Dhaka aspirations of the concealed

DHAKA: ASPIRATIONS OF THE CONCEALED TABASSUM ZAMAN B.A. (Hons.), University of Dhaka M.A., University of Dhaka A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY CULTURAL STUDIES IN ASIA PROGRAMME NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2014 DHAKA: ASPIRATIONS OF THE CONCEALED TABASSUM ZAMAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2014 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety. I have duly acknowledged all the sources of information which have been used in the thesis. This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously. ----------------------------Tabassum Zaman April 2014 i Acknowledgements I dedicate this thesis to the most important trio in my life: my parents – Ammu, Abbu and my son, Ehan. Abbu, you are the reason for my being in academia in the first place. Losing you, I lost all enthusiasm to pursue higher studies and almost thought of giving up. Then it was my dream to make you proud and happy and to justice to your undying faith in me that helped me collect myself and keep at it. I hope you are watching me complete this journey today. Ammu, who became a proxy mother in my absence to my son, this thesis is dedicated to your hard work and endless sacrifices. It is for you that I have been able to juggle my work and parental duties without major mishaps. Thank you Ehan, my sunshine, for being in my life. You were a blessing in disguise. I remember complaining so many times for not being able to get any work done when you were around until I realised that you were the only reason for the discipline I needed to carry on with this daunting task. I might have started this journey on my own, but without you, I would never have pushed myself so diligently to meet those harrowing deadlines that I did, eventually completing this thesis. A big thank you is in order to all my teachers who played an equally important part in making me who I’m  today.  I  have  had  the  best  teachers  one  can  ask   for  in  one’s  lifetime.  I  thank  all  my  mentors  from  the  bottom  of  my  heart  for  leaving  a   part of them in me and inspiring me to strive for the best. Being in an uncertain and a transitional phase, as I was making my first forays into Cultural Studies from my comfort zone, English literature, I could not have asked for a better supervisor than Professor Chua Beng Huat, who was sensitive to my queries, needs and often blatant ignorance. With his atypical insights, he has always intrigued me to rethink what I readily accepted as unproblematic and made this journey at once enlightening and enjoyable for me. I owe so much of my own scholastic refinement as well as that of the main premises of this thesis to his relentless   “So   what?”s   and   “What     you   mean?”s.   Thank   you   for   creating   that   ii critical space for me to discover the old anew. Thank you also for being so patient with my prolonged procrastination and problems, which were plenty, while pushing me when I lagged behind. I feel blessed to be able to work with you, Prof. Firdous Azim and Syed Manzoorul Islam, you truly are my guardian angels. A  mere  “thank  you”  would  be  too  inadequate  to  acknowledge  your  love, affection and unconditional support for me. Yet, not knowing better, I want to thank you for having the confidence in me and showering me with your care and love whenever I needed them. You have truly been the pillars of strength and encouragement for me. You are the reason why I continue to be in academia. I look up to you and aspire to imbibe what you have taught me over the years. I am fortunate to have you in my life. My heart felt appreciation goes to all my informants and resource persons who have shown interest in my project and given me their precious time and advice. A big thank you also goes to Faisal Amin, my unofficial research assistant, for helping  me  out  during  my  field  work  with  all  the  “dirty  work.”  Thank  you  Safia  Azim   and Al Amin for sharing your wonderful photographs with me out of sheer benevolence. A big thanks to Tim Bunnell and Tania Roy for your interest in my work and providing me with your invaluable feedback during the formational period of this thesis. I want to extend my earnest gratitude to Ms Raja, my problem solving genie at NUS, who helped me through all the administrative nightmares and saved me from possible blunders. Last  but  not  the  least,  I’m  blessed  to  have  the  circle  of  family  and  friends  who   have been beside me through thick and thin. Sumona, Dipu Bhai, Antu, Babu and Sonia, thank you for going that extra mile, for being what you are and probably more than what you could be to hold the fort in my absence. It is for your collective effort that  I’m  able  to  write  this   note today. I would also like to thank all my students and colleagues at BRACU and friends at NUS who have made this entire journey worthwhile and even possible. A very special thanks to all my friends in Singapore, who made this little, sunny island my home away from home and such a welcoming iii and accommodating place to be. Jaime Koh, I cannot imagine Singapore without you. I’m  indebted  and  grateful  to  you  for  lending  that  “fresh  pair  of  [critical]  eyes”  that  I   was badly in need of. Thank you also for being my most dependable encyclopaedia of Singapore at all times and above else such a dear friend who has always been a shout away. A big thank you to all fellow post-grads, friends in all shapes and forms and everyone else who have seen me through bouts of PhD blues, and have helped me beat it by extending constant moral support (actually and virtually) and encouragement. iv Summary This thesis explores the quotidian imaginative practices of city dwellers in the social urban context of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Driven by a desire to understand the psycho-social and cultural associations – the invisible properties – of the city in the context of everyday life, the city of the mind has been deployed as a speculative method. With that the study embraces both the lived and imaginary properties of the city that remain equally understudied and marginalised in urban discourse in general. The central focus of the research has been to see what the roles of the city of the mind are in the everyday negotiation of the hard city and to what extent and capacity imagination   gets   employed   to   reconstruct   the   dwellers’   experiences in locating themselves in the urban world. The empirical content of the study – personal narratives, authoritative discourse on the city and popular cultural texts – offers a critique of the traditionally circulated idea of the visible and tangible city as significantly limited and helps deconstruct it to make way for a broader and nuanced understanding of the city, which in turn embraces the most contradictory trends and diverse patterns of thinking about the city. Together, these trends uncover newer realities where the city of the mind is found to be an embedded urban social practice and popular cultural products and practices as alternative sources of knowledge production about the city. v Table of Contents Declaration Acknowledgements Summary Table of Contents List of Tables List of Figures i ii v vi viii ix Chapter One: Preamble 1.1. 1.2. 11 12 13 19 21 25 27 27 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 1.6. 1.7. 1.8. Why The City of The Mind? Whose Imaginative Practices? 1.2.1. Original Locals/ Dhakaiyas 1.2.2. Long-Term Residents 1.2.3. Migrants to the City Why Dhaka? A Brief Note on the Administrative Units of Dhaka Scope of the Research The Main Arguments at a Glance Research Questions Chapter Outline Chapter Two: Conceptual Moorings 2.1. The City as Imaginary 2.2. Telling the City Anew: Reading One City through the Images of Another 2.3. Imagination in Urban Context 2.4. Power and Possibilities of the Mundane and the Popular 2.5. Units of Analysis 30 30 Chapter Three: Stories So Far: Existing Research 3.1. Early Scholarship on the City: The Social Drift 3.2. The Intimate City of Everyday: The Cultural Drift 3.3. The Imaginary City in Different Contexts 3.4. Making Sense of the City 3.4.1. Imageability 3.4.2. Lived Stories and Praxis: Making Sense through Binaries and Differences 3.4.3. The City as an Emotive Site 3.5. Research on Dhaka 3.6. Contextualising the Present Research 55 56 62 64 69 70 Chapter Four: Modi Operandi: The Nuts and Bolts 4.1. Timeline and Duration 4.2. How I did What I Did 4.3. Notes on the Informants: Demographics 4.3.1. Occupational Profile 4.3.2. Educational Profile 4.3.3. Spatial Distribution of the Informants 4.4. Selecting Minds: Prelude to the Interviews 4.4.1. Selecting Minds: Phase Two 4.5. Being the Voyeur 4.6. Content and Discourse Analysis 89 89 89 92 93 94 96 99 103 105 106 vi 36 49 51 52 73 74 75 84 4.7. Difficulties Faced 108 Chapter Five: The City of the Book : The Formal City 5.1. Master  Plans  of  Dhaka:  Not  So  “Practical  Utopias” 5.2. Dhaka in Tourist Brochures 5.3. The Developer’s  City 5.4. The City in Print Media 5.5. One Dhaka, Many Cities 110 112 120 124 132 142 Chapter Six: The Lived City:  Dhaka’s  Imageability  Redefined 6.1. A City of Convenience 6.2. An Unplanned City 6.3. An Unsafe City 6.4. A City of Unbridled Corruption 6.5. An Active City 6.6. A Male City 6.7. Dhaka’s  Experiential Icons 6.8. A City that Sniffs, Nudges and Makes Noise too! 6.9. A Synecdochical City 6.10. Afterword 145 146 149 153 156 157 159 162 166 169 175 Chapter Seven: The Imaginary Dhaka: The City of the Mind 7.1. The Other City: A City of Difference 7.1.1. The Temporal Other: The Remembered City 7.1.2. The Spatial Other: The Ruralised City 7.1.3. A City Without Heart? 7.2. Afterword 179 180 180 190 199 204 Chapter Eight: A Chance Discourse on the City 208 8.1. 8.2. 8.3. 8.4. 8.5. 209 228 236 240 245 The City in Transport Art The City on the Walls The City on Billboards The City Distributed Hand to Hand What Do They Tell Us? Chapter Nine: Epilogue 9.1. The City of the Book as Parochial and Inadequate 9.2. The Everyday City of Imagination: Redefining Imageability 9.3. The Imaginary City 9.3.1.Overcoming Negativity 9.4. The Chance Discourse: Knowledge Made in the open 9.5. Locating the City 9.6. Postscript: Way Forward 250 251 253 254 255 256 258 259 Bibliography 261 vii List of Tables Table 1: Informants by age group 93 Table 2: Informants by occupation 94 Table 3: Informants by educational level 95 Table 4: Spatial distribution of informants 98 Table 5: The recurrent pattern and categories of news in PA and DS from July 2011- December 2011 viii 137 physical elements are operationalised by the city dwellers to make sense of and operate within the structural city. Infrastructure, the prime focus of the formal discourse is invested with personal meanings and abstractions by the city dwellers before they can be a part of their mental urbanscape. In other words, it is difficult to make the city legible based on the physical or infrastructural components alone. One has to take in the cultural and social elements too. Therefore, it is worth examining these meaning making practises that hinged on the lived practices of the everyday city alongside the intended functions of the planners, which get reconfigured at the hands of the city dwellers. 9.3. The Imaginary City One of the major methodological challenges of the present study was to make a pragmatic connection between the two apparently antithetical research loci – the city and imagination in order to make this available for critical scholarship. It is with this view that the city of the mind has been used as a unit of analysis. The initial queries were thus recast into the following: What constitutes this imagination of the city? Does   the   imaginary   city   have   any   bearing   on   the   dweller’s   everyday   urban   living? To what extent is imagination   being   employed   to   reconstruct   the   dwellers’   experiences of and relationship to urban space? Drawing empirical data from three predominant social types of dwellers from Dhaka, the research findings clearly demonstrate how the imaginary city is an embedded reality than an isolated individual emotional response to the city. Informants’  narratives  about  the  city  revealed  three  significant  imaginary  cities  that   are interconnected by their common operational modality – difference and absence. The physical city of Dhaka is found to be conditioned by the deserts it opposes – the idyllic village, the golden past and the mythic villager. It is from them that the dweller conjures up a diasporic and often epic journey, which is more emotional than 254 physical, producing what Appadurai  (1996)  terms  “mythographies”  of hope, terror, despair etc. by the force of imagination in the form of desire and memory (7). Both the remembered city from yester years and the ruralised city are found to be in constant dialectic with the present metropolis, which according to popular perception has fallen from its grace both temporally and spatially. There is a constant presence of these  absences  in  the  dwellers’  lives,  and  they  are  as  much  a  part  of  the  daily  urban   life as the material city itself. The third popular imaginary of the city  that  directly  conditions  people’s   behaviour is dispositional. Dhaka is perceived by many as a cruel city that lacks fellow  feelings.  This  perception  drives  people’s  actions  in  ways  more  than  one.  For   example, some migrants get extra cautious in sourcing out and forging sodalities based  on  shared  grounds,  the  most  common  being  one’s  native  village  or  region  as  if   in anticipation of or to counter that imagined cruelty and lack of sympathy in Dhaka. The proverbial Dhakaiya camaraderie among the old towners is also overtly played out against the imaginary cold and indifferent urbanites in New Dhaka. Some dwellers, on the other hand welcome an insular existence within comfort bubbles, over which they have full control. The imaginary city, thus quite subtly influences the dwellers’  actions  in  the  physical  city,  making  it  what  it  is  and  determining  their  own   place in it. In societies like Dhaka where people are constantly presented with complex living situations, where they have to improvise and nothing is given, these immaterial and invisible cities become operational in generating subjective positions, which in the long run determine the social reality and the dynamics of urban life for them. Seen in this light the imaginary city is no less real than the so called real city. 9.3.1. Overcoming Negativity Probing further as to why the residents nurture these imaginary other cities, the research finds how the imaginary city is a constant presence in the mind of Dhaka 255 dwellers, and which remains the driving force for many of their actions in the material city that physically surround them. To be more precise, the city of the mind performs a catalytic function that helps dwellers naturalise the over bearing negativities inherent in the urban environment and the discursive practices in general. Among the dwellers, the dislocated migrants 118 turn to these imaginary cities for solace, emotionally restoring their link with their aspirational home, family etc. whereas the disgruntled residents119 turn to them to ameliorate the disturbing present. That is how a majority of people negotiate the negativity that surrounds them. Invisible these cities may be but they maintain a strong presence in the minds of city dwellers and inform important choices and decisions they make, which in turn shape the urban experience for them. Thus, the research findings clearly show how these invisible, and imaginary other cities without having any material presence in the city are a vital part of the city. Not only are they an embedded urban social reality, they are deployed by the urbanites as part of their adaptive tool kit for negotiating the city. Thus  using  the  imaginary  “other  cities”  as  a  speculative  method,  this  research   has been able to broaden the reach of urban discourse by bringing under critical attention the intimate city in its analytical capacities that are generally neglected in the dominant discursive approaches to the city. 9.4. The Chance Discourse: Knowledge Made in the Open Out of dissatisfactions with the city of the book in containing and representing the city, the research probed further into the realm of the popular and everyday construction of knowledge and uncovered a treasure trove for complementary sources of knowledge about the city. They are non-specialist and casual,   thick   in   Dhaka’s   texture nonetheless. These discourses in the open have a fortuitousness about them. Refers to the migrants who have been dislocated from their ancestral homes for various reasons and hence, always harbour a longing for the home from which they have been disconnected physically. The city always remains a temporary dwelling for them. 119 Refers to residents across social types that are dissatisfied with the city on many grounds yet cannot leave the city for the absence of a better choice. 118 256 The city is never their primary focus, yet the intimate city of everyday flickers through them with more affective and immaterial associations than any official discourse could ever accommodate. Popular cultural products like traffic art, graffiti, billboards, leaf-lets, posters etc. contain clues to both the lived and imaginary cities narrated by the informants and many more affective associations of the city. Many of these somewhat casual texts are important not only for being what Andreas   Huyssen   calls   “sites   of   encounters   with   other   cities,” but they also provide valuable   insights   into   the   dwellers’   negotiation   of   the   city   which   is   less   by   reasons   and logics of the predictable hard city and more by the mysterious rules of nostalgia, aspiration, dreams, memory etc. that are still denied a legitimate space in the authoritative urban discourse (2008: 5). One last intervention that these frivolous texts make is that they raise an important question about what could be a more inclusive mode of representing the city. As both the formal and the informal discourse have shown, journalistic realism has not been very effective in accommodating a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the city and risked generating an anti-urban discourse instead. The unpopularity   of  the  realistic  depiction  of  the   woes  and  problems  in  “Dhakay  Thaki”   came across as too much of reality bites to the readers. The rickshaw painters’   conscious  choice  of  not  painting  the  “real  Dhaka”  is  also  telling  in  this  regard.  What   they instead is addressing the aspirational city, carefully reordering the present in the mould of that vision, removing every bit of adulterant that may compromise the purity of the vision. Thus, using filters in the forms of fantasy, magic etc. they make the  anarchic  city  negotiable,   much  like  the   dwellers’  way   of  living  in  the  city.  They   bring to light how reason, logic order alone may not be the only ways for the dwellers to configure and construct their relationship to urban space and to negotiate the urban world. Therefore, the urban discourse in general will only good to make space for 257 quotidian imaginative practices as legitimate ways to enhance the knowledge of the city. 9.5. Locating the city The imaginative practices of the quotidian in the urban context have significant impact on the general understanding of the city. The imaginary Dhakas, as foil cities have pointed out how what is formally circulated as the city is significantly limited and how so much more lie outside this curtailed vision. Consequently, the research findings outlined in Chapter Seven and Eight make explicit the shortcomings inherent in theories and perspectives of the city that are contingent upon the continued prominence of physical and visual properties as the legitimate city. Therefore, to think of the urban experience without its intangible and often disorderly associations, as is wont in the local urban discursive practices, is doomed to be a flawed one, a half-truth. This realisation calls for a reconceptualisation of what we know as the city and what we call the real. Contrary to an orderly, logical and readable reality, the city is subjected to a cross cutting flow of realities that are messy, illogical and unmappable by the common sociological toolkit. It is true that imaginaries have been part of urban theorising for a long time, yet due to their unmappability they remain fuzzy as ever and never consolidate into a substantive way of seeing the city. If urban discourse is geared towards making the experience of living in the city better for its dwellers, the city of the mind needs to be examined with more care to unearth the aspirations of its dwellers. Imagination practised in everyday activities in the present time works as a staging ground for action, generating agency. Thus, it acts as a major force  constitutive  of  social  reality  as  aptly  manifested  in  the  urbanite’s  deployment  of   the imaginary cities in negotiating the hard city. In this changed urban conditions then, the so called real city is no longer the actual experience of the city in real time and space but reconfigured as a strange 258 mixture of fact and fiction, actual experience and what it incites, probable and improbable, past and present, dreams and aspirations all at once. In other words, in this revised understanding the line demarcating the imaginary and the so-called real is rendered pellucid. 9.6. Postscript: Way Forward With this research I have consciously tried to address some gaps in the existing urban scholarship on Dhaka, a primate city from the developing world and challenged some taken for granted notions about the city in urban studies in general. As my review of the local scholarship in Chapter Three outlines, too many material problems in the city and its sustained lower ranks in international indexes of varied sorts have naturalised the notion of urban discourse as problem oriented and prescriptive in character. Amidst these, the experiences that are not necessarily problematic in those scales have never received enough critical attention. Such discursive practices become self defeating and stun the growth of creative thinking, which is all the more necessary for the future of cities like Dhaka, if it is to break free of this vicious cycle of prescriptive theorisation. I believe this exploratory research will contribute, however minimally to spur the growth of constructive debates about the taken for granted, resulting in fresh and innovative theorisation on the city. Drawing on a research framework from literature, bringing in an inter-Asia reference, prioritising the popular construction of knowledge than that of the specialist, this interdisciplinary study also hopes to break new grounds both in the field of general urban studies and in the local scholarship on Dhaka. By probing into these new sites of formation and circulation of knowledge about the city, I hope to have uncovered a rich ground for further research in the field too. Against the reductive, statistical city, the study prioritised the city of the mind with all its porosity as a crucial urban phenomenon and an analytical tool. Making the 259 often neglected, yet crucial aspects of urban experiences available for scholastic attention, it thus calls for a more nuanced understanding of what we know as the urban in general. 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Dhakaiyas are the original locals that have no ancestral home outside Dhaka like the other two social groups under study Dhakaiyas are said to be the indigenous dwellers of the city and constitute around 20% of the total population of Dhaka city (Khatun, 2003:27) Most of the Dhakaiyas live in the old quarter of the city, popularly known as Old Dhaka, on the north bank of river Buriganga where the seat of power... village communities They are also the most socially integrated of Dhaka city dwellers, marked by cohesive neighbourhood practices that strengthen the unity Moreover, they have their own unique language and life style that make them stand apart from the rest of the city dwellers The Dhakaiyas are also the most geographically localized group of all Dhaka residents They live mostly in Old Dhaka, even though... places all over the city Unlike the first assemblage, they are not directly about the city, but they reveal the hidden dynamics and intricacies at play between the city and the dweller, which very often determine how the dweller comes to terms with, behaves in and navigates the city A critical analysis of them also brings to fore the embeddedness of the imagined city in the daily practices of the dwellers,... those of Roland Barthes as found in his imaginative rendition of Japan.20 Therefore, in the context of the present research, the city of the mind refers to a largely reflexive experience of the city that has become an inherent component in any discussion of the urban for many in Dhaka It is reflexive because the city dweller could very well not be conscious of the individual and subjective nature of his/her... media, the daily discursive realities of its inhabitants, habitual practices, images, icons, and numerous other forms of public culture of daily life Keeping this permeation of imagination in all levels of the urban social reality in mind, this research chooses the city of the mind as the primary unit of analysis The term “city   of   the   mind,”   as   used   in   this   thesis,   refers   to   the. .. constitutive of the modern urban experience I aim to explore how these invisible, imaginary, soft cities are formed and maintained by the predominant social groups living in Dhaka and what they contribute to the  dwellers’   understanding and negotiation of the hard city Accordingly, the major probe in this dissertation will be: what is the role of the soft city in the everyday negotiation of the 6While... taste by the upper and upper middle class educated people are the most common and stereotypical media representation of Dhakaiyas Apart from these two groups there are other kinds of settlers too, who have migrated from their once ancestral homes in the neighbouring areas of Keraniganj, Jinjira, Aminbazar or other nearby places, located mostly on the other side of the river There are also non-Dhakaiyas... through out the city according to their financial ability, profession and overall social standing 1.3 Why Dhaka? The location of the research is Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh One of the reasons for choosing Dhaka for the study is my personal association and familiarity with the city I grew up and lived most of my life in this city I consider this first hand experience of living in the research...  in Dhaka s   name in many of his publications including the recent one Designing Dhaka The name of Dhaka has a disputed origin There are three contesting stories about the origin of the name, and none directly relates this with its meaning The most famous story says that the name came from the Dhak trees that were found in abundance in the areas that now form Dhaka The second story relates the name... comprehensive soft Dhaka To do so, the study would run the risk of falling into the same essentialist lens that it critiques Using a selection of popular cultural texts as well as lived experiences of the city, the research aims to underscore the complexities inherent in the relationship between the hard and the soft city, and show how the soft city is a lived and an embedded reality rather than only . Chapter Seven: The Imaginary Dhaka: The City of the Mind 179 7.1. The Other City: A City of Difference 180 7.1.1. The Temporal Other: The Remembered City 180 7.1.2. The Spatial Other: The Ruralised. DHAKA: ASPIRATIONS OF THE CONCEALED TABASSUM ZAMAN B.A. (Hons.), University of Dhaka M.A., University of Dhaka A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF. constitute around 20% of the total population of Dhaka city (Khatun, 2003:27). Most of the Dhakaiyas live in the old quarter of the city, popularly known as Old Dhaka, on the north bank of river Buriganga