The Social Life Of Streets In India

Streets are places that stimulate activities, interactions, behaviours and, by extension, controls. Yet, within the built environment discourse, the street is first and foremost conceptualised as a mute backdrop to movement-vehicular or pedestrian. The Covid-19 pandemic brought renewed focus on the street as the space of networks, flows and mobilities as the 'lockdown' was the preferred mode of controlling the spread of the disease. The Social Life of Streets in India: Histories, Contestations and Subjectivities endeavours to understand the complexities of social dynamics of streets in relation to spatiality and materiality in the Indian milieu. It draws from a diverse body of scholarship and varied disciplinary leanings and engages with three broad strands: historical aspects of streets, the physicality of street as a built environment and social science discourse mediated through anthropology, urban geography, social theory and urban studies. Further the volume deliberates on questions such as: How do we look at streets and, in particular, how do we document and conceptualise streets in the Indian context that highlights the particularities of South Asian milieus? Is the street public? Is it merely a physical space? How does the street in its physicality and in its built form enter or respond to the metaphorical, the literary, the methodological and the social?

Streets are places that stimulate activities, interactions, behaviours and, by extension, controls. Yet, within the built environment discourse, the street is first and foremost conceptualised as a mute backdrop to movement-vehicular or pedestrian. The Covid-19 pandemic brought renewed focus on the street as the space of networks, flows and mobilities as the 'lockdown' was the preferred mode of controlling the spread of the disease. The Social Life of Streets in India: Histories, Contestations and Subjectivities endeavours to understand the complexities of social dynamics of streets in relation to spatiality and materiality in the Indian milieu. It draws from a diverse body of scholarship and varied disciplinary leanings and engages with three broad strands: historical aspects of streets, the physicality of street as a built environment and social science discourse mediated through anthropology, urban geography, social theory and urban studies. Further the volume deliberates on questions such as: How do we look at streets and, in particular, how do we document and conceptualise streets in the Indian context that highlights the particularities of South Asian milieus? Is the street public? Is it merely a physical space? How does the street in its physicality and in its built form enter or respond to the metaphorical, the literary, the methodological and the social?

Images of the Streetsubjects the street to sustained critical scrutiny, enriching and extending our understanding of the making and meaning of urban space.

After ten years of study in England and America, Ved Mehta revisited his home in India in the summer of 1959. In this book he gives a sensitive and vivid account—sometimes deeply serious, sometimes very funny—of his attempt to reidentify himself first with his family, then with the military and civil leaders of the Indian state. He is joined by his great friend from Oxford, the poet Dom Moraes, and together they spent a carefree month meeting Indian writers and poets, enjoying the social life of New Delhi, Nepal, and Calcutta, and speaking at Indian universities. Ved Mehta then returns alone to Delhi to reflect on what he has seen and heard, to make an ancestral pilgrimage to Haridwar, and—the climax of his visit home—to meet Nehru.

Monograph on sociological aspects of life in a poverty-stricken urban area slum community in Southern India - presents survey data on squatters' attitudes towards caste, religion, family planning and other issues, and comments on their political behaviour, etc. Bibliography pp. 169 to 1975, references and statistical tables.