The Society of Fellows hosts the Thursday Lecture Series (TLS), which runs regularly throughout the academic year. The Fall Semester TLS, our Fellows present their own work, chaired by Columbia faculty.

Caste, Race, and Space: Architectural History as Property History

Lecture by Sonali Dhanpal
Chaired by Zeynep Çelik Alexander

By examining Bangalore’s emergence out of a boundary between colonial and princely rule, this talk shows the persistence of caste in the city, revealing how caste power is far from overcome through the transition to colonial modernity but rather hardened onto a new racial regime of property. Using the suburban house form, the bungalow, she will show how property ownership was the material domain by which hierarchies like caste materialized in the built environment. Setting aside the dominant histories of the bungalow as a ‘global’ building form, she will show its proliferation in Bangalore, just as in other colonies through British colonialism, as the naturalization of modern property with the growth of the capitalist world economy. By reading architectural history as property history, we see how the bungalow as a propertied building form drew the touchability line in South Asia, separating upper caste peoples from those they deemed “untouchables” with implications for theorizing the global color line.

Image Caption: The bungalow as a detached house within a compound and enforced as a model dwelling Picture Courtesy: Stephens, J. H. (1914) British Library.

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