ABSTRACT
Discussing the relevance of notions like the ‘public’ and ‘private’ in India, Partha Chatterjee (1993) has convincingly argued that the private–public dichotomy was shaped during the colonial era by reproducing gendered notions of private and public space (‘private’ as female, preserving and stabilising culture and tradition, ‘backstage’; ‘public’ as the political domain in which men could actively position themselves, ‘frontstage’ — the public as a domain theoretically open to all), with a bourgeoisie that cherished ideas of the intimacy of home, the family, and even the idea of the nation as an extended family. Yet, the transfer of the European type of the public and the private (which was in itself remarkably heterogeneous) to the Indian context did not take place directly, but was in fact constantly contested and altered. The colonial city, as several studies have shown, was based, quite like its European cousins, on spatial segregation. It worked along the axis of attributing or withholding rights from particular groups. As opposed to the working class versus the elite tension, the Indian case was complicated through skin colour, religion and caste. Particular narratives implying social anxieties (for example, moral and civic decline) and desires (such as the rise of an underdeveloped city to the status of a world or global city) are tied to the imaginary of the city itself and undergo change over time. In fact, the central question is: how rise and decline, gains and losses are defined and legitimised, and by whom. To a great extent, the discourse evolves around notions of threat and security, order and hygiene, the public and the private.
