Forging Communal Space: Negotiating Streets and Practices in Delhi, 1922–65

Abstract

This paper examines space-making in the Jangpura-Bhogal locality of Delhi by documenting communal conflicts in the late 1920s and 1950s. First, it addresses the production of a Hindu religious space by disavowing Muslim ritual practices under a colonial regime seeking to control religious conflict. Second, it unpacks the diverse mechanisms used to produce a Sikh political space during a nascent postcolonial state’s management of linguistic subnationalisms. Grounded in power relations and cohesions around multiple social registers, these variegated spatial claims were made through political and religious processions, petitions and physical violence. These communal geographies highlight the importance of neighbourhood histories.