Between Hostile Temporalities and Threatened Corporeality: New Urban Landscapes in Delhi

Abstract

Situated in a liminal historical-political moment, this presentation examines the changing visual landscapes in the Indian capital over the last five years. Specifically, I examine the time period between late 2019 to 2025, starting with the dramatic legislative steps spearheaded by the Citizenship Amendment Act, the protests that transformed the capital’s landscapes and created new visual imageries introducing street art that endowed high visibility to bodies that had not previously been seen as a conspicuous part of the public space; lower middle class Muslim women. By March 2020, the lockdown imposed under the pretext of the Covid-19 crisis eliminated the new landscapes and corporeal imagery, thus whitewashing the legislative threat and civic unrest. To date in early 2025, this legislation has not been systematically implemented, but the upcoming census of India (2025) could dramatically change this situation.

This presentation discusses two analytical axes related to the ways in which the eliminated landscapes and bodily imageries re-emerged in murals and new visual repertoires in the Indian capital. The first deals with the new visual discourse about hygiene and sanitation that negotiated both with the Covid pandemic and the BJP’s Swachh Bharat campaign. The second ponders on the resuscitated images through a multi-temporal reading of present-absent bodies. Ghostly bodies certainly have a ubiquitous presence in narratives about the Indian capital. Based on the works of Mukul Kesavan, and on Anand Vivek Tanja’s 2017 reading of djinns as symbolic mediators that enable a revival and reconnection with the pre-partitioned past, I analyze the subtle placated and conflicted significance prompted by these landscapes.