Geddes in India: Town Planning, Plant Sentience, and Cooperative Evolution

In this paper I focus on the ideas and efforts of Patrick Geddes, which are well known but not often discussed, by which he attempted to elevate the status of Indian sweepers and sewage collectors into gardeners by transforming sewage into fertilizer for gardens. Geddes transmitted his vision by means of religious performances, and through these efforts he attempted to produce change in Indian society in the register of human evolution. In this paper I take seriously the triangulation of waste, gardens, and performance as a reasoned means by which Geddes attempted to aid evolution. I suggest that by ‘evolution’ Geddes had in mind less an abstract process and more a state of awareness of one's capacities for self-transformation and relationship with one's environment. Furthermore, this awareness would largely be inculcated by taking into consideration the environment from the plant's point of view. In other words, expanding one's consciousness to be able to sense plant presence would not so much ready one for evolution as it would indicate that one had already evolved. This was town planning toward evolution. To make my arguments, I draw on Geddes's 1918 town planning reports for the Princely State of Indore, India, and draw out his intellectual engagements with William James, Henri Bergson, and Jagadis Chandra Bose implicit in these reports and elsewhere in his writings.