In his latest, sociologist Sanjay Srivastava explores the Indian city as a masculine construct

Srivastava’s idea of masculinity has less to do with gender and more to do with type, where it “engages with the urban flux in order to domesticate its unsettling nature through gendered power”. The book attributes the design of the modern city to the “ethos of ‘metropolitanism’” that emanates from elite boys’ schools. While this is questionable simply because it generalises the school as a “trapdoor” for the creation of post-nationalism urban thought — of an egalitarian social order that rises above status, caste and religion – it remains the place from which numerous leaders rose in all spheres of Indian modernity. Was this the fraternal order that led to the building of cities like Chandigarh, breaking out of the colonial idiom unshackled from history? Or public housing and commercial complexes built by DDA that became a uniform imagery for Delhi’s newly minted middle class? While mitigating difference, it could be argued that they diminished distinctiveness or worse built a banal identity.

Srivastava culminates his thesis with the newly finished Central Vista project as the site for “re-fashioning the national destiny.” According to him the project represents not so much breaking the shackles of the colonial past but the idea of the bureaucratic, legal and even political “obstructionism”, ironically, by connecting it to an even more distant past, through a leader whose masculinity is in stark contrast to his predecessors. While this thread is tenuous, the connections made between the dark underbelly of the city and that of the “great Indian detective novel” reveals a remote if biased perspective, a reading within a reading.

Almost cinematic in narrative, the book navigates through shadowy streets in urban villages of Delhi, lurking in the dark alleys that house sex clinics that make for a dangerous cocktail “of both human flaws and strengths”. According to the author, sexuality forms the irreducible ground for making urban masculine identities. And it is through this perspective that the city is consumed by them, turning it into a “patrolled neighbourhood” where men exercise their power through moral censorship.

While this has less to do with how the city is designed, it certainly contributes to how it is consumed. There is a rare female in the Capital that can claim that she has never faced harassment or hazard due to her gender. While safety apps and CCTVs in the urban space enable the imagination of the safe return from “the world to the home”, the idea of masculinity according to Srivastava has acquired a new aspirational role magnified, interestingly by none other than the Prime Minister himself. The book sees him as an icon, merging the marginalised and the “territorialized” into a new political idiom of India’s new public modernity, where he advocates appropriate consumption, technological forces and consumerism all the while remaining true to traditionalism.

Complex and curious, the book makes for a meandering read of our city as a social construct. Combining mobilities with patriarchies, behaviour with culture, sexuality with anxieties and then consumerism with politics, it allows one to celebrate the hyper reality of the Indian city, soaking in the minutest of gestures as clues-to its new face.

Looking at the modern city not as a neutral space but one which is rife with imbalances and inequalities that challenge gender roles is perhaps the authentic experiment of the book. Should gender become a viable diagram or discourse in the changing design of the Indian city? The answer is obvious. It must. As Shakespeare once famously put it, “what is the city but the people?”

Suparna Bhalla is a Delhi-based architect.