Events

CPR-CSH Digital Workshop on Peopling New Delhi: Conjugality and Urban History in the City, 1950s-70s

Date and Time

October 27, 2020

3:45 pm to 5:30 pm

Location

Online via Zoom

CPR and CSH are pleased to invite you to a digital workshop on Peopling New Delhi: Conjugality and Urban History in the City, 1950s-70s

Speaker: Aprajita Sarcar, Postdoctoral Researcher, CSH

The session will be online via Zoom. Kindly register here. It will also be live-streamed on the CPR India Facebook page.

If there is an issue, please email urbanization@cprindia.org

About the talk

The first two decades (1950s to 1970s) of family planning in postcolonial India entailed building a material world for young married couples that instilled a desire to reduce birth rates. Nuclear families in New Delhi found visible manifestations of a specific form of modernity in the built environment around them. This paper will analyse the spatial politics of the everyday city such that the nuclear family unit becomes a site of desire for the capital city’s new settlers. Juxtaposing the archival paper trail with audiovisual media shows how the nuclear family became the cornerstone of economic modernisation and urban planning in India.

About the speaker

Aprajita Sarcar is a historian specialising in the postcolonial history of family planning in India. Her research interests span disciplines, including, inter alia, gender, urban histories, histories of health governance, and population control in Asia. She was initially trained as a journalist and completed her M. Phil in Social Medicine and Community Health from JNU and received her PhD from the Department of History, Queen’s University, Canada, where she examined the nuclear family in the backdrop of the urbanising cities within India. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.

Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here


This is the hundred and twenty-ninth in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on issues relating to the development of the city and try to address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society and politics. For further information, please contact: Rémi de Bercegol at remi.debercegol@gmail.com, Olivier Telle of CSH at olivier.telle@csh-delhi.com, Mukta Naik at mukta@cprindia.org or Marie-Hélène Zerah at marie-helene.zerah@ird.fr.