ABSTRACT
Chittaranjan Park, formerly known as the ‘East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ Colony’, in Delhi was constructed by the government exclusively for Bengali displaced persons. This chapter discusses how this neighbourhood has been formed and influenced by urbanisation by examining two aspects of life in Chittaranjan Park. One is the ritual aspect, namely the changing processes of the annual Hindu Durga Puja festival. We describe how Durga Pujas have changed alongside the transformation of neighbourhood in the colony, becoming progressively more commercialised as the size of the urban neighbourhood expanded until the residents moved to improve the neighbourhood and adapted the celebrations to a more appropriate scale. It further demonstrates how rituals such as Durga Puja not only help to integrate and maintain urban neighbourhoods, but also are organised as afterimages of neighbourhoods that physically no longer exist. Our second focal point is the ethnic aspect of the urban neighbourhood, exploring the impact of urbanisation – specifically rapid urbanisation in Delhi and the redevelopment of two squatters’ markets in the colony – upon the ethnic composition of Chittaranjan Park. Before describing the case of Chittaranjan Park, it is appropriate to comment briefly on the terms ‘community’, ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘locality’, and place this chapter conceptually in the context of those related terms. These terms have likely been used uncritically as interchangeable in urban studies in India (De Neve & Donner 2006: 7). However, they have also been used in the specific context of this discussion. First, ‘community’ has generally been treated as synonymous with traditional society, pre-industrial agrarian Europe or the non-western civilisations of the east (Jodhka 2001: 18). The same tendency can be found in Indian social studies. In a review article on the concept of community in the Indian context, Upadhya (2001: 33-36) points out that ‘community’ has been associated with social organisations considered fundamental to traditional or precolonial Indian society such as jati (caste), village or religious sect. Community is usually regarded as being in opposition to the individualism of modern society as well as market, class and the state; it is considered to belong to culture, and hence is more authentic than other social units. Upadhya concludes that although conceptualisations of community have shifted from such primordial or ‘substantivist’
notions to constructivist understandings, community continues to belong to the realm of culture but not economy, and represents genuine social formation and the principal source of identity (Upadhya 2001: 53-54). In the context of this chapter, Chittaranjan Park might represent an ethnic ‘community’ of Bengalis who share language, culture, religion and identity. However, the Bengali community in the urban environment of Delhi goes far beyond the community explained by Upadhya. Chittaranjan Park was the outcome of negotiations with the government (state). It is not a traditional community but a newly constructed colony whose residents are disconnected from their homeland; it is under the influence of domestic and global markets. The identities of its residents are not based on caste but on educational qualifications, occupation and being urban middle class. Second, though the ‘neighbourhood’ is the principal concept in this chapter, the local has received much less attention and tends to be treated as a less central concern in contemporary social analysis of globalisation (De Neve & Donner 2006: 2). However, De Neve and Donner emphasise the importance of studying the local, and state that places themselves are highly political and fluid, and gender, caste and community identities are constantly produced, negotiated, and challenged through spatial practices and shifting spatial concepts (De Neve & Donner 2006: 3). According to them, previous studies have assumed neighbourhood as the only site within which the real concerns of the study – namely caste, gender and family – could be researched, and thus barely explored the form and meaning of neighbourhoods as socially constructed places. For De Neve and Donner, exploring the ways in which neighbourhoods are made into meaningful places is fundamental to understanding urban life (De Neve & Donner 2006: 7); the local, particularly the neighbourhood, is not a mere space but the locale that actually produces social relationships in urban India. Though their approach is weighted on the political sphere, this chapter basically shares their concern. Chittaranjan Park is the space where political struggle has been deployed and the impacts of market, commercialism and globalisation are seen. It is also a space whose characteristics have been created by the processes of bordering and attributing specific meanings – namely cultural, historical and religious – to particular places. The spatial practices associated with Durga Pujas clearly illustrate how the residents of the colony manipulate the neighbourhood to make it favourable to them. Our final discussion concerns the relation between neighbourhood, locality and globalisation. In his well-known discussion, Appadurai defines locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial. It is a phenomenological property of social life, a structure of feeling that is produced by particular forms of intentional activity. He defines neighbourhood as the actually existing social forms in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realised. Neighbourhoods are situated communities characterised by their actuality and their potential for social reproduction (Appadurai 1997: 178-179, 182). While neighbourhoods are prerequisites for the production of local subjects, local subjects also contribute to the creation of contexts that might exceed the
existing boundaries of the neighbourhood (Appadurai 1997: 185). However, he states, in a world that has become deterritorialised, diasporic and transnational, the task of producing locality is increasingly challenging (Appadurai 1997: 188-189). In the context of this chapter, his categorisation of neighbourhood as an actual social form, and locality as non-spatial property, is suggestive: Chittaranjan Park has not only spatial neighbourhood, but locality, which is observed on the occasion of Durga Puja and may be shared beyond the area of the colony. However, his emphasis on deterritorialisation and disjuncture among his socalled five dimensions of global cultural flows (Appadurai 1997: 33) must be treated carefully. Though the urban environment and middle-class characters connect the colony and its residents with global flows, locality has been continuously produced in the colony.
