venugopal maddipati | Ambedkar University Delhi (original) (raw)
Papers by venugopal maddipati
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018
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Water Histories of South Asia, 2019
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Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies, 2023
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South Asian Studies Volume 40 , 2024
In the early twentieth century M.K. Gandhi articulated Satyagraha as a decentering quest for trut... more In the early twentieth century M.K. Gandhi articulated Satyagraha as a decentering quest for truth through everyday politics. Satyagraha privileged the “minor” or the marginalized over the dominant and everydayness and dwelling over history. In light of the contemporary criticisms of Gandhi, this paper examines Gandhian Satyagraha as a minor force that may hold him accountable for his entrenchment within dominant race and caste relations. The paper is divided into three sections devoted to “minor” matters of dwelling and ordinariness. I begin with an examination of Gandhi’s politics through race and labor in South Africa, between 1896 and 1905. To understand Gandhi’s racism in South Africa it is necessary to pay attention to his marginalization of social and legal narratives related to labor, agriculture, rent and places of habitation such as the hut. I then foreground Gandhi’s marginalization of architecture in his discourses around Akash (the sky) and his body in 1932 and in 1942 during his incarcerations in Pune. Finally, I focus on the architecture of the huts built for him in Wardha in 1936–37 and the conflict that emerges between his conception of the social reproduction of labor as a minor voice within the self and his embrace of caste through varnashramadharma.
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The Wire , 2023
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The Wire , 2022
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South Asian Studies , 2021
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Gandhi and Architecture, 2020
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If 19th century British colonial reports are to be believed, the Mufassil town or the small town ... more If 19th century British colonial reports are to be believed, the Mufassil town or the small town in India was a particular kind of urban architectural reality. At the broadest level, the Mufassil comprised country spaces, provinces and districts, and was distinctly removed from the administrative and urban realities of large presidency towns. The Mufassil town, in that sense, was directly entrenched within the mores of a predominantly rural society with its continuing contestations and constellations of colonial officials, landlords, service gentry, religious authorities, moneylenders, artisanal groups, and peasant land-holders and tillers. Therefore, while the architecture of the Mufassil town verged on being urban, it simultaneously represented the unreconciled coexistence between dissenting social imaginaries, each of which was differently predisposed towards agrarian realities. In short, the architectural morphology of the Mufassil town was not so much uniform and structured as it was one constituted by differentiation.
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Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-cost Housing, 2021
Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-... more Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservative Gandhian ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice and rendering the pursuit of self-sacrifice legible as the practice of an exclusionary varnashramadharma. At a considerable remove from Gandhi’s religious conservatism, successive
generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate Gandhian finitude from Gandhi’s own exclusions. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies, and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.
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Nehru Memorial Occassional Paper , 2014
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Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, 2019
Over 33 million years ago, a vast, cyclopean, freshwater lake extended in central India over such... more Over 33 million years ago, a vast, cyclopean, freshwater lake extended in central India over such far–removed locations as the present–day Rajmahal, Mumbai and Rajamahendri. This essay explores the emergence of evidence in the nineteenth century of that lake on the mountain of Girar: a religious site. The essay raises a few questions. How did nineteenth century geologists place the square peg of their own everyday religiosity and at-homeness by Girar, into the round hole of their fascination over the transpiring of the natural time of the region’s erstwhile waterscapes? In other words, how did the transpiring of the continuing fragmentation and evisceration of the traces of a sublimely large Eocene lake, metamorphose into the transpiring of a human time of faith and piety? The essay attempts a few answers. It explores the emergence of deep time as a kind of holy, disjunctive time. On the one hand, at Girar, deep time may have been the time of the absolute stranger; on the other hand, deep time may have been oddly familiar as one's very own intimately known time. In keeping with this disjunctive formulation, the essay delves into the emergence of geological drawing in the Deccan in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as an ensign of strangeness and intimacy at one and the same time.
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LA Journal of Landscape Architecture, India. , 2017
Who or what is the Raja of Rajghat or the King's bank in the city of Delhi? The answer to this qu... more Who or what is the Raja of Rajghat or the King's bank in the city of Delhi? The answer to this question rotates away in entirely different, in-commensurable directions, depending almost entirely on where, in which slice of time, one finds oneself most at home.
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018
This essay attempts to open up a conversation between M.K. Gandhi and contemporary ecological tho... more This essay attempts to open up a conversation between M.K. Gandhi and contemporary ecological thought. Unlike ecologists, who think through the human and then reach for a wider post-human ecology, in the 1930s Gandhi journeyed in the reverse order, arriving at an emphasis on human withdrawal into nothingness after initially thinking through the withdrawal into nothingness of an infinitely extended, non-human, celestial being. The essay explores Gandhi's emerging anthropocentric conception of the piety of nothingness in the context of a household plan designed for him in 1936–37 by Madeline Slade, in the village of Segaon in Maharashtra. The essay draws out the architectural and political entailments of Gandhi's anthropocentrism and his emphasis on varnashramadharma.
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A brief impression of the Workshop “Landscapes of the Long 18th Century: Mediating Places, Powers... more A brief impression of the Workshop “Landscapes of the Long 18th Century: Mediating Places, Powers and Pasts in South Asia and Beyond,” which was organized by Dipti Khera and Hannah Baader on June 22-23, 2017 at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. This article provides a few insights into the amorphousness, both in spatial and temporal terms, of contemporary landscape thinking. Amorphousness, however, does not so much herald the end of conversations, as much as it serves as a clarion call to seek out more exacting and more rigorous ways of imagining unitary frameworks.
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Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500-Present Edited by Deborah S. Hutton, Rebecca M. Brown (Routledge 2017)
This study examines how two artists, Atul Bhalla (b. 1964) and Asim Waqif (b. 1978), drew attenti... more This study examines how two artists, Atul Bhalla (b. 1964) and Asim Waqif (b. 1978), drew attention to the immersion of the Yamuna river in the city of Delhi. Bhalla and Waqif, through their artworks in 2008 and 2011 respectively, attempted to encourage a broader social appreciation of the river in the city; they foregrounded how the water-body played a part in the lives of communities and individuals dwelling near the riverbank. The work of the two artists stands in marked contrast to how the Yamuna and the riverine plain adjacent to it in Delhi, gathered significance in Indian mediatized imaginaries in 2010, when the Commonwealth Games were hosted in the city. As the Delhi-based sociologist Amita Baviskar (b. 1965) has observed, in the time leading up to the Commonwealth Games, the creation of infrastructure in the riverine plain of the Yamuna, and the subsequent flooding in the region, attracted intense speculation in the print and televisual media in India. Bhalla’s and Waqif’s work is at a considerable remove from this speculation. On the one hand, Bhalla, particularly in his project titled Chabeel (2008), emphasized the manner in which the Yamuna embodies the very consciousness that perceives that water-body and its architectural severance from Delhi. On the other hand, Waqif, in his video Maintain–Scavenge (2011) drew attention to how video-graphic awareness of the demeanor of the Yamuna can begin beyond the boundaries of Delhi’s urban, mediatized gaze, in the very nadir of emergent infrastructural developments. Bhalla’s and Waqif’s work, in this sense, moves past mainstream mediatized metanarratives in Delhi and enriches Baviskar’s observations by foregrounding more intimate, embodied forms of knowing the river from the vantages of those who live or visit the banks of the river. More significantly, the work of the two artists draws attention to the difficulty of preserving clear distinctions and boundaries between the viewer and the viewed in the context of the Yamuna River.
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Water Histories of South Asia, 2019
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Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies, 2023
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South Asian Studies Volume 40 , 2024
In the early twentieth century M.K. Gandhi articulated Satyagraha as a decentering quest for trut... more In the early twentieth century M.K. Gandhi articulated Satyagraha as a decentering quest for truth through everyday politics. Satyagraha privileged the “minor” or the marginalized over the dominant and everydayness and dwelling over history. In light of the contemporary criticisms of Gandhi, this paper examines Gandhian Satyagraha as a minor force that may hold him accountable for his entrenchment within dominant race and caste relations. The paper is divided into three sections devoted to “minor” matters of dwelling and ordinariness. I begin with an examination of Gandhi’s politics through race and labor in South Africa, between 1896 and 1905. To understand Gandhi’s racism in South Africa it is necessary to pay attention to his marginalization of social and legal narratives related to labor, agriculture, rent and places of habitation such as the hut. I then foreground Gandhi’s marginalization of architecture in his discourses around Akash (the sky) and his body in 1932 and in 1942 during his incarcerations in Pune. Finally, I focus on the architecture of the huts built for him in Wardha in 1936–37 and the conflict that emerges between his conception of the social reproduction of labor as a minor voice within the self and his embrace of caste through varnashramadharma.
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The Wire , 2023
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The Wire , 2022
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South Asian Studies , 2021
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Gandhi and Architecture, 2020
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If 19th century British colonial reports are to be believed, the Mufassil town or the small town ... more If 19th century British colonial reports are to be believed, the Mufassil town or the small town in India was a particular kind of urban architectural reality. At the broadest level, the Mufassil comprised country spaces, provinces and districts, and was distinctly removed from the administrative and urban realities of large presidency towns. The Mufassil town, in that sense, was directly entrenched within the mores of a predominantly rural society with its continuing contestations and constellations of colonial officials, landlords, service gentry, religious authorities, moneylenders, artisanal groups, and peasant land-holders and tillers. Therefore, while the architecture of the Mufassil town verged on being urban, it simultaneously represented the unreconciled coexistence between dissenting social imaginaries, each of which was differently predisposed towards agrarian realities. In short, the architectural morphology of the Mufassil town was not so much uniform and structured as it was one constituted by differentiation.
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Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-cost Housing, 2021
Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-... more Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservative Gandhian ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice and rendering the pursuit of self-sacrifice legible as the practice of an exclusionary varnashramadharma. At a considerable remove from Gandhi’s religious conservatism, successive
generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate Gandhian finitude from Gandhi’s own exclusions. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies, and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
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Nehru Memorial Occassional Paper , 2014
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Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, 2019
Over 33 million years ago, a vast, cyclopean, freshwater lake extended in central India over such... more Over 33 million years ago, a vast, cyclopean, freshwater lake extended in central India over such far–removed locations as the present–day Rajmahal, Mumbai and Rajamahendri. This essay explores the emergence of evidence in the nineteenth century of that lake on the mountain of Girar: a religious site. The essay raises a few questions. How did nineteenth century geologists place the square peg of their own everyday religiosity and at-homeness by Girar, into the round hole of their fascination over the transpiring of the natural time of the region’s erstwhile waterscapes? In other words, how did the transpiring of the continuing fragmentation and evisceration of the traces of a sublimely large Eocene lake, metamorphose into the transpiring of a human time of faith and piety? The essay attempts a few answers. It explores the emergence of deep time as a kind of holy, disjunctive time. On the one hand, at Girar, deep time may have been the time of the absolute stranger; on the other hand, deep time may have been oddly familiar as one's very own intimately known time. In keeping with this disjunctive formulation, the essay delves into the emergence of geological drawing in the Deccan in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as an ensign of strangeness and intimacy at one and the same time.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
LA Journal of Landscape Architecture, India. , 2017
Who or what is the Raja of Rajghat or the King's bank in the city of Delhi? The answer to this qu... more Who or what is the Raja of Rajghat or the King's bank in the city of Delhi? The answer to this question rotates away in entirely different, in-commensurable directions, depending almost entirely on where, in which slice of time, one finds oneself most at home.
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018
This essay attempts to open up a conversation between M.K. Gandhi and contemporary ecological tho... more This essay attempts to open up a conversation between M.K. Gandhi and contemporary ecological thought. Unlike ecologists, who think through the human and then reach for a wider post-human ecology, in the 1930s Gandhi journeyed in the reverse order, arriving at an emphasis on human withdrawal into nothingness after initially thinking through the withdrawal into nothingness of an infinitely extended, non-human, celestial being. The essay explores Gandhi's emerging anthropocentric conception of the piety of nothingness in the context of a household plan designed for him in 1936–37 by Madeline Slade, in the village of Segaon in Maharashtra. The essay draws out the architectural and political entailments of Gandhi's anthropocentrism and his emphasis on varnashramadharma.
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A brief impression of the Workshop “Landscapes of the Long 18th Century: Mediating Places, Powers... more A brief impression of the Workshop “Landscapes of the Long 18th Century: Mediating Places, Powers and Pasts in South Asia and Beyond,” which was organized by Dipti Khera and Hannah Baader on June 22-23, 2017 at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. This article provides a few insights into the amorphousness, both in spatial and temporal terms, of contemporary landscape thinking. Amorphousness, however, does not so much herald the end of conversations, as much as it serves as a clarion call to seek out more exacting and more rigorous ways of imagining unitary frameworks.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500-Present Edited by Deborah S. Hutton, Rebecca M. Brown (Routledge 2017)
This study examines how two artists, Atul Bhalla (b. 1964) and Asim Waqif (b. 1978), drew attenti... more This study examines how two artists, Atul Bhalla (b. 1964) and Asim Waqif (b. 1978), drew attention to the immersion of the Yamuna river in the city of Delhi. Bhalla and Waqif, through their artworks in 2008 and 2011 respectively, attempted to encourage a broader social appreciation of the river in the city; they foregrounded how the water-body played a part in the lives of communities and individuals dwelling near the riverbank. The work of the two artists stands in marked contrast to how the Yamuna and the riverine plain adjacent to it in Delhi, gathered significance in Indian mediatized imaginaries in 2010, when the Commonwealth Games were hosted in the city. As the Delhi-based sociologist Amita Baviskar (b. 1965) has observed, in the time leading up to the Commonwealth Games, the creation of infrastructure in the riverine plain of the Yamuna, and the subsequent flooding in the region, attracted intense speculation in the print and televisual media in India. Bhalla’s and Waqif’s work is at a considerable remove from this speculation. On the one hand, Bhalla, particularly in his project titled Chabeel (2008), emphasized the manner in which the Yamuna embodies the very consciousness that perceives that water-body and its architectural severance from Delhi. On the other hand, Waqif, in his video Maintain–Scavenge (2011) drew attention to how video-graphic awareness of the demeanor of the Yamuna can begin beyond the boundaries of Delhi’s urban, mediatized gaze, in the very nadir of emergent infrastructural developments. Bhalla’s and Waqif’s work, in this sense, moves past mainstream mediatized metanarratives in Delhi and enriches Baviskar’s observations by foregrounding more intimate, embodied forms of knowing the river from the vantages of those who live or visit the banks of the river. More significantly, the work of the two artists draws attention to the difficulty of preserving clear distinctions and boundaries between the viewer and the viewed in the context of the Yamuna River.
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The reciprocal relationship between global water systems and cultures of spatiality in constituti... more The reciprocal relationship between global water systems and cultures of spatiality in constituting historical events across time and space has received little attention in ecohistories of India. Spaces of Water: New Paradigms in Ecocritical Enquiry is an attempt to address this opacity in environmental studies by bringing together leading scholars, artists, architects, and activists from India, Europe, and the United States to articulate new forms of ecocritical thinking that reads the cultural as both determining and being determined by the environmental. How does the environment shape, and is shaped by, the ontological domain of affective spatialities? Over two days, speakers will rethink the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of spatial cultures in early modern, colonial, and contemporary India to explore the topographies of the concept-term waterscape in the wake of environmental histories and ecocriticism more broadly.
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Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing , 2020
Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-... more Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative, exclusionary conception of religiosity. Drawing from archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous conservative Gandhian ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice, and rendering the pursuit of self-sacrifice legible as the practice of varnashramadharma.
At a considerable remove from Gandhi's religious conservatism, successive generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate Gandhian finitude from Gandhi's own exclusions.
This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.
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This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual culture... more This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial and contemporary South Asia. Bringing together contributions by eminent artists, architects, curators and scholars who explore the connections between the environmental and the cultural, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies, and make an intervention within political, social and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change by examining water's artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific and environmental facets from the 16th century to the present.
‘This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.’―Amita Baviskar, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India
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Marg: Volume 71 Number 2 , Gandhi & Aesthetics edited by Tridip Suhrud, 2019
When one embraces weak thinking, particularly in the field of textual analysis, one moves endless... more When one embraces weak thinking, particularly in the field of textual analysis, one moves endlessly within a space of immense fluidity. In weak thinking, there is no single strong notion of meaning embedded within a text. There is no certitude. Rather, there are multiple certitudes, or multiple, weak interpretations of any given text.
How, then, is one to interpret buildings, which are often metaphors for certitude, reliability, stability and strength, in terms of weak thought? How, for instance, is one to argue in the favor of the strength of a Gandhian architectural history, when the only historically tenable way of imagining a Gandhian architecture is a weak one. The manner in which Gandhi himself relegated household architecture to the margins of his thinking ensures that his remains, at best, a weak architectural imagination. What, then, are the entailments of embracing a weak architectural imagination? How do weak ontologies stake a claim to a Gandhian reality? This essay attempts a few answers to such questions.
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Video Link for Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTUuy7tBSrI Abstract: When one embraces ... more Video Link for Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTUuy7tBSrI
Abstract:
When one embraces weak thinking, particularly in the field of textual analysis, one moves endlessly within a space of immense fluidity. In weak thinking, there is no single, strong notion of meaning embedded within a text. There is no certitude. Rather, there are multiple certitudes, or multiple, weak interpretations of any given text. How, then, is one to interpret buildings, which are often metaphors for certitude, reliability, reliability and strength, in terms of weak thought? How, for instance, is one to argue in the favor of the strength of a Gandhian architectural history, when the only historically tenable way of imagining a Gandhian architecture is a weak one. The manner in which Gandhi himself relegated household architecture to the margins of his thinking ensures that his remains, at best, a weak architectural imagination. What, then, are the entailments of embracing a weak architectural imagination? How do weak ontologies stake a claim to a Gandhian reality? This presentation attempts a few answers to such questions.
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Nidān: International Journal for Indian Studies Volume 8, Issue 1. July 2023, pp.10-14, 2023
Relational space is an entity that does not exist on its own. While space, conventionally underst... more Relational space is an entity that does not exist on its own. While space, conventionally understood, is an a-priori condition for the existence of entities, “relational space” is nothing unto itself prior to the exchanges between its constituents. Its contours and outlines are contingent upon the particular ways in which communities and materialities enter into relation. In other words, relationships have causal efficacy. But what distinguishes “relational space” as a category in the South Asian context? How are spaces in the subcontinent transformed by the emergence of new relationships or antagonisms between social groups that collectivize or self-identify along the lines of ethnicity, class, caste, language and religion? Why are particular spatial forms sometimes reified by the emergence of the very relationships that they are expected to discourage? Our special issue is an attempt at answering some of these questions.
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Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies, 2023
Ontologies of Relational Space in South Asia 1 (Guest Edited: Venugopal Maddipati) Relational sp... more Ontologies of Relational Space in South Asia 1 (Guest Edited: Venugopal Maddipati)
Relational space is an entity that does not exist on its own. While space, conventionally understood, is an a-priori condition for the existence of entities, “relational space” is nothing unto itself prior to the exchanges between its constituents. Its contours and outlines are contingent upon the particular ways in which communities and materialities enter into relation. In other words, relationships have causal efficacy. But what distinguishes “relational space” as a category in the South Asian context? How are spaces in the subcontinent transformed by the emergence of new relationships or antagonisms between social groups that collectivize or self-identify along the lines of ethnicity, class, caste, language and religion? Why are particular spatial forms sometimes reified by the emergence of the very relationships that they are expected to discourage? Our special issue is an attempt at answering some of these questions.
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LA Landscape Architecture , 2024
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