Excavating Experience: Exploring Delhi’s mid-century housing through literature and streetscape survey

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

People engage with material landscapes in embodied, emotive ways. Experience is shaped not only by physical realities, but also by social positionality and individual perspective. Archaeologists often use oral history, ethnoarchaeology, or phenomenology as a means of considering human engagement with material landscapes. Literature also provides an account of how people occupy, perceive, and navigate such landscapes. In this paper, we draw on literary analysis to add a consideration of lived experience to archaeological observations of post-Independence homescapes in Delhi. Mid-century Delhi witnessed a significant increase in middle-class homes, spurred by Nehruvian socialism’s commitment to public and subsidized housing. But, to what extent was such housing accessible or visible to the ordinary citizen? Through a reading of Mohan Rakesh’s Andhere Band Kamre (1961) [Dark Enclosed Rooms], we reflect on how residents living in post-Independence Delhi continued to move across landscapes segregated by wealth and shaped by the city's colonial past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Historical Archaeology in South Asia   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology