Abstract
In this rich and extensively researched book, Awadhendra Sharan chronicles the transformation of the contemporary Indian city—Delhi in this case, by using the conceptual lens of the environment. This book, first and foremost, is a significant contribution to the growing field of urban studies for it says much about the Indian city’s contradictory, contested and fraught relationship with modernity. As the author points out in his introduction, the concern with what we call the ‘environment’ is a fairly recent development. Through the course of the twentieth century, it was sanitation first and then the social dimensions of urban living that became the object of attention of planners, municipal commissioners and the like. However, Sharan quickly eschews any universal claims of this transition and argues that the Indian city is an altogether distinct configuration of discourses and practices that make up the environment. This is the major argument of the book: that concerns over environmental issues in Indian cities—over nuisances and pollution, for example—envelop rather than displace one another and thus are not separated in space and time. The second major point made is that until recently the strategies of dealing with such environmental concerns fluctuated between spatial relocation and technological modernisation.
The book’s four empirical chapters offer four configurations of the city as environment: water, nuisance and offensive trades, congestion and pollution. The Introduction sets the context and a postscript deals with recent shifts in the understating of environmental problems. What makes Sharan’s account particularly praiseworthy is that the analysis of each concern straddles the colonial and post-colonial divide, bringing a more nuanced account of India’s urban modernity. It enables the author to suggest that the colonial modern continues to have a profound impact on contemporary environmental thought and practice (p. 5). Sharan tackles the question of water first and demonstrates how a politics of difference permeated colonial interventions in the city. Traditional water sources were condemned as contaminated in favour of piped water, and drainage/ sewerage facilities like water carriage systems were reserved for New Delhi at the expense of the old city. However, here we are also presented with a story of abject failure. Profit-seeking motives, departmental conflicts, water supply shortages, fallacious distinctions between sewage and sullage, and the discharge of sewage into the Yamuna River after alleged ‘purification’ all intersected disastrously for the city. Sharan concludes by suggesting that even today the faith in technological modernisation remains unshaken as sewage effluent finds its way into the Yamuna River.
The next chapter takes the story of difference further with a discussion of animal slaughter. Sharan suggests that unlike in Europe, questions over slaughterhouse reform in colonial Delhi were focused and organised ‘around the “figure” of the cow as around the burdens of health’ (p. 74). Archival material is used effectively here to show how regulations curbing meat circulation and slaughter elicited ‘religiously oriented interpretations’ (p. 83) from Muslim butchers and hawkers. By the 1930s, Sharan argues that questions around animals and slaughter were recast—not simply as of sanitation but of ‘animal industry’ and ‘offensive trades’ (p. 105) as colonial plans sought to link the relocation of a slaughterhouse with the resettlement of ancillary trades. In conclusion, the recent creation of the Ghazipur slaughterhouse is used to argue that while the significance of cultural questions in matters of meat remain, the shift of the slaughterhouse has now been recast again as a ‘matter of waste and pollution alone’ (p. 112).
The next two chapters on congestion and pollution are more formally concerned with planning and have strong overlaps as they detail the trials and tribulations of the Delhi Improvement Trust and the Delhi Master Plans. The author points out that in the calculation and alleviation of congestion by the Improvement Trust, the rule of colonial difference and profit motives was again at play. Significantly, like the activities of colonial Improvement Trusts elsewhere, Sharan suggests that ‘the poor were rehoused, if ever, only after the Trust had acquired, developed and made a profit on its extension schemes’ (p. 145). The 1962 Master Plan is used to explore how the language of ‘counter magnets’ and ‘zoning’ became a familiar nationalist recourse in creating a well-ordered and ‘inclusive’ modern city. However, examples are skillfully deployed to reveal that quite the reverse happened. If not ostensibly the poor, it became the rural that did not find space within the plan. And ironically, by the 1970s the poor were recast as environmental burdens to be removed for their ‘encroachment’ on government lands (p. 163). Industrial pollutants too proliferated despite the faith in land use planning (zoning) and Sharan convincingly argues that the object of the latter has simply been geared to address the acceptable use of land but not the real control of pollutants. It is the old city in particular that emerges battered and bruised in Sharan’s account, suffering from a politics of neglect into the present.
Sharan’s book is remarkable for its analytical acuity in comprehending the urban condition. As possibilities of pollution containment seem no longer viable and as the question of the environment is posed as a matter of life itself, the author highlights that alongside modernist planning, a perceptible yet tentative shift in rationalities is evident: of apprehending risk through the development of the precautionary principle. Despite the impressiveness of his work, there are, however, a few points that need further clarification. First, one wonders how the liberalisation reforms of the 1990s have influenced the travel of global biomedical and e-waste, as they continue to search for new markets of disposal. How has the city come to be redefined as a result of this? Second, barring a couple of references, there is little discussion in the book on how greenery and debates around the garden city movement intersected with questions of congestion and pollution in Delhi. Lastly, one returns to Sharan’s point about continuity between the colonial and post-colonial. The author maintains that while there have been shifts in slum improvement and rehousing, zoning laws and the rise of the precautionary principle, in matters of water supply and treatment for example, the shadow of the colonial modern looms large. It remains unclear, however, as to why there are stronger continuities in some areas over others, especially so given the larger legacy of institutional and technological failures that haunt us. Nonetheless, this book represents a valuable contribution to our understanding of urban environmental issues, the contemporary Indian city and its troubled relationship with modernity.