Delhi’s Journey Part 4

Journal of emerging technologies and innovative research, 2018

Journey of any city is a very fascinating one to scholars of urban studies as well as dwellers, visitors, policy makers and managers of cities. Delhi has an extremely rich past dating back to prehistoric times and charting epochs like the Gupta period, Rajput phase, the Sultanate, Lodhis, Mughals, British and finally, capital of Independent India. This paper presents a birds' eye view of the urban character of Delhi from the prehistoric times to 1638: the founding of Shahjahanabad. The objective of the paper is to contextualize many monuments, travel writings, novels, memoirs, films, myths, stories, stereotypes present in/ on Delhi to a continuity as well as complexity of urban and cultural tradition. As thinkers and users of cities, it is imperative that we appreciate the ethos we inherit, consume, represent and create. Using a variety of sources from history, sociology, cultural and urban studies, the paper puts together diverse dimensions of this ancient city and imperial capital from the perspective of underscoring that urbanity has always been a matter of intersecting spaces, lives, powers and intentions.

2018

Journey of any city is a very fascinating one to scholars of urban studies as well as dwellers, visitors, policy makers and managers of cities. Delhi has an extremely rich past dating back to pre-historic times and charting epochs like the Gupta period, Rajput phase, the Sultanate, Lodhis, Mughals, British and finally, capital of Independent India. This paper presents a birds’ eye view of the urban character of Delhi from the founding of Shahjahanabad in 1638 to British occupation of Delhi in 1803. The objective of the paper is to contextualize many monuments, travel writings, novels, memoirs, films, myths, stories, stereotypes present in/ on Delhi to a continuity as well as complexity of urban and cultural tradition. As thinkers and users of cities, it is imperative that we appreciate the ethos we inherit, consume, represent and create. Using a variety of sources from history, sociology, cultural and urban studies, the paper puts together diverse dimensions of this ancient city and...

Journal of emerging technologies and innovative research, 2018

Journey of any city is a very fascinating one to scholars of urban studies as well as dwellers, visitors, policy makers and managers of cities. Delhi has an extremely rich past dating back to pre-historic times and charting epochs like the Gupta period, Rajput phase, the Sultanate, Lodhis, Mughals, British and finally, capital of Independent India. This paper is third part of a series in which the first part presented a birds’ eye view of the urban character of Delhi from the prehistoric times to 1638: the founding of Shahjahanabad and the second continued the story till the Twilight of the Mughals. The next phase of Delhi history has been covered in a previously published paper by the author'Delhi during Pax Britannica'. The third part of this series in this paper encapsulates the impact and aftermath of the 1857 uprising on the city of Delhi, including the three darbars and the announcement of shifting of the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi in the last one in 1911....

A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. F. Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu. Wiley Blackwell, 2017

The urban refashionings of Istanbul, Isfahan, and Delhi, in the Ottoman (c. , Safavid (1501Safavid ( -1722, and Mughal (1526-1857) empires between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries were timed to be productive of new sociopolitical and economic configurations. Despite their embodiment of comparable paradigms, these imperial capital cities present different historical trajectories; Istanbul began its transformation in the mid-fifteenth century, following the conquest of Byzantine Constantinople, while Isfahan and Delhi assumed this new urban identity in the early seventeenth century. Their different historical courses notwithstanding, they were all understood within contemporary theories of rulership in each empire as the primary locus, generative, and representative of power at a time of territorial consolidation and centralizing predilections. This chapter follows themes in the making of the three capital cities. Exploring the meanings attributed to these imperial seats, we trace practices of social and courtly life as they shaped and were shaped by urban configurations. We suggest that changes in the articulation and restructuring of political authority and the emergence of new elites and urban groups continuously generated new formations of social and political networks that facilitate our understanding of an early modern urbanity.

edgehill.ac.uk

This book, as the editors suggest, is concerned with challenging the conventional images of a capital city that 'nobody loves', offering alternative images of Delhi originating from less predictable perspectives, alternative social dynamics and from other less conventional life ...

In this paper I focus on an archaeological site called Kondapur that has been excavated on the Deccan Plateau twice in the last fifty years highlighting its character and nature. The data thus far collected reveals complex structural remains along with artifacts that sometimes defy the application of convenient labels –‘Buddhist’, ‘Roman’, ‘Satavahana’ – that mark the early historic period [c. 200 BCE – 300 CE] in South India. We posit tentative interpretations about the difference and diversity of settlement patterns in hinterland societies which compels us to re-think issues around the unraveling of their permanence and totality. This further critically rests on the way we define community configurations in a given locality that could have been, to use Springborg’s words, “more transactional” than the ones we use as models to discuss more concrete manifestations of city life. Grappling with the ‘realities’ thrown up by this archaeological data to discuss the profile and possible configuration of a ‘city’ in the larger context of the settlement patterns on the ancient volcanic landscape of the Deccan Plateau, this paper also brings to focus how interpretation of the archaeological data has often led to divergent conclusions. Illustrating this with descriptions and interpretations of archaeological data found at Kondapur we endeavor to stress that absences too need to be addressed while conflating discussions around the city in the ancient world.

Books and Ideas, 2018

What do late nineteenth-century Berlin and Cairo have in common? The German historian Joseph Ben Prestel accepts the challenge of comparing these two cities in order to interrogate the boundaries between Europe and the Middle East, as well as orientalism's assumptions. Comparative approaches to history have, for several decades, been the subject of profound debate. At issue is the cross-cultural validity of analytical frameworks, the ability of scholars to be competent in multiple domains, and the appropriateness of greater levels of generality. Joseph Ben Prestel's recent book, though it avoids addressing these methodological issues head on, proposes an innovative approach, the primary mechanism of which is the thematic juxtaposition of compatible archival materials relating to different realities, yet which, in the way they echo one another, elicit curiosity and thought. Through this method, Ben Prestel is able to propose parallel interrogations, the main effect of which is to challenge the force of orientalism's most persistent paradigms, while raising the question of the cultural character of morality and gender identities. By using as its entry point the perception of various sources of urban excitement and the imposition of social norms for controlling emotions, the book also aspires to propose a displaced reading of a newly defined urban modernity in the late nineteenth century.

Cities struck by sectarian/communal violence carry their scars in many ways. Geographies of fear and suspicion, cultures of hate and hostility; halted or transformed personal and group biographies are some ways in which the social fabric of such cities are changed into times far beyond the event or era of the events themselves. My intent in this essay is to explore two such urban contexts, both damaged during specifi c episodes of ethnic violence or civil warfare, in Delhi and Beirut respectively. The overall theme under which I bring together Delhi and Beirut is as follows-what futures do these events produce in urban horizons that have been marked by violence? What kinds of socio-spatial formations appear which work towards the fragmentation or integration of everyday spaces and relationships in these cities?

2011