape the relations of city-dwellers in subsequent generations? In a well-known essay on the question “do artifacts have politics?”, Langdon Winner has cited the example of the low-lying bridges designed by planner Robert Moses in New York, whose passages were too low to permit movement by public buses between the freeways and beaches of Long Island. Moses’ bridges prevented access to these elite white spaces of recreation by inner-city black populations, thus inscribing a permanent spatial discrimination into the design of seemingly apolitical technical artifact.

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I am happy to announce the new version 3.0 of The Memory Bank, the digital archive and weblog of my friend and mentor for the past six years, Keith Hart. Keith is a social anthropologist and writer, founder of the Prickly Pear Press and amateur anthropological association (the small triple a) who now teaches at Goldsmith’s College in London.

I met Keith in early 2001 in Mumbai, and organised the first ever PUKAR public lecture at the David Sassoon Library (whose dusty Victorian fittings reminded Keith of the Manchester Philosophical Society). Keith and I ran together from then on, maintaining an intense correspondence and occasionally meeting in different cities. I also came to know those amongst his far-flung network of his friends, including Anna Grimshaw, William Mazarella, Jim Murray, Sunil Khilnani, Marshall Sahlins, Jonathan Parry, Marilyn Strathern, John Hutnyk, Craig Calhoun and many others. His teacher was Jack Goody. The year after I met him, he married the anthropologist Sophie Chevalier, with whom he has lived in Paris for many years now.

The site was first setup by his publishers in the U.K. to promote his book, The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World, published in 2000 at the height of the dotcom boom. In 2002 Keith and I took over http://www.thememorybank.co.uk, and ran a basic html and frames site containing the entire text of the book, which I argued to him needed to reach new audiences. In 2004 we moved the Memory Bank 2.0 and 2.1 to the Plone content management system, and migrated all the html into a dynamic publishing environment. I wanted to allow Keith to learn to self-publish his work online, and he slowly but steadily mastered the web tools, as he had earlier turned e-mail into a new discursive form. Over the past two years he has published much of his recent work. We have now moved this archive into a weblog running on WordPress in the new version.

Keith has been my persisent correspondent, critic, and was a great moral support to me at a crucial time in my mid-twenties in Mumbai. I remain in his debt intellectually, and am pleased to have Keith become that truly rare example of a senior academic (he is 63) who combines a rhetorical proficiency and vision of history with a mastery of the tools of networked communication and online publishing. Over the past six years, the Memory Bank has come to contain the entire text of the book from the earlier site, as well as Keith’s prolific output as a pamphleteer, lecturer, ethnographer, and critic including all his published work, unpublished papers, as well as talks, reviews, and other materials.

The Memory Bank 3.0 now marks Keith’s entry into the blogosphere. Please join us in creating a new Commonwealth.

Arvind forwarded me this article from today’s Sunday Express in New Delhi, “Are you an American Scholar? You are not welcome in India”. It is well known in the research community here in the homeland that the Home Ministry and Intelligence Bureau (IB) in India have delayed approvals and finally rejected the proposals for research sponsored by American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) and Fulbright, pending for the past two years. This has caused much loss to many friends and colleagues. There is no reason anymore to make sponsored research subject to a bilateral regime, and have everything submitted to the Home Ministry and IB for approval. Apart from AIIS and Fulbright, I do not believe most other funding agencies require one to submit to the research visa regime. Nor should anyone have to in this day and age — this regime is a relic of the early sixties.

Why should scholars seek anything other than entry visas to come to do research in India? Indian law actually permits for much more academic freedom and right to access if you go through other channels such as the university system and approaching officials directly. Perhaps I am painting too rosy a picture. But I believe funding should not be connected to your nationality, whether Indian or not, and apart from these few bilateral programmes under the old visa regime, it isn’t.

One needs to remember that most of these are public documents in state institutions which are, in principle, open to all. Of course access is always negotiated. One can do much through the recommendations of high-level bureaucrats, and the good-will of your average clerk, and I know many American scholars who have learned the ways of the system and taught me very much when I met them in the field in India or on campus here in America. One the other hand, I have had severe arguments with American scholars of South Asia who have seriously contended with me that one cannot access archives and other materials without a research visa. This is wrong, and the perception this generates must be condemned. These same elite institutions in the U.S. play a role in mediating access to state collections in India, and setting standards for research practice globally. Some of the most important collections for doing research on Indian history are located in the U.S. and the U.K. In most cases the fruits of our research work, while sponsored and supported by public institutions in India and the U.S., is privately published, stored and circulated in closed archives and university libraries to which the wider public in India or America has only limited access.

The scholars themselves are trapped inside this system, and gain very little from subjecting themselves to it. I have seen many dear friends and colleagues humiliated by the registrations, inspections, and process of seeking approvals to which research visa holders must undergo. It is degrading once you are in India. But these Fulbrighters were kept waiting for all this time and finally rejected! How many liberals amongst us would seriously submit such sensitive project ideas if they knew that the police intelligence is opening a file on them, which is tied to their conditions of stay in the country, and which will haunt them for the rest of their careers as scholars of South Asia, whether their nationality is Indian or American? The whole idea of dragging oneself through this bureaucratic-police state in India is absurd if it can be avoided.

The people at SARAI to have been an inspiration and example in India for many years, and the discourse which they have sponsored in the varied fields of free software, media culture, film studies and urban research have been deeply influential on my thinking for nearly six years now. Indeed my visits to Delhi and for their gatherings on the Public Domain, the Tactical Media Lab, CITY One, and Emerging Urbanism over the years — and their work with the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore — have exposed me to new research networks and communities of practice. It was with great anticipation that we at CRIT co-organised our first public workshop with SARAI on 27-29 December in Mumbai, called Metrolog(ue): A Discussion on Emerging Urbanism.

The workshop was beautifully and almost single-handedly organised by Prasad Shetty and signified for CRIT our first public engagement on our own platform. You can read the problem statement of the workshop here, which was co-written by several of us (and in which it later emerged that I slyly inserted several normative, rather than purely descriptive, terms). The web-site contains further write-ups about each of the panels and thematic foci of the workshop: Emerging Morphologies, the Politics of Occupancy, New Civil Society Organisations, Urban Peripheries, New Entrepreneurship, and Publishing Archiving and Mapping. The workshop grows out of work done by members of CRIT under the SARAI Independent Fellowships, especially Rupali Gupte’s Tactical City and Prasad’s Stories of Entrepreneurship.

As the Anarchytect has elegantly stated in one of his daily reports on the conference, there was little dialogue between the innocently empirical and technical presentations on new urban environments, and the all-knowing discourse analysis which is preoccupied with the city as a field of representations. There was a perverse juxtaposition of an enthusiastic sense of improvement and development, with a pessimistic post-modernism which is sceptical of all such impulses. The arrogance of this posture is almost impossible to convey, but it was felt by many of the independent researchers and activists from Mumbai. As a social scientist, I was disappointed in my fellow academics in the room, who gave away little, and kept themselves safe and dry on the high-ground of cultual theory. Have a look at Anarchytect’s reports on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and his other scrawlings.

In the final week of the semester,I have been avidly procrastinating by reading the major works of Ravinder Kumar, the social historian of western India. Apart from the phenomenal account of the rise of British power in nineteenth century Maharashtra in his magisterial Western India in the Nineeeth Century (1968), I have been dipping into his Essays in the Social History of Modern India (1983). His long article, “From Swaraj to Purna Swaraj: Nationalist Politics in the City of Bombay, 1920-32″, written in 1977, is remarkable in anticipating many of the later historiographic debates on the nature of nationalist politics, particularly the work of Shahid Amin on Gandhi as Mahatma. Indeed Kumar’s work combines the empirical depth and richness of Cambridge School social history with the sophistication and theoretical boldness of Subaltern Studies. And his major works were all completed long before either of these schools of historical writing took over the conversation.

In my own lifetime of thirty years, global society has been transformed by the widespread availability of inexpensive computing technology. Indeed, only within the past ten years, a new combination of commoditised hardware, software, and network infrastructure has put this technology within reach of millions of new people. A certain taint of presentism is, therefore, inevitable in any attempt to write the history of “computing” in our time, as we are positioned at a particular point in a dynamic of ongoing social and technical change. As with earlier historians of the “industrial revolution”, we must assess the historicity of the “information” or “digital revolution” both as historical narratives and popular common sense. This presentism presents particular challenges to the historian in his or her craft of framing a coherent narrative of technological development. Here I will consider different approaches to the history of computing which confront both the the familiar challenges of a historian of technology, as well as the unique aspects of computing as an object of historical inquiry.
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Schuyler and I just submitted our applications to Asia Source II, which will be held in Sukabumi in West Java, from 22-30 January 2007, organised by the International Open Source Network (IOSN). Schuyler and I first met at Asia Source I, organised by the Tactical Technology Collective outside Bangalore in January 2005. It was as close as I have come to a religious conversion. In tribute to the spirit of Asia Source, here is our over-ambitious proposal for organising a Freemap Workshop on open-source geo-spatial tools and locative media for the participants from NGOs and SMEs in Southeast Asia at the next camp in Indonesia. While we won’t know if it’s been accepted for another month or so, this template can be implemented in a town near you. Give us a call.

I finally gave the new OpenLayers Map Rectifier a serious crash test today, and a few hours later I was still in the same quiet groove, with rosy visions of what it might make possible for historical geography. The rectifier has enormous potential to give users an easy point-and-click interface for geo-referencing and then warping their own flat maps of places, for use as layers in a geographic database. What this means is that I now am within reach of a tool which will allow me to begin creating layers of the various maps of Bombay and loading them as layers in the Mumbai Free Map, as I can now easily warp any image by making a few markers based on common landmarks between the source map and reference map.

This screenshot shows the 1969 Bombay City Guide Map loaded into the rectifier, tagged with a few common markers between the source image on the left and the new layer on the right, now warped according to the surface of the earth. Chris Schmidt helped squash a small bug to get this rendering to work, and I’m hoping that the team can implement the projection system for Mumbai (WGS Datum 84 and UTM Zone 43N) so we can begin serving layers live to the Mumbai Free Map. In anticipation, I uploaded high-resolution maps of Bombay, Salsette, and parts of Thana and Colaba from 1926, 1930, 1933, and 1969. Go to to one of these maps and zoom in on a neighbourhood you know, and load up the satellite imagery in the reference map, and click away.