News Details

Venue :  Blocker 203

Date   : March 6 th -4:00 pm-6:00 pm

The South Asia Working Group announces the visit of Dr. Amita Baviskar of Delhi University on March 6, 2008. Her talk will be titled: "Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: The Politics of Nature on the Streets of Delhi, India." The visit and talk are co-sponsored by the Institute for Pacific Asia. The venue will be announced shortly.

This talk focuses on cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws as they navigate Delhi's roads, and on the people who own, use and seek to control them. All three have been the subject of strenuous efforts at regulation by courts, citizens’ groups and traders’ associations. These conflicts are instances of bourgeois environmentalism, the (mainly) middle-class pursuit of urban order, hygiene and safety, and ecological conservation. Collective action in the ‘public interest’ by citizens’ concerned about congestion and the collapse of civic infrastructure constitutes a public that excludes the city’s poorer sections. Claims to civic responsibility and environmentalism by bourgeois citizens are contradicted by the simultaneous rise of consumerism in the same social stratum, as expressed in the explosive growth of private car ownership. The talk examines state attempts to regulate the traffic between cars, cows and rickshaws, and concludes by arguing that complex interdependencies avert imminent collision and enable the republic of the street’to survive.

Nandini Bhattacharya
Convenor, South Asia Working Group, Texas A&M University