so good to see all of you here I just want to begin by thanking the organizers of interdisciplin area especially sankalp and Lux and Yasha and all the others who've done so much work including feeding us sandwiches and giving us water right before we came up here because clearly we need our strength to face a fearsome audience like all of you um but it's good to see you and thank you to all of you for organizing this um my talk today is called Desiring Delhi it's uh part of a new book I'm working on and this is the first airing that this book is getting so um it's in a very nent stage I would love to hear from all of you your thoughts on this um this is a book it's supposed to be a crossover book so not entirely an academic book called a history of desire in India and this is one of the chapters on that on on Desiring Delhi and the question that I want to ask and I do ask of this in this chapter is about whether cities can feel desire because usually when we think about desire we think about it as having human agents and human subjects and so my question is can Ci's feel desire and if so what form does that desire take and since this is a conference about Crossing Borders and crossing boundaries I'm taking that invitation literally and I want to begin by thinking about what it means to cross borders and so I want to show you all a little um clip an ad that no doubt all of you have seen before um and all of you have cried over before and so if you cry today too I'm not responsible responsible for it because you've cried already but I'm going to show it to you anyway and um for fore helloe foree foree happy birthday this ad was called The Reunion the reunion is successful because it is a well-made film with an emotionally resonant soundtrack but it makes us cry also because it Taps into three reservoirs of emotion that run deep in the subcontinent the first Reservoir incredibly Rich historic and intense is the sociosexual bond between men Delhi has a long publicly recorded history of male homosexual cultures the great poet Mir Taki Meir claims in the 18th century that the boys of Delhi with their caps arai have destroyed their lovers such a culture was not only homosexual but also homosocial with men publicly bonding with each other Indian men have inherited this tradition fully even when they are not sexually involved with one another they openly hold hands and walk with their arms around each other the male body relation is considered to be a man's primary emotional bond and the yarana or male friendship Trope in Hindi Cinema is living testimony to the emotional strength of this Bond exemplified poignantly by amitab bachan Shashi Kapur Rajesh Kanna Amir Khan SEF Ali Khan and others the yarana that exceeds barriers that breaks boundaries exerts a strong pull on the Indian psyche equally intense is the relationship between cities that Google flaunts by using both Delhi and lahor as the physical backdrop for the film we see delhi's Jama Majid in India Gate and Lor's badshah mosque the architectural features of the two City bring into Focus the emotional bond of the two men just as the culturally Rich Lor and Delhi are often considered twins of one another so too are we asked to think of balev and Yousef as twins separated by a cruel fate cities and men are both considered Ys and finally the film uses explicit reference to the traumas of partition in 1947 to create create its emotional impact against this backdrop of nostalgic men and bloody partitions the film envisions the possibility and the fantasy of reunion between cities and people across time and historical scars the ad is successful then because it touches a nerve that far exceeds the lived experiences of any individual Indian or Pakistani it Taps into a collective and historical Desire by which we continue to be marked today this ad is only 2 years old but it touches all of us even today the ad reunites balev and Yousef but equally it brings into frame A Love Affair between cities and histories that have been driven by partitions can cities love one another as much as two men can can lore feel a desire for Delhi that is matched by delhi's yearning for laor if cities are major players in the drama of Desire then what is striking is the way in which the cities themselves and not just the inhabitants play this role we can ask therefore how does Delhi feel desire what shapes its Desiring configurations how does one feel desire for Delhi much like the city's historical and Monumental structures this question too solicits a multi-layered response and today I will just touch on two of those layers the first involves the pain of partition and the second paradoxically suggests the increased desire that is engendered by such repeated loss intazar Hussein describes An Occurrence that takes us back all the way to 300 BC at which point Delhi was called Indra prasa and was the home city of the pandas in the Mahabharata husse insists that the idea of loss generated as recently as the Exile and migration during the partition of 1947 is a repetition of what people have experienced since the days of the Mahabharata even in those days he says the partition of the land and the kingdom between members of the same family was a violent event partition then is a repeated occurrence in Delhi 1947 is only the most recent example of a violent tearing apart but even though Delhi has been witness to several partitions perhaps the most consequential to a history of Desire even more than the 1947 partition on which the Google ad depends is the bloody battle waged here in 1857 these uprisings were not the first that Delhi had seen and nor were they the last but this first war of independence against the British this Mutiny tried to change the patterns of desire in the city the British were famously conservative about mixing with Indians resident in the country unlike the denisons of Delhi for centuries before them all of whom lived here and intermingled both socially and sexually we can move the British passed laws in the 1820s preventing misation rulers before them from the Chans onwards regularly married locally and became assimilated in the into the cities of Delhi this process of desirous assimilation was such a strong current in the city that the mugal emperor Shah Jahan build a of delhi's iconic Red Fort was three quarters rajput 1/8 Persian and 1/8th Central asan of which half was mugal and half Turk in other words this mugal Emperor was only 116th ethnically mugul the Chans Tomar Lis mugal all became Delhi but not so the British of the 19th century despite their massive building projects across the city thus the Battle of 1857 was nothing less than a war between two versions of Desire the first was a mingled hybrid desire in which sexual inclinations languages religions mingled widely over the centuries without being able to tell where the one ended and the other began the second version of Desire what was at stake for the British suggested absolute Mo moral difference between religions and desires as well as a hierarchy among them this was the version that resulted both in the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the section 377 that's being fought in the courts is an inhabitant of this Penal Code it resulted both in the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the partition of 1947 this idea that things can be completely separated and put into different categories though focusing on 1947 then the Google ad picks up also on this moment of sundering in 1857 when the Red Fort moved from being the Beating Heart of the capital city to becoming a barracks in which the British lived cultures were torn apart and Delhi was subjected to a loss from which it has been almost impossible to recover the sense of loss however has given rise to a stubborn insistence that partition can be reversed the script for Bev and yousef's tearful reunion draws its material then from a traum Matic history of repeated partitions a desire for a glorious Deli and finally the desire to undo partition's worst foes and Wars even if only in fantasy what marks deli's desire then is not only that it has frequently hosted cross dressing mhas or poetry sessions all that its patron saint nudin Olia was the subject of Amir K's love poetry all that its high court in 2009 read down the phobic section 377 of the Indian Penal Code what marks delhi's desire is that it is inevitably linked to partition and loss conquerors and Poets from Afghanistan and Central Asia and the dean and the western coast and Persia have all won Delhi but they have also all lost it so much so that the desirable idea of possessing Delhi is always tinged with the thrilling possib abity of losing Delhi or of possessing a Delhi that is present only as lost but the desire for Delhi the desire in Delhi the desire of Delhi is marked not only by ideas of partition and loss this desire is also marked by its profusion by the way in which it has accreted over the ages rather than being diminished the longings of its multiple inhabitants from different parts of the world have not been replaced by each new ruler but have gathered layers against which one continues to stub one's toe while walking around the city rather than a diminution then loss here has resulted in a profusion there is simply too much here and has been for centuries Delhi loses its charms sees them go to seed and then Witnesses new ones rise up in their place and even when the new ones go up the old ones have not gone away they live on in poems Legends and sometimes even as the architectural base for other monuments Delhi is a city of desires that overlap with one another messily where the past can never fully be put behind us but continues to haunt our present take for instance the famous Loi Gardens its compound has been built alike by the Lois in the 16th century and the British in the 20th century when lady Willington organized the site into an English Park men and women Nestle against one another in the undergrowth and within the walls of its ruins the loss of the Lois forms the bed on which lovers live out their desires they come here to kiss and fondle impartial view of the Walkers men walk about holding hands not exciting comment or stairs women saunter by themselves or in pairs like other parks in the city Loi Gardens accommodates lovers of all Stripes unlike some other parks though these different lovers blend into the many layers of history that forms their bedroom the ghosts of Delhi past illuminated at night in the tombs of the Lis have generated desires that are steeped in the city no matter what the demographic of who might be living in the city at that moment Deli allows us to think about desire then not just in relation to human actors but also in relation to their physical settings mangled histories and and a collective sense of loss the wealth of poetry about the city for instance speaks of its monumentality as being a cause of Desire this Monumental desire has been commemorated in brj Basha Persian hindii hindustani Hindi and uddu in a recent nazam or poem Muhammad Ali describes delhi's desire in a language that is itself multiple and takes cognizance of the fact that the city's physical it is at the heart of its desirability and I will just read the um oh this is the English translation okay I'll read just the English translation Delhi the mo in your eye is the kutub Minar Delhi Your Heart of Stone is the Lilla Deli in your wallet you have gb's grave Let It Be old Deli do not take off your clothes the nazam suggests that the ruins of old buildings are sexy deli's monuments limb the city's physical space and become in a slightly creepy way marks on its body to be caressed and lingered over on the one hand and covered up and protected on the other Deli is both old and has an old Deli as it so it is a beloved whose desirability exists as a thing of the past but which is no less a thing of beauty because of that pastness indeed there is a timelessness to this idea of Deli as a destroyed and magnificent profusion so much so that even a lament for delhi's lost Glory ends up paying homage to its unsurpassed Beauty Jan Nar akar's despairing couplet and jannar akar is the father of Javed akar and the grandfather of faran akar who is probably the only akar you know um Jan Nar akar's despairing couplet and again I'm going to read just the U English and I think we can move to the next slide Delhi where your glorious streets I now walk down your roads with my head bent in shame even this cannot but stand testimony testimony to the glory of Delhi the strain of nostalgia repeatedly attached to the city suggests both that delhi's desirability is pasted and that the city is the current object of Desire after all Deli is the addresse of the poem in the current moment equally for akar it is the streets of Delhi which are described as beautiful the physical structures on which we walk the destroyed Garden is both dead and blooming in its physical decrepitude the heart or Dill is worthy of being in Dilly because Delhi and Delhi streets have desire in them what is particularly crucial about paying attention to these streets is that they sidestep our usual conversations about human sexuality or rather they lead us up a different path both temporally and spatially the desire of Delhi is not equal to the desire of the people who currently live in Delhi at the very least it also includes the desires of those who have lived in Delhi for centuries past and ever since equally the desire of Delhi is not a desire about individual human beings and their sexual proclivities no matter over how long a period of time desire here is rarely about individuals instead it involves non-human actors as much as it does people it shows us that cities too can be marked traumatized emboldened by desire buildings speak monuments extol tombs announce ruins declaim houses Embrace streets kiss Bowes tremble desire in Delhi is animalistic mon Monumental and StreetWise every bit as it is human the desire of Delhi the desire for Delhi involves an entire landscape of buildings ruins Foods PS it is based on dilapidation depredation passions and partitions desire here is not a sentence that stops IT extends outward to Lor to other cities deepened by partitions and expanded by a sense that far from being diminished it burns more brightly in the fires of loss Delhi is the land of Desire Without End thank you