the map is here.
"a Dalit bombay cartography" was the final project i submitted for prof. anupama rao's seminar "bombay/muwmbai and its urban imaginaries." this was also the first time i utilized mapping and data visualization technology (in this case the software carto) as medium for an academic argument. given this context, the project has certain limitations in its theoretical positioning of the software itself. it also suffers from my own lack of technical skills, hindering my ability to properly think through the software. with this project i was not as skilled in data visualization technology as i would have liked to be, limiting the ways in which i could think about data visualization itself in relation to the argument about space and gender in relation to namdeo dhasal's poetry.
the result is that the project relies on the mapping and data visualization technology mostly as a repository that facilitates an incorporation of historical materials across different media as well as the opportunity to alter the terrain of mumbai as presented by map with locations important to a repressed history that plays in the systematic marginalization of Dalits in a city that relies on their labor for its existence. while this in itself is a different kind of writing and thinking through history facilitated by technology, just using the technology and not thinking about it as it relates to the knowledge produced is not enough. my future projects will try to tackle that issue as i become more versed in data visualization methodology and programming knowledge.
the original project site is here.
original description:
“A Dalit Bombay Counter-Cartography: Aesthetics of Violence and Stigmatized Bodies
Instructions: Hovering over the pins will show the location’s name. Start with the BDD Chawls, right in the middle of Bombay. Go to the next location specified on the last slide of each location. The argument ends in Kala Ghoda. Following the locations specified will develop the map’s argument. Zooming in will be necessary in order to read some of the media.
About the map:
The map charts a syncretized modernism (a Bombay geomodernism) as the condition of possibility for Dalit literature to negotiate Dalit social and physical spaces in the city. Through a close reading of four of Dhasal’s poetry, I map a counter-cartography where violence becomes an aesthetic experience that is both dehumanizing but also a way through which to negotiate conditions of disposability. Dhasal offers a life-world of Dalit Bombay whose violence is informed by the way “women” are constructed in relation to Dhasal’s Dalit masculinity. The polysemic function of the “whore” in his poetry constructs different versions of women (women with different genders) along the lines of caste, class, religion and stigma, which allows Dalit masculinity to negotiate with the state and make itself a political subject.
The map ends with a discussion on Dhasal’s wife, Malika Amar Shaikh, and the way in which her non-stigmatized body as a Hindu, middle-class becomes a limit she must negotiate in her own subjective experience of Dhasal’s politics/aesthetics of violence.
A text-only version of the essay with bibliography can be downloaded here.
I do not own any of the images that have been reproduced here.”