Unruly Monuments has taken you, dear reader, on a walk among picturesque landscapes and knowledge-generating museums, to see the splendor of imperial displays, inside the anatomy of the traveler's archive via postcards and touristic encounters, to a time of rupture and displacement inside Partition refugee camps, and finally to the cinema. The analysis of form— whether in terms of landscapes, museums, performative displays, postcard images, travel encounters, refugee camps, or films—has shown how an archive of presences and absences shapes the monument. At every instance, we have seen how order was created at the monument and the ways in which disorder ensued or could be read into the failure of the order itself. We paid attention to the everyday, the routine, untangled knowable public transcripts, illuminated strategic excisions and hidden transcripts, juxtaposed pieces of evidence that had not yet been analyzed in conjunction, read archival material against the grain, and found archival layers in unfamiliar places. I began each chapter by inserting myself, either as a scholar, a tourist, a young child, a schoolgirl, or as a lover of literature and film songs, in order to show that we are deeply interconnected with our objects and spaces of study. My hope is that in these connections and the questions they engender, perchance, we may find unbounded, unruly, interdependent, heterogenous futures that help us move away from bounded homogeneity. This examination has also, one hopes, led to a broader understanding of how different publics create, challenge, and relate to monuments and also how varying groups may find a place in them as unruly but heterogenous, hopeful beings.

Amidst the 2014 general election, VCK parliamentary candidate D. Ravikumar stands in an open-air jeep as it barrels down the pothole-stricken roads stitching together remote villages across Tiruvallur district, northern Tamil Nadu. Today, a sizeable entourage has amassed behind his campaign vehicle. It includes some twenty-odd SUVs followed by a sea of motorcycles with monitors from the ECI nipping at their heels. Unbeknownst to the campaign team, the caravan went off route when a wrong turn ushered the convoy into the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. This mistake becomes apparent only after a polite bystander informs the candidate's driver that he is no longer in Tamil Nadu. This news quickly travels up the chain of command, prompting the candidate's microphone to be cut mid-speech as campaign leaders are apprised of their blunder. In quick succession, the navigator is cursed, engines roar to life, and the convoy swiftly lurches back toward Tamil Nadu. Today, there is a palpable anxiety in the air due to the sheer number of far-flung villages left to visit before ECI monitors bring the day's activities to an abrupt halt at 10:00 pm. If a village is omitted, campaign organizers fear that their local workers, who have assembled their community and are waiting impatiently with firecrackers and decorative shawls to welcome the caravan, may interpret their absence as a personal slight, leaving them more susceptible to “influence money” doled out by rival party operatives.

Presently immersed in a two-week blitz across Tiruvallur district, the motley convoy of jeeps, SUVs, motorcycles, and auto-rickshaws—the vehicles vary by day depending on the local terrain—traverses half of a legislative assembly constituency each day. As parliamentary districts typically consist of six legislative constituencies, this involves twelve days of grueling dawn-till-dusk electioneering in which the candidate interacts with voters throughout the region. While preparations begin well before sunrise, electioneering kicks off by 9 a.m. and concludes abruptly at 10 p.m., if election monitors are present A festive atmosphere greets the candidate and his entourage at each stop as they race across the constituency at breakneck speed. First, firecrackers announce their imminent arrival.

Prologue

Manto This is the last sentence of Sa’adat Hasan Manto's “Toba Tek Singh,” a story that has had an abiding impact on me. Originally written in Urdu, it was published in 1953 in the Lahore-based magazine Savera. Manto's rather matter-of-fact, Kafkaesque commentary on the violence of the Partition has since stayed with me as a searing critique of the violence of the nation-state and its boundaries, as well as a compassionate voice for the marginalized. Toba Tek Singh happens to be the name of a town in Pakistan's Punjab province, but due to its word structure, can also be the name of a man. Manto uses this collapsibility between the land and the human to narrate the Indo– Pak Partition—an event that threw into question the associations people had with the land they had long inhabited and called home.

In the story, the insane yet intrepid protagonist, Toba Tek Singh, is an inmate in a lunatic asylum in Pakistan, who, being Sikh, is to be exchanged for Muslim lunatics from India. His name is actually Bishan Singh, but he is called Toba Tek Singh in the asylum because he says he belonged to a village of the same name and keeps repeating that name, wanting to return to it urgently.

On the river Ganges in Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta), there is a small ghat (pier) bearing the name of a faraway South American country – the Surinam Ghat. Seemingly out of place in a port city about 15,000 kilometres away from Surinam, it is named after the Surinam Depot, which used to accommodate Indian labourers migrating to the erstwhile Dutch colony as plantation workers. In fact, for a large part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the port side of Calcutta was dotted with buildings like the Trinidad Depot, Mauritius Depot, British Guiana Depot and Surinam Depot – physical remnants of an 80-year-long trade in Indian labourers. The abolition of slavery in 1833 had prompted the Indian indenture trade, whereby Indian labourers migrated to European plantation colonies to work in the production of sugar. Despite being a key port in the global indenture trade and a site for debating the terms of indenture, Calcutta has remained entirely unexplored in scholarship. This book sets out to insert the British Indian capital of Calcutta into the history of indenture, offering a history of Calcuttans shaping colonial labour on a global stage. Instead of focusing on plantation colonies that labourers migrated to, it refocuses indenture literature on a port city that they embarked from.

Bringing sugar to the metropolitan plate has a long and complicated history, featuring overseas plantation colonies, absentee planters, lucrative commodity trade, labour migration across continents, slavery and various forms of unfree labour. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire, the empire straddled several plantation colonies.

Scholarship on Indian indenture has seen several historiographical turns over the years – from the overarching migration histories of the 1950s and the administrative histories of the 1960s and 1970s to the colony-focused histories that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. The end of the century saw an increasing focus on migrants’ experience of recruitment, passage and plantation, and the publication of Hugh Tinker's A New System of Slavery encouraged reflection on the vestiges of slavery while also prompting works that emphasised the autonomous agency of labourers in shaping their own economic futures.1 The last two decades have seen an exciting shift in the field, as scholars are rejecting plantation colonies as the natural boundaries for framing indenture research and moving outside the ‘indenture bubble’ to draw links with other labour systems and wider imperial processes. Historians are increasingly framing indenture within the overseas movements of convicts, labourers, lascars and servants, interrogating the implications of indenture research on understandings of colonial power and labour rights, and exploring the interplay of race and the body in the Indian indenture trade.2 Increasingly, works have foregrounded connections between plantation colonies and explored spaces beyond the sugar colonies.3 Yet others have flipped the narrative of indentured migrants as producers to explore their role as consumers, discussing how sale, taxation and consumption (of opium and cannabis, for instance) were ways of maintaining control over indentured Indians.4 Indeed, the future of indenture research seems to be moving towards bringing indenture out of the slavery–indenture dichotomy and out of siloed colony-focused studies.

On September 18–19, 1982, the Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI; Dalit Panther Movement) convened its inaugural symposium in Madurai. In preparation, DPI chairman A. Malaichamy, a spindly twenty-eight-year-old law student, publicized the meeting among Dalit public sector employees, educators, lawyers, students, and activists, addressing them as “the spark that will ignite tomorrow's fire.” On a printed invitation circulated ahead of the symposium, he bemoaned that despite thirty-five years of independence, Dalit socio-economic development remained stagnant and the community languished as an exploited “toiling class.” Pledging that Dalits would no longer be offered up as a “ritual sacrifice” to the economy, he characterized their plight as a betrayal of India's democracy and disparaged politicians for capitalizing on their misery for electoral gains. In particular, Malaichamy charged the state government with undermining Dalit development by seeking to fob off their community with piecemeal concessions instead of enforcing existing laws and upholding their democratic rights. He declared: “Rather than providing a means for us to live in this country, they are offering us percentage-wise quotas. Our rights are being refused in the name of concessions. This is detrimental to our economic condition.” Although Malaichamy described the DPI as a “revolutionary organization,” he promised to act “on a legal basis” to pressure state authorities to enforce existing laws and fulfill their commitments to Dalit citizens.

This vignette from the archives of DPI politics contrasts with conventional accounts of lower caste assertion, which frequently depict collective forms of protest that, by design, generate a visible, and often disruptive, public presence.

Prologue

The ever-present sights and melodious sounds of popular Bombay cinema were the mass culture of my childhood. I took for granted its use of Indo- Islamic architecture as an aesthetic backdrop for romance. In these films, the architectural monument was beautiful and ordered, just as the British colonial authorities had desired and as the postcolonial Indian nation has perpetuated. The ordered monument made Bollywood love possible, much like the picturesque landscaping around the Qutb mosque complex made elite and middle-class picnicking on its lawns an enjoyable leisure activity.

Just as there existed an ordered way to display and experience the Indo-Islamic monument in physical reality, so too did an ordered mode of representing it in film gradually emerge. What, then, might we term as “resistance” to this order of filmic beauty? In examining representations of Indo-Islamic monuments in postcards in Chapter 3, we found that unruliness and disorder came from outside in the form of anxiety-ridden tourist experiences that failed to align with postcard imagery. Conversely, in the context of film, I argue that both order and disorder come from the same source: that is, from the film itself. In this chapter, I discuss two patriotic films of the 1950s: Jagriti (Awakening, 1955, director Satyen Bose) from India,

and Bedari (Awakening, 1957, director Rafiq Rizvi), a Pakistani remake of Jagriti. In particular, I explore the consequences of the fact that both films highlight the importance of historic monuments to national identity while also absenting the Indo-Islamic monument from the visual, aural, and scriptural narratives or making those monuments unspeakable and unanchored from national iconography.

Just prior to the 2014 general election, I interviewed VCK Deputy General Secretary J. Gowtham Sannah in a shared law office at Madras High Court. Casually perched on a rolling chair behind a cluttered desk, his silhouette was set against a towering bookshelf featuring an archive of legal volumes intermixed with the conspicuous thick blue tomes of B. R. Ambedkar's collected life works. I posed what I had intended to be a straightforward question about his party's present challenges and its prospects for continued growth. I asked Sannah to discuss the difficulties of merging the VCK, which is often described in popular media as a “Dalit party,” with the “political mainstream” as a “common party.” Sannah's posture immediately stiffened as he shot a wry glance in my direction. Muttering under his breath, he was visibly cross at my choice of the terms “common” and “mainstream,” both of which are often used by political commentators and VCK organizers alike.

Following a protracted silence, Sannah rattled off a barrage of questions. Referring to parties that are widely reputed to draw support from and cater to the interests of particular caste constituencies, he inquired: “Is the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) a common party? And, moreover, tell me, do you think the Marumaralarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) is a common party? What about the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK)? Was the Dravidian movement a common movement?” “Of course not!” he underscored, “they were established on the foundations of specific groups pursuing a greater share of resources. But these parties feel that they alone—as caste Hindus—can raise their voice in the name of what is ‘common’.”

On the morning of November 4, 2013, a puttering auto-rickshaw dropped me off at the Liberation Panthers's headquarters nestled in a former elementary school building in Velachery, south Chennai. On my arrival, a handful of party cadre accustomed to my presence welcomed me with a cup of hot tea. We retrieved several chairs from a former classroom and spoke informally as I waited to interview Thirumavalavan, whom they called talaivar (the leader). As the hours passed, a crowd of visitors swelled around us on the shaded, open-air veranda, each awaiting their turn for a meeting with the party president. At the time, Thirumavalavan was the acting MP from Chidambaram, yet Dalits traveled from across the state to see him because he was widely regarded as a surrogate representative for all Dalits. Some visitors came to appeal for his intervention in personal matters. Others came to request a signed document on his parliamentary letterhead that directed a government bureaucrat to remedy a grievance. While most visitors arrived with specific requests, a handful came bearing ornate marriage invitations, hopeful to confirm his attendance and schedule the ceremony accordingly. No appointment was necessary, only patience.

After attending to a flurry of requests, Thirumavalavan emerged from his office and gestured for me to accompany his entourage as they set off for their afternoon meetings. Taking his cue, I squeezed into an overflowing SUV. Thirumavalavan sat in the front passenger seat while his secretaries positioned themselves at my sides and additional cadre piled into the back. Seemingly without pause, his assistants vetted incoming calls throughout the trip, carefully noting the caller's name and nature of inquiry before deciding whether to pass the phone to their talaivar.

In 2015, nearly a full year ahead of the state assembly polls, the VCK co-founded the Makkal Nala Kūttani (PWF; People's Welfare Front), a motley alliance of the communist parties (CPI[M] and CPI) and the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK; Renaissance Dravidian Progressive Federation) led by ex-DMK firebrand Vaiko. From the start, the PWF billed itself as “a policy-based alternative” to Dravidian coalitions. Moreover, PWF leaders critiqued the conventional model of coalition politics in Tamil Nadu, where Dravidian parties formed coalitions with allied parties to face the polls and then proceeded to keep their allies at arm's length once the next administration was formed. In an evident departure, the PWF demanded pre-poll guarantees for a share (pangu) of political power as a precondition for its support. Censuring the uninterrupted reign of Dravidian parties in the state, VCK organizers panned Dravidian rule as oru katci ātchi, or single-party rule, which they alleged amounted to edēccādikāram (despotism). In contrast, the PWF advanced a pioneering demand for “coalition government.” Touting a broad-based platform of popular issues, PWF leaders traversed the state and conducted public rallies that addressed the rights of unorganized workers, regularization of labor contracts in the public sector, and a wide breadth of other topics including education, police reform, healthcare, and environmental conservation. As the polls drew near, VCK leaders reverted to an old playbook and ramped up a caustic critique of their Dravidian rivals.

Initially, the DMK and the AIADMK were largely unphased, auguring that these “opportunists” would almost certainly “disintegrate” before the next election, chalking up the coalition to a publicity stunt before the polls. They predicted that its leaders would invariably come groveling back seeking an alliance with a Dravidian patron in the coming months. Then, as elections drew near, the PWF released a “Common Minimum Program”—a shared political agenda that represented a consensus among its members and would act as a policy blueprint for coalition governance. According to preliminary media reports, the public response was initially positive and, as 2015 rounded into 2016, prominent outlets aired footage of massive PWF rallies across the state.

Prologue: Fatehpur Sikri, January 2007

For a moment, let us leave Delhi and travel a few hours east to the sixteenth-century fort-palace Fatehpur Sikri, where I encountered a young postcard seller in January 2007 who disrupted my leisurely experience and scholarly analysis of the monument. It is winter and I am with a group of graduate school friends on a trip to Fatehpur Sikri and Agra—two popular tourist destinations and the erstwhile capitals of the Mughal empire under Akbar (r. 1542–1605). Both cities have been made famous by the quintessential Mughal red sandstone and white marble architecture. As art historians, we photographed the architecture with our lenses focused on capturing the buildings’ style and shied away from locating ourselves as posed tourists in the photos. In doing so, we disassociated our presence from the commercial act of tourism, using people in our images only to show scale. Feeling smug in our knowledge of the site, we also refused to hire a guide. However, despite our efforts to escape the trappings of touristic activity, the accoutrements of tourism enveloped us from time to time. As we emerged from the Buland Darwaza (Lofty Doorway), a grand and imposing entrance to the Fatehpur- Sikri fort-palace, several souvenir sellers surrounded our group of nine. The most persistent of the lot, a young boy selling postcards, got into an argument with one member of our group. My friend, speaking for the rest of us, kept refusing the advances of the postcard seller, telling him that he should spend his time studying instead of wasting it selling postcards.

Prologue

On a sweltering, sunny, late April morning in 2018, I found myself outside the now erstwhile Swatantrata Sangram Sanghrahalaya (Freedom Struggle Museum), a 1990s museum housed in a nineteenth-century British barrack within the seventeenth-century Mughal Lal Qila (also known as the Red Fort). I was there to seek permission from the ASI—whose offices used to be housed to one side of this museum—to photograph the colonial and postcolonial on-site museums within the fort. To my dismay, scaffolding enveloped the building in question, the museum displays I had visited earlier had been dismantled, and the ASI office was nowhere in sight. While I was able to locate the office in a space behind this structure, I wondered what would happen to the chapter I was writing, which analyzed the on-site museums at the Lal Qila.

In conversing with an official, I learnt about the impending reorganization of the museums, which included the Swatantrata Sangram Sanghrahalaya and the Swatantrata Senani Smarak (Freedom Fighters’ Memorial), which were housed in British barracks and jails within the fort; the Delhi Museum of Archaeology housed inside the Mumtaz Mahal; and the Indian War Memorial Museum, located inside the Naqqar Khana. At the behest of the Indian government's Ministry of Culture, under whose authority the ASI functions, the four museums were now to be housed in one building to create a more cohesive narrative—one more consistently centered on anti-colonial struggles and the formation and consequent “unity” of the Indian nation. More revealing, however, was this official's annoyance at the numerous visitors, belonging mainly to the lower classes, who created “nuisance” inside the museums.