Advertisement

Guarded Luxotopias and Expulsions in New Delhi: Aesthetics and Ideology of Outer and Inner Spaces of an Urban Utopia

  • Tereza Kuldova
Chapter
First Online:
  • 575 Downloads
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology book series (PSUA)

Abstract

This chapter draws us in the world of carefully guarded and gated spaces where spectacular fashion shows present themselves as compressed urban utopias, or rather luxotopias, with all the elements crafted to set apart the worlds of the rich and powerful. Theatrical stage sets of the Delhi fashion ramps evoke a semi-futuristic luxurious ideal nowhere (often Hindu and hyper-modern), condensing the gated elite world onto a few square meters. Juxtaposing the aesthetics and mythologies of the gated fashion shows with the utopias of neoliberal urban planning, the chapter shows how neoliberal luxotopias become both expressions of desire and fears pertaining of the Indian elite clientele and how the elitist vision of a desirable social order is materialized, while multiplying material and aesthetic internal boundaries within a society and expelling those unwanted and undesirable.

Keywords

Construction Project Smart City Muslim Brotherhood National Capital Region Indian Business 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

References

  1. Augé, Marc. 2008. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London: Verso.Google Scholar
  2. Banerjee, Sikata. 2003. Gender and Nationalism: The Masculinization of Hinduism and Female Political Participation in India. Women’s Studies International Forum 26(2): 167–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. Berry, Christopher. 1994. The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. Bhan, Gautam. 2009. ‘This is No Longer the City I Once Knew’: Evictions, the Urban Poor and the Right to the City in Millennial Delhi. Environment & Urbanization 21(1): 127–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. Bhaviskar, Amita. 2003. Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi. International Social Science Journal 55(175): 89–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. Brosius, Christiane. 2009. The Gated Romance of ‘India Shining’: Visualizing Urban Lifestyle in Advertisement of Residential Housing Development. In Popular Culture in Globalized India, ed. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, 174–191. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
  7. Cannadine, David. 2002. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
  8. Ciotti, Manuela. 2012. Post-Colonial Renaissance: ‘Indianness’, Contemporary Art and the Market in the Age of Neoliberal Capital. Third World Quarterly 33(4): 637–655.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. Desai, Santosh. 2010. Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India.Google Scholar
  10. Fanon, Franz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.Google Scholar
  11. Fernandes, Leela. 2004. The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the Restructuring of Urban Space in India. Urban Studies 41(12): 2415–2430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. Ghertner, Asher D. 2011. Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, ed. Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy, 279–306. London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. Ghosh, Bishnupriya. 2014. The Security Aesthetic in Bollywood’s High-Rise Horror. Representations 126(1): 58–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
  15. ———. 2003. The Right to the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(4): 939–941.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. Kaur, Ravinder. 2016. ‘I am India Shining’: Investor-Citizen and the Indelible Icon of Good Times. Journal of Asian: Studies. Online first.Google Scholar
  17. Kuldova, Tereza. 2013. ‘The Maharaja Style’: Royal Chic, Heritage Luxury and the Nomadic Elites. In Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism, ed. Tereza Kuldova, 51–70. Oslo: Akademika Publishing.Google Scholar
  18. ———. 2014. Designing an Illusion of India’s Future Superpowerdom: Of the Rise of Neo-Aristocracy, Hindutva and Philanthrocapitalism. The Unfamiliar: An Anthropological Journal 4(1): 15–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. ———. 2015. Designing Hypermuscular Neoaristocracy: Of Kings, Gangsters and Muscles in Indian Cinema, Fashion and Politics. Film, Fashion and Consumption 3(2): 149–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. ———. 2016a. Fatalist Luxuries: Of Inequality, Wasting and Anti-Work Ethic in India. Cultural Politics 12(1).Google Scholar
  21. ———. 2016b. Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
  22. ———. 2016c. Heads Against Hands and Hierarchies of Creativity: Indian Luxury Embroidery between Craft, Fashion Design and Art. In Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Circulating Images, ed. M. Svašek and B. Meyer. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
  23. ———. 2017a. Designing Interpassive Indianness. In Fashion Tales, ed. Marco Pedroni and Emanuela Mora. London: Intellect Publishing.Google Scholar
  24. ———. 2017b. Forcing ‘Good’ and the Legitimization of Informal Power: Philanthrocapitlism and Artistic Nationalism among the Indian Business Elite. Asienforum: International Quarterly for Asian Studies 48: 1–12.Google Scholar
  25. Lang, Fritz. 1927. Metropolis. US: UFA, Paramount Pictures.Google Scholar
  26. Lukose, Ritty A. 2009. Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  27. McKenzie, Evan. 1996. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Private Residential Government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
  28. Pfaller, Robert. 2003. Little Gestures of Disappearance: Interpassivity and the Theory of Ritual. European Journal of Psychoanalysis 16: 3–16.Google Scholar
  29. ———. 2014. On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners. London: Verso.Google Scholar
  30. ———. 2016. A Philosopher Within an Art Design Academy. Praznine Google Scholar
  31. Roy, Ananya. 2011. The Blockade of the World-Class City: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, ed. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 259–278. London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd..CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  32. Roy, Arundhati. 2014. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.Google Scholar
  33. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  34. Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2009. Craft Matters: Artisans, Development and the Indian Nation. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Tereza Kuldova
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Archaeology, Conservation and HistoryUniversity of OsloOsloNorway

Personalised recommendations

Cite chapter

Buy options