ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the culture of Indian streets to provide a contrast to the Western streets considered elsewhere in this volume. It is important that explorations of the street should not blunder into the ethnocentric pitfalls of so many social and cultural theories, which examine distinct Western contexts and produce ideas that are taken as universally applicable. In the bazaar, a sense of familiarity is maintained through particular modes of address, types of economic exchange and the maintenance of formalized and convivial obligations. These strategies for dealing with the unfamiliar contribute to the formation of a gregarious environment which privileges speech and removes barriers between backstage and front stage so that visual and verbal enquiry is facilitated. As a commercial realm, street is occupied by diverse enterprises, organized according to variety of time-space constraints. The colonial enclaves built by the British testify to the urge to reconstruct urban and suburban aesthetics and order upon what was imagined as urban chaos.
