abstract: Likho Script apna apna: Aesthetics of language and the Body of the City

This is the abstract of my paper,"Likho Script apna apna: Aesthetics of language and the Body of the City", presented in "Language, Culture and Urban Publics Workshop", organised by Sarai,CSDS, Delhi on April 2-3, 2004.

“Idhar khuda hai udhar khuda hai,
aage khuda hai pichhe khuda hai,
jidhar dekho udhar khuda hai,
jahan nahi khuda hai wahan kal khudega.... Metro Railway.”

----SMS message figured in Times of India as narrated to me by a friend.

The abovementioned message is an unusual inscription of the city. Digging the body, playing with ( and mocking over) the omnipresence of the almighty and commenting over the temporal landscape ( of Delhi), this message is crucial (for a researcher) as it has traveled a long journey – from oral to SMS to print to oral mediums. The language, the city and the body ( of almighty and the landscape) find new partners in the form of Metro Railway and the SMS messages.
This paper seeks to analyse the politics of the language, its temporal dimensions and the ways in which the city becomes a body for inscribing various language games. The focus will be on the zones of engagement between the (written) word and visual in the context of the signs and images produced by the city ( in this case Delhi). An attempt will be made to read the vast and scattered representational field (consisted of wall writings, graffiti, signboards, hoardings, pamphlets, stickers, SMS messages etc.) to analyse the politics that go in the construction of this city of visuals.
Without going in for the content analysis and the construction of the meanings generated by this field, I will restrict my focus, rather narrowly, on the ways in which written words are used in visual regimes. In the studies of visual cultures, not much attention has been paid to the relation between word and the image, curtailing dangerously the richness of the visual field. The fact that words can also be seen and not merely read out opens up a range of possibilities to play with the aesthetics of the representational spaces as well as with the networks of the power operational among different signifier ( partners) in the language game. What, for me, is equally crucial is the body of the city which is both the location for the play of these signifiers as well as the consumer of images generated by these language games. What is also significant in this regard is the temporality of the field and the gendered dimensions of the whole web of city-visuals.
In the language of this visual field, the image of the city appears to be an anthropomorphic body with its desires and frustrations. These desires and frustrations, obviously can not be delineated in clear binaries of masculine and faminine. The play of gender is much more complicated. This complicated gendered body acquires further complexities due to the politics of space and temporal nature of the imageries . The problem in this multi- layered field of cultural practices ( culture of the production of visual regimes) is then how to read this field. The politics of language torn in between figural and the written gets actualised in this vast and highly unexplored field in and through a whole range of strategies, networks and relationship making the contours of both the city and the language highly fractured ,fragmented and fluid. This study should obviously be seen as an attempt to problematise the field and not as mapping of the territory.