Shiben Banerji, "Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Dr. Shiben Banerji, "Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy" (U Texas Press, 2025)
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Shiben Banerji
Date: December 18, 2025

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Overview of the Episode

In this episode, Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Dr. Shiben Banerji about his new book, Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025). They explore how early 20th-century architects, urban planners, pacifists, and anti-colonial figures used the language and imagery of the “global city” and occult spiritualism not just to design cities, but to imagine new forms of collective ethical belonging. The discussion weaves together urban planning, spiritual politics, anti-colonial thought, and debates on democracy across Europe, the Americas, South Asia, and Australia, illuminating surprising connections and ongoing relevance.

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Main Themes and Purpose

• Examining the Overlap: Investigation into the cross-cultural encounters between modernism and occultism and their influence on the design and imagination of “global cities.”
• The Globe as Ethical Category: The evolution of the “globe” from a mere scale or frame of political-economic analysis to an ethical and spiritual metaphor for human interconnectedness.
• Planning as Spiritual Practice: Urban planning is framed as a transformative method for consciousness—changes in physical space are tied to a more profound change in collective ethics and responsibility.
• Global Urban Visions: Analysis of ambitious urban plans (“World Capital,” “World Center,” “Cité Mondiale,” garden cities, ashrams) that sought to materialize a global ethos or sense of planet-wide solidarity—emphasizing their successes, failures, and lingering lessons.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Motivations and Origins of the Book

• Banerji is trained as an architect, planner, and historian.
• Two core trajectories shaped the book:
  • Dissatisfaction with shallow accounts of modernism’s relationship with occultism: “...towering figures like Mondrian, Kandinsky, Yeats...all immersed in spiritual, mystical, and occultist practices at the dawn of the 20th century, but that was about all we knew.” ([04:37])
  • Desire to historicize “globality” as a concept and object: approaching “the globe as an object of historical inquiry...the globe emerges as a figure for the unity of humankind, and, in some cases, all creatures and things.” ([06:45])

2. Defining "Occult Modernism" and Its Materialization

• Occult modernism saw urban form (and its representation, especially through film) as a prompt for feelings and sensations of interconnection.
• Example: The 1928 film advertisement “Beautiful Middle Harbor,” promoting the Castlecrag suburb in Sydney by Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, uses cinematic techniques to model ecological and ethical relationships between residents and the land ([10:20]).
  • “Urban form, including forms of representation like film, could inculcate a sensitivity to the sorts of relationships we all have...” ([12:30])
• Occult modernism diverges from forms like Italian futurism. Rather than destroying the past, it seeks to “destroy narratives about the past.”
  • E.g., Highlighting that urban planning should reveal “this is, to use the term from that period, aboriginal land,” challenging colonial myths of progress. ([14:20])

3. Urban Planning as Vehicle for Global Ethics

• Period of focus: 1905–1945—an “early 20th century story...shaped by profound uncertainty about the future of empire.” ([16:56])
• Banerji’s central thesis: The "globe" as an ethical concept arose negatively, as a rejection of the limited, exclusive visions of liberal internationalism and international socialism.
  • “Liberal internationalism...offered visions of post-imperial futures...each rejected by miscellaneous modernists.” ([18:10])
• Occult modernists sought to cultivate a “global ethos,” unbound by state, class, or ethnic exclusions.

4. Transformative Urban Plans: World Capital & World Center

• World Capital (Carl Petrus de Basel, The Hague): Cluster of academies, promoting humanitarian exchange.
• World Center (Hendrik Christian Andersen, Rome): Similar idea, focused on clustering research academies and crossing disciplinary/national lines.
• Both plans evolve “from campus plans to satellite cities,” but are spatially “unremarkable” ([23:27]).
• Central point: “...consciousness of the unity of humankind cannot be relegated to international law....urban planning...claims to organize daily life, that something like a global consciousness can emerge.” ([27:45])

5. Reception, Debate, and Iteration

• Paul Otlet, Belgian pacifist, critiques the World Capital for being tied to a center of international law (The Hague), arguing that “pacifism requires trust...best fostered in centers of commerce” ([28:45]).
• Otlet supports the more flexible World Center concept, eventually seeks to re-site it near Brussels.
• By the 1920s, Otlet grows skeptical of these architectural utopias, and looks to “real estate and financial speculation” as means of building global consciousness—an approach that fails to persuade others ([32:45]).
• Collaboration with Le Corbusier leads to the Cité Mondiale plan, moving the concept to Geneva, then Antwerp ([34:00]).

6. Competing Global Urban Experiments and Anti-Colonial Responses

• The interwar period sees proliferation and disagreement—multiple schemes for founding “global” environments, many coordinated through or influenced by the Theosophical Society ([35:24]).
• Actual built projects: Suburban experiments in Sydney and Bombay, “ashram” colonies in India, garden cities in Britain.
• Anti-colonial leaders like Annie Besant and Gandhi dispute the meaning and practice of the ashram; Banerji contrasts Besant’s pluralistic, spiritual vision of self-governing federations with Gandhi’s stricter ethic of disinterested action ([38:00–47:00]).
  • “Ashram life...and the ways in which one can equalize relations across religions and castes, is possible and entirely compatible with private property rights. And I think that this explains the suburban characteristic of this ashram.” ([47:09])
• Broader point: “Anti-colonials...are deeply skeptical with the idea that government could make one good...Equality among subject peoples cannot be brought about by governmental intervention. Mere voting rights will not actually create a democratic mentality. And so...democracy is not mechanical, it’s spiritual.” ([37:00–40:00])

7. "The Magic of America"—A Feminist, Anti-Colonial Intervention

• Marion Mahony Griffin’s omnibus text “The Magic of America” is a key focus.
• Banerji: “In Magic of America, Marion Marnie is renovating...the architect's autobiography...from a specifically feminist and anti-colonial perspective.” ([51:25])
  • She explicitly argues that “the conservation of the earth is the duty of women and that women are shirking this duty in the face of colonizing...actions by men.” ([52:10])
• Stresses the need to listen to unfamiliar and threatening others—the democratic “demos” as infinitely expansive, not just a crowd to be ruled by “exceptional men.”
• Frames the nuclear age as a crisis for the political meaning of the globe; ethics must supersede politics: “For democracy to be meaningful at the scale of humanity as a unified whole requires wrenching democracy from its political context...and citing it instead in the individual body.” ([58:05])

8. Lasting Implications and Takeaways

• Banerji identifies three enduring lessons:

  1. Ethical Commitment Trumps Institutional Design: “Changing one’s commitments is much harder than devising a scheme for institutional reform.” ([60:02])
  2. Danger of Capital Accumulation: The large “global city” projects teach little today, as their focus on endless capital accumulation offers little for addressing today’s crises.
  3. Anti-Colonial Insights—Restraint & Common Cause: Anti-colonial projects centered on the need to “put constraints on the movement of capital” and to “make common cause between the perpetrators and abettors, but also the victims, of unjust socialities.” ([63:35])
  • “...the colonized subject...had an affirmative duty to save colonizers from their worst selves.” ([63:46])
  • Academic history’s duty is to “restore the worldview even of those who appear to be doing injury to others.” ([64:43])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I wanted to tell the story about modernism's formative encounter with occultism...to explain what it was that modernists were doing when they described humans as embedded in an enchanted universe.” – Dr. Shiben Banerji ([05:00])
• “Urban planning...emerges as a method for altering perception and consciousness, and most specifically to reimagine what it is to perceive and experience oneself as unconditionally interconnected with others who do not resemble us.” – Dr. Shiben Banerji ([07:30])
• “So occult modernism has this way of actually saying that everything you know about the past must be destroyed, and you must see yourself in an entirely new light.” – Dr. Shiben Banerji ([14:00])
• “...that from these legal technologies, from practices of jurisprudence, no sense of the fundamental unity of humankind could emerge. And so, again, the thought is that it's urban planning ... that something like a global consciousness can emerge.” ([27:45])
• “Equality between and among all of these subject peoples cannot be brought about by governmental intervention. Mere voting rights will not actually create a democratic mentality. And so this is where you get these very strong arguments that democracy is not mechanical, it's spiritual.” ([39:19])
• “The only way to save democracy is to see the demos as infinitely expansive, and that...to honor what it is to be a democratic subject is to have a democratic mentality and affect and to constantly seek to hear what the other is saying, even if it is unfamiliar or threatening.” ([54:00])
• “It is important, in the words of the cultural theorist Leela Gandhi, to make common cause between the perpetrators and abettors, but also the victims of unjust socialities.” ([63:35])
• “It has become all too common to seek to apportion guilt and assign blame. And I don't think that that's actually what the institution of history can do.” ([64:43])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:27] – Banerji’s background and what led to the book
• [08:13] – Definition and manifestations of “occult modernism”
• [16:56] – The emergence of the “global ethos” against empire, liberal internationalism, and socialism
• [23:27] – Comparison of “World Capital” and “World Center” urban plans
• [28:45] – Controversies and reception among contemporaries (Otlet, others)
• [34:00] – Cité Mondiale, interwar experiments, proliferation of plans
• [36:51] – Suburban/ashram experiments in Bombay and their political-philosophical stakes
• [51:25] – Marion Mahony Griffin and “The Magic of America”
• [60:02] – Final lessons and takeaways from the research

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Tone and Style

The episode is deeply analytical while maintaining accessibility and warmth. Both interviewer and guest balance scholarly rigor with storytelling—anchoring abstract ideas in concrete examples, personalities, and disputes. There is a sense of genuine intellectual excitement, respect for past actors, and concern for present and future crises.

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Conclusion

Banerji’s work refigures the history of the “global city” as a story not just of planning or capital, but of ethical aspiration, spiritual experimentation, and anti-colonial debate—lessons urgently relevant in an age of planetary crisis and social struggle.

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Further Reading:
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025)
For more, listen to the full episode or explore Banerji’s current research on urban planning’s role in Black civil rights movements (1930s–1960s).

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Transcript

[Marshall Poe]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Shibin Banerjee about his book titled Lineages of the Global Occult, Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy, published by the University of Texas Press in 2025. Now, as that title suggests, we have a whole bunch of things to get into here, right? Global City. Turns out that's a whole idea and has been for a while, with lots of competing, overlapping ideas of what that look like, sometimes literally what the plans of the city should be, conceptually, politically, sociologically, what this should entail. Lineages, right? I mentioned overlapping. We've got kind of change over time, which is always an interesting topic. And of course, the subtitle of the book, occult Modernism, Spiritualization of Democracy. Loads of intricate things to get into here that are going to take us. We're going to be in Europe, we're going to be in the Americas, we're going to go to South Asia, we might even end up in Australia. There's lots of interesting threads for us to pull here. So, Shibin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Thank you, Miranda. I am so looking forward to our conversation.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I am, too. But before we get too excited, we should start with some useful foundation information. So can you please introduce yourself a little bit? Tell us why you decided to write the book. What sorts of questions are you asking with this project?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

I would be glad to say something about my motivations in writing Lineages of the Global City. I'm trained as an architect, planner, and historian, and I've apprenticed myself to these three subjects, really, since I was a teen. I'm now an associate professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Looking back, there were two trajectories that led me to write Lineages of the Global City. The first was a dissatisfaction, very frankly, with the existing account of the relationship between modernism and occultism. We knew that a number of leading modernists across painting, music, writing, towering figures like Mondrian, Kandinsky, Yeats, had all been immersed in spiritual, mystical and occultist practices at the dawn of the 20th century, but that was about all we knew. I wanted to tell the story about modernism's formative account, encounter with occultism and tell a story that was cross cultural and went beyond the biographical to explain what it was that modernists were doing when they described humans or depicted humans as embedded in an enchanted universe. So that was my first motivation. The second trajectory that led me to write Lineages of the Global City was a desire to contribute to conceptual histories of globality. Now, 20 years ago, when I began my postgraduate training, there was a ubiquitous call to globalize the curriculum, except that no one seemed to know what the slogan meant. I thought it might help to approach the globe as an object of historical inquiry. Instead of presupposing the existence of the globe as a scale of interaction and a frame of analysis, the two trajectories intersected. In my research and writing, I found that modernists who asserted that there was a spiritual dimension to the universe used the term globe as a figure for the unity of humankind, and in some cases as a figure for the unity of all creatures and things. So for renowned figures such as the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier, or even those who have been overlooked, like the American architect Marion Marni, urban planning then emerges as a method for altering perception and consciousness, and most specifically to reimagine what it is to perceive and experience oneself as unconditionally interconnected with others who do not resemble us. And I describe this in the book as a global ethos. That is to say, it was both an ethic or an outlook on oneself as unavoidably interconnected with others and an ethics or an obligation to choose an act with a view to one's inexorable impact on others.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I love hearing about the origins of projects because there's never just one moment or one motivation. It's always things that develop and change over time and intersections of different ideas that maybe don't start off as being related, but then end up in that sort of place. So thank you for that introduction. Is there anything further you want to tell us around the kinds of particular questions that came up in the book, or key terms like occult modernism?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

I would be glad to say something about occult modernism. The first and most important thing to share is that what emerges in the early 20th century among a broad range of architects, artists as well as pacifists and anti colonials, across the range of places that you mentioned in your very generous introduction. The Americas, Europe, South Asia, Australia. Across these areas, in ways that are profoundly linked historically, there emerges a sense that urban form, the ways in which a city is physically organized but also represented, represented in images Represented in text, represented increasingly, I will say more on this in film, that urban form was a prompt for feelings and sensations, and specifically feelings and sensations of being connected with others, including potentially other species. And this is often simulated through the medium of film. And so very early in the book, I describe a silent film advertisement by the American architect Marion Marni, whom I just referenced in partnership with Walter Burley Griffin, with whom she had worked since the very early 1900s and to whom she would eventually get married. Marnie and Griffin are practicing across the United States and Australia. In the 1920s, they would practice, would eventually expand to India as well. And in the 1920s and 30s, they're experimenting with real estate development, which is to say that they've gone beyond working as architects who work on buildings, they've gone beyond working as town planners and landscape architects who work at a larger scale of, say, the design of neighborhoods or even in entire cities, to really trying to develop a set of practices as real estate developers. So they're really their own, in some senses, client. They're developing a suburb of Sydney Castle Crag. It remains extant today in North Sydney. It's a beautiful waterfront residential suburb. And to advertise homes and lots in this suburb, Marnie and Griffin produce a film. It's titled Beautiful Middle Harbor. I encourage anyone listening to this to search for that on YouTube. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia has done a wonderful job of restoring this fascinating 12 minute long advertisement that is also quite experimental in its filmmaking and editing techniques. And part of what I argue is that the new medium of film and the new social phenomenon of cinema going comes to mediate the practice of urban planning itself. Techniques of filmmaking, film editing in film, but also in other forms of architectural representation come to change how architects present particularly urban space and do so in a way of modeling for a mass audience what it might mean to think of oneself as having an inescapable connection with others and an unavoidable impact on others. So what this beautiful Middle harbor advertisement does is not only advertise living in this absolutely beautiful suburb that has the last remnants of the Australian bushland in the Sydney area at that point in time and to this day, precisely because of the ecological approach to urban design and planning that Marnie and Griffin advance, but it's also then showing potential homeowners this is how you might live in the suburb, that part of your attraction to the suburb is taking on the responsibility or the obligation of seeing yourself as responsible to the land and the creatures that grow on the land. And this is modeled in these exquisitely filmed sequences of potential homeowners winding through a steep and narrow trail through the bushland, consciously seeking not to veer off the trail in a way that would threaten endangered wildflower species, among other creatures that lived on the land. So it's this sense that urban form, including in forms of representation like film, could inculcate a sensitivity to the sorts of relationships we all have in an everyday sense. We, walking on the ground, will always do things to that ground. Age it. If there is something underneath your foot, you'll kill it. What urban design, what occult modernism in the early 20th century is seeking to do, is to alert humans to that impact. So those were the really sort of very significant dimensions of the phenomena that I refer to as occult modernism. There was one, one other thing that I found very intriguing. And in this, occult modernism was like many other familiar varieties of modernism, including anti passatismo, which was a tendency within Italian futurism that sought to destroy the past. The difference between, say, something like antipassatismo and occult modernism is that occult modernism did not wish to precisely destroy the past, but destroy narratives about the past. And so part of what I'm arguing is that in a project like Castle Cragg and its representation in a film like Beautiful Middle harbor from 1928, there is a sense of saying what people in Sydney have been told about their ancestral past, of the place in which they reside, is simply wrong. This is, to use the term from that period, aboriginal land. This is space that was inhabited by Indigenous Australians. Settler colonialism has destroyed most of the natural features of the land as well as the human relationship to those features, and has described it as progress. That's the narrative that has to be broken down. This is not the act of the so called civilized. This is merely barbarism. So occult modernism has this way of actually saying that everything you know about the past must be destroyed and you must see yourself in an entirely new light.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

This is a very helpful description of what you mean by the term and the ways in which it shows up in conversation, but also, as you said, like in actual places where real people live, which is always a helpful sort of combination of things. We don't like terms just being theoretical. Right. Being able to understand what they mean in practice is helpful too. And these ideas are taken to, as you mentioned, in Australia, kind of where real people live and talking about, like real impacts of the environment. And a lot of what you've described there is kind of, to some extent, depending on who, which thinker we're talking about a more or less explicit critique of the past. Right. These things have gone wrong, wrong and should not be done in these sorts of ways. They're also used very explicitly to look forward to the future. What could be done better beyond one particular place? You know, thinking even bigger picture than that. And a lot of this seems to be discussed at the 2nd Hague Peace Conference that you take us to in the book. So what is happening there that makes this a place where we get really big ideas like World Capital and World center that I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit more detail in a moment. Why is this the kind of place and time where those sorts of ideas come together?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

I'll be glad to say something about this. The book covers the period between 1905 and 1945, and I argue that the impetus to cultivate a global ethos in planned urban space is very much an early 20th century story, one shaped by profound uncertainty about the future of empire now. Liberal internationalism of the sort incarnated in the two Hague Peace Conferences of 1899, 1907 and international socialism, also emergent in the 19th century and gaining new organizational ground around 1907 at the Stuttgart meeting of the Second International, both liberal internationalism and international socialism offered visions of post imperial futures, and each of these visions is rejected by a miscellaneous modernists. Now I think this is significant from the more parochial standpoint of urban and planning history that I very much seek to contribute to. Why? Because there has been an assumption in urban and planning history that globality is an outgrowth of internationalist political organizing and that imperialism was an antecedent for globality. One of the central historical claims that I am advancing is that the globe emerges as an ethical category, as the name of a certain kind of ethos. As I have been saying, it emerges as a global ethos as a negative response to both liberal internationalism and international socialism. Moreover, I argue that imperialism was not a sufficient condition for the emergence of the globe as a concept in ethics. It was only when the bonds between colonizers and colonized were thrown into doubt that the globe emerged as a concept and metaphor for the unity of humankind. And it's the interdependencies across metropolitan and colonized worlds that are very much in doubt. In the early 1900s already there are a succession of of political and economic crises leading up to and including the First World War, but also a series of revolutions and anti colonial revolts, these phenomena not being mutually exclusive. There's also increasing economic uncertainty with A cycle of boom and bust. And it's in that context that it appears that the empires that had built up, particularly in the late 19th century under the new imperialism, were at great risk of falling apart. Now, it's not just modernists and occultists who realize this. Political elites do as well. And arguably, and I'm not the first person by any means to suggest this, far more learned scholars in the fields of international legal theory have pointed this out for decades that indeed, liberal internationalism, starting with the Hague Peace Conferences, is an effort at trying to stabilize imperial futures. And so you get old and new empires saying, look, these are our spheres of influences. These are our semi colonies, these are our overseas territories. Those are yours. Let's just stay out of each other's hair. International socialism has, of course, a very different vision for the future of empire, one in which you get a federation of, or in its own terms, an international brotherhood of working men. Now, the class and gender specificity of that vision is something that a number of modernists find deeply unattractive, as they also find liberal internationalism very unattractive, not least of all because it tends to shatter the category of humanity in its invocation of terms like civilized or racialist concepts in which some races are seen as superior to others. So both of these varieties of internationalism, which are first and foremost political projects, but also ones that are highly conditioned, who gets to participate in the project is really a function of birth and occupation or ethnicity. This makes both those internationalisms deeply dissatisfying for modernists who think particularly informed by these wacky occultist texts that talk about spiritual bonds, existing invisible occult forces existing in the universe that tie all creatures and things together, it seems to a number of modernists that if one saw the universe as enchanted, as having a spiritual dimension that cannot be studied with detachment the way the natural sciences study nature, that in those circumstances it would be important to reject political projects that would fragment the fundamental unity of humankind, and to instead then turn to methods of emphasizing ethics over politics, wherein a person's ethical conduct would exemplify and instantiate the unity of humankind. And planning, I'm saying, becomes that principal method.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So let's talk about some of those particular plans that are kind of drawing in so many of these different strands you've just explained to us. As I mentioned, they have somewhat similar and interchangeable titles to those of us less familiar with these ideas than you are. But can you do a bit of compare and contrast with us for one called World Capital and another called World World Dash center.

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Indeed. I'd be glad to say something about these two projects. They both emerge as preliminary campus plans around 1904. That's to say, in the run up to the second Hague Conference, a decision has been held to call a second Hague Conference. And that seems to be the spark that gets, in the case of the World Capital, the Dutch architect and theosophist Carl Petrus de Basel, to get working on a plan for really a cluster of academies, with the idea being that you intensify exchange across scholars and that will yield a humanitarian sentiment. And around the same time, in Rome, the Norwegian American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen, he's working out of a studio in Rome, begins working on a very similar campus that he calls the World Center. Again, the idea is you cluster different research academies, including an academy of art, and that artists and scholars would exchange ideas across national and disciplinary boundaries, and that this would result in a global ethos. Now, there's several things to be said about this. The first is that both of these plans evolve from campus plans to plans for satellite cities that are about two and a half thousand acres large. So they increase in scale and their form changes. And in many ways, in both their incarnations as campus plan and as satellite city, they are spatially unremarkable. To put it very politely, these are just absolutely boring plans that had I had to show up to a student review and I saw that I would be clutching my head being like, good Lord, what do I say to this person that's positive? They said, absolutely costly, or what made them costly or spatially unremarkable? The campus plans just looked like any university campus plan from the late 19th century in the United States to sort of emphasize axial symmetry, there tended to be some ornamental fountain in the middle of it, utterly unremarkable. When they become satellite cities, they start looking like baroque plans from the early 20th century that are gaining favorite not just in the United States, but I would say also in Australia and to a lesser extent in South Africa. So, crucially, settler, colonial, temperate zone colonies. These are plans in these places where there's some effort at devising an alternative to gridiron planning. And I plot the ways in which both the World Capital and the World center plans formally join in with these transnational conversations about alternatives to gridiron planning. I think what's intriguing about the Second Hague Conference as a spark for these plans, and remember I said that these plans really start before the Second Hague Conference meets. But once the decision to call a second conference has been made, publicly announced I think what's happening there is that Debazel and the circle of pacifists around him, including two people who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and Henry Christian Andersen, each think that consciousness of the unity of humankind cannot be relegated to international law. That all the second hate Conference could do was pretty much what the first Hague Conference would have done, which is to set into place a series of covenants and declarations between imperial powers to avoid going to war with each other, but that from these legal technologies, from practices of jurisprudence, no sense of the fundamental unity of humankind could emerge. And so, again, the thought is that it's urban planning in the ways in which it not only creates space, but in the ways in which it claims to organize daily life, that something like a global consciousness can emerge.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Very interesting to have that explanation and analysis, because as you said, just looking at the images of these plans, like all of these layers are not visible, if that makes sense. They have to sort of have this interpretation added to them. Because, yeah, I looked at some of the images without. You know, you flip the page, you see an image. You look at that first, right? And I wasn't like, oh, my God, this is amazing. I was like, well, hang on, what's happening here? So very useful to have you explain them to us. What was the reception like at the time? What sorts of things did others kind of agree with, or maybe not, not like so much about these proposals?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Well, let me tell you the story about the Belgian pacifist Paul Otley, because I think he encapsulates some of the ways in which these plans are received. Orle learns of the World capital first in 1907 during the Second Hague Peace Conference, and instantly criticizes the World Capital Plan, principally because of its location in the Hague. And he's writing a series of essays at that moment in which he's arguing that pacifism requires trust, trust between nations, but also trust between state and non state actors within a nation. And he's arguing that it's really only an independent and supposedly apolitical civil society that is capable of. Of fostering trust relations within and across national boundaries. And he goes on to argue that civil society can really only thrive in centers of commerce and that this is what fundamentally makes the Hague unsuitable. It's now a center of international jurisprudence and public law. That means that this is not a place where independent civil society can thrive. And he also thinks that this very nomenclature of world capital is deeply offensive. Now, I must point out that this is all coming from A lawyer. Otley has trained his lawyer and yet has at best diffidence about the power of international public law to foster peace. Now, interestingly, four years later, in 1911, when Ottley learns of Anderson's work, World center, he's much more supportive of it. Now, at son had never been very clear about where the World center could be located. He improbably says it could be located anywhere. Ideally, it should be located on a water body. He sort of thinks that either the Libyan Mediterranean, which is under Italian occupation, or the ancient Roman port city of Ostia, either one of these locations would be ideal. But he's also drawn to the idea that the project could be cited in Cuba, in the Caribbean, in Honolulu, in the Pacific, in Australia, again in the Indo Pacific basin. Atlay thinks that it's a great plan that at its heart this is a plan that is about fostering bonds across research institutes and voluntary associations such as, say, the constituent elements of civil society. And I suspect that he's very drawn to the fact that Anderson cannot make up his mind about where to cite the plan. And Autelay thinks that Brussels, which did have a density of printing presses and publishing houses, research centers and international civil society organizations like the Red Cross, he does think that the outskirts of Brussels would be a great, albeit landlocked, location for the World Center. So that begins to give us some sense of the divergent responses to what are fundamentally very similar plans, both in terms of their purposes as well as in terms of their forms. Now, in 1921, Ottley starts singing a very different tune. He now thinks that neither the World Capital nor the World center are fit for purpose. And it's in highly coded language in a series of essays that he publishes in that year, in 1922, that he argues that pacifism in the wake of Bolshevik victories in the Russian Civil War, cannot rely exclusively on communication between elites. He thinks a lasting post war peace requires imagining oneself as interconnected with others. And he's very much drawing from the language of the theosophical society in whose orbit he has been for a number of years. He never formally joins a theosophical society, but he begins to mine its terminology of invisible spiritual bonds and says that it's capital markets, that is to say, the financial marketplace, that is the medium through which one would sense one's interconnection with others, and argues that it's real estate and financial speculation that are the techniques by which one trains the imagination to intuit the hopes and fears of others. Now, Otley is unable to convince Henry Christian Andersen, who had first proposed the World center, to modify his plan such that it would become a vehicle for real estate and financial speculation. And so it's in that context, in 1927, that Otley reaches out to the Swiss French architect Leor Corbusier. And together they plan a very different city that they call the Cite Mondiale. And at first they're imagining it be located on the outskirts of Geneva. And then in 1930, Otley says this Geneva is going nowhere, and then lands on the idea that the settlement should be located on the outskirts of antwerp. And in 1933, Otley and Le Corbusier iterate a version of the Sette mandial plan for the Left bank, or in Dutch, what's called Linkroofer across the Scheldt, or in French d', escorps, from the historic city center of Antwerp. Antwerp.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So this is really interesting to be in this inter war period. Obviously they don't know there's going to be World War II at this point. So if we think about it, even as you said, in the aftermath of what, World War I, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, there's lots of other ideas now kind of being floated around. It's not just World Capital and World Centre. And we've got these ideas about Otley you've just told us about. Can we throw some other ones in? Because it turned, you know, there were a bunch of other ones in this period too, and they're all in dispute with each other.

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

That was what was so fascinating, was to discover that they weren't just aware of each other, not infrequently, because plans were exhibited in the same show, or the same architects and pacifists were showing up at the same conferences or were publishing in the same journals, and these all being platforms very, very frequently under the auspices of the Theosophical Society, this sort of very weird central occultist group of the late 19th and early 20th century. And yes, they're all in disagreement with each other, are they not? They all agree that there should be some kind of global consciousness and ethic, but they can't figure out how one actually inculcates that. What sort of spaces does that entail? And so they're constantly, in some senses, shall we say politely bickering with one another by advancing a new plan. So sorry, I interrupted you, but some.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Of these plans become realized, or at least like versions of the plans have like baby attempts at them, right? So like, they take the polite bickering beyond the journals into reality, into some instances. You told us about the one in Australia. Let's throw in, please. We've got some ashrams in Bombay, we've got garden cities in Britain. How are those attempts at solving these questions part of these debates?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Thank you. It's a wonderful question. There is this extant gridiron suburb in my first hometown of Bombay. It's located in Juhu. It's built in the mid-1920s and at that time Juhu was a suburb of Bombay. It has been more fully folded into the fabric of the city. But this little enclave remains in its idyllic form from the 1920s. It's right on the water. It's very low density in the context of a very high density and chaotic city and is extremely tranquil. Now, there are a couple of things to share by way of background about this project and then I'll say a little bit more about its physical and social features as well. I think the first and most important thing to say is that the anti colonials that I write about, as is true of, I would say the vast majority if not almost all anti colonials in the early 20th century in different societies, they're deeply skeptical with the idea that government could make one good, that becoming a citizen. So something like nationalist liberation in the interest of creating citizens where one was a subject. They're deeply skeptical of the notion that that process could make a formally colonized subject an ethical individual. Now this is to say that anti colonial nationalism in the 1920s is emergent, but ideally wouldn't characterize it as dominant. I actually would argue that particularly in the South Asian context, what I describe as anti colonial globalism is in the main there is certainly an organized movement around nationalist liberation and one that universalists and globalists and humanists have to constantly contend with and criticize. But there is a very strong sense among anti colonials that we have to get the complaint about empire right. The complaint should never be one that is predicated on claims about race and ethnicity. It shouldn't be that we are dominated by an alien race. In any event, particularly in the South Asian context, that's not true. There's a handful of a handful of Europeans. All of the day to day management of the Indian empire is being done by native elites. What emerges, and it is a variety of liberal argument or liberalist argument is, and this has been emerging in the 19th century, it's not new to the 20th century, is a sense that what is the primary virtue of any form of political liberalism, that it puts all sorts of constraints on absolutism, and that it seeks to avoid impediments on one's range of actions by minimizing bureaucracy and other forms of red tape and interference. So in the colonized world, colonial liberalism takes the form of saying that native elites are the natural leaders. And this is an argument made equally by colonizers and anti colonials, that native elites are tempered by convention, therefore they will not tend supposedly toward absolutism. And equally, by devolving the management of the colonial state to native elites, you obviate the need for a bloated colonial bureaucracy. Now it's with that background that has been coalescing in the second half of the 19th century very powerfully, not just in the English language, but in a variety of languages across South Asia, emerges the first uses of Ashram in a political context. That's to say that the concept and metaphor of ashram journeys outwards from its meaning as a religious, specifically brahmanical institution to a modern political one. In the context of the earliest constitutional debates from the end of the 19th century in colonial South Asia, the uses and meanings of Ashram are powerfully re articulated in the interwar period after the First World War, amid a fresh round of constitutional reforms to the colonial state and the enfranchisement of the masses. I'm sure many of your listeners know that the first experiments in mass enfranchisement and universal adult franchise are from colonial South Asia. In the 1930s and post independence, India is the first state that grants voting rights universally. No other state in its formation, going back to the 18th century had, without qualification, given franchise to everyone who was at least an adult. Now it's amid these discussions about expanding the franchise, about more representation for native elites within the colonial state, that you get a number of anti colonials in South Asia saying wait a minute. Equality not just between Europeans and Asians, but equality among various constituent ethnic and social groups and castes and communities in South Asia, religious groups in South Asia. Equality between and among all of these subject peoples cannot be brought about by governmental intervention. Mere voting rights will not actually create a democratic mentality. And so this is where you get these very strong arguments that democracy is not mechanical, it's spiritual. And interestingly, these arguments are not infrequent, frequently articulated with reference to plans by Auckle and Anderson and the World Center. And so the Ashram starts being described as co equal to a plan like the World center, precisely because it inculcates this global ethos, much as the World center is trying to do in a metropolis important context. Now coming back to suburban Bombay of 1920s, there's something rather funny that's happening in this enclave that is being developed by acolytes of the Irish anti colonial leader of the Indian Home Rule movement and president of the Theosophical Society which I referenced a few minutes ago, Annie Besant. Now Annie Besant had also been twice president of the Indian National Congress and is certainly an anti colonial who argues vociferously against the idea that the future of empire is a fractured and jealous set of ethnically defined nation states. She very much is of the mind that empire needs to be transformed into a federation of self governing societies. Now Mahatma Gandhi, whose political philosophy and spiritual revolution is on the rise at this moment, also takes the view that nationalist liberation would be a quite inappropriate outcome to the colonial encounter of the long 19th century and also is quite comfortable with the idea of imperial federation. Certainly does not think that government should have a very large place in the scheme of things. He very strongly thinks that it is left to the individual to act ethically in impossible circumstances and thereby gain self governance and equality with others. Besant and Gandhi have a cataclysmic falling out beginning in 1916 over the place of interest in modern life. Gandhi thinks that interest as an organizing category of liberal politics has no place in modern life. That in fact to be ethical is to act in ways that are entirely disinterested. Besant, who also critiques interest as the principal organizing category of political and economic liberalism, thinks that it has no place in political life. She thinks that politics should be really about convention. Native elites guided by some set of customer records doing the right thing because they see themselves as inheritors of some ancient legacy. But she does think that interest has a place in economic life. She finds Gandhi's way of describing Ashram life as far too abstemious. It is strictly she thinks of it as pastoralism gone amok. She imputes sinister motives to Gandhi in around 1921, saying that he's only talking about the need to simplify life, a slogan that Gandhi inherits from the English socialist and arts and crafts theorist Edward Carpenter. Besant thinks that Gandhi is only embracing the call to simplify life as a way of seducing the Indian masses. That he is trying to present himself as a quasi divine figure, in her words, despite having given no evidence of his divinity and is really confusing the uses and meanings of the ashram, particularly in his own experiments at communitarian living first in South Africa at the end of the 19th century and then with the creation of his first Indian Ashram in 1915. The suburb in Juhu, initially called Vasanthapuram, now more generally referred to as the Theosophical colony in Bombay or in Juhu, is really a response to Gandhi. It's really saying that ashram life, the ways in which one can equalize relations across religions and castes, is possible and entirely compatible with private property rights. And I think that this explains the suburban characteristic of this ashram. It is really trying to rebut Gandhi at the moment at which he has completely captured anti colonial imagination across South Asia. So good, so good, so good.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Marshall Poe]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

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[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Indeed.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, the stakes to this, I think are really interesting kind of at the time. Right. That's part of the historical work that you're doing here is just kind of excavating these links that we don't always, we aren't always aware of that. The Theosophical Society, for example, is kind of how all these different places that we don't always sort of put together in this moment are in fact very connected. You also do a lot of kind of close reading. I mean, we've already talked a lot about the close reading of the spatial plans themselves and how you'd assess them if a student brought them to you.

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Right.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Without all these layers of analysis. There's also close reading of kind of some particular writing as well, of the period. So I'd love to kind of turn there to bring in one more place that we haven't discussed yet. Now, the text, I believe, is titled Magic of America. And I wonder if you can tell us both what it is, but also why you spent a whole chapter on it. This isn't one paragraph of analysis. Why is there so much going on here?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

I'll be glad to say something about this wonderful, vexing, beguiling text by the American architect Marion Marni. I have been justifiably accused of harboring a crush on Marion Marny. So that's just that. What I argue is that in Magic of America, Marion Marni is renovating the peculiar genre of American architectural literature, the architect's autobiography, and that she's renovating the genre from a specifically feminist and anti colonial perspective. So one example of this from the text is Mani's call to conserve the earth. And she explicitly, in those very terms, said that the conservation of the earth is the duty of women and that women are shirking this duty in the face of the colonizing and other forms of imperial actions by men. What she is saying in this passage, that recurs in a variety of ways and also takes the form of experimental drawings in these unpublished memoirs that I wrote on in that final chapter, as you say, is Mani saying that there is something fundamentally unfair about the division of gendered sexual and reproductive labor. What that unfairness points to is that none of us can get to do as we please. Men simply think that. And it is reflected in phenomena like settler colonialism and ecological destruction. But it is then the duty of women, she says, to use the unfair division of gender, sexual and reproductive labor, to emplace constraints on capital and to cultivate a sense of self governance or a desire not to live at the expense of others. And so she's using her memoirs to describe this. And this differed from the architect's autobiographies that had emerged before. The genre is launched by the American architect Louis Sullivan in 1901. Claude Bragdon, Frank Lloyd Wright contribute to the genre prolifically. There's a string of autobiographical texts between 1901 and 1949. Marni's memoirs she abandons in 1949, which is really sort of the moment at which that genre finally begins to disappear. But unlike the text that preceded it, which had talked about the formation of an exemplary man, gender specificity intended by those authors like Frank Lloyd Wright, that instead of arguing about the formation of an exemplary man who stood above the crowd, Mani's text is not just calling for, but it is simulating the experience of having to constantly respond to demands from those who do not resemble oneself, demands from creatures whose ways of being radically differ from one's own. It's this call to in fact say that democracy survives, not because of exceptional men, as Frank Lloyd Wright uses his memoirs to pose himself. As he says, look, democracy is always going to degenerate into mobocracy or mob rule, and it takes a genius, this is Frank Lloyd Wright's terms, to save democracy from degenerating into mob rule. Mani says, absolutely not. The only way to save democracy is to see the demos as infinitely expansive, and that to honor what it is to be a democratic subject is to have a democratic mentality and affect and to constantly seek to hear what the other is saying, even if it is unfamiliar or threatening. You don't have to agree with it, but you do have to listen to it. Now, what interested me about this text is not just the ways in which it renovated the genre of the architect's autobiography. That is certainly a subject which worthy of inspection in its own right. But there was a much broader historical claim that I wanted to make with the book, which was this. The globe had emerged as an ethical category. Amid the wars, revolution, genocide, anti colonial revolts, economic slumps of the interwar period. In the shadow of Hiroshima, the globe emerged as a political concept. The advent of atomic weapons gave political action global reach and consequence, and humanity was now unified as a political actor, albeit one whose unity or singularity could only be evinced in the annihilation of the species in a nuclear Armageddon. Marni is absolutely alive to that. The opening essay of her memoirs, the Magic of America, aptly titled Democracy, says that the releasing of energy from the atom will turn demonic unless democracy is applied to humanity as a whole. I'm quoting verbatim. What she's saying in that is that for democracy to be meaningful at the scale of humanity as a unified whole requires wrenching democracy from its political context, that is, say, wrenching it from its citing in the body politic and citing it instead in the individual body, and that you had to make an ethical subject whose ethical commitments trumped any political leanings they may have had, because all that politics could yield in a nuclear age was nuclear self annihilation. So that, to me, was an important way of signaling how a key participant in this continuous transnational exchange on the spaces and routines that would cultivate a global ethos came to reckon with the emergence of the globe as a political rather than ethical concept. And I try and show how the emergence of the globe as a political concept strained the legibility of its prior conceptions as an ethical category. And I'm interested, then, in the ways in which the poetics of Marni's text, as well as the various experimental diagrams and drawings that she includes in her memoirs, are trying to wrestle with the new meaning, let's say the new conceptual meaning that the globe has acquired, while trying to assert the enduring relevance of prioritizing ethics over politics.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, there's certainly a lot there definitely makes sense that it's not just one or two paragraphs, but a whole chapter at the end of the book. But as you mentioned, it is one of the final aspects of the book. So that does mean we're coming to the end of our discussion about it as well. So perhaps we want to wrap up all these different places you've taken us to and the kind of transformation we've seen over the decades we've covered as well. And obviously we've been careful to highlight some of the sort of key linkages and things that weren't as clear until you put these pieces together. Are there any other big implications of this research we haven't mentioned yet that we want to conclude with?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Gladly. I think the takeaway for me is simply this changing one's commitments is much harder than devising a scheme for institutional reform. I do think that someone like Marian Marni downplays the formal and procedural and institutional aspects of democracy far too much. But I do think that what her work in Castle Cragg, in Magic of America, instructs us is in the importance of importance of forming commitments that emphasize such things as self governance or striving to avoid living at the expense of others. I think that's very, very important in a moment of ecological catastrophe that we are living through. I think more generally, the metropolitan schemes, World Capital, World center, the two iterations of the city Mondiale, have very little instruction for us 100 years on. I think they all had interesting afterlives in other architectural projects that were built sometimes by the same architects like Le Corbusier, sometimes by Legati's and acolytes of a debasel. But I think ultimately the emphasis that those projects place on endless capital accumulation and seeing the private accumulation of capital as a necessary condition for the formation of a global ethos offers us very little instruction for our present. Conversely, the anti colonial projects that I describe from South Asia, but also from the rural United States and certainly from Australia, are engaged in cultivating a will to put constraints on the movement of capital. And I think that that is essential. I think it's not enough to talk about good ethical conduct in the face of ecological catastrophe and millennial forms of social discrimination based on race and ethnicity and class and caste. I think it's absolutely wrong to talk about individual conduct as addressing those harms without also saying that one wishes to put some kind of constraints on the movement of capital. So I think that's a series of lessons from these anti colonial global city projects that offer much instruction. The last thing I'll say that again is not limited to these anti colonial projects, but I think was equality of anti colonialism right until certainly the 1960s, is that it is important to, in the words of the cultural theorist Leela Gandhi, make common cause between the perpetrators and abettors, but also the victims of unjust. Socialities. I think this is a consistent way of thinking in the early 20th century among anti colonials, that it was the colonized subject who had an affirmative duty to save colonizers from their worst selves. I think that's very important, not merely in our politics, but also in academic work, particularly historical work. It has become all too common to seek to apportion guilt and assign blame. And I don't think that that's actually what the institution of history can do. And I think this spirit, to coin a word of seeking to save colonizers from themselves from 100 years ago, which as I said, had very faint echoes all the way through the 1960s across not just the colonized world, but also metropolitan worlds, particularly in strains of or varieties of civil rights struggles in the United States and also Northern Ireland. I think this sense that one is seeking to restore the worldview even of those who appear to be doing injury to others, who appear to be doing injury to ourselves, I think is very, very important. And so for me, those are the three lasting inferences, perhaps that I take from having written the book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, I think that's a brilliant way to conclude our discussion on it. So thank you for those lasting takeaways, leaving me to just ask what you might be working on. Now that the book is out in the world, do you have anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Well, I'll be glad to say something, and in a sense, I've already snuck a teaser for it. I think of my work as focusing on the performativity of urban plans. That's to say, how does planning inflect conceptual debates and the ways in which different sorts of individuals, some of them architects and planners, some of them not, advance arguments towards particular normative ends? And the book that I'm working on right now is looking at a black civil rights archive from the 1930s to the 1960s and looks at the salience of planning under New Deal conditions and the ways in which planning mediates and inflects conceptions of the political and the social within black civil rights discourse.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

All right. Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Best of luck exploring those archives and figuring out what you want to do with them.

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Thank you so much, Miranda. It's been a pleasure.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, for any listeners who want more of what we've been talking about, they can, of course, course read the book titled Lineages of the Global Occult, Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy, published by the University of Texas Press in 2025. Shibin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Shibin Banerjee]

Thank you, Miranda.