 Welcome everyone. My name's Sarah Turner. I'm the acting director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies and British Arts. It's a great pleasure to welcome so many of you here this evening in a very warm Bedford Square and to welcome those of you who are joining us online for this talk. I hope if this is the first time you've interacted with the Paul Mellon Centre, you'll be encouraged to either come back to Bedford Square or to use many of our resources online through our publications or our events recordings, look at our grants and fellowships and all that we have to offer, so a very warm welcome to everyone. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to the last event of the Architecture Summer Series. These have been five lectures in which we've tried to open up conversations between the arts and architecture, thinking expansively about both fields and the porous boundaries between them. I want to thank in particular my colleagues, Rix Wustra and Shria Chatterjee and Shria's Head of Research and Learning here. Rix hasn't been able to join us for these last two events because she's very close to giving birth and so we really want to wish her well but thank her very much for all the thought and care and preparation she put into planning this series with Shria. Rix has really bought her knowledge of the field and her expansive networks to bear and as a result lots of new people have given talks to the centre, we've had lots of new ideas and conversations generated by the talks and the discussion and conversation that always flourishes after them. So, again, we welcome lots of questions and lots of discussion and really that's very much part of the ethos of our event. So, thank you very much Rix as well for really opening up these conversations for us at the centre. Last week we heard from David Gisson about how architects and designers cater to a wide range of human ability and how cities can be designed for a vast variety of physical experiences. And this week we got on to think more historically with Professor Chatterjee who offers new approaches to empire, focusing on small spaces and I'm really looking forward to opening up this really evocative term. These spaces include service spaces, workspaces, storage spaces that have long been considered insignificant because of their size or location, or the minor role that they seem to play in economic and political histories. Chatterpadhae demonstrates how attention to small scale and size and the lived world of small spaces might help us to rethink empire as a global enterprise. And just before we hear from the talk I'm just going to do some introductions of Chatterjee and also our respondent as well, Tania Sengupta. And again, we're really pleased to welcome you both to the centre. Chatterjee is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And she's a visiting professor of architectural history at the Manchester School of Architecture. Trained as an architect, an architectural historian, Chatterjee specialises in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscapes of the British Empire. There are many publications to list and I won't do that all now but to say again the biographies are published on our website so you can go and read more there and I'm sure use the space if you're here in the room at the reception to talk more about your own intersections of interest and research. Following the presentation we'll have a short response from Tania Sengupta and who is Associate Professor and Director of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture at the University of College London just up the road. Always lovely to have close neighbours as well here. Her research looks at histories and legacies of colonial architecture and urban landscapes in South Asia and more broadly global post-colonial contexts and questions of inequity that stem from these inheritances today. She's particularly interested in marginalised knowledges, sites, people and people in architectural history. Tania, I should say, is also presently a Paul Mellon Centre mid-career fellow for her monograph on the spatial cultures of provincial governance and everyday life in colonial Eastern India in the 19th century. Again, I think this might open up questions for us about thinking more expansively about British art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and I think a lot of researchers, a lot of members of our community and colleagues at the centre. I'm really thinking in provocative and expansive ways about what comes under that umbrella term and that rubric and I think especially actually architectural history, urban studies, spaces of everyday life and living really help us put pressure on perhaps categories or national schools which one seemed perhaps quite solid and firm and now feel very porous and open I think for discussion and debate. So I look forward to if that doesn't come up particularly in the conversation or questions again, maybe we can talk about that more in our conversation as well. So I think without further ado, I hope you feel relatively comfortable. I know it's really hot here but we've got the fans going, the air purifiers going, the windows open as much as we can because it's also quite noisy with a literary festival in the square. So if you do feel uncomfortable at any point, if you're in the room please feel free to go out. We've got some drinks in that room so just please make yourself feel at home and as comfortable as we possibly can in 30 degrees in central London and I hope if you're online you've got a cool drink by your side and fans blowing in your face so you're feeling very comfortable. So without further ado please join me in welcoming Shatiy, welcome to the Paul Melonson. Thank you Sarah and thank you all for coming on this really warm, you know it's outside it's so much more pleasant honestly, this is a very nice building I don't want to mean to say, it's small but since we're going to talk about small spaces, this is comfy. Well, that's the way to think about it. small can be very comfy. So I wanted to thank the Powlmell Centre, Sarah and Shria and Ella for making this possible. I'm always pleased to come to London, enjoy it. So I know we are a little restrained in terms of time so let me just begin by saying The material I'm drawing on is from my forthcoming book, which should be out this summer. I'm told by Bloomsbury. It's called Small Spaces, recasting the Architecture of Empire. So, you know, I started with this. I sent people always ask for images for talks, right? So I thought I'll send an image of the veranda. Now it might look like an ordinary veranda to you. If you know anything about architectural history or architecture buildings in Calcutta, you would know that that's a Tagore mansion. That ain't no ordinary mansion. There's no ordinary house at all. That's an extremely important veranda because Ramnath Tagore's room was next to it. So that's why the floodlights, that's why it's decorated. It's very visible. It's visible at night. So it's not that these spaces which are ordinary. It's really an ordinary veranda. I mean architectural, it's nothing particularly significant. It is a particular lineage in colonial history and you know that is in itself interesting. But that's not the only reason why I'm interested in small spaces. So I'm, first of me, small spaces are what I call the adjunct spaces. They could be verandas. They could be service spaces. They could be back stairs. But we really don't have what we might call an architectural history of these spaces. I mean if you want to think about, okay, do I want an architectural history of back stairs? You won't find it. Okay? You'll have to look for like, you know, Robin Evans might have talked a little about it in one book. Somebody else might have talked about it in little else, you know, in another book. So my concern with small spaces is that these spaces are actually tremendously important. They held up what I call the infrastructure of empire. As service spaces, as spaces where servants, women and minorities worked. These are not the parlours. These are not the important spaces in the house. These are the back spaces. And there's a particular genealogy to these spaces. But this is something that we have never tried to actually understand because they are not important. Because it's really, you know, possible to link an important person to these spaces. Okay. So, bless you. Okay. Nice to hear that. So I was also kind of interested by the fact that there were terms when I, and these are, you know, spaces that I come across in the archives, that I didn't know what they meant, bottle canna. Like what the heck is bottle canna? I didn't know what it was. But because it kind of went out of use in the 1920s. Okay. But it is very much in the historical archives. But you cannot, you know, if you do go to the British Library archive catalogs and do a search, you might find a few. You have no idea how pervasive that space and term is. Just like the go down. And I know Cole sitting here wouldn't know exactly what I'm talking about go downs because he himself has written about it. But it's like a few people have actually written about go downs. So there are, and these are actually dimensionally not small go downs. Our warehouses, they're huge. Warrandas could be huge. In other words, they're not necessarily dimensionally small. They could be. But they're marginal. Margin in a very material sense. Very sort of, in a sort of a very embodied sense, they're marginal. But they are everywhere. They're pervasive. But they also in the book look at what people would not consider as livable spaces, like containers, bookshelves, medicine chests, because socialities, sort of social linkages were formed around these. Entire sense of self were formed around these containers. If you have not seen it, 1970, a young Ghanaian filmmaker doing his, I think, thesis from London School of Art of Film did a 16 minute black and white documentary in the basement of the British Museum. He managed to find access to it. And he documented the boxes within which African art is stored. Just the boxes. So the two of them went in and were just opening boxes. It is fantastic. The amount of loot that's sitting right there in the basement without anybody having access to them, anybody, they're not even most of them are brought out. So I actually went to see, you know, the African art collection here. I do pay my homage. So we have to go to the British Museum. So it's very interesting how it is, you know, the minor attempt to reconfigure it. I'll park that for the moment. My point is that those boxes are actually very important. It's not even the stuff inside them. It is the relationship, the boxes, and the spaces set up. It's in the basement. It's the through. It's by opening the boxes. They were sort of what I would call on archiving the collection. And this is something I had to think about. How do I write about these spaces? Empire, we are told, is about big things. And entire generations of excellent scholarship has been done on looking at the big commodities, indigo tea, opium, and how the structured empire. And they did. It's about trade linkages. But if you look at this map, and you don't need to read in sort of in great detail the red parts of the British empire, the more darker parts are the ones that are more developed and the paler parts are waiting to be developed. And the grey parts are not within the British empire, but clearly could be. So, you know, Parkinson's was, it was Canadian, who was a big, you know, imperial federation, you know, enthusiast. So what is interesting about this map is that despite the fact they are like very disparate territories, the linkages, and these are the blue lines of the trade routes, you know, the shipping routes, and there are grey lines that you cannot see, which are actually the telegraph routes. So the empire has been shown as a connected entity, despite being very, like, you know, territorially dispersed for reasons that are obvious. Empire wasn't got not only gotten in a day, it was gotten with great difficulty. So space was always, always fragmented. Question is, which scale are you looking at? So if empire is always about the big scale, about some of the global scale, what is the role of small spaces, or how do we even begin thinking through empire, thinking about empire through the small spaces? So my argument is this, if we begin with small spaces, we get a different narrative of empire. We don't start with Parkinson's maps, let's say. We don't start with the big commodities. We look at the smaller commodities and how they travelled. We'll get a different history. We look at small spaces and how they are connected or disconnected. We'll get a different history. So the argument about space and small spaces is not just about size, but it has something to do with scale. And size and scale are obviously not the same thing. Because when you look, think of spaces in scalar terms, other ideas emerge. In other words, a small space, as I mentioned, could be dimensionally small, or could be dimensionally large. It could be a warehouse. But what is key is the relation between process and size. In other words, what kind of social processes take place in a particular kind of space, a particular dimension of space? And how are those connected? Because social structure changes with scale. And I'm talking about when you move from small scale to big scale at every intermediate scale in between. So when you see an object from different scalar relations, you will actually uncover different social relationships, different political relationships. Zachary Horton, a former student from UC Santa Barbara actually from the film and media studies department, wrote a wonderful book. It's called The Cosmic Zoom recently published, and he described scale beautifully. And I'll read this out. Scale as a reference frame wherein certain differences can be detected or resolved while others fall either above or below the perspective threshold of differentiation. He actually calls it the resolving cut. In other words, you can resolve some differences at a particular scale. You cannot resolve every difference at that scale. You're also thinking about, in other words, you can think about, look at an object at a particular scale, you will see a different set of actual material relations. A great example is gold. We see it. It's gold. It's, well, gold, yellow. At the nanoscale, it's green. It's blue. That means when you change scale, you actually figure out an entire different sense of material relations. And this is something that physicists would think about. They think of size domains. Now as architectural historians and architects, we think of, you know, scale in terms of internally coherent. Any engineer architect could actually tell you that a model bridge is not the way a real bridge works. The forces don't work like that. The materials don't work like that. So processes change with scale. So this is something that I want us to hold on to. What that also means is that an otherness, an alterity, inhers in scalar thinking. And the only way we can really think about small spaces or even large spaces as meaningful when we shift scales, when we move from one scale to another and see what emerges, just as an experiment. So I'm going to talk about this space that was called the cookroom, not the kitchen. Cookroom was a space, it's a kitchen, it's cooking space, but it's not inside the house. So in colonial houses in British India, I'm living from the late 18th century onwards, it could be part of the outhouses. In other words, it's literally outside the main house. And this is a common pattern. You know, you find it in colonial American plantations. You find it plantations pretty much anywhere else in the world. So in other words, there's some relation between outhouse, they're literally out. And some of it was explained, oh, it's sanitary. You know, you have to have the bathrooms Abraham Lincoln's house in Springfield, Illinois. The bathroom is against the boundary wall because bathrooms really could not. Mrs. Lincoln's was the commodities inside her bedroom because she's a polite woman. But housing all the service spaces against the boundary wall, which is the typical pattern. And we see in these late 18th century ad, there's a clustering of the spaces. In other words, there is a particular ecology of those spaces. And they're set in a certain relationship, which sometimes you may not recognize until you actually look at the plants, is that what you see on the left margin there, those are actually the outhouses. And they could be the kitchen was actually located there. It's not that's why it's not called the kitchen. The Mrs does not preside over it. The lady does not preside over it. It's the cook room because the cook presides over it. So it was located as far away from possible to avoid smell, smoke, and God knows what is happening here. You don't want to see that kind of attitude. In other words, there's something about its messiness that sort of repelled polite sensibilities and was justified in many ways. Then we're going to look at some of these. And it was recognized, very well recognized, to bring the food being cooked pretty much against the boundary wall to the main house, meant under difficult weather like this. This would be balmy. But let's say it's raining and this is a caricature. And they always appear as caricatures tells you something that was very difficult for servants to do this work. But it still would not be brought within or close to the main house. And I'm going to look at one author who suggested, and under what terms, that the kitchen really be brought closer to the house. Mid-19th century, George Atkinson. He wrote a caricature, Korean Rice on 40 Plates. He's actually making fun of British colonial life. He's making as much fun about his fellow Brits as he's making fun of what he thought was absurdity of colonial life. So this is how he's describing the cookroom. If your eyes are not instantly blinded, when with the smoke, and if your sight can penetrate into the darkness, enter that hovel and witness the preparation of your dinner. And this was, and he had plates, 40 plates. So there are 40 plates and texts. So this is what he had to say. The table on the dresser, you observe a mother earth. For niggers, orientals, I mean, have that peculiar faculty which characterizes the ape and the kangaroo. They can only stand erect on an occasion, let a nigger alone, and down he drops upon his hands spontaneously with as much joy as the wretched monkey in our streets when his polka is accomplished. Now, you know, there's a certain way of practice of cooking, preparing meals. And this is, of course, blatant racism. And he's very plain about it because, you know, these differences cannot be reconciled. So his racism is out in the open because his audience would not find anything problematic about that. Now, 70 years later, Mildred Pingham, Pingham is actually American. She's wrote a book called Bangalow in India. And she describes the cookroom exactly the same way, 70 years later. So you have to say, what gives? Oh, so you know, like nothing changed? And this is interesting. Historically, we expect change in history, right? We have this absurd thinking that historical change might mean that spaces change, social relations change and so on and so forth. Well, may not be always. What she focused on was something very important. And this is something that what Atkinson is talking about. And every cookbook author spoke about, which is the dirt. Why you don't want to see that space? Because it's dirty. Their habits are dirty. You don't want to see how your meal is being prepared. So Pingham is describing that, you know, there's a long description. I mean, this is a short excerpt. She did not find a white enameled kitchenette in the little brick building where no filest cookers, nor modern gas nor electric ranges, but only a crude brick stove built into the wall. Currents of heated air struggled to get out through the door and the loosely tiled roof. The cookhouse was shrouded in a blue haze. What she's pointing out is that it has not changed. It remains that primitive hovel as it ever was since the late 18th century. In other words, there's an absence of those modern convenience that a kitchen should have a proper range. Now, what is interesting about both Atkinson and Pingham is that they agree, however, and there's a counter assertion that even if it's really dirty, you don't want to see it. The food that comes out of it is pretty darn good. Not only that, it's a meal fit for a king. That gives me a pause, not because somebody's thinking, oh, so-called Indian colonial food is good, or that service is good, is that it is a meal fit for a king. In other words, there's something about the relation, the acceptance of the dirt, let's say. There's a kind of a reward at the end. Another author, Wyvern, is a colonel in the Madras army retired. He wrote a cookbook, and I'm going to talk about that a bit. He said, you know, dirt is actually useful because you leave the native cook on the march where they have to travel ahead of you and set up the stove and all of that and cook a meal before you arrive. They can do with so little, give them a pot, a few twigs, and they're fine. They're at home with dirt, and then he immediately changes that. I'll come back to that. What you find in these descriptions, housekeeping guides, is something about the ability to command food at any time, at any place. Here I'm leaning on Ashile Membe's idea of commandment. He writes about empire, colonialism actually, as the right to demand, to force, to ban, to compel, to authorise, to punish, to reward, to be obeyed, in short to enjoin and to direct. Command of empire is the essence of, it's the ability to the right to command resources and labour at any time, any, whether it's related to your domestic consumption or other levels of consumption. You look at, and I've looked at a lot of these cookbooks. I'm a foodie. I spend enormous amounts of time looking at cooking stuff, but this is something I do, because I like it, because it fascinates me. It's not because it's contradictory. There's no contradiction, because it is so consistent. Consistency is almost troubling that kind of consistency, and I describe it as culinary racism. Culinary racism, you want that food to be cooked. You don't like the space in which it is cooked, but you're not going to change it, because that would mean changing labour conditions, labouring conditions. So the way I see it is culinary racism justified the coloniser's right to command food at any hour of the day, at any place, whether it's home or camp. Cooks had to be ready 24 hours a day. It linked various scales of production and consumption, and I'm going to get to that. It aestheticised certain European food ways over native food ways. Again, I'm going to get to that. Valorising European body and comfort, most of all, it provided access to native labour. What I'm going to do in the rest of the talk is bring two trajectories. One is the reform of the cookroom, with at least one author, a why one recommended, and it has to do with more comfort for the European folks for whom the meal is being cooked, but that is linked to efficiency, modern efficiency, and the context of culinary reform in which that book was written, it was written and published in 1878, in the middle of the Madras famine. By some estimates, 8 million people died. So there's something about the quantification and the withholding of food during the Madras famine. Once you cross-hatch that with the story that I just gave you, you see interesting relations emerge. Again, rely on a concept that Elizabeth Crumley used in her book on American colonial houses. It's called food access. She's thinking about storage spaces, places of food preparation and kitchen and space of consumption. Rather than typical way of thinking about American colonial houses, it's Hall and Parlor. Let's talk about the Hall and Parlor. She starts with the service spaces, and it's actually a really interesting argument because it allows you to relate, map different moments because nomenclature, like 18th century, the Hall is the cooking space. It is no longer the cooking space is no longer the Hall in the 19th century. So nomenclature, names of spaces change. So how do you still understand the continuity about practices and where do you notice the changes? Such a food access is very, very important in terms of thinking about change over time across regions. It allows you to actually cross-map class relations. And she does do that within the house proper that it connects spaces of food production and consumption. So I borrowed that idea to think of the food access of empire. How the command of her food became a defining characteristic of empire. So I'm going to talk about two food access. One I just described. I started describing and I'm going to continue with that. And I'm going to describe one more. So the relation between the cookroom, the house, typically the bungalow, and camp that he saw in the images was something that was presumed. So at least one author, whose book was published in 1878, he said, you know, it should be, we should not allow to have such a dirty cookroom. Cookroom really should be reformed because labouring practices need to be reformed. And his argument is that now you need delicate European cookery. You cannot continue to use barbarian methods and that's the term used. Because you need to bring in techniques and equipment from civilised Europe. What he proposed was, you know, you need a purpose-willed cookroom, he's still not calling it a kitchen, close to the main house. May be connected by a veranda, covered veranda. And the room has to be well ventilated. It has to be well lit. It has to have a chimney. And note this, it must have an English or an American range. No mud range, brick range in the wall. And of course, if you bring the cookroom closer to the house, you will have better ability to surveil the servants because they can just walk over when you're not watching them. I mean that visual thinking, but we'll let that be. Do you recognise in some of these commentaries that servants obviously resisted control over their method of labouring and cooking? So, he actually gives an example. He says, okay, in camp, and this is an anecdote. He says, a military official decided that he's going to actually organise the kitchen in camp, this is a military camp, army camp, in a proper manner. So, Walsley's Field Kitchen, it's a broad-arrow kitchen. In other words, you dig long trenches. And what you've seen in this section here, this one, let me see whether I can, I don't think I can. So, in other words, it's a big trench, three big trenches. It can have lots of ranges on top. It can really cook for a large army. What happened? He gave the directions, order and left, and he came back to find that the servants had found a ditch, and they were lighting their few fires the way they want to, and doing their own thing, and he's furious. He has a perfect geometric plan, and so, and this is what Wyvern tells us. So, apparently, the servant said, what's sir, that bad sense kitchen sir, I beg your pardon, too much firewood taking. See sir, this is the proper kitchen only. So, there's a kind of, you would think of the, you know, the sort of recalcitrance, you know, the sort of disobedience and like, you guys don't know what you're talking about with your orderly plans. We know how it is done because they have to gather the firewood, okay? And Wyvern then turns the table and said, no, don't buy that argument that in the house too much firewood taking. That's what the phrase uses. Because the English or American range is easily more efficient than the many fires in the Indian kitchen. And so he says, you know, it's just nonsense to say that that is more efficient and the English, you know, modern method of English or American cooking is not. And then he goes on into this thing of efficient food production. He says, the servants use too much, you know, bones, too much meat. This should be much more efficient. Actually, if you force them to cook through the European method, it will be more efficient, productive and civilized. So that makes me think and this gets me to the food access of empire too. It occurred to me after a long time, by God, by God. He's just published this during the Madras famine, living in Madras, where there is, you know, the time ish were not allowed to actually come within the city limits. So here I want to connect the home and the home of the peasant, the relief seeker, with the famished body, the famine camp and infrastructure construction. So let's say I'm moving scale. I'm moving to a different scale. So this is what I call it the calorie transfer, command over food, a second version. So we did a quotation from India to Britain jumped for, you know, five-fold different people who give different, you know, estimates. The fact is it was very well understood by the British administrators at the time that it's not the pure shortage of food. It was really distribution. In other words, what Amritsyn talked about in the 1940s famine is in other words, it's about entitlement. It's about access to food. It's not the production of food. And actually, a recent study validates that claim in terms of rain and, you know, the drought conditions. We've criticised the British administration's handling of the famine that led to 8 million, you know, dead. Among them, geographer Mike Davis, he brought in the city. This is the thing. This is how terrible it was. Madras famine, the relief seekers were given food in terms of 1627 calories as compared to book, even book involved was better than that concentration camps. And the void at water standard is much higher. So he's taking the idea of the calorie and using it that as a universal measure to compare from the 19th century to the 20th century. And what is the void at water standard? It has something to do with the Wilbur at water figured out how to think about calorie. The way we use the word calorie now food, it was actually, you know, nobody used the term of the mid 19th century. It's a late 19th century construction. So between 1880s and 1920s, states and beginning with the United States, subscribe to the idea that the eating habits of the poor are a result of ignorance. And yes, there's a long tradition also in Britain in other parts of the world. But what is interesting in terms of calorie, calorie is a universal nutritional measure rendered food and eating habits of populations politically legible. You did not have to talk about cultural, you know, processes. You don't have to think about localities. You can absolutely neutralize all of those. You can seemingly take culture out of the game and think about it as, you know, a perfect objective measure. So Nicolatha, who is basically looked at the history of the calorie, this is again happening in the 1880s and 1890s. So this is, you know, this is the idea that the, you know, before the idea of the calorie was used in terms of measuring the efficiency of machines and explosives. Now you're thinking about energy efficiency of foods as it works into labor. In other words, you're thinking about labor efficiency and food efficiency and bringing them together. So what Atwater did was created, and this is a Wesleyan university supported by the US Department of Agriculture, a calorimeter, and which is a room, small space, within which, you know, a person was put in there and with a particular amount of food, they were supposed to do particular exercises, and then their, you know, input and output was measured objectively to understand how much calorie they consumed. In other words, how much energy they consume. You're trying to think about what would make utilization of food, distribution of food most efficient. How much does a person need to survive? How much does a person need to labor, as opposed to, you know, women and children who were always thought of as sort of fractions of the man unit, the real unit was the man unit, adult male, laboring male. So food as statecraft linked nutritional efficiency with labor efficiency and translated all the vernacular customs of food into the language of empire. What it did, and it's my way of thinking, is that calorie confronted culture through racial difference. It both invoked it and dismissed it. In other words, it invoked the difference, but it could say it doesn't matter what you're used to, what you prefer, this is what you need. You don't need more than that. And that was graphically demonstrated during the Madras famine. What is interesting is that the administrators, they were not using the term calorie. They were actually talking about quantification of food, but not using. So it predated the calorie by, you know, of several years. But it's part of the same kind of thinking. And the key to this, and was very criticised at that time, was the temple wage. You're trying to give relief to those who are victims of famine. And the temple wage was that you would be given food per one, three quarters of Anna per hour, where the normal labour rate was four to five, had regional variations. So it was initially brought down to two Anna's. In other words, you really should not be given more food than that. You have to do labour against that. But you don't, in other words, you don't deserve it. You should not be able to save anything. You should not be able to support anyone. So William Digby put it like this. He called the temple wage an experiment to see how little a person could eat and still do labour. In other words, you're really bringing down, you know, and this is, they're typically eating food they're not used to. But they were what I call the four tests, the distance test. They would not be given food at home, in their villages. They had to work to their work sites, 70, 15 miles. They had to work there and they had to show physical signs of distress. And what is the distress? The clothes had to be ragged. Women could not have any bit of jewellery. In other words, you have to appear completely destitute. And then you would be given that relief. And Digby called it the degradation test, which is they had to labour under extremely unacceptable conditions at one, three-quarter of an Anna per hour. And so they actually chose to die rather than labour. And part of this, you know, moving people away from their houses, they've been moved to construction sites or relief camps and construction sites. The engineers are complaining, you know, famished labour doesn't make good labour. But the administration insisted they must labour. And this is canal and railway construction primarily, which is very hard labour. And they were forced to live in relief camps. So the discipline test was that they had to stay in the camp and had to submit themselves to the food discipline, whatever they're given, whether they're cooked or the wages. And the famine camps, it's probably hard for you to see in here. These are sort of, you know, preambles to later concentration camps. Adenforth has done wonderful work looking at, a book is called Bob Duvar in Perilism. So you have a confined space. You cannot leave and enter on your own, not under your own volition. You need permission to enter. You need permission to get out. And you had to be. You had to submit to whatever was served. And you had to construct those. By the way, it looks like everything was in plan and houses. They had to build their own houses in the famine camp. What I call the 4Ds, the distress test, the discipline test, the degradation test and the discipline. When you look at those, bring them together, you find a different set of relations emerging. Suddenly that cookroom, that isolated cookroom in the corner of the bungalow, against the walls, where from which you expect unlimited amount of food. Here you are restricting the food to as much as possible to just see whether people could actually live or die. So calorie transfer, what I call spatialized food needs. In other words, through techniques, which are old under colonial rule, which uses techniques of separation, distancing and placement or confinement. You see that in the bungalow, but here it is at a different scale, through different subjects. Sort of even not the last bit of this. So the famine fund, which is collected, various means, one was raising the tax on salt from two to 45 annas per mond. You get a sense of why Gandhi made such a big deal about salt. That fund was funneled into the second angle of gun war. When Richard Temple, in charge of famine relief, was asked why this was happening, he said there was no obligation on the state to the famine victims or the population to actually deliver this money to that purpose. Thank you. Okay, so I have a couple of observations. I have made copious notes, but I guess we'll have to sort of economize somehow. So some observations and questions around small spaces, some about the notion of food and food access that you use, and maybe about really methodology, how do you actually go about looking for small spaces, whether it's archival, whether it is working in the field, but also a lot of it can happen incidentally as small spaces themselves do, so they kind of appear from the crevices, so something around that. And also, how do we talk about them? Because doing the work is one kind of thing, how do we describe them in descriptive methods and I'm curious about that. I'll kind of start with those, but let's say go back to the sort of thoughts on small spaces, so obviously in what you're saying we see, and I'm familiar with some of the chapters as well, with this idea of, you know, their patiness, fragmentation, yet ubiquitous. They can be individually small but collectively substantial. They are often constrained and highly oppressed and oppressive, yet fluid and can be liberatories. So there's some things particular about their speciality, labour, material relations, materiality and that kind of make them kind of essential and an essential part of empire and complicit with empire, but equally they seem to be sort of elusive and fugitive. So that they can be both or they can move from one to the other. That was one thought that sort of struck me. Also, I guess you're saying, for instance, that in a way if we imagine there are far more small spaces than there are big ones, so to say, because there's so numerous and so sort of diffuse and they're sort of all pervasive. So in that sense, they're obviously, they're not small, they're big. Small spaces are big but equally, I mean if we critique bigness, then maybe small is good enough for us. But they are a way of thinking about, like you're saying, it's not so much about dimensions. It can be about scale but it is their ability to make us think about paradigm, power, resource, labour. They obviously have material and spatial forms, which is why in a way that gives us a good entry point as architectural historians or even art historians to talk about them. So just as these can be oppressive, they can be liberatory as well because sometimes they happen between crevices and they may lie, their sort of more emancipatory potential. And when, for instance, protests around questions of food happens, when basically colonised people refuse to participate in the process of empire making by withdrawing and extreme examples even in today's context are things like hunger strikes and where it comes down to the kind of bare level of the body. And the relationship between the small and the big, so we can never, one of the points you're really making is that the small, that never take your eye off the big, the madras famine when you talk about the cook room in a way that is a kind of a, which Wyvern did obviously, he was totally oblivious of that juxtaposition. And I was kind of wondering how do therefore the, when, for instance, even now, like you know the shift to global history, the mandates of really looking at connections and networks and demand a kind of an abstraction at a certain level because you're working in that meta kind of scales. And that's also needed for other things, including say today's planetary crisis, where to the extent where the Peshto Crobothu is basically saying that almost history as a project and global history is no longer sufficient, we need to think in a different scale. So whether, what do small spaces then do to within that kind of context? I kind of can hear you say that this is, they have radical potential even within that, but that's something maybe we could talk about. I have other things to ask, but maybe you can. So I think you're raising multiple issues. One is, Okay, one thing I want to say is just respond to maybe whatever you choose to because that's one, because I've kind of randomly written down many things that's Sarah can tell us when to shut up. Okay, how about that? Right, okay, so you moderate us. Okay, so I think one of the issues is that, you know, the reason I chose today to do the food access one and food access two, thinking of what would be typically considered the small scale, because it's actually dimensionally small space, the cook room, and the bungalow, it's still kind of small. But, and I juxtaposed that with the food access two, which seemingly is about, you know, this is eight million we're talking about, we're talking about the entire decade, okay, the entire southern peninsula. So regionally big, big administrative issues here. This is about grain and so on and so forth. For me, if we just look at, you know, in fact, look at the famine histories, histories of the famine. And I am always curious to know where is the, where are the, sort of the, or how is the home of the peasant, the relief, you know, seeker, where is that in there? Where is that, you know, where is that small scale, except in the photographs of the emaciated bodies, which I do not want to reproduce for, you know, because it's very much of an imperial project of placing people who are going to die probably in a few hours against large architectural, like architectural, classical architectural frames like that and photographing them. That's a particularly horrific politics, but it is a small space. So for me, something has been missed and Wyburn was not oblivious. He actually had one sentence and Radhika Mahanuram, he actually looked at this, she's a literary theorist, she actually noted that he writes, when he's talking about, you know, the market and so on and so forth, said, you know, now in the last few years it's been very difficult to get good meat and supplies, but still it can be got. So she kind of lashed on to that kind of passive construction and said that's very odd. So in other words, he is talking about, he just mentioned about the present calamity. And if you look at his book, it is about, it's very fit of francophone, francophile, you know, menu, and I would like very much, you know, adoring French cooking, that's what civilization means, that's how you need to do. And you know, like very elaborate cooking as far as possible from older Anglo-Indian food. So he's not oblivious of it, but he also, like our modern scholars, do not make the connection. Right? In other words, something gets messed up when you bring in the small issues, small scale and small spaces within the big ones. For example, when you actually talk about warehouses and trade networks, when you talk about trade networks, you know, you can do, you know, look at the big merchant companies and do the big histories of empire. No problem. But that doesn't mean you're actually doing anything critical about empire. You're literally reiterating every bias of the imperial authorities because you're beginning with them. You're not beginning with a different vantage. For me, it is very, very important if you're going to critique imperial narratives begin with a different place, with a different vantage. And so it's not so much that, you know, oh, I must link it with large spaces. No. In fact, in the book, I don't. So this is one chapter in which I do. In many of those, I'm actually talking about sort of a much more embodied sense of whether it's service spaces or whether it is courtyards or terraces, which produce different kinds of histories, which we don't have. We don't have histories of those courtyards and terraces. So in terms of my methodological ploy, I have to sort of undertake multiple sort of sort of avenues approaches. It's not sort of one approach because it doesn't fit. What I'm using for these spaces is not going to work when I'm looking at homeopathic medicine boxes. That's a different kind of object. That requires a different method. So Mark and Charlotte in their book that talked about the relation between objects and buildings, that's very different. So I'm not actually talking about that. So I have three different parts in the book and I actually, they have three different methods. One is very much about instead of the high vantage of thinking about a landscape, what happens if you take the interior courtyards as an advantage? What changes? Everything changes about flooding when you think of that. Everything changes about daily life in a rural, and I'm talking about a Bengal community, when you're looking at what not, the magnificent boat ride or thinking from the carts and so on and so forth. So there are different methodological approaches. I think that are necessary when you're talking about different spaces and different artefacts. I know. I'm going to get only out to some questions as we're going to join the discussion. I do have one already online, so we'll have that in because it's always really great to hear the voices as well and the people who are joining us from beyond Bedford Square. This is a question to ask you to what extent were elites paramode about being poisoned and what steps were not taken to address that? You know, they were typically not, but there was a huge anxiety and it's a completely, you know, sort of drummed up anxiety about, oh, sanitation and disease. Apparently nothing happened until the late 19th century, suddenly the late 19th century. Everybody, including women doctors, are basically saying you cannot let children play near the cookhouses because you know how disease happened. Like no, disease don't happen like that. They're still thinking about the environmental kind of ideas about disease like, you know, bad air arising that side in the larya and infecting the children. The fact that you don't want the children close to the servants in the servants quarters, you want them in the verandahs because you're completely dependent on the servant population. So it's not so much about being poisoned. And you know, part of me is, you know, what I'm doing in this book, I am actually don't particularly care about whether they're paranoid about being poisoned or not. So that's taken upon a view of somebody, you know, I refuse to valorise that because we have done that until now. So how do we think about sharing of food differently? Do we have questions, comments, discussion points? Thank you, that was so stimulating and very provocative and great stuff. I wonder about the word small, whether it's doing too much work for you. Clearly, I mean, I get the perspectival aspect of it in relation to scale, which means you can be very flexible, but at the same time, I think small is also metaphorical for you as well, that it indicates things like maybe marginalism, maybe things which are simply, you know, starting from a different place. I thought it was telling that the word small dropped off about halfway through your talk so do you see small as more of a kind of a holding term for a range of positions you can adopt vis-a-vis the material you've got? What I would say is not quite, okay, I'm not using it in metaphor actually, okay, because I actually are, I am herding in a lot of under it, okay, so when I actually think of the calorimeter, I said that's a small space, okay, they're not thinking it of a small space, but when you are doing that kind of experimental, the cage, they call it the glass cage, okay, so that's very much the division of the experimental, the body under experiment, right, it's a very different kind of thinking about space and they're measuring air, et cetera. As you know very well, all of that completely flows into 20th century architectural thinking in terms of quantity of air, but those also have a previous history in prisons and so on, so forth, right, so I'm using smallness to think about small dimension yes, small scale yes, but always you know thinking about scalar alterity, there's an otherness about it, but also things which are invisible that that's, that is you know in other words it's a subaltern aspect of it, there's a subterranean spaces, they're invisible spaces and they are absolutely marginalised spaces, okay, in other words even if they're big their marginalised, that is what I find fascinating, so small is not a metaphor, okay, in other words it is, you're right, I'm making it do a lot of work because it has done a lot of work throughout history, it has held up their entire infrastructure of empire, so what I want us to kind of think collectively is those who study empire, you know, I have to ask what the heck do I study empire, okay, there are much more pleasant things to you know study I presume, I mean this is one of my talks where there's no single nice image, I mean they're all really kind of like you, right, so in other words yet I, I chose, I made those choices for today, but when we think about let's say I started the veranda and I really didn't talk about the veranda except the you know veranda is a connecting piece when why one wants to bring the cookroom in, right, is that I do talk extensively about the veranda, except for God Myers who wrote a book called veranda's of power talking about you know Zanzibar and mostly you know that part of colonial Africa and he really doesn't get into it, okay, there's nothing on veranda's to think of as different not just for you know space of power, they were actually necessary, they were vulnerable spaces, there were service spaces, servants worked there, okay and there were different sort of sort of articulation, for Indian population veranda was very different, right, so part of my goal is to sort of bring out sort of what I spoke of on archive you know from you know I'm literally you know looking at things in the margins because you just go in to say I'm going to do you know research in veranda's you know you have dealt with that archive, you know exactly what I'm talking about, you would not have any luck, so most of what I actually have included in this book is that for about you know at least more than 20 years of research and always from the margin I'm working on something else I find this, so that's what I have cobbled together and I had to think very strategically about what is my method, I obsess about my method, so how do I bring this, what could be actually talked about as like very disparate space, you know famine camps, small spaces like you would not expect, my point is to make you know surprise ourselves with all the connections we don't make and what happened if I bring in the cook room and yes you could say it's racialized but you know everybody knows that right, why don't we bring in another racialized space and see the relations and I'm hoping and next generation scholars will find other relations through what I'm my juxtaposition that I have not looked into. One of the things you mentioned which was that other than so for instance the relationship between the small and the big so to say is and we are using them as shorthands is one but you also said that there's an autonomy of the small spaces as well as sites of legitimate sites of enquiries so that I thought was very interesting and it's not like so the everyday can be is not benign but equally it is it still has its own ecology is its own kind of legitim but the other interesting thing is that it's not a kind of often sometimes the everyday is understood as essentialized into some kind of a pre-colonial as if the pre-colonial practices lives in the everyday, the state lives in the normatives, state and the dominant structures live in normative spaces but the fact that that first of all modernity and colonial modernity produce its own everyday so that interaction is what you're looking at very much and in that sense they themselves are also sort of legitimate areas of study it's what you are. I'm going to respond to that connects with what Mark just mentioned when your comment which is for example you know why how a small space has been thought about, the typical thought of as local and Sunday superminium and it's very well respected article connected histories said that you know when he's talking about the local he said I'm not saying that those are you know unimportant but if they are you know somehow legible if we can retrieve them from the archive except through archaeology it is because they are networked into the large spaces I refuse that I think that's a fundamentally faulty argument that makes the local the fixed and those that are you know the the big histories are the really important things and I am responding to the Peshachar word these you know the climate of history the article in the sense that I think the way they might you know simply put it if we ever get to the big things that we worry about in the environmental stuff it is too small spaces it is not by using that same technique and same method that produce the problem in the first place I think something fundamentally needs to change so I actually disagree with the question. Hi there um thank you so much for a fantastic paper and I'm really intrigued to read the book now and my question is a little bit related to the book you mentioned the images and I'm just wondering about the cultural circulation and reproduction of some of these small spaces can they become big through their cultural reproduction circulation when they become for example the centre of a literary narrative or the focus of an artist's work and I'm sure you go into much more detail in this in the book. Um several years ago I know Shriya contributed to that volume on Bahau's in Calcutta Calcutta I wrote a paper called Spaces of Conversation this is Abunat Tegor and the south veranda which was his salon and his older brother Gagunath's salon so it is canonical it appears in covers of books and I have written about that I problematized those kinds of approaches but it is um yeah it depends on see in other words it's not the space and it's you know architectural delineation I mean the image that I started with those kinds of verandas a dime a dozen in the city it only gains significance because it happens to be connected to Ramanat Tegor and to a particular in a particular milieu most of the world doesn't care but Bengal is heck do right so the issue is that you know who is my reader who am I talking to who is it really important to clearly these spaces were very important to the people who inhabited them and worked with them it simply wasn't important to historians of the empire and the reason we can still find them the traces in the archives because they were important they were not recognized as important so one of the things I also look at is that you know and I when you think about small spaces as a constellation they actually an aggregate they can be huge not just the warehouse which is huge okay that's why you know that the collection of outhouses this is actually larger number than the main spaces of the house okay so they had so they in my thinking small spaces refer to not only different kinds of spaces but whether they show us how well are they recognized or not in other words it's not the dimension it's not their architectural delineation it is not you know any kind of particular merit it is how they are part of a particular kind of sociality in other words how do we read them as social spaces and to do that we choose what to link it with so in this talk today I chose to link them to certain sort of networks I in it doesn't have to be you can read you know cook rooms differently right and give them a different sort of a kind of a I would even say ontology any other comments questions desperation for liquid hydration could be I'm feeling that and I think because we've got a particular set of circumstances like you say in our own intimate small space here perhaps we can continue conversation and discussion I'm sure people have lots of thoughts and follow-ups that they would like to make and discuss with you stimulated by your talk so thank you so much I'd like to say thank you very much to Shati and thank you as well Tanya for for your response please join us if you're in the room for a drink next door and feel free to use both spaces again we'll open the windows get some air in here and thank you everyone to join who joined us online