Business as Usual? Bazars and Communalism in Colonial Delhi, 1913–32

2025-06-12

This paper uncovers a hitherto unnoticed pattern of communal segregation among establishments located in some of Delhi’s most important bazars. It demonstrates that this pattern, emerging between 1913 and 1932, was driven by structural features of the ways in which Delhi’s trade and retail interacted with communal violence in the 1920s. Those features include the dislocating effects of communal violence on bazars. More strident political activity by merchants, however, was important fuel to this fire. Merchants did not, also, restrict themselves to repeating communal tropes developed elsewhere. Their self-organisation gave shape to a conception of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ trades. Rather than see a communal ‘pre-Partition’ in the 1930s, this evidence suggests that communal segregation was already well on the rise in the 1920s. Business as usual, then, was a source of deepening communal antagonisms rather than, as is sometimes assumed, a source of everyday bonhomie.

Business as Usual? Bazars and Communalism in Colonial Delhi, 1913–32

South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies · 2023-11-02

This paper uncovers a hitherto unnoticed pattern of communal segregation among establishments located in some of Delhi's most important bazars. It demonstrates that this pattern, emerging between 1913 and 1932, was driven by structural features of the ways in which Delhi's trade and retail interacted with communal violence in the 1920s. Those features include the dislocating effects of communal violence on bazars. More strident political activity by merchants, however, was important fuel to this fire. Merchants did not, also, restrict themselves to repeating communal tropes developed elsewhere. Their self-organisation gave shape to a conception of 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' trades. Rather than see a communal 'pre-Partition' in the 1930s, this evidence suggests that communal segregation was already well on the rise in the 1920s. Business as usual, then, was a source of deepening communal antagonisms rather than, as is sometimes assumed, a source of everyday bonhomie.

Chris Moffat. <i>India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh</i>.

The American Historical Review · 2023-12-01

Journal Article Chris Moffat. India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh. Get access Chris Moffat. India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp xi, 282. Cloth $105.00, paper $32.99. Anish Vanaik Anish Vanaik Purdue University, US, US Email: avanaik@jgu.edu.in Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1834–1835, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac059 Published: 05 December 2023

Book review: Sushmita Pati, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi

Society and Culture in South Asia · 2023-07-01

Sushmita Pati, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), ISBN: 978-1-316-51727-7 (Price not known).

Reframing racism: political cartoons in the era of Black Lives Matter

2020-12-12

Possessing the city property and politics in Delhi, 1911-1947

2020-01-01 · 6 citations

Delhi as an urban space was re-made in the late-colonial period, not purely because of the new architecture, but also because of crucial social transformations. This text poses the question: who owned property, and what did they do with it, with answers rooted in the South Asian state, housing, finance, and religious conflict

Delhi

2020-10-15

Delhi has a unique place among the three big metropolises of India. Compared to Mumbai and Kolkata, Delhi’s history is much older: stretching back to the 12th century. Its growth in size, however, is much more recent. From a population of a little over a million in 1951, Delhi and its satellites—the National Capital Region (NCR)—had a population of over eighteen million in the 2011 census. In fact, Delhi’s urban history can be divided neatly at independence. Before that time, Delhi’s urban form reflected its repeated (but not continuous) status as a setting of political power. For the period of explosive urban growth after independence, scholarship about planning initiatives and their discontents abounds. There are excellent accounts of the movement from high-modernist planning to the more recent invocations of making Delhi a world-class city. Inadequate housing and repeated displacements of the poor are keynotes in this scholarship. Social movements, particularly those of the urban poor, have been an important theme from the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. Alongside spatial conflicts over planning, there is a rich vein of empirical work, and some theorization, of the ways in which political mobilizations around religion have shaped the city. Scholars have also dwelt on the complicated structure of urban governance in Delhi—as national capital and burgeoning metropolis, as an urban region that spans four separate provinces, as a megacity engulfing rural pockets, and as an administrative and commercial center ringed by an industrial periphery. Urban interventions aimed at improving Delhi’s environment have also been a topic of scholarly study. Thus, the expulsion of so-called polluting industries in Delhi, on the one hand, has gone together with the emergence of industrial zones in the peripheries of the NCR. Broadly speaking, the scholarship on historical urbanisms in Delhi points to the ways in which shifting structures of power generated urban forms in the Delhi landscape. Unsurprisingly, one manifestation of this long history has been in the active presence of heritage discourses. There is a particularly rich literature on the ways in which the present and the past coexist in modern Delhi, and the multiple possibilities for place-making opened up thereby. The author would like to thank Deepasri Baul and the anonymous reviewer for their suggestions.

Grave Investments

2019-11-21

Abstract Chapter 7 studies the connection between modes of community formation, the general commodification of urban space, and the specific effects of this on religious places. In a city where profit and loss from urban space was moulding the urban fabric, religious structures were no exception. Effective management of temples and mosques came to require that wealth be generated and accounts be maintained. At the same time, sacral sites were also seen in precisely the opposite manner, as outside of the process of commodification. Indeed, there were numerous efforts, especially at the local level, to prevent illegitimate commodification of religious structures by local managers or owners. Through the 1930s, a resolution was offered by religious collectives that defined themselves against local managers and claimed to operate in the interests of the community as a whole. Abstract space, then, called forth more abstract conceptions of community.

Intimacy in Four Registers

2019-11-21

Abstract Chapter 5 outlines the convergence between the state and the property market in Delhi during this period. This convergence can be understood in terms of four registers of intimacy between the state and the market. For one, the state internalized market valuations into its own everyday practice—a kind of ingestion of the property market. A second register might be thought of as affinity—an attraction towards the property market as an opportunity and means to make profits and boost income. A third register resembles something more like symbiosis—a coming together of state and urban property to the point where it becomes impossible to think about the latter except inasmuch as it was mediated by the state. The fourth register is that of the property market as nightmare, thwarting efforts of the state to serve the ‘common good’.

Landlords, Tenants, and Real Estate Firms

2019-11-21

Abstract Chapter 3 studies the changing nature of ownership and tenancy in Delhi. It examines the property market at a number of different levels: the poor, the suburban ex-farmer, women, and the wide variety of intermediate groups, from petty traders to the emerging professional middle classes. Patterns of ownership and speculation in the property market were transformed by depression of credit in the 1920s. New actors in the property market emerged from the mid-1930s onwards. Large firms specializing in real estate and cooperative housing societies were two new kinds of entity that made their initial beginnings in this period. While often unsuccessful, these entities reflected a larger structural dilemma: the need to solve the problem of access to easy credit.