ABSTRACT
The urban studies discourse in South Asia is predominantly confined to the metropolitan landscape. Contesting this dominance, this chapter aims to engage with the memory of a neighbourhood called Banglagarh in Darbhanga, a small town of north Bihar. The core concern of the chapter is to narrate and analytically explore childhood memory of staying in this neighbourhood and the relation between memory and neighbourliness. At a broader level, the question of memory and neighbourhood spaces comes before us through scholars narrating the experiences of refugeehood in the context of the Partition violence and displacement. Outside, this specific frame in which memory and its linkages with inhabited spaces are essentially mediated in and through mass violence, scholars have not paid attention to engage with how memory and urban space come together to produce what can be called sensuous urban landscape in the South Asian milieu. However, there are chances of such a project getting appropriated by the frames of nostalgia leaving little scope for a critical engagement with the social in the idea of the neighbourhood. Aware of this possibility, the study aims to embed the ties between memory and neighbourliness to get a thick account of sociality in the context of a small town of north Bihar. Unlike the settled, coherent, and formal approach of disciplinary history, the fluid, unsettled, and in-between character (neither in the past nor in the present or memory as occupying the terrains of both past as well as the present) of memory is mobilised for this study as some of these essential and defining features of memory are also shared by the neighbourhoods in South Asia. In this sense, the chapter also offers a critique of the dominant paradigms of looking at neighbourhoods as bound, settled physical spaces, or as administratively defined segregated units.
