From Cybermohalla to Trickster City: Writing from the margins of Delhi

Abstract

This article explores the way Delhi was being converted into a “world-class” city in order to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The negative consequences of the “beautification” project were borne by the urban poor living in informal settlements in the centre of Delhi. The Cybermohalla project created by Sarai (at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi) in collaboration with the non-governmental organization (NGO) Ankur, set up media labs in many of these settlements. These labs became a platform for young practitioners to transmit the challenges of living in Delhi and building their own public sphere. The blogs and details of life in these settlements were put on the Cybermohalla website. Some of these works were included in the 2007 anthology, Bahurupiya Shaha, published in translation in 2010 as Trickster City: Stories from the Belly of the Metropolis translated by Shveta Sarda, who worked closely with these authors since the inception of the Project. The blogs published as diaries examine critically the definition of testimonio that emerged in Latin America.

Keywords:

• Internal migrants
• informal settlements
• public sphere
• community
• testimony
• postcolonial Delhi

Notes

1. Delhi was declared Union Territory in 1956 to provide better administrative and financial support. The Delhi Development Authority (DDA) was constituted as an Act of Parliament to check the haphazard growth of Delhi. Roy (2010) points out that “for the next three years the TPO, guided by the experts from the Ford Foundation, developed a Master Plan for Delhi for twenty years” (150). This was presented “along with maps and charts for unprecedented ‘public’ discussion in 1960.” It elicited “over 600 objections and suggestions from (as documented in the final Plan itself) ‘the public, cooperative house-building societies, associations of industrialists, local bodies, and various Ministries and Departments of the Government of India’”. Roy points out, however, that “the associations of the working poor did not appear in the list of what constitutes the ‘public’” (150). Thus one can say that the urban poor were not included in this exercise of constructing the city, though they were the ones who actually built Delhi.

2. One of the first settlements to be demolished by the colonial authorities was Basti Harphool Singh in 1924; the residents were then moved to the outskirts of the eighth city being built there (Roy 2010, 146).

3. The young practitioners prefer to refer to the areas they live in (known commonly either as slums or informal settlements) as localities (Butcher 2009, 173). In this way, the participants challenge the stigma attached to their places of residence.

4. Shveta Sarda (2010) explains how the blogs were set up by the practitioners to make public the unsettling experience of losing their homes as the bulldozers inched their way into the settlements (309–310).

5. Some scholars now claim that testimonio emerged from the experiences of the Holocaust and the anti-colonial movements for liberation that took place after the Second World War (Fernández Benítez 2010, 48).

6. This narrative invited a fair share of controversy. David Stoll (1999) disputes some of the incidents related by Menchú. John Beverley (2004) responded to Stoll’s arguments (79–93).

7. The Bolivian Government, for instance, had privatized the management of water. The price of water skyrocketed, which led to a water war in Cochabamba, led by the indigenous communities who suffered the most from this privatization (Lobina 2000). Another example of resistance to the detrimental effect of globalization on marginalized communities is the Zapatista Movement led by Subcomandante Marcos in Chiapas, which exploded on January 1, 1994, as Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with the USA and Canada. Marcos has since stepped down as commander.

8. It can also be said that I too am a mediator as I have transcribed and translated into English Nagar’s answers to my questions. However, as I translated, I involved Nagar to ensure that I did not misinterpret his point of view.