Economic and Political Weekly November 25, 2006

4905
In the City, Out of Place
Environment and Modernity, Delhi 1860s to 1960s
Over the last two decades, cities as spaces of residence have come into conflict with
cities as sites of work, mediated by concerns around the environment. This essay engages
with the nature of urban modernity in India while historicising the debates over the
environment in Delhi. The issues and practices bundled together as environmental, around
which strategies and tactics are organised, shift through time. Infrastructure and public
health; nuisance and noxious trades; pollution and zoning; standards and technoscience;
and environmentalism through legal rights, leave their distinct imprints on how we dwell
in the city. An environmental injury, perhaps, does not lie in Nature alone and must
be apprehended through frameworks that render these injuries intelligible. The
attention to these shifting registers shall help to link planning and environment
both to power and to an anthropology of the urban modern in India.
AWADHENDRA SHARAN
thick foliage, cramped and ill-ventilated housing, etc.
3
Excrement,
corpses, carcasses, and their odours, were anathema to the sani-
tary inspectors in cities across the world. Alain Corbin writes
that through the nineteenth century to contemplate the mass of
vapours that accumulated where living beings crowded together
was to be seized with a vertiginous sense of alarm.
4
Not sur-
prisingly, the putrid crowd, the togetherness of people and animals
and the enclosed nature of residential spaces became familiar
objects of reform. Comprehensive water and sewerage systems,
well ventilated houses, clear streets and public spaces through
which a civic community could express the urban collective self
were hallmarks of 19th century European cities as they responded
to the spatial and social impacts of the industrial revolution.
5
The
functioning of the human heart, as William Harvey had revealed
it, shaped an image in which modern European and American
cities cast themselves, as circulatory systems with unhampered
movement of air, water and citizens through the body of the city.
6
Liberal governmentality implied that these networks shaped
individual conduct without being directly interventionist, clean-
liness being a function not of the exercise of police power but
of technological discipline that left the home and the family
relatively autonomous to shape itself.
7
Colonial cities could not have been more different. The crowd
was suspect for more reasons than one and the lack of legibility
of colonial streets that wound their way into narrow lanes and
cul-de-sacs spoke both of inferior urban design and functioned
as a sign of degeneracy.
8
Local urban practices, whether they
related to the mix of the public or private or concerned the proper
relationship between the spaces of the living and the dead, could
not simply be cajoled into transforming themselves. Instead they
had to be coaxed into rendering themselves in the image of
Europe, making municipal governance in colonial contexts more
a matter of authority and policing than of individual fashioning.
9
As Gyan Prakash has argued colonial governmentality could not
be the mere tropicalisation of the Western norm, but its funda-
mental dislocation.
10
What was achieved in the metropolitan
centre through the sovereignty-discipline-government triangle
identified by Foucault could be effected in the colony only through
the power of police; the making of the citizen in the imperial domain
was counterposed to the domination of subjects in the colonies.
O
ver the last two decades, cities as spaces of residence
have increasingly come into conflict with cities as
sites of work, the two often being mediated by concerns
about the environment. For some commentators environmental
degradation in urban India is a consequence of administrative lapse
and lack of political will. Short-term interests have prevailed over
long-range, scientifically conceived plans, leading to chaos with
industries flourishing in residential spaces and majority of the urban
poor huddled in numerous bastis and slums.
1
For others, contem-
porary environmentalism in cities such as Delhi, aims no more than
to render invisible that which is unaesthetic, the ugliness of pro-
duction, and together with it, bodies at work.
2
This essay seeks to
engage with the nature of urban modernity while historicising the
debates over environment in Delhi. I suggest that the constellation
of issues and practices that are bundled together as environ-
mental, around which strategies and tactics are then organised,
shift through time. Five broad constellations may be suggested:
infrastructure and public health; nuisance and noxious trades;
pollution and zoning; standards and technoscience; and environ-
mentalism through legal rights, each of which leaves its distinct
imprint on how we dwell in the city. Argued another way, the
essay suggests that the nature of an environmental injury does not
lie in Nature alone but must be apprehended through the framework
that render these injuries intelligible. The attention to these shifting
registers, we hope, shall help us link planning and environment both
to power and to an anthropology of the urban modern in India.
The inquiry is developed in two parts, the first concerning the
nature of colonial urbanism in Delhi and the second addressing
the period of nationalist planning. The conclusion briefly outlines
the framework of regulatory science and legal rights through
which environmentalism in contemporary Delhi has unfolded
over the last decade.
Colonial Urbanism:
Infrastructure, Nuisance and Congestion
Technologies of urban governance till the end of the 19th
century were anchored in conceptions of public health. Miasma
was the influential theory of disease that explained a sick body
through the corruption of air on account of decaying vegetation,
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4906
In Delhi, Europeans and Indians had lived in a rather mixed
fashion till the middle of the 19th century. This changed fairly
rapidly in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857 when a third of
the city was demolished and rebuilt. Post-mutiny Delhi, like many
other Indian cities, had to be sanitised and improved, with
a view to establishing order and containing disaffection. In 1863,
a municipal committee was established for the city but unlike
English municipalities that provided amenities such as gas,
electricity, water and sewerage networks through taxes on rental
value of property, Indian municipalities, Delhi included, were
hampered by considerably less power, and even less financial
resources, to effect the necessary transformation.
11
Not surpris-
ingly, the infrastructure that developed could, at best, secure
partial improvements. Water supply in Delhi saw the replacement
of the system of canals and wells by piped water beginning in
the 1890s,
12
conservancy arrangements were reworked
13
and
electricity was first supplied on a regular basis from 1902.
14
Disease and disaffection were sought to be simultaneously
addressed through widening of roads and creation of open spaces
that separated European residents from native quarters.
15
Effec-
tive connectivity through these networks, however, was rather
limited, both on account of cultural differences and insufficient
finances.
16
By 1894, Jyoti Hosagrahar points out, only 146 houses
in the city, mostly European, had water connections. Few streets
were regularly maintained and by 1912 the municipality had been
able to build only 25 public latrines and three public urinals for a
city that now numbered close to 5,00,000.
17
Waterborne latrines
were yet to be introduced in the city by the first decade of the
century and the ambitious scheme floated in 1913 to provide a
waterborne sanitation system for the city remained a paper dream
in the face of the fiscal conservancy of the government of India.
18
Infrastructure in the colonial city, it may be suggested, operated
most powerfully in the symbolic realm, gesturing to an imminent
modernity, even as that modernity was endlessly deferred.
The management of vapours and nuisances defined a
second domain of interventions in the colonial city. The Military
Cantonments Act of 1864 contained regulations not only on land
use and drainage but also on nuisances and unlicensed trade.
19
Similarly, the report on the sanitary state of the army mentioned
unhealthy trades alongside bad air, badly constructed and
ill-ventilated habitations, poor drainage, etc, as contributing
to an undesirable state of affairs.
20
The remedy in law that had
developed Europe was largely in the nature of private disputes
suggesting that the enjoyment of ones property could not be at
the expense of injury to another. Typically used by one form
of productive activity (e g, agriculture) against pollution and
consequent loss of value caused by another (e g, industry), these
laws were resorted to rather infrequently by the working class
of Britain and found even less use in colonial cities.
21
Instead
what came to the fore as a technology of governance in colonial
India were the laws of public nuisance, coded first in the penal
code of 1862, chapter XIV of which concerns offences affecting
the public health, safety, convenience, decency and morals.
The code recognised a person to be guilty of public nuisance if
s/he carried out any act or is guilty of an illegal omission which
causes any common injury, danger or annoyance to the public
or to the people in general who dwell or occupy property in the
vicinity, or which must necessarily cause injury, obstruction,
danger or annoyance to persons who may have occasion to use
any public right. Instances of these included [any] negligent
act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life, [any]
malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to
life, fouling water of public spring or reservoir, making
atmosphere noxious to health, and negligent conduct with
respect to poisonous substance.
22
Thus defined, nuisance covered a rather wide spectrum of
activities, many of which were not recognised as nuisance even
in England.
23
Characteristic of the colonial context was also the
power enjoyed by local officials to prosecute under this law, with
the duty of lay inspectors being to see the abatement of
nuisances and to bringing the cases of nuisances before the
law.
24
Convictions for public nuisance increased rapidly between
1870s and 1910s in Bengal presidency from about 15 per cent
of total convictions to about 45 per cent of total convictions for
cognisable crimes.
25
The post-mutiny colonial state might have
affirmed a hands-off social policy at the highest levels of govern-
ment but as Veena Oldenburg suggests, there were steady attempts
to insert colonial agendas in fashioning the Indian society at lower
levels.
26
In every major city of the country we thus see nuisance
as providing an important frame for fashioning the urban order.
Michael Anderson mentions roadside hawking, bathing in a
stream, use of manure in local fishing and defecation on the streets
as instances in which the colonial state intervened in shaping
the everyday environment of cities. In Bombay we read of Arthur
Crawfords concern with trades such as dyeing that he tried in
vain to locate outside the city boundaries.
27
In Lucknow, the
location of the graveyard became a matter of great dispute.
28
In
Delhi, familiar nuisances included encroachments on public lands,
construction of new privies opening into public streets, dilapi-
dated houses, protruding walls endangering the lives of occupants
or passers by and cremation grounds, around all of which there were
frequent contests between the residents and municipal authorities,
given the rather different cultural understandings of public and
private, sacred and profane, appropriate and inappropriate
behaviours.
29
Even open spaces outside the city wall qualified as
sightless nuisance, rubbish lands that awaited improvement!
30
Fines and cessation of activity were two ways of dealing with
the issue of nuisance.
31
In Delhi, fines were levied for encro-
aching on roads, on unauthorised structures and for carrying on
offensive trades and at various times during the 19th century
tanners and dyers were relocated, taxes were levied on tehbazari
and on draught animals and milch cattle whose object was
entirely sanitary, lime kilns were removed to Ajmere gate
owing to smoke nuisance, trade in hides was sought to be
regulated and the slaughter house sought to be moved from its
location at Idgah to a site outside the city.
32
Anderson argues
that these frequent conflicts around nuisance were reflective of
an intense conflict over the use of public spaces and physical
resources suggesting that the state policy was at extreme variance
with the modes of existence and conceptions of property that
obtained in the local society. This was especially true as one
moved down the social ladder, the colonial law operating ad-
versely against economically marginal groups by dispossessing
them of common facilities that they had hitherto enjoyed. An
environmental good, Anderson suggests, did not imply the
same for those who relied upon rivers, streets, and wastelands
as key resources in the daily conduct of production and subsis-
tence and those who did not depend immediately upon common
property resources for subsistence.
33
Christine Rosens study
of nuisance laws in 19th century US also suggests that the move
to curb certain kinds of activities in the city was an aspect of
modernisation, the legal evidence suggesting that the bar for proof
of environmental harm caused by modern, steam-driven factories,
mines, etc, was considerably raised as compared to proof of harm
from traditional works like pottery, slaughter houses, wax making,
etc.
34
Andersons study of smoke pollution in Calcutta also sug-
gests that the burden of proof under the 1863 Calcutta and Howrah
smoke nuisances act was very high so as to make successful
prosecution almost impossible.
35
Conversely, we may note that
the dyers, weavers etc, who had been the objects of Crawfords
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4907
ire in Bombay had significant financial clout, the opposition to
these activities therefore not simply being a matter of economic
divide but reflective of the fact that they were seen as being out
of place in the modern city.
Read thus as a modernising impulse, it is possible to argue that
the delineation of nuisance activities were always inflected by
cultural markers. Mark Harrison points out that prior to the 19th
century climatic differences were seen as being sources of disease
but subsequent emphasis shifted to the habits of the natives, the
latter perspective being elegantly summed up in the view of the
surgeon Kenneth MacKinnon who wrote in 1848 that disease
depends mainly on general climate ... but it depends also in part
upon mere local causes, and on the social conditions, habits and
morals of the population.
36
The view found support in influential
quarters such as in the Cantonment Act of 1864 and in the writings
of Florence Nightingale: They live amidst their own filth,
infecting the air with it, poisoning the ground...polluting the
water... [some] even think it a holy thing to drink filth.
37
Quite
obviously, referents of pollution in colonial narratives were
always in excess of nature and included elements of aesthetics,
racial difference and class biases. Consider for instance these
reports from the Delhi municipality:
Ghosis living in Gali Shahtara are a source of great nuisance as
their cattle collect and roam about in the streets, and their
womenfolk collect cow-dung cakes within the railway boundary...
these dung cakes when stuck to the walls and roofs of the houses,
are as unsanitary as unsightly.
38
Over 66 per cent of the deaths from respiratory diseases occurred
in Delhi city...The larger percentage of deaths amongst females
is no doubt largely due to the purdah system and to the insanitary
and congested housing conditions.
39
Nuisance and disease, in the colonial imagination, thus called
for both material improvements and the containment of the
dangers posed by native habits. Cultural differences translated
into spatial distinctions and what Gyan Praksh calls the irreduc-
ible difference regarding the truth of the Indian body both
produced the knowledge and techniques of policing and the
pragmatics of education in matters of health and hygiene.
Congestion, in addition to sanitation and nuisance, was the third
important category through which the colonial state sought to
manage native populations and cityscapes. The people in Delhi,
Colonel Beadon, president of the New Delhi Municipal Com-
mittee, noted in 1912 have been huddled into a totally insufficient
area so that the streets have been encroached upon [and] slums
have been built.
40
By the early part of the 20th century it was
suggested to take up the question of extension comprehensively
and prepare outlines of a general scheme to provide for roads,
streets and space for building during the next 30 years.
41
Improvement ever more tried to anticipate rather than merely
respond to a situation and as it did so, it began to acquire the
veneer of a plan. However, contrary to the assumption that any
such plan would be for the betterment of the entire city, the two
cities of Delhi were increasingly severed. Further, contrary to
the growth of professional planning in the metropolitan context,
the most that Delhi got was a bureaucratic Improvement Trust.
The formation of this Trust was first proposed by A P Hume in
the Report on Relief of Congestion in Delhi that outlined the need
to provide an additional built area of about 1,200 acre to house
the excess population of the city (estimated at 1,00,000 persons),
which, Hume felt, would be best carried out by an Improvement
Trust.
42
This was so because the Trust could work in public
interest while ignoring politics in a manner that was not
possible even for a municipality with limited powers:
The argument for an Improvement Trust rests on the basis that
having decided what scheme should be undertaken it has statutory
authority to carry out the scheme. Where a municipality might
be undecided for months and years regarding the execution of any
particular scheme, a Trust, subject to government approval, has
power by statute to notify that a particular scheme be undertaken.
43
Beginning December 1937 the Delhi Improvement Trust drew
up a number of schemes, 26 schemes being listed for the first
triennial, followed by another 21 schemes between 1941and 1944
and six schemes between 1947 and 1950, all of which were
marked by the precedence of financial consideration over im-
provement. Tanners were not shifted from Rehgar Pura as it
was felt that this would have a prejudicial effect on land value
in Sarai Rohilla. The slaughterhouse remained where it was and
big slum clearance schemes such as the Delhi-Ajmere Gate
rehousing scheme, in which approximately 2,000 families were
to be relocated, remained on paper since it was felt that existing
ground rents would make the entire scheme unprofitable.
44
Hume
had been well aware of the potential pitfalls. He wrote, On the
subject of poor class accommodation that the comparatively
heavy cost of acquisition of land, which in the circumstances
will not yield a big return, is a serious obstacle, unless proposals
for such a scheme go hand in hand with proposals for improve-
ment of an area of government land from which a higher return
may be expected.
45
As it turned out, between the play of the
economic and the environmental, the latter understood as decent
housing conditions that could rid the city of its slums, the former
always trumped. Sandip Hazeerasingh rightly points out that, in
spite of the consistently high level of frustration at their failure
to reverse the process of environmental degradation, the colonial
agencies never questioned the shibboleth that urban development
should be driven by the profit and prestige motives of the dominant
classes.
46
Not surprisingly the committee set up by the govern-
ment of independent India to inquire into the functioning of the
Trust was scathing in its assessment of the Trusts activities. The
capital of an independent, democratic India, it suggested, needed to
be built according to radically different set of imperatives than what
had characterised the first city of an Empire, based on scientific
knowledge and in accordance with a master plan.
47
Even more
critically, it suggested, the planned city must cater to the needs
of all members of the urban public, especially bearing in mindthe
requirements of the poorest sections of the population.
48
Nationalist Modernisation and Urban Environments
In 1947, India was partitioned and Delhi became a city of
refugees forced to migrate from the other side of the newly minted
border under the shadow of death and massacre. Simultaneously,
the normal stream of migration continued, contributing to a
massive growth of the city population from approximately 4,00,000
persons at the beginning of the century to over 17,00,000 by 1951,
the large numbers taking a toll on the citys infrastructural
capacities. This was a matter of some concern to the newly
independent rulers of India. Bad environment affects us all alike;
we are choked, each one of us...by the meanness and squalor
which stretch their tentacles upwards from the lives of our less
fortunate fellow citizens, wrote G D Birla in his report on the
Delhi Improvement Trust.
49
The crisis was evidently most signi-
ficant for the slum dwellers, but its articulation was through the
lens of the urban reformer, concerned simultaneously with health
and morality of the poor and danger to the city. Pandit Thakur
Das Bhargava, among many others, hinted at sexual/psycho-
logical tensions through proximate living: There is so much
congestion in Harpul basti that many families live in a single
room. Father, mother, son, daughter-in-law, daughter, son-in-law
are all huddled in the same room. Under the circumstances how
on earth can a person maintain his health (tandrusti), preserve
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4908
her shame (sharm/haya) or retain their morality.
50
Housing
congestion, the Birla Committee noted, was not only a causative
factor in the spread of tuberculosis and other communicable
diseases but also bred juvenile delinquency, accentuated the
bitterness of class antagonisms and fostered social discontent.
It observed Where honest toil can produce nothing but squalor
there need be no wonder that unsocial tempers rise.
51
Into this
social complex of doing justice for the honest worker, address-
ing the needs both of the victims of partition and those who were
merely poor and working towards the making of a national capital
that would not suffer the pyschological and social burdens of
mass poverty, Delhi began preparing for a planned future. This
was a political task, to be accomplished by technical means. If
in the case of the Improvement Trust, politics was evaded through
the creation of an intermediate institution between the govern-
ment and the elected municipality, nationalist urban planning
operated not by evading politics but by making it distinct from
technical calculations:
Non-officials do not understand anything about town planning
But any plan that will come now will come before this committee
on which there are plenty of non-official members. They can study
it and make any suggestions. But the actual planning for a town
or an urban area must be done by town planners.
52
In this background, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, in her capacity as
minister for health and local self-government, invited the Ford
Foundation to assist in the planning of Delhi in 1956.
53
Albert
Mayer, a US-based planner with prior experience of working on
the planning of Bombay and Chandigarh and the initiator of
Etawah rural community development project, was appointed to
head the consultation team consisting of a physical planner, a
specialist in government, an industrial planner, a transportation
specialist, an economist and an urban sociologist.
The city of Delhi that the planners encountered in the 1950s
was one that was embedded in the regional economy, drawing
upon resources, providing goods but above all attracting people,
both migrants and refugees. Its governance required the ability
to comprehensively map and order these flows so that optimum
balance could be obtained, minimising the friction of progress
as James Scott puts it.
54
A comprehensive regional and urban
plan was the suggested solution. Two strands of regional planning
had developed in the US since the 1920s, a metropolitan regional
development plan and another view inspired by Patrick Geddes
and the garden city movement that subscribed to low-density
urban developments situated in their regional contexts.
55
In the
case of Delhi, the region as metropolitan area found favour over
its conception as a resource region. Delhi, the argument went,
was an almost pure example of the need for the concept,
development and execution of a plan for the metropolitan region,
and within this metropolitan region two broad environmental
concerns were outlined: slums and industrial location.
56
The issue of slums, in post-partition Delhi, was an absolute
priority, to be tackled pragmatically and scientifically. In a letter
to Nehru, Mayer pointed out that while in the west the social
conscience that demanded slum elimination emerged after a
large build-up of capital and resources, in India, the task was
rendered far more difficult because of the growth of moral,
social and political pressure before the build-up of resources to
permit the massive attack required.
57
It is entirely understand-
able that Mayer was cautious that care must be exercised not
to imply a type and rate of action which in fact may not be possible
to attain or continue.
58
What was required, in his opinion, was
a demonstration effect, the need to solve select problems in
specific areas on a minimum, adequate, standard scale through
limited controlled development, while making long-term
plans.
59
Plans were thus drawn up for urban renewal of specific
areas and neighbourhoods (e g, Sarai Rohilla, Mata Sundari,
Motia Khan, Mubarakpur Kotla, etc), transit camps and
unauthorised land use, the last including on the one hand
beggars, vagabonds and squatters and on the other, open markets
and small vendors. The desire was to produce integration through
improvement, to secure at least a minimal degree of equity
through planning through schemes for relocation of basti squat-
ters in suitable areas not too far away from major work centres
with structures and facilities [that] may be substandard in order
to keep rents and costs down, while maintaining space standards
for schools and parks and streets, etc. It was also recommended
that these should be integrated with a larger neighbourhood and
that reasonable areas should be earmarked in several zones for
the low-income groups who migrate to Delhi on accord of the
relentless push from the rural areas.
60
Zoning, the plan argued, was entirely for promotion of health
and safety, moral and social welfare, and could not, on any count,
be used to accomplish any kind of human segregation like
excluding certain communities, or income groups from certain
areas.
61
In the course of parliamentary debates that preceded
the arrival of the American planners the issue had elicited two
responses. One view favoured the acceptance of difference in
standards and amenities so that all residents of Delhi had a place
to stay. It would be much better, Mohanlal Saxena, member
of Parliament from Delhi argued, if we divide the whole of Delhi
into zones and say such and such zones will be A class, such
and such will be B class and they will have such and such services,
some will have all the services and some will have a few.
62
To insist on uniform standards, he argued, would be to deprive
the many of decent housing who could not afford such living.
Others contested this logic of differentiation, arguing that similar
environmental amenities ought to be made available to all
electricity, water, latrines and parks being the needs of the urban
poor as much as of middle class residents.
63
The master plan when
it was formulated took both elements, suggesting that economic
differentiation would only partially translate into differences of
built form, the exceptions in quality of building material, etc, being
offset by the need to adopt a comprehensive system of building,
sanitary and other codes which prescribe adequate minimum
standards of health, sanitation and safety.
64
The rule of excep-
tions, it argued, would not translate into the zoning of difference.
However, what justice offered with one hand, culture withdrew
with the other. To be in city and inhabit its numerous bastis was
to be always under the injunction to mutate into an other, the
violence of the policing of colonial difference yielding to the
burden of the nationalist/modernist desire for assimilation. Slums
were about economic poverty but also social degeneration, so
that their improvement was always more than merely physical
reconstruction. Nehru stressed the need for improvement of
physical conditions but also of the need to face up to ingrained
habits and lack of desire as well as lack of training to use better
accommodation.
65
The Bharat Sevak Samaj wrote of slums as
a consequence of urban poverty, but remarked that miserable
environment in which they live breeds despair and a fatalistic
approach to life.
66
For them, social life in slums lacked any-
thing desirable and smacked of many unhealthy trends, sug-
gesting that social regeneration of slum dwellers ought to be
an essential and integral part of a slum clearance or slum
eradication programme.
67
It is another matter altogether that the
problems of the reformer were sometimes no more than alter-
native preferred by the dweller. Details of a survey of the slums
of old Delhi conducted by the Samaj, and made available to the
planners, make clear that though an overwhelming 90 per cent
of those surveyed expressed their dissatisfaction with the
existing conditions in Delhi slums, a mere 3 per cent considered
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4909
overcrowding to be a principal reason for the same; while many
spoke of the need for provisions, a mere 0.4 per cent considered
education of people in sanitary habits as a possible solution;
and while congestion had been a common concern of both the
colonial state and the nationalist modernisers, most slum dwe-
llers preferred to suffer a little more congestion to being cold
to social ties.
68
However, while these alternatives were re-
corded, they hardly registered and so even as the Samaj recom-
mended the provision of facilities, it also spoke of rousing social
and civic consciousness, infusing hope and confidence,
through a programme of extensive education.
69
The fullest
expression of this urge to recast the rural in the mould of the
appropriately urban came two decades later, expressed in the
words of Jagmohan:
I have always believed in the destiny of this city, in its historic
role, in its being a spiritual workshop of the nation, in its capacity
to impart urbanity and civility to the rural migrant...The real
problem of the slums is not taking people out of slums but slums
out of people.
70
But we anticipate our story. In the years when the master plan
was being put together, American consultants brought their own
views on the matter of the refashioning of Delhis slums on the
basis of American neighbourhood schemes that resonated with
ideas being promoted by Indian nationalists on the issue of civic
citizenship. In the American view too, Indian slums were more
than the aggregate of physical surroundings. They were a way
of life as well, one characterised by disease, illiteracy and limited
cultural resources, save cinema and gambling, peopled by persons
who were apathetic or even antagonistic to local authorities
and lacking community consciousness.
71
The task before the
planner was to help the slum dwellers make the transition from
this state to one of engaged civic disposition by stimulating
common frontiers of associations that would pave the way
for community consciousness and integration and identifying
natural leaders who would help organise mutual aid and self-
help work.
72
Planning and community were tied through the
making of vikas mandals (development councils), specifying
sets of activities in which the entire community could participate.
The education was not of slum dwellers alone but of all marginal
sections of the society including refugees and migrants. We need
to, Mayer wrote to Nehru, tie these submerged citizens into our
corporate and civic life, give them a sense of a stake in living and
performing [which would] both fulfill the needs of social policy
and buy time for a realistic policy of urban development.
73
This
was the proposal for the making of a reasoned civil society, that
in time was constantly undermined by the operations of the
political society.
74
The play between the social and the physical, between land-
use and environment and between environment and the fashion-
ing of the urban modern in Delhi found an even fuller expression
in considerations of industry and pollution, their types and location
and the extent to which zoning and planning could help in making
improvements. Zoning had first been introduced in Germany in
the late 19th century and soon became globally influential with
New York passing the first comprehensive zoning law in 1916
and the constitutionality of the zoning principle being upheld by
the US supreme court in 1926. Links between nuisance and zoning
and between zoning and planning were enunciated in the course
of the arguments presented before the US supreme court. Both
the proponents and opponents of zoning recognised that nuisance
laws were incapable of dealing with more dense, complex urban
settings, necessitating an extension of the police powers which
inhered in them. However, while opponents feared that zoning
on aesthetic grounds might constrain public welfare by restri-
cting growth of business and industry, proponents argued that
anticipation, not reaction, was needed in a new urban context
and zoning helped place a margin of safety between that which
is permitted and that which is sure to lend to injury or loss.
75
The argument against zoning also considered the question of
knowledge, arguing that municipal councils simply lacked the
wisdom and the knowledge to measure prophetically the surging
and receding tides by which business evolves and grows, to
foresee and map exactly the appropriate uses to which land shall
be developed and for each separate use.
76
The argument in
favour of zoning, in contrast, emphasised its scientific, apolitical
character: A zone plan finds its scientific as well as its legal
justification in the fact that it represents the product of a study
designed for the promotion of public health, safety, convenience,
prosperity and welfare, and that he who made the design kept
these purposes in mind throughout the work.
77
Thus conceived,
zoning was also tied to regional planning, so as to eliminate any
possibility of its manipulation by local interests. Zoning without
planning, it was suggested, lacked coherence and discipline in
the pursuit of goals of public welfare.
78
This was the tradition available to Mayer and his team at the
time they began to prepare the master plan for Delhi. Not sur-
prisingly, they made a strong case for zoning regulations as not
only protecting residential areas from the harmful invasions of
commercial and industrial uses but also promoting business and
industry through planned and orderly development.
79
However,
zoning was not simply an idea that had been grafted onto Indian
cities from elsewhere. As we saw above, versions of the zoning/
planning paradigm had been debated in India for some time and had
many Indian adherents.
80
In the course of the planning exercise,
J P Sah of the Central Regional and Urban Planning Organisation,
Delhi posited the necessary and desirable link between the
modernisation of nuisance laws and zoning:
Zoning regulation should provide a very effective remedy against
blight, non-conforming uses and high densitiesAt present only
very few trades, business or industries, characterised as offensive
and dangerous are subject to municipal licensing powers. There
is every reason why municipal licensing should be made so
extensive as to comprehend every trade, business or industry
within a city.
81
The consideration before the planners was two-fold: provision
of adequate workspace for workers and provision of adequate
space for the growth of desirable kinds of industry and production
in the city. The manufacturing industry was considered of some
importance for the economic growth of the city. However, existing
industries posed a number of problems. Apart from some cotton
mills, very few modern plants had been established in Delhi in
the preceding decades; industries established in the wake of the
inflow of refugee population were marked by severe inadequacies
regarding space, air and light; in most neighbourhoods, especially
in Old Delhi, there was an intimate mingling of industry with
residence; working space for manufacturing workers was limited;
many industries were rural in character and little suited for a
modern metropolis; and above all, many were noxious and
produced nuisance, making it imperative that they be relocated
elsewhere.
82
The size of plants and scale of nuisance, planners
suggested, were the two most important considerations in classi-
fying industries.
83
Depending on these, it was proposed to have
a number of industrial zones in the city. Multistoried flatted
factory spaces were envisaged for smaller industries and work-
shops that dotted the old city and the city centre and were not
noxious.
84
Work-cum-industrial centres were proposed for out-
lying industrial areas to provide for household manufacturing
units. Provision were also made for non-noxious light and service
industries.
85
In contrast, there was only a grudging acceptance
of clay mining and pottery and it was suggested too that large
Economic and Political Weekly November 25, 2006
4910
industries were undesirable industries in urban Delhi and
therefore, best located in neighbouring towns.
86
Finally, there
were those industries that were to be completely prohibited, viz,
the noxious industries that were associated with stench, smoke,
fumes, etc, posing hazards to those residing in their
neighbourhoods. A list of 22 such obnoxious and hazardous
industries was prepared and these, the plan emphatically argued,
must be kept out of Delhi urban area, leaving unsaid where these
should be located.
87
However, the most interesting case was that
of industries designated rural, discussions on which figure both
in the context of urban redevelopment and the making of new
industrial zones, sometimes described as noxious and at other
times as being merely anachronistic.
In the colonial period, we have suggested above, native habits
were considered a major cause of environmental degradation. In
many ways the nationalist plans for urban improvement and
dealing with nuisances carried this style of argument forward,
and yet they could hardly do so without dropping the baggage
of cultural inferiority ingrained in colonial writings. The response
that emerged was to deploy the trope of the rural, rural persons
and rural industrial processes/trades being made to stand in the
place of the native, as that which was prior and inferior and in
need of transformation. The first needed to be educated into being
properly urban/modern while the second required to be relocated
beyond the margins of the city, into urban villages. The main
plan itself spoke little of the subject except to recommend that
village-like trades such as keeping milch cattle be removed to
urban villages, which would both strengthen the rural economy
and help provide cheap milk to the city.
88
However, a more
elaborate set of reasonings were on offer in the work studies
related to the making of the master plan. Rural industries were
defined more widely to include such activities as pottery, tannery,
keeping milch cattle, handloom weaving, artistic metal works,
zari and zardosi making, etc. The criteria that made them rural
was not quite spelt out though the reasons regarding the necessity
for such a shift were on offer: these industries, it was argued,
were located in the heart of the residential areas, intensifying
slum conditions, and their relocation would therefore mean the
release of valuable land and weeding out those uses not
required in the urban core. It was argued too that some of these,
such as tanning, were also obnoxious and hence must be located
outside the proposed urbanisable limits. On the other hand, it
was assumed that the villages would gain through new economic
activities and rural life that had been stagnating would be revitalised.
The problem was that the people who practised such trades were
hardly appreciative of the win-win scenario. It was estimated that
of the nearly 30,000 families of slum dwellers involved in rural
industries, only about half would be willing to move to the urban
villages being created, the fate of the other half left unsaid.
89
This sharp polarisation between the urban and the rural, as
persons and in their economic roles, was posited not only in the
plan itself but also in its popular descriptions:
A further step would be to relieve urban Delhi of those members
of its population whose occupations and consequently ways of
living are primarily rural, and resettle them in the villages.
Tannery, pottery, weaving... are all occupations which belong not to
the city but the village ...Too many people now settled in Delhi...are
by their very nature and instincts rural dwellers ...if Delhi is to
be planned into a well integrated city, and to be maintained as such,
it needs inhabitants with a primarily urban psychology.
90
Nuisance and pollution were thus to be located elsewhere,
spatially and socially, and the discourse of planning acquired its
significance from its confidence in managing these separations.
Over the next three decades or so, this confidence has been much
shaken, both through the many exceptions to the master plan and
because there is now an entirely different order of material flows
and urban expectations than that which obtained for the planners,
necessitating the innovation of new institutional mechanisms.
Conclusion: New Beginnings
Earlier concerns with pollution that was visible and degradable
are giving way to new types of pollution with very small quantities
of synthetic chemicals thatdamage the environment...Despite
uncertainties and insufficient knowledge, political and scientific
decisions concerning environmental change will increasingly be
necessary.
91
This essay has argued that environment is a fluid concept,
linking cultures, populations, materials and spaces in specific
ways in particular historical conjunctures. In the colonial period,
public health and concerns around nuisance shaped the strategies
through which the state sought to manage spaces and populations.
About a half century ago, the nuisance paradigm yielded to the
planning approach in a bid to tackle pollution that occurred in
non-proximate instances. Over the last decade, land use planning
itself has had to gradually accommodate environmental planning,
first in the form of statutory laws governing air and water
pollution and then as a discourse of rights, environment as
fundamental right, as pronounced in numerous judgments of the
Supreme Court. Planning, in the 1950s had justified itself as a
science and a diagnostic of social needs that could address general
good through specific standards. Today, we reflect on the possible
limits of that science and the uncertainty that is intrinsic to
regulatory science trying to cope with an ever rapid introduction
of new chemicals and wastes into our environment and try to
unpack the new politics of environment legal, technoscientific
and highly mediated; precaution must take precedence over
follow-up. However, even in these contemporary environmen-
talist discourses there is also the evocation of common nuisance
laws, planning prescriptions and provisions of statutory laws,
suggesting that no one agenda totally eclipses another though
each does seek to fashion the city in its own way. Reflections
on the contemporary city requires that we recover the ways in
which we ordered our cities in the past, not with a view of a
return but to excavate their traces in our everyday habits and
ways of inhabiting the city.
Email: sharan@sarai.net
Notes
1 Gita Dewan Verma, Slumming in India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their
Saviours, Penguin Books, Delhi, 2002.
2 Amita Baviskar, The Politics of the City, Seminar 516, August 2002;
Dunu Roy, From Home to Estate, Seminar, 533, January 2004.
3 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment
and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850, OUP, Delhi, 1999.
4 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social
Imagination, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1986, p 47.
5 On sanitary city in England see Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and
Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick, Britain 1800-1854, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
6 Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2002, p 8.
7 Thomas Osborne, Security and Vitality, Drains, Liberalism and Power in
the 19th Century in Andrew Berry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds),
Foucault and Political Reason, Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Ration-
alities of Government, Routledge, London and New York, pp 99-122.
8 Jyoti Hosagrahar, Design, Domination and Defiance: Negotiating
Urbanism in Delhi, 1857-1910, PhD, Diss, University of California,
Berkeley, 1997.
9 This in not to deny that there were significant social differentiation
within European cities with regard to the nature of the municipal intervention.
10 Gyan Prakash, The Colonial Genealogy of Society, Community and
EPW
Economic and Political Weekly November 25, 2006
4911
Political Modernity in India in Patrick Joyce (ed), The Social in Question, New
Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, Routledge, 2002, pp 81-96.
11 Sandip Hazareesingh, Colonial Modernism and the Flawed Paradigms
of Urban Renewal in Bombay, 1900-1925, Urban History, 28, 2, 2001,
pp 235-55. For expenditures of Delhi municipality on policing and other
functions see Narayani Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires: Society,
Government and Urban Growth, 1809-1931, Oxford University Press,
Delhi, 1998, pp 83-168.
12 Gupta, Delhi between Empires, pp 160-61.
13 Vijay Prashad, The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi, Modern
Asian Studies (hereafter MAS), 35, 1, 2001, pp 113-55.
14 Gupta, Delhi between Empires, pp 167-68.
15 Gupta, Delhi between Empires, Ch 6, The Strains of Urban Expansion
and Hosagrahar, Design, Domination and Defiance, esp Ch 3,
Constructing Landscapes of Health, Sanitation and Infrastructure.
16 Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India, Delhi, Foundation Books,
1994, esp Ch 7, Public Health and Local Self-Government.
17 Hosagrahar, Design, Domination and Defiance, p 169.
18 Prashad, Sanitation Technology, p 123.
19 Harrison, Public Health in British India, p 76.
20 Hosagrahar, Design, Domination and Defiance, p 147.
21 John P S McLaren, Nuisance Law and the Industrial Revolution Some
Lessons from Social History, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol 3,
No 2, 1983, pp 155-221.
22 Indian Penal Code, Sections 268-291, in England, nuisance laws had been
first passed in 1846.
23 M R Anderson, Public Nuisance and Private Purpose, SOAS law
department working paper, 1, 1992.
24 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason, Science and the Imagination of Modern
India, OUP, Delhi, 1999, p 131.
25 Anderson, Public Nuisance and Private Purpose.
26 Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877,
OUP, Delhi, 1985.
27 Arthur C Crawford, The Development of New Bombay: A Pamphlet,
Bombay, 1908, cited in Miriam Dossal, A Master Plan for the City:
Looking at the Past, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XL, No 36,
September 3-9, 2005, p 3899.
28 Oldenburg, Colonial Lucknow, pp 112-16.
29 Hosagrahar, Design, Domination and Defiance, p 174, fn 62.
30 Charles Trevelyan, cited in Gupta, Delhi between Empires, p 17.
31 Gupta, Delhi between Empires, p 71.
32 Gupta, Delhi between Empires, pp 61, 159; Hoshragar, Design, Domination
and Defiance, p 138 and A P Hume, Report on Relief of Congestion
in Delhi, Vol 1, Simla, 1936, p 38.
33 Anderson, Public Nuisance and Private Purpose, pp 24-25.
34 Christine Rosen, Knowing Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the
Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840-1864,
Environmental History, Vol 8, No 3, October 2003, pp 565-97.
35 M R Anderson, The Conquest of Smoke: Legislation and Pollution in
Colonial Calcutta in David Arnold and Ramchandra Guha (eds), Nature
& Culture and Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South
Asia, OUP, Delhi, 1995, pp 293-335. Anderson also points out that the
blame in the case of pollution was often passed on to the Indian workers,
suggesting that class and racial distinctions were never too far off from
the considerations of tradition and modernity.
36 Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, p 176.
37 Cited in Gyan Prakash, Another Reason, p 130.
38 Government of India (GoI), Report on the Administration of the Delhi
Municipality for the Year 1940-41, Vol II: Annual Report of the Medical
Officer of Health for 1940, p 26.
39 GoI, 1932, Public Health Report on the Delhi Province for the Year 1930,
pp 1-2. Racial distinctions of this kind were invoked in many other
colonial cities in India and elsewhere. See, Robert-Home, Of Planting and
Planning, the Making of British Colonial Cities, E and FN Spon, London, 1997.
40 Cited in Bharat Sevak Samaj, Slums of Old Delhi, Atma Ram and Sons,
New Delhi, 1958, p 215.
41 Cited in Hume, Congestion in Delhi, Vol 1, p 5.
42 Hume, Congestion in Delhi, Vol 1, p 22. The size of the excess population
was based on the standard of 50 sqft of living space per person.
43 Hume, Congestion in Delhi, Vol 1, pp 67-68.
44 GoI, Report of the Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry Committee, Vol 1,
Delhi, 1951.
45 Hume, Congestion in Delhi, Vol 1, pp 38-39.
46 Hazeerasingh, Colonial Modernism, p 242.
47 GoI, Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry, Vol 1, p 25.
48 GoI, Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry, Vol 1, p 11.
49 GoI, Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry, Vol 1, p 13.
50 Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava, Lok Sabha Debates, 1955, Vol IX, Part II,
p 1838.
51 GoI, Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry Report, Vol 1, p 21.
52 Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Lok Sabha Debates, 1955, Vol IX, Part II, p 1890.
53 Letter from Rajkumari Amrit Kaur to Douglas Ensminger, Ford Foundation
Representative in India, January 14, 1956. Ford Foundation Archives,
NY. A Town Planning Organisation had been set up prior to the
arrival of the American consultants that had prepared an interim
general plan for the city, a holding the line operation awaiting
the making of a regional master plan. See George Goetschius,
TPO: History and Current Affairs (nd), Albert Mayer Papers
(hereafter AMpapers), box no 23, folder 3, University of Chicago spl
collections.
54 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1998.
55 On the New York Plan see David A Johnson, Planning the Great Metropolis:
The 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, London, E and
FN Spon, 1996, On Garden City Movement see Stephen Ward (ed),
Garden City, Past, Present and Future, Spon Press, 1992.
56 Albert Mayer, AM Papers, box 21, folder 35.
57 AM Papers, box 22, folder 4, Letter May 15, 1957.
58 Albert Mayer to Jawaharlal Nehru, May 15, 1957, AM Papers, box 22,
folder 4.
59 See the note, Study-Work Plan, Slum Clearance and Urban
Redevelopment Section, first draft (revised) (nd), Ford Foundation
archives, NY.
60 Delhi Development Authority, Master Plan for Delhi, 1962 (hereafter
MPD-62), p 27.
61 MPD-62, p 44.
62 Mohanlal Saxena, Lok Sabha Debates, 1955, Vol IX, Part II, December 7,
1955, p 1728.
63 Naval Prabhakar, Lok Sabha Debates, 1955, Vol IX, Part II, p 1739.
64 MPD-62, p 28.
65 Jawaharlal Nehru, Foreword, to Bharat Sevak Samaj, Slums of Old Delhi,
Atma Ram and Sons, Delhi, 1958.
66 Bharat Sevak Samaj, Slums, p 217.
67 Bharat Sevak Samaj, Slums, p 150.
68 Bharat Sevak Samaj, Slums, pp 183, 85, 72.
69 Bharat Sevak Samaj, Slums, p 209.
70 Jagmohan, Island of Truth, Vikas Publishing House, Delhi, 1978, pp 9, 14.
71 Marshall B Clinnard, Report of a Pilot Project in Urban Community
Development, Ford Foundation Programme Letter, India, Report No 112,
May 23, 1960.
72 B Chatterjee, director, Delhi Municipal Corporation, The Delhi Urban
Community Development Project, Ford Foundation India, Report No 130,
July 12, 1962.
73 Albert Mayer to Jawaharlal Nehru, May 15, 1957, AM Papers, box 22,
folder 4.
74 On the interplay of civil and political society see, Partha Chatterjee, The
Politics of the Governed, Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the
World, Columbia University Press, 2004.
75 Arthus V N Brooks, The Office File Box in Charles Haar and Jerold
Kayden (eds), Zoning and the American Dream, American Planning
Association, 1990, p 29.
76 Brooks, The Office File Box in Haar and Kayden (eds), Zoning, p 14.
77 Earl Finbar Murphy, Euclid and the Environment in Haar and Kayden
(eds), Zoning, p 169.
78 Charles Haar, In Accordance with a Comprehensive Plan, Harvard Law
Review, 68, 1955. Cited in Robert Nelson, Zoning and Property Rights,
MIT Press, 1980, p 60.
79 MPD-62, p 44.
80 In zoning in Bombay see Annapurna Shaw, The Planning and Development
of New Bombay, MAS, 33, 4, 1999, pp 951-88.
81 J P Sah, A Note on Urban Land Policy, 1961, AM Papers, box 22,
folder 23.
82 Noxious/nuisance industries were described in the master plan as any
industry Which Is or May be Dangerous to Life or Injurious to Health
or Property Caused by Fumes, Effluent or Smoke or by Producing or
Storing Inflammable Materials, MPD-62, p 46.
83 Weekly Report, September 30, October 12, 1957, AM Papers, box 23,
folder 11.
84 MPD-62, p 71, p 51.
85 MPD-62, p 22.
86 MPD-62, p 83; p 153.
87 MPD-62, p 85.
88 MPD-62, p 27.
89 DDA, Work Studies, Vol 1, p 188. On consultation prior to relocation
see Social Studies and Action in Planning, AM Papers, box 23, folder 20.
90 Anand, Aptay and Jhabvala, Why a Master Plan for Delhi, The Hindustan
Times, August 21, 1960.
91 GoI, MoEF, 1992, Policy Statement for Abatement of Pollution, p 2.