Aniruddha Bose, Associate Professor of History at Saint Francis University, passed away on March 31, 2024 from brain cancer. Aniruddha was a remarkable person and brilliant scholar, soft-spoken and modest to a fault, combining a rare gravitas and decency with irrepressible cheer and good humor. With his passing, the world feels slighter and lesser. He was much loved by every single person who was privileged to know him, as this account by his wife, Frances, so movingly conveys.

My association with Aniruddha–or Rahul, as I always knew and addressed him– spanned almost forty years. Over this sea of time, our lives overlapped and intersected across three cities, Calcutta, Bombay, and Boston. Our families were friends and our fathers were colleagues, working at the same firm in the Indian shipping industry, first in Calcutta and later in Bombay. Like his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bose, Rahul was an immensely kind, gentle, and generous person. Rahul and I first met when I was 11 or 12 and he several year younger. The first image of him in my mind is at a weekend dinner at his Calcutta home, when we got talking about books that we both loved.

As I write, I recall in vivid detail his magnificent library, which included neatly arranged collections of Enid Blyton, Asterix, and Tintin. In the India of the time, these books, along with Archie comics, Mad Magazine, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew, were precious currency and valued companions, portals unlocking the world of the imagination, treasures to be read and re-read, savored afresh each time they were encountered. Tintin and Asterix in particular were sources of endless delight; everyone had their favorite characters in the series, with Captain Haddock triumphing in the world of Tintin and Getafix and Obelix besting others in the Asterix universe. Our conversations at family and social gatherings in Calcutta often gravitated toward the different adventures of the detective and his motley crew and the endearing bunch of intrepid Gauls who feared nothing but the sky falling on their heads.

Down the line, we would both attend St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, though a few years apart, where Rahul read history before he moved to JNU in Delhi for his master’s degree. Our paths crossed again many years later and a continent away in the Greater Boston area. I had taken up a position as Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Babson College in Wellesley in the Fall of 2007, and was living in Newton, another satellite town of the city. Rahul was pursuing his PhD in history at Boston College and living close to the heart of Cambridge. I knew hardly anyone in the city. The year was an unusually hectic one for me; along with managing the demands of a new job, I spent much time shuttling back and forth across the country and was hoping to secure an academic job closer to my family on the West Coast. The uncertain nature of the academic job market meant living with a constant sense of being unsettled, not helped by the brutal Boston cold, which would set in not too long after the semester started.

Meeting Rahul, getting to know Frances, and spending time with them in Boston was like finding sanctuary and experiencing a sense of home. I carry detailed recollections of many wonderful days spent together in the autumn of 2007 and winter and spring of 2008, of long conversations about India and America, the world of higher education, the Bourne Ultimatum, which Rahul and I watched at an iconic art deco theater in the city, cricket, food, politics, and, most of all, history and the study of history. Though I was not trained in a history department, I was deeply interested in ideas of historicity that permeated everyday life and ordinary social consciousness in India. My research examined, in part, how Indian communities fashioned historical claims online.

Through lengthy, thought-provoking conversations, I had the opportunity to learn an inestimable amount from Rahul. His dissertation research, which would break new ground in labor history and would form the basis of his first book, Conflict and Modernization: The Raj and the Calcutta Waterfront (2018), examined the emergence of class consciousness among Indian dockworkers in colonial-era Calcutta in relation to processes of modernization. Rahul shared with much happiness that his father was delighted at his choice of topic, given his association with the worlds of shipping, shipbuilding, and the docks. Our discussions ranged across a wide canvas, encompassing theoretical and empirical questions, the viability of different conceptual frameworks for understanding historical agency, traditions of historiography in South Asian history and labor history, the sense in which a bounded world of online utterances could or could not be considered a historical archive proper, technological determinism, implicit and overt teleological assumptions in the writing of history, and the challenge of excavating not just evidence of historical agency but of accurately capturing the texture of that agency. Our conversations would often start over a lengthy meal at an Indian restaurant and continue over cups of tea at a coffee shop or my place.

At the end of the academic term in May 2008, I left Boston for San Francisco to take up a position at a university in the Bay Area. I did not meet Rahul after that, though we emailed and spoke intermittently in the years that followed. In January this year, when my father passed away, Mrs. Bose wrote to me to express condolences at his demise on behalf of their family. In her message, she shared news of Rahul’s illness. She mentioned that Rahul had specially wanted to convey his deep respect for my father. Devastated by news of his illness, I found myself simultaneously overwhelmed by his incredible grace and generosity of spirit in thinking of me and my family even at such a difficult time. That, in a nutshell, was Rahul.

A few weeks later, browsing in a bookshop, I chanced upon Rahul’s second work, Shunting the Nation: India’s Railway Workers and the Most Tumultuous Decade in Modern Indian History (1939-1949) (2023). I did not know he had written another book. Upon reading the Acknowledgements, I learned that he had written the book under enormously challenging circumstances while undergoing treatment for brain cancer. He expressed regret that his grandfather, who worked in the Indian Railways, could not see this book. Through his research and both his scholarly volumes, Rahul was writing not just the history of India but also the history of his family.

I remember him in many ways. An old soul who never once had an uncharitable word to say about anyone. A true scholar and teacher, who lived his vocation. A careful, precise thinker and exceptionally gifted historian. Someone with a wry, laconic sense of humor and unforgettable smile.

Rest in peace and power, Rahul, my friend and brother. I miss you and you will live in my heart forever.

Rohit

Rohit Chopra is Professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University

Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College. Her first book Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023) examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition. Kanjwal has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC. She received her Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Q: The first thing that people will notice about your book is obviously its title — Colonizing Kashmir: State Building Under Indian Occupation. So, let us begin with that. Why do you frame the story of state-building in Kashmir in the post partition era, which on its face sounds like a positive aspiration, under the rubric of colonialism, which we can safely assume to be an unwelcome historical phenomenon everywhere. You also do not call it ‘like colonialism’ or ‘internal colonialism’ or other such terms which scholars have occasionally used, but colonialism proper. Is this an intellectual provocation or a considered reading of Kashmiri history?

It is in some ways both. It is a provocation because I am insisting on ‘colonialism’ proper in a ‘postcolonial’ context, as the two are seen as binaries, and also, postcolonial states that have been colonized by European powers are often not deemed as colonial themselves. Part of this is because power differentials within the global south are not seen within a colonial frame, especially when the two regions (like Kashmir and India) are geographically contiguous. It is also a critique of decades of scholarship on India that has taken its territorial boundaries as a given and subsumed Kashmir to categories like “secessionism” or “ethno-nationalist insurgency.” I argue that the exercise and expansion of Indian territorial sovereignty, especially in the case of Kashmir, was a fundamentally colonial exercise. This is not only because it was coercive, lacked a democratic basis, denied a people their self-determination, or was buttressed by a class of native elites or compradors, which in this case are Kashmir’s client regimes. But it is also because India’s colonial rule in Kashmir relied on civilizing tropes, historicizing mythologies, racialized othering, and machinations of control that we often associate with more ‘classical’ forms of colonialism from the global north to the global south.

The book is about a number of aspirations that have a ‘positive’ connotation including state-building, but also democracy, secularism, development, and empowerment. I show how these processes played a critical role in India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir, and how they worked in tandem to suppress Kashmiri demands for sovereignty or self-determination.

Q: Let me follow up on the above. You not only argue that India’s relationship with Kashmir post-1947 must be seen through a prism of colonialism, you also call it an occupation. Many scholars of Kashmiri history and politics use the term occupation to denote the militarized character of governance or everyday life in Kashmir after the start of the armed rebellion for self-determination in the late 1980’s. Your book makes the case that such description must go further back in time. Would you elaborate on why that must be so?

My book examines how colonialism, settler-colonialism, and occupation are all important analytics to understand India’s relationship with Kashmir. That is to say—India uses characteristics of each of these categories to cement its rule in Kashmir over time, and thus, it is difficult to say that it is just one or the other. This is important because it encourages us to not see these categories as being oppositional to one another, but rather working in tandem in different moments to achieve particular ends for the state or respond to local forms of resistance.

A number of scholars have used the term occupation to denote the militarized character of governance starting from the late 1980s and beyond. Traditionally, the term occupation is from international humanitarian law and refers to military control by a power over a territory that is outside of its sovereign jurisdiction. It is meant to be temporary, but scholars of occupation have noted how the temporary can become prolonged and can overlap with colonialism (through resource appropriation) and settler colonialism (through land grabs). In the post-Partition period, Kashmir was still militarized (although the militarization may have appeared different to what occurred after the 1980s) and was under a permanent state of emergency through draconian laws that undermined democratic processes and dissent. Legal scholars Haley Duschinski and Shrimoyee Ghosh have also argued how Article 370 of the Indian constitution can be see through the framework of “occupational constitutionalism,” whereby the law produces Indian ‘foreign’ dominance in Kashmir. Article 370 was meant to be temporary, and pave the way for a mechanism of self-determination for the people of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the context of a contested accession, war between India and Pakistan, and UN intervention. Of course, this never happened, leading to a more prolonged occupation in Kashmir.

Q: Among the key concepts that you work with is Neve Gordon’s ‘politics of life’ which is a phrase that Gordon employs to describe the relationship of Israeli State with Palestinians post 1967 in his book Israel’s Occupation. Could you elaborate on why you used this concept and also comparisons that you find relevant between the two contexts?

The politics of life is probably one of the most useful concepts to think with in terms of understanding Kashmir at this time, but also in understanding different modalities of control under colonialism, settler-colonialism, and occupation. Neve Gordon, in Israel’s Occupation, used the term to describe Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war, whereby Israel attempted to secure the existence and livelihood of the Palestinians there, through agricultural reform, for example, or the planting of trees.

I found this concept to be really useful to understand how the Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes propagated development, empowerment, and progress to secure the well-being of Kashmir’s popula¬tion and to normalize the occupation for multiple audiences. This meant foreground¬ing the day-to-day concerns of employment, food, education, and the provision of basic services. At the same time, questions of self-determination and Kashmir’s political future were being suppressed. The government intended to ensure that with an improved standard of living and greater prosperity, Kashmiri Muslim sentiments would shift in favor of India, and Kashmiris would effectively be integrated. This is a very different mechanism of control than, say, a more necropolitical one, whereby the state manages death through killings, torture, and disappearances, instead of life. However, both the politics of life, and more necropolitical forms of governance have operated in Kashmir to different degrees, and often at the same time.

Israel, similarly, utilizes different mechanisms of control across historic Palestine, relying on tactics of settler-colonialism, colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. So the modes that Israel uses to deny Palestinian sovereignty change over time and across space—from 48 lands, to the West Bank, and Gaza. It is important to understand how these tactics may resonate or differ across these distinct regions—Kashmir and Palestine—to better understand how these modalities of control are all part of an overarching structure of (settler) colonial occupation.

Q: Let us turn to specifics. In the first chapter, which comes after an extensive conceptual introduction, you write about the state-building in 1950s and 1960s Kashmir under its Prime Minister Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad in terms of a longer genealogy. How do Kashmiri struggles against the Dogra rule from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, inform what transpired in the region once India and Pakistan were created in 1947? Relatedly, why did you choose Bakshi for this study instead of a more well-known figure like Sheikh Abdullah, who both preceded and succeeded Bakshi in ruling positions of power?

Under Dogra rule, Kashmiri Muslims were, in particular, extremely marginalized socially and economically. Illiteracy was high, most did not own land or property, and they were forced to pay heavy taxes to the Dogra state. Popular mobilizations against Dogra rule called for greater economic, educational, and political rights, as well as the uplift of the state’s longsuffering communities. Bakshi himself was part of one of these movements—the National Conference, which was one of the main parties opposing Dogra rule; it’s charter, the Naya Kashmir manifesto, was influenced by prominent leftists in the subcontinent at the time and called for a socialist democratic future for the state. Bakshi’s state-building project in the 1950s and 1960s was in part drawn from the Naya Kashmir manifesto, but also departed from it because the political context and compulsions under Indian rule were different. The Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes initially saw that the resolution to the ‘Kashmir issue’ would address the economic and social concerns that Kashmiris had raised during their struggle against the Dogras—so things like land reform, education, employment—the politics of life, so to speak. They believed that political aspirations could be kept at bay as long as those issues were given attention to. This is how state-building was drawing from a longer genealogy that went back to the struggles against the Dogras.

I chose Bakshi precisely because I found that there was so little written about him, or the decade that he was in power, even though it appeared to me from preliminary research that this was the time that so much of the financial, cultural, legal, and political contours of India’s colonial occupation were entrenched. I was also intrigued by some of the oral narratives about him and his time in power I came across in my initial interviews—for example, stories of immense corruption, but also genuine concern for Kashmir’s marginalized populations.

Q: In chapter two, you detail the official narratives coming out of Kashmir during Prime Minister Bakshi’s regime, and curiously so in the context of a peak in global decolonization movements in which India played a major role under its Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. These official narratives seemed to make a case for Kashmiri acceptance of the Indian sovereignty. In the third chapter, you talk about Indian cinema’s arrival in Kashmir during the same period. And, as you show, a number of Bollywood films coming out of India were set or shot in Kashmir, which was also employed as a proof of normalcy and development in the region. But you argue that, ultimately, all such state-led efforts were wanting. Why do you think such efforts on part of Kashmiri and Indian governments did not work out as planned?

When there is such a strong attempt to produce ‘normalcy,’ it usually means that something is askance, and we can see the parallels of this time period to the moment we are in today. The third chapter examines both film and tourism as playing a crucial role in the production of ‘normalcy.’ Development and the production of normalcy was occurring congruent to immense political suppression. Yet, as I argue, even though the Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes may have been successful in legally, economically, and politically integrating Kashmir with the Indian union during this time, they did not succeed in emotionally integrating Kashmiris, who still did not see themselves as “Indians.” There were popular political aspirations in Kashmir that did not align with the Indian state. Fundamentally, Kashmiris had been denied their right to self-determination. And so, all of these attempts were mechanisms of control to manage that denial, and to transform Kashmiri subjectivities in favor of India, but such efforts were wanting. In fact, they led to an opposite effect, whereby mobilizations for self-determination were even more heightened after Bakshi’s decade in power.

At the same time, however, film and tourism did succeed in territorializing India’s colonial occupation, especially for Indian audiences. Both allowed the idea of Kashmir and the desire for Kashmir to be cemented in the Indian imaginary. And I show in this chapter how Kashmir was constructed not just as a site of desire for middle-class Indian tourists, but also a site of religious attachment for Indian Hindus and integral to Hindu sacred geographies—at the expense of Muslim ones.

Q:The fourth chapter deals with how financial integration of Kashmir with India was central to the efforts of the Bakshi regime. In fact, Bakshi established his legacy as a beneficent administrator in the region and created many opportunities for jobs and development, especially for Kashmiri Muslims. Yet you also examine these developments through the framework of developing dependency. What does that imply?

Bakshi was different from his predecessor, Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir’s first prime minister, in that he saw financial integration as important for the state to implement its development aims. Bakshi was called the “architect of modern Kashmir.” Under his rule, Kashmir entered what was portrayed as a “golden age” of large-scale modernization, including agricultural reform, infrastructural growth, and increased employment opportunities. These developments resulted from a complete renegotiation of Kashmir’s financial relationship with the Government of India as the Kashmir government placed certain fiscal demands on the Indian state. The state received significant grants and agricultural subsidies. This enabled a dependency on the Indian state as the developmentalist strategy in Kashmir focused more on meeting short-term strategic interests rather than long-term economic growth. It meant that Kashmir was not able to be self-sufficient, which further entrenched India’s colonial occupation. It was also different from the strategy of the Indian government elsewhere. India was then able to rely on tropes that Kashmir ‘needed’ India in order to survive. By looking at economic development and the fiscal relations between India and Kashmir and how they transformed during Bakshi’s rule, I contend that India was able to infiltrate Kashmir by fiscal and not direct military means.

Q: In chapter five, you write about the construction and multiple failures of the Indian secular project in Kashmir. The sixth chapter further raises the question of state appropriation of Kashmiri culture. A key element of both these chapters seemed to me that even as the state-controlled narratives about secularism and cultivating a pro-state Kashmiri Muslim subjectivity, ultimately—much like the efforts of developing an international narrative, promoting tourism, or financial integration—these attempts were also fraught. What is even more interesting is that many writers and intellectuals that you mention actually ended up critiquing the state and often faced consequences for their actions. As such, it seems that even though the state sought to closely control the intellectual production, it could not establish its hegemony. Would that be a fair assessment?

Yes, absolutely. And I think Akhter Mohiuddin’s story is very instructive in this regard. Mohiuddin was a Kashmiri novelist and short story writer. He was affiliated with some of the progressive writers in Kashmir beginning in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of these writers would come to be coopted into the state bureaucracy under Bakshi. Kashmir’s cultural intelligentsia faced significant pressures to join the ranks of his administration—and Bakshi was also able to exploit their desire for a steady income. The JK Cultural Academy was established at this time, to basically consolidate what was considered Kashmiri culture, but also to reflect a syncretic Kashmiri culture that was able to align well with the Indian state. As his day job, Mohiuddin was basically working within these statist cultural institutions and even served as a secretary in the cultural academy—although I did find some sources on how he tried to push back in the archive. He received Indian literary awards like the Sahitya Akademi award for his published works. Yet, part of what Mohiuddin’s story also shows is how those very same Kashmiri artists that worked in the state bureaucracy found ways to subvert the state narrative, and so the states control over cultural production was not hegemonic. In the case of Akhtar Mohiuddin – he wrote novels and short stories which paint a very different picture of Kashmir at the time, from the image that the state wanted to project of development or progress. His stories serve as a counter narrative to the “politics of life.” He writes about people being pushed by greed, loneliness and helplessness and subsequently make questionable choices. He also writes about how people learned to live and function in a fractured society. His short stories cover a range of topics—relations between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits, the ways in which elections in Kashmir were ruses to serve the ruling party, and the corruption that came with newfound wealth. Mohiuddin would eventually come to renounce awards given to him by the Indian state, in the wake of the armed movement of the 1990s, when both his son and son-in-law were killed in the violence. His trajectory—from being one of the artists incorporated into the government’s cultural intelligentsia, to later renouncing the awards he received—reflects the complex interplay between conformity and resistance in the context of a colonial occupation. And in many ways this was not just specific to the subjectivities of the cultural intelligentsia alone—but many others, as well.

Q: The final sixth chapter takes a turn to narrate the story of explicit resistance by groups such as the Plebiscite Front and the Political Conference, and consequently outright repression against them. Arguably, this was the result of failure on part of Indian and Kashmiri states to establish their political legitimacy, and as such they resorted to outright repression by detaining and persecuting individuals and groups which challenged the political status quo. What were the stakes of this confrontation? And in what ways might this have laid the foundations of a diverse Kashmiri political resistance in decades to come?

During this time, contestation primary revolved around the politics of the “plebiscite.” Activists from these organizations would mobilize the masses in protests, rallies, and strikes demanding that the Kashmir issue was not final, and that Kashmiris had a right to self-determination via a UN-backed plebiscite. In response, the state would rely on sheer force—using its various police forces and intelligence networks to torture, detain, surveil, and harass dissenters. Part of what this chapter argues is that there was a state of permanent emergency in Kashmir at this time, bolstering the framework of a colonial occupation. Preventive detention, in particular, was often used against members of opposition groups. As with today, the state denied Kashmiris any agency; all opposition was depicted as being sponsored by Pakistan.

At the same time, I argue that the range of political possibility at this time also enabled ambiguity around the aspirations for these political groups. If the politics of plebiscite entailed either India or Pakistan, did it mean that these groups and the populations they mobilized were agitating for merger with Pakistan, since it was clear they were in opposition to Indian control? I show how some leaders of the Plebiscite Front were using the politics of plebiscite to secure greater autonomy within the Indian Union. One of the primary reasons why the Plebiscite Front was unable to sustain itself is that a number of its leaders were operating within the same frame of reference and background as those who were officially in power. This made it easier for the organization to be co-opted by the state, leading to other, more revolutionary possibilities to emerge in subsequent decades.

Q: Colonizing Kashmir brings to light many new sources which hitherto had not seen the light of the day, in addition to oral histories from interviews that you managed to conduct over the years. Could you elaborate on what your research process was like, especially considering the fact that it is not easy or straightforward to conduct research in Kashmir, which you yourself mention in the book. What is curious to me is how can we, as scholars, still strive to write meticulously researched histories when at a general level we understand and know that access to archival sources is restricted in Kashmir?

Doing research in Kashmir is complicated. For all scholars, especially those who do not have the benefit of being associated with the state, getting access is challenging, as is questions of safety and security. And yet, at the same time, one’s experience can be different based on your positionality, or even your discipline. During the time that I was conducting my archival fieldwork for my dissertation, the Srinagar State Archives was accessible, and was a huge resource for me. On the other hand, the National Archives of India in New Delhi, was not very accessible. Most of the material I requested regarding Kashmir came back “non-transferrable.” This changed a bit in subsequent field visits, and I was able to access a few important documents, including correspondence between the Indian government and Bakshi’s government regarding agricultural and rice subsidies, which really helped bolster my argument for my economic development chapter.

I was also able to get access in Kashmir to a number of private collections and additional libraries and archives. So much of this was linked to building trust with people, but also the privilege that I have being based in the US academy and being of Kashmiri background myself. This also came into play with the oral interviews that I conducted as part of my research, which really helped me understand the period better, its legacies, and also gave me “clues” as to what types of additional sources I should be looking out for. I am very grateful to many people in Kashmir who shared books and archival material with me.

Ultimately, I think the research process is a mixture of sheer luck, perseverance, and creativity. As researchers, and specifically those who are historians, we live with the fear that perhaps we didn’t incorporate everything that existed that could have buttressed our argument, or even worse, would have perhaps negated our argument. I still wish I could have come across sources that gave me more insight into Bakshi’s own political thinking or experiences. So, I am not sure if it is possible to write the most meticulously researched histories about a certain time period, but we can be meticulous with the sources we engage with, and those sources also ultimately shape the kinds of questions we ask.

Q: This is your first book based on your dissertation at the University of Michigan. Could you speak about the challenges in your intellectual journey: How did you navigate the dissertation writing process? And what did transforming it into the book look like? And finally, maybe some advice for people who might be working on their dissertations or first book manuscripts?

Writing a book on Kashmir that challenges normative frameworks isn’t easy. But, I am grateful that I was trying to publish this book at a time when there have been a number of monographs and edited volumes on Kashmir that challenge statist perspectives and move beyond the normal tropes in South Asian studies. And yet, at the same time, for me as a historian of South Asia, trying to build an argument about India’s rule in Kashmir as a colonial one in the time period that I examine, I had to push myself to think beyond South Asian history and area studies frameworks. The biggest intellectual transformation from the dissertation to the book was inspired by a friend who encouraged me to read widely across comparative regions—like Palestine, Tibet, Hawaii—and more theoretical works on settler-colonialism, colonialism, and occupation. This is what ultimately allowed me to fine-tune my arguments and interventions.

One often thinks that this whole process of writing a book is an individual one, but it is not. For me, it was important to build my own communities of support, especially other scholars of Kashmir, and those who are trying to ask similar questions in different contexts. So many people helped me in different ways from the dissertation to the book—by reading drafts, sharing additional sources, sharing their book proposals, doing co-writing sessions, and so on. My primary advice for those working on their first books based on the dissertation is to get other eyes on your work. They don’t even have to be people who know the region/topic that well; in fact, it might be better if they are not. Some incredibly helpful feedback for me has come from colleagues and friends whose work ranges from black feminist writings of the Caribbean to the racial and theological logics of the American security state. Building intellectual communities of support is the primary way that I was able to finish and publish this book.

Suvaid Yaseen is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.

Faiza Moatasim is Assistant Professor of Architecture in Urbanism and Urban Design at the USC School of Architecture. Her first book, Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2023. She specializes in history and theory of architecture and urban design, modern colonial and post-colonial architecture and urbanism, low-income housing and urban informality. Moatasim’s research explores how the agency of individuals and communities in shaping their built environments is integral to our understanding of the planning, functioning, and everyday lived experiences of cities everywhere. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Graham Foundation, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Mellon Foundation, International Institute for Asian Studies, Teagle Foundation and Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies.

Q. In this fascinating book you present a nuanced distinction between the imagination of “entopia” that the Greek architect and city planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis had for the city of Islamabad and the visions of “utopia” held by other modernist architect-planners of the time such as Le Corbusier who designed the city of Chandigarh in India. While the modernist lineage of his vision and the contradictions within it are beautifully elaborated in the first chapter of this book, can you speak to the particular political economic moment in which these modernist architect-planners and their grand visions for urban development are emerging within prominent centers of the Global South?

As an ideology, high modernism is rooted in the conviction that scientific rationality and technological progress can improve social and natural worlds. High-modernist cities are imagined to be highly efficiency because of their simplified organization and reliance on technology. They typically feature a rational geometric grid of repetitive neighborhoods, a strict separation of functions in clearly defined zones, expansive green spaces, and an automobile dependent transportation system.

It is no coincidence that the most ambitious and thorough examples of twentieth century high-modernist architecture and urban design are found in emerging economies and post-colonial nation states like Brazil, India, and Pakistan. The ruling elites of these nations invested in expensive city building projects in the post-World War II era to fulfill their political and economic agendas. By representing experimentation and innovation, these cities were intended to help their nations project an image of a modernized present and prosperous future. Building new political centers held symbolic significance in the newly independent nation states of Pakistan and India, which had lost important political centers to each other because of the 1947 Partition of British India. Western modernist architects enthusiastically accepted design commissions in the so-called global South because they offered unique design opportunities that were not available in Europe or North America at the time. High modernism thus emerged as the dominant planning and design ideology across diverse contexts because it aligned so well with the political and economic visions of progress, development, and modernization of the ruling elites and the ambitions of design professionals at the time.

Q: Given that one of Doxiadis’s guiding principles was that “time and not space as [are] the real dimension of the cities,” and that his ideal city would develop in a “predetermined one directional path” – how do you think would he react to the “living document” that is the masterplan of Islamabad today?

Getting commissioned to design a building or a city is a deeply personal experience for architects; it is a test of their creativity and innovative thinking. If I could take the liberty to overgeneralize, then I would say that most architects like to have complete control over their design projects. Even though many other people eventually occupy their designed environments, architects see themselves as the primary decision-makers of the creative design process. For these reasons, I think that it becomes very challenging for architects to leave major design decisions to other people or to chance.

I think Doxiadis would not entirely appreciate the evolution of his master plan as a “living document,” because while he left room in his design for the city to develop over time, he was careful about identifying the pattern (the sector) and the direction (southwest) in which the city would grow (i.e., “predetermined one directional path”). While he anticipated Islamabad’s growth, I think he would not appreciate a deviation from his prescribed form and direction of future growth. The concept of the master plan as a living document is about growth but it is also about competing interests and negotiations of different types of people in Islamabad. All these factors lead to constant revisions to the overall planning framework and urban forms by multiple authors. This mode of planning is very different to conventional design practice that very much revolves around the creative genius of the principal architect.

Q: One of the central arguments in your work is that “informality is an orientation to law, rather than an absence of it.” You argue that both the encroacher and the planner negotiate to come to an understanding that is either temporary or long-term, but never really permanent. Yet, the Bheka Syedan case in the first chapter seems to point to an instance where the Capital Development authority (CDA) reneged on the terms of the land acquisitions deal with the residents of one of the villages in the planning area of Islamabad and operated within what Ananya Roy (2009) has called a “state of deregulation” a mode of urbanization that allows the “state considerable territorialized flexibility to alter land use, deploy eminent domain, and to acquire land.” How can we think of this violent tendency of the planning authority to privilege the interests of some over that of the poor? Can the poor really negotiate for a permanence with the planning authority?

Violence of the state in dispossessing communities of their land in developmental projects must not be underestimated. To answer your second question directly, I do not think that underprivileged people living in highly regulated cities can fairly negotiate with their powerful planning authorities. The point that I make in the book is that despite all the power that state authorities wield, I have observed how low-income communities sometimes successfully negotiate their right to space by relying on various modes of informality, particularly temporariness. Temporariness has an effect of tolerance. Occupying land on a temporary basis is a survival strategy that allows builders of informal spaces to claim land, often for long periods of time. Temporary modes of informality do not mean that the constructions or claims are fragile or fleeting. They are a part of a discourse and practice that makes it acceptable for transgressions as long as they are imagined to be temporary.

But returning to your example of the violence and dispossession of property experienced by the people in Bheka Syedan as well as the many evicted katchi abadis in Islamabad, we can see a correlation with what Ananya Roy has described as the state wielding its power to deregulate territories and dispossess communities. However, while the state is fully capable of abusing the power of laws that it helps define, state power is never absolute. It is this tension that shapes my understanding of the relationship between informality and the law. I am interested in how deregulation and eminent domain policies often unleash a new set of challenges for powerful state actors.

For instance, even when CDA acquires land through eminent domain, it does so under its own terms and conditions. Usually the payment to each household for both undeveloped land and the built-up property that exists on that land varies. When CDA announces its decision to acquire places like Bheka Syedan and other existing rural communities, some residents and speculators (often with the help of CDA staff) immediately start building new structures (referred to as “dummy” houses) so that they can claim more built-up property. By taking inspiration from the law, speculative builders undermine the forceful land acquisition process. There are examples of both acquired and unacquired villages in Islamabad that negotiated more successfully with CDA because of similar tactics. These practices can sometimes delay or stall developmental projects because CDA doesn’t have the ability to pay for all the built-up property under its own laws. Of course, not everyone impacted by forced acquisitions participate in such tactics, and unfortunately, many small landowners are forced out of their ancestral villages as a result of CDA’s acquisition process. While it is difficult to imagine fair negotiations between two unequal groups: powerful corporate bodies like the CDA, on one side, and small communities of low-income people living in existing villages or informal katchi abadis, on the other, this does not mean that state planning authorities cannot be forced to tolerate or negotiate with low-income builders whose actions are oriented towards CDA’s laws.

Q: In the chapter on “Ordinary Informality” in your book, you present an incredible history of France Colony, an informal settlement inhabited by construction workers, settled by the planning authority, within an area that is marked as a greenbelt on the masterplan of Islamabad. It is an excellent example of how spatial non conformity is essential to the development of the city space. However, you also tell us how the original plan of Doxiadis had accounted for the provisioning of low-income housing for these very workers. Why do you think the CDA saw fit to not adhere to its promise of providing public housing for its workers? Can you speak more to the practices of squatting in these spaces and the minority status of the residents? Who and how do you believe such instances of “authorized transgressions” benefit?

During my research at the Doxiadis Archives (in Athens), I came across reports and correspondence that showed how Doxiadis shared with CDA officials, designs and locations of housing for low-income workers like sweepers and laborers. In his correspondence, Doxiadis also warned CDA officials about how in the other modernist capital cities of Brasilia (Brazil) and Chandigarh (India), housing for low-income workers had not been built as part of the official master plan. Consequently, low-income workers ended up living in informally built communities, often outside of the master planned areas.

The discovery of Doxiadis Associates’ unrealized plans for workers’ housing at the archives helped me disrupt one of the major narratives around the emergence of low-income informal communities in high-modernist cities like Chandigarh and Brasilia. According to this narrative, self-built communities (i.e., informality) first emerged in high-modernist cities to house essential workers, whose housing needs had been overlooked by modern architects and planners. But in Islamabad, low-income informal neighborhoods developed because CDA officials did not follow Doxiadis’s recommendations for building low-income housing. But while CDA officials ignored Doxiadis’s proposal, they could not completely ignore the shelter needs of low-income city workers.

CDA officials address the housing needs of its essential workers by identifying locations according to the master plan where the workers could build their own communities. The official location of these authorized informal settlements in green areas next to nalas (ravines) that exist naturally all over the city and where CDA’s Christian sanitation workers live in self-built dwellings in the middle of elite master planned sectors. France Colony presents a rare example of a minority yet functionally important community benefitting from an authorized transgression in the middle of a highly regulated city. While it may seem like the residents of France Colony benefit from this official allowance, the actual beneficiaries of these authorized transgressions are people who live outside of France Colony and who depend on the labor of its residents to clean their city and maintain their comfortable lifestyles. City officials, instead of providing proper housing to its workers, ended up setting up and facilitating the process of self-built informal housing in a comprehensively planned city.

Q: Mr. Ahmed and his conflicts with the people of France colony are the kind that are witnessed in other cities of the Global South where affluence and abjection must live in close proximity. He arguable suggests that the “moral failings” and “lack of purity” of the residents of France colony are reasons for their own abjection. Can you please tell us more about the socio-economic (caste/class) background of Mr. Ahmed and similar residents in the vicinity of France colony and their understanding of the labor contributed by their neighbors (residents of France Colony) in producing the city?

Upper class people like Mr Ahmed who own houses in areas around low-income self-built communities like France Colony behave the same way as NIMBYs behave elsewhere. In Islamabad, differences in religion in addition to economic status contribute towards the segregation and stigmatization of people living in low-income informal communities like France Colony. During his interview, Mr Ahmed mentioned that the earlier settlers of France Colony were honest hardworking people but now they have been replaced by drug dealers, criminals, and prostitutes. I suspect that as France Colony grew in size, and received official recognition over time, people like Mr Ahmed started to feel more resentful about the intrusion of a low-income Christian minority community asserting its presence in a predominantly elite Muslim neighborhood.

It is important to emphasize that most low-income Christians living in places like France Colony engage in necessary yet polluting and undesirable work. Based on economic and religious discrimination, low-income Christians find their employment options limited to sweepers, garbage collectors, and sewer cleaners. They are underpaid and work without any protective equipment and are treated with scorn because of the supposedly unsanitary nature of their work. Keeping in line with the discrimination, danger, and humiliation they face at work, low-income Christians in Pakistan (and other countries in South Asia) mostly have no choice but to live in religiously homogenous, and therefore segregated, village communities and informal urban settlements.

While functional necessity ensures that France Colony is tolerated at the official level, it is not enough to pacify the resentment of elite neighbors towards the residents of France Colony. While the elites in Islamabad need poor people to clean their homes and make tea for them in their offices, they do not wish for their low-level staff and servants to be their neighbors. It is expected that low-level city workers, like sweepers, gardeners, and domestic help, work in the city but reside outside of it, spending hours commuting each day to their places of work. For high income Muslim elites in Islamabad, the rightful place of these workers performing essential, yet polluting jobs is outside the city.

Q: The modalities of property transactions that you describe in France colony through the examples of Baji Perveen, Zara, Fahima, Saima, and Shaheena is fascinating. Their experiences and stories reveal so much about kinship and property within the informal settlement. I was however struck by the similarity of “mimicking procedure” by the elite “housewife” Mrs Nabila Sheikh and these women within informal settlements. It is almost by repeating some bureaucratic utterances and practices these women were able to conjure property. Is there a conscious decision in choosing these women as your entry points into this imagined property scape? Do you think gender relations play a role in the manipulation and creations of property relations within the planning regimes of Islamabad?

The so-called “house-wives” play an integral role in informal residential property regimes and bureaucratic procedures in Islamabad. When I did most of the research for this book project, I wasn’t as attentive to gender and property relations as I could have been. During my interviews of home builders in France Colony and Bani Gala, I repeatedly encountered strong women who were deeply invested in building homes for themselves and their families, and navigating bureaucratic procedures and property transactions, using informal means. I realized that this was not a coincidence when I started writing my doctoral dissertation, on which this book is based.

Even though the protagonists of my book belong to different socio-economic backgrounds and literacy levels, their homes were their primary area of concern and responsibility. And this is in keeping with the socially prescribed gender roles in places like South Asia where the home is the woman’s principal domain. But the women protagonists in my book were not simply figurative homemakers; they were the actual makers of their residential properties, including how they get built and transacted. The women I met figured out where and how to buy or sell property, how to add a room so that it could be rented for additional income, how to get water or electricity for their homes and neighborhoods, how to respond to government letters and notices, how to protest city officials and actions, all while maintaining their obligations of care at home.

Q: You move through a variety of spaces while analyzing the informalities within the master plan of Islamabad. First, we encounter the model villages and the Katchi Abadis, then we meet the khokas or the stalls of the street vendors, France colony and the neighborhood surrounding it, the very elite neighborhood of Bani Gala, other elite spaces such as salons within residential areas and also some of the unbuilt sectors around the lake. How did you choose these locations? Can you speak more to the methodological choices involved in choosing these locations and actors for analysis

The quintessential spaces of informality like katchi abadis and khokhas were easy to identify because of my long-term association with the city. I knew how there were these spaces like informal settlements and roadside kiosks and cafes that contradicted the pristine image of Islamabad as a modern, beautiful capital city. I selected France Colony because it is one of the iconic katchi abadis in Islamabad, because of its prominent and visible location next to a popular commercial market in the middle of an elite sector.

At the time I was doing my research, there were two well publicized court cases about large mansions (called “farmhouses”) built on land officially designated for farming purpose, and the unlawful lease of a public park for a privately owned and operated mini golf. Because of these high-profile cases, I became interested in the trend of elite-driven illegal constructions, which were the norm at the time of my research. Things have changed a lot now but at the time, it was nearly impossible to avoid a non-conforming business operating from a building designed as a house. From the dentist’s office to a hair salon, clothing boutique, gym, or a cafe, large houses were used for unauthorized functions. Non-conforming, informal activities were prevalent all over the city so identifying places to study wasn’t difficult. Based on these experiences and observations, it became apparent to me that in order to study informality in Islamabad, it was important to study both its high- and low- forms.

Because most of the spaces I examine in this book are legally contentious, it was often not very easy to speak to people involved in making different types of elite and ordinary informal spaces. I interviewed roadside khokha owners, residents of a katchi abadi, low- and high-ranking government officials, wealthy homeowners and businesspeople, store managers, architects, real estate agents, political activists, and NGO workers. Most people were very generous with their time and insights. Residents of France Colony were always gracious in sharing their stories with me whenever I showed up in their neighborhood. But they exercised caution while describing their dealings with the state. I gained access to my interlocutors for the elite informal neighborhood of Bani Gala, through friends and colleagues. The level of response from people in many ways correlated with how secure they felt in the informal spaces that they occupied in the city: residents of Bani Gala and France Colony were relatively more comfortable with sharing how they built their homes; builders of roadside kiosks and elite non-conforming stores were less so.

Q: You argue that the official concessions for some of the temporariness for informal commercial and vending uses of space in Islamabad is written into the municipal bye-laws which results in inconsistencies between the CDA’s planning process and the city planning practices of the municipality. Can you speak a bit more to the specific regulations through which the municipal bye-laws codify temporariness? What role do you think institutional differences between the CDA and the local municipal authority play in ensuring such slippages?

In Islamabad, CDA is a powerful corporate body in charge of both its planning and management. All municipal administration comes under a CDA department called DMA (Municipal Administration Directorate), so the discrepancy between the master plan and municipal regulations can be explained as a function of reconciling differences between an imagined ideal and lived reality, between bureaucratic planning systems and pressing global challenges such as urban poverty and lack of resources.

While CDA officials have the difficult task to maintain the impression of Islamabad as a highly planned city, they are also responsible for managing the large number of underprivileged people who live and work informally in the city. Temporariness emerges as an important strategy for city officials to make room for spaces of informality in Islamabad. For instance, to manage street vending in a modernist city where street commerce has no place, concessions are written in existing bye-laws to allow “encroachments,” defined as erecting “an immovable structure, hut or khokha or overhanging structure” on government land. According to these bye-laws, street hawking is one of the licensable trades and hawkers can be issued “temporary” monthly licenses that be revoked on a short notice can be issue. The material characteristics of “licensed encroachments” contribute to the logic of temporariness, as the stalls for which these licenses can be issued are characterized in the bylaws as “roofless” and “movable” structures that can be easily removed. It is the discrepancy between the bye-laws and the master plan that tolerates spaces of informality in the city.

Q: In the penultimate chapter on the making of non-conforming spaces within the elite neighborhoods of Islamabad, you describe a series of negotiations in creating such space that one of the transgressors describes as “chote motey masle (little issues)” which in reality are anything but little. How do these issues get resolved? Do they only involve the establishment of paper truths or are there some more material surveillance mechanisms that need to be adhered with? Can you speak more to the system of negotiations that you allude to in regularization of non-conforming uses in this chapter?

Building-control officers at CDA maintain sector-wise lists of non-conforming uses in elite residential buildings in Islamabad. The purpose of this detailed record-keeping is not to deter the practice of using large houses for commercial functions, but to use these lists to send notices of violation to their owners. The owners of non-conforming businesses respond to these notices in a number of ways: they give bribes and use their political connections with powerful people to avoid getting their businesses sealed. Another common practice at the time of my research was to get a court stay order against CDA’s legal notices and actions. In terms of material surveillance practices, owners of elite non-conforming uses in existing or new large houses carefully maintain the appearance of these buildings as houses. Many owners of home-offices (where owners live in one part of the house and run their businesses in the other part like beauty salons and architectural firms) do not display any signs of their businesses on the outside.

The regularization of non-conforming elite residences in the protected nature reserve was based on judicial mechanisms that mediated between an official planning framework and personal property rights. A series of court rulings in favor of non-conforming elite residences in 1998 and 2007 exposed a tension between planning rules and regulations and the rights of non-conforming property owners. Both these cases featured elite homebuilders who have built large mansions in Islamabad’s protected nature reserve called the National Park (Zone IV).

In 1998, a judge upheld the constitutional rights of the elite homebuilders who had built in the protected National Park area and declared CDA’s actions of placing restrictions on the use of privately owned land as illegal. The 2007 court decision declared existing bylaws for National Park unjust and without legal force because they restricted the use of privately owned land only for agricultural purposes. These court decisions upheld the proprietary rights of landowners who had violated the master plan by building their lavish homes on their legally owned properties. Elite homeowners made substantial material investments on land that they bought at throw away rates from local villages to build their lavish homes in violation of the master plan. These legal decisions and material investments have made it impossible for CDA to free protected land from elite encroachments and instituted major structural changes to the master plan and zoning laws in Islamabad.

Q: How did you get interested in instances of informality within the modernist master planning processes of Islamabad? Can you speak to the process of researching for your dissertation and then the process of transforming the dissertation into a book?

I grew up in nearby cities, so I would often visit Islamabad either on family vacations or school trips. Certain impressions of the city from these visits sparked my fascination with its distinct urban form and experience. For example, I came to know Islamabad as clean, green, and an elite city. I also noticed pockets of extreme destitution in the form of self-built informal communities in the middle of very wealthy neighborhoods. I first became interested in informality as topic of research during my undergraduate studies in Pakistan. For my final Bachelor of Architecture thesis, I researched and proposed an upgrading plan for a large (and now evicted) katchi abadi in sector I-11/4 (Haq Bahu) in Islamabad. These early informal and formal understandings of Islamabad as a highly planned and unequal city led me to my PhD research project, which formed the basis of this book.

The process of turning my dissertation into a book was long but enjoyable. It involved figuring out how to communicate the main contributions of the project along with its various details and evidence in an engaging and intelligent (and not clunky) manner, so that it would appeal to a wider audience. Because I was dealing with disparate, messy, and contingent urban processes, it was important to identify a clear overarching framework to organize my research. My thinking and writing got clarity over time, as I became comfortable with my own work and its contributions by writing journal articles and a book precis, presenting at conferences, and organizing a book manuscript workshop. These writing exercises and engagements helped me develop the framing of the project along the lines of elite and ordinary encroachments and their orientation towards the master plan and zoning regulations.

Sangeeta Banerji is the Assistant Professor of Human Geography at the New York University in Shanghai. She works at the intersection of anthropology of the state, Urban Geography and Development Studies and is broadly interested in the politics of informality within megacity regions.

My twitter journey started in May 2007 and it ends today, July 23, 2023, with 32.6K tweets. I cannot sustain Elon Musk’s nonsense. Sorry. I have archived my twitter on github (will update this link when it is searchable).

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M/S.