WHILE there are differences between cultures, culture itself is grounded in interculturality, the exception being cultures that are isolated such as of the Jarawa tribes of the Andaman Islands. If intersubjectivity is constitutive of the personal self à la George Herbert Mead, interculturality is surely the substance of the cultural self, the personal and the cultural selves being deeply imbricated. Language and communication are universals and just as an address awakens us to self-awareness,¹ cultural encounters awaken the self to the awareness of different life forms.

The city is crucial for civilizations and cultures. A man without a city is a beast or a god, exaggerated Saul Bellow! In the city one encounters strangers and meets and interacts with numerous cultural others. The city has historically framed encounters between merchants, warriors, artisans, musicians, priests and pilgrims, which occur in its neighbourhoods, markets, streets.

The extent of interaction in history has varied with the character of the city. The fortress city was hierarchical and often had considerable cultural uniformity. Trading and imperial cities have by contrast been characterized by a high degree of cultural diversity, as also cities which have been intellectual centres or have had craftspersons guilds.

In the mega-city and the megalopolis there is curiously both greater distancing and intimacy. In cities of the global South, gated neighbourhoods constitute the slum as their other. The former are often marked by individuation while the slum suggests an effort to create community amidst the crowd, the hypothetical village in the city!

The city is crucial to the interculturality of communities and individuals, cultures and civilizations. Nationalizing cultures, however, have also been known to exorcize their interculturality. The Nazis did so by exterminating Jews and gypsies, banishing poets, philosophers and homosexuals. Aryan civilization was made clean!

As the nation states of South Asia came into being, the most densely intercultural areas of the city were witness to terrible carnage: Mehrauli and Nizamuddin in Delhi, Hira Mandi and Natak Para in Lahore and Dacca. East Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories have been colonized by Israel; a wall has created faultlines from shared memory, history and identity. From an older multiethnic if mosaic model, Jerusalem has now become a deeply polarized city. Israeli sovereignty ensures the permanent minoritization of Arabs so that Jewish interests are given priority in public housing, urban planning, municipal services and there is continuing expropriation of Arab land for new Jewish settlements.² Other such divided cities include Beirut, Nicosia and Belfast. We know of Beirut’s massacre of the camps where Palestinians had to seek the permission of the Mufti to eat the flesh of their own dead! One can only imagine the wretched inhumanity they had been reduced to.

If the combination of imperium, capital and state is the source of this violence in Lebanon and Israel, the effort to create a socialist utopia too has not lagged behind. Phnom Penh was rendered a ghostly city and the ancient interculturality of Angkor Vat erased after history’s greatest deurbanization campaign where even mourners were not allowed to dwell.

 

How does one counter this formation of polarized cities? In a recent work, Wood and Landry advocate the intercultural city, emphasizing the need to move from diversity deficit to diversity advantage for neighbourhoods, cities and nations.³ They are interested in urban encounter, historical cosmopolitan cities and living together, themes we have explored in a project on Asian cities.⁴ Diversity advantage is about the benefits of cross-cultural interaction. The authors regard interculturalism as a quest for cosmopolitanism. The intercultural city is defined by the capacity of people to understand and empathize with another’s view of the world. It builds on Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis (1954), which is that contact between different groups and persons can challenge stereotypes and foster favourable views of minorities. It is contrasted with the multicultural approach in which communities are defined by their ethnicity and consulted in isolation.

 

One needs to note that a particular definition of ‘social diversity’ is currently being espoused by corporate capitalism as being more conducive to technological innovation, productivity and economic growth. Workforce diversity, seen as conducive to competitiveness and diversity per se, is viewed instrumentally as fostering a ‘creative class’. From Silicon Valley to Singapore, foreign nationals are marked as preferred citizens – in the former some 24-28 per cent companies are founded by Indians and Chinese. Wood and Landry laud them as global entrepreneurs or ‘hybrid innovators’ – hybridity being defined by biogenetic terms rather than with any implications for a conversation of cultures or ideas. They comment, ‘For cities to unlock the benefits of cultural diversity – to realize the diversity advantage or dividend – they need to become more intercultural… But they also need to be seedbeds in which the new social, economic and technological ideas that ensue can be nurtured and grown.’⁵ By contrast, Ong presents a strong critique of this view, highlighting the ethnic tensions preferred citizenship can entail.⁶

Wood and Landry advocate a ‘new intercultural citizenship’, arguing that because cities bear greater responsibility for managing and ministering to migrant populations they should be vested with autonomy and powers to grant citizenship.⁷ They overlook the whitening/blackening involved in citizenship debates. Ong has pointed out how the Chinese have become preferred citizens, contrasted with the blackening of Cambodians in the US.⁸ Stereotypically, the latter are not seen as potentially part of the ‘creative class’.

 

Nonetheless, Wood and Landry highlight significant experiments in western cities. The Sense of Place campaign of the Manchester City Council explored for a year what the city means to people as they were urged to talk about their neighbourhood and the city for purposes of facilitating better understanding.⁹ Turin developed a project of supporting historically intercultural neighbourhoods. The formation of neighbourhood committees in conflict zones led to the rebuilding of cities in Bosnia marked by massacres. In the Madrid project on Convivencia, an intercultural laboratory was established under its plan for social and intercultural coexistence.

Wood and Landry recommend masterplanning interculturally so that land use factors in social inclusion, taking into account cultural, gender and generational sensitivities. Hence, they recognize the vibrancy of street markets that derive from the interaction between people and products and foster intercultural spaces of inter-dependence and habitual engagement, such that what Ash Amin calls ‘micro publics’ come together in a variety of settings – including in libraries, educational institutions, and sports and recreation. Regrettably, faith schools are seen as incompatible with an intercultural society. I will shortly return to the point about how the masterplan can authorize foreign ‘experts’ and how the ‘sacred’ remains outside their zone of cognition in my subsequent discussion of Delhi.

 

Kymlicka points to the emergence of a ‘multicultural nation state’ in the western world defined by three criteria – of the state belonging equally to all citizens and not just to dominant national groups; that assimilationist and exclusionary nation building be substituted by policies of recognition and accommodation; and that there be acknowledgment of historical injustice.¹⁰ He recognizes that there may be multiculturalism at the national level in the recognition and protection of minority rights, but avoidance of inter-group contact at the local level. Hence, Kymlicka advocates giving a greater emphasis to the city and the local to build a new form of cross-cultural polity and citizenship, pointing out that many people prefer global inter-culturalism, focused on learning about distant/world cultures, to local inter-culturalism, focused on learning about neighbouring groups. Wood and Landry follow Kymlicka in stressing the latter.

This can be the basis for building a new form of local intercultural leadership and citizenship and the creative management of conflict. An intercultural city, Wood and Landry assert, ‘must be an engaged, argumentative and an essentially political place.’¹¹ Their position draws upon Chantal Mouffe who suggests that ‘antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries… from the perspective of "agonistic pluralism" the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism.’ ‘Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict.’¹²

 

The question is not merely of ethnic diversity in cities, but also of how open they are to movement between different communities, the extent to which ethnicities mix, cooperate and collaborate. Both quantitative and qualitative indicators might be used to assess how (transparency)/openness and inclusiveness can be aspects of institutions. This includes how the business environment might address issues of ethnic diversity in employment practices, ownership of local businesses and foreign links of companies.

With respect to civil society, there are issues of ethnically and culturally mixed business associations, political parties and movements and the extent of recourse to images of the Other in media. Further, public space needs to contend with mixing in housing and neighbourhoods, the security and mobility of ethnic minorities, their participation in public facilities, and their perceptions of inclusiveness with respect to city institutions. The need is for city visions that emphasize welcoming outsiders.

City making and city management emerge as important themes in Wood and Landry’s discussion. ‘Most larger cities are passively tolerant of outsiders and people live side by side. But they do not actively promote engagement with the "Other" and crossing boundaries. Instead, spatial segregation is fostered by both infrastructure and settlement. Such is the ecology of the new civics,’ they comment.

In older cities diversity was often not just tolerated but embraced, whether for purposes of empire or trade. The cultures of these cities were not secular and often there was a dominant religion. Intercultural cities of the 21st century will have to review the fields of education, public spaces, housing, neighbourhoods, police, business and economy, sports and arts. They might establish an intercultural observatory to monitor good practice as has been done in Madrid; establish city-wide interfaith consultative forums, train politicians and public officials who are likely to suffer from perils of multiculturalism, and so on.

 

Let us examine closely two moments in the making of Delhi to suggest that there are certain components of interculturality which this West-centred debate has tended to miss. For one, there is the role of sacralized interculturality fashioned fairly early in the history of Delhi. Following the upheaval caused by the Mongols and the destruction of cities and centres of learning such as Baghdad (marked by massacres and razed mosques), a phenomenal migration of scholars and sufis, princes and poets took place from Iran and Central Asia that contributed to the making of Delhi, the capital of the fledgling Sultanate. Delhi was recognized as a centre of Islamic studies and mysticism by the end of the 13th century and came to be known as Hazrat-i Dilli, Dilli Sharif, Dar-ul Auliya, Baghdad-i Hind and Khurd-i Mecca.¹³

Delhi and Lahore like Bukhara, Nishapur and Herat became a part of the Perso-Turkic Islamicate world.¹⁴ We need to remember also that there was substantial intercultural loss in this process as it exacerbated the decline of Buddhism and its great monasteries. The inscription of the congregational mosque built in Mehrauli mentions its building at the cost of 27 Hindu and Jain temples from which materials had been plundered for the new structure.¹⁵ Also, the mere presence of migrants does not necessarily foster interculturality. The Turko-Afghan ruling group, based on an intercultural alliance surely, launched a major drive colonizing land, cutting down forests, sedentarizing and domesticating pastoralists – violence I have written about elsewhere.¹⁶

 

The state did patronize Persian scribes, writers, and poets. But Delhi became known for its holy men and the identity of the city came not from mosques or the ulama but from the tradition of holy men, the sufis that came to India from Khurasan (northeast of modern Iran and modern Afghanistan), where there was a vigorous sufi tradition in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Khwaja Qutubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, Khalifa of Muinuddin Chishti believed that Delhi would not be destroyed so long as his shrine existed! Baba Farid, the sufi poet of Punjab (Pakistan) was his murid (disciple) and his disciple, in turn, was Shaikh Nizamuddin Awliya who dominated the city for 60 years. Hence Delhi became known as Bais Khwaja ji Chaukhat, the threshold of 22 sufis. Sufi shrines represented a contrast to scholastic, legalist Islam and were seen as relating to dar ul ishq.¹⁷ The sufis were great patrons of art and literature and provided a crucial impetus to all the Indian languages. Namvar Singh argues that they introduced the idea of prem (love) into medieval cultures from where it was picked up by Krishna bhakti. Prior to that the Indian purusharthas included kama (eros) but not prem.¹⁸

 

The sufis could also be arrogant and demonstrate jalal or wrath. This capacity for malignancy and supernatural and even shamanistic powers has ancient Indian but also Turkish and other Central Asian sources. Recognition came from the perception that the sufi was a ‘recipient of divine grace… visible ecstasy, often of a shamanistic type.’ It is interesting that the last of the great Chishti saints should say in his declaration on the shar`iat as the Divine secret, that he has heard talk of haqiqat not only from Haidaris, Qalandars, Mulhids and Zindiqs, but also from Jogis, Brahmans and Gurus.¹⁹ There is a cognition of a deep sharing rather than of an ethnicized multi-culturality.

The power of the sufis derived from poetic sensibility, sung or chanted verse set to music – Qutb al-Din Bakhtyar Kaki passed away after four days of ecstasy generated by the recital of a Persian couplet (bait). The debate on the lawfulness of sama (sessions of mystic music) had Chishti and Suhrawardi shaikhs on the same side against the Shaikh al-Islam, Najm al-Din Sughra. Nizamuddin was in near confrontation with the three Khalji sultans and sufi shaikhs were coerced by Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. The role of the sufic khanqah (hospice) was particularly important where disciples and dependants were fed and travellers accommodated in accord with Muslim precepts and expectations of hospitality.

Wrote Amir Khusrau,

‘Delhi, the refuge of faith and equity

Delhi is the garden of paradise

May its prosperity be long lived

If Mecca happens to learn about this garden

It may circumambulate Hindustan.’

Ibn Batuta eulogized, ‘Dihli, the metropolis of India, (is) a vast and magnificent city, uniting beauty with strength. It is surrounded by a wall that has no equal in the world, and is the largest city in the entire Muslim Orient.’

 

Aquil raises the question also of an intrinsic antagonism spurred by conversion, for one may presume that pir followings became significant sources of Islamization for peasant groups already influenced by the magico-mystical aspects of sufism and various Hindu sects. He also acknowledges the acculturation of Islam in which the pre/non-Islamic and pagan was incorporated and Islamic principles accordingly adapted. Thus Zinda Pir was a holy man associated with a hot sulphur spring; Shaikh Sarwar was said to be originally a ‘fertilizing earth-god of the Hindu’; Guga Pir was a Rajput guru; and Khwaja Khizr had similar pagan origins as a god of water.

The interculturality created sharedness of Islamic and non-Islamic practices, but also between the Sunni and Shi’i. Ali was a major symbol in Sunni sufi shrines and sufi lineages usually derive not from the Prophet but from Ali. These suggest the modification of the stark, rigid monotheism of the Prophet²⁰ and the austerity of legalist Islam. It was an Islam in which the poor and deprived of all faiths could find solace and refuge.

 

In 1947 not only was there enormous human loss, but what was threatened was the sacral interculturality of Delhi. Mosques and dargahs were closed down, their imams and sajjada nashins having fled to the refugee camps or to Pakistan. The drive to reopen them came from civil society: Gandhi was insistent that the Urs in Mehrauli be held once again and khadims from Ajmer were invited to organize this. In the Nizamuddin area pandits of a local temple petitioned the authorities that the mosque be made active once again.

In Ward and Landry’s secular humanist approach to contemporary cities there is little recognition of the sacred life of older cities and for the narratives of martyrdom that mark its streets and are the bearers of immense meaning. In the case of Delhi there is the martyrdom of the Jewish-Muslim sufi Sarmad Shahid by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb who also killed his older brother, Dara Shikoh. Dara, the philosopher-prince who believed that drawing boundaries between religions is like drawing a line on water and who was so beloved of his people that Delhi wept at his beheading. Delhi was also marked by the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur and Gandhi.

 

Ward and Landry betray, moreover, a misplaced optimism in state planning and the idea of a masterplan. As Ravi Sundaram points out, Delhi’s masterplan relates to a period of urban modernism of the 1950s when many architects and the prime minister himself were taken by the idea of architecture as transformative.²¹ Nehru expressed the idea that a city should be (as Chandigarh was) ‘free of the existing encumbrances of old towns and traditions.’²² Early postcolonial urban policy was derivative from American liberal modernism, which came to India via the Ford Foundation. Its concerns were framed by modernization and development theory, seen as crucial in countering the communist bloc. A global model of the liberal social preferred the regionalist to the ‘metropolitanist’ model as was advocated by Lewis Mumford and Albert Mayer. A decadal review of the masterplan critiqued it for being based on ‘western’ models of planning, for having marginalized the unorganized sector, and for disrupting the link between people and livelihoods in Shahjehanabad ‘by a mechanical separation of land implied in zoning superimposed on a city form evolved through centuries.’²³

In liberal and secular discourse, however, the sacral underlife of the city, rendered horrifically fragile by the violence of 1947 and 1984 does not figure. In its globalized, neoliberal version diversity is rendered functional and seen as arising from the state’s managerial capacities. It is seen as enhancing productivity rather than contributing to the intercultural fashioning of human selfhood. Gandhi signals this intercultural self. In Attenborough’s film, Gandhi, he says, ‘I am a Muslim, and a Hindu and a Christian,’ an echo of his Noakhali speech – ‘Main hindu bhi hun, musalman bhi, isai bhi... ham sab ye sab hain’ (I am Hindu, also Muslim, also Christian, all of us are these). What better expression of the interculturality of culture and the self. How close this is to Desmond Tutu’s idea of ubuntu, meaning I am through you.

 

For Gandhi as for Simone Weil, self-suffering was paramount. Weil suggested that the recognition of the needs of others is the first step to shared humanity. The first quality of being human is to recognize hunger in another – the need for food, shelter, clothing, education, community. There is the hunger that arises from the moral condition of humans also. There is then an obligation to the other, a dialogicity established as soon as we recognize the needs of others.²⁴ The quest for this is a journey often in the dark, without a light, and sometimes without a guide, demanding the ultimate sacrifice, but it is characterized by hope. This is about deep sharing on which depends the possibility of cosmopolitan futures.

 

Footnotes:

1. I am drawing here on the formulation so powerfully made by Ramchandra Gandhi in, The Availability of Religious Ideas. Macmillan, London, 1976.

2. R. Torstrick, The Limits of Coexistence: Identity Politics in Israel. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2000.

3. P. Wood and C. Landry, The Intercultural City: Planning to Make the Most of Diversity. Earthscan, London, 2008, chs. 6-7.

4. S. Mayaram (ed.), The Other Global City. Routledge, London and New York, 2009.

5. P. Wood and C. Landry, op cit., pp. 244, 222-3.

6.. A. Ong, ‘Intelligent City: From Ethnic Governmentality to Ethnic Evolutionarism’, in S. Mayaram (ed.), The Other Global City. Routledge, London and New York, 2009, pp. 86-97.

7. P. Wood and C. Landry, op cit., p. 273.

8. A. Ong, Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003, p. 157.

9. P. Wood and C. Landry, op cit., p. 249. Also http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/culture/cities/AG_en.pdf.

10. W. Kymlicka, ‘Multicultural States and Intercultural Citizens’, Theory and Research in Education 1, 2003, pp. 147-69.

11. P. Wood and C. Landry, op cit., p. 280.

12. C. Mouffe (ed.), The Democratic Paradox. Verso, London, 2000.

13, R. Aquil, ‘Hazrat-i-Dehli: The Making of the Chishti Sufi Centre and the Stronghold of Islam’, South Asia Research 28, 2008, pp. 23-48; M. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India c. 1200-1800. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004; S. Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192-1286. Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007.

14. M. Alam, ibid., pp. 116-8.

15. S. Digby, ‘The Sufi Shaikh as a Source of Authority in Medieval India’, Islam et Societe en Asie du Sud, Purusartha 9, 1986, pp. 57-77.

16. S. Mayaram, Against History, Against State: Counterperspectives From the Margins. Columbia University Press, New York and London, 2003.

17. S. Kumar, ‘Reflections on Past and Present of Sufi Shrines in Delhi’ (talk), India International Centre, Delhi, 2006.

18. N. Singh, Chairperson’s comments at seminar by Sudipta Kaviraj on ‘Abhinavabharati: A Reading’, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, 16 July 2008.

19. S. Digby, op cit.

20. M. Currie, The Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-din Chishti of Ajmer. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989, p. 17.

21. R. Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism. Routledge, London, New York, New Delhi, 2010.

22. Ravi Kalia, cited in R. Sundaram, ibid., p. 30.

23. In Sundaram, op cit., p. 63.

24. See for a discussion, S. Visvanathan, The Children of Nature: Sacred Manifestation and Popular Culture in Tiruvannamalai (forthcoming).