Join the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies for a lecture with history professor Deepasri Baul.
The Festival, the Mohalla and the City: Bakr-Id Riots and the politics of urban space in Delhi, 1924-26
In 1911, the colonial state in British India began to build a new imperial capital in the vicinity of Shahjahanabad, the existing city of Delhi. The new city was visualized as a space of order and symmetry. It simultaneously heralded new practices of governance, to produce both a disciplined cityscape and pliant urban subjects. However, within a decade, this vision of order was seriously disrupted by recurring “disturbances” on the festival of Bakr-Id between 1924 and 1926.
A close look at the Bakr-Id riots reveals that it was not just the Imperial Delhi Committee that was actively modifying the urban landscape of Delhi in the mid-1920s. Ordinary residents of the city were equally engaged in reshaping the boundaries of their own neighborhoods. In this presentation I show how rival Hindu-Muslim groups, used congregative rituals of the festival as a pretext to effect incremental changes in the spatial practices of the city through carefully controlled but cumulative acts of collective violence against one another. In a rapidly transforming urban landscape, I read this popular politics of collective intimidation as an attempt to assert community claims over contested public spaces in the city.
