City of Several Walls

 Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend (virtually) the London Science Fiction Research Community's annual conference; this year's theme was "Beyond Borders: Empires, Bodies, Science Fictions" (perhaps I should have just dragged my students there rather than teaching for a whole term). There's a conference schedule here, which gives you a sense of quite how wide (geographically and intellectually) this conference's span was--and I wonder to what extent this was because the pandemic had forced us all online and thus saved a lot of people from the choice between skipping the conference and an expensive and exhausting negotiation with the UK's border regime. 

My own paper took off from Samit Basu's recent SF novel, Chosen Spirits, which imagines an upsetting "best case scenario" for India ten years into the future. Basu's novel is set in a Delhi whose borders are rigorously policed against "mobs from the Uttar Pradesh wildlands", where freedom of movement within the city is largely a matter of class status, and where the anti-CAA protests actually succeeded -- but what did that success grant us in real terms? And what are the implications of these spatial and class-based restrictions on the potential for fiction about Delhi to imagine and represent activism and change? I was fortunate enough to share a panel with two papers that worked on similar themes (you can see livetweeted responses to the panel here, here and here). 

In lieu of a regular blog post, I'm going to post the second half of the paper (which deals with the actual texts) here:

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Walidah Imarisha has claimed that “all organizing is science fiction” because it is dedicated to “creating and envisioning another world”. The 2019-2020 protests were science fictional in this sense: a key example is the utopian Faiz Ahmed Faiz poem “Hum Dekhenge” (we will see, or we will bear witness), a widely used protest anthem across the subcontinent that became a sort of keystone for these protests. The image of Shaheen Bagh itself, a peaceful, open, cross-cultural community centred on women and children, was projected at the time, and has been since, as a utopian one. In Basu’s novel, Joey’s memories of the moment are “happy and hopeful, full of an energy and a sense of belonging that she hasn’t felt in years”.

Chosen Spirits is set a decade after the protests, in a world which Basu himself describes in the acknowledgements as “not a dystopia, but […] a best case scenario”. This line, not in the actual book, has been widely quoted in reviews as a sign of Just How Bad things are.

But I think this line has a wider significance in terms of the book itself and how its characters respond to the possibility of change. The narrative is split between Joey (a successful new media professional from a left wing, middle class family) and her childhood friend Rudra, the disappointing younger son of a rich and unethical businessman. Both are relatively sheltered within the class and power structures that make up this future Delhi. Both are vaguely horrified by the realities of the worlds they live in. But to a great extent, neither seems to believe in the possibility of change, at least at first. And I think it’s significant that this impossibility seems to them inherent in the structure of Delhi itself. Reminded of her colleague’s belief that one day the poor of the city will rise up to destroy it, Joey thinks immediately of what she calls the “production challenges”. “But whenever she looks at the streets, at the guards and barriers and the spikes and the drones, she knows that more thought has gone into them than most urban infrastructure; that the city’s rulers are prepared to fight any insurrection.” Movement through this future Delhi is mediated by the police, private militias owned by corporations, and Residents’ Welfare Associations; local bodies that defend residential areas against outsiders or undesirables, and have small armies to enforce their commands. 

The geography of Delhi is a geography of power. Midway through the book, Rudra’s older brother offers a spatial analysis of power in Delhi: 

“Delhi has always been a city of seven walls, and the men who live inside each. […] You could guess you’d crashed into your wall before, when you couldn’t go further, but now the walls can be mapped and measured, the tools exist.” 

This spatial analogy seems to allow for movement—Rudra himself compares it to a sort of video game logic where the goal is to get to the next level, and their father has apparently moved in two walls during his lifetime. But there’s also a sense in which power is entirely static. As is pointed out during the same conversation, almost everyone Rudra knows has a job and social status that are cognate with their caste background. Delhi’s spatial inequality also serves to protect the privileged from the poor—Rudra’s brother imagines “a tide of people” cracking these walls in the wake of climate change, disease, and other disasters until “one day there’s only one wall and the people inside it are gods and the people outside it are monsters, or dead.”

These images are from Sarnath Banerjee’s 2015 speculative graphic novel, All Quiet in Vikaspuri, in which Delhi's rich live in walled, fortified compounds with armed guards, and the city fractures into its neighbourhoods and goes to war over water scarcity. In Banerjee’s book, as in Uday Prakash’s “The Walls of Delhi”, the nexus of corrupt political and economic power in the capital city presents ordinary people with unwinnable situations: Prakash presents his reader with a choice between living an honest life and probably being brutalized by the Delhi police, or a dishonest one—and probably being brutalized by the Delhi police. It is difficult to imagine what change or transformation could look like in these narratives—this may be why Banerjee has his protagonist discover what may be an unlimited source of water, but ends his book there. 

Even Chosen Spirits, a book whose characters remember the protests so fondly, seems to suggest that they are ultimately neutralised. The protestors theoretically “won”, but whatever that means in this new world, it’s not great. Joey’s boss, currently partnering some of the worst corporations in the world, boasts that “while you people were kids, my generation transformed the country by standing up and defeating fascism. We saved India.” 

 At the other end of the spectrum is something like Vandana Singh’s 2011 short story “Indra’s Web,” which takes place in Ashapur, an egalitarian, environmentally-friendly utopia. We’re told that this settlement, whose name means “city of hope”, was a former slum on the edge of Delhi, populated by climate refugees from Bangladesh. So here, we genuinely do have a story of transformation, where visionary possibility has been realised. But it seems pointed that Ashapur can only exist on or outside the boundaries of Delhi itself—that change requires us to leave the space of the imperial city altogether.

It may be relevant, also, that Ashapur is a former slum. Writing about first-person narratives produced in and from unauthorized residential colonies in Delhi, Sanjukta Poddar notes that the authors evoke an all-pervasive marginality as “an affective subject position that defines their relationship with the city”. Despite this, she claims, in occupying the spatial and cultural fringes of the city they are also able to occupy an imagination of the city that counters the bourgeois imaginary that otherwise pervades literary representations of Delhi.
 
Coming back to Chosen Spirits, then, the positionality of Basu’s protagonists is central to how they see or unsee the city. Activism is happening all around them, and always has been— even Joey’s happy memories of the 2019 protests are interrupted by the reminder that while her family had been protesting at India Gate, “news filtered in of police brutalities and illegal detentions at a less privileged march”. In the book’s opening scene, Joey sees, then chooses to ignore, street art inviting her to a protest about slum clearance; in the background to her plot and Rudra’s we see mention of processions, a farmer’s march, a Dalit graffiti artist against whom a protective cordon of Delhi police drones has so far been ineffective. For much of the book these events are at the fringes of the characters’ perceptions, until they stumble on some of those connected to them. We learn of secret spaces on the internet, where international women activists with names that are science fiction tributes (Rokeya and Olamina among them) communicate through fable; and of the vast, complex and criminal network that operates out of what used to be Nehru Place, the city’s premier market for tech.

“[Joey] knows there are many things sold here that he cannot tell her about, too, and wishes she didn’t know, that she could see Cyber Bazaar as he did, as some sort of biopunk pirate-port paradise. But she envies his evident belonging to all these cities: she was born here, he was not, but her upper-class indigo passport doesn’t give her the gate passes he possesses.”

I don’t think this is about Joey’s own freedom of movement, so much—Rudra, in some ways even more sheltered than Joey, is able to throw himself into this parallel world. But in doing so, he disappears from the book. Basu restricts his representation of the city to the Delhi that he and his Anglophone readers know—most of us, after all, were at the protest marches that didn’t face illegal detentions.  When Rudra steps out of that city, he goes somewhere the narrative can’t follow him. What we’re left with is the hope that someone, somewhere, is doing the work—that there are connections and networks out of our sight but that we can participate in, in a limited manner.

And Basu’s not alone in implying this. In “The Walls of Delhi”, Uday Prakash evokes a kind of global subterranean network of the dispossessed: 

"You see how this tunnel that starts from the little corner of the street that's home to Sanjay's paan stall leads to the Bypass ruins, from there to Kingsway Camp, and from there extends to each and every corner of the capital. Enter the tunnel, quietly make your way deeper and deeper, and you'll soon discover that the tunnel traverses the entire length of the country; then it continues below the ocean floor, until, finally, it circumnavigates the entire subterranean earth. This is a different kind of globalisation, one so stealthy and so secret that not a single sociologist in the whole wide world knows a thing about it. Those who do know keep quiet, stay put, and wait until tomorrow."

Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri literalises such a network through the excavations of Girish the plumber.

So I’m ending here with – no real conclusion, except that Delhi’s literary establishment currently seems to have no real way of entering or depicting these spaces, except in their absence. What this means for our hopes of envisioning protest and change is unclear.

Works Cited:

Banerjee, Sarnath. All Quiet in Vikaspuri. HarperCollins, 2015.

Basu, Samit. Chosen Spirits. Simon and Schuster, 2020.

Imarisha, Walidah. "Introduction" Octavia's Brood. Ed. adrienne maree brown & Walidah Imarisha. AK Press, 2015. 3-6.

Poddar, Sanjukta. "Delhi at the Margins: Heterotopic Imagination, Bricolage and Alternative Urbanity in Trickster City." Postcolonial Urban Outcasts. Ed. Madhurima Chakraborty & Umme Al-Wazedi. Routledge, 2017.

Prakash, Uday. The Walls of Delhi. Trans. Jason Grunebaum. Hachette, 2013.

Singh, Vandana. "Indra's Web". Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Zubaan, 2018.