Excerpt Emergency Book Ch1

8/2/2019 Excerpt Emergency Book Ch1

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1INTRODUCTION

One Sunday morning in February 1995,1 boarded an auto-rickshawto visit some of the ancient sites of Shahdara in east Delhi. Unfortu-natelyor fortunately as it turned outthe rickshaw driver lost hisway. After we had made several circles through the dense winter smogon the east side of the Yamuna river, I told him to stop the vehicleand drop me off wherever we were. Little did I kn ow at the time thatI would return to this place persistently over the next three years.

I had arrived in Welcomeone ofDelhi's 47 'resettlement colonies',designed for relocating families evicted from inner city slums. Therewas nothing spectacular about the place and it was partly for thatreason that I contemplated making it a site for fieldwork. At the timeI was working on a project about furniture and the uses of the body.I had done a fair amount of research in middle-class areas in southDelhi and now wanted to work in a poorer, less westernised environment.However, my project, like my Sunday itinerary, was soon to change.

What changed everything was a visit to the local branch of theSlum Department of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD)a building situated within Welcome. Here my assistant and I had hopedto gather a few background facts about the planning and resettlementof the colony. However, it soon became clear that such general infor-mation had never been collated. Instead it lay dispersed in thousandsof dusty files. Opening these, I became aware of a wealth of otherdocuments pertaining to the little-studied period known as 'the Emer-gency'. Bj the time I closed the files, my research agenda had beenredefined. *This book is about unsettling memories: both the process of disruptingand unearthing memories and the unsettling nature of memoriesevoked. It focuses in particular on events which took place in the

1

Unsettling memories : narratives of Indias

emergency / Emma Tarlo; New Delhi:

Permanent Black, 2003. (1-20 p.)


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2 IntroductionIndian capital city of Delhi between June 1975 and March 1977a period known in India as 'the Emergency'. Popular and officialnarratives of these events are analysed for wh at they tell us about therelationship betw een citizen, state and market in con temporary urbanIndia. While the immediate aim is to rewrite the Emergency from ananthropological perspective, the wider objective is to demonstratethe possibility of producing an ethnograp hy of the state.The Emergen cy occupies an unusual place in the Indian past. Ithas been m uch mythologised but little studied. Too recent to be ofinterest to historians yet too distant to have attracted the attentionof oth er social scientists, it has somehow slipped through the net ofacademic disciplines. But time is not the o nly factor that explains thesilence surrounding this brief period. This silence can also be ex-plained in terms of the unsettling nature of what went on duringthose 21 mo nths when democratic rights were suspended under IndiraGandhi and coercive measures brought into play. Press censorship,arrests, tortu re, th e demo lition of slums and tales of forcible sterilisa-tion have all made the Emergency fertile food for fiction,1 but un-comfortable ground for historical, political or sociological analysis.While literary writers have been keen to evoke and, at times, embel-lish the horror of such atrocities, politicians and dominant politicalparties have been equally keen to deny th eir reality and suppress theirmemory. Th e silence that surrounds the Emergency 'as fact' is notentirely accidental.This book belongs, then, to a growing body of literature whichseeks to w ork against the areas of collective silence which often clingto violent and disturbing events. In particular it seeks to articulatethe experiences and perceptions of ordinary people who foundthemselves caught up in the twists and turns of a bleak historicalmoment.2 The key protagonists of the book are men and women

'Nirm al Verma, 1993, Dark Dispatches, Delhi: Indus; Rohinton Mistry, 1995,A FineBalance, Calcutta: Rupa & Co .; Salman Rush die, 198 3, Midnight's Children, and morespecifically, 1994, 'T he Free R adi o' in East, West, both originally published in Lo ndonby Jonathan Cape; R.K . Narayan, 1976, The Painter of Signs, New York: Viking.2As such, it has affinities with the wealth of recent literature about mem ories ofthe Holocaust and Partition. For two recent examples of books conveying personalexperiences of Partition see Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, Delhi: Viking,and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, Delhi: Kali for Wom en,both published in 1998.

Introduction 3who , by dint o f poverty and circumstance, were targetted in the massslum clearance and sterilisation drives, ubiquitous in Delhi durin gthe Emergency. They are people whose lives were profoundly disruptedby these policies but whose personal renderings of the event havenot been either written or heard. Other protagonists include the low-level bureaucrats, local leaders and middlemen with whom theyneg otiated their attempts to retain basic rights and am enities often atthe risk of losing others.

A focus o n the voices and exp eriences of the Emergency's mostobvious victims does not, however, pretend to offer privileged accessto the truth of the event. Like the official record itself, personalmemories are fraught with ambiguity and are formulated withinthe context of wider experiences and agendaslocal, national andglobal. They testify n ot only t o the state's targeting of the poo r d uringthe Emergency, but also to the active role played by many of the p oorin perpe tuating state oppression at that time. Th e Em ergency as factleaves little space for the romanticisation of the victim.Though much of this book is concerned with personal narratives,it is equally concerned with other avenues of remembering andforgettingwith government files assumed not to exist, with Em er-gency propaganda, censored newspapers, post-Emergency resistanceliterature and political exposes which lead us down the paths ofpublic memory and through the intricacies and inconsistencies ofthe official record. These various sources offer not only different takeson the event but also different time frames through which to com-prehend it. Fieldwork conversations with the sterilised and displacedre-work the past in relation to subsequent events, present circum-stances and anticipated futures. The memories they engender are

squarely located in the present and are never unm ediated. By contrast,government files and official propagandaboth produced duringthe Eme rgency itselflend insight into the present o f the past. Theyoffer an official mem ory still uncensored by subsequent developmentsand political trends, though such literature was of course subject to adifferentjype of censorship at the time. Located somewhere betw eenthese two time-frames, post-Emergency exposes, letters, and judg-ments which surfaced immediately after the event offer a short-termmemo ry of the Emergen cyone which reads strangely now for itslack of historical depth and the imagined futures it evokes. Thesedifferent time frames rem ind us of the relativity of all representations


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4 Introductionof the past as well as the impossibility of historical perfection. Ho w-ever, they also famish the basis for the creation of a new multi-texturednarrative of the Emergency, which does not claim to represent thetotality of the event bu t which, in allowing diversity, seeks to create aricher portrait of the elements at play.

Although at one level concerned w ith th e specificities of a par-ticular historical moment, this book is also concerned with whatsuch a moment tells us of the everyday lives of the urban poor inIndia's capital city. What seems to characterise their situation is theextreme precariousness of their relationship to both land and statea precariousness which came to light most intensely dur ing the E mer -gency but is by no m eans specific to it. Th e discourse of developm entwhich provided the logic for the mass displacement of some 700,000people to marginal spaces beyond the borders of the city in 19757did not guarantee either security or entitlement to the displaced. Andalthough the means by which the po or negotiated 'provisional' landrights during the Emergency were specific, th e fact that they had to

bargain w ith p oliticians and bureaucrats for th e basic amenities ofeveryday life reveals the co ntinuities with bot h past and present. Suchcontinuities are all too apparent in the recent re-em ergence in Delhipolitics of Jagmohan, the man who had been in charge of slum clear-ance and resettlement during the Emergency. Now Union UrbanDevelopment Minister, Jagmohan is renewing his stringent efforts to'dean up' the city by enforcing the closure of thousands of'no n-co n-forming indu stries' and remo ving 'illegal squatters' from the capital.3For the hundred s o f thousands o f citizens whose lives are inescapablyenmeshed in this major re-development scheme, it must seem thatlittle has changed since the mid 1970s. In this sense, the Em ergency of3In 1996, the Supreme Cou rt ordered the closure and shifting of industrial unitssituated in 'non-conforming' residential areas. The precise number of such 'non-conforming' industrial units in Delhi is unknown but it is estimated at around 100,000.Following delays in implementation, the Supreme Court served a notice to theDelhi Chief Minister in November 2000 concerning non-compliance with the court'searlier instructions. This was followed by a rapid drive to close down industrial unitswith a view to eventually relocating some of them . Mass sealing operations are currentlyunderway, despite organised protest from w orkers. An estimated 2 0-lakh (2 million)people are thoug ht to be employed in these industries. Th e majority of these will losetheir means to earn a livelihood if the closures continue to function at the currentrate (see Frontline, 22 Dec. 2000).

Introduction 51975 is a trope through which to explore the emergencies of every-day life for poor and marginalised sections of the Delhi population.For those who may be sceptical about the interest in an eventwhich took place over 25 years ago, let me begin by highlightingsome key areas of anthropological importance.Th e ethnography of eventsHistory has often proved a stumbling block to anthropology andalthough the relationship between the two is in a process of radicaltransformation, m any anthropologists still endorse (explicitly or implic-itly) a false dicho tomy betwe en structure and event. Social structurethe seemingly stable state of affairswas long seen as the d omain parexcellence of anthropologists leaving significant eventsespecially v io-lent onesto journalists, political scientists and historians.Anthropology's refusal t o engage w ith h istorical events has its originsin a variety of factors. On e is anthropology's favoured methodologyof participant observation through fieldwork. This method hastraditionally consisted of taking up residence amongst a comm unityor people for a period of o ne o r two years and gathering informationbased on this experience of proximity. Althou gh tw o years may seema long time to ournalists accustomed to darting in and o ut o f people'slives within a single day, it is of course inadequate for observinghistorical change and anthropology's reverence of the ethnographicpresent has often given rise to works which, at best, underplay and,at worst, deny the forces of history. This problem is accentuated bythe absence of historical records amongst many of the peoplesanthropologists conventionally choose to study. Added to thesepractical dilemmas is the uneasy nature of what might b e uncoveredif anthropologists did delve closely into the histories of the peoplethey studied, many of whom have uncomfortable pasts tied withEuropean imperialist interests which anthropologists (who, untilrecently, were mainly from colonising countries) preferred to ignore.It was then a combination of methodology and circumstance whichserved to bo9st the development of an ahistorical anthropology whic hgenerated a string of self-sufficient holistic models functionalism,structuralism and society-as-text explicable throu gh cultural exegesis.These models left little space for events which tended either to beseen as disruptions, too temporary to interest anthropologists, or as


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6 Introductionrituals which simply served to boost o r reinforce the social structure.Hen ce in M ax Gluckman's famous 'rituals of rebellion' which findtheir Indian equivalent in studies of the Holi festival, violence anddisruption are seen as temporary ritual devices which allow societyto let off steam before returning to the status quo.4

In advocating the study of an event like the Emergency, I am notsuggesting a return to rituals of rebellion although I would endorseGluckman's obvious point that structure and event are not oppositionalterm s. Rath er, I am interested in the n ew areas of research suggestedby a few contemporary anthropologists who argue for the need forstudies which explore the dynamic relationship between momentsof disruption and mo ments of calm.5 Such studies are necessary becauseviolence and disruption are so integral to the lives of many m odernpeoples and nations that they are often experience d no t as aberrationsof the norm al state of affairs b ut as inevitable elements of the everyday.6Viewed from this perspective, social structure is no t so muc h a stableforce temporarily disrupted by political events, but rather a dynamicform shaped and re-moulded through such events. The fact thatthe mo dern nations of India and Pakistan were born through theunspeakable violence that accom panied P artition stands asproof-if proof were needed of the transformative potential of events.Veena Das who has led the way in India for a new ethnography ofwhat she calls 'critical events' has argued that a theoretical shift to-wards events does not so much create new anthropolog ical objects asinvite old objects to inhabit unfamiliar spaces and thereby acquire newlife.7 Th e events she calls critical are those which bri ng abo ut n ewmodes o f action and encourage n ew social and political formations

*Sec Max G luckman, 1963, Order and Rebellion in TribalAfrica, London: Routledgeand Danny Miller, 1973, 'Holi-Dh ulendi: Licensed Rebellion in a Nor th IndianVillage', South Asia, 3, pp. 15-22.5See, for example, the arguments raised in Joh n Davis, 1992, 'The Anthropologyof Suffering'.Jowma/ of Refugee Studies, 5,2 , pp. 149-61 and Jonathan Spencer, 1992,'Problems in the Analysis of Communal Violence', Contributions to Indian Sociology(n.s.), 26,2 .6For an exploration of the n otion of the violence or violences of everyday life, seeNancy Scheper Hughes, 1992,Death without W&eping, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress; Paul Farmer, 1996, 'On Suffering and Structural Violence', Daedalus 1 5,1 ; pp.261- 3; Arth ur Kleinman, 2000, "The Violences ofEveryday Life' in Veena Das, Arthu rKleinman etal., eds, Violence andSubjectivity, Berkeley: University of California Press.7Veena Das, 1995, Critical Events, Delhi: OUP , p. 1.

Th e anthropology of the state 7as people are propelled into unpredicted terrains. Wh at her examplesof Partition (1947), the Sikh massacre (1984) and the Bhopal gas dis-aster (1985) share in co mm on is the way these events 'criss-crossedseveral institutions, moving across family, community, bureaucracy,courts of law, the medical profession, th e state and multinational cor -porations.'8 Conventional anthropological studies, with their synchronicand location-based focus, can rarely capture the interrelationship be-tween such institutions, yet it is precisely this interrelationship whi chcharacterises so much of mo dern life. 'A description of critical events,'Das argues, 'helps form an ethnography w hich makes an incision up onall these institutions together, so that their m utual implications in th eevents are foregrounded during the analysis.'9

By making the Emergency the key focus of this book, my aimis to provide just such an ethnography of a 'critical event'. Theanthr opolo gical value of taking this event as a starting point is, as Dasargues, that it provides a view o nto a mom ent o f intense social andpolitical dynamism when a whole range of actorsin this case, innercity slum dwellers, displaced peop les, local leaders, professionals, traders,bureaucrats, police and politicianswere brought into interactionand, in many cases, renegotiated their position in th e socio-geographicfabric of Delh i. But although it is only at such mom ents of intenserenegotiation that such a range of social interactions becomes apparent,the relationships on which these interactions are based form part ofthe everyday functioning of life in the capital city. This means thatdespite the specificity of the Emergency as an event, it providessome so rt of privileged access to the semi-obscure social and po liticalstructures of everyday life in the capital city.Th e anthropology of the stateIf critical events have hitherto taken a back stage in anthropologicalaccounts, so too has the analysis of the role of the state in everyday life.Th e absence of ethnographies of the mod ern Indian state has beenhighlighted in particular by Akhil Gupta who uses the concept of'blurred b oundaries' to describe the enmeshed relationships by whic hlocal level bureaucrats and rural people interact in a North Indian

8Ibid., p. 6.9Ibid.


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8 Introductionvillage.10 He points to the need forfurther examination o f the quotidianpractices of bureaucrats which might tell us about the effects of thestate in everyday life. He also suggests the importance of analysingho w the state is discursively constructed through popular culturalforms including newspapers and TV which inform local perceptions.Anthropological methodology which places a high value on face-to-face encounters and spatial proximity may not, he argues, be wellsuited to the study of so unwieldy a set of discourses and practices asthe state, though a recent collection of ethnographies of the modernIndian state suggests that mu ch can in fact be learned using conventionalethnographic methods.11

Unlike Gupta, I suggest that it is precisely its emphasis on face-to-face encounters and spatial proximity that enables ethnographicmethodology to offer fresh insights into the lived ex perience and per-ceptions of the modern state. Furtherm ore, far from being ill-equippedfor such an exercise, anthropologists are in many ways extremelywell placed for investigating the workings of the state as both ideaand practice. Not only do they daily and increasingly engage withbureaucratic structures andmythologies within andbeyond academicdepartments, but they also learn to master a variety of relationshipswith high and low level representatives of the state when organisingand conducting fieldworkwhether 'at home* or abroad. Often it is'face-to-face' encou nters with local officials that either open or closedoors for anthropologists who are, I would argue, deeply familiarwith the concept of'blurred boundaries'a term which might befruitfully used to characterise fieldwork itself.

It would be inaccurate to say that my research abo ut the Emergencyled me to engage with local bureaucrats, for it happened the otherway round. It was my 'face to face' enco unter w ith local bureaucratsof the Slum Department of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi andmy interest in the products with which they dealofficial papersthat led me tofocus on theEmergency in thefirstplace. This enco unterand sustained interaction not only taught me much about the role ofthe Indian state during the Emergency but provided important insight

10Akhil Gupta, 1995, 'Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, theCulture of Politics,and the Imagined State', American Ethnologist, 22,2, pp. 375402."Christopher Fuller and Veronique Benei', eds, 2000, The Everyday State andSociety inModern India, Delhi: Social Science Press.

Th e anthropology of the state 9into the complex relationships of both bureaucrats andordinary peopleto the state's administrative structures in everyday life.My entry into the records room ofon e ofDelhi's regional branchesof the Slum Department was not, then, aprelude to myfieldwork butwas very much part of the fieldwork itself. These government officesconstituted a specific typ e of ethnographic terraina bureaucraticspacein w hich aparticular type of material artefactofficial papersis produced. Like allartefacts, official papers embody social relationships:they have producers andconsumers; they circulate b etween individualsand representatives of institutions; they are rich in symbolism just asthey are concrete in form. Anthropologically their interest lies notsimply in their content but in the circumstances surrounding theirproduction, circulation and interpretation. And who is better placedto unveil the mysteries of such documents than the people whoseprofession it is to create them ?

Too often anthropologists areprone to treat official records asmerebackground information and to dismiss bureaucrats and archivists aspeople who might stand in the way ofresearch. But as the producersand guardians of official documents, government officials can beextremely helpful in decoding the artefacts they have produc ed aswell asdemonstrating the techniques of production. It was throughconversations with low-level bureaucrats that I was able to establisha basis for interpreting these everyday artefacts of the state. I treatthem here, not simply as 'evidence' of what went on before, duringand after the Emergency, but as a field of'paper truths.' The maincharacteristic of these paper truths liesin thefact that they aremalleableand constructed on the one hand yet take on an aura of irrefutabilityon the other. They highlight the ever-present gap between what isimplicitly known and what isofficially recorded, a gap open to bothnegotiation and exploitation as people's experiences during theEmergency make clear.Bringing anthropological methodology to the Slum Departmen tnot only helped expose the everyday technologies and mythologiesof state practice but it also shed light on the variegated nature ofofficial memory. Like m any othe r studies, this one highlights the state'sattempt to control the production of memory by making its versionof events hold and by discouraging the memorisation of particularhappenings. The voices of low-level bureaucrats comp licate the issuefor they maintain a distinction between what they have recorded and


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10 Introductionwhat they experienced. Their status as officials gives their oral testi-monies some sort of official status, though their accounts are often atvariance with what they themselves recorded in the files. Further-mor e, taken together, both the 'paper truths' of the records room andthe mem ories of bureaucrats provide important material with w hichit becom es possible to challenge the state's official m aster narrative ofthe Emergency.These discrepancies within the official memorisation of the eventalso point to the hierarchy and fragmentation found w ithin bureaucraticstructure s, whe re different grades of officials are differently situatedin relation to policies and events. This hierarchy is literally visible inthe allocation of space and resources within government departmentsso it becom es possible to read a person's status quite literally from thesize of his desk. Nevertheless, an ethnography of theEmergency whichfocuses only on the production and interpretation of'paper truths'inside government offices would, of course, be limited. The otherimportant element about 'paper tru ths' is their reproducibility outsideGovern ment departmen ts. If docum ents are the lingua franca o f thestate, then citizens wishing to negotiate w ith th e state not only learnthat language but also learn to reproduce it in the form of officialdocuments 'proving' housing and sterilisation status. Th e state's demandfor paper proofs generates the popular pro duction of paper truths aspeople m imic the very writing technologies that ensnare them . Suchacts of mimesis bear witness to the reach o f the state in the everydaylives of ordinary citizens but they also point to the limitations of thatreach, for ultimately the state risks drowning in the artifice of its ow ncreation. Governm ent files relating to th e Emergency po int to the factthat agents of the state were often unable to interpre t die proliferationof documents that they themselves had set in motion.

The 'paper truths' of the Emergency also bear witness to the m ulti-ple violences of the state which they record and embody, howeverobliquely. The capacity of the state to act as an implicit o r explicitinstrument of violence is something to which anthropologists aredrawing increasing attention. What the personal narratives of victimsof the Em ergency brin g to this debate is a chilling demonstration ofhow state abuses not only produce local worlds but also becomere-worked w ithin them . The process by which the poor were drawninto p articipation in the sterilisation campaign as a means of avoid-ing getting sterilised themselves directly confirms Kleinman s recent

Hie anthropology of the state 11observation concerning the inadequacy of current taxonomies of vio-lence which draw clear distinctions between 'public versus domestic,ordinary as against extreme political violence'.12 Too often thesecategories seem to merge. For example, the dem olition drives wh ichhave been a regular feature of life amongst the urban poor in India'smajor cities since the early 1960s require demolition workers. Theselow-level state employees often en d u p demolishing each o thers' hom eswith the aid of a simple iron rod in the interests of'do ing their job s'.

The plight of the local demolition worker who finds himselfdisplaced and homeless even as he demolishes the hom es of othersreminds us that large sections of the urban poor, particularly thosefrom scheduled caste backgrounds, 13 earn their livelihoods work ingfor the state which promises them a degree of security, even if theconditions of the promise are subject to change over time. The limitsto that security were amply demonstrated durin g the Emergency wh enthose with two o r three children (depending on which branch of theadministration) found themselves threatened with loss of employ-ment if they failed to get sterilised. That getting sterilised or payingsomeon e else to do so became, in many cases the only way displacedpeople could obtain small plots of land in resettlement colonies,reveals the fickle nature of the state's offer of protection. But it alsoexposes how local people entered into deals with the state by wh ichthey negotiated their claims to land on the outskirts of the city.

The rapidity with which the family planning drive of theEm ergency transformed into a market for sterilisation in the marginalspaces of Delhi's resettlement colonies is interesting for what it tellsus about how people relate to the state at a local level. Situatedwithin the wider context of everyday life in resettlement coloniesthis trade ceases to surprise for it becomes quite clear that the poorin Delhi relate to the state principally through the market. Basicamenities such as land, jobs, electricity, water and paving are things,not provided, but purchased in exchange for votes, money, or, in thecase of the Emergency, sterilisation certificates. That people commonly12Kleinman, 2000, 'The Violences ef Everyday Life", p.227.13 In th e 1950s positive discrimination in public sector jobs and industries wasintroduced in favour of members of 'scheduled castes' who had previously beenclassified as 'untouch ables'. As a result a large numbers of scheduled caste men and,to a lesser extent, wom en occupy the lower levels of governm ent posts, work ing assweepers, demolition w orkers, railway coolies and so forth.


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12 Introductionpay bureau crats for ga ining access to what ostensibly is their due is apoint made by Gupta in the context of development projects in ruralIndia and by Jeffrey, Jeffrey and Lyon in the co nte xt of rura l wo men'slack of access to health facilities.14 It is not that health facilities areunavailable in Uttar Pradesh but that local people feel they cannotgain access to effective treatment without 'heating' the pockets ofdoctors and nurses. In effect the market, far from operating outsidethe state, often features as the vernacular idiom throu gh whic h ordinarypeople negotiate w ith local agents of the state. Furthermore, as Guptapoints ou t, it w ould be fallacious to assume that it is only at the 'lowerlevels' that this vernacular idiom is understood. How else might weexplain the fact that the unauthorised dwellings of the rich in Delhitoo often remain unscathed15 whilst those of the po or seem to quakepermanently under the threat of demolition?

Wh ether this threat is fulfilled or no t depends very largely on thebalance of power between representatives of local government onthe one hand and the state or municipal authorities on the other.Despite their haphazard and spontaneous appearance most squattersettlements are nurtured by politicians who maintain closerelationships of patronage wi th local pradhans (self-styled local leaders)who, in tur n, promise politicians the votes of their supporters. 16 It istherefore in th e interests o f individual politicians to 'protect' settlementsor segments of them from demolition in order to maintain thesesignificant vote banks. Here again the fragmented nature of the stateemerges as policies of slum clearance are often effectively blocked byrepresentatives of local government. Yet such informal relationshipsof'pro tection ' are inherently unstable. A slight shift in the balance ofpower takes the wind out of the politicians' promise and often hasdrastic implications for those relying on their pro tection. This becameclear during the Emergency when informal agreements between

14See P atricia Jeffrey, R oger Jeflrey and Andrew Lyon, 198 9, Labour Pains, LabourPower, London: Zed.15 For discussion of the uninterrupted spread of unauthorised palatial residencesin South D elhi, see Anita Soni, 2000, 'Urban Conquest of Ou ter D elhi: Beneficiaries,Intermediaries and Victims' in Veronique Du pont, Em ma Tarlo and Denis Vidal,eds, 2000, Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, Delhi: Manohar. The recentcrackdown on unauthorised buildings may threaten even these palatial residences.16

For discussion of these dynamics see Saraswati Haider, 2000, 'M igrant W omenand Urban E xperience in a Squatter Settlement' in Du pont, Tarlo and Vidal, eds, Delhi.

Th e anthropology of the state 13individual politicians and squatters were overridden by firmlyimplemented state action u nder a centralised authoritarian g overnment,backed by force. Curr ent attempts to close down 'non -conf orm ing'industries and displace squatters in response to an injunctio n fromthe Supreme C our t testify to the enduring sense of insecurity facedby Delhi's urban poor.LocationThe personal and official narratives that inform this text flow pre-dominantly from one particular locationthe resettlement colony ofWelcomejust one of Delhi's 47 poorly serviced urban settlementscreated to absorb displaced inner city squatters. The specificity ofsuch spaces lies not only in their social and geographic marginality,but also in the fact that they are made up of fragments of disruptedand dispersed settlements from elsewhere. Arjun Appadurai drawsan interesting distinction between 'neighborhoods'(situated com-munities characterised by their actuality) and what he calls 'locality'(a phenomen ological quality or'feeling 'expressed in certain kindsof agency, sociality and reproducibility').17 By creating colonies ou tof ragments of demolished neighbourhood s, the state authorities lumptogether people who may share little more in common than theirpoverty and displacement. As Appadurai points out, such acts ofenforced localisation place severe constraints and obstacles on the 'sur-vival of locality'. It must also be remembered that the sense of localityin the inner city areas and squatter settlements demolished duringthe Emergency was no doubt already tenuous. Most of the peoplewho were displaced to Welcome in the 1970s, had already experi-enced displacement before, whether in the form of migration or asa response to local or state violence. Many have also experiencedfurther displacement since their arrival in Welcom e, for life in Delhi'sresettlement colonies is far from 'settled'.

The inhabitants of such fragmented spaces may have difficultybuilding a sense of shared locality, but in the minds of Delhi's middle-class citizens, they seem to represent a unified g roup. W hat they shareis the stigma of their association with the slum. Born in the name ofslum-clearance, resettlement colonies are rarely ever able to shake off17Arjun Appadurai, 1997, Modernity at Large, Delhi: OUP, ch. 9.


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14 Introductionthis association. The ir very existence evokes the 'cleaning up ' processout of which they emerged. And if the city is perceived as beingcleaner without its poore r inhabitants, then resettlement colonies areinevitably perceived as places of dirtcontainers of the city's unwa ntedelements. In th e case of Welcom e, this general stigma fuses with thecolony's more specific rep utation as a 'notorio us plac e' of violenceand criminality.

The process by which particular spaces and their inhabitants arecharacterised as being inherently dangerous has been highlightedby Dhareshwar and Srivatsan in their elaboration of th e figure of the'rowdy' who 'in middle-class imagination...inhabits the dark zone ofthe city, trafficking in illegal, immoral activities; a zone that is inevitablyin need of law and order, and always threatening to spread to thesafer, cleaner habitat of the city'.18 It is difficult t o track the specifichistoriography of Welcome's 'bad reputation' but it is certain thatpress coverage of the colony's implication in the communal violenceof 199219 has given Welcome a special place on the map of Delhi'sdubious places. This 'fame for infamy' has become a source of localpride to some young m en in the colony who boast of how the policecan always track a notorio us criminal to Welcome. T heir words testifyto the production of discourses of marginalisation both from withinand outside the colony. This popular perception ofWelcom e as a place'to b e avoided' is to some extent negated by commercial interests.Being o ne of Delhi's oldest resettlement colonies, it is bette r situatedthan m ost and rising property prices ensure its rapid development evenas the repu tation for violence and disrepute keeps prices com petitive.Th e question remains as to the appropriateness of situating a studyof wider events, ideas and placesdie Emergency, the state, Delhiwith in th e confines of a single marginal space like Welcome. Increasing

18See Vivek Dhareshwar and R . Srivatsun, 1996, '"Row dy-Sheeters" : Subalternityand Politics' in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds, Subaltern Studies IX,Delhi: OUP, p. 202.19 In D ecember 1992 right wing H indu activists were responsible for demolishinga medieval mosque at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradeshan act that unleashed a trail ofvjolence between Hindus and Muslims throughout north India. In Delhi, Welcomebecame a key site of violence. Areas of the colony, including religious buildings, wereset on fire. Once the violence and curfew were over, a halo of fear seemed to lingerover the colony, deterring business partners and othe r visitors from coming to Welcome.The event clearly served to boost the colony's reputation as a dangerous or dubiousplace.

Location 15awareness of the extent to w hich local sites are produced thro ugh trans-local power relations arid cultural flows has led some anth ropologiststo advocate multi-locational fieldwork20 just as it has led others tosuggest a shift from location to event.21 The peculiarity of this study isthat it approaches an event th rough its articulation in the local, arguingthat precisely because of its history of displacement, a resettlementcolony like Welcome is a suitable location from w hich to approachwid er issues, places and events.This becomes clear once it is recognised that the inhabitants ofWelcome come from over 80 different locations spread throughoutthe capital, ranging from the southern corners of'N ew Delh i' to thehistoric core of' Old Delh i'. A map indicating the key sites of demolitionmay look more like a bomba rdment plan than a development plan(the similarity is not incidental), but it testifies to the varied spatialtrajectories of the displaced. This means that although today theinhabitants ofWelcome are based within the confines of a single colony,they carry with them memories and experiences of elsewhere. Thesewere people w ho lived and worked in varied locations all over Delhiprior to experiencing dem olition, and just as many of them built newshelters in Welcome using the bricks and corrugated iron from theirdemolished homes, so they construct their narratives out of theircomplex personal trajectories. As a result, this was not a case of theanthropologist having to shift from one location to another in orderto en counte r the diversity of different experiences of the Emergency.Rather, diverse multi-locational experiences emerged from a singlegeographic space. The other side of the resettlement equation lies inthe concurrent transformations that have occurred to the inner cityareas where dem olitions took place. Delhi wou ld look quite differentwere it not for the succession of demolitions ou t of which the colon yofWelcom e was born and throu gh wh ich new roads, public buildingsand parks were created as part of the 'beautification' of the capital. Inthis sense the birth of the colony was inextricably bound up withthe morpho logy of the city as a whole, highlighting the fact that thepeople ofW elcome are not so much marginal to Delhi's history asmarginalised by it.22

20Georg e Marcus, 1995, 'Ethnography in /of the World System: The Emergenceof Multi-sited Ethnography', Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, pp. 95-117.21 See Das, 1995, Critical Events.22 For more specific discussion of the history and development ofWelcome within


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16 IntroductionOn ce we re-establish the links between those resettled in Welcomeand the places where they once lived and worked, it becomes lesssurprising that their narratives should lend insight into places andevents of wider n ational impo rtance. In fact, elsewhere I have arguedthat, far from standing o utside national policies and events, the urbanpoor often find themselves deeply implicated within them for they

lack the political, economic and educational resources with whichto build a shield in m oments of crisis.23 This was blatantly obviousduring the Emergency when an estimated 700,000 people (15 percent of the local population) were dispersed outside the city and over161,000 were purportedly sterilised. W hether singled ou t as the keytargets of state policies, or simply exposed t o critical events like warsand so called 'communal riots', the people of Welcome have oftenfound themselves caught at the centre and drawn into th e action. Fromthis viewpoint, they no longer seem so marginal. Their narrativesconfirm Appadurai s point that in a contemporary world of com plexdislocations and relocations, there is nothing 'mere ' abou t 't he local'.

Voice and imageMuch has been made in recent years of a paradigmatic shift inanthropology from the visual to the verbal, from seeing to listening,from observing the lives ofothers to giving them voice. Though muchof this book is devoted t o just such an exercise, it is impo rtant to stressthat the opposition often im plied between the visual and the verbalis both artificial and unhelpful. We live in a world in wh ich w e constantlyinterpret a complex variety of words, images and material forms w hichsometimes communicate in different ways and sometimes in unison.In the first chapter, I take the reader on an imaginary tour of Delhi inorder to track how narratives of the Emergency and its forgetting arevisibly inscribed in the city's layout, its street names, its museums andmonu ments. Similarly, when listening to peop le recount their personalexperiences of the Em ergency, I was aware no t only of what was saidand ho w it was said but also of the wid er circumstances including thevisual field: who said what in front of who m, in wh at types of places,the context of national policies and events see Emma Tario, 2000, 'Welcom e to H istory:A Resettlement C olony in the Mak ing' in Dupont , Tarlo and Vidal, eds, Delhi.

23 Ibid.

Voice and image 17with what gestures and so forth. Like other anthropologists I havetried to be sensitive to the discrepancies between what pe ople say andwhat they do, between how they want to present themselves and howwe observe others reacting to t hem . These visual observations, farfrom belittling the research process, are essential to it. T hey provide acontext to voices which , disembodied, can to o easily be used uncriticallyby writers /ethno graph ers as a simplistic device to support the storythey want to tell.

None the less the recent incorporation of different 'voices' inanthropological and historical texts has been important in all sorts ofways. Voices not only convey the subjectivity o f experience, bu t theyalso disrupt th e hom ogen eity and closure of texts as well as enablinga rejection of the spurious old anthropological assumption tha t allmembers of a given culture necessarily represent it in a direct andunproblematic way. Voices, then, allow for controversy and debate;they leave space for different personalities and they carry the potentialto challenge the anthropologist's prior assumptions. The ir insertioninto texts seems particularly important when the subjects of researchare mostly illiterate and when the events under investigation havebeen largely suppressed.However, as has often been pointed out, researchers, both as eth-nographers and as writers are in a position of power w hich enablesthem to be selective, to take hee d of some voices and ignore others,to re-arrange different narratives within the text. F or this reason somemod ern ethnographic writin g is accused of being deceptive on thegrounds that it gives the impression of allowing others to speak wh enultimately these others are always subjected to t he author's w ill. Thisseems inevitable, but the question remains as to whether such au-thorial control is necessarily a negative thing. Surely the point ofresearchers devoting years to a particular project is that the y dev elopthe competence to be able to follow leads intelligently, to selectappropriately from different types of material, to recognise the differ-ence between the person whose opinions are informative and theone wh o triesjtp lead them up the garden path? On e striking pecu -liarity of the predicament of ethnographers is that they often findthemselves able to mix with a much wider variety of people than anyone m ember of the comm unity they are studying is ever able to do.Outsider status lends at least some degree of immunity to internalfactions o r social divisions, whether these are based on gender, re ligion ,


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18 Introductionclass, caste or o ther criteria.24 Hence, in m y research about the Em er-gency I found myself able to discuss with all sorts of people whowould barely, if ever, interact among themselves and it is this varietyof encounters w hich I hope lends a certain legitimacy to the natureof the collective narrative which, as author , I have orchestrated.

Th e use of voices in this text and th e conversational form in wh ichthey are often included reflect, then, the nature of my fieldworkexperience in Delhi. This was an experience based much more ontalking than on participation in the classic anthropological sense. Iwas not living in the resettlement colony ofWelcome; neither wouldit have been appropriate for me to do so. My outsider statusanobvious disadvantage in terms o f languagewas advantageous to th eextent that people were often as curious to speak to me as I was tothem. T his outsider status was explicit thro ughout my fieldwork andremains so in the b ook. W here the questions I asked seem relevant tothe types of answers people gave, I have included them in the text;where they seem insignificant, I have chosen to omit them and attimes I simply repo rt conversations which were triggered off by myinitial inquiries but in which I barely participated. This was a field-work which bore the character of one long collective, open-endedconversation based on people's accounts of their own experiencesand it is precisely this quality that I seek to retain in the text.Ultimately the narrative I have produced is not without itsimperfections: some voices may dominate more than they should;others will always remain inaccessible; official records reveal mu ch,but there are also things that they conceal. This is a text made up ofmany fragments w hich, pu t together, will never make a perfect whole.No ne the less, I was struck throug hout the research by the high degreeof coherence between official papers, bureaucratic interpretations,photographic documents and personal narratives which, w hen criticallyexamined and pieced together, are mutually supporting in the storythey collectively tell even if they tell that stor y in very different waysand add different elements to it.25 In this sense, this account of w hat

24 Following Kiran Natayan, I would argue that the very process of doingethnography creates both intimacy and distance between researcher and researched,making all ethnographers both part-insiders and part-outsiders, whatever their ethnicbackground (Kiran Narayan, 1998, 'How Native is a Native Anthropologist?' inMeenakshi Thapan, ed. Anthropologicaljourneys, Delhi: Sangam).25 In his attempt to rewrite the history of a violent event which too k place in

Voice and image 19went on during th e Emergency takes distance both from fiction andfrom earlier stereotyped renderings of the event in spite of the factthat it relies on the notoriously complex and imperfect instrument ofhuman memory and its verbal and material embodiments.

The photographic sequences between chapters are intended notso much to illustrate the text as to ru n parallel to it. They make visualobservations on the themes of memory, marginality, state policies,leadership and everyday life. Like other forms of docum entation, theyshould be interpreted as a powerful form of paper truth.

The book begins by examining the various means by which thememory of the Emergency has been handed down, distorted orsuppressed. Th e first chapter is intended to intro duce those unfamiliarwith Delhi and the Emergency to the existing master narratives ofthe event. As a mom ent of national shame, a blot on India's democraticrecord, the Emergency has been built more as a mom ent for forgettingthan as one for remem bering. This agenda for forgetting the Emergencyis marked by the lack of public mon umen ts which might invoke itsmem ory as well as by memorials which encourage a very differentreading of the past. Inviting the reader on an alternative guided tourof the cityI trace the material deposits through which the Em ergencymight be remembered but also the contours through which it hasbecome forgotten. The chapter is also intended to provide a tasteof the early stages of the research process characterised by movin gabou t from place to place, meeting with different people and workin gthrough existing literature. The aim is not to analyse the rhetoric ofthe Emergency bu t to give a sense of the ingredients with w hich theethnographer starts and from which she eventually departs.

Those already familiar with th e rhetor ic o f the Emergency m aywish to move straight to chapters 3 and 4 w hich lay the foundationsfor the emergence of anew narrative of the event. Based on an analysisof official documents and letters pertaining to slum clearance andsterilisation, these chapters trace the role of the state bureaucracy inChauri Chaura in 1922, Shahid Amin suggests the impossibility of surmountingthe high levels of discrepancy, distortion and fragmentation which exist betweenofficial records and different personal narrations of an event. My own research,though by no means suggesting the possibility of historic perfection, does imply afar greater degree of coherence between the various fragments of history withwhich a researcher can work, see Shahid Amin, 1995, Event, Metaphor, Memory:Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992, Delhi: OUP.


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20 Introductioncarrying out Emergency measures. Unlike existing renditions of theevent, bureaucratic memories portray it, not as a moment of wildunfettered violence, but as a period of meticulously orchestratedstate oppression. They also problematise conventional dichotom iesdrawn between the official and unofficial, between victim and agent,highlighting the many grey areas, not o nly in state policy but also inpopular responses to it. These issues are examined more closely inthe remaining chapters which take us out of the Slum Departmentand into the hom es of the people of Welcomecraftsmen, vendors,rickshaw pullers, sweepers and other low level government servantsand their husbands and wives. Their personal accounts reveal thelinks and disjunctions between political intentions a nd lived realities.Taken together they provide a powerful collective critique of theEmergency even if this critique rem ains fragmented and retains manycontradictions. Tho ugh focused p rincipally around a specific historicalmoment, their narratives tell us much about the dynamics of lifeamongst the urban poor in Delhi.

Documents

Excerpt Emergency Book Ch1