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Maps are pictures
Maps are self-portraits
Maps are manifestations of perceptions
Maps are portraits of the world in the manner
in which those preparing them would like
the world to be understood
Maps are subjective
Mapping isan act of power
/ ''/' \\'\ ' This essay reviews
experiments in making visible through mapping those
who are traditionally made invisible by mapping.
From 19781986 (and again in 198890) some of us at an
organization called Unnayan in Calcutta (now Kolkata)
worked on projects that included preparing maps that
located and detailed settlements that existed in that
city at that time but were blanked out in ofcial and
commercial maps. This initially involved mapping the
settlements of the communities that Unnayan worked
withcommunities of so-called unauthorized settlers
or, as I referred to them at that time, the unintended,
!5
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Chhinnamul Sramajibi Adhikar Samiti (Organization for
the Rights of Uprooted Laboring People).
The second phase of work, during 198890, involved
painstakingly mapping the manner in which ordinary
peoplethe laboring poor and the working classeshad
settled in Calcutta over centuries. Prepared with an eye
to Calcuttas tercentennial in 1990 (which we correctly
suspected would be all about the history of the ruling
classes and castes) the aim of these maps was to document
and celebrate the reality of the citys development, an
aspect that is hidden in ofcial and commercial maps.
Tragically, the vast majority of the maps we produced in
both these phases of work are lost. Many were destroyed
by oods in the 1990s; in late 2004, the ofce where
remaining maps were stored was looted by builders
contracted by the owner. Everything that was there,
the maps included, was taken out and dumped in a eld
far outside the city. Those still in Unnayan fortunately
discovered this theft a few days after the event (it took
place during an extended public holiday) and were able,
with the help of the police, to recover much of what
was dumped. In the course of this, a few damaged
maps were recovered, including the map published in
this collection.
Having recollected and reconstructed fragments of this
experiment, this essay intends to in part simply to put this
experiment on record; but also to open up and explore
some of its underlying thinking in terms of power and
counter-power, or, in more useful terms, power-over and
power-to.
3
In these terms, looking back, what I think we
failed to sufciently do was to engage the people of the
settlements either in mapping themselves or in studying
primarily in East Calcutta.
1
At the most basic level, we
needed to prepare the maps simply because none existed,
and in order to be able to help the settlers plan out
improvements such as where to locate common services
such as water pumps. By locating where houses were,
relative not only to each other but also to roads, canals,
and the rest of the already ofcially recognized and visible
world, our maps also made these communities visible,
whereas in ofcial maps the areas they dwelled on were
labeled vacant land. Our maps were part of a wider
range of measures we took to highlight in public how the
most basic rights of such people were violated, and to help
them gain their rights.
We then moved on to mapping what we referred to
collectively as marginal land settlementspeople who
dwelled along the margins of drainage canals, rail lines,
and major roads. In this phase we mapped not only those
communities Unnayan already worked with but those
in the metropolis as a whole. We did this in order to
understand the larger picture of the conditions of what we
termed the unintended city.
2
We also hoped to help these
communities and this social class gain a sense of their place
in Calcutta and of the manner in which their presence
transforms the city. In turn, this allowed us to challenge
the citys perception of itself. This is of course, what maps
representthey are portrayals of the world in the manner
in which those preparing them would like the world to
be understood. Looking back, this was also a phase when
our work was shifting from the local to a metropolitan
level of concern and activity, and from local community
organization to, ultimately, helping the emergence of a
city-wide mass organization around dwelling rights, the
!7
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most particularly the concepts of empowerment and
conscientization. Because unnayan was also commonly
used in formal planning and development work (e.g., the
headquarters of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development
Authority was named Unnayan Bhavan, Development
House), in taking the word as our name we challenged
its conventional and commodied meanings and instead
offered a counter-concept of development. The fact that
the term is normally not used by itself in Bengali only
made this symbol stronger.
Unnayans work during its life from 197795 was
primarily in three areas: community organizing;
related initiatives in research and documentation; and
public education or advocacy campaigns. Its work in
local community organizing around issues of dwelling,
health, schooling, and artisanal production took place
in more than 40 settlements of the laboring poor spread
across east, north, and south Calcutta. The main project
in Unnayans rst decade was titled the Unintended
City Project (UCP), and was to a large extent organized
around an essay I had written in 1974, The Unintended
City : An essay on the city of the poor.
5
The essay argued
that in countries of the South, entire cities existed and
took shape in the interstices of the city as it is known,
by people and communities who were unintendedin the
sense that formal economic, planning, and governance
structures and systems used them and their labor but
had no real place for them.

Unnayan also worked on the question of the rights and
futures of the rickshaw pullers of Calcuttawho were
(and remain) a very important symbol and manifestation
of the unintended city
6
, and in building up a major
documentation center called the Jana Tathya Kendra
the maps we were producing; we could have reected
on what their new visibility (or what we saw as visibility)
meant, not only through the maps but also with other
political actions that accompanied this (such as increased
local and city-wide actions by communities in attempts to
gain their dwelling rights). Overwhelmed by other work
howeverin particular by our new city-wide coalition and
national campaignthe mapping became and remained an
incomplete experiment.
In retrospect, I feel we also had an inadequate conception
of power, and especially of power-to, and of what role
maps could play. Nevertheless, I believe what we tried was
perhaps a useful and an important initiative that, if it had
been carried through to greater completion, could have
had some interesting, perhaps even powerful, impacts.
'``//` '/`/ ' Formed in 1977,
Unnayan was a civil organization based in Calcutta that
attempted to organize and conduct itself as a workers
collective in support of the struggles of the laboring poor.
Our objective was to work with these urban communities
to help them gain control over their lives. Unnayans
formation was a part of a rst wave of civil initiatives that
took shape in India during the second half of the 1970s
towards social (and political, though we did not use the
term then) engagement with the harsh social and economic
realities of the country.
4

The choice of the name Unnayan for the new enterprise
was deliberate. The word means development in Bengali,
with the sense of unfolding or self-realization. On the one
hand, the work we wanted to do grew out of the rising
discourse in the elds of education and social development,
!9
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immediately adjacent to it. City agencies were proposing
and planning not just a road but also a massive
redevelopment and urbanization of the entire eastern
fringe of the city. This was an area of nearly two million
people, a large proportion of whom were unauthorized
or low-income settlers who did not appear on the ofcial
maps. As was then (and still is) typical of such projects,
the agencies had not informed the people in the area of
their plans, and no one I met in the community or in the
area around it had even heard of this project.
In the end I was successful in helping the Panchannagram
community negotiate reasonably good terms with the
government in terms of having access to the new road,
retaining rights over the water bodies in the area, and so
on. However, this triggered the realization that a major
part of the unintended city within Calcutta was going
to be massively affected by formal planningand that
unless something changed, these communities would
have no knowledge of what was going to happen to their
lives, let alone power to inuence it.
This chance discovery of an illustration on a peanut
bag led to the formation of Unnayan. Specically, it
led me rst to propose to friends and colleagues that
we consider formulating a major project to address this
situation. The resulting Unintended City Project laid out
a ve-year program of activities in action, research, and
public education as a public intervention aimed towards
inuencing the nature of planning and development in
the city, with East Calcutta as the project area. As we
were unable to nd an organizational host, we decided
to set up Unnayan both as an organization and as an
experiment in social organization.
(Peoples Information Centre). In addition, it worked
extensively in post-natural disaster resettlement research,
policymaking, and consulting in eastern India. What
Unnayan perhaps came to be best known for however,
were its contributions to the eld of housing rights (and
what I now term dwelling rights), and more generally to
promote the rights of the laboring poor in the city.
7

Underlying this work was a drive, not always well thought
out, to help people make themselves visible and thereby
to gain some degree of control and power-to in their lives,
celebrate their existence and contributions to the world
around them, and also to challenge the power-over of
those who made them unintended. We thought of mapping
work not as end in itself, but as an instrument of this
work. Mapping was a behind-the-scenes activity within
the organization that was sustained over several years
by myself along with other architects and planners who
joined Unnayan precisely because of this unusual thrust in
a nonprot organization.
`/'` \ ' At one level, my work in
mapping power in Calcutta started before Unnayans
formation, back in 1975. On the side of a paper bag
containing some peanuts I had bought from a roadside
vendor was printed a small map showing a proposed
Eastern Metropolitan Bypass for the city. On closer
look, I realized that the proposed route road went right
through a community named Panchannagram.
8
(I was at
that time advising Panchannagrams residents and two
social service organizations in the planning and design
of a housing project.) In reality, the road was not going
to slice through Panchannagram, but instead would be
2!
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Between 1979 and 1981, evictions of the laboring poor
seemed to be increasing throughout as a result of a World
Bank nanced program aimed towards modernizing
Calcutta by improving the citys infrastructure. At
Unnayan, we gradually realized that working in one
part of the city was not going to be enough to defend the
rights of even those living there. So we lifted our gaze to
look at the city, and the system, as a whole.
9
We soon realized that certain categories of settlements
of the laboring poor in Calcutta had come to be fairly
well documented: (1) the bastislaborer settlements
that had been given legal recognition in the 1950s and
60s, and in turn, basic services from the 1970s; (2) the
refugee colonies set up by the government, including
certain unauthorized colonies that had successfully won
legal recognition; and even (3) the pavement dwellers.
10
However, nothing was known or documented about the
seemingly very large number of settlements that existed
along the infrastructure of the city: this entire population
did not ofcially exist! Hence our decision to undertake
mapping all marginal land settlements in Calcutta.
The result of this was a sub-project within UCP to
establish this phenomenon at a broad-brush level, to get
a rst idea of scale. A student volunteer travelled along
infrastructure in the city and identied the settlements;
and then, over a six-month period, up to three Unnayan
workers physically visited and broadly mapped all such
settlements in the metropolitan area. Very signicantly
for us, our work expanded beyond east Calcutta. The
map included in this publication shows a detail from
one of the settlements we started working with at that
timeChetla Lock Gate, in southwest Calcutta. In a few
cases we also went some steps further than just mapping
Our work was to provide mutually dened services to local
communities of the laboring poor. We did not provide any
aid other than our labor. As mentioned above, we came to
focus on community organization around basic dwelling
rights (e.g sanitation services, ration cards, postal delivery,
voting rights) as well as education, health services, and
livelihoods. Several of these seemingly basic entitlements
have values that most of us take for granted: in particular,
ration cardsissued by the government and providing
guaranteed access to essential goods such as rice, salt,
sugar, and oilserve as crucial identity documents, dening
the address where the holder lived. Having an address
on the card, and consequently receiving letters, created
self-esteem that little else could. In order for Unnayan to
provide these services, we took the step of progressively
creating and building a database on the communities and
on the region, and in particular, databases on the location
and physical and legal characteristics of these technically
unauthorized settlements.
We generated detailed planning maps for the entire region
of East Calcutta, at a scale where individual dwelling
units could become visible. These were based on large-
scale maps and planning reports that we collected from
our contacts in metropolitan planning and development
agencies, augmented by local mapping that we ourselves
conducted. The result of this was, among other things,
a huge 8 x 12 collage of maps of the entire region at
this scale. Our job over time became the inking in of
settlements that we worked with. This project of measuring
and then mapping became a very substantial part of our
overall work. The collage that loomed over the Action
Room in our ofce always reminded us of the realities
of the city.
23
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In all cultures, dwelling is one of the most basic actions
we undertake as human beings and therefore one of
the most fundamental parts of the act of building our world
itself. Dwelling is an act of building order in our lives
and gaining some degree of control over itexercising
power-to. Conversely, the denial of a place to live,
and the denial that people live somewhere, is a brutal
exercise of power-over. Dwelling, and the act of mapping
dwellings (or human settlements)and equally, the act of
not mapping dwellings and instead labeling them vacant
landis therefore all about power.
Where we dwell, after all, isor becomes, if we can
live there for long enoughthe center of our cosmos
and universe; and indeed, our home is the place
from which we establish many and even most of our
social and economic relations. It is also the place from
which we claim two of our most basic political rights
and freedoms: our most fundamental freedom as
human beings to build community and so to exercise
governance over our individual and collective lives; and
our right as citizens to vote (and thereby to participate
in institutional governance). Equally, where we live also
contributes immensely to our cultural and social identity,
and in a very real sense, all our social, economic, and
other relations are constructed around and from this
place. In India, and also in many societies across the
world, many of our constitutional and other human
rights are linked to where we dwell.
12
A secure place to
live in dignity is therefore a basic element in building
power-to.
The obverse of this is also true: That in most societies
as they exist today, whether capitalist or socialist, those
who do not have a specic place to live are grossly
the settlements, for example in 1984 along the same
Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, by then built. We had been
organizing three communities who had been suddenly
evicted from their homes at dawn one Sunday morning in
the name of city beautication. We also prepared a detailed
planning and housing proposal to show the metropolitan
and municipal authorities how they could be legally settled
on surplus and otherwise unutilizable land along the road.
11

This would have been impossible without the background
mapping we had done.
By highlighting this aspect of our work, I do not mean to
suggest that preparing maps was the center of it. We were a
mixed group coming from a range of different professional
and occupational backgrounds, and mapping was in some
senses a preoccupation only for those of us in the group
who saw this as a way of understanding and representing
the world. The very fact of having produced these unique
maps gave us a legitimacy and authority, and intimacy, that
in some senses no one else in Calcutta then enjoyed; and
this in turn gave us at Unnayan an inuence in planning
affairs, even if only briey, that few others had. For a brief
period from 1984 to 1989, the campaigns that we organized
did seem to have an impact on politics and policy. The
incidence of evictions decreased, the incidence of militant
resistance increased, and there was some dialogue.
Although the fact of these settlements and struggles
becoming visible had some impact on those we targeted
in our campaigns, I would not go so far as to say that this
power we enjoyed extended to each of the communities
whose settlements we mapped. I also do not mean to
suggest that what we did at Unnayan in the 1980s was a
mapping of the contours of power. But what I think we
unconsciously did was to prepare a fragment of this map.
25
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with power-over did. The techniques of representation
we used were all drawn from our skills as professionals
trained in the formal worlds of planning and architec-
ture. We rarely discussed or developed the maps with
those whose lives and struggles we were documenting.
There is nothing wrong (and everything right) about
using such skills for counter-purposes. The questions
nevertheless arise: What would the maps have been like
if we had developed them with the settlers themselves?
Did the settlers have a vocabulary of their own for
mapping the world around them, as many folk cultures
do?
14
And would such maps have lived on, including
through memory and oral culture, in ways that our
maps could not and did not?
1 For a discussion of an unintended city, see Jai Sen, The Unintended City.
Seminar # 500, April 2001, pp 3947. Originally published as The
Unintended City: An Essay on the City of the Poor, Cathedral Relief
Services, Calcutta, April 1975.
2 Unnayan, East Calcutta: Unintended City Project Area Statement,
August 1977 (unpublished).
3 For a discussion of the concepts of power-over and power-to, see John
Holloway, How to Change the World without Taking Power, (London:
Pluto Press, 2002).
4 Harsh Sethi, Some Dilemmas Facing Non-Party Political Groups : A
Response to the Party Based Critiques, in Lokayan Bulletin, 2:2, November
1984, pp 1726; Gail Omvedt Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements
and the Socialist Tradition in India, (New York: M E Sharpe, 1993).
5 Sen, The Unintended City.
6 Jai Sen, November 1996, The Left Front and the Unintended City: Is a
Civilised Transition Possible? in Economic and Political Weekly, November
916 1996, pp 29772982.
7 Jai Sen, Foundations of our lives, The New Internationalist, February 1996,
pp 2022; and : Jai Sen, April 2002, Its dwelling, stupid, not housing!,
unpublished manuscript.
8 In the Indian context, the term refugee refers to people either from what
was is now Pakistan and Bangladeshformerly West Punjab and East Bengal,
partitioned by the British in the course of India gaining independence.
Panchannagram was one of dozens of refugee colonies created by the Indian
government in Calcutta for the more than 7 million refugees coming from
East Bengal.
9 This led to a series of other activities, including a national conference
and publication in 1982 titled Banning the Unlicensed: Planning for the
Unorganised Sector? in defense of the rights of rickshaw pullers.
disprivileged and discriminated against; their ability
to build power-to is greatly eroded; and they are made
vulnerable to all exercise of power-over. This is the case
whether the fact of not having a specic place to live is
by choice or by cultural circumstance, as in the case of
nomads; by historical dispossession and deprivation, as in
political refugees and the victims of planned development
projects; or by structural circumstance, as in the case of
women
13
and dalits in India and poor peoples throughout
the world. The demolition of homes, evictions, and forced
and involuntary displacement all lead to the complete
shattering of the victims worldsand even of their very
identities.
Dwelling, therefore, and the denial of a place to dwell,
is a fundamental action of power. Maps are not the only
documents that can show where and how people dwell
but they can play a crucial role in this struggle.
\'''` `/'` /` \ ' In looking
back I realize that although we at Unnayan had denite
reasons for preparing the maps that we did, we did not
have a clear idea at that time of maps being instruments or
vehicles for building power-to. Despite the fact that all our
other work was imbued with a politics of empowerment, we
clearly had not grasped this possible potential of mapping.
I would like to think that the very act of spelling this out
here might be useful for others interested or involved in
doing similar work.
Finally, there remain some unanswered questions unan-
swered, perhaps, because they were never asked. After all
is said and done, the maps that we at Unnayan prepared
used the same vocabulary of mapping the world as those
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r 10 Sudhendhu Mukherjee, Under the Shadow of the Metropolis, They Are Citizens
Too! (Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, 197374); and J Roy et
al, Calcutta 1976: A Socio-Economic Survey of Pavement Dwellers, (Calcutta: Indian
Statistical Institute, 1978).
11 Jai Sen with Unnayan, Housing Struggles of the Labouring Poor and
Urban Planning: Rabindranagar, Calcutta. Paper presented at the Convention
of International Society of Area and Regional Planners, New Delhi, India,
December 1987.
12 See Article 19(1)(e) in the Constitution of India, in relation to the freedom to
settle and reside anywhere in the country.
13 See Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi, The Sky for a Roof: The Essential
Homelessness of Women. Paper for NCHR National Workshop on Gender &
Housing, Madras, July 1987; and Ruth Vanita and Madhu Kishwar, A womans
home is not her own, Indian Express, 1987, reprinted in Housing Struggle,
newsletter of the NCHR, No. 1, March 1987.
14 For instance, the extraordinary tradition of wall and paper painting in the
Madhubani area of Bihar in eastern India.
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