— Lakshmi Priya
The third panel of the 2021 HSS Conference was held on 10th April 2021 and began at 3 pm and went on about an hour. The panel was on the topic Street Life, Commerce and Mobility and was moderated by Prof. Mathangi Krishnamurthy. The panellists were Anisa Bhutia from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Soumita Mazumder from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The first panellist Anisa Bhutia presented her paper on Chokepoints: Roads, Infrastructure, and Streets in the Hilly Town of Kalimpong.
In the paper, Bhutia examines the streets of Kalimpong, especially the 10th mile to understand the flow of goods, ideas and communication. In the paper, she conceptually analyses the idea of ‘chokepoint’ and theorises that the market has an important role to play in the social, economic and political lives of the streets in Kalimpong. Bhutia defines chokepoints as a constriction of some sorts in terms of network system or processes and the term originated centuries ago in engineering. In anthropology, chokepoints are associated with global circulation. While roads are important elements of infrastructure, they are also where political motivation plays. As one of her respondents said, roads in Kalimpong are constructed/repaired during election time. She says that roads take up different forms as we move through different landscapes. In Kalimpong, the streets are lined by buildings and are also the only state highway passing through that area. It takes up different roles during different seasons, times and conditions. During the colonel times, the construction of roads in hilly areas was a means to control and govern the tribal population. Bhutia’s place of study, the 10th mile saw the settlement of various migrant communities. She says that street stories give insight into the everyday lives of the people and the development of roads are indicative of modernity and a promise of a better life. Even though the international press is critical of Himalayan roads as it is believed to obstruct the traditional ways of life, Bhutia points out that roads differ from landscapes and is of different styles according to the region. 10th mile is also where the Tibetan marketplace takes place. She reiterates that the roads take on different roles during different times as Highway 12 takes on different forms during the different season. The streets transform into public spaces hosting numerous vendors and houses. She emphasises the difficulty in clearly demarcating streets and roads in Kalimpong. She concludes her talk by pointing out how the roads are narrow, and even the narrow space between road and pavement become the site of transactions while markets assume the role of a place where social relations are made and maintained.
After Anisa Bhutia, Soumitra Mazumder presented her paper titled, ‘Obstruction’ ‘Congestion’ and ‘Nuisance’: Many faces of Calcutta Streets. In her paper, Mazumder attempts to explore the myriad hues of late colonial Calcutta through vehicular movements. The objective being to understand the ways in which traffic and transport modified spatial arrangements in the first half of the twentieth century. She explains that the categories of ‘main streets’ and ‘side streets’ were introduced by the colonial government during the early 1900s. They connected the suburbs and neighbourhoods in the north and south. Calcutta’s streets lacked serious planning and were notorious for their obstructive and congested nature of traffic. Mazumder gives the backdrop of Calcutta streets being in a state of high traffic density and poor traffic flow with low average speed. Mazumder in this backdrop, asks the question of “how the phenomenon of ‘obstruction’, ‘congestion’ and ‘nuisance’ defined the relationship between traffic circulation and public spaces”. She uses these terms as tools to analyse the correlation between traffic control and space management. She advances that these terms were loaded and signified layered traffic conditions. Mazumder asserts that the use of these terms revealed a spectrum of activities that exposed the street life of Calcutta. She engages thoroughly with the colonial archives to reconstruct the ideas and perceptions about Calcutta streets. Mazumder points out class entitlement inherent in the understanding of these terms, especially ‘nuisance’. Commercial vehicles like carts and animals were seen as disrupting the social and class fabric of residential areas. Vehicles and nuisance became the marker of close and intimate spaces. However, obstruction was found to be a result of the indiscriminate parking of motor vehicles by merchants. The concept of parking spaces was introduced by the Calcutta police to tackle this problem. Soumita Mazumder says that the trope of nuisance and congestion was used by the colonial administration to alter city spaces and deal with the indigenous population. The traffic department issued several guiding instructions to different types of vehicles creating separate spheres of movement and halting for different class of vehicles. Mazumder says that this kind of zone segregation between public and private vehicles sowed seeds of lines of the class decision in the public spaces of 20th century Calcutta. She also points out the colonial state’s attempt to engage spatiality relation with time with the introduction of parking time in parking space. Prohibitive passages and controlled movement was seen as the remedy to congestion and obstruction in Calcutta streets while handcarts and animals were branded as the symbols of obstruction by the Calcutta police, Bengal government and business houses. Mazumder concluded her paper by summarising that “conditional accessibility bound by time manifested official attempt to distinguish streets for public transport and freight. The overlap of these caused problems and congestion. She reiterated her arguments that “traffic imperatives generated layered spaces where one permeated the other within the realm of that tangible space.” She ended the paper by saying that the interplay of many factors contributed to the structured spatial history of traffic administration in late colonial Calcutta. Thus panel came to an end, with Prof. Mathangi opening the floor to questions and discussion.
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