ABSTRACT
This snobbishness could only preclude empathy with those at the same altitude. The bohemian wanderer was intoxicated, yes – but also, inevitably, alienated (Benjamin 1983 [1973]: 50). The flâneur – though rooted in a particular time and place – nevertheless found his way into the street at large. In the 1960s, the situationists of Paris, selfstyled radicals, amplified the flâneurs’ aloofness with their notion of dérive or drift (McDonough 2009). The one who drifted, the dériviste, also specialised in aimless walking, certain that state control was shaken with every step (no word on whether French authorities were commensurably troubled). Other twentieth-century thinkers took up the mantle of the flâneur and dériviste, divining radical possibility in the humble street. The walker on Manhattan’s streets, for example, was said to practice a ‘delinquent narrativity’, defying larger imperatives (de Certeau 1988 [1984]: 130). Walking in the city, with ‘tactile apprehension and kinaesthetic appropriation’, was a radical statement (de Certeau 1988 [1984]: 97). Prevailing notions of the street, then, encompass the citizen’s gaze and the planner’s inscription. We also remain in thrall to the flâneur’s wanderings and dériviste’s hubris. These ideas have found periodic popularity far afield, in places such as India. In the mid-1970s, during what came to be termed ‘The Emergency’, democratic rights were suspended. Fetishists of civic sense and rational planning in Delhi used the opportunity to carry out an extreme makeover: its streets became laboratories for a high-modernist vision borrowed, predictably, from Paris’s facelift after the French Revolution. Nexuses and mafias were to be smashed, the streets fastidiously scrubbed. The planners’s zeal underwrote, in the form of demolition squads and police arrests, the erasure of tens of thousands of members of the streets’ underclass (Tarlo 2003). If this was a ruthlessly efficient vision of the street, there was also its selfconscious romantic. So it is that observers of Kolkata note how its rooftops, parks and streets host adda, a genteel form of gossip and debate (Chakrabarty 2000: 201). Just as proponents of flânerie saw themselves as superior to capitalists, adda ideologues give it an anti-teleological aura. The practice is ‘opposed to the idea of achieving any definite outcome’ and stalls the march of progress (Chakrabarty 2000: 204). The adda and the street, in this view, belong to a highminded class coeval with, if ambivalent about, urban modernity. On closer inspection, these become celebrations of privileged outlook, not descriptions of commonplace experience. They universalise a certain kind of bourgeois, modernist city, even where art-deco arcades are absent and sidewalks are chewed up. Imagine if citizen and planner, flâneur and habitué of adda, were dropped onto the streets of Old Delhi. Their turf would be unrecognisable. The planner, anticipating a linear, functional void, would see instead, on Lal Kuan Bazaar Road, a space used for card-playing, slogan-raising, cow-grazing, procession-conveying, and tooth-brushing. Far from being an innocuous and aseptic space, the street would be abundant and multifarious. On Ballimaran Road, the flâneur, determined to stay removed from the crowd, would be accosted for money, jostled by hand-carts and rickshaws, assaulted by
fumes, and overcome by honking. Rather than extricating himself from the crowd, he would be assailed, drawn helplessly into the vortex of the street. On Fasil Road, the adda-seeking poet, in search of bourgeois company, would find a different scene: workers from the countryside congregating in ganja addas, huddled circles of hashish smokers. Capitalism, no doubt, would be deficiently realised – and the canon of verse may not extend to Bengali poets. Adda in Old Delhi is a male activity associated with unemployment and undesirables. At the tea stall or crouched at a traffic junction, high on various stimulants, men verbally joust, taunt women and horse around (Jeffrey 2010, Mehta 1997: 226). That other admirer of the street, the dériviste, might find it less conceivable to drift on the streets bordering the Meena Bazaar, should a political jaloos or procession, with thousands waving placards and shouting slogans, impede his passage. All these icons of the street, after visiting such an area, would need to go back to their blueprints and notebooks, and re-imagine the street on its own terms. How can we make sense of these features of the postcolonial street? This chapter employs concepts that may help to revise this ubiquitous feature of urban life. Any visitor to the Indian city will know how distinct the street is as a social space. It is perpetually charged and potentially dangerous; it contains the ordinary friction of difference and desire, which can suddenly mutate into a malevolent crowd. Yet we lack a vocabulary for understanding how sociality unfolds – in aggressive, organic and disorienting ways – on the street. Instead, writers often revert to the notions advanced above, the stern gaze and romantic musings of those who objectify the street but rarely dwell on it. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2007-09 in Old Delhi, this chapter tries to sketch some of the street’s defining features. These reflections are packaged with some rubrics for conceptualising the street. The following terms are suggestive of recurring patterns, modes and forms that define an Old Delhi street, and likely other postcolonial streets as well: abundance and plasticity, osmosis and porosity, and altitude and adjustment.
