Sleepless Dreamers of the CIty

 As Gautam Bhan documents, while the general notion of the word ‘sarkar’ which means ‘government’ but literally, according to Bhan’s work translates to ‘executive’ obfuscates the fact that people living in irregular colonies and ‘pavement-dwellers’ though officially part of the vision of Delhi's three Master Plans that have looked to acquire land for the construction of government owned housing, are marginalized repeatedly by Court judgements that evict them from settled or semi-settled sites of dwelling. Courts, according to Bhan, also produce, amongst residents of irregular colonies in Delhi, a drive to produce documentation to verify their ownership of land. He argues that such ‘irregularities’ do not lie outside the domain of planning, but are the products of planning. The Delhi Development Authority, charged with constructing government-owned housing, has never really catered to low-income housing, although this is a clearly marked part of repeated plans. 

What happens to the city that is thrown out of the very land it helped to consolidate and the very buildings it helped to build? I argue here that documentation is an insufficient methodological tool for approaching the representation of migrant workers and the homeless in cities. The representation has to lead somewhere. And this somewhere has to be conditioned by the ethics of a proletariat rather than bourgeois aesthetics. In my work on homelessness in Delhi, I was struck by the emphasis placed by workers on Bollywood cinema emerging out of the 70s and 80s precisely because it represented the working class. Part of this story was depicted by Shaunak Sen in his film on Delhi's Night Shelters: Cities of Sleep. 

The movie starts with a montage of the city at night, with the voice of a resident of one of the night shelters describing life as someone without a home, at night in the city:

“’Have you ever wondered why people sleep on the divider in the summer? When a car comes at high speed one feels a strong breeze which prevents mosquitoes from biting’

‘So if you wish to save yourself from Dengue Malaraia, sleep on dividers’

‘In Delhi people sleep in many makeshift (chalau dhang se) ways: under flyovers, in discarded pipes and outside closed shops, in garages, under cars, on top of trucks’

‘To figure out the extent of someone’s power observe the way they sleep’

‘A fight for a comfortable and preservable sleeping spot is always on. You need to know the right places to survive the winters, which parks have benches with sturdy wooden planks, how to fold cardboard boxes and where to get cheap offal which keeps the body warm’”. 

Sen’s documentary is another textual reminder about the importance of the question of unshelteredness for civilisation as such. Inspired by Ranciere’s (1989) ‘Proletarian Nights’ the movie describes a world amongst the unsheltered in Old Delhi, that is rife with art and philosophical thought.  Rancière’s (1989) classic history of workers’ engagement with art and literature in the 19th century traces an alternative history of labour and offers us a reconsideration of Marxism. The question is no longer merely a rise in political consciousness. Sen’s documentary traces tent cinemas that screen Bollywood movies from the 70s and 80s, where workers and homeless people go to relax and, in many ways, to regain a sense of life after being subjected to the rigours of various forms of mechanical and dangerous labour.

As the monologue above describes, homelessness in not merely a question of rights, but also a question of existence. Sen’s documentary explores deep existential questions, such as what prevents someone from returning to the village once the enterprise of earning money quickly to address a number of familial existential problems fails. Intuitively, Sen describes how the night in the Old City of Delhi is also a deeply political space. What it involves, moreover, is what Grohmann (2023) describes as an ‘ethics of space’. The tent cinemas bring us back to the question of existence in relation to homelessness. At the tent cinemas under Loha Pull  (Iron Bridge), workers lie in large tents, often falling asleep, writing, or simply ‘being’.

As one worker explains in one of the tents:

‘Aur mujhe bohot acha lagta hai cinema mein neend se jagna…Surakshit sa lagta hai’

‘Filme sirf dekhne ke liye thodi hota hai, yeh cinema ek ghar hai’

‘Yahan log, aate hain, filme dekhte hein, aaram karte hein’

‘Jabh mein pehle rickshaw chala tha, mein aksar rikshe pe hi so jata tha. Nafratt hi mujhe wahan sone se, magar log utha the achanak se “chal bhai chal! Wahan chal!” Gareebi ka matlab hai ki aap apni thakavat kabhi chun Nahin sakte’

‘Apka waqt kisi aur ka hai aur us wakt apka sharer kya Karega who koi aur tai Karega. Main itna toh tai karoon mein din ke kitne ghanta sounga.’

‘Cinema mein jitni der jo Marzi aap karlo’.

[‘And I really like waking up from sleep in the tent cinema, I feel secure’

‘Films are not just to watch. This tent cinema is a home.’

‘People come here to watch a film and relax’

‘When I used to ride a cycle rickshaw before I would often sleep on it. I used to hate sleeping like that, people would wake me up suddenly and say ‘get out of here! Go there!. The meaning of poverty is that you cannot chose your tiredness.’

‘Your time is someone else’s and what happens to your body is decided by someone else. I wish I could at least decide how many hours a day I sleep.’

‘In the tent cinema we can do what we want to for however long’.]

While both Sen and Ranciere’s (1989) work emphasize the contexts of art in freeing up a sense of being or existence, here in this account I look at the inverse proposition: that existence itself involves skill, that even in the absence of a home, we carry homes with us in various forms, if nothing else in tokens and photos we carry of family and home. And that the night itsel demands a different mode of engagement with practices that contitute the social edifice. 

                                                                    -x-

Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher best known for his writings on equality, politics, education and aesthetics. He began his intellectual career as a student of Louis Althusser and contributed to Reading Capital. After May 1968, however, Rancière rejected the Althusserian distinction between knowledgeable theorists and workers supposedly trapped within ideology. He argued that this model reproduced inequality by making intellectuals the necessary interpreters of working-class experience.

First published in French in 1981 as La Nuit des prolétaires, Proletarian Nights emerged from Rancière’s research in nineteenth-century French working-class archives. Instead of presenting a conventional history of factories, unions or socialist doctrine, the book follows artisans who wrote poems, produced journals, exchanged letters, pursued utopian schemes and discussed philosophy during hours normally reserved for sleep.

The book’s central claim is that workers did not need intellectuals to explain domination to them. Their more fundamental struggle was to escape the bodily habits, language and identities domination imposed. By taking time from sleep, they asserted themselves as full inhabitants of a shared intellectual world. The book combines history, philosophy and literary narration, deliberately refusing to treat workers’ writing merely as evidence requiring explanation by a superior scholarly voice.

After his initial chapter describing how workers saw their own representations in Bourgisoie art Ranciere comments:

Perhaps, then, there is something at stake in our effort to mark the digression that intervenes between the old partitions of knowledge and the new apportionments that range thoughts, discourses, and images in the twofold registers of class struggle, science and ideology, power and resistance, mastery and dissidence. Perhaps there is a real point in letting  the scene unfold as weavers and shoemakers, joiners or smiths, ask themselves about their identity and their right to speak, carried along by the very logic of the disjunction that prompts recognition of one only at the expense of the other. Such is their venture as they seek to appropriate for themselves the night of those who can stay awake, the language of those who do not have to beg, and the image of those who do not need to be flattered. We must take this detour on the supposedly direct road from exploitation to class message, from worker identity to its collective expression. We must examine the mixed scene in which some workers, with the complicity of intellectuals who have gone out to meet them and perhaps wish to expropriate their role, replay and shift the old myth about who has the right to speak for others by trying their hand at words and theories from on high. Perhaps it is through a few singular passions, a few chance encounters, and a few discussions of the sex of God and the origin of the world that we may see the image of the great labor community take visible shape and hear its voice sound out. (22)

In a volume entitled ‘Science, religion reality’ edited by Joseph Needham (1925) Arthur Eddington publishes an article called ‘The domain of physical science’ where he argues that even mathematical sciences are subject to a subjectivism of perspective. Malinowski publishes his now classic work on ‘Magic, science and religion’  in the same volume. While the subjective dimension of participant observation is by now apparent to any fieldworker or ethnographer, how this dimension is articulated changes the structure of the reality portrayed entirely.

The production of a structural representation of the worker's life necessitates such redefinition precisely because the praxis of 'making a home in the absence of one' involves defining spaces of belonging despite belonging nowhere. As Ranciere (2009, 10) describes it in his ‘Emancipated Spectator’:

‘The same intelligence at work –an intelligence that translated signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate  its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavoring to communicate to it’

The spectator of art, of life, of the field Ranciere (2009, 102) argues is no longer to be merely a kind of subjective sieve to the perceived world but rather is actively involved in reconstituting it, through a network of aesthetic perception or ‘an aesthetic community’ which is:

“a spatiotemporal system in which words and visible forms are assembled into shared data, shared ways of perceiving, being, affects, and imparted meaning. The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense –that is to say, “different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings.”

The question of aesthetics then is liberated in Ranciere from its common sensical preservation in art and elite forms of leisure, to encapsulate the very making of space and time and meaning. The emancipated spectator participates in this re-organization. 

 The question of Proletarian art and technique is a central one and one we would do well to actively participate in. Too much of the city's story has been told from the point of view of a representational art. But the problem goes both ways, the modes of representaiton of the proletariat are mostly reports and tragic stories. The question is no longer, how the proletariat should be represented, in fact the question now is how do the bourgeoisie participate in the lives of those that build their cities for them. The city has to produce itself through its own collective dream,  as it does. While the state plays some role, public actors themselves cannot reduce themselves to the role of the state in surveying the poor. 

A sociology of urban life has to position itself precisely at this level of technique to evolve a form of life that is continuous with that of the city's creators.