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Stephen Legg, "Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. My name is Soumya Dadu and today I'm in conversation with Stephen Legg, professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham, about his book Spaces of Delhi's Urban Governmentalities. Published by the University of Georgia Press in 2025. This book offers a fresh perspective on both anti colonial politics and the city of Delhi in the two decades before Independ in 1947. It develops a spatial governmentality approach to examine how anti colonial speech and action took shape across and through the urban landscape. Stephen, a very warm welcome to the podcast.
- [01:51]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:53]
B
I'd like to begin by asking how this project came together. Spaces of Anti Colonialism clearly sits in dialogue with your first book, Spaces of Colonialism, and you note in the preface that you initially intended to write this book much earlier. Could you tell us about that journey and what changed in your perspective and approach when you finally came to this work?
- [02:14]
C
Yes, thank you for noting this. The book has been sort of 18 years in coming into being. Not that I've been working on it consistently, but it did produce a series of blocks which retrospectively were really productive. I started this work on my PhD thesis which was solely focused on Old Delhi, but looked at spaces of both colonialism and what at the time I called nationalism, just focusing on the old city. When I decided to write the books, those two projects split off. I extended the analysis to look at the interactions between the new and the old cities. My first book in 2007 focused on those relationships. And the plan was to move to a second book straight away on anti colonialism across the two cities. But it kept on running up against a series of blockages. The spaces were clear and the practices were clear. And to an extent, because Congress was quite central to this story in Delhi, the chronology was relatively clear. I wanted to focus upon the Last sort of 15, 20 years and these big markers of civil disobedience in the early 30s, Quit India in the early 40s were quite apparent. But I kept on running up against a series of blocks in terms of analysis. How we thought about power and space and subjectivity, which are my core interests here, how we thought about the utility of theory for engaging with really fragmented and different archives. So I paused and engaged in a series of collaborative, broader projects, which resulted in some outputs that really helped me get to a position to write the book. I worked with Dina Heath on three workshops on South Asian governmentalities, which came out as an edited cup book in 2018. I turned a series of conference sessions with Tariq Jaziel into an editor book called Subaltern Geographies. And I published two papers in the journal epd, Society in Space, working with Foucault's last lecture on ancient Greece and Rome. And those sort of enabled me to get to a position where I could write this book. It is similar. It's got many similarities to spaces of colonialism. It studies old and New Delhi together. It focuses on these relatively understudied, especially In Delhi, last 15 years of rule. It focuses on small spaces, everyday interactions, tries to give a sense of the city as a lived space. And it achieves this through Governmentality analytics, which for me is focused on looking at a sort of bottom up series of power relations, focused on conducting conduct and focuses on thinking about how spatial relations enable those forms of conduct. So in those ways, it's positioned explicitly as a companion volume. The big difference, of course, is that it's a study of anti colonialism and it tries to move us beyond the spaces of government into society. And in this book I try to think about anti colonialism as a governmentality and the breakthrough that came through collaborating with Dina and Tarek and all the other people that came in on those projects, which eventually came, which was so painful, painfully obvious, but hints at the sort of inherent Eurocentrism in a lot of these theories was that it did no justice to the people or the project to approach anti colonialism as an outside. There's an inherent sort of Eurocentrism to that approach. And as various campaigners in Delhi and elsewhere made clear, it was the British who were the alien government, they were the outside. So what I tried to create was an approach which viewed governmentalities from the ground as emerging through engagements with subaltern populations, but also debates about political theory regarding resistance as a sort of approach which was identified at the time. But thinking about anti colonialism as something that went beyond resistance, to think of it in terms of spirituality, subjectivity, and in the. The framing of Foucault's last lectures, thinking it through, this framing of Parrhesia as a way of thinking about different types of governmentality.
- [06:31]
B
Thank you. Yes, the arc of your collaborative intellectual work really comes through in this book. A central and quite a counterintuitive move in the book is how you frame anti colonialism itself. And you hint at this a little bit. Many of us might think of anti colonialism in terms of resistance to the colonial state, but you're pushing against this through approaching anti colonialism itself as a governmentality. Can you walk us through this move and tell us why you found this analytical framework apt for understanding what was happening in Delhi in this period?
- [07:08]
C
Yeah, sure. So I was at university, my undergrad degree was in the late 90s. And at that time there was this emergent interest in governmentality as an approach, but it was largely based on fragmentary lectures and translations and illicit translations that were coming through. And it was in the years I was doing my PhD in the early 2000s, that the translations of Foucault's lecture courses started coming through. And it sort of spurred this huge new interest in governmentality and the work which came beyond governmentality. And that really sort of informed my method for engaging and interpreting archive. So it was security, territory, population, which came out around about the time my first book, and I was amongst the first people to engage with that really more detailed engagement with the concepts of governmentality, how it integrated biopower and discipline and sovereign power in those early years. And I used that to inform the first book, my second book on prostitution, the Ends of Empire, really engaged with the Birth of Biopolitics lectures, which helped us think about scale and what this question of liberal conduct of conduct might mean. But most of these earlier lecture courses, like the majority of Foucault's work, returned to thinking about powers operated by those with resources, those in control, even if those resources were problematized and fractured and broke down. What was missing in those works was the question of resistance, or works which questioned the category of resistance as whether that was useful, a term which of course, have been used very influentially in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. So there are benefits to thinking of anti colonial as a form of resistance. It was explicitly viewed in those terms at the time. But to view it only as resistance delimits the project. Anti colonial movements across the world were way more than just resisting colonialism. They were future oriented. And they were often committed to articulating an alternative form of being, an alternative form of conducting populations that went way beyond resistance. So I set thinking, as many others have done, of thinking about anti colonialism as a. As a governmentality as more than a form of resistance. And I think initial ways of doing that led us to thinking about what sort of governmentalities would replace the colonial state. So in the Indian context, what would Congress's approach to healthcare or education or foreign policy be? But what that inevitably leads you down the path of is thinking about governmentalities in that frame of derivative discourses. How are they similar or how are they different to European models? Now, it's important to analyze those postcolonial legacies. There's been a lot of work on how much the Indian state of the 1950s replicated the state of 1935. But what that doesn't do is quite capture the difference of what was aimed for or the sort of audacity of Congress and Gandhi's claims in terms of subjectivity, in terms of truth and in terms of personhood. And it's in that way which I found the last lectures by Foucault and Palisio really enabled that different approach to governmentality which went beyond thinking of it as a series of derivative replacements and created a space for a much bigger and more ambitious project.
- [10:48]
B
Right. Can you tell us a little bit more about anti colonialism itself and how you're framing it here? Because you do mention that you're not seeing anti colonialism as an outside, as an external. What do you mean when you say that?
- [11:04]
C
So I think that's really a methodological and an archive point, especially in being explicitly aware that I'm writing this as a white British man, using as one of the key framings, the writings of a white French man, and trying to sort of tackle head on, as Subaltern Theory has made clear, we need to do all the different ways in which theories center and peripheralize perspectives, people and spaces. So to view anti colonialism as an outside is very much the perspective and the spatiality really of what the colonial archive produces. The colonial archive is dominated by reports that are inherently surveillant. An attempt to understand how this external threat to the state can be neutralized, can be placed under surveillance, can be manipulated, criminalized, and crack down upon that finds its way many insidious ways into the ways in which we write and think of our theory and historical processes and categories. So the attempt to not have anti colonialism as an outside is an archival one, it's a theoretical one. But it really does try to encourage us to attempt to understand the worldview of people engaged in these projects and to think who are their outside. To them, the colonial state is an outside. But to the Congress a threatening outside was also communist internationalism, types of socialism, communalism, violent forms of religious nationalism. These were all things which Congress was jostling with and trying to articulate through its forms of anti colonialism. So that's one sort of relationship. The other is to think about the relationship between anti colonialism and nationalism. So often those two phrases and interpretations are brought together. We think of anti colonial nationalism, but what framings of nationalism tend towards is a more bourgeois form of cultural as well as political articulation that necessarily, I think, takes us towards a form of interpretation in which the people, the masses, become another form of outside. And that of course, is the broader, longer standing project of the Subaltern Studies collective. So whilst I'm really interested in the ways in which a sort of bourgeois form of nationalism was of course dominant, and you see that in the people who articulated and the people who were influential in Delhi, Having anti colonialism as a framework actually encourages us to open up spaces to think from the perspectives or to even speculate on whether we can bring in the perspectives of people for whom Congress elites were an outside, but for whom people were equally passionate about ending British rule and trying to influence the independent India that would come afterwards. So I think that approach to 20 colonialism is not new, but the way in which I approach it through the governmentality analytics and thinking geographically about outsides, hopefully gives places some checks and balances in all of these incredibly powerful tensions which exist between ideology, archive and political.
- [14:17]
B
Interpretation, that's very helpful, and I think it does open up how we analyze anti colonialism itself. Before we turn fully to the heart of the book, I wanted to ask about another analytic you develop here, which is Foucault's notion of Parrhesia or courageous truth telling. What does parrhesia mean in this book and why is it useful for thinking about spaces of anti colonialism?
- [14:44]
C
I was fortunate enough to do an author meets critics at a conference in America last year and one of the people whose responding he was very kind. He just said why this word Parisia? Why, why all this? And what I sort of like about Paris is it's an unsettling term and it's an unsettling body of literature. I think many of us who've engaged with Foucault's work can just about know enough about the context to work on utilitarian theory in 19th century 18th century prison discourses, thinking about physiocratic policies in terms of famine in 18th century France. Suddenly you get to the last lectures and you're looking at Periclean Athens, you're looking at Greek colonies in Sicily, there'll be debates with Persians. With the emergence of early ascetic Christianity, it's a really challenging body of work. But the concept itself is designed to be challenging because what we see Foucault doing in these latter years is trying to find the basis for, for an alternative history of alternative ways of connecting self, other and truth relations. Which was how he I think got beyond the power resistance dialectic without simply looking at the constant repetition of power and therefore forms of governmentality throughout all time. He still argued that this last work on ancient philosophy was part of his history of governmentality project. So I found that really enlightening and it seems, and I make this case more broad in two papers in Society and Space published over the last ten years or so. When I think a lot of people turn to this work, it's because they think that's where Foucault's version of resistance comes. The resistance subject embodying alternative truths. But when you read especially the last two Lech courses before his death in, in 1984, what we find is all these philosophers which he focuses upon which seem like they're resisting, are actually trying to articulate forms of alternative truth relationship that would actually help society. So whether it's Plato attempting to counsel a tyrant, whether it's Socrates moving through the streets of Athens interrogating citizens self awareness, or it's the cynics embodying this radical, seemingly radical form of alternative life and questioning in the street, they're all doing it because they want to aid society by confronting it or its leaders with uncomfortable truths that would better them. So these forms of relationships aren't necessarily about resistance, but they are about forms of alterity. So what this work doesn't use as a framing is the phrase resistance or even counter conducts which was introduced in the Security Territory Population Lectures. What we do have is part of the history of governmentality. And in the book I have an extended quote by Sergei Prozarov who talks about these alternative forms of truth telling, of courageous alternative forms of being, and how they relate to the earlier articulation of forms of governmentality as ways of conduct populations through resource rich institutions, whether they're government or otherwise. And he argues that these aren't forms of resisting governmental biopower, but they demonstrate that through their practice of the true life that forms of governmentality had always already failed to transform one's life, even in their worst situation. The Parrhesiast is capable of what governmentality asserts but always lacks. And I think that enabled me to use this framing to help us think about anti colonialism as precisely a broader project of Polesia in terms of both Gandhi's injunction to embody a different form of truth, self, other relationship, but also as a way of thinking about different forms of power relation that enable us to analyze the archive and analyze materials and political movements in new and hopefully productive ways.
- [19:14]
B
Right. This is very intriguing and I especially enjoyed how you thought about Foucault's Parisia alongside Gandhi's investment in truth in Satyagraha. Let's turn now to how this plays out concretely in the city of Delhi, starting with the civil disobedience movement of 1930. In your chapter on the civil disobedience movement, you make the distinct claim that women didn't just participate in Delhi, they led. Could you tell us about the figures you look at here and what they show us about the development of an urban anti colonial governmentality?
- [19:51]
C
Sure, yeah. What was really nice about dealing with materials in Delhi is the way really quite naturally women did emerge in the archive and emerged in the coverage and enabled a form of sort of feminist geographical interpretation, which is something which was at the center of my education. In my undergrad at Cambridge, I was lectured by Linda McDowell, who's one of the leading feminist geographers. And I've always tried to find space for these interpretations in my work. It was the center of my second book on prostitution and the ends of empire. But the reason it got so much attraction, attracted so much attention in Delhi is that Delhi was considered both in governmental sources and social reformer sources, to be a very gender conservative city, even in comparison of other north Indian cities. There hadn't been the hugely influential social reform movements of other cities, both in terms of Muslim heritage, but also caste heritage. Women in Delhi were especially middle class and upper class women didn't work. There was a strong tradition of murder. There wasn't a sense of them being politically active, in public at least. And the big reports that came out at the beginning of the civil disobedience movement right at the front of them. The chief Commissioner admitted in a confidential report that it took everyone by surprise that women came out in such big numbers during the civil disobedience movement. And there's various ways you can quantify this claim. I tried to use wherever possible, photographs that were published in newspapers, nationalist newspapers, and they would include these wonderful images of large female processions with women wearing white khadi saris. But that was part of the sort of PR campaign. But it comes through again and again in the accounts. And it's true that a lot of this was orchestrated. And it's true that a lot of the women who were encouraging women to leave their homes and come out the street were often the wives of senior congressmen. So Mrs. Coley and Mrs. Sarney feature in the book who are wives of newspaper editors. But what also came through in the early 2000s when I was doing oral history work in in Delhi, trying to interview as many women as possible, is that women were doing or bringing anti colonialism into the home in a series that's really inventive and often very small ways, whether it was having an image of Gandhi in their house, encouraging their husbands to wear cardi to work, reading, or having people read stories from the newspaper to children in the home. And there are also stories, some well documented, of women refusing their families to go out onto the street and protest during these protests. So there's a sense of a real swell of participation of women. And as we know, this is in part encouraged by Gandhi. But he was also reluctant to give women free rein. Initially, he discouraged women from joining the SALT march, but they joined anyway. And eventually, I think it was women convinced him of their utility. And he became one of the biggest advocates of women as political agents. But there are particular figures who rise in the book because they became leaders in Delhi, but also in terms of Aruna Asafali later in the Kurt India movement at the national scale. But the leading figure in Delhi was a woman named Satyavati, again part of the elite. She was the granddaughter of Swami Shraddhanan. She was part of one of the biggest political families in Delhi, but still she became the leading figure in her family. She was a major figure on the public scene in, in Delhi and during the civil disobedience movement. She very much adheres to nonviolence. But what we find in the mid-30s, as did many in Congress and beyond, she moves very much to the left of politics, but stays within the Congress Party. She's part of the Congress Socialist Party. And towards the end of the 30s, she's absolutely pushing at that external boundary between nonviolence as violence, nonviolence and violence. And that, of course, was a tension that was more prominent, dominant, you might say, during Quit India, but it was still there during the civil disobedience movement. And it was embodied in several of the key sort of tension points during that movement in Delhi.
- [24:45]
B
I see. And that really brings out how anti colonial governmentality was producing specific identities. Let me now pick up on that tension of violence and nonviolence that you raised here. This is one of the most important and difficult problems that's running through the book. And a crucial moment where this becomes visible is in the police shooting that takes place at Gurudwara Sisganj in Chandni Chowk. Tell us about this event and Congress's response to it. Why is violence important in understanding anticolonial governmentality?
- [25:20]
C
Yeah. Thank you. This incident was so central and so shocking and traumatic in the archive. But the reason I was so drawn to it right from my PhD days is that there was absolutely no recollection of it in, in Delhi I did a lot of oral history work. I met local historians and a lot of the figures I was treating as historical subjects were known to people. Like chatting to one friend about Aruna Rasaf Ali and he was like, oh yeah, she came to my school and she was known. But this shooting, this huge event slipped from, from memory. And there are various reasons for that in terms of Hindu Sikh relationships, I think before, but also during, after 47 and then 84. But this incident was absolutely at the center of the archive of anti colonialism in Delhi, but not of popular mem read. So the reason I think it's central and it gives us a real pivot to think about what was happening and why I give it a whole chapter of its own in the book is that it problematized this claim which Congress were making, which was that their movement was a non violent one. And Gandhi argued that the deeper aim, the deeper challenge was for Indians to convince the British, the world at large, that they were ready for self government through the demonstration of self discipline. One of the greatest Tests of which was to stay committed to non violence in the face of colonial violence. And that was a test which many argued the people of Delhi failed. Although this was contested in May 1930. So the context in terms of chronology is that Gandhi was eventually arrested. About a month after the Dandy salt march news came through overnight to Delhi. A hartel was announced a total strike and thousands of people come out onto the street. There was an earlier, which is interesting, led by Satyavati. She led women in red saris to encircle the court. When there was some a police car reversed into the crowd. Many were injured and there were rumors that the injured had been taken to the Kotwali on Chandni Chowk. And this is where the attention moved to. And if that's the sort of chronology, the geography here is absolutely central. If we go back and look at the origin of the location of the Gurdvara Sysganj right next to the Kotvali on Chandi Chowk, the main thoroughfaring in Delhi. The reason for this is that under the reign of Emperor Aurangzeb, the 9th Guru Guru Tegwar Dur had been arrested and taken and held in the Kotwali. And he was executed next to the Khatvali in Chandni Chowk. And his head was rescued and kept at this place. And then the body and the head were moved on. And the Gurdvar Sisganj is the place where his head was kept. So the Gurdvara is right next to the Kot Valley. For interested for historical reasons of a different form of anti imperialism, you could say. So the crowds come to the Kot Valley and a police van eventually is trying to return to the Kot Valley. It gets stuck and the accusation is that it gets stoned by people in and on top of the Gurdvara. There's a concern that the policemen might be killed in the van. So the police open fire from the Kot Valley onto the neighboring building. Four people are killed and 190 are injured. And a huge debate results which is what the chapter focuses on. And it becomes about these two versions of truth. The sort of juridical one with a series of evidence that is very legalistic and an alternative inquiry organized by local and national Sikh community to contest this version. So the police version was that the crowd, the mob was angry, it was attacking them and they were restoring law and order. And this magistrate inquiry was held in the, in the town hall on Chandni Chowk. But the alternative inquiry was held right next to this inquiry in the grounds of the town hall near Queen's Gardens, it was an open call. People were encouraged to come and give their narratives of what happened on the day. And they concluded that it was absurd to suggest that people would have continued throwing stones at a van or a police station that was firing on them at the time. How could so many innocents have been hit? How could children have been hit? How could the religious sanctity of the Gurdwar have been profaned? Why was the state acting so irrationally? So this debate, this contest, happened in space and in terms of interpretation. But I think the reason it doesn't really scale up was that Congress struggled to claim this as a sort of triumphal site because it was not possible to disprove the claim that people in the Gurdwar had been violent. Gandhi spoke of the Gurdvar as an example of the national struggle. It didn't really enter the national consciousness. So the site itself and the issue becomes very difficult and very messy. But it's a sort of forerunner of later debates that would take place about whether the people were ready for non violence. And obviously in the early 20s, Ganny had suspended a movement because he felt they were not ready. At this period, it was noted, and by quit India, by 1942, we have a much larger acceptance of the boundaries with which nonviolence and violence might be experimented with. But this was a harbinger of those later debates, I think.
- [31:30]
B
Right, thank you for that vivid portrayal. And I really appreciate you bringing attention to this event while also clarifying the complicated relationship that Congress actually had with violence and nonviolence. In the second part of the book, you argue that Quit India reorganized Delhi's geography in producing not a horizontal divide between old and New Delhi, but a vertical one between overground and underground cities. How were anti colonial politics playing out differently across these two urban worlds? And what can this spatial division allow us to see about history and politics in Delhi? Could you take us there?
- [32:11]
C
I can try. The way I decided to structure the book was to effectively have it as two halves that were in dialogue with each other. And each half had three chapters. The first chapter looks at the overground movement, the way in which the new and old delis were used as sort of spatial technologies to bring about forms of mass protest. The second chapters in each half look at how nonviolence was problematised. And the third chapters look at what happened after the mass movements ended. So the 1930s, for the first half, the short break between the end of Quit India and independence in the second. So the first half uses the good vices, gun shootings as an example of the problematization of non violence. In the second half, I look at how similar techniques were used to get people out on the street, keep the non violent Quit India movement going. But the second chapter, which looks at the problematization of that nonviolent project, rather than looking at a site or an incident, it takes the underground movement as its focus. The underground operated across New and Old Delhi. And the distinction I make is that the overground movement wasn't exactly totally open. You had people in secret planning where there'd be a procession, where there'd be a protest the next day. So it's not so much about being secret or not, but the underground movement was one which was, if not totally committed to, was accepting of violence. And at its heart was a commitment to the underground being hidden. And that's a particular truth claim. It committed people to life. So what I try to do is to think about how Quit India had a very different politics that we can think of, not in terms of Old Delhi, New Delhi, but in terms of the overground and the underground. So both of the cities were really important for the Quit India movement. New Delhi is actually much more important. During the Quit India movement, Eric Hobsbawm listed New Delhi as one of the most of anti revolutionary landscape. Like Haussmann's Paris, it was one through which the police and the army could be moved quickly. But it was also a landscape that arsonists or campaigners or picketers could move through quickly, especially if you had a car or a motorbike. But also by the 40s, because of the Indianization of the civil service, most of the accommodation in the bungalows in Delhi were occupied by Indian civil servants, most of which many of which were very sympathetic towards the movement and might be willing to host an absconder or perhaps donate money or resources to the movement. So there's lots of accounts of people moving through the landscape of New Delhi, of having spies and informants in the government of India, press leaking telegrams to Congress. And also the city became an interesting target because of the symbolicness of the landscape. So graffiti around the Legislative assembly, attempts to deface the King George V statue on Rajpath. Old Delhi was in some ways also a good landscape to move through. There are lots of stories of people, you know, running across the roofs of houses and disappearing into these, into, into the bazaars. But it was also more intensely penetrated by the police and informers. But what I try to do across both of those landscapes is to think about and the underground, but to also to think carefully about what we can know of the underground, to think about the sources and to reflect upon what we want to do when we try to describe the underground. Do we want to replicate the challenge which the CID faced, which is to sort of unearth it, to crack it, which I'm not particularly interested in, or do we try to understand it as a functioning geography, as a place which genuinely did exist? You could have written this chapter in a much more magical, realist sense, as a genuinely alternative, existing cityscape. So what I try to do is to not unveil this invisibility, but to look at how it was produced through infrastructures, through messengers, through carriers, through monies and objects and texts which circulated and through that, think about how people were constantly negotiating this boundary between violence and non violence. And this is where Aruna Rasafali emerges as vital. She was the wife of the longstanding Delhi member of the Legislative Assembly, Mohammed As Saf Ali. But it was only towards the end of the 1930s that she became explicitly political and again influenced by Satyavati and others, started engaging deeply in leftist and socialist texts and thought and writing, as she did after she absconded after August 42. And she became not just the leader of Delhi's underground movement, but one of the leaders of the national underground movement. So I trace her life and I use the life of others who tried to negotiate this simultaneous status of being underground, but supporting Congress, technically stretching technicalities a long way through, being nonviolent. So people might be violent against objects, so they might be willing to burn a post box or maybe derail a train, but not to harm people. Others were much more willing to do that. So these are the sort of spaces and landscapes and dilemmas which I take us through. And of course, Winn Rasafali evaded capture throughout. She refused Gandhi's direct instruction to give herself up. And she emerged to continue her activism in Delhi from the late. From the mid-1940s as independence sort of hurtled towards the city.
- [38:28]
B
Right, thank you. That really highlights how urban space itself is transformed into a political technology during Quit India and shapes who acts how, where, and at what risk. So stepping back from Delhi for a moment, I wanted to return to Foucault in South Asia. In your introduction and conclusion, you directly address criticisms of using Foucaultian frameworks to study South Asia. Do you think that your studies of Delhi have expanded or altered how you read and use Foucault?
- [39:03]
C
Yes, I Think so. What I've tried to do as a. As a geographer who tries to write urban histories is to use Foucault's injunctions to give us a series of ways to which we can fragment and put together again, archives, hopefully in new and interesting ways. But I would like to say that I think, like many Indian scholars or scholars of India, I was actually reading Subaltern Studies in depth way before I actually started going and reading the original Foucault lectures. I encountered Subaltern Studies earlier at my undergrad degree than the detailed Foucaultian work. So I suppose I've always read Foucault through the lens of post colonial scholarship. What I was inspired by in that scholarship was the way in which people were willing to take and adapt his categories and try and make them usable and more interesting. There are, of course, failings with Bucko's work, or at least things which he didn't do, which we need to do to make the work more useful for ourselves. His works tend to be, when they're not dealing with more abstract discourses, when they engage with real lived spaces, they tend to be institutional or philosophical. That's not my project. I'm trying to do something which brings a broader array of people into our forms of understanding. So I've tried to create ways in which we can encourage people to do that. He was negligent of colonialism, not necessarily more than other European thinkers of his time, but we've now got a wealth of resources through which we can challenge that. But what I found in his later works is a sort of invitation to find alternative forms of relationships between truth, self and other. Now, there's been a lot of critical work on his one sort of doomed attempt to do this himself, which is an engagement with the Iranian revolution, which did, I think, slip into Orientalist tropes of othering. But I don't think we have to do that. And I think the work presents us with an invitation to think of alternative forms of self, other political relationships which don't lapse into lazy forms of othering. It's difficult and I don't think it's an easy route. But that was at the heart of what I was trying to do in this book and why I still think there's more to be done to engage this very influential body of Foucaultian scholarship.
- [41:38]
B
Yes, and you're really deploying quite an adapted Foucault and adapting him as well through your reading. I'll also say that I really enjoyed that you're deploying quite a gentle framing that very much maintains the focus on the places and people of the city.
- [41:57]
C
I think this is one of the dangers of the analytical approach which I mentioned briefly in the book. I like to frame my work in ways which are sort of visible and hopefully replicable. So I always have a table in the introduction showing how I've used the categories in what chapter to do what. The danger if you go too far down that route is it becomes almost a sort of structural functionalist approach where you to code everything and put the codes together. And especially in a book like this where I do try to maintain an historical narrative, it does move from the 30s to the 40s to 47. So whilst that framing is there, what I hope is that there is enough space for historical processes and people and the places to come through. And those analytical categories are a guide to how I've put things together from the archive and hopefully might be something which other people could use to tell their stories as well, in ways which don't become sort of too analytical, too functional and too fragmented.
- [43:03]
B
Definitely. And I think novice scholars like me are quite lucky for it. So to close, I just wanted to ask what is one thing that you hope readers take away from spaces of anti colonialism?
- [43:16]
C
Thank you. That's such a great question. I try not to be like a dogmatic geographer. Beating the drum and saying space is important doesn't really get it. Get. Get you very far. I think the thing I suppose I'd encourage people, I hope people would take from this is that these huge debates and Gandhi is a controversial figure. But one of the best sort of defenses of him I read is that he would always try to engage people, no matter who they were, with some of the deepest and most profound philosophical and religious questions in a language that they could understand and engage with. And that to me is one of the great opportunities of this sort of work. It does take a long time. You might have to comb 15 reports for that one mention of that one local community group who stopped a religious procession because the gods were dressed in clothes that weren't khadi. It does take time and then you have to work hard to piece them together. But I think the one thing I'd really like people to take away from from this work is that when you do increase the scope of people, you do increase the cast of people who were engaged in making a city political. It's just the most rewarding process. And you find that you engage with people who are inspiring and challenging and often very funny. A lot of these posters are so witty and damning. I would laugh often in the archive and people would come over and try and figure out what I find so amusing by these posters or these jokes or these poems. So it really does give you material to engage in that much broader project of acknowledging the already political nature of people of the subaltern in ways which just gives them space to demonstrate the ways they were doing that. And they were engaging the history of ideas, they're engaging political concepts, but they were doing it in ways which were urban and lived and dynamic and yes, often really funny.
- [45:18]
B
Excellent. All right, Stephen, thank you so much for joining us today and for such a rich conversation.
- [45:24]
C
Thank you for such a detailed reading and these questions. It's really helped me approach the book in new ways.
- [45:30]
B
I'm sure many of our listeners will want to spend time with the original and thought provoking work. You can find details about spaces of anti colonialism in the description of this podcast episode. Thanks again for being with us on the New Books Network.