 I just wanted to welcome everyone today. So sorry, Atea, and especially just share my big thanks to Atea Korakiawala for organizing this event today. Atea is one of our rising stars at the school and I'm just so heartened by this conversation on infrastructure, architecture, ecology, and so much more. So welcome. Thank you so much, Dean Andreas, for your continuing support and for making this event happen. Thank you, Laila, for bringing this event into being. Good afternoon, everyone. As the Dean just mentioned, I'm Atea Korakiawala, Assistant Professor of Architecture here at Columbia University. I'm speaking from our campus in New York, which sits on the ancestral lands and unceded territory of the Lenape people who have suffered displacement through the settler colonization of Manhattan. Today's presentations and conversations revolve around the question of infrastructure, what it is and how we use it. The word itself suggests something underneath the surface but constitutive of that surface, something underneath that makes the surface possible. Infrastructure, in a normative sense, implies the prolific process of human intervention, progressively domesticating nature to connect and facilitate human life. Yet the numerous ways in which we have seen infrastructure fail in the last year, among others, hint that there might be something missing in the definition of infrastructure as matter that moves matter. The immediate provocation for this panel was the migrant crisis last year. After India went into lockdown in March, 2020, a record number of migrants walked from the city, homewards, towards their villages and towns. One of the images of this massive administrative failure that stayed with me was that of people crowded amid a pandemic, waiting at the Bandra train station in Mumbai upon information that the trains were going to restart when in fact to the lockdown was extended yet multiple times over. In India, housing is sometimes categorized as infrastructure and this is for budgetary reasons so that infrastructure spending can be dispersed towards producing much needed affordable housing. Migrants who often labor on these housing and infrastructural projects in cities walked hundreds of kilometers to their villages and towns precisely because they didn't have access, didn't have homes that is access to housing infrastructure in the city. In this context, extrapolating from someone like Dr. Sai Balakrishnan's work, it is possible to imagine that infrastructure privileges the movement of capital and commodities before it does the movement of human bodies and so perhaps infrastructure only moves matter as a side effect of moving wealth. Then there is the question of violence. Violence here can be described by the callous disregard for human life and suffering even as development projects are propagandized as built for people. This disregard sits atop the ecological devastation that infrastructure has wrought and facilitated which in turn enacts what someone like Rob Binixon has called slow violence upon the environments and bodies of the poor. Today's conversation aims to think these infrastructures as they relate to violence historically. How do we locate them in longer narratives of colonial extractivisms? That is how is infrastructure articulated in the landscape in an extractive colony? How did these infrastructural desires get articulated and recycled through the technoscientific rationalities of post-colonial development? How has a politics of ever expanding extractivism located itself on the bodies of working people? Finally, how can we think of infrastructure as constituted not by tar, bitumen, concrete and steel and instead by the feet of the people who use it the arms that carry the rock in the stone and the bodies that inhabit it? How can we write that history of infrastructure? With that, I want to introduce you to our three speakers today. Each of our speakers will speak for about 15 minutes and after that we will open the floor to questions which I hope will take the form of a dialogue between all of us. Our first speaker is Professor Shati Chatabadhyay. She is professor of history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Chatabadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscape of the British Empire. Her book, Representing Calcutta and Her Essay Blurring Boundaries have been constitutive of new methodologies of thinking urban form from the field of architectural history and her other very important work, Unlearning the City, Infrastructure and a New Optical Field, Critique Normative and Technocratic Definitions of Infrastructure and Proposed New Vocabularies for Speaking the City. She continues to write on the subject, arguing that we need to unlearn the discourses that enact violence and produce new discursive and material architectures to inhabit and today she'll present some of that work. Our next speaker is Professor Rebecca M. Brown. She is professor and chair of the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. Her scholarship in South Asian Art and Architectural History spans the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book, Art for a Modern India brought forth the contradictions between modernisms and modernization in India in how the paradoxical framing of progress versus history shaped modernist aesthetics themselves. Her other book, Displaying Time, the many temporalities of the festival of India vividly describes the minute durations within the politics of display at the cusp of liberalization and neoliberalization under the, that took place under the prolific architectural figure of the tent, of the festival tent. Today she will speak on KR Panikar's founding and building of the artist's village at Chula Mandel in the 1960s. Our third speaker today is Dr. Avishak Ray. He is assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at the National Institute of Technology in Silchar. Dr. Ray's research is concerned with moving bodies, tourists, vagabonds in the 19th and 20th centuries. And if I can be so able to editorialize his work makes a case for thinking infrastructure as made by the bodies that use it. Infrastructure in his work is first the feet of the feet that walk on it. He has written extensively on the different ways in which the pandemic has inverted mobility regimes while preserving the security of India's rich while and reinforcing the vulnerability of these bodies who labor whose labor made the pandemic induced immobility of India's upper classes possible. And I imagine he will share ideas from this work today. Thank you for joining our conversation. And with that, I welcome Shwati to begin with her presentation. Thank you, Ateya. I'm going to share my screen. So let me begin by posing a question. Are there instances of state or corporate infrastructures that are not violent? In different degrees, all physical infrastructures roads, railways, canals, airports, utility lines are violent, often deadly interventions that constructed by interfering with the soil, gradient and drainage of an area. The disrupt wildlife and host of habitats besides human habitation. They affect the quality and experience of airspace. The spatial logic of such infrastructures confronts and proliferates a range of social structural inequities on a daily basis. Our collective shock in witnessing the brutal withholding of infrastructure, in this case, the railways from migrant workers as a strategy of confinement, is founded on an assumption, a trust, that the state-controlled infrastructures are meant to enable social life. In what follows, I want to bring together three figures that became visible in the COVID crisis. Railways, strategies of containment, and infrastructure in a capacious sense to think through the bio-spatial, that is the spatial organization of life and death. Infrastructures by definition, lines of control. The investment opportunities and techniques of appropriation. And Israel network grew at a fast pace after 1861. This was no technological inevitability. The rapid growth in the post-Sapoi Rebellion decades spatially mirrored the growth of military contourments. So if we simply weigh the affordances again, the declarations that infrastructures produce, we miss a very few, we miss certain dimensions about infrastructure in the way that it operates. So this is my point. We need to look at not what it is as an artifact, but its modality, what it does and how it does it. Infrastructures enable and disable differentially. Our blindness to its differential purchase is a result of the way we privilege infrastructure as representational space, its strategic and symbolic use. Infrastructure as representational space relies on relation among infrastructures. Ones that are not often evident if we focus on the artifact and its construction. To disaggregate infrastructure, we need to attend to the infra in infrastructure, the workings that remain below the threshold of visibility. Only in moments of crisis, these workings are revealed. I've been looking at the relation between infrastructure and sovereignty, focusing on some pivotal events of the 19th and 20th century in India. To see how infrastructure was conceptualized and mobilized, how it was staged as representational space, how it was normalized. One of the issues that interest me is the relation between infrastructure and martial law. And how that generates a racially grounded biospace. So I'll share some notes from the Santal Rebellion of 1855. Between 1780 and 1840, the Santals, a peripatitic people had been herded into an area called Dominico in Eastern India on the borders of the present-day West Bengal and Charkhand. The objective was to use Santal labor for clearing jungles for cultivation. In 1832-33, the Damin, an area of approximately 1,400 square miles, was constructed as a bounded space to control the interaction of Santals with the surrounding indigenous society. Initially marked by natural features and pillars, the Damin boundary was strengthened and made absolute by police stations at small intervals. As Pratama Banerjee notes, it was also argued that the boundary must be made precisely mathematical and in straight lines wherever possible. Natural features, the government argued, tended to be tampered by the primitives and by nature itself. The Santals' bounded space meant that they no longer could avoid the colonial state. Santal villages as mobile assemblies became spatially fixed. Thus creating new boundary disputes that required the mediation of the state. The Santals were subjected to ruinous interest rates by money lenders and the complaints went unheeded in the colonial court. The British administrator in charge of the Damin made Santals experiment with new cash crops. Forced to extend cultivation beyond a fertile stretch, the crops became vulnerable to natural disasters and this made them completely dependent on the discretionary rights of the colonial state to forego revenue claims. The Damin was crisscrossed with roads built by the state in an effort to chase after the Santals who wanted to flee from this bondage. Having divorced Santal society from freely exchanging goods with outsiders, the colonial state instituted marketplaces for the sale of goods from the outside world including English long cloth, caps and jackets. Exchanging goods for money was expected to civilize the Santals who refused to produce a surplus of everything. All transactions with other groups were mediated in and through the colonial marketplace. Other locations of trade being prohibited in the Damin. The Santal rebellion constituted a wholesale challenge to the codes that defined the Damin as representational space. On one fine day, the British administrators and the Bengali landlords and moneylenders suddenly recognized that the so-called peace-loving Santals had rebelled against colonial authority. The officiating magistrate of Bhagalpur hastily penned a note to William Gray, the secretary of the Bengal government in Calcutta in the failing light of 9th July 1855. My dear Gray, I write a line in a great hurry to let you know that the Santals of this district have risen to take possession of the country. And as they are in considerable force, the police of these districts will not be able to stop them. So I write to ask you if you think fit to get order passed for the sending of troops for rail as far as they can go to the roads by which the Santals will be most likely to return home. The natives are in a great state of consternation. The railway people are arming and barricading themselves in various places. The dark, that is the post, is just about to go, I'm in a great hurry. Nominal reading shows Richardson trying to assemble the state infrastructure. In response, Gray wrote to Richardson, produce maps he said. The administrators worried that the insurrection would spread to adjacent communities, which it did, and that the army or the police had no military advantages when fighting the Santals in the forest, their quote unquote native habitat. The Santals proficient hunters knew paths and trails that were unrecognizable to colonial authorities. The sites of colonial authority that marked the landscape, the Bunlow court, police station, railway, post office, the offices of landlords, their residences, and the marketplace were picked out by Santals as specific targets of insurgency. They disrupted the colonial communication system by destroying the infrastructure that aided the relation between the state, the money lender and the landlord. While the Santals took control of the science systems that marked the colonial landscape, the colonial state appeared hobbled by its own governing practices and mode of envisioning the landscape. The state could only apprehend the rebellion in terms of its own infrastructure and the conception of space and representational practices congruent with such infrastructure. Practices that were based on a desire for exactitude, certainty, permanence, of objects carrying fixed meaning and discrete bounded events that could be placed in a narrative of cause and effect. Most disturbing to authorities was not the pitched battles that the Santals fought with the colonial troops, which after some initial setbacks, the colonial armed forces handily won. But when the Santals were seemingly going about their everyday business, harvesting, mending buildings, hunting and celebrating. Prior to the insurrection, none of these actions had appeared particularly significant, let alone hostile to the administrators. These practices of everyday life had remained invisible, so to speak. During the rebellion, the colonial authorities suddenly confronted the spectacularism of the Santals every day. They were gathering in large numbers, digging tanks and earthworks, building large storehouses and pavilions to conduct the Hindu festival of Durga Pooja. The problem was that even if many of these activities were symbolically defined, they could not be sorted out with the normalcy of everyday to be described as crime. Arrests were futile because no colonial court could punish them. There was scarcely any evidence of overturning authority in the normal acts of carrying axes or celebrating a Brahminical ritual. The everyday entered the colonial archive only when it had exceeded its norm and had taken on a particular visible form through the magnification of scale. The Santals self-consciously mimicked the formal conventions of the colonial army in organizing their own forces and chose to partake in high-caste rituals which they did not ordinarily. The Santals were switching cultural codes to assert the form and formality that could be recognizable to colonial authorities. And in that moment of switching codes, their everyday appeared visible. They were speaking in the code of their opponents. They wanted the colonial state to read these insurrectional acts as insurrectional. Put another way, the Santals were using insurrectionary tactics to create an infrastructure. This elicited further demand to strengthen the very infrastructure that was under attack. Colonial officers and European railway staff in the district asked to have the quote unquote gaps between the military and civil stations reinforced and urged that the railways and telegraph be extended to military stations to the north without further delay. The impossibility of apprehending the Santals in the situation of the everyday resulted in the administrators demanding martial law in the Santal districts. So what passed as normality could be viewed as criminality without obstacles posed by a civil court of law. But the need for martial law was also articulated as the necessity of dealing with the Santal as a figure of excessive violence that could erupt without notice. This in turn became a rationale for summary executions and burning of Santal villages as a strategy for putting down the rebellion. Martial law as infrastructure created the legibility that the colonial state needed to define the rebellion. After the rebellion, the entire Damin was reorganized spatially and administratively to form a separate non-regulation district, the Santal Parganas. A non-regulation district implied that the civil and criminal procedures that govern the rest of the region were held in abeyance in this enclave. Laws and regulations that were applicable to the rest of Bengal were found to be quote unquote unsuited to so uncivilized a race. A deputy commissioner with four assistants were placed in charge of the non-regulation district all of whom were vested with civil as well as criminal jurisdiction. The justification suggested that the complex procedural formality of colonial English law was to be abandoned in favor of more informal paternalistic relation between the deputy commissioner and the tribal centaurs. The solution then was not to strengthen the formal infrastructure of the colonial judiciary for the benefits of the centaurs to enable them to access the system but to remove them further from it. The Santal Parganas as a space of exception constituted one more of a series of spatial dislocation for the centaurs. Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the Santal Parganas became the prime catchment area for supplying Cooley labor to the tea plantations in the Northeast. It is not a coincidence that the tea plantations in the Western Duars and Darjeeling were non-regulation tracks as well. An important condition that allowed the planters to regulate without the intervention of the judiciary, the mobility and working conditions of the laborers. Now this kind of practice was not atypical and we find it repeated in the Savoy Rebellion and scores of other insurrections before and after. In conclusion, I want to emphasize the infrastructural role of martial law using maps that accompanied the Disorders Inquiry Committee report of 1920, commonly known as the Hunter Committee report. This was convened to inquire into the disturbances in Western and Northern India between March and May 1919. The disorders, as they were referred to, followed the enactment of the Rallet Act that indefinitely extended the emergency measures of the Defense of India Act, but in place during the First World War. That reaffirmed the state's right to contain the Indian population from freely moving around. And among its many clauses, it allowed the creation of new categories of offense. Matters came to a head and Mahandas Gandhi was prevented from leaving the Bombay Presidency. He left anyway and on attempting to enter the Punjab district was arrested. Protests erupted in small and large towns and the Punjab was effectively placed under military control. The Hunter Committee was convened following public outrage about military killings in Jali and Wallabakh and Amritsar. And also because of the use of martial law. This included the dropping of bombs in Gujarat Wala because it would have taken too long for the troops to arrive by rail. In most areas, third-class rail travel was prohibited to contain the population from moving around. The opinions passed by the majority of British members of the committee was that the unrest was in the nature of a rebellion against British administration. Thereby, the imposition of martial law was necessary and therefore the killings that happened in towns such as Amritsar and Gujarat Wala were unfortunate but justified. The minority opinion by the three Indian members read the same documents contrary and argued that it was not a rebellion which presumes premeditation and organized action. And the implication extension of martial law was unjustified. We can get into the details of the debate here but it suffices to say that the debate was about what constitutes rebellion and whether the colonial state in this case was indeed facing a rebellion. The maps of the Punjab were intended to provide the grounds for arguing this was a rebellion. Noting the locations where telegraph wire was cut by protesters and the location of the person, murder and other outrages. Notice the language in the reference. The fences included burning of the King Emperor's photograph. The map of Amritsar where the Jalan Wala were killings happened specifically noted the locations where Europeans were assaulted or killed marked here by the red cross and the red cross in the circle. So it's locations that are here and here and here. As a text of counterinsurgency, the assaults on Europeans and on government buildings and the sites of proclamation of military rule which are here, all these red dots were set up as the infrastructure of rebellion and evidence of a besieged government. What it didn't show was how many Indians died in the conflict between April 10th and 13th. Importantly, general Dyer's decision to gun down an unarmed gathering in Jalan Wala was not specifically indicated. Rather, the military action that we suppose rebellion in a circuitous logic became the evidence of rebellion on the ground. The minority report attempted to delineate the limits of necessity and arrived at the conclusion that martial law was not simply what we would now call a tool of biopolitics but it was a tool of the biosocial intended on demarcating the rulers from the road. They did not produce a counter map but condemned Dyer's argument that the killing was necessary to produce a moral effect. A nominal modification of that map might give a different sense of the modality of civil and military infrastructure in the way they reciprocate each other and set up an intimacy between biopolitics and the biosocial. Thank you. Thank you, Shanti, we'll now move on to Rebecca. Thanks very much. I'm thrilled to be here and really excited to take part in this conversation. This is my first foray into these questions around infrastructure and thinking about that as a way of dealing with some of my material. So I really welcome any thoughts and comments. In 1966, then principal of the Madrasa School of Art, KCS Punnaker, founded the Cholamandal Artist's Village between the sea and the main Madrasa Mahabali Putnam Road. Recognizing that many graduates ended up finding careers outside of art making, Punnaker created spaces at the art school for students to learn crafts of various types, boutique, wood carving, jewelry that could be sold as crafts and in turn support the other artistic pursuits he, his faculty and his students wish to engage in. Primarily painting and sculpture. Punnaker also was intimately aware of the dearth of commercial fine art galleries supporting contemporary art in the 1950s and 60s. Finding an audience and by extension a market for contemporary art was impossible without these structures in place. Thus, Punnaker's founding of Cholamandal Artist's Village creates a piece of art world infrastructure in a context where a shared space for discussion, criticism, debate and creativity was largely absent. Over the next few decades, Cholamandal achieved much of the vision Punnaker had in mind for it. Artists purchased or helped to purchase small plots of land, built homes and studios in community with one another, carved out shared performance discussion and exhibition spaces including a gallery and continued to support themselves with craft sales via domestic and international buyers and to the travelers on the main road headed to tourist destinations further south. So while Cholamandal clearly operated as an infrastructure through which artists could find paths towards living and working as artists, I'd like to consider the village as a counter infrastructure, one that worked against the grain of larger capital and political forces at the time. Now the artist's village, I wanna also argue was not anti-infrastructural, it absolutely constituted a network of people and a built environment, all of which was dependent on larger flows of capital and people in the region. But it carved out a place for countering the prevailing norms in a region, Madras State, Madras State at the time and later Tamil Nadu, which was focused primarily on performing arts and music and to create a space of belonging for a group of people, the artists, from across linguistic and regional divides. And as Karan Zitzu, which shows us in the context of the art of the 90s and the 2000s, this counter infrastructure did not operate as a passive field on which artists worked. The counter-infrastructural network of Cholamandal deeply shaped and was shaped by the art practices of its participants. So the first, I have two counter infrastructures I wanna lay out in the time I have today. The first is fine art, not performing art. So one of the maxims spoken by many contemporary Chennai residents when discussing painting and the visual arts, and I'm talking here mostly of elite Chennai residents today, is that historically Madras has had a little interest in these arenas devoting its primary attention and energy to the arts of music and dance. The maxim spoken today hides a good deal of the class, caste, and linguistic politics that underlie the emphasis, not just on dance and music, but on particular forms of those arts. One infrastructure then that Cholamandal countered was this strand of classicizing dance and music that operated on two tracks, as some of you may already know. On the one hand, a Sanskritized text-based, constructed Paranathian dance and the Telugu-derived Karnathic music, both largely Brahmin-led and positioned as Pan-Indian traditions, sanitizing and de-eroticizing and consolidating a multitude of earlier forms. On the other hand, the Tamil Isai or Tamil music movement was part of a larger pure Tamil language movement that had emerged forcefully in the region via anti-Hindi protests in the late 1930s and again in the mid-1960s and found its political purchase in a succession of Dravidian anti-Brahmin political parties, including the DMK, or culminating really in the DMK. The particularities of the cultural politics then of Madras state in this period created a framework in which art that did not have a performance or a classicizing thread at its center, that is all of the art that KCS Panakar was trying to support, painting, printmaking, drawing, ceramic sculpture. That art had a comparative disadvantage finding economic patronage and political support. Against that frame, Panakar's drive to establish the Artist's Handicraft Association and fund the Cholamandal Artist's Village can be read as a countering move to an infrastructure, a discursive political economic infrastructure that could not recognize modern and contemporary art as legitimate. And in some ways, this really dovetails with what Ashafi was saying about the recognition of the Santal sort of insurgency infrastructure, right? Panakar's trying to create something that's recognizable in the face of not being recognized. All right, so that's the first counter infrastructure. The second one I wanna talk about is maximal language diversity. This is the counter infrastructure too. So this probing of the discourse around dance and music in Madras opens up my second counter infrastructure, the push against linguistic and ethnic politics. Cholamandal is founded in 1966, a moment that positions the village in relation to the deeply felt and often violent anti-Hindi pro-tomal protest movements that took the country during this decade. A major reorganization of India's states on linguistic lines took place in the 1950s, splitting off the Northern Telugu-speaking portion of Madras state to form Andhra Pradesh. These national level political machinations meant a consolidation of the Southern portion of Madras state around a largely, although not entirely Tamil speaking population. As Sumathi Ramaswami narrates in her wonderful book on the history of devotion to Tamil as a language and as a goddess. In 1964, a man named Chinasami set himself on fire shouting, death to Hindi may Tamil flourish. He was followed by five others in the following year. Two years after Chinasami's suicide in the midst of these changes across the 1950s and 1960s, Cholamandal is founded. On one level, this is just a correlation or coincidence. And I will tell you that my conversations with people who remember the founding of Cholamandal and are still alive today, they don't, when I push them on this even, they don't recognize this connection. So I'm sort of arguing this as a sort of subtle underlying, again, looking back at Cholamandal's paper, a kind of invisible underlying layer of infrastructure. So, but the major political focus of the decade leading up to Cholamandal's founding, extending to the reclaiming of the state as Tamil Nadu, renaming of the state as Tamil Nadu or land of the Tamils in 1969, involved ethnic linguistic battle lines, ones inflected with a deeply felt devotional movement and overwritten with caste politics. As someone born in Coimbatore to a Carolyn Malayali family who spoke Malayalam, Tamil and English, surrounded by artists from across Southern India and beyond, who themselves occupied what Ramaswami calls following Rosi Paredati, a nomadic consciousness of a polyglot, always in between languages and homes, how could Panakkar not feel the pressure of the ethno-linguistic politics that swirled and came to a head during this long decade? I propose that Cholamandal, while usually seen as a counter infrastructure to the dominant dance music regime in the region as I outlined before, can also be read as a counter to the emergent ethnic and linguistic infrastructures being built to exclude the polyglot artist crowd Panakkar had nurtured at the Madras school art. What's more, and I'm sharing my screen again, Panakkar himself changes his idiom in the 1960s. From experimentations with floating ethereal figural forms and garden jungle landscapes to, in 1963, the series that he would continue until his premature death in 1977, a series called Words and Symbols. How does one counter an infrastructure centered in language politics and exclusion? I suggest that Panakkar answers this not only with the founding of Cholamandal, but also in an artistic practice that directly takes on the question of language, meaning, and belonging. And what's more, we might also say that this artistic practice itself counters not only the regional exclusionary politics of language and ethnicity, but also counters by charging over its exclusionary boundaries, the European and American-centered modernist art infrastructures. Panakkar's work itself thus turns back to language, the language of painting, color, line, texture, the communicative potential of symbol in mathematics, science, and religion, and the twin practices of reading and writing. Panakkar's painting in the 1963-64 year, and I'm showing you here one from 1964, shifts dramatically to explore the power of text, diagram, and symbol, drawing on a wide range of citations from across visual cultures and notational practices. He uses math equations, geometry, and other imagery related to science in dialogue with astrological charts and symbols drawn from Carolyn practices of magic. He uses text, Roman script, and hinted English at first, as you can see here, and then shifting to the script used to write Moellum, sometimes spelling out words from both that language and Sanskrit, sometimes spelling out nothing. As I've argued elsewhere, this work draws you in to decode it, only to rebuff any attempt at doing so, forcing a confrontation with how we know what we know, and whether these sign systems, each designed to parse a complex universe, might themselves always fall short of transmitting understanding or knowledge. In the rich context of the founding of Cholamundal, plans for which were well underway as he started his words and symbols journey, Ponagra's turn to script and writing takes on new salience as a politicized language, excuse me, a politicized challenge to the language politics of the time. In a multilingual society, one in one which Filipino art critic, Marian Pastor Rosas, might characterize as a space of maximal language diversity. Ponagra gives us a language that can be read, but not understood, or at least not understood as we might understand by reading a passage of text. Ponagra's gambit to explore language is bound up with an artistic project of claiming for himself the genealogy of not only the artistic history of the subcontinent, but truly of the world. Here I see him turning in words and symbols to rework and rethink the philosophical and pedagogical work that Paul Clay and others in the Bauhaus did in relation to thinking through a new language of painting in the early decades of the 20th century. So one of the things I'm interested in is setting up this idea of the linguistic politics of Tamil and other Southern Indian languages and anti-Hindi movements in relation to the language of painting. This language of painting includes text, often as you can see in the Paul Clay example I've pulled here a lot of text, but it puts it in dialogue with the other elements of painting, including color and its communicates of power, line, texture, brushwork, the layering of pigment, the use of figural animal and linguistic forms detached from their reference, the engagement with music and spoken text as a way of working through the materiality of paint. One might therefore see his move to the textual in his painting as a double counter, as it creates a new infrastructure for thinking the language politics in Southern India and a new infrastructure for thinking about the relation to the art of Europe as the hegemonic infrastructural center of artistic modernism. I'll conclude by turning back to the question of an infrastructure of violence that Atea very productively prompted us with or the sense that infrastructures enable certain violences. Indeed, material bodily violence is not far from reach in this political and historical context grounded as it is in protest and self-immolations of the 1960s. I'm showing you here the Baltimore Sun coverage of the self-immolations from that time. I don't want to dismiss that in order to undermine the difficulties and challenges faced by Panukkar and others who strove to work productively as artists and is not quite fully tamillion in a context that increasingly thought sought to exclude them. I see Panukkar, however, countering this with an infrastructure not of violence, but of care. And I see this infrastructure of care accounted to the primary perhaps hegemonic infrastructures of the state and a prevailing cultural politics as an example of what queer theorists have called productive failure. Panukkar never claimed the Cholamandal project was an intervention that would last forever. Indeed, if you talk to those still working as artists in Cholamandal today, many will repeat this idea that it was not meant to be permanent. At present, Cholamandals caretakers have sought to institutionalize the museum and gallery spaces on the site, but real estate realities and the ever-expanding excerpts of Chennai have meant that it no longer serves as a residential commune for artists alone. This further underscores the temporal quality of the counter infrastructure. It intervenes creating a modified space for lives that might incrementally challenge the prevailing norms, but then it fades or alternatively is co-opted into the prevailing infrastructure, losing its countering quality. Cholamandal remains, however, a productive failure if indeed it is a failure at all. And for the linguistic cast and ethnic diversity of artists working in the Madras School of Arts, this counter infrastructure really pushed against the primacy of music and dance and clear to space for them. And these were incredibly powerful moves that enabled the efflorescence of Panakar, whose infrastructures of care supported an incredible group of artists for a short time in the second half of the 20th century. Thank you. Thank you, Rebecca. And we will now turn to Abhishek. Yeah, thanks, Athea, for inviting me and it's absolute pleasure to take part in the conversation and as a cultural and literary studies person, I'm going to talk about metaphors, not so much about history, but I'll talk about walking as enacted by the migrant workers in India during the pandemic. So I'll see that act as a metaphor, but also let me tell you at one point of time, Rebecca, talked about rosy-brides with this concept of the nomadic subjectivity. So I'll depart from there. So I see the walk as performed by the migrant workers as necessarily nomadic in the sense that rosy-brides at the end. Michel, these are two and a bunch of other scholars invoked. So I'm going to talk about the act of walking, as I say, as a metaphor and also the highways as an infrastructure and how both of them have connected in the context of the pandemic. So my presentation reflects on the dissenting act of mobility precisely in the sense of nomadic subjectivity as articulated by the migrant workers in India who during the nationwide lockdown amid the pandemic are walking back home, literally hundreds of miles away in lieu of public transport. So their mobility as in the act of walking has thus acquired a metaphoric status and laid bare the ideological practices of territorializing the city space. So this presentation argues that the migrant workers mobility from within the axiomatic of the prevalent mobility regime can be read as a powerful metaphor of our tensions with the global political economic order that the pandemic has so starkly exposed. So in modern Athens and I quote Michel, these are two here the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorite to go to work or to go home one takes metaphor, a bus or a train. So that's the Athenian use of the word metaphors of public transport as in our report as metaphor. So metaphors are literally in as much their spatial. So my presentation demonstrates how the spatial and the literary switches in the context of the migrant workers mobility which renders the work a metaphoric the metaphoric aspect of mobility is thus illuminated by its spatial aspect. So in the wake of the so-called urban turn the city space is imagined as mappable, readable and perfectly segregable. This furnishes an imaginary border land within the city and the way we imagine city these days is basically envisioning of enclaves within enclaves. So territorial techniques of urbanization what we may refer to as city making furnish urban enclaves. So in Boston for example the Uber app is twice likely to cancel rides booked by Afro-American riders. I mean there's a very interesting paper on this how the Uber ride applications is grossly racialized. Some city roads for instance features separately demarcated tracks for bicyclists and we all know that Google traffic app for example offers user based navigation solutions customized for cars to pedestrians, bicycles and so on and so forth. So certain gated communities for example restrict the mobility of certain occupational communities beyond their gates so in a sense with what I try to point with these examples is how imaginary border lands align the geographies of the city and in doing so furnishing enclavist identity not only for those who thus imagine the city but also for these certain interstitial heterotopic communities in our case being the migrant worker but also if we could extend this set of examples this might cover we made the food delivery personnel, the bicyclist and so on. So this separatist undercurrent thus restraints certain forms of urban mobility based on an imagined taxonomy that deems certain practices of mobility as degenerative and others virtuous. It institutes a rupture between acceptable and unacceptable practices of mobility from within the framework of this cultural polarity the migrant workers work is symbolic of a certain socio-special production the migrant worker is an urban outcast to begin with but an important source of surplus labor. So they must inhabit heterotopic spaces and I am drawing on Foucault here. So they must inhabit heterotopic spaces slums, squads, rookeries and so on within the city yet they are exteriorized from the coordinates of urban speciality however amid the lockdown migrants do not have the subsistence to stay put in the city. Public transport is withdrawn and the interstate borders are sealed. They are thus forced to work home. So in other words what I am trying to suggest is I mean there is a visualization of these migrant workers who are otherwise who has been rendered invisible. So out of the heterotopic ghettos they are now walking right on the highways. Today the phenomenon of migrant worker walking on the highway has become a symbolic landmark and of course made international news not least because it serves as a sequential exposition of the territory of the city from under the veneer of urban speciality that had rendered them heterotopic and their mobility peripheral migrant workers have populated the highways at a moment when no one else can step out of their homes. Typically highways are not meant for walking. Walking is prohibited on the highways in that sense the migrant workers walk is doubly subversive. They are walking on the highway which is shut down during the migration white lockdown. As an infrastructural network the highway ironically in most instances built by the migrant worker herself bridges and sustains the city. So in other words like the highway which has been built by the migrant worker is prohibited for walking. So in that sense it is doubly subaltern. So it leads to it as in the highway leads to and emerges from the city. It is not inside the city yet in a sense it is integral to city making. So without the highway the city would be reduced to an island. So this ambiguous status of the highway transposes into the city's relationship with the migrant workers as they choose to walk across the highway. The highway is a transversal site where the walk unfolds in the context of what Kevin Lynch calls the major ability of the city points to the wider ramifications for the metaphorization of the walk. It interrupts the fixity of urban cartographies and ascribed identities that is the enclaves migrant workers are otherwise relegated to. The banishment of the migrant workers from the city is an act of sabotage. Establishing a right to remain in the city means a territorial claim. The liminal practice of determining who belongs in the city and who does not, who retains the privilege of mobility and who does not is central to the territorial imagination of the city space. Migrant workers walks are a condition of forced mobility arising from the lockdown and the pandemic crisis. However, it becomes semi-autorically potent in the context of how currently in India an immobility regime has prevailed. Of course, this is not specific to India but I mean what I point to what I try to point in this context that the migrant worker is walking continuously in an immobility regime. So its cultural signification is derived from the paradoxes of the issues of mobility, the framework of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal capitalism itself is a regime of extreme mobility and if you could invoke Bauman here it's an extreme mobility of people goods, labor and so on and so forth. What John Uri has famously called the new mobility's paradigm. But it is still largely a privilege that is most intriguing about this pandemic is that it exposes how in a political economic order in which extreme mobility is the norm any attempt to impose a regime of immobility that is the lockdown will inevitably temporarily at least general, sorry excuse me, will generate the opposite of extreme mobility. In other words, extreme mobility negates extreme counter mobility. What characterizes the migrants mobility however is its forced and very federal nature both in terms of the economic forces that precipitated the imperative of having to migrate for work and now the loss of work forcing them to return home. What this pandemic is conversely exposing is the so called freedom of immobility playing out across the world in vastly different but predominantly class based contexts. Those who return autonomy in the new mobility's paradigm are those in the upper middle class of patients who can afford to be sedentary for an exception and during the lockdown can continue to work from home for career deliveries and things like grocery shopping and career mail and shield themselves from the virus while the migrant worker is forced to be mobile often times in service of the former. So I'll stop here and maybe if you have doubts and questions I'll be able to provide you with this question session. Thank you. Thank you so much and I want to welcome Rebecca and Shatti back into the room so to speak. Thank you. I really enjoyed all three of those talks and as we wait for questions I'll maybe say just a tiny little bit because I'm sure that there will be many questions I don't think anyone wants to hear from me anymore but what I was thinking that was a moment of intersection in all three talks was this idea that infrastructure, the material world of infrastructure relies on an infrastructure of norms and in that sense infrastructure sets those norms and I think one of the things that all of your talks did was try and find a way look at bodies that are constantly defined as exceeding norms exceeding the norms set by infrastructure that then help you understand what the kind of norm is and so this constant being in excess of norms that the santhal body, the migrant body the polyglot body the polyglot, I forgot the phrase that you used there but these moments are constantly defined by the norms but they also find ways to exceed those norms and I don't know, I thought maybe that might be something to kind of begin a conversation with on the idea of how we're like even the question even the concept that Abhishek brought up surplus labor the word itself puts the body of that liberer as exceeding exceeding their own almost their own need to eat because their surplus we can therefore rely on helping bring wages down in a sense so yeah, I just wanted to kind of point out to that way in which all three papers sort of aimed at theorizing infrastructure through its outside, through its excess while we wait for questions but also taking cues from what Patea says I mean also this is question of descent here I mean imagine the santhal body or the migrant body I mean what is surplus to the normativity is also the question of descent so these bodies are essentially dissenting in one way or the other and for me it's also about that question of visibility that seems to have be shared among all three of our subjects that there's an invisibility of the santhals when they don't when they disappear into their own infrastructures of small paths that then they turn to build new infrastructures that can be seen but that are sort of their own protest against the prevailing colonial infrastructures and likewise you know the powerful visibility of the migrants on the highway it's like they've always been there they've always been visible it's just you haven't seen them you haven't recognized them so this idea of recognition I think is also quite powerful in these things and I'd love to hear Shatya talk more about this the way in which these maps that you showed kind of their the colonial space or the colonial discourses giving us is reifying reinforcing their own narrative but they're also creating ways of producing the norm right so the norm sort of emerges through that process of mapping right I need to map is the response to that that was really telling I thought when I read that first you know sitting in an archive looking at judicial proceedings I thought imagine Richardson sitting there what map I don't have personnel to produce map but the normativity we're talking about I think infrastructures cities and here I'm thinking of Shatya Chabria's work making the modern slum she made a great point that what made the city was defined the city was what was excluded the definition was a matter of exclusion you exclude the workers bodies the migrant bodies from it and that's how the city gets defined so infrastructure gets defined by exclusion and that is why it is always be the excess it is always exceed what it is because it is defined like that it is not a coincidence or it just happens to be so that is important for us to recognize we are talking about state and I make a distinction between state and corporate infrastructures as opposed to the kind that Rebecca you were talking about what I anticipate Abhishek's earlier work which I would be very interested in knowing more about is about traveling as other kinds of bodies traveling as opposed to the proper tourism which we think of as a particular kind of mobility so when we think about bodies traveling bodies not being contained in space what are the norms through which they are allowed to be visible so it is important to think about this I would be very interested in hearing a little more from Abhishek about connecting your earlier work with what you see in COVID in terms of the migrant workers or marginal populations well in the earlier work I looked at dissenting bodies in the sense that I take on the work of the concept of unbecoming modern like sort of dubious concept of unbecoming modern so I look at this indigenous normative bodies and like how people for example Rahul Shankritan and a bunch of other like Dinesh Chandrishan and all of these bunch of scholars I mean if you may call them scholars they wanted to travel which was symbolically a slap on the colonial government because the colonial government wanted to sedentarize them and the more they wanted to sedentarize them the more these people took to travel in which was basically a slap on the colonial governmentality and they said look I am doing precisely what you are forbidding me to do so there is a forthcoming book in which there is a chapter on Rahul Shankritan and he has this interesting very skinny book called Guddagumakar Shastra which has been translated in Bangla as Pavagura Shastra and is like a sets of like a presets for the someone who wants to be a vagabond let's say so he has a sets of do's and don's and then I look into these texts and I deal with certain traveling bodies who necessarily do not want to become modern and they resist the statist techniques and biopolitical infrastructures that want them to sedentarize and let's say the modernizing techniques of sedentarization the part of Brazil the walking as the way of whether it's pilgrimage or just you know moving between in this case like what we were seeing but in home and work okay this is not new I mean the assumption that earlier societies were somehow more sedentary you know the village community was more sedentary and then suddenly capitalism happened and then you know movement happened you know the hugely problematic notion that's a constant that's what happened so it's good and of course if you could recall Gandhi here like the Gandhian march the English expression walk out I mean walk out as a very dissenting connotation by itself we actually had a very good discussion about that you know what was Gandhi doing I mean in here he had the railways he had a very conflicted you know relation with the railways right but the whole idea of the march okay and what was it I mean for me Rebecca was also he's building an infrastructure right but what is his infrastructure okay so the new infrastructures are only built on define other infrastructures right so yeah we can call them counter infrastructures but you know for I like to use the term infrastructure in a very capacious sense is that only infrastructure matters is what lies underneath the threshold of visibility we are interested in speaking you know talking in the language of the state okay that's what we do when we talk about dams canals etc and I do that plenty but then we are still kind of moving within that you know sort of vocabulary and that becomes a self-fulfilling process okay and then of course of course you need roads in you know canals and dams like no let's not have the discussion let's have a different kind of discussion infrastructure actually do we do have a question here so I'm going to read that this is a question for Rebecca from Karen Zitzewitz I'm interested in the relationship between counter infrastructure and counter public particularly with regard to the centrality of public address in some of the best work on these language movements and their relationships to the art to arts I'm thinking Fran Cody of Amanda Whiteman on public address systems and karnatic music and on Lisa Mitchell's critical repost to some of these work the question is I guess is the counter in counter infrastructure the same as the counter and counter public thanks Karen it's wonderful to have you here in this conversation and this is a great question and something that I will really think hard about because this is again very new modes of thinking for me and I and I want to think about not just counter public but what kinds of publics are created through these infrastructures and I think that's part of the project of producing a community at Shola Mandel to kind of counter the prevailing music dance community in Madras that you that you actually start to produce or hopefully start to produce a kind of a patronage community and an elite community that can see the visual arts in a different way so I'm not sure how it might map on to the counter public but that is an excellent provocation and I will I will be exploring that further I'm sure you will get an email for me right after this thank you I'm going to read a question from Anu from Anuradha Siddiqui thank you to all this thanks to all the speakers you all use such urgent details which make infrastructure into a terrain rather than a line or even a series of points or the bitumen and concrete that I are referred to talking about insurgency through infrastructure in this capacious way makes it so that insurgency cannot be narrated monolithically from only one point of view but has to be narrated from many locations across this terrain can you speak to this a bit more and she mentions that actually Swati is actually Swati sorry actually is already speaking to this a bit it would be great to hear about it through each speaker's work and more scholarly approaches but why don't you I mean I could you know let me respond briefly then you guys could because you're working on different material you probably have a very different understanding of this for me what how do people who have a limited resources to capital and b, a different kind of set of resources, it's not like they don't have resources construct their infrastructure this is what I looked at and you know unlearning the city because I was looking at visual culture and how certain kinds of visual culture infrastructures and very powerful political infrastructures from community building to anti-colonial you know political movements so what I I've been looking at the Senthal rebellion for a while now and my interest comes in from two you know seminal books one is Rana Jitka's work, the other is Berthama Banerjee's work, both have done exceptional work on that but the early work actually goes back which was published in 1939 and then so there is there is a kind of a way of thinking about the political implication of the Senthal rebellion so more I have looked at it, more it seems to me is that it was the insurgency itself was the infrastructure in other words it is not a material thing that you can touch when you think about roads even when we think about the bitumen etc we think of it as a material thing but you have to understand the materiality in other ways it has to do with speed, it has to do with movement it has to do with the enigmatic leaves that they sent as a warning and you don't know what it means that's the that's the scare is that you were just delivered in the Separiah you were just delivered bread and you have no idea what means, so you are constructing meaning that proliferation is a very effective way of thinking about infrastructure, actually formal infrastructure also does that it's an ember like effect so for me if I really have to understand from the archives and this is again it's a prose of counterinsurgency is that it is as the rebellion was a communication that was what they needed to get to the state, okay they had tried before through other means they could not and I think it's productively you know connects with both Rebecca and Abhishek with your different examples that you're looking at I mean I can point to one connection to Rebecca's talk today which I thought was interesting about Panika's idea that this infrastructure should only last as long as it is necessary and so if you think about it from there the ruin of the infrastructure looks very different what is the ruin one of the problems of concrete of course has been that it has left these ruins that will just last forever in states of degradation not in any usable way and so what does it mean to think an infrastructure that doesn't produce these kinds of ruins yeah I think there's something about I mean and the other thing too is sometimes it's ruins and sometimes what's there and I think this is the case in Schoenlandel it's sort of a inertial presence of the community and of the gallery and of the shared communal spaces that a weight of that on the next generation on the following generation to try to keep it up but they may or may not have any interest in doing so so there's a kind of how do you gracefully sunset infrastructure like how do you actually how do you move on to something else that is going to be productive and I think that's actually a real problem with a lot of different infrastructures as you say I'm actually really interested I think that the provocation here in terms of insurgency from Anu Anu Radha's question is this idea of that I see in Abhishek's paper and I just wanted to get him to talk more about is this idea of when does it become an insurrection when does it become an insurgency and I feel like even though the migrant workers walking on the highway wasn't organized in that way that because it resonated with so many other images like the Dundee salt barge that it sort of became an insurgency just sort of almost on its own agency and I'm curious about that kind of sort of undefined or consolidation congealing of an insurgency when there wasn't really a plan for it in the beginning yeah I mean that's why I precisely call it a metaphor and if we recall the image that Shati had first showed us I mean the railway tracks and if you recall that was the image when 16 migrant workers were crushed under the railway I mean they were slipping on the tracks assuming that the railway services were suspended but actually the goods train were still running I mean it's a very powerful image in the sense that actually it didn't portray any migrant worker as such all their belongings and a couple of rotis what all the image had showed I mean it's a very powerful image in the sense that it acquires a metabolic value in itself so in other words what I'm trying to suggest is I mean there's this narrative of visibility and also denial and if we recall and I remember this news piece that appeared on with the same like a few days after that image appeared on the national news I mean the state actually denied the whole railway crushing because people didn't have any citizenship documents to begin with although it made the national news and the image was so powerful and so potent to begin with I mean the state virtually denied it because they didn't have citizenship like they didn't have papers to prove their citizenship so in other words like what I'm suggesting is this narrative of visibility and recognition on the one hand counter poised let's say with with these narratives of denial I think that's very important because this is where the the idea of surplus labor what makes labor surplus the surplus their bodies are surplus because they can be you know included into the regime when needed and thrown out when needed they are in that sense excess in multiple ways in terms of violence in terms of their indigeneity their excess in terms of their un-modernity and they are excess in terms of their labor because now they are not required right and the fact that having when I started doing my last work I was simply actually looking I didn't think of looking at infrastructure in the beginning I was looking at nationalist movements and then you know contemporary city building and I made the connection like they are actually out of the built from the same sort of the framework that's not different and what allows one to the state to make the denial is because they are thinking about infrastructural connections right the road infrastructure is related to the citizenship citizenship act right and other infrastructures so it has to have this ratio right it is related to what it connects so the capacity of the state to connect infrastructures but this is important it can only do so through those infrastructures that it recognizes it is blind in the face of other infrastructures and that's the only reason why insurgencies can even happen because it has that it has certain representational techniques certain legal modes through which it can comprehend infrastructure I'm going to read out this one more question that we have from Otto Seme Thank you for a great lecture and further exploration of what is infrastructure whether it is in maps historical records or metaphors what do you think the rule of design is in relation to your individual explorations solutions to contemporary infrastructural problems so you know we're not a group of designers here or lapsed designers in some cases but maybe we have thoughts I'm one of those lapsed designers so I'll make a pass I think one of the big problems we have is that we immediately jump to the idea of design from problems of infrastructure that something must be built you know my challenge to my architect colleagues who teach in schools like yours is how do you practice architecture without building without construction because we don't need more buildings we don't it's a matter of not more buildings it's a matter of redistribution of resources that's the problem so how does one think of design not as construction that's what I'm trying to say how do you think of design which presumes a certain kind of relation between present and future sometimes the past has a certain kind of temporal understanding and this is where the discussion we just had about Paniker's idea that this is not permanent even if it stays it'll outlive its own purpose and then it might morph it might become something else it has a certain kind of temporal imagination built into it most architectural projects have a certain kind of temporal imagination built into it and because it assumes it presumes like the Roman bridges they're going to last forever think of just the representation of infrastructures the pride people take in constructing that beautiful bridge beautiful flyover my dad was a civil engineer absolutely sort of cued into that kind of pride I think unless we can rethink what a design is we will not be able to address any of the issues we're talking about today I'm not I don't come from a design background but I just wanted to second what Shatya was just saying about the kind of solution the sort of temporal horizon that I think should be perhaps more present particularly in architectural design I think it might be more present in other kinds of design that are seen as more ephemeral like print media and things like that but one of the things I'm very interested in with Punnaker's move to be found in part on the financing from craft production which itself is bound up with a history of design in India so there's a sort of a sense of design he's created a intervention into the design world from his madras art school artists in order to ground this new intervention into the infrastructure south of Chennai that is the Jolamandal artist village that then continues to kind of foment additional change and additional interventions into the landscape both in the physical landscape and into the landscape of aesthetics and of what does it mean to have an aesthetics that is of this region that is through craft what's called craft at the time so I'm interested in all of these intersections and I do think that Shathie's call for an ethical architectural design given that we have this temporal horizon I think is incredibly important so I'll just end there and I think I'll read one more question that we have but I will say that I think the answer to the question is yes it's from Yichen Li it says would you say that design also has the same blindness that makes insurgency possible let me address that Yichen I think the idea of design I always say you need to unpack what it means to design it's like you need to unpack infrastructure to understand infrastructure you need to disassemble it no design you know this is where we think about the metaphor of the master plan presumption that you have a fully worked out solution I mean in no architect or planner I'm just actually thinking everything is worked out but there is that desire there is that sort of nominative notion of completion in it no design is complete even the ones that say they are the problem is that their endpoints are worked out differently than one that has actually envisions an open horizon so design is by actually by definition blind because it's even a collaborative designs they are blind because they cannot otherwise be really I mean I think that's a sort of really potent point at which to kind of wrap up this so I want to invite Rebecca and Abhishek to say any final thoughts that they might have I was actually thinking as Athea was responding to that sorry as Swati was responding to that question that I wonder about design versus the maker right so I was thinking about the migrant workers who built the very highway that they were walking on in Abhishek's presentation and I wonder how much design they took into their own hands when building that highway like whether they walked over a flyover and said oh yeah I put my handprint on the concrete underneath this or I redid this space means something different to me than it means to other people who are using it and I think there's also that kind of idea of small interventions, small insurgencies that might not be visible even yet so I wanted to just put that out there and thank everybody for their conversation. Yeah just to quickly conclude my understanding my impression the migrant worker would have just executed the master plan and I think taking cues from what Shati just now pointed to I think Levisthras would have much to say on this the idea of the master plan as opposed to Bricolair for example the idea of the collage which is very nearly incomplete I think these are two notions and two very paradigmatically different notions to deal with I think we have to weigh out against each other like the model of the Bricolair as opposed to the model of the master plan as in the blueprint. Thank you so much and I'm so grateful to have had the ability to have this conversation today and thank you to the audience and Leila Thank you. My pleasure, thank you so much.