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dates.sites: PROJECT CINEMA CITY Bombay/Mumbai, a Majlis project, concept and text: Madhusree Dutta, design and graphics: Shilpa Gupta and Madhusree Dutta, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2012,240 pages, Rs 995.
Time and space are the chief stuff of conventional history-writing. The book dates.sites by Madhusree Dutta takes such a framework, and with admirable brevity as the title suggests. This book, then, is a book of history but not quite as we know it. Chronology is at the centre of the conventional historical enterprise - one that the book takes as an organising principle, organising the chapters by consecutive decades. Timelines have been the most trusted instruments of professional historians; in recent years, documentation has also gained popularity. Both these are also devices that this book uses. But there the similarity ends. Timelines and genealogical charts in the hands of professional historians are the building blocks of master-narratives of world, regional or national histories. Documentation means taking files from an archive, editing and printing them in sequence to accord fixity and construct authoritative accounts. The author of this book has subverted both these instruments: the timeline and documentation. She has made the timeline a flexible and dynamic instrument - a line that is anything but a straight line. It is jagged and ragged; it zigzags and segues into arrows and circles. She has also unravelled the narrative into discrete facts to hold them in multiple simultaneous inter-relationships, to present the possibilities of plural and dialogic narratives - to make, unmake and remake, in a seemingly unending process that goes beyond what we see and read. We get a book that its covers cannot contain; its bits and pieces spill into other dates and sites that are suggested, provoked and, at times, vaguely signalled to.
The author calls this book a scrapbook. Conventionally, a scrapbook is a personal record of usually family history, but it often includes resonances of public events in that much-discussed and quite inevitable interplay of private and public. The book uses the techniques of a scrapbook but it by no means tells a personal story; it does not speak to the private/public separation of spheres at all. It tells us the story of a city and an industry, of events and institutions, of...