CANCELLED

Presented by the Geographies of Injustice: Gender and the City working group

During the nineteenth century, Bombay was India’s leading steam-shipping port and held the unique position of sending people, capital, cultural practices, and new ideas about urbanism and working-class culture across the ocean. However, since the 1960s, Bombay has become increasingly decentered and has given way to city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which are organized around new capital flows such as real estate speculation and container shipping. We seek to understand this shift by examining the maritime and historical roots of contemporary urban Bombay and the endurance of these roots during the remaking of built and social formations in other Indian Ocean cities. Little is known about the endurance of these roots and exchanges that may underpin the twenty-first century Asian city because scholarship on colonial and post-colonial urbanism has largely overlooked these cities’ maritime pasts. This conference intervenes in and connects the fields of Urban and Indian Ocean Studies by studying Bombay comparatively with other Indian Ocean cities. Our conference takes the nodal centrality of Bombay as a place from which to explore the specificity, stakes, and consequences of what might be termed “Indian Ocean urbanisms.” Thus, we ask: how did Indian Ocean cities constitute each other? What ocean-wide mental and material structures allowed urban forms and practices to move between port cities, and how did they persist and change with colonial and post-colonial governance? How does this shared past continue to shape contemporary urbanism and the new Asian regional economy?

There is a long and well-established tradition of addressing the Atlantic World as a connected system, especially through the slave trade and its interconnections across Africa, Europe, and the New World. If studies of the Atlantic have shown enduring material and mental formations of the ocean created by the slave trade and consequent diasporas, Indian Ocean scholarship can reveal enduring social worlds created by long-standing networks of kin and capital. This is the first conference of its kind to highlight Bombay’s importance as a center of movement and commerce across the Indian Ocean and the distinctive spatial orders this produced; to analyze Bombay beyond its colonial status; and to connect emerging work on the Indian Ocean region with scholarship on the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Nine selected presentations will focus on change and continuity in Bombay’s urban life as a result of ongoing relationships with other Indian Ocean cities of Singapore, Yangon, Manama, and Dar es Salaam. The papers showcase new ways of reading Bombay’s urbanism: as shaped by shared itineraries of design aesthetics and planning policy (and the experts behind them); as a configured   organization of environmental and climate knowledge, especially the monsoons; as a site of anticolonial internationalism and alternative to Bandung; and as a built form funded by merchant families spread across the Indian Ocean network. The presentations intervene methodologically by drawing on the methods of urban history, labor history, and science and technology studies to study oceanic networks. However, what is distinctive to this enterprise is its focus on the scale of the urban, the relationship between built form, visual cultures, and social life, and the organization of economic life, which continue to shape the relationship between ocean and city. We take built form to be a materialization of capital flows and an important trace of the social lives of labor and community across the Indian Ocean. We wager that comparison across hierarchies of urban order will allow us to consider the place of Indian Ocean urbanism during this moment of resurgence across East Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Faculty organizers:
Anupama P. Rao (Barnard History and MESAAS, Columbia), Amy Chazkel (History, Columbia)

Graduate Student organizers:
Laura Yan (History, Columbia), Sohini Chattopadhyay (History, Columbia). 

Schedule

Friday, March 13

5:00 pm-7:30 pm
Plenary Session: Built Forms, Social Histories, and the Environment: The Makings of Indian Ocean Urbanisms

Discussant and Chair: Anupama Rao, Barnard History and MESAAS, Columbia University

Plenary Speakers:
Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University
Nancy Um, SUNY-Binghamton University
Mustansir Dalvi, Sir JJ College of Architecture, University of Mumbai

Saturday, March 14

9:30 am Breakfast

10:00 am-12:00 pm
Panel 1: Oceanic Urban Histories

Discussant: Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University
Darren Wan, Cornell University, “Nationalist Narration and the Horizons of Anticolonial Internationalism: Evacuating Singapore for Bombay During the Japanese War”
Thomas McDow, Ohio State University, “Seeing Muscat from Bombay: Intellectual Networks of Indian Ocean Port Cities”

12:00 pm-1:00 pm Lunch

1:00 pm-3:30 pm
Panel 2: Social Formations in Port Cities

Discussant: Sheetal Chhabria, Connecticut College
Gaurav Garg, NYU, “Banking on the City: Place of Urban Land in Housing and Industrial Finance in Calcutta and Bombay, c.1920-1970”
Michael Sugarman, University of Bristol, “Differentiating the Deserving: Water, the environment, and an Indian Ocean urbanism in Bombay and Rangoon, 1860-1941”
Radhika Gupta, Leiden Institute for Area Studies, “(Re-) scaling urbanism from the city to the community: Notes from Bombay and Dar es Salaam”

3:30 pm Tea and coffee

4:00 pm–6:00 pm
Panel 3: Built Form and Urban Sensoria

Discussant: Abigail McGowan, University of Vermont
Urna Mukherjee, Johns Hopkins University, “Uncertain Geographies and Urban Development: The Geographical Imagination of Colonial Bombay and the “Drainage” Debates of the 1860s”
Tim Riding, University of York, “Company Urbanism: Colonial Failure at Bombay, 1668-1790”

6:00-6:15pm Closing Remarks 

Directions:

The closest subway station to the campus is the 116th Street station on 116th Street and Broadway. This station is located on the 1 line.

The M60 bus route also stops at 116th and Broadway on the route to and from LaGuardia Airport.

The Heyman Center for the Humanities is located at the East Campus residential complex. Enter the main Columbia gates at 116th Street and Broadway and walk up the steps of Low Library. Turn right (east) at the top of the first set of steps and keep walking east until you come to Philosophy Hall. Turn left (north) at Philosophy Hall and walk until you see a ramp on your right going (east) over Amsterdam Avenue.

Take that ramp and walk straight ahead, past the law school on your right and Casa Italiana and the International Affairs Building on your left until you come to a short flight of steps going into the East Campus Residential Center. Take those steps, which will bring you to a security booth for East Campus Residential housing.

Show a picture ID to the guard and walk straight (north) through the courtyard. You will see the Heyman Center building in front of you.

Two Alternative Routes: 

Enter the Wien Hall Gate on 116th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. Walk past Wien Hall, then turn right and make a sharp turn up the staircase to the left, which leads to East Campus. Check in with the guard and follow the sign to the Heyman Center.

Enter the International Affairs Building at 420 118th Street. Take the elevators to the 6th Floor and exit the building through the southern doors. The entrance to East Campus will be at the far left (southeastern) corner of the courtyard. Take the stairs up to East Campus. Check in with the guard and walk through the courtyard to the Heyman Center. 

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the History Department, and the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department