Book review: Abdou Maliq Simone,Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South

This little book by a highly articulate urbanist is at first sight of limited relevance for readers focused on South Asia. Yet it contains wonderful surprises, as it talks in some depth about Hyderabad (pp. 80–8) and suburban Delhi (pp. 84–115). Simone addresses scholars of ‘home’ and of the city as a collection of negotiated spaces, which he labels as districts, linked to notions of neighbourhood, familiar in South Asia as para , mohalla and much else. Gazing at global/glocal manifestations of life in working-class urban neighbourhoods, depicting them partly as ‘uninhabitable spaces’ (p. 9), Simone speaks to urban studies and globalisation, meditates on postmodern urban life and charts the multiple connections and transformations in the experience of urban living.

The disruptive introduction (pp. 1–33), titled ‘The Uninhabitable’, seeks to capture the fleeting, highly dynamic and volatile nature of postmodern urbanity. Throughout this book, three major interconnected themes are developed. The first is the predicament that there may be a perceived need for structure and order, yet this is never completely possible (p. 4). This yearning for some kind of order is constantly undermined by deeply plural realities. The second theme concerns contradictions of poverty and technology (p. 18ff.), and a third theme problematises the position of Muslims in the world, including South Asia.

Regarding the first theme, Simone is not mainly concerned with the state of governance, but stresses, as expressed in the book’s title, the improvised nature of urban human life. And yet, ‘[n]o matter how improvised, lives need to be held, supported’ (p. 4). While this perceived need comes close to ‘traditional’ notions of connectedness, the postmodern urbanist author steps back from this abyss of a controlling order, whether religious or secular, since ‘to hold easily mutates into a form of capture, and if urban life comes to depend upon improvisation, the holding cannot take the form of a strictly notated score’ (p. 4). Simone shows here ‘a politics of the periphery’ (p. 32), a process in which ‘[t]here is too much going on for anyone to exert an overarching claim on controlling these districts’ (p. 108).

Improvised lives, too, require spaces in which to develop. Simone argues that the constant rhythmic movement of urban life plays itself out locally, in districts, ‘as places capable of holding an intensive heterogeneity of lives and ways of doing things, but which also do not hold residents down to specific regimens of discipline or anticipation’ (p. 4). In this way, residents are ‘held in an atmosphere of things continuously being worked out and proportioned’ (p. 4), so that ‘a person becomes more than one and less than two’ (p. 17). This radical bottom-up approach, where even in Delhi, dilli bahut dūr hai (‘Delhi is far away) illuminates how the local and the global interact in never-ending rhythms of incessant turbulence (p. 17). Constant dynamic movement (p. 7) involves a forever changing sense of place so that individuals ‘spiral around each other and their respective places of operation’ (p. 17). Simone thus describes human predicaments in the postmodern anthropocene, the post-global world (p. 11), a malfunctioning and yet functioning highly diverse urban environment, in which humans employ ‘all kinds of makeshift measures to regulate proximity and distance’ (p. 18). This activity produces rhythm so that the urban districts become ‘a built environment that generates a rhythm of both convergence and detachment’ (p. 18), supported by all kinds of technologies, including moneyless credit systems. Indeed, ‘[t]he slums are full of machines’ (p. 18).

Technologically accelerated, the frenetic pace of activities has quickened, so that both tāl and laya of these breathless dynamism have been affected in this agitated world. South Asian readers might recognise this new post-global description as a modified kaliyuga , a new age of confusion, dominated by improvised forms of life rather than order and certainty. While Simone emphasises connections, these religious and pluri-diverse scenarios and encounters do not segregate the religious and the secular. As the book’s title indicates, everything in life remains imperfect and improvised. Simone, himself a kind of footloose migrant, a Weltenbummler in German, a kind of global traveller, aimless yet not without purpose, is among other things a Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in Germany. As an author, he excels in bringing out the intensely unpredictable and plural nature of human life and ways to manage it.

Regarding Hyderabad and suburban Delhi, Simone admits not being a South Asia expert (p. 99), yet makes highly pertinent observations in the section titled ‘Hyderabad: Looking Out for the Ummah from the Trash’ (pp. 80–8), combining his lifelong interest in Islam with India’s urban recycling economy, in which bulk waste material is received and recycled in various ways. These may be toxic, as the account of tanneries in Bholakpur (pp. 83–5) confirms. Partially controlled by Chinese business interests, the tanneries have largely shifted from Hyderabad to Chennai, but continue to pollute the local water and sewage infrastructure, reflecting ‘a district of fine-tuned balances, not overt collective organization’ (p. 87). Thus, ‘Bholakpur is something that is already gone, but in its departure intensifies the power of what remains—not as leftovers but as some force, difficult to identify or contain’ (p. 88). Intriguingly, Simone relates this to local people’s experience of Islam, as ‘something that also has to be paid attention to’ (p. 88).

Chapter 4, ‘Inscribing Sociality in the Dark: The Pragmatics of a Legible Home’ (pp. 89–121), starts with a well-known Koranic verse about creation to explore what Simone identifies as triple darkness. In Delhi’s ‘backward Muslim area’ (p. 100) of New Seelampur, where the actual interest in Islam is often perfunctory (p. 112), Muslims as a community that may well have little in common (p. 89) are shown to experience Islam as ‘the voice of investment’ (p. 104). Intensely busy in various forms of production and recycling, trade and distribution, they often work together with different kinds of Hindus. Their improvised lives are not necessarily precarious (p. 110), but there is ‘no discernible scale on which to work out the conundrum that these places exist as both protection and trap’ (p. 111). A brief exposition of how this may give rise to locally-focused initiatives by young Muslims (pp. 112–5) identifies the scope for incipient Islamic urban politics. This gives rise to the claim that ‘Muslims across the world are preoccupied with failure’ (p. 116), yet also highlights the productivity of failure, as it constantly sparks new initiatives and efforts. In a largely improvised urban context, this relates, ultimately, to ways that can foster spatial justice for all (p. 119) and also generates an experience of ‘home’.

Chapter 5, ‘The Politics of Peripheral Care’ (pp. 122–37) concludes this book with the advice that cultivating elite obsessions with absolute unwillingness to tolerate injustice is not really a feasible method to address the various forms of harm experienced by the peripheral people portrayed in this book. Depicting the challenges as a ‘navigation of the tightrope’ (p. 134), Simone suggests finally that ‘it is unreasonable to expect a politics of sustained antagonisms at the barricades’ (p. 136) and advises that elite political activists need to learn from the political practice of peripheral urban people, ‘as a series of rhythms that enable surprising, frustrating, sometimes confusing, sentiments and practices of residents caring for and enduring with each other’ (p. 137). This final appeal, not to oppose and kill each other, but to continue collaborative improvisation in conditions of scarcity and austerity, is not false consciousness (p. 123), but post-global realism, with significant lessons for South Asia, too.