2 Theoretical Framework

2.1 Idea of camps:

Sadhugram, also known as the “simhastha camp”, is this city of “unending landscape of tents” (Tahir Shah, 2013), built within the span of a few months to host the mela. This temporary settlement needs a large infrastructural movement to function. All Kumbh Melas require the mobilization of various government bodies to approve and build this infrastructure. From laying drainage lines, to providing electricity connections to thousands of tents. As discussed by Diana Eck and Rahul Mehrotra (2015), in their book Kumbh Mela: Mapping the ephemeral megacity, “the Kumbh Mela takes form like a choreographic process of temporal urbanization, happening in coordination with environmental dynamics.” The city goes into the process of unfolding itself, and then again folding itself, generating a very temporary context. They narrowed down the city to its built materials : nails, bamboo, rope, and a skinning material like fabric, plastic or corrugated sheets. The materiality of the form of tents generates a carnival like atmosphere.

“On the surface, the tent city resembles something out of a military campaign. In addition to the pontoons and the neat rows of khaki tents, the main thoroughfares are laid with iron sheets so that vehicles don’t get stuck in the mud. There’s electric streetlighting, too, which bathes the camp in an unnerving yellow glow through the hours of darkness. The lights are run by a series of mobile power stations, set up just for the Kumbh Mela. “ (Tahir Shah, 2013)

1. The military camp , as described by Michel Foucault (1978), is a diagram of surveillance, and power, where the practice of power is solely prescribed to the seat of power. It is a “shortlived, artificial city, built and reshaped almost at will”. For him, this idea of the military camp, pushed towards the urban development where cities were constructed in hierarchy of social class. Such a diagram of power was translated in many institutions, where continuous observation became the prime principle behind its design, neglecting its imperatives socially and politically.

2. Hannah Arendt in We Refugees (1943) , writes about the identity of a refugee: one “who has lost all rights, yet stops wanting to be assimilated at any cost to a newer identity”. A person who is displaced due to a certain crisis. Giorgio Agamben (1995), built on the works of Hannah Arendt (1943), says that refugees are ones who enter a “liminal status between citizen and outcast”. In his observations of the Palestinian refugee camps, he claims them as “sites of ‘bare life’ ”, where a person is deprived of their identity. The refugee camp becomes a “spatial mechanism of control and management”, which generates the politics of power, control, lack and suffering. The camp here not only generates spaces of control and management, but also a space which is constantly evolving by the inhabitants of them.

3. The form and configuration of the adventure camp is shaped through the ideas of leisure and exploration. Usually found in areas where it is inaccessible to the vehicles and away from the hustle and bustle of cities, these camps are vantage points to the popularized idea of living in wilderness. These are temporary settlements built for fun and gathering, of a specific class of people.

To understand the temporal nature of this space, the idea of a camp becomes helpful to device a frame to look at Simhastha camp. Camp helps us explore the ideas of pop-up, ephemerality, impermanence and its politics.

There are mainly three broad kinds of camps: Adventure camps, Military camps, Refugee camps. Other than the Simhastha camp, each of these camps have a sense of temporality embedded in them, but each of them function with different politics. The type of a tent comes out on top, as brings out many of its affordances. The same type produces many spatialities, bringing out the a question. So if the same type can afford different opportunities, the question arises on what are the architectural specificities that form this in a simhastha camp space?