Sonali Dhanpal

Race in the Garden: Modern Property and Planning in Colonial India The making of modern property in colonial South Asia constructed a hierarchy between colonial subjects, wherein upper caste groups that benefited from hereditary ownership also gained preferential rights to property. In this landscape, I focus on the radial plan of Whitefield near Bangalore’s outskirts, which sought to bring ‘town’ and ‘country’ together in an agricultural commune for an outlying minority group, the Eurasian and Anglo-Indians. Whitefield’s planner and the Association he was part of published a guidebook in 1881 with schemes to acquire land and plans for the commune, complete with architectural drawings. These plans, I argue, were not simply the outcome of metropolitan and colonial imports but the exchange of planning ideas between Britain, South Asia, the United States, and potentially elsewhere. Whitefield was conceptualized as a “geometric utopia” in colonial India, a decade before Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideas, often considered the archetype of utopian planning brought to the colonies. Planning was part of the displacement strategies that sought to resolve colonialism’s contradictions— in this case, to settle Eurasian and Anglo-Indians (a “mixed race” group) created by the colonial encounter through displacing existing peasants. I show how the use of eugenic ideas of acquired characteristics to manipulate urban realities and produce racial hierarchies was implicated in local systems of racialization. Caste was imperative in such a racial regime of modern property.

Here, I focus on a non-dominant group’s use planning and the institutions of property it granted for their “racial uplift” when bureaucratic reforms were increasingly marginalizing such groups. Whitefield’s media-transmitted plans and the mechanisms of land transformation by which such plans could be realized enable us to bring discussions of planning, property, and eugenics together. In this talk, I show how planning was integral to the making and maintenance of racial regimes of property.

Sonali Dhanpal is an architect, a built heritage conservationist, and a historian of modern architecture and urbanism who specializes in histories of colonialism, capitalism, and inequality from the 1800s to the present. She earned a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the Dayananda Sagar School of Architecture, an M.A. in Conservation Studies from the University of York, and a PhD in Architectural History and Theory from Newcastle University. Her research has been supported by a number of awards and fellowships, including from the Institute of Historical Research at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London; the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art; the Society of Architectural Historians; and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Her work has appeared in the journal Planning Perspectives and the edited volume New Planning Histories.

Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Diana Guo, dg3372@columbia.edu; Vinita Govindarajan, vg2588@columbia.edu; Mauricio Enrique Rada Orellana, mer2245@columbia.edu

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is organized by the second year PhD students in Urban Planning: Vinita Govindarajan, Diana Guo, and Mauricio Rada Orellana.