The Student Stipendship Programme started as a part of City One Conference organised by Sarai/ CSDS in January 2003. The conference design included an innovative component for students who were offered an opportunity to attend the conference and also report on it on the Reader List and other forums. Invitation to attend the conference was through a public call that required students to submit a brief write-up on their research interests and background. Sarai also provided financial support to the extent of Rs.10,000 to prepare a research paper that would build upon their learning through conference participation. These papers were presented at a separate workshop in June 2003.

 

ABSTRACTS

Anand Vivek Taneja- An Archeology of Memory
Anand seeks to anchor his study in a ‘deep’ history of ‘monuments’ in Delhi to come to grips with the embedded layers of meaning and memories, some official and others fluid. He is currently writing a fictional narrative of the city that travels both into the future and the past, through which he hopes to destabilize notions of time and space.

Dhiraj Kumar
A Study of Social Organization/Reorganization of Workers’ Lives at the Workplace and in the Neighborhood
By focusing on Delhi and Dhanbad, Dhiraj attempts to look at the processes that go in the making of the ‘working class’. He is seeking to address questions of arrival in the city, social networks, labour markets, routines, work conditions, social differentiation, alienation, imaginaries, relationship with the city and with the ‘problematizing’ elite.

J. Indira
Labouring in the City: Dalit Women in Demeaning Occupations
Indira wishes to study ‘castiesed sexuality’ of dalit women shaping the contours of the division of labour. Deconstructing nationalist discourses, the study attempts to trace out the realities of those dalit women who perform labour in demeaning occupations in urban areas. The study hopes to contribute to the development of a dalit feminist perspective that is grounded in experience and subjectivity.

Jabir Ali
Waste Utilization and Management of Slaughterhouses in the Metropolitan City of Delhi and its Impact on the Environment
The study is an analysis of the structures and management of Delhi slaughterhouses to assess the available waste disposal and utilization processes and to understand government policy on pollution. It is premised on the observation that most slaughterhouses of Delhi are unhygienic and lack basic facilities that result in health hazards, environmental pollution and economic loss.

Joanna Pereira
Linguistic Mobilizations in Postcolonial Urban Goa
Joanna will undertake a study of language movements in Goa by tracing their genealogies through interviews and popular literature. The concern is to understand the role of language in Goan identity, politics and in the formation of a new public sphere, in the backdrop of rapid urbanization.

K.S. Arul M M Selvan
Online Chatting: Future of Public Spaces – Ethnographic Perspective
Arul wants to read online chat spaces as forms of public space in relation to the literature on digital communities and the social/phenomenological relationships they engender. He seeks to identify the structure and function of common public places in the virtual world, their purpose and goals and to find comparisons between online and offline public places.

Kalyan Kumar
The Evolution of the City and its Regime: A Case Study of Jamshedpur c. 1920-1960
Kalyan seeks to study the evolution of Jamshedpur as an industrial town that was subject to peculiar spatial and urban formations, being a site of migration of labour and a site designed and governed by a corporation. The issues being probed lie at the intersection of the two and are concerned with structures of governance, experiences of labour and the role of capital in defining urban space.

Manu Agarwal
‘Address’ and ‘Mental Map’ as Codes to Perception of the Urban Space in Palimpsest Cities
Manu proposes to draw up, analyse and study the mental maps of the residents of the Indian city in various quarters (the old city, new city, slums) to arrive at ways of decoding the implied socio-cultural and spatial factors that make the foundation of an urban space.

Mriganka Madhukaillya
The Great Divide: The Politics of Location
Mriganka is planning to make a film with a view to discovering the simultaneous linkages and the inherent contradictions of urbanity (perceived as a modern location of habitation) and myths of violence. She intends to use visual and written records to interrogate various facets of urban modernity, with a focus on the city of Ahmedabad.

Nitin Sinha
Railways and the Changing Rural-Urban Interface: A Case Study of a Railway Town, Jamalpur, c. 1860-1930
This study seeks a convergence between the study of railways as a vehicle for economic transformation and new urban-rural interface and the new identities that develop in the railway town of Jamalpur. It attempts to look at the intermeshed histories of new technology, novel work sites (the railway workshop), the emergence of a new form of labour and patterns of urban development.

P. Sudarshan
Planned and Unplanned Processes of Urbanization in Bangalore: A Comparative Study of Two Areas
Sudarshan will look at how space becomes urbanized in a rapidly growing city like Bangalore, with special emphasis on how the land supply is increased through acquiring land in peripheral villages both through acquisitions (involuntary transactions) and private layout formations (voluntary transactions). It is a case study of two village areas on the southern periphery of Bangalore.

Polly Hazarika
Urban Educational Practices
Polly is undertaking a study of government policies, education reports and syllabus formation to think about how contemporary education is being conceived of, especially at the higher secondary level. The focus is on gap between ‘learned’ and ‘lived’ realities – an education that no longer provides tools for understanding but instead produces a sort of alienation.

Ravi Kumar
Urban Social Movements in the Age of Globalization: Studying the Changing Patterns of Cultural and Social Mobilization in Cities
Taking the manifest ‘absence’ of social movements in the city, Ravi seeks to introspect and rethink the nature of social movements by moving away from explicitness and continued manifestation of public action to one that sustains issues – social movements not as explicit protests but as constructive alternatives by examining the new globalising and urbanising contexts.

Ravindra Karnena
City and its Heterotopia: An Investigation into the Annual Industrial Exhibition in Hyderabad
Ravindra wants to investigate the event, the supporting institutional structures, their origins and changing discourses and contexts of an Industrial Exhibition. The research is an exploration of the city as a site of everyday practice and a place that yields valuable insights into the linkages of macro processes, the texture and fabric of human experience.

Rutul Joshi
A Comparative Study of Contemporary City Structures
Rutul proposes to trace urban morphologies, especially documenting the post-independence spatial growth in the city. He intends to look at five case studies utilizing city level plans, plans of urban spaces and their built typology to compare their morphological characteristics.

Sheema Fatima
Chowks in Munger
Sheema will examine two ‘chowk’ related incidents: the erection of a chowk by the town’s Muslim community and the defacement on another chowk in post-Godhra events. She will examine issues of claims/responsibilities that open up the field in terms of community, urban semiotics and the existing politico-religious nexus in Munger.

Shruti Tambe
City through the Prism of Movements : Aurangabad from 1948 to 1998
Shruti analyses the ways in which various urban processes interact dialectically by looking at a range of issues – expansion of the city, distribution of services, reconstruction of boundaries and policy of land use, physical planning – with the politics of the region and its play on, and in, the city. Issues of language, caste and religion will be addressed.

Srabanti Bhattacharya
Kolkata’s Water Supply: A Historical Perspective
Delineating three periods in the history of the city’s water supply – company, imperial and postcolonial – Srabanti seeks to use archival materials, maps and statistics to document the water supply situation of the city as it relates in varying ways to demographic transformations, changing character of decision-making bodies and patterns of growth of other infrastructural networks.

Students from the M.A. Programme in Sociology
Usurped Freedom – Women Students, Safety and City Space
This class of M.A. students wants to explore the Weberian insight of the city as a space of domination, but see it in terms of gender relations. They intend to look at women’s experiences of urban space within the context of residence and patterns of accommodation that are available to the women who can be viewed as “temporary migrants” in the city, like those who come to the city to seek higher education.

Sujithkumar Parayil
Visualization of the Colonial Urbanism
Sujith tries to understand how photography visualises or constructs urban identities, in the specific case of Kerala. Institutional practices of urban photography (studios) and photographs as sites of cultural histories will be addressed.

Swati Dyahadroy
Gender and Hindutva in Pune City: Documenting Women’s Participation in Jnana Prabodhini
Swati intends to look at a prominent right-wing women’s organization in Pune through the content analysis of magazines and publications of the cultural wing and youth wing for the girls. She also hopes to collect narratives from participants in these wings of the organisation to understand their psyche, experiences, networks and their conception of their new ‘public roles’ in the city.

Vinoj Abraham
Labour in Globalising Cities
Centered on post-Fordist labour markets in large urban agglomerations of developing economies, Vinoj seeks to examine the informalisation of work, individuation of workspace, degendering of work, impact of locational and time flexibility and skill-based segregation in the context of the ICT industry in metropolitan cities of India.