INDIAN STREET CULTURE- ANJARIA.

Streets, and their culture, have been at the heart of public life in India since earliest times and it
is the streets which intensify the cultural experience of urban life. The clear division between the
modernistic categories of the public and private worlds is only a recent addition to the Indian
psyche, as seen by the streets of India.

Writings on Indian streets are primarily categorized into two (2) perspectives- space of
difference and manifestations of power. In the first group, the city is viewed as ‘premature’,
‘underdeveloped’ mostly as deviations from modern ideals. In the latter category, it is viewed as
a site where global forces and neoliberal ideologies unfold bringing out power play. The
culturalist approach constitutes the third perspective which frames Indian streetscapes in terms
of their unique rhythms and logic of practice. The author in the article focuses on the third
approach for it is compelling and that it highlights the specificity of urban experience. She argues
that the uniqueness of the Indian street is rooted in the problem of difference, or the apparent
tension between lived experience and the standards of urban modernity, which drives both
everyday occurrences and governmental efforts to reshape the city.

The street's multipurpose design offers an amalgam of overlapping places where work and play,
public and private, and sacred and profane activities coexist. Urban Indians use the streets for
more than just walking; they also use them for working, cooking, conversing, eating, sleeping,
reading, and exchanging gossip, news, and information. On the street, barbers, ear cleaners, and
fortune tellers engage in private business with customers. Above all else, the street is a
commercial area. The author poses a few questions on the interpretation of streets and puts
forward perspectives of several scholars on Indian streets. She ponders if mix of activities on the
streets is a sign of infrastructural and governance failure, or the citizens refusal to follow a
bourgeoisie order or they are a representative of cultural resources of India.
The author begins with Appadurai’s view on Indian streetscapes as a place where notions of
place and affiliation take place. Streets are the environment that best portrays India. India eats,
works, sleeps, moves, celebrates, and worships on its streets. The streets are also excellent
location to study links between popular media, politics, and society in a setting of rising
international image circulation. Ahuja’s work highlights how public spaces are converted into
private spaces through the medium of streets. The abundance of interpersonal interactions that
define Indian streets, according to Ahuja, is exemplified by the fact that "the food carts and
people around them and the simple act of eating made the place appear intimate." Mehta's
memoir ‘Alice in Bhuleshwar’, which combines postmodern pastiche with ethnographic
thoughts, is about the author's wanderings around the historic Mumbai area of Bhuleshwar. The
article "The Culture of the Indian Street" by Tim Edensor from 1998 is also driven by these
imaginative possibilities of the public spectacle, sensory experience, and social mix. Mixed-use
streetscapes present a theoretical challenge to urban research that normalizes the rigorously
delineated, closely watched streetscape of the West, according to Edensor. "Haptic geography,"
defined as "the continuous touching of others and weaving between and against bodies," is
present in Indian streetscapes.

As with other culturalist assessments, there is a risk of attributing stasis, harmony, and
boundlessness to a situation that is actually considerably more contentious and changing.
Edensor's assessments of street life imply a single, constrained cultural realm, and the activities
he portrays on the streets are assumed to be ontologically separate. Although it is clear that
Indian cities are modern, the ongoing public debate about civic illiteracy, the exploitation of
public space, and the aesthetics of the streets is in part a reflection of uncertainty about whether
Indian cities are fully integrated into global modernity. The politics of contemporary urban India
argues that what is needed is to understand how otherness operates on the street, whereas
writings on the culture of the Indian street are concerned with "understanding... difference and
"otherness"" (Edensor 1998: 220). The functionality of modern streetscapes is still a topic of
much contestation.

The author describes street as an element of the built environment that simultaneously operates
as an abstract entity and a lived experience. It is a space of everyday interaction, urban savvy,
morality and popular political sentiment. The street is also where the political categories of
liberal democracy manifest themselves. The street occupies a privileged place in accounts of
urban modernity. She references Walter Benjamin on the experience of the street thatstands in
for the contradictions of capitalist modernity. The street is where one encounters the technology,
sociality and politics of the modern world. She however questions if the experience of the
modern city is defined by alienation, then how do we interpret streets in places like Bombay,
which are represented as ‘part village community, part cosmopolitan city street.’ She mentions
that the street also becomes a physical infrastructure of informal economy. Eg: Fences meant to
discipline street users.

If there is a street culture in India, it is in relation to the modernization project. This is more of a
contested terrain made up of disagreements over how streets should be used than it is a shared
sensibility. Indian streets neither replicate nor invert modernist urbanism; rather, they are
influenced by this dynamic conflict over the form and content of the city. In this way, both the
architectural style of urbanist modernism and the mindset of urban modernity embody both
problems and remedies. Its potential to develop into a modern metropolis is thought to lie in its
capacity to replicate other cities' urban settings.