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 EDITED BY TEREZA KULDOVA
AND MATHEW A. VARGHESE

URBAN UTOPIAS
EXCESS AND EXPULSION IN
NEOLIBERAL SOUTH ASIA
Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology

Series Editors

Italo Pardo
School of Anthropology and Conservation
University of Kent
Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom

Giuliana B. Prato
School of Anthropology and Conservation
University of Kent
Canterbury, United Kingdom
Aim of the series
Half of humanity lives in towns and cities and that proportion is expected
to increase in the coming decades. Society, both Western and ­ non-
Western, is fast becoming urban and mega-urban as existing cities and a
growing number of smaller towns are set on a path of demographic and
spatial expansion. Given the disciplinary commitment to an empirically-­
based analysis, anthropology has a unique contribution to make to our
­understanding of our evolving urban world. It is in such a belief that we
have established the Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology series. In the
awareness of the unique contribution that ethnography offers for a better
theoretical and practical grasp of our rapidly changing and increasingly
complex cities, the series will seek high-quality contributions from
anthropologists and other social scientists, such as geographers, political
scientists, sociologists and others, engaged in empirical research in diverse
ethnographic settings. Proposed topics should set the agenda concerning
new debates and chart new theoretical directions, encouraging reflection
on the significance of the anthropological paradigm in urban research
and its centrality to mainstream academic debates and to society more
broadly. The series aims to promote critical scholarship in international
­anthropology. Volumes published in the series should address theoretical
and methodological issues, showing the relevance of ethnographic
research in understanding the socio-cultural, demographic, economic and
geo-­political changes of contemporary society.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14573
 Tereza Kuldova • Mathew A. Varghese
Editors

Urban Utopias
Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia
Editors
Tereza Kuldova Mathew A. Varghese
Department of Archaeology, Department of Political Science
Conservation and History Maharajas College
University of Oslo Kerala, India
Oslo, Norway

Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology

ISBN 978-3-319-47622-3    ISBN 978-3-319-47623-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47623-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933828

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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Dedicated to All Expelled
 Acknowledgements

This volume is a result of a series of enquiries into the materializations of

urban utopias, which would not have been possible without the intense
collaboration of all the authors included in this volume. As editors, we
would like to thank all of the contributors for their wonderful work and
their intellectual generosity.
Mathew A. Varghese extends his gratitude to all informants and friends
from Kerala and beyond. He thanks in particular the academic staff at the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Bergen for their support
in his academic ventures; he would also like to thank in particular Anne-­
Kathrin Thomassen and Gro Aase for their assistance in his research. While
many more people deserve thanks, he would like to mention in particular
Antony Dawson DeSilva of the Department of Political Science, Maharajas
College and thank the colleagues at the Maharajas College Ernakulam for
their encouragements as well as The Centre for Public Policy Research
(CPPR) for offering working space. Critical encouragements that came
from Professor Bruce Kapferer from 2004 to 2013, opened up ethno-
graphic enquiries into urban processes. Finally, there was his Akkanad
home (parents, Srija, Rachel and Toto) that always stands united.
Tereza Kuldova would like to thank her colleagues at the Department of
Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, in par-
ticular Veronique Pouillard and Erling Sverdrup Sandmo, for their persis-
tent encouragements in all her projects. She would also like to acknowledge
the larger project funding, of which this publication is a small part, namely
the HERA project The Enterprise of Culture: International Structures and

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Connections in the Fashion Industry (grant agreement no. 291827), and

within this collaborative international project, in particular one of the
principle investigators, Regina Lee Blaszczyk, University of Leeds, for her
always kind support and encouragements. This work would also not be
possible without the generous support, continuous care, and charming
companionship of Robert Pfaller.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Urban Utopias—Excess and Expulsion

in Neoliberal India and Sri Lanka   1
Tereza Kuldova and Mathew A. Varghese

Part I Futuristic Visions of Urbanity and

Socio-Economic Expulsions  17

2 The Impossibility of World-Class Slum-Free Indian

Cities and the Fantasy of ‘Two Indias’  19
Tara van Dijk

3 Guarded Luxotopias and Expulsions in New Delhi:

Aesthetics and Ideology of Outer and Inner Spaces
of an Urban Utopia  37
Tereza Kuldova

4 Golden or Green? Growth Infrastructures

and Resistance in Goa  53
Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Solano Jose Savio Da Silva

ix
x Contents

5 Vikasanam: The Expansionist Choreography

of Space-Making in Kerala  75
Mathew A. Varghese

6 Cities of Neoliberal Future: Urban Utopia

in Indian Science Fiction Cinema  97
Shiju Sam Varughese

Part II Urban Megalomaniac Visions and Heritage Utopias 117

7 Manifesting Sri Lankan Megalomania: The Rajapakses’

Vision of Empire and of a Clean Colombo 119
Øivind Fuglerud

8 A Modern Chakravartin: Mayawati’s New Buddhist

Visual Culture 139
Melia Belli Bose

9 Past as a Metaphor in the New Utopian Imaginations

of Heritage in Kerala 169
Rachel A. Varghese

10 Excavating the City: Metro Rail Construction

and Imagination of Past in Contemporary Jaipur 189
Garima Dhabhai

Part III Urban Queer Utopias and Bodily Expulsions 207

11 Utopia or Elsewhere: Queer Modernities

in Small Town West Bengal 209
Paul Boyce and Rohit K. Dasgupta
 Contents  xi

12 Utopia Interrupted: Indian Sex/Gender

Dissident Activism and the Everyday Search
for a Life Worth Living 227
Caroline Osella

13 Queerness’s Domain?: Queer Negotiations, Utopian

Visions and the Failures of Heterotopias in Bangalore 247
Jacquelyn P. Strey

14 Epilogue: The Promise of Urbanity—How the City

Makes Life Worth Living 269
Robert Pfaller

Index 281
 Notes on Contributors

Melia Belli Bose received her PhD in Art History from the University of
California, Los Angeles, and is now Assistant Professor of Asian Art at the
University of Victoria, Canada. Her work examines intersections of gen-
der, memorization, and visual culture in early modern and contemporary
South Asia. She is the author of Royal Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Politics
and Public Identity in Rajput Funerary Art (2015).
Paul Boyce is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and International
Development at the University of Sussex. He is the co-editor of
Understanding global sexualities: New frontiers (2012).
Rohit K. Dasgupta is Lecturer in Media at the Institute for Media and
Creative Industries at Loughborough University. He is the author of the
forthcoming monograph Digital Queer Cultures in India (Routledge, 2017)
Garima Dhabhai is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Political Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research aims at understanding the
interface between old city form and new templates of urbanization in con-
temporary India. Focusing intensively on the city of Jaipur, her work seeks
to unravel the political and cultural dynamics of heritage and tourism
industry, while investigating the ways in which it shapes urban space.
Garima has also taught courses on contemporary Indian politics and soci-
ety, international politics and globalization in several colleges of the Delhi
University. She was a Fox Fellow at Yale University in 2015–16.
Tara van Dijk is Lecturer in Globalisation and Development in the
Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University. She

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

is also affiliated with the Institute of Housing and Urban Development in

Rotterdam. Tara recently completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam,
where she studied urban geography, political economy, and development
studies. Her research has two main strands. One on the political economy
and geography of informal urbanization in India, with a focus on how these
shape livelihoods and housing. The second strand takes development studies
as an object of analysis and applies a Žižekian critique of ideology.
Øivind Fuglerud is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Museum of
Cultural History, University of Oslo. His research interests include dias-
pora formations, politics of cultural representation, and aesthetics. He has
published a number of works on the conflict in Sri Lanka and its conse-
quences, including Life on the Outside: The Tamil Diaspora and Long-­
Distance Nationalism (1999). He is the co-editor of Objects and
Imagination. Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning (2015).
Tereza Kuldova is a Researcher at the Department of Archaeology,
Conservation and History, University of Oslo and a Visiting Senior Researcher
at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of
Vienna. She is a social anthropologist specializing in India and Europe, and
her projects span from the study of Indian fashion industry to her current
research on outlaw motorcycle clubs and biker subculture. She is the author
of Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique (London, 2016).
Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department
of Sociology, University of Bergen. Nielsen works on land acquisitions,
popular politics, and the politics of development in contemporary India,
with a particular focus on West Bengal and, more recently, Goa. His arti-
cles have appeared in different international peer review journals—most
recently Journal of Contemporary Asia (2015), Globalizations (2015) and
Development Studies Research (2014)—as well as in various edited book
volumes. He has also co-edited a number of books, most recently The
Politics of Caste in West Bengal (2015).
Caroline Osella is a Reader in Anthropology with reference to South
Asia and teaches social anthropology and sex/gender studies at SOAS,
University of London. Since 1989, her research work has been based in
Kerala, south India, and in the UAE, among Kerala migrants.
Robert Pfaller is Professor of cultural theory at the University of Art and
Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. He is the founding member of the
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Viennese psychoanalytic research group “stuzzicadenti”. In 2007, he was

awarded “The Missing Link” prize for connecting psychoanalysis with
other scientific disciplines by Psychoanalytisches Seminar Zurich. His
most recent publications include the books The Pleasure Principle in
Culture: Illusions Without Owners (2014) and Zweite Welten und andere
Lebenselixiere (2012).
Solano Jose Savio Da Silva is a Lecturer in the Department of Humanities
and Social Sciences at BITS-Pilani, K. K. Birla Goa Campus where he
teaches political theory and is also pursuing his doctoral research on the
politics of land-use planning. Prior to this he worked as an independent
researcher in Goa and was involved in some of the civil society movements
there. He read his M.Phil. in Development Studies at the University of
Oxford and has worked as a research assistant on the State of Democracy
in South Asia project conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies (CSDS), Delhi.
Jacquelyn P. Strey is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies at
the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Jacquelyn received
her Master of Arts from the University of Manchester in Religions and
Theology. Her research focuses on the everyday lives of queer women in
India. She is also interested in the role that methodological approaches
play in the field and how creative methods can highlight alternative experi-
ences and forms of knowledge production.
Mathew A. Varghese has a PhD from the Faculty of Social Sciences,
University of Bergen and was a researcher at the Department of Social
Anthropology. His doctoral thesis, ‘Spatial Reconfigurations and New
Social Formations: The Contemporary Urban Context of Kerala’, focused
on places in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala that have been tradi-
tionally constituted outside of recognized urban spaces.
Rachel A. Varghese is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Historical Studies,
JNU, New Delhi. She has worked as a field archaeologist with different
projects from 2006. Her research interests include public archaeology,
early social formation in South India and the history and archaeology of
Indian Ocean trade. Her most recent publication is Archaeology and the
New Imaginations of the Past: Understanding the Muziris Heritage
Project In: Bose, Satheese Chandra and Varughese, Shiju Sam (eds.).
Kerala Modernity: Ideas, Spacesand Practices in Transition.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Shiju Sam Varughese is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Studies in

Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSSTIP) in the School of
Social Sciences of the Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India.
He has a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Zakir Husain Centre for
Educational Studies (School of Social Sciences); his doctoral research was
on the interaction between science and media in the context of public
controversies.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 A view from my balcony at Emerald Court, Sector 93, Noida 38
Fig. 7.1 Former president Mahinda Rajapakse 125
Fig. 8.1 Deeksha Bhumi Stūpa in Nagpur, Maharashtra, designed
by Sheo Dan Mal, constructed between 1978 and 2001 141
Fig. 8.2 Ambedkar Stūpa at the Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik
Parivartan Prateek Sthal, Uttar Pradesh, designed by
Jay Kaktikar, completed in 2012, and bronze statue
of Ambedkar by Ram V. Sutar 143
Fig. 8.3 Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal, Noida, Uttar Pradesh,
designed by Jay Kaktikar, completed in 2012 144
Fig. 8.4 Bronze frieze in the Ambedkar Stupa depicting Ambedkar
presenting the constitution to President Rajendra Prasad
before the Houses of Parlement. Ram V. Sutar 154
Fig. 8.5 Bronze statue of Mayawati beside a frieze depicting a map
of the Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan
Prateek Sthal. Ram V. Sutar 155
Fig. 8.6 Relief of a Bodhi tree flanked by elephants on the base
of the Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal porch 157
Fig. 8.7 (a, b) Bronze frieze in the Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal
titled “the seven great men of the Bahujan Samāj
(People of the Majority),” with Mayawati in the
lower panel. Ram V. Sutar 159
Fig. 8.8 Bronze frieze depicting Ambedkar’s Mahad Satyāgrah
in the Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal. Ram V. Sutar 160
Fig. 8.9 Bronze frieze in the Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal depicting
Mayawati’s swearing in ceremonies on the occasions she was
elected as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Ram V. Sutar 161

xvii
xviii List of Figures

Fig. 8.10 (a, b) Prerna Sthal Green Garden sculpture installation with
pillars (the central one is topped with a wheel) and ringed by
Indian social activists. Mayawati is among them. Ram V. Sutar 162
Fig. 9.1 Close up, Terracotta installation, part of Black Gold by artist
Vivan Sundaram 181
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Urban Utopias—Excess

and Expulsion in Neoliberal India
and Sri Lanka

Tereza Kuldova and Mathew A. Varghese

For most of its independent national history, India has envisioned itself as
the nation of villages; these villages were conceived of as the heart and soul
of the nation, as the very essence of India and of its authentic ‘Indianness’,
and as a source of cultural pride (Mukherjee 2006; Mohsini 2011; Kaur
2012; Greenough 1996; Favero 2013; Parry et al. 2000; Mines 1988;
Dumont 1970; Marriot 1989), symbolically immortalized in the image
of Gandhi and khadi (Jodhka 2002). The village was the national ­utopia.
Even in academic writing, until the 1980s, the ‘urban’ was more or less
a marginalized category of analysis in India (Prakash 2002). While the
urban ethnographies represented by the Rhodes Livingstone Institute
focused on industrial spaces, encouraged by people like Max Gluckman,
and attempted to distance themselves from the colonialist ‘tribalizing’

T. Kuldova (*)
Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo,
Oslo, Norway
M.A. Varghese
Department of Political Science, Maharajas College, Ernakulam, Kerala, India

© The Author(s) 2017 1

T. Kuldova, M.A. Varghese (eds.), Urban Utopias, Palgrave Studies
in Urban Anthropology, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47623-0_1
2 T. KULDOVA AND M.A. VARGHESE

tendencies, the Indian strand tried to distantiate itself from Africanist

anthropology. In the process, works like that of Jonathan Parry invested
much in the rural–urban connections as well as what they perceived as
‘distinct’ Indian character. Much of the work stood short of considering
the ‘urban’ as a category in itself.
The Rhodes Livingstone ethnography was a major turning point and
paradigm shift with a focus on the structural impacts of the then global
processes like colonialism. Urban economy was no longer abstract but
firmly shaped by social and material relationships within historical con-
texts. Workspaces, spaces of flows of capital and people, migrant networks,
marginalities, spatial segregation, and conflicts as well as the globalization
and transnationalism have further developed the urban fields of reference
since the 1990s (Ong and Nonini 1997; Caldeira 2000; Prato and Pardo
2013).
But it was first when the first National Commission on Urbanization
was constituted in 1985, that urbanity was slowly becoming a topic in
regional academia. Today, the village is still idealized and romanticized,
along with the Gandhian narrative, in particular by the middle classes
and elites, as a space of tradition and rich cultural heritage, and yet, it is
considered as backward, as the very opposite of contemporary modern
and urban India; in the imagination, it is thus firmly positioned within
the past of the nation and has no place in the present or in the utopian
future. What survived from the Nehruvian narrative of ‘really existing vil-
lages’ in India seems to be solely the idea of their backwardness, only
this time around they are excluded from development, as development
becomes concentrated in selected urban enclaves. The idealized village
thus exists as a positive and nationalist model only in so far as the ‘liv-
ing past’ has become effectively commodified for the consumption of the
upper strata; even khadi has become a glamorous object displayed on fash-
ion ramps (Kuldova 2016). At the same time as the cultural heritage and
tradition are being commodified for the consumption of the select few,
often with added ‘ethical value’ (protecting cultural heritage, supporting
poor artisans, and displaying patriotism), the future is envisioned as purely
urban and exclusive (Kuldova, ibid.). The villages and their craftsmen
are thus on one hand essential to delivering the commodified and pack-
aged idea of India to the well-off urbanites, who can then proudly display
their belonging to the ideal nation located somewhere in an imaginary
authentic traditional village, but the actually living ‘oh so authentically
 INTRODUCTION: URBAN UTOPIAS—EXCESS AND EXPULSION IN NEOLIBERAL... 3

Indian’ producers of these commodities are not to be incorporated into

the future India; they are expelled from the vision of the future India,
to use Saskia Sassen’s term (Sassen 2014), and only included as an inte-
grated reject—as a commodified, and thus also sublimated, version of the
really existing structural expulsion. And yet, this adornment in symbols
of a desirable social utopia has little to do with the elite’s actions and
their often socially and economically divisive (corporate) politics (Kuldova
2014, 2016). However, constraining the social utopia (often one of secu-
lar nationalism or harmonious cohabitation) within the ‘essence’ of the
branded commodity precisely restricts its potential; it closes down its pos-
sibilities and transforms it into a banal next hot thing in town. It appears
that the more a social utopia is commodified, the less capable it is of struc-
turing actual social relations within the city. The social utopia is robbed
of its power by the market pressures, penetration of corporate and inter-
national capital, neoliberal policies, and the rise of divisive politics and
‘muscular’ Hindu nationalism (Kuldova 2015) that transform it into an
inconsequential personal status symbol. An idea of inclusion is sold today
‘freely’ in the market and yet as such in practice affordable for few. Within
the marketplace, the utopian idea of inclusion and communal harmony is
turned into a privatized feel-good practice of exclusion. This in turn leads
to urban spaces without urbanity, from which the majority of the public
is excluded (Kuldova, ibid.), all at the cost of proliferation of ‘privato-
pias’ (McKenzie 1996). This also leads to a process of bifurcation of India
into seemingly parallel worlds—the world of the rich and the world of the
poor, the formal economy and the informal economy, materialism and
spirituality, modernity/future and tradition/past, and the ‘new’ versus the
‘real’ India (Kuldova 2016). Both are alternatively cast as either good or
bad, depending on context and interest. The business elites can be either
despised as the greedy rich or become the only thinkable philanthropic
saviors of India—the same quality, greed, is transfigured into benevolence
and thus legitimate power (Kuldova 2017b). The poor can be alternatively
perceived as backward masses that drag the country down or as the noble
poor, idealized as the spirit of the Indian nation—both precisely because
of their poverty. Academic discourse, too, often reproduces this illusion
of a split India consisting of two parallel worlds that do not meet. The
characteristic ways in which the parallel worlds of the seemingly opposed
(formal–informal, extremities of wealth and deprivation, and legal and
the illegal) normalize orders have often been subjects of recent academic
4 T. KULDOVA AND M.A. VARGHESE

enquiries (Prato and Pardo 2013; Busà 2014; da Silva 2013), which have
shown that authenticities are paradoxically often generated and imposed in
globalizing contexts (Pezzi 2013), while in the process excluding people
who actually live in these places. We can read that once we exit Gurgaon’s
gated world-­class amenities where the rich reside, we are ‘“back in India”
as it were’ (Kalyan 2011, 39) or that those living in the gated luxury spaces
are said to aspire to live ‘as though one were rich and lived in New York,
London, Paris, Frankfurt or Amsterdam’ (Mani 2008, 53). This split is
constituted along the lines of class and caste, which correlate with the
tendency to position the privileged part of the population into the present
and future of postmodernity and the other into the past and unbreakable
shackles of tradition—both praised and resented depending on interest.
However, in reality there are no two Indias (Kuldova 2017a); instead, this
fantasy of the split is actively (re)produced and serves crucial ideologi-
cal functions that are crucial to understand in order to be able to discuss
urban development and the utopian visions that drive it in the first place.

Futuristic Visions of Urbanity and Socio-Economic

Expulsions
Tara van Dijk critically analyzes in this volume precisely the social fanta-
sies that support the idea of the ‘two Indias’, that is, the fantasy of the
split between the ‘world-class cities of the future’ and the slums and that
sustains the profoundly impossible neoliberal utopia of a ‘world-class
slum-­free city’ (ibid.). She argues that the proposed neoliberal remedy
for the so-called malevolent urbanism (McFarlane 2012) is precisely what
has caused it to emerge in the first place and that we need to reject the
fantasy of the two Indias in order to be even able to imagine an alterna-
tive future for India beyond the ruling disastrous neoliberal utopia. The
future has become urban but is paradoxically also lacking urbanity at the
same time, as it increasingly excludes public rather than including public
and as internal borders within a society proliferate rather than diminish.
This development has been exacerbated by the neoliberal restructuring
of the economy since the 1990s, marked by rising inequality and hence
also proliferating exclusions. As Kuldova remarks in this volume, only the
good consumer- and investor-citizens have a guaranteed place within this
urban future without urbanity (ibid.). In order to capture this particular
neoliberal utopia, Kuldova coins the term ‘luxotopia’, pointing directly to
the excessive and exclusive character of this neoliberal utopia; she invites
 INTRODUCTION: URBAN UTOPIAS—EXCESS AND EXPULSION IN NEOLIBERAL... 5

us to the spaces of gated communities and luxury fashion shows to con-

template how this utopia is materialized because only in its materiality can
an ideology be effective (Althusser 1971) in terms of mobilizing subjects
and their affects (Lordon 2014). She argues that the Indian urban luxoto-
pia is a very particular one, namely one that ‘on the outside appears global
and modern, with its emphasis on technology and sleek design, but on the
inside, at its very core, is traditionalist and neo-feudal and it is this core
that provides it with assumed strength and superiority over similar luxo-
topias in other parts of the emerging economies, as well as in the West,
which is imagined precisely as lacking this moral anchor and thus as driven
solely by profit and greed. Indian greed, on the other hand, is imagined
increasingly, as a cultural good, precisely because of this perceived moral
anchoring materialized in the aesthetic of the inner space of the luxoto-
pia—the Indian billionaires, inspired by traditional scriptures and engaged
in philanthropy, are imagined and hailed as national saviors’ (ibid.). In
this case, it is clearly to be seen that those excluded become an integrated
reject, they become the symbols of traditions that provide the elites with
superiority, and yet in their physical presence they need to be sanitized
and pushed into invisibility, their slums bulldozed, and their land sold to
builders capable of attracting international capital.
It has been precisely this shift in utopian thinking toward one that
expels the majority of population that has motivated this volume. But
something else struck us as well, namely the observation that as opposed
to Western utopian or rather increasingly dystopian narratives about the
future of collapse and civilizational rebirth, utopias in South Asia not
only tend to be localized in the cities as heartlands of civilization and
of future superpowerdom but also tend to be overfilled with hope of a
better future, a spectacular future of excessive wealth. The rising gross
domestic product (GDP) has become a particular national obsession, a
cult of the ‘factish’ god of GDP, as Latour would have put it (Latour
2010), a god that perfectly captures this profound neoliberal hope for a
better future. Irrespective of how neoliberal this hope is at its core in this
case, the general hope that the future will be something better than the
present, that the future generations will live in a better world, appears to
have been lost and abandoned by the West somewhere in the 1980s or
1990s (depending on where), along the path to this neoliberal future as
hope was replaced by impoverishment, discontent, resignation, and disil-
lusionment. Even popular culture testifies to this utopian mood in India.
Bollywood ­cinema has to our knowledge never produced an apocalyptic
6 T. KULDOVA AND M.A. VARGHESE

movie ending in a full-blown destruction of the world. To the contrary, it

churns out enormous amounts of movies that cast India as a global super-
power, as a hypermodern high-tech country with a bright future, full of
pride for its achievements (Kuldova 2014); Bollywood movies are full of
escapism but still loaded with hope for a future within the current sys-
tem. Shiju Sam Varughese has analyzed the Bollywood movie Love Story
2050 in this volume, a movie that travels to the utopian technoscientific
future of Mumbai in 2050 and shows how it reveals both the desires and
anxieties pertaining to the experience of the neoliberal city as the movie
in effect rehearses the cultural imagination of neoliberal future. In line
with what Kuldova has argued in respect to the contemporary nature of
the luxotopias that materialize themselves in city development and on
fashion ramps, Varughese’s analysis of the movie reveals that the spectac-
ular embodiment of the neoliberal future of Mumbai, reduced to being
merely one of the booming nodes of the global network devoid of brown
bodies and cultural specificity, becomes ‘undesirable (and uninhabitable)
because of the lack of its “Indianness”’ (ibid.). While Tara van Dijk has
argued for the impossibility of achieving the neoliberal world-class slum-­
free city, Varughese shows that even in the cinema the ‘futuristic city,
as a sanitized, technoscientific autopoetic system, (…) is unachievable’
(ibid.).
Impossible or not, utopian visions of spectacular economic growth and
innovation keep on materializing in one imperfect version after another
across South Asia, often at high human and environmental costs, as
the chapter by Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Solano DaSilva shows (ibid.).
Analyzing the struggles and resistance surrounding the emergence of new
growth infrastructures and an airport in Goa, they show how these devel-
opmental projects materialize not only the utopias of the ruling politi-
cal and economic elites but also global power relations, while taking into
account the expulsions in which they result, such as dispossession. In the
process they look at the ways in which the symbolic and hyperreal con-
struct of ‘New India’, also already critically analyzed in the chapter by
Tara van Dijk, manifests itself in the materiality of new growth structures,
arguing that the ‘New India’ cannot be simply ignored as mere elitist
myth-making but instead needs to be taken seriously, if only because of
its power to mobilize affects, aspirations, and identities of people and thus
also pushing them into action. The authors argue that the utopian ideal of
the ‘New India’, even against the expulsions it incorporates and inequali-
ties that it exacerbates, presents itself as a collective dream and aspiration
 INTRODUCTION: URBAN UTOPIAS—EXCESS AND EXPULSION IN NEOLIBERAL... 7

for all. Forms of exclusions can as a result ensue, in addition to top-down

impositions, through bottom-up aspirational demands (Scotti and Sacco
2013). Moreover, it is also fascinating to observe that the airports them-
selves are to be developed according to the model of an airport city, a
mixture of a special economic zone, and a gated community, in line with
the notion of ‘luxotopias’ coined by Kuldova (ibid.).
Special economic zones, the GDP-centered developmentalism, the cor-
porate state, the liquidation of public spaces, and the increase of the spec-
tacular and excessive can be all seen also as the signs of the materialization
of exclusions. These exclusions often operate in carefully crafted regimes
of exceptions, thus complicating the terrain even further. This is most vis-
ible in the mega-urban conceptualizations, such as the smart cities, which
have begun to (re)structure everyday lives’ normative orders. Mathew
A. Varghese illustrates in his chapter in detail these processes resulting
in different forms of loss, expulsion, and excess but also development in
the name of capital accumulation (Varghese, ibid.). He does so by pre-
senting cases from regions in the south western Indian state of Kerala,
where the assemblage of neoliberal choreography works through rhetoric
of future and protocols of ‘smartness’. He shows that in the process of
trying to achieve the goal of ‘smartness’, everything becomes sacrificed
to this vision, ultimately even smartness itself (see Pfaller, ibid.). Not only
people, but also geographies must become smart in order to be included
in the discourse of utopia. Ironically, however, the inclusions usurp the
utopias and literally eviscerate places, and there is very little smartness to
be found around such processes.

Urban Megalomaniac Visions and Heritage Utopias

Alas, hope still lives in places like India and that is why it has such a pleth-
ora of utopias, as we came to find out and it is precisely this interest in
hope, against all odds, and perhaps also against the very hope destroying
the potentiality of a better future, that binds this volume together. In the
process of putting this book together, we realized that we cannot deal
only with the futuristic visions of urbanity and the related socio-economic
expulsions, which we have discussed here so far and which fall within
the Part I of this book. Instead, in order to address the actually existing
urban utopias, we had to broaden the spectrum of possibilities. Firstly, as
has already become partially visible in the chapters by Kuldova, van Dijk,
and Varughese, there is always the ‘trouble’ with the imagined traditional
8 T. KULDOVA AND M.A. VARGHESE

other and hence also the trouble with the past; the past is often idealized,
imagined as golden, and as a utopia in itself that would like to see itself
projected into the future. These imagined golden pasts have a particular
tendency to be excessive and megalomaniac, and it is not uncommon that
certain political leaders but also business elites succumb to the idea of rec-
reation of such golden ages, projecting them into the future. Alternatively,
the past is manipulated or at least re-adjusted to fit the future needs of the
city, to position the city on the global map of world. With the rise of Hindu
nationalism, we have seen not only the intensification of neoliberal policies
but also increased concerns with protection of tradition, as with claiming
cultural superiority (Kuldova 2014). In order to capture the multiple ways
in which megalomaniac visions of grandeur and the notions of heritage
play together, and apart, the Part II of this book investigates multiple cases
that illustrate these dynamics. The second part thus goes further in reveal-
ing the double dynamics of these urban utopias: on one hand, the impulse
to hide and ignore the squalor, violence, inequality, and oppressions from
sight, already discussed previously, but on the other hand, the capacity to
manufacture panoramas of utopia precisely out of what is otherwise meant
to be kept hidden. The real needs, scarcities, the so-called backwardness,
as well as deprivations become often presented as new entrepreneurial pos-
sibilities (Roy 2011), as new possibilities. Commodification of heritage
or even of, for instance, the ‘living tribal culture’ (Kuldova, ibid.) is the
reverse side of the same coin. However, another feature connected to the
golden ages, and to visions of megalomania, is the revival of neo-feudalism
and creation of a global elite that imagines itself as a version of superior
aristocracy (Kuldova 2016, 2015) and, as Øivind Fuglerud shows in his
chapter from the Sri Lankan context, of authoritarianism, which more
often than not utilizes military force and corruption to achieve the desired
utopia. Slavoj Žižek has talked in this sense of the rise of ‘authoritarian
capitalism’ (Žižek 2009) and the way in which capitalism, far from being
the ‘natural bringer of democracy’ as the ideology of spectacular capital-
ism would like us to believe (Gilman-Opalsky 2011), thrives much better
under authoritarian conditions (preferably accompanied by high levels of
corruption). Even in Colombo, the largest city of Sri Lanka, the rulers
desire a world-class slum-free city, much in line with what Tara van Dijk
has described in this volume for the case of India. Again, many have to
pay price for this and face expulsion. Fuglerud describes forced evictions
of people who have occupied commercially viable land in the center of
Colombo, an eviction not only to remove the slum but also to create a new
 INTRODUCTION: URBAN UTOPIAS—EXCESS AND EXPULSION IN NEOLIBERAL... 9

visual regime of the city. ‘Aesthetic governance’ (Kuldova, ibid.) comes of

age in Colombo as well, as urban development is placed into the hands of
private-sector actors who are given a central role in planning of cities. The
megalomaniac visions are sustained by the greed and hunger for power of
the corrupt leaders, in this case in particular Mahinda Rajapakse, match-
ing his authoritarian rule that has been supported by the militarization of
society and by creating monuments to oneself, that is building airports,
harbors, cricket stadiums, and so on, all bearing the name of Rajapakse.
The strength of Fuglerud’s contribution lies in its fearlessness in reveal-
ing how corruption, hotch-potch neoliberalism, and authoritarianism
work together, sustained by the utopian visions of world-class future. If
Rajapakse is the megalomaniac of Sri Lanka, the former dalit (untouch-
able) Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mayawati was his counterpart in
India. But Mayawati, as Melia Belli Bose goes to show, did not only create
larger-than-life monuments to herself all over Lucknow but also commis-
sioned numerous architectural and sculptural memorials commemorating
prominent social reformers. As such, she has envisioned and materialized
inclusive dalit (untouchable) utopias. Irrespective of the obsession with
her own greatness, Mayawati has tried to re-create the public space so that
it would include those previously marginalized and excluded. Within this
context of a highly visual and performative political assertion as well as
invocation of ancient ideas of empire (and casting herself as an emperor),
Belli Bose’s chapter talks about how communities can be imagined anew
around alternative and monumental logics. While Lucknow has been a city
known for its golden ages, and even for its utopian golden age of com-
munal harmony (Kuldova 2017c), the dalits were often excluded even
from the most inclusive utopias of the time. Identity politics, as we will
see later as well, tends to have its own utopias, which it wishes to mark on
the urban space in order to achieve inclusion, but even among the dalits,
as Belli Bose shows, there is a particular desire for the royal affiliation of
Buddhism as opposed to the subaltern one due to which they have been
stigmatized. This desire for the royal affiliation is not only a question of
status, but within the current system it becomes also a way of acquiring
cultural capital through claiming superior heritage and belonging. Cities
have increasingly the same ambition to cultivate their cultural heritage and
cultural capital in order to commodify themselves for touristic consump-
tion. Here we can yet again see commodified utopias reemerge, much like
in the construction projects of gated communities or on the fashion ramps
(Kuldova, ibid.). As Rachel A. Varghese shows in this volume, organizing
10 T. KULDOVA AND M.A. VARGHESE

international art biennales is one way of acquiring such necessary cultural

capital and capitalizing on local cultural heritage, while luring in interna-
tional financial capital (Varghese, ibid.). However, for such an event to
become successful, a unified narrative of the city has to be created and
cultivated. In this case, the narrative of historical communal harmony and
happy cosmopolitanism has been selected, precisely in order to project
an image of the same onto the desired future of the city, only this time
largely in order to attract foreign capital rather than to actually create such
a utopia. Moreover, as Varghese shows, such a narrative can be created
and sustained only through a series of exclusions and reappropriations that
play with the temporal and territorial notions of Kochi’s past and through
selective privileging of spaces. The past is here intentionally projected onto
the desirable future in order to make the city itself desirable.
Heritage has also become a buzzword in Jaipur, the popular tourist des-
tination in Rajasthan, where the former royalty has turned their palaces into
luxury hotels catering to local and global rich. And there has been a tension
building up between the further heritization of the city for the touristic
consumption and the ideal of the world-class city, which has come to the
fore, as Garima Dhabai’s chapter reveals (Dhabai, ibid.), with the controver-
sial construction of the metro rail in Jaipur. Here the registers of ‘heritage’
became directly confronted with the registers of ‘development’; the strength
of Dhabai’s chapter is in dwelling upon the micro-dynamics of power and
contestations that shape the ‘re-production’ of the old city in the times of
‘world-class’ urbanity, both being at the same time postulated as utopian
ideals onto themselves and both demanding that certain narratives and cer-
tain people are expelled in the name of purity of the utopia; the past and the
future is in the process often re-adjusted to fit corporate and state desires.

Urban Queer Utopias and Bodily Expulsions

While we have already touched upon those excluded, even in the marginal-
ized communities such as the dalits, when investigating urban exclusions
as well as the proliferation of utopias within the urban context, we have
realized that the neoliberal city is also often envisioned as a site of sexual
liberation, inclusiveness, and anonymity which provides a space to breath
and the possibility to live one’s life according to one’s desires. This is not
too surprising considering that the city itself is often imagined as a space of
freedom (especially freedom from the pressures of community and related
moralities) but also because the 1990s have been both marked by intense
 INTRODUCTION: URBAN UTOPIAS—EXCESS AND EXPULSION IN NEOLIBERAL... 11

neoliberalization as well as by identity politics. What is interesting here is to

follow how this unfolds in the context of urban India, where sexual libera-
tion and the ability of even sexual minorities to live a liveable life or, even
better, ‘a life worth living’ (Pfaller, ibid.) become an object of intense hope
and of utopian ideals. Since these everyday struggles of the queer inscribe
themselves into the cities and urban structures and since they form a par-
ticular demand for inclusion, which can easily be also universalized, we
have decided to devote the last Part III of the book to urban queer utopias
and bodily exclusions. These utopias are interesting also because they are
sites of intense struggle not only between the marginalized and the major-
ity but also within the marginalized themselves who are often themselves
divided by class membership. Rohit K. Dasgupta and Paul Boyce take the
readers to a small town in West Bengal and contemplate the nature of
the utopia that emerges directly from discontent and dissatisfaction. They
argue that ‘queer perspectives on futurity have accented the unrealizable
conditions for queer life-worlds in the present. A queer utopian view might
emerge in these terms as an affective attachment to a better life, even if
that life remains out of reach, this perhaps being the condition of its pro-
jected romantic existence’ (Dasgupta and Boyce, ibid.). And they ask an
interesting question, namely—what does it entail to be queer and hence
also to be to an extent a physical materialization of a phantasmatic futurity,
at the same time embodying the contemporary socio-political struggles?
The chapter goes on to engage with everyday life of several informants
and shows what utopian hopes they themselves project onto the city, as
opposed to what the realities of living in the city as queer entail, poten-
tially even disrupting the queer neoliberal progress and resisting neoliberal
and normative subjecthood. Being sex/gender dissidents in the neoliberal
urban ‘New India’ is also the subject of the further enlightening analysis
provided by Caroline Osella, who has been doing fieldwork in Kerala since
1989, a place back then sex-gender conservative, but since 2010 hosting
Kerala Queer Pride, and who carefully investigates the changes most vis-
ible in the public space and in the discussions about the public space. For
instance, the courtship and romantic encounters have been in the neolib-
eral era pushed from courtship in the parents’ home toward enjoyment in
the urban public sphere of consumption, as a means of socializing proper
neoliberal subjects and consumer-­citizens, something that queer or sex/
gender dissident subjects can both easily fall victim to as it offers new pos-
sibilities but can also be something they can particularly effectively resist,
refusing the cynicism, nihilism, and the despair of the present.
12 T. KULDOVA AND M.A. VARGHESE

Bangalore, which has been nicknamed as India’s Silicon Valley, and

Mumbai are the sites of Jacquelyn Strey’s investigations into the urban and
queer geographies of the cities. The themes of the neoliberal city reappear
for the last time in the book, as does the ‘brand India’, the ‘New India’,
only this time to be investigated both from the position of the largely
privileged middle class and from its members who self-identify as queer.
This has put the subjects of the study into an uneasy position of having to
choose between being queer or middle class or claim both, which may not
always be equally easy. Citizenship reveals itself here as based, in practice,
predominantly on consumption habits and heteronormativity; however, as
Strey points out, queer subjects are not always resistant and avant-garde;
instead, they too become incorporated into the hegemonic structures and
that too often when on the first sight appearing as if resisting them. At the
same time, however, Strey argues that queer women actively participate
in creating new spaces that reflect their desire for a life worth living. The
queer women have shown Strey that it is the small steps toward creating
of the utopian and optimistic future that matter and that we should also
try to understand and learn to cherish rather than always look for a radical
break or fully anti-normative subjects. Strey also invokes the problematic
idea of the ‘New Indian Woman’, a utopian figure in itself, one that, as
Kuldova has argued in this volume, also coincides with the aesthetic of the
inside of the luxotopias which are meant to contain the source of proud
‘Indianness’ correlated with home and femininity, vis-à-vis the masculine
and muscular smooth surfaces of the high-rises world-class city (Kuldova,
ibid.). Thus, this chapter reveals, through the engagements with individ-
ual subjects, that the dramas that the first part of the book has mapped
onto the city and urban infrastructure at large, and the masses of expelled,
are mirrored within discourses, practices, and everyday negotiations of the
individual subjects within the city and the public space. The last part of the
book thus supplies us with a plethora of ambiguous narratives about exclu-
sion and discontent on one hand and utopian possibilities within urban
spaces on the other. What it teaches us very clearly is that we have to insist
on the ‘right to the city’, as David Harvey would put it (Harvey 2003):

the right to the city which (…) is not merely a right of access to what the
property speculators and state planners define, but an active right to make
the city different, to shape it more in accord with our heart’s desire, and to
re-make ourselves thereby in a different image. The creation of a new urban
commons, a public sphere of active democratic participation, requires that
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America it may apply to the students in the graduate school. Some
American colleges have tried the extreme theory of mental and
moral freedom for the college student, and have learned from an
unsatisfactory experience the lesson of a wise conservatism.
The old struggle between science and the humanities still goes on.
We must adopt a view of education which regards the nature of man
and its adaptation to the whole environment, including its historical
element. In a keen analysis of the nature of things we shall not find
Greek and Latin, but we shall find them historically in our language
and literature, and in the generic concepts of our civilization. Hence
they are a necessary part of any extended study of language,
literature, or art.
We do not believe that the practical tendency of American
education will destroy our reverence for what the Germans call the
philosophical faculty in the university. The liberal arts, including pure
science, are the gems of human culture, and are given a high value
even in the imagination of the ignorant. The editor of “The
Cosmopolitan” draws a bold and somewhat original outline for
modern education, and it is in many ways suggestive. But the author
overlooks what every true scholar knows, that thorough scientific
knowledge of principles must remain the fundamental work of
education and the substantial ground of progress in civilization. A
university course may not consist chiefly of lectures upon prudential
maxims, such as all must learn partly from experience. Such a
theory would award the palm, not to Socrates, but to the Sophists.
The truth in all the clamor for practical work in the college is that the
culture studies must be vivified by closer relation to the real world
and to modern life.
Little has been said of what is called the graduate school.
Germany credits us with eleven institutions that have either reached
the standard of a genuine university or are rapidly approaching it. Of
these eleven, five are state universities. This estimate, of course, is
made in accord with the plan and standard of the German university.
It appears certain that in time the name university in America will be
applied only to those institutions which maintain the graduate school
and raise the dignity of the professional schools. The university
system will develop freely in this country only after a somewhat
important reorganization of our higher education. The line must be
drawn more sharply between foundation education and university
work, the whole period of education must be somewhat shortened,
and, in most of our universities, the graduate faculty must be
strengthened. That these changes will be wrought, and that we shall
have a rapid development of the genuine university is certain. Much
is to be expected from our higher scholarship in many lines of
investigation. In America, men are solving problems the existence of
which has only been dimly conceived by the masses of people in the
Old World. Inspired by our advanced conceptions of government and
society, and by the free, inventive, truth-seeking spirit characteristic
of our people, the American scholar will make leading contributions
to the world’s literature of sociology, politics, and science. And when
the spirit of reality, now superficial, gains a deeper insight into the
nature of things, America may yet lead the world in those
investigations which belong to the sphere of philosophy.

FOOTNOTES:
[5] Read at the National Council of Education, Milwaukee, July
6, 1897. This is one of three papers on “University Ideals” there
presented, the other two representing respectively Princeton and
Leland Stanford, Jr. The author was requested to write on “State
University Ideals.”
 GENERAL EDUCATION PRACTICAL.

The possibilities of education depend upon inborn capacities, but

the unfolding of them is education. A man of large capacity, born
among savages, remains a savage, an Arab is a Mohammedan, an
Englishman is a Christian, a child among thieves is a thief, a child in
a home of culture imbibes refinement and truth. Tennyson, in the
interior of Africa, would not have developed his exquisite rhyme and
rhythm, metaphor and verse, and polish and sparkle of expression,
would not have conceived thoughts that penetrate the earth and the
nature of man, and shoot upward to the quivering stars; he would
have mused under his palm tree, and have fed, perhaps somewhat
daintily, upon unlucky missionaries. An African of natural ability in the
homes of Massachusetts, under the influence of Harvard, would
become a man of vigorous thought and fine feeling, possibly of
genius.
Since education is so potent, what shall the nature of it be? Shall
knowledge of mountain and forest and the seasons, and the
common sense that grows from experience, and the practical power
to read and compute be sufficient? If all minds were equal, if the
stores of wisdom were valueless, if special investigators found
nothing worth revealing, if thoughts of master minds did not inspire, if
men, like brutes, were governed by instincts and had no possibilities
beyond a certain physical skill, the education of nature might suffice.
This is a practical age, and no picture too bright can be drawn of
the advantages of a high material civilization for bettering the
condition of all classes of men. The necessity of being an active
factor in the world of usefulness cannot be too strongly urged. But
our material progress is dependent upon soul activity. This activity is
nourished by general education. Soul activity finds expression in a
thousand practical ways. We educate highly that the man may have
more power, that he may have many resources, that he may do
better what he has to do, and may not be dependent on one means
of support or one set of conditions. It is not so much labor with the
hands as intelligent directive power which is needed, and this power
is largely derived from general education. Intelligent men are
intelligent laborers. An educated man will learn more quickly, work
more successfully, and attain a higher standard than the ignorant
artisan. Theory teaches and practice proves that in business and
manual pursuits educated men bring an intelligence to their work and
accomplish results impossible for the ignorant man; that, as a class,
they average high in all practical activities. There should be no haste
to enter a trade. Life is long enough to accomplish all that may be
done, and all the preparation made for its duties is a wise economy.
It is hardly necessary here to state the inference that general
education is practical education.
The demand for less of general education before the special is
prominent. This demand does not necessarily imply that its authors
believe there is too much preparation for life work; indeed, few of
them would wish that preparation to be less; they would simply
change the ratio between general and special training. We believe
that a critical examination of rational courses of study in the schools
would show that little of the work could well be omitted; that nearly all
contributes toward the end of a well-rounded education, indeed is
necessary to that end; and that the training of faculty is only well
begun at the end of the high-school course. Even the study of the
classics, besides other incidental advantages, trains the critical
powers, refines the taste, and is in an important sense a subjective
study. The inference is that, with less of general education, the
forces of one’s being would not be properly trained and marshalled
for active service in life.
If we define practical education as that which is capable of being
turned to use or account, a high degree of general education before
the special is eminently practical, inasmuch as it broadens and
heightens a man’s possibilities. Moreover, it is of service to all that
even a few should be educated ideally. Such education places ideals
before men which tend to elevate them. We cannot easily estimate
the value to the world of a genius, one of those men who stand on
nature’s heights and see with clear vision, and proclaim the glories of
their view to listening men, who picture at least feebly the things
described. They are the heralds of new events, the inspirers of
progress. A highly educated man, though not a genius, in a way may
occupy a similar place, and may repay by his influence, many times,
in practical ways, the expense of his education. Societies of laborers
are already beginning to ascribe their troubles in part to lack of
education, and are looking to education as a means of improving
their condition. General education is practical education.
While every boy should be taught to earn a living, this should not
be done needlessly at the expense of the higher development of the
faculties. Too much attention to the practical dwarfs the powers,
limits the horizon, and will result in the destruction of that spirit which
makes a strong national character. There is little need to urge the
practical; the more immediate and obvious motives constantly draw
men toward it. The refinements of the soul are at first less inviting;
they are hard to gain and easy to lose. Carlyle says: “By our skill in
Mechanism, it has come to pass that, in the management of external
things, we excel all other ages, while in whatever respects the pure
moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are, perhaps,
inferior to most civilized ages.... The infinite, absolute character of
Virtue has passed into a finite, conditioned one; it is no longer a
worship of the Beautiful and Good, but a calculation of the
profitable.... Our true deity is Mechanism. It has subdued external
nature for us, and we think it will do all other things.” Carlyle
possessed a true insight when he penned these words. Popular
demands tend to make the age more unpoetic than it is. In this age
the tourney has been converted into a fair; the vision of the poet is
obscured by the smoke of factories; Apollo no longer leads the
Immortal Nine upon Parnassus; and we would dethrone the gods
from Olympus.

Men and peoples have made permanent contributions to the

world’s progress, not by military achievement or accumulation of
wealth, but by the something better called culture. The glory of the
Greeks lay not in their civil wars, but in the spirit brought to the
defence of their country at Thermopylæ; not in the cost and use of
their temples and statuary, but in the art that found expression in
them; not in their commerce, but in the lofty views of their
philosophers and the skill of their poets. Men admire that which
ennobles, without thought of price or utility, and the world still
demands liberal education. Literature and philosophy have much
more in them for the average student than has yet been gained from
them. The æsthetic side of literature is too often condemned or
neglected. There is genuine education in all æsthetic power, even in
the lower form of appreciation of the ludicrous, the power to observe
fine distinctions of incongruity. We say a thing is perfectly ludicrous,
perfectly grotesque, and thereby recognize the art idea, namely,
perfection in execution. Man is always striving to attain the perfect in
some form, and the art idea is one of the highest in the field of
education. Art leans toward the side of feeling, but is none the less
rich and valuable for that. Shakespeare furnishes some of the
highest types of art in literature. The flow of his verse, the light
beauty of his sonnets, the boldness and wonderful aptness of his
metaphors, the skill of his development, the ever-varying types, the
humor, the joys, the sorrows, the wisdom, the folly of men, the
condensation of events and traits and experiences in individual
types, the philosophical and prophetic insight, the artistic whole of
his plays, constitute a rich field of education.
The Gothic cathedral, with its pointed arch, its mullioned window,
tapering spire, and upward-running lines, indicating the hope and
aspiration of the middle ages, with its cruciform shape, typical of the
faith of the Christian, is more than the stone and mortar of which it is
constructed. The truly educated man in art perceives the adaptation,
polish, and perfection in literature; discovers the grace, the just
proportions, the ideal form and typical idea in sculpture; views the
expression, grouping, sentiment, coloring, and human passion in
painting; enjoys the harmonies, movements, and ideas in music, that
combination of effects that makes subtile and evasive metaphors;
discovers the conventionalized forms and mute symbols, the “frozen
music” of architecture; finds grandeur in the mountains, glory in the
sunset, metaphors of thought in every form of nature; laughs with the
morning breeze, finds strength in the giant oak, and sorrow in the
drooping willow.
We need the ideal. Let us not permit the mortal body to lord it too
much over the immortal spirit. The ideal man is the purpose of
education and the aim of existence, or life is not worth living. All
material prosperity is naught except as contributing to that end.
Sympathetic spirits are calling for more enlightenment and
enjoyment, and leisure for the laboring classes. They believe that
men should be men as well as machines, and that, if they are
educated ideally, the practical will take care of itself. If we retain our
belief in the high possibilities of the human soul, we shall have faith
in ideal education, and shall confidently offer every opportunity for
the highest development possible of the child’s power for knowledge,
enjoyment, and action. And let his development be full and rounded.
Let the roar of ocean and the sough of the pines make music for his
ears as well as the whir of factories; let the starry heavens speak to
his soul as vividly as the electric lamp to his eye. Let us evolve from
the material present ideals that shall stand in place of the vanished
ones.
ELEMENTS OF AN IDEAL LIFE.
 ELEMENTS OF AN IDEAL LIFE.
THE MODERN GOSPEL OF WORK.

A gentleman who had resided some years in Central and South

America, conversing one evening with friends upon a doctrine of
happiness, illustrated his argument with an anecdote. A Yankee
living in South America observed that the native bees had no care
for the morrow. He thought to make a fortune by bringing hard-
working honey bees from the North to this land of perennial flowers,
where they could store up honey the year around, and he tried the
experiment. The bees worked eagerly for a time, but soon
discovered that there was no winter in this paradise, and they
perched on the flowers and trees and dozed the livelong day. Our
philosopher assumed that the indolent, improvident life of the
ignorant natives of sunny climes is the one of real happiness, and
that a life of great activity is not to be desired. If his theory holds,
then the savage under his palm tree is happier than the civilized man
of the temperate zone, the monkey in the tropical jungle is better off
than the savage, and the clam is happiest of all.
An observant traveller, returning by the southern route from
California, studies Indians of various tribes at successive stages of
the journey. Near the Mohave desert he sees abject beings loafing
about the railway station to beg from the curious passengers; further
east he sees self-respecting red people offering for sale pottery or
blankets—their own handiwork; later he notes members of another
tribe working on railroad construction by the side of white laborers;
as he approaches the settled region he observes yet others who
have homes and farms and engage in civilized industry, and his
thought runs along the ascending scale of being until he
contemplates the highest energy of the most cultured and forceful
minds of our best civilization. He instinctively decides that the
desirable life is on the upper scale of intelligence, feeling, and action.
 Happiness through work is the creed of the dawning century. The
romance of chivalry gives place to the poetry of steam; democracy is
teaching wealth and position the dignity of labor; evolution and
psychology show action to be the consummate flower of thought and
feeling; recent literature illustrates the gospel of effort; and religion
reaffirms the doctrine that faith without works is dead.
Herbert Spencer’s philosophy defines life to be “the continuous
adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” This
adjustment implies self-activity. If man has been evolved through a
long period of change, he is a survival of the fittest in the struggle for
existence. His ancestral history is one of exertion, his powers have
been developed by use, he maintains himself by striving, his normal
state is in the field of labor, and logically it is there his welfare and
happiness are found.
Max Nordau wrote a book on “Degeneration.” It contains much
interesting matter, many wholesome suggestions, and considerable
false theory. He claims that the demands of modern civilization place
men under too great a strain, that the human race is tending toward
insanity, and that by and by we shall stop our daily newspapers,
remove the telephones from our homes, and return to a life of
greater simplicity. It is true that tension never relaxed loses its spring,
and worry kills, but the most potent causes of degeneration are false
pleasures and lack of healthful work. Evolution’s most important
ethical maxim is that deadheads in society degenerate as do
parasites in the lower animal kingdom. Every idler violates a great
law of his being, which demands that thought and feeling shall
emerge in action. Every class of people has its idlers, men who
desire to possess without earning. The aimless son of wealth and
the tramp tread the same path. Universal interest in honest, healthful
employment would cure nearly all the evils of society and state.
Manual labor is the first moral lesson for the street Arab and the
criminal, and the best cure for some species of insanity. True charity
does not give when it can provide the chance to earn. Idlers, lacking
the normal source of happiness, seek harmful pleasures, and learn
sooner or later that for every silver joy they must pay in golden
sorrow. False stimuli, false excitement, purposeless activities, take
the place of vocation. Tramps are not the only vagabonds; there are
mental and moral vagabonds whom a fixed purpose, a definite
interest and principles of conduct would turn from degeneration to
regeneration. Balzac, with his keen analysis, describes the career of
a graceless spendthrift who, finally weary of himself, one day
resolved to give himself some reason for living. Under good
influences he took up a life of regularity, simplicity, and usefulness,
and learned that men’s happiness and saneness of mind are
proportionate to their labors. This is the great lesson of Goethe’s
“Faust,” set in imperishable drama for the instruction of the ages.
Balzac’s Curé of Montegnac speaks to a repentant criminal: “There
is no sin beyond redemption through the good works of repentance.
For you, work must be prayer. The monasteries wept, but acted too;
they prayed, but they civilized. Be yourself a monastery here.”
Repentance, prayer, work—these are the way of salvation.
Every man of broad mind has full regard for the problems of labor
and has faith in a progress that shall mean better conditions for the
less fortunate, but Edwin Markham’s “Man With the Hoe,” as applied,
not to special and extreme conditions of hardship, but in general to
the problems of the human race, is wrong at the foundation; it is
neither correct science, good philosophy, nor accurate history. It is
the doctrine of the fall of man rather than of the ascent of man; it is
the doctrine that labor is a curse. Without the hoe the human race
would be chimpanzees, savages, tramps and criminals. In human
development no useful labor ever “loosened and let down the brutal
jaw” or “slanted back the brow” or “blew out the light within the brain”
or deprived man of his birthright. At a stage of his progress, by
cultivating the soil man of necessity cultivates his soul. The hoe has
been an indispensable instrument to the growth of intelligence and
morals, has been the great civilizer—a means of advance toward
Plato and the divine image. Hardship may arrest development, but
seldom causes degeneration. Our problem is not to free from
bondage to work, but to relieve of burdens that are too heavy, and
place a larger part on the shoulders of the strong and selfish.
Our educational philosophy at times wanders in dangerous
bypaths, but there is a recent return to the plain highway. Some late
notable utterances maintain that character must be formed by
struggle, that a good impulse must prove its quality by a good act,
that education is self-effort, and that passive reception of knowledge
and rules of conduct may make mental and moral paupers. Here is
an apt thrust from a trenchant pen: “Soft pedagogics have taken the
place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this
lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense to
suppose that every step in education can be interesting. The fighting
impulse must often be appealed to.”
I like to discover philosophy in the literature of the day, literature
which does not rank as scientific, but contains half-conscious,
incidental expression of deep perceptions of human nature. Kipling
at his best sounds great moral depths, and teaches the lesson of
life’s discipline. He has a plain message for America as she takes
her new place in the congress of the world. Civilized nations must
take up the burden of aiding less favored peoples, not for glory or
gain, but as an uncompromising duty without hope of appreciation or
reward. We must expect the untaught races will weigh our God, our
religion, and us by our every word and act in relation to them. We, as
a nation, may no longer wear the lightly proffered laurel, but must
expect the older, civilized nations will judge us by our wisdom, equity,
and success in discharge of our new responsibilities. In Kipling’s
“McAndrew’s Hymn” many years of hardship, sternly borne in
obedience to duty, atone for misspent days under the influence of
the soft stars in the velvet skies of the Orient. In “The ’Eathen” the
author refers to the native inhabitants of India, whose most familiar
household words are “not now,” “to-morrow,” “wait a bit,” and whose
chief traits are dirtiness, laziness, and “doin’ things rather-more-or-
less.” He describes the raw English recruit, picked out of the gutter,
recounts the stages of discipline that make him a good soldier, and
finally a reliable non-commissioned officer—a man that, returned to
his country, would prove a good and useful citizen.

“The ’eathen in ’is blindness bows down to wood ’an stone.

’E don’t obey no orders unless they is ’is own;
’E keeps ’is side arms awful: ’e leaves ’em all about,
An’ then comes up the regiment an’ pokes the ’eathen out.
 The ’eathen in ’is blindness must end where ’e began,
But the backbone of the Army is the non-commissioned man.”

“L’Envoi” of “The Seven Seas” suggests the creed of a healthy soul:

to accept true criticism; to find joy in work; to be honest in the search
for truth; to believe that all our labor is under God, the Source of all
knowledge and all good.
Robert Louis Stevenson is great as a novelist; he is greater in his
brief writings and his letters. He presents some plain truths with
attractive vigor. He says: “To have suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a
keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth,
and has to be learned in the fire.... In almost all circumstances the
human soul can play a fair part.... To me morals, the conscience, the
affections, and the passions are, I will own frankly and sweepingly,
so infinitely more important than the other parts of life, that I
conceive men rather triflers who become immersed in the latter. To
me the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood in my
handkerchief are accidents; they do not color my view of life.... We
are not put here to enjoy ourselves; it was not God’s purpose; and I
am prepared to argue it is not our sincere wish.... Men do not want,
and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is
rivalry, effort, success. Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst
hours of danger and fatigue.”

A cartoon of Gladstone, appearing soon after he had ostensibly

retired from public life, showed him, with eager look and keen eye,
writing vigorous essays upon current political questions. It recalled
the grandeur of a life filled with great interests, sane purposes, and
perpetual action. Biography is the best source of practical ideals; it is
philosophy teaching by example; the personal element gives force to
abstract truths. Luther’s Titanic power and courage under the
inspiration of a faith that could remove mountains has served the
purpose of millions of men in great crises.
Were I to seek an epic for its power to influence, I would go to real
history and choose the life of William the Silent. For thirty years this
Prince of Orange stood for civil and religious liberty in the
Netherlands, in an age when men little understood the meaning of
liberty. He sacrificed wealth and honors for his country. In spite of
reverses, of the cowardice and disloyalty of his followers, of
ignorance of the very motives of his action, he persevered.
Throughout the long struggle he was hopeful, cheerful, and
courageous. When the celebrated ban appeared, barring him from
food, water, fire, shelter, and human companionship, setting a price
on his head, in reply he painted in vivid colors a terrible picture of the
oppressors of his people and held it up to the view of the civilized
world. The motives which sustained him were faith in God, a strong
sense of duty, and a deep feeling of patriotism. His biographer says:
“As long as he lived he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation,
and when he died the little children cried in the streets.”
Heine, the poet and philosopher, was dying in an obscure attic in
Paris. He was wasted to a skeleton and was enduring the extremity
of human suffering. He could see only dimly, as through a screen. As
he himself said, there was nothing left of him except his voice. Under
these almost impossible conditions, he was still laboriously writing,
that he might leave a competence to his wife. A friend of his earlier
days visited him, and through a long conversation his words sparkled
with wit, humor, poetry, and philosophy. Surely the active spirit is
more than the body! There was a feudal knight who went about
saying to all despondent wayfarers, “Courage, friend; the devil is
dead!” and he always spoke with such cheerful confidence that his
listeners accepted the announcement as good news, and gained
fresh hope.

In this Philosophy of Work is there no place for romance? Shall

there be no thrilling adventure, nothing but dull duty and drudgery?
Shall we have only dead monotony—no color, light, or shadow?
Shall Carlyle’s “splendors high as Heaven” and “terrors deep as Hell”
no longer give a zest to life? Stevenson’s “Lantern Bearers” has an
answer for this natural and ever recurrent question. In a little village
in England, along the sands by the sea, some schoolboys were
accustomed to spend their autumn holidays. At the end of the
season, when the September nights were black, the boys would
purchase tin bull’s-eye lanterns. These they wore buckled to their
waists and concealed under topcoats. In the cold and darkness of
the night, in the wind and under the rain, they would gather in a
hollow of the lonely sand drifts, and, disclosing their lanterns, would
engage in inconsequential talk. In his words: “The essence of this
bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the
topcoat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your
footsteps or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in
the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s
heart, to know that you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and
sing over the knowledge.... Justice is not done to the versatility and
the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination. His life from
without may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some
golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and
for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some
kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt.... The ground of a man’s joy is often
hard to hit. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all
abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall
see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is
above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by
winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that
of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some
glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And the true realism,
always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
resides and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is
to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action, that is
the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of
the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the
haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.” This
quotation needs no excuse. The mould of human nature from which
this copy was taken is forever broken, and can never be reproduced.
To be a lantern-bearer on the lonely heath, to rejoice in work and
struggle—this is the romance, real, attainable, and apt for the world
as it is and for the work we must do. If irrational pastime, attended
with endurance, may be a joy, surely rational effort toward some
desired result may have its poetry. Sacrifice and heroism are found
in humble homes; commonplace labor has its dangers and its
victories; and many a man at his work, in knowledge of the light
concealed, the interest he makes of his vocation, his romance, exults
and sings.
The world is as we regard it. Many look at the world as Doctor
Holmes’ squint-brained member of the tea-table views the plant
kingdom. He makes the underground, downward-probing life of the
tree the real life. The spreading roots are a great octopus, searching
beneath instinctively for food, while the branches and leaves are
mere terminal appendages swaying in the air. It is a horrible
conception, and we are pained at standing on our heads. The tree
roots itself to the earth and draws its nourishment therefrom that it
may spring heavenward, and bear rich fruit and be a thing of beauty,
a lesson and a promise. Man is rooted to the earth, but his real life
springs into the free air and bathes in the glad sunlight.

The purpose of our labor determines its qualities of truth and

healthfulness. Satisfaction must be sought by employing our
faculties in the useful arts and in the search for truth. Perfection of
self is the ultimate good for each individual, but this is attained, not in
isolation, but in social life with its mutual obligations. The lesson of
civil and religious liberty, taught by the great reformers, has been
only partly learned. Individualism, rightly understood, is the true
political doctrine, but the selfishness of individual freedom is the first
quality to develop. Concerning great public questions often the
attitude is as expressed in Balzac’s words: “What is that to me?
Each for himself! Let each man mind his own business!” Democracy
is the way of social and political progress, but we have not yet
reached the height of clear vision. We are struggling up the difficult
and dangerous path, looking hopefully upward, thinking we see the
summit, only to find at each stage that the ultimate heights are still
beyond. When kings are dethroned, the hope of democracy is to
enthrone public conscience. Here is a picture of a condition
occasionally possible in any state of America to-day. We will say
there is some great public interest, not a party problem, involving the
financial prosperity and the essential welfare of the state, and
affecting its credit, honor, and reputation abroad. And—with some
noble exceptions—perhaps not a minister in his pulpit, not an orator
on his platform, not a newspaper with its great opportunity for
enlightening the people and exerting influence, not an educator, not
a college graduate, not a high-school graduate, not a business man,
not a politician arises and says: Here is a common good imperilled,
and I for one will give of my time, my energy, and, if need be,
according to my ability, of my money in its support. So long as such
a state of apathy concerning public questions may exist, there is
something still to be desired for the ideals of democracy and for our
methods of education.
The Platonic philosophy has largely inspired educational work, and
must still furnish its best ideals. But emphasizing the worth of the
individual to himself has created a false conception of social
obligation. Culture for culture’s sake has been the maxim, but I have
come to believe that a culture which does not in some way reach out
to benefit others is not of much value to the individual himself. Some
one has aptly illustrated this view: probably the drone in the bee-
hive, when he is about to be destroyed, would say, “I would like to
live for life’s sake, and would like to buzz a while longer for buzz’s
sake.”
I would see young men and women go out into the world with a
true democratic spirit, with a ready sympathy for all classes of
people, and with a helpful attitude toward all problems of state and
society. The work of any public institution of higher learning is a
failure in so far as its graduates fail to honor the state’s claim on
them as citizens. The great principle of evolution is the struggle for
life; there is another equally important principle, namely, the struggle
for the life of others. Altruism, dimly disclosed away down on the
scale of being, finally shines forth in the family and home in all of
those social sentiments that make human character beautiful and
noble. Society is the mirror in which each one sees himself reflected,
by which each attains self-consciousness, and becomes a human
being. From coöperation spring industries, commerce, science,
literature, art—all that makes life worth living. If the individual owes
everything to society, he should be willing in some small ways to
repay part of the debt.

The great Bismarck, that man of iron and blood, not given to
sentimentality, in fireside conversation repeatedly proclaimed that
during his long and arduous struggle for the unification of Germany
he was sustained by a sense of duty and faith in God. “If I did not
believe in a Divine Providence which has ordained this German
nation to something good and great, I would at once give up my
trade as a statesman. If I had not the wonderful basis of religion, I
should have turned my back to the whole court.” Some one has said
that the essence of pessimism is disbelief in God and man. Fear is a
kind of atheism. Heine once said: “God was always the beginning
and end of my thought. When I hear His existence questioned I feel
a ghastly forlornness in a mad world.” The inspiration of labor is faith
in God, faith in man, faith in the moral order of the world, faith in
progress. The religious man should have a sane view of life, should
have convictions, and the courage of his convictions. He should
believe that his work all counts toward some great purpose.
The impulse to reverence and prayer is an essential fact, as real
as the inborn tendency to physical and mental action. Its
development is necessary to the complete man. The religious nature
obeys the great law of power through effort, and increases strength
by use. He who by scientific analysis comes to doubt the value of his
ethical feeling has not learned the essential truth of philosophy,
namely, that a thing’s origin must not be mistaken for its character.
 Some tendencies of the best scientific thought of to-day, seen here
and there, confirm this view of man’s nature. Here are some
fragments, expressed, not literally, but in substance: It is the
business of science to analyze the entire content of human
consciousness into atomic sensations, but there its work ends. The
man of history, of freedom and responsibility, whose deeds we
approve or disapprove, is the real man, a being of transcendent
worth, aspiring toward perfect ideals; and the teacher must carry this
conception of the child’s nature into the work of education. It is a
scientific fact that prayer is for the health of the soul. It is useless to
theorize on the subject—men pray because it is their nature; they
can not help it. Even if prayer does not change the will of God, at
least it does change the will of man, which may be the object of
prayer. The Christian experience shows that prayer is a communion
of man’s spirit with God, the Spirit. John Fiske affirms the reality of
religion. He argues that the progress of life has been achieved
through adjustment to external realities; that the religious idea has
played a dominant part in history; that all the analogies of evolution
show that man’s religious nature cannot be an adjustment to an
external non-reality. He says: “Of all the implications of the doctrine
of evolution with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and
strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of
Religion.”

In this message to students we have emphasized a particular

ideal, namely, normal activity, because one’s own effort and
experience count most for growth and power.

“It was better youth

Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Toward making, than repose on aught found made.”

Students are at an age when to them the roses nod and the stars
seem to wink. Their mental landscape is filled with budding flowers,
singing birds, and rosy dawns. Every one has a right to consider his
own perfection and enjoyment, his own emotions. One is better for
his healthful recreations, his aspirations and ideals, his perceptions
of beauty and his divine communings—the sweetness and light of
the soul. We can only ask that the main purpose and trend of life
may be laborious and useful, even strenuous and successful.
Lowell wrote of the pioneers who settled New England that they
were men

“Who pitched a state as other men pitch tents,

And led the march of time to great events.”

The pioneers of this Commonwealth were men who here pitched a

state as other men pitch tents, and are leading the march of time to
great events. The age, America, offer great opportunities to
educated young men and women. Use them with courage. King
Henry IV. of France once gained a great victory at Arques. After the
battle, as he was leading his troops toward Paris, he met one of his
generals coming up late with a detachment of the army, and thus
greeted him, “Go hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques
and you were not there,” as though the greatest privilege in life were
an opportunity to contend and win for one’s self a victory.
A few years ago I went to Ayr, the birthplace of Burns. I visited the
poet’s cottage, walked by the Alloway Kirk where Tam o’ Shanter
beheld the witch dance, crossed the Auld Brig and wandered by the
banks and braes o’ bonny Doon—and it is a beautiful stream. I found
myself repeating lines from “Tam o’ Shanter,” “Bonny Doon,” “Scots
Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled,” and from some of the sweeter and
nobler songs of Burns. And I thought of the mission of the poet. The
scenery in and about Ayr is beautiful, but there is many another
region equally attractive. The people with whom Burns dwelt, his
neighbors and friends, were commonplace men and women,
knowing the hardships, the drudgery, the pettiness of life. And yet he
so sang of these scenes and these people, so touched every chord
of the human heart, that annually thirty thousand travellers visit Ayr
to pay their homage at the poet’s shrine. The poetic view of life is the