Bourgeois Self-Fashioning in India: Domesticity, urbanity and consumption

Abstract

Bourgeois Self-Fashioning in India: Domesticity, urbanity and consumption Anoma Pieris The Bungalow in Twentieth Century India: The cultural expression of changing ways of life and aspirations in the domestic architecture of colonial and post-colonial society. By Madhavi Desai, Miki Desai and John Lang. London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. A Joint Enterprise: Indian elites and the making of British Bombay. By Preeti Chopra. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. India’s Middle Class: New forms of urban leisure consumption and prosperity. By Christiane Brosius. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. It is nearly three decades since Anthony King offered us a fascinating study of the global proliferation of the bungalow as a type originally derived from the traditional village house in Bengal but destined to influence detached houses across the world.1 King’s emphasis was typically on the socio-political dimension of built space—the objectification of power structures through the artifact or the complexities of race, space or difference explored in postcolonial scholarship. More recently, in 2012, Desai, Desai and Lang locate the bungalow within a longer history of detached houses within India, indigenizing it as a phenomenon local to the sub-continent. They describe the bungalow as a signifier of individualistic colonial values in India that would transform the meaning of the house as an artifact and accommodate heterogeneous variations of the form. By bringing the discussion of the bungalow back to its indigenous roots and documenting the resilience of its formal attributes as a vehicle of middle class mobility, this significant and timely study supports a recent resurgent interest in bourgeois self-fashioning. An example of this trend would be Christiane Brosius’ India’s Middle Class: New forms of urban leisure consumption and prosperity—a cultural anthropology of Indian society following economic liberalization. Preeti Chopra’s A Joint Enterprise: Indian elites and the making of British Bombay discusses similar processes of elite formation during the colonial period and through public architecture. This review locates these three publications within a broader context of recent spatial histories of South Asia in order to understand how they engage with the region and more specifically the sub continent’s colonial past. They respond to distinct types of spatial analysis that can be organized according to the following three schemas. The first model is of survey histories based on close empirical studies such as that by Desai, Desai and Lang. These straddle the boundary between historical and design monographs, and require a close understanding of the contemporary context. They are frequently collaborative research endeavors between local and international researchers located in professional programs of architecture or urban planning. Research higher degree programs are as yet undeveloped in the spatial disciplines (such as architecture and urban planning) in South Asia and books like these inform and educate future professionals. They are invaluable for drawing attention to colonial or nationalist period buildings that are neglected by archaeological surveys. Such books also play a significant role in replacing colonial accounts of local phenomena with fine-grained and culturally attenuated studies of indigenous material accessible to both local and international audiences. The second model discussed in this essay, and as exemplified by Chopra, belongs to a group of scholars writing on India but located in the West. They are theoretically informed by Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory and follow in a tradition established by innovators in the spatial fields like Anthony D. King and Thomas Metcalf.2 They are intimately involved in the project of decolonization. Spatial histories on South Asian nationalism and on the colonial period in South Asia, such as these, far outnumber equivalent spatial histories on or from other parts of Asia.3 The scars of colonization appear to run deeper and produce a far more pervasive spatial dialectic on the subcontinent, when compared with spatial histories on Southeast Asia, for example, where neither nationalism nor colonization takes centre-stage. Conversely, Southeast Asian spatial histories appear to be predominantly concerned with postcolonial phenomena linked to the regions rapid economic growth and national developmental policies.4 The absence of that kind of content in twentieth century spatial histories of South Asia is highlighted by their relatively late emergence, in the...