Reframing the city

Awadhendra Sharan's In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850-2000 is without a hint of doubt one of the most important books on Delhi to have come out in the past few years. Sharan is a meticulous researcher, who brings discipline and a wealth of scholarship to bear upon his subject, namely, colonial and postcolonial Delhi. Specifically, this book seeks to understand practices and governance around key arenas of the city. The first of these is water. Sharan looks at the story from both 'ends' of the water cycle in the urban settlement – from the availability of water from canals, rivers and underground sources to the variety of distribution networks leading to the city's various thirsty populations; and conversely, as he terms it, the "flow away" of water from homes and factories as sewage and sullage. In both cases, Sharan notes that valuable opportunities to create an environmentally sustainable regime of water were squandered several times in Delhi, even as an understanding of the state as responsible for both clean water and a city free of sewage was put into place.

Second, Sharan documents changing practices of animal slaughter in modern Delhi, tracing the tortured evolution of the modern slaughterhouse. Complicating the matter are modern notions of the trauma of open animal slaughter, seen as unfit for civilised folk, especially their children; and conversely, the peculiarly colonial phenomenon of the rise of organised community 'sensitivities' around slaughtering practices. Since the late 19th century, as documented by historians like Peter Van Der Veer, a vigorous cow protection movement emerged amongst largely upper-caste vegetarian Hindus, led by organisations like the Arya Samaj. This movement, with its many offshoots in places like Awadh, Rohilkhand, Bombay Presidency and Punjab, targeted the 'evil' of beef consumption, especially by Muslims. Subsequently, religious processions that included ritual animal sacrifice amongst Muslims, often of the goat and not the cow, attracted these communal mobilisations.