e-flux Architecture
Positions
03/22
Refugee camp at Humayun’s Tomb, Delhi, September 1947. Photo courtesy of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and Google Arts and Culture.
Decolonization needs to be restituted from rote historical
narratives and static exhibitions and instead brought to
the sites of ongoing struggle.
As Shaheen Bagh, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood
in Delhi, became ground zero for a groundswell of protests
in early 2020 against laws dividing the Indian citizenry (yet
again) on the basis of religion, the violence of partitions
erupted once more.15 The forty-foot structure of a
people’s refusal to submit to this violence—an iron and
mesh map of delineated, post-Independence India—alerts
us to a landscape of coalescing histories that are
simultaneously inflected by architectures of protest,
ruptures of nation-states, and the hyperproduction of
borders.
in Karnataka’s Bylakuppe enclave; Bangladesh in
settlements of stacked concrete pipe sections in
Calcutta’s Salt Lake; or the Tamil Eelam in the Sri Lankan
jungles. Their logic, that of “partition,” is one of apartheid,
which gives architectural form to the present. Yet if the
dissenters in Shaheen Bagh are right, then the
subcontinent has inscribed not only lines of control but
practices for their contestation and traversal. It is upon
this legacy of partitions that an architectural futurity
continues to hinge.
During the years that a modernist architectural sensibility
crystallized around the world, camps in South Asia were
shaping imagined and actualized nations: incubating Tibet
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