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Jan.20th - 09H00
Peace and Public Works: Colonial Building and Thinking in and after Conflict

Peter Scriver (University of Adelaide, AUS)

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“When by the blessing of Providence, internal tranquillity shall be restored, it is our earnest desire to stimulate the peaceful industry of India, to promote works of public utility and improvement, and to administer its Government for the benefit of all our subjects resident therein.” Pronounced in 1858, even as British troops were still ruthlessly suppressing the Great Revolt that had swept across North India the year before, these were the words with which the British Parliament (in the name of Queen Victoria) simultaneously revoked the monopolistic charter of the anarchic East India Company regime and firmly secured the crown jewel of Britain’s nascent global Empire – an ostensible bid for Peace through Public Works!

Through the case of British India, this talk will critically consider the production and uses of public works in contexts of conflict and their aftermath. My aim is to trace a thread between the formative post-Revolt era in which the British Indian Public Works Department (PWD) system was substantially developed and institutionalized, and the era of early nation-building and development by the newly independent ex-colonial Indian state a century later that was then just emerging from the profound trauma of the Partition of India and Pakistan in the aftermath of World War 2. What I might characterise as the 'post-development' era of political revisionism that we are currently witnessing in the war-like re-working of the public/political spaces and built fabric of India’s national capital, New Delhi, will offer a further salient contemporary context to serve the argument for the longer 'cognitive-historical' interpretation that I hope to foreground. The talk will focus in particular on the production of housing norms and forms as perhaps the most fundamental form of built work in which public means and values may be invested, and thereby constructed or destroyed.

Habib Rahman type II flats, Netaji Nagar Delhi 1954-56. Being demolished now. These were the iconic ‘Rahman type’ flats. Generations of officers who ran our government have lived here.

© Ram Rahman

Professor Peter Scriver is a critical authority on the architecture and planning histories of colonial and contemporary South Asia, Peter Scriver’s theoretical work on culture and cognition in the design and reproduction of colonial built environments has been path-breaking. His extensive research on the built and cognitive legacies of the British Indian Department of Public Works has explored the instrumental role of such institutionalized agency in the propagation of architecturally embedded knowledge of social space and order across and beyond the colonial arena. Peter Scriver is a founding director of the Centre for Asian and Middle-Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide, Australia, where his ongoing work focuses on the colonial-modern foundations of contemporary built environments, and the broader frameworks of their production, with a specific focus on the transregional building world of the Indian Ocean Rim.

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