Abstract
Is it possible to discuss utopia without taking note of ideologies underneath? While a sociologist of knowledge would be inclined to answer in negative, Smriti Srinivas seems to think otherwise. A Place for Utopia performs a mammoth feat, through terrible limitations, as it explores the nuanced meanings of urbanism in South Asian imagina-tions through the twentieth century. The author methodologically sets up the ‘urban’ as a spatial category to be read through the complexes of spirituality, environment, architectural designs, flows of capital among others, within contexts set up by changing meanings of modernity. These themes are rendered lifelike through her extensive archival and eth-nographic research and historical placement of these themes to make possible a contextually accountable understanding. She also brings together biographies with personal and subjective geographies, to better place the professional lives of individuals she traces and the urban forms she looks at (which come alive as spaces only in their changing meanings and varied usages).
With Patrick Geddes, she explores the way in which ‘utopia’ is not spatially and/or temporally distinct from the present. She explores tropes of interpreting modernity in local contexts and exploring definitions of urban to be understood through everyday living and symbolic catego-ries as well as those of environment, waste management and health. She specifically focuses on the nature of urbanism proposed by him in smaller cities (Indore, for instance) which bring together pilgrimage and planning, as she puts it.
Through the travels and movements of Jinarajadasa of the Theosop-hical society, she enters into the landscape of urbanism in South India and intellectually grounds his toiling in the Adyar gardens. Carving an interpretation through his writings and biography which reiterates that the presence of a ‘utopia’ is rooted in practice and in labour. For Jinarajadasa, seeking out Adyar gardens as the ‘good place’ was founded on the bringing together of spiritual thought and practice and bringing together human and non-human nature (charted through the special focus on children in his writings) and transcendent localism which embraces his globally marked geography.
Srinivas’ explorations of urban designs are strongly informed by their histories, evident throughout her book. The understanding of Adyar gar-dens, for instance, is located not simply through the work of Jinarajadasa and the intellectual traditions which influenced him but also the history of the city of Chennai as the traditions of gardening that were part of the scene at the moment (among other discourses).
Her ventures into the spiritual traditions of Vedanta’s ‘ecumenicalism’ as well as movement and spirituality in the contemporary city of Bangalore also offer sites to engage with the themes of urbanism through experience in different contexts. The aesthetic experience of the urban present (sights, smells, bodily movements and feelings) then becomes vital to the accessing the past as well as the future(s). History is understood through traces and the ways in which the city is embodied.
Her investigations into the Californian Vedanta historically posit-ion the philosophy of the institution through the architectural designs, practices within the space (goddess worship, affiliations with trantra and bhakti traditions) and more prominently the publications which underlined its intentions. By tracing the contributors and contributions to the journals and publications of Vedanta, the author focuses on the spatially rooted trajectory informed by the environment (a theme which is explored in greater detail in her research on the city of Bangalore). However, her focus with regard to Vedanta remains on the structuring of its beliefs which, according to her, is informed by ‘global ecumenicalism’; a range of spiritual beliefs flowing through the nervous system of the ‘utopian’ space.
Srinivas’ observations in Bangalore are especially indicative of the
thickets of urban spaces rooted in histories, patterns of migration, flows of capital, spiritual geographies and seamless flows of capital and con-sumption. She weaves together the infrastructural changes of the city and the ‘somatic’ inhabitations that people undertake through everyday movements and living. The theme of utopia is evoked in the context of spirituality through historically rooting traditions of reki, trans-national pilgrimages (Sathya Sai Baba) bringing together a healthy union of the body and the mind for an ‘Indian new age’.
She uses walking, through parts of Bangalore, as a methodological intervention (following Benjamin and Bakhtin) to allow for an under-standing of the urban rooted in experience that works in varying relations with the city on the map. Exploring the development of shrines (revered by migrant populations) by the roadside in neighbourhoods of lower socio-economic status to consumption havens for the middle class, she highlights just how complex the subjective geographies in urban spaces can be.
Her focus on individuals, such as Geddes or Jinarajadasa or Swami Prabhawananda of Vedanta, mark an attempt understand urban utopias beyond perfection that culminated after the complete destruction of existing structures. Utopias are to be sought in the present through a union of thought and practice, and hence which cannot afford stagnation.
There is a general sense of expanding and complicating the sense of what one means by ‘urban’ that comes through in the book. Delving into themes of spirituality, religiosity and the environment, she locates the urban in traditions that go beyond industry and mindless consumption. The urban is traced through movements (travelling within the city, pilgrimages, migrations) and seen in a state of flux where memory is spatially inscribed and is embodied in somatic movements of individuals and groups.
There is, of course, always more to be said about the specificities of the varying meanings people make of space and how they live it. In an almost meditative understanding of a transcendental forms of urbanism, what could be further explored are the conflicts which underline and impregnate the everyday experiences allowing us to go back to structures of difference and inequality.