Engaging the Urban from the Periphery - OpenEdition Journals

South Asia Multidisciplinary AcademicJournal

26 | 2021Engaging the Urban from the PeripheryShubhra Gururani, Loraine Kennedy and Ashima Sood (dir.)

Electronic versionURL: https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/7131DOI: 10.4000/samaj.7131ISSN: 1960-6060

PublisherAssociation pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic referenceShubhra Gururani, Loraine Kennedy and Ashima Sood (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary AcademicJournal, 26 | 2021, “Engaging the Urban from the Periphery” [Online], Online since 03 March 2021,connection on 11 May 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/7131; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.7131

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Co-production of Space, Politics and Subjectivities in India’s Urban PeripheriesShubhra Gururani and Loraine Kennedy

Caste at the City’s Edge: Land Struggles in Peri-urban BengaluruCarol Upadhya and Sachinkumar Rathod

Seeing the Urban from the Agrarian: Emerging Forms of Agrarian Urbanization in IndiaAnkita Rathi

The Speculative Frontier: Real Estate, Governance and Occupancy on the MetropolitanPeripheryAshima Sood

The Making of Urban Peripheries and Peripheral Labor: Brick Kilns and Circular Migrationin and beyond Greater DelhiPratik Mishra

Assemblages of Living Together: Residential Cohabitation in Peri-urban Areas of Chengduand HyderabadLiubing Xie

The Peripheral Turn in Global Urban Studies: Theory, Evidence, SitesXuefei Ren

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 26 | 2021

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The Co-production of Space, Politicsand Subjectivities in India’s UrbanPeripheriesShubhra Gururani and Loraine Kennedy

Introduction

1 In her pathbreaking essay on modes of production of urban space in the global South,

anthropologist Teresa Caldeira (2017) deploys the concept of “peripheral urbanization”

to conjure “a problem-space that allows us to investigate logics of the production of the

urban that differ from those of the North Atlantic … as a means of exploring processes

of both socio-spatial formation and theory-making” (p. 4). Along similar lines, in this

special issue, we invoke the concept of the periphery to attend to diverse and

heterogeneous forms of extended urbanization that are taking shape in India.1 Instead

of considering the periphery as a spatially fixed zone, hinged to the geographies of

metropolitan centers, for instance, we mobilize the notion of the periphery as a

conceptual and territorial threshold that allows us to explore the urbanisms unfolding

across the country. For us, the periphery, or the peri-urban as it is often referred to,

may be located on the edges of metropolitan cities and entangled with their regimes of

labor, capital, and governance, or it may be further afield, in smaller towns and

settlements and enmeshed with agrarian and rural rhythms and dynamics that propel

such peripheral urbanization. Irrespective of their location, amid intense competition

for land and other resources, peripheries have not only become key sites of

contestation, social exclusion, and speculation but they have also come to embody hope

and aspirations for diverse social groups. They are attractive to investors seeking to

capture gains from rapidly rising land value, to migrants who come from rural areas to

live and work in the peripheries, as well as to upwardly mobile city-dwellers who have

placed their bets on materializing their middle-class dreams and aspirations in these

urbanizing frontiers. Located materially and symbolically at the intersection of

multiple modalities of rural, urban, and agrarian; of desire and displacement; of loss


2

and possibilities, the peripheries fully embody and give expression to Doreen Massey’s

(2005) conception of space as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of

multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct

trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity” (p. 9).

2 While at a theoretical level these characteristics are shared with space more generally,

and with urban space in particular, we argue that the periphery in this conjuncture

captures Massey’s conceptualization of space particularly well and merits special

attention. First, the processes unfolding in these dynamic spaces are driving India’s

urbanization trajectory through changes in land use, large-scale infrastructure projects

and commercial real estate development, as well as through economic development

processes rooted in local economies arising from the incremental, subaltern strategies

of individuals and households. The last Census (2011) showed that growth is occurring

across the urban spectrum and is not limited to metropolitan centers, where growth

rates actually declined; both the peripheries of large cities and smaller settlements,

notably Census towns, recorded faster growth (Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zérah 2012).

Second, compared to earlier phases of urbanization, contemporary processes are

inextricably linked to India’s increasing global engagement over the last decades and

peripheries are being produced through multi-scalar relations and interactions of local,

regional, national, and transnational flows of capital, expertise, and speculation. Third,

they are sites where diverse modes of governance overlap or intersect, often linked to

their classification as “urban” or “rural,” producing dissonance and jurisdictional gaps.

Institutional fragmentation is mirrored by other types of fragmentation, most visibly

spatial, the interpenetration of built-up area and open spaces that characterize the

urban frontier (Angel, Parent, and Civco 2012, Hamel and Keil 2015). Relatedly, given

that extensive tracts of land are acquired and converted for urban development, the

peripheries have emerged as key sites of contestation over land and land regimes. And

lastly, crucially, we argue that even though all spaces are dynamic and coproduced by

multiple social-political relations, peripheries—owing to their pace and scale of change

—are indisputably incomplete spaces, “always under construction,” (Massey 2005:9),

enrolling new actors and logics that steer social and political change, sometimes in

unexpected ways, and thus offer a generative site for urban studies to reflect and

analyze the complex processes that are coproducing the urban frontier.

3 Peripheries, in the context of extended (or planetary) urbanization,2 have expectedly

been the subject of increased scholarly interest and, as we discuss below, there is a

growing body of work that has engaged with different aspects of peripheral

urbanization. Moving beyond the conventional approaches that classify urban

peripheries according to their degree of functional integration with the core city, or

conversely, their primary connection to local agricultural systems or global production

platforms (Friedmann 2016), the more recent writings have argued that rather than

conceptualizing such vibrant spaces of change as a residual category, urban peripheries

deserve attention in their own right (see, e.g., Roy 2011a; Denis and Zérah 2017;

Mukhopadhyay, Zérah, and Denis 2020; Hamel and Keil 2015; Gururani and

Dasgupta 2018; Arabindoo 2020; Kennedy and Sood 2016; Gururani 2020; Upadhya 2020;

Wu and Keil 2020; Follmann et al. 2020; Coelho, Mahadevia, and Williams 2020). In

conversation with this emerging body of scholarship, the specific aim of the special

issue is to contribute to this research agenda by investigating the social-spatial

processes and everyday practices that co-constitute the peripheries in contemporary


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India. Adopting a capacious understanding of the periphery, the collection reflects on

the heterogeneity of urban forms and analyzes multi-scalar and transversal processes

of place-making as well as places-in-making and explores how periphery as a problem-

space contributes to theory-making.

4 The common thread that runs through the collection is the authors’ attentiveness to

the “relational constructedness” of politics, places, and subjectivities (Massey 2005). By

focusing on co-production, the special issue emphasizes how relational processes that

involve a range of different actors—state agencies, workers, investors, households,

builders, real estate intermediaries, business owners, migrants—, with varying

capacities to influence outcomes on the ground, interact with each other and how they

recalibrate multiple relations of power to produce peripheries in diverse ways. Thus,

the authors are attuned to the politics and diverse modes of governance that underpin

these processes in specific places: the capitalist (and criminal) impulses of land

grabbing and accumulation, the influence of neoliberal-inspired policies, the

dominance of landed castes and upwardly mobile middle-classes, as well as the forms of

resistance and agency of subaltern actors. A focus on co-production or relational

constructedness offers a grounded, more comprehensive analytical lens, compared to

“hegemonic” approaches, which tend to assume homogenizing effects of capitalism and

colonialism (Ong 2011).3 The papers show that alongside the more visible

transformation of the built environment, other processes such as the circulation of

migrant labor, the shift in occupations of landowning groups, or the residential

cohabitation of diverse social groups, all contribute to a re-scripting of social relations

and the forging of new subjectivities. In tracking such social-spatial changes, the

special issue responds to Caldeira’s call to renew the concepts and categories of urban

theory and suggests that to simply characterize these processes as “urban” would be to

overlook the complexity and heterogeneity of the changes taking place and limit the

potential that the space of the periphery brings to urban theory.

5 This intellectual project started with a conference panel focused on critically

questioning key categories and concepts of the urban analytic.4 In taking the

conversation forward, we bring together the work of both established and early-career

scholars to highlight the diversity of current scholarship on the emerging forms and

processes beyond the “city.” In bringing together case studies from regions in North

and South India (Telangana, Haryana, Karnataka, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh), as well as a

comparative discussion on Hyderabad and Chengdu (China), the special issue is

attentive to multiple regional and trans-local politics that coproduce urban

peripheries. At the same time, it is cognizant of the historically sedimented colonial

relations of land, property, and law that continue to play a vital, and even constitutive,

role in how the social-spatial geographies of the urban are being remade at this

political-economic conjuncture. Taking their departure points from a range of

disciplinary perspectives to problematize the periphery (anthropology, sociology,

geography, planning, economics), the papers also draw on various methodological

approaches and sources, ranging from ethnographic fieldwork, colonial archives, land

records, real estate data, which will be further discussed below. Interested in forging a

conversation with comparative urban approaches, the collection ends with an essay by

Xuefei Ren reflecting on the significance of peripheries for urban scholarship more

generally.


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6 Before we turn to a discussion of the papers, we first situate in the next section our

core research focus in relation to existing literature in urban studies. We then discuss

the methodological challenges and possibilities offered by the periphery as a

conceptual and territorial threshold. Lastly, we highlight the key thematic areas

explored in the papers, briefly describe each contribution, and present some potential

directions for future research.

Situating peripheries, frontiers, hinterlands withinurban theory

7 As is widely acknowledged, the bulk of urban expansion globally is taking place, not in

metropolitan centers but in hinterlands, suburbs, agricultural fields, transport

corridors between major cities and coastal edges (Angel et al. 2012; Keil 2017). Such

peripheries are witnessing unprecedented urban growth and transformation and

constitute the new frontiers of urbanization. Along with the category of periphery and

peripheralization, as discussed by Roy (2011a) and Caldeira (2017), there are

comparable designations that have been deployed to capture the diversity of extended

urbanization in India, including hinterlands (Arabindoo 2020), suburbs (Keil 2017),

subaltern urbanization (Denis and Zérah 2017), peri-urban (Dupont 2007; Follmann

et al. 2020), greenfield and frontiers (Balakrishnan 2019; Kennedy and Sood 2016;

Gururani and Dasgupta 2018). Rather than attempt to present a comprehensive review,

we limit our discussion to the bodies of literature most relevant for the papers in the

special issue.

8 From an economic and political geography perspective, one established field of

scholarship interprets changes occurring in urban peripheries through a framework of

global economic processes. It analyzes some of the major strands such as planetary

urbanization, state rescaling (or restructuring), financialization of urban production

and speculative urbanism. The assumption is that as the capitalist economy expands,

capital seeks out places with the highest returns. In this context, urban peripheries in

the global South emerge as key sites for investments, whether directed toward the

integration of global production chains, infrastructure mega-projects (Kanai and

Schindler 2018; Kennedy et al. 2014) or property development, including speculative

real estate (Denis 2011; Searle 2016; Halbert and Rouanet 2014; Raman 2016; Rouanet

and Halbert 2016; Goldman 2011, 2020). Such peripheral spaces are attractive for a

variety of reasons, including their relative proximity to city-based human and capital

resources and transport infrastructures, relatively cheaper land and under-regulated

governance regimes. Various actors, state and non-state, domestic and international,

target these peripheral spaces for establishing projects.

9 At a theoretical level, the spread of neoliberalism is considered to be at the origin of

this trend because it advocates smaller government and privatization of services and

the allocation of resources via the market. As states adapt to global economic

conditions and strive to compete, they undertake economic and political restructuring,

a process whereby new economic geographies emerge alongside new state spaces (for

India, see Kennedy 2014; Anand and Sami 2016; Williams et al. 2021). These broad

trends are considered to be instrumental in shaping contemporary urbanization

processes, especially as they are conceptualized in the formulation of what has been

described as “extended urbanization” whereby the urban becomes generalized,


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blurring the conventional distinctions between different types of spaces

(Brenner 2014). To counter the critique of determinism, i.e., that a common capitalist

logic underpins these transformations, more recent scholarship in this vein emphasizes

how historically and territorially entrenched social relations give rise to distinct forms

and expressions (Shatkin 2017; Schmid et al. 2018). Still, the planetary focus of the

extended urbanization theory has come under criticism for obfuscating differences

that exist in “the lived reality of real people in actual cities” (Schindler 2017:3), with

the risk of further marginalizing research on Southern cities and on urbanization

processes in the global South more generally (Buckley and Strauss 2016).5

10 Like in other so-called “emerging” economies, India’s urban built environment has

been impacted in manifold ways by inflows of global finance capital, especially after the

real estate sector was opened up to foreign investment in 2005. One strand of literature

has examined the precise ways that footloose global capital “touches down” in specific

places (Searle 2016; Halbert and Rouanet 2014; Rouanet and Halbert 2016) and

demonstrated the importance of a multi-scalar perspective to apprehend these

complex processes. Far from being a mechanical top-down operation, this scholarship

draws attention to ways in which the transformation of agricultural or forest lands into

tradeable real estate takes place with the concurrence of several intermediaries,

including local actors with knowledge and contacts. In particular, many national and

subnational governments are actively supportive of these transformations when they

are not initiating them. As Shatkin’s (2017) comparative study of the “real estate turn”

in Asia has shown, state actors are often the only ones in a position to assemble land on

a large scale, given the co-existence of various tenure regimes; they alone have the

power to invoke eminent domain to expropriate existing residents. However, the

relative power and propensity of states to use administrative machinery to develop

land on the urban peripheries depends very much on the broader political regimes in

place (Jenkins, Kennedy, and Mukhopadhyay 2014; Sud 2014). In India, subnational

state governments have emerged as key drivers of change, investing in land

development and connective infrastructure, and elaborating incentives for potential

investors, including exceptional regulatory and governance frameworks (e.g., Sood and

Kennedy 2020).

11 The concept of speculative urbanism, elaborated a decade ago for the Indian case by

Goldman (2011), specifically aims to capture the entrepreneurial dimension of the state

as it increasingly implicates itself in the business of partnering with capital and

directing it into urban peripheries. As the subprime crisis in the global North

redirected capital flows toward greener fields, notably in Asia, national and subnational

governments were elaborating strategies to build “world-class” cities, eager to enlist

private funds to bankroll megaprojects.6 Goldman, building on pioneering research on

urban politics in Bangalore (Benjamin 2008; Benjamin and Raman 2006), examined the

emergence of new “architectures” of urban governance, conceived to adapt to the

demands of global investors. The contribution of this generative concept has been

cogently summarized by Sood (2019), who argued, “[s]peculative urbanism can be said

to embody urban governance as ‘investment strategy’; it represents the turbulent

trajectory of world-class city-making projects in an era where the returns to capital are

their primary driving force and metric” (p. 2026).

12 Another strand of literature, called “subaltern urbanization” (Denis and Zérah 2017;

Mukhopadhyay et al. 2020), critically engages with some of the tenets of planetary


6

urbanization and more generally with mainstream urban theory, as part of a larger

agenda to build postcolonial theory from the South, following Parnell and

Robinson (2012) and Robinson and Roy (2016), among others. This scholarship draws

attention to the significance of urban transitions occurring in settlements below

100,000 inhabitants, where approximately 40 percent of India’s urban population lives,

according to the last Census (2011). This dynamic body of research challenges

metropolitan-centered scholarship by focusing on local agency and on settlement types

in places that are usually considered marginal in urban research. It counters the view

that urban expansion, and indeed economic growth and innovation, are dependent on

state-led initiatives or global actors. Rather, on the basis of empirical case material

spanning the breadth of the country, the research shows that endogenous social and

governance structures form the basis of the evolution of small settlements, including

their engagement with the global economy (Denis and Zérah 2017). This is important

for our purposes as a reminder that “peripheral” is neither a dependent nor

subordinate category; such places of peripheral urbanization “complicate the idea of

the urban as networks” (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2020:3) and highlight the heterogeneity

of the social-spatial forms that coexist and coproduce the urbanizing frontiers.

13 Motivated by similar intellectual goals of tracking urbanization in countries like India

that are predominantly agrarian, there is a new body of work on “agrarian urbanism”

that highlights the relational dynamics between the agrarian and urban

(Gururani 2020, Balakrishnan 2019, Cowan 2018, Gururani and Dasgupta 2018,

Sircar 2016, Roy 2016). It forges an important conversation between agrarian and urban

studies and argues that the urban question is intimately linked to the agrarian

questions of land, labor, tenure, and livelihoods, and that only by attending to the

constitutive role of agrarian regimes of caste-based control, authority, and exclusion

can we begin to grasp the persistent rurality and uneven development in India.

Gururani, for example, by focusing on urban villages in the city of Gurgaon on the

southern edge of New Delhi has argued that urbanization in the peripheries pivots on

the politics of land and caste (Gururani 2020). To analyze how the relational dynamics

of urban and agrarian co-produce the periphery in the crucible of intense political

contestations, this body of scholarship engages critically with colonial histories and the

agrarian political economy of land and property (see also Nielsen, Sareen, and

Oskarsson 2020). The key contribution of scholarship on agrarian urbanism is drawing

attention to the centrality of land and how its complex relational dynamics, namely of

caste and property, undergirds and coproduces the urban in its various dimensions,

material and immaterial. It directs our attention to diverse social-spatial processes and

practices of urbanization that depart significantly from the global North and calls into

question the city-centrism and other standard assumptions of mainstream urban

theory. In doing so, it demonstrates that the forces of urbanization do not assimilate or

erase the spaces of rurality, the villages or the agrarian relations embedded in

agricultural rhythms of land, labor, and livelihood but rather, the agrarian and urban

sustain and co-produce each other and contour the unfolding landscape of the

peripheries.

14 This broad overview provides a framework to anchor the papers in the collection and

allows us to turn next to the question of how to study the peripheries through a

discussion of research methods.


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Researching the periphery: methodological challengesand possibilities

15 We started this essay by arguing that peripheries are the new frontiers of urbanization

and as dynamic and emergent spaces, they are “always under construction.” But

tracking and documenting spaces that are undergoing rapid social-spatial

transformation pose a significant methodological challenge for social science research,

which relies on firm conceptual anchors, borders, boundaries, and classifications. How

can we map and analyze a landscape that is constantly changing? As researchers who

study the periphery, we recognize that in these frenzied zones, plans and maps are

continuously redrawn, new models/instruments of governance are introduced,

agricultural and pastoral lands are rapidly turned into high-rises and highways, and

local populations are confronted with the influx of new residents, all of which make the

task of tracking unfolding urbanisms in the periphery thorny. Although all urban

spaces are entangled in multi-scalar political economies, we argue that peripheries

engage an even wider range of local and transregional actors and urge us to revisit not

only the standard conceptual repertoire but also take seriously the question of method

and research methodologies. Their study demands methodological creativity and

innovation.

16 In acknowledging this challenge, some scholars have begun to build a more holistic,

socio-spatial analytics for investigating peri-urban spaces, advocating a vigorous and

systematic exchange between critical urban theory and geospatial sciences (Follmann

et al. 2020).7 These embryonic efforts can be seen as a response to calls for building a

more robust “urban science.” As Acuto, Parnell, and Seto (2018) note, “for urban

science to be collectively greater than the sum of its parts, it needs to draw from all the

sciences—natural, engineering, and social, as well as the arts and humanities—whilst

linking directly into practice, and offering effective global assessments of the state of

our planet’s urban condition.” (p. 2; see also Zérah 2020).8 Geospatial sciences typically

use remote sensing and geographic information systems, for instance, to detect

patterns and forms of urbanization in different places at various spatial scales, allowing

precise measurement of diachronic changes in morphology as well as land cover and

land-use change.9 Notwithstanding the contribution of geo-spatial techniques, social

science research methods remain essential to fully capture the everyday practices and

lived realities of old and new residents, of migrant workers, developers, bureaucrats,

and a range of other actors who actively participate in making the periphery. As

scholars track the spatiality of urban transformations, it is equally critical to also

address the temporality of changes and as such locate the study of urbanization in

historical conditions and the material relations that undergird them. Archives, oral

histories, and memories, as papers in the collection show, are rich vantage points to

gain a longer durée perspective and take into consideration the enduring legacy of

colonial laws and property regimes that sediment urbanization. To capture the

complex and often convoluted and contradictory processes through which spaces and

subjects are co-produced, we suggest that in-depth grounded ethnographic lines of

inquiry are highly generative methodological approaches. Since urban studies is

generally focused on institutional dynamics, governance structures, and planning

regimes, as well as on the analysis of macro-scalar politics and policies, we view the

ethnographic turn10 as a welcome and much needed methodological intervention that


8

can help grasp the everyday practices of work, mobility, habitation, livelihood, and

gain a grounded perspective on the local dynamics of power and politics. Among

others, ethnographic attention can throw light on the micropolitics of caste, land,

place, exclusion, and belonging as they play out in the peripheries and present

conceptual openings for theory-making.

17 The papers in this issue, grounded in different disciplinary traditions, are positioned

primarily within a critical and interpretive research paradigm and have adopted mixed

social science methods to analyze the (trans-)formation of the urban periphery.

Significantly, all of the authors have engaged in fieldwork, generating original,

territorially anchored data bases on which to ground their analyses and

interpretations. Indeed, as Upadhya and Rathod’s piece demonstrates, only fieldwork-

based research can produce insights into quotidian practices, specifically the “small-

scale, ‘informal’ and ‘illegal’ modalities through which agrarian land becomes real

estate” (Upadhya and Rathod, this issue, paragraph 13) Likewise, it is through intensive

fieldwork that the authors have been able to investigate the subtle but powerful ways

through which politics of land, accumulation, and dispossession intersects and is

informed by the hierarchical relations of caste and community. Whether in rural

Punjab (Rathi, this issue), or on the outskirts of Bengaluru (Upadhya and Rathod, this

issue), Hyderabad (Sood, this issue; Xie, this issue) or Delhi (Mishra, this issue; Sood,

this issue), the collection highlights the potential of ethnographic methods and sheds

light on how urban peripheries are co-produced through the social interactions of

various groups, whether acting in concert or at cross-purposes. Both Mishra’s and

Rathi’s pieces demonstrate the value of combining archival research with ethnographic

research methods: for Mishra, to articulate the relocation of “polluting” brick kilns and

the relegation of equally undesirable manual laborers to the urban periphery; for Rathi,

to reconstruct how land tenure systems and peasant movements were instrumental in

shaping the distribution of land among different groups, which in turn influenced

trajectories of urbanization. The papers are discussed in further detail in the next

section.

18 Comparative urbanism is another major stream of research that holds considerable

promise for investigating the urban frontier. The exceptional dynamism of peripheral

sites in the global South, despite occurring contemporaneously at a particular moment

of globalization, demonstrates remarkably different trajectories, reminding us that

urbanization is always a situated process. Yet, comparative methods can provide a basis

for understanding how specific outcomes are produced in a given context. Numerous

scholars are calling for a new methodological agenda in the field of urban studies,

advocating for more flexible and creative comparative methods (McFarlane 2010).

Robinson (2016) has provocatively asserted that theories of the urban can start “from

anywhere,” taking forward Roy’s (2009) call for new geographies of theory and building

on her own pathbreaking research on “ordinary cities” (Robinson 2006). Rather than

restricting inquiry to formal comparative methods, which limit the scope for

comparing in and from the global South, Robinson (2016) enjoins scholars to adopt a

wider repertoire of tactics, building in particular on relational comparative methods

(also see Ward 2010) and comparative urbanism (McFarlane 2010). From such a

comparative stance, three papers explicitly mobilize comparative methods and/or rely

on comparative insights for the analysis: whereas Upadhya and Rathod compare

processes unfolding in two localities within peri-urban Bengaluru, Xie compares

selected peripheral areas in Hyderabad and Chengdu (China), and Sood contrasts modes


9



















of government in the National Capital Region of Delhi with those in Greater Hyderabad.

It is in conversation with these bodies of work that the papers engage the urban

through the periphery, as we discuss next.

Key thematic issues in this collection

19 As the literature section highlighted, a common thematic that prevails in all

peripheries is the intense contestation over land. Amid soaring land prices and

speculation, land has come to be traded or acquired in all possible—legal and extra-

legal—ways and there is a broad range of stakeholders, besides the land mafia, who

have jumped into the business: large and small land developers, local and transnational

real estate companies, state agencies and politicians. As scholars note, the current

trend is towards increasing commodification, bringing land not previously traded into

the market and converting land use to non-agricultural uses (industrial, commercial,

residential,…), which has resulted in a diminished and uneven role of land as a source

of agrarian accumulation (Nielsen et al 2020; Balakrishnan 2018; Lerche 2013;

Sampat 2016). Whether through market transactions or through state-led land

acquisition, i.e., using the legal instrument of eminent domain, large tracts of land in

the peripheries have been acquired for urbanization and other purposes.11 As the

papers show, these processes always unfold in articulation with local configurations of

caste and class.

20 In focusing on the question of land as it is playing out in the peripheries of Bengaluru,

Carol Upadhya and Sachinkumar Rathod draw on their extensive ethnographic

fieldwork with local land brokers and dealers and argue that the struggle over land is

intimately connected with the entrenched politics of caste. Through a careful

engagement with the recent debate on how the urban question in countries like India

pivots on the embedded dynamics of agrarian relations, Upadhya and Rathod

emphasize the centrality of caste in analyzing uneven urban development. By “bringing

in” caste and mapping how land is being acquired in small and incremental ways, the

authors focus specifically on how the local Dalit groups carefully navigate the changing

social-material landscape. They argue that in this political-economic conjuncture, caste

is not just another vector of social difference, or basis of collective identity, which it of

course is, but it is more than that. Through material and discursive ways, Dalit groups

enter the world of land transactions and are able to challenge the social power of

dominant caste groups, like the Reddys in the case of Bengaluru. The authors argue

that caste certainly is a social structure of the agrarian economy but it also structures

the land market, and is reshaped—and re-spatialized—as agrarian land is assetized and

enters into urban circuits of accumulation. As they show, their key Dalit interlocutors,

who work as broker-activists, do contest land grabbing by the dominant caste groups,

but they also go beyond this and mobilize their collective caste identity to “hail the

state” and demand their grievances be attended to. In offering a highly nuanced and

grounded reading of the changing imbrications of land and caste, Upadhya and Rathod

describe how multi-scalar and transversal relations of power coproduce the peripheries

in unprecedented ways.

21 Ankita Rathi’s contribution also engages with the entanglements of urban and rural

dynamics and how the politics of land plays out in Patiala District in Punjab. Drawing

on the colonial histories of agrarian change, the paper documents the passage of a


10

small town called Patran from feudal village in a princely state to a thriving agro-

commercial town. Through archival research on land tenure systems, combined with

household surveys and in-depth interviews with landholders, Rathi shows how the

urban and the agrarian are co-produced in this particular setting. Extending the

agrarian urbanism framework, Rathi argues that in predominantly agrarian societies

like India, where relations of land and property are deeply entangled in caste

hierarchies and exclusions, there is not a neat conversion from “agriculture land” to

“urban land,” as standard planning theory would suggest, but rather a series of land-

based negotiations, capital investments, and everyday practices of work, labor, and

credit cutting across the rural and urban and simultaneously contouring the social and

political geography of both. While the feudal land tenure systems are tenacious and

cast their long shadow in contemporary land politics, the history of peasant resistance

and intricate caste-based negotiations work to transform the agrarian urban landscape,

although in highly uneven ways. Intersecting with changing rural aspirations and

subjectivities, while the erstwhile farmers have migrated to urban centers their links

with the village, especially caste-based ties, have not disappeared. In fact, as Rathi

points out, rural spaces continue to sustain and co-produce unfolding urban dynamics

and their attendant uncertainties.

22 Ashima Sood uses the term “speculative frontiers” to designate those unfinished,

“conjectural” peri-urban spaces being shaped by real estate capital on the peripheries

of India’s large metropolises. Opening with a conflict in Noida (Delhi - National Capital

Region) between working-class residents of a basti (auto-constructed settlement) and

those of a gated enclave catering to the upwardly mobile middle-classes, the essay

explores divergent modalities of government in such edge settings. Such territories

usually fall outside the municipality proper and the norms associated with

representative local government, evolving distinct forms of “frontier governance.”

Mobilizing an original database of over 7,000 large-scale private housing projects

spanning the last decades (1995–2018), Sood shows that private real estate activity has

concentrated in India’s eight largest metropolitan areas. Zooming in on the case of

Greater Hyderabad and mobilizing a political economy framework to examine recent

patterns of development in the urban periphery, she argues that a nexus of real estate-

led growth and state-led infrastructure has given rise to particular modes of

government that, inter alia, “valorize the interests of propertied groups at the expense

of migrants and working-class communities” (Sood, this issue, paragraph 69). She

argues that the frontier is hostile to claims made by vulnerable and migrant

populations, undercutting the scope for occupancy urbanisms (Benjamin 2008). In an

effort to advance a theoretical understanding of speculative peri-urbanism she

elaborates a typology of the modalities of government—privatized, specialized and

exceptional—as emblematic of those that have emerged in India’s urban peripheries.

23 Pratik Mishra in presenting an account of brick kilns and brick kiln workers from the

vantage point of Khanda, a small village in Haryana, draws our attention to the

question of labor and how peripheries are materially and socially produced. Khanda

supplies millions of bricks to Delhi and the National Capital Region every year for the

construction of a wide variety of buildings and infrastructure. The paper examines how

the relocation of brick kilns has implicated Khanda in a series of temporary peripheral

landscapes as metropolitan Delhi has continued to grow and expand. Mishra argues

that exclusionary urbanization processes, in tandem with migrants’ mobility choices,

produce migrant workers as peripheral subjects while contributing to the production


11



of the urban periphery. Drawing parallels between the displacement of brick kilns from

Delhi to peri-urban villages and the precarious migration of brick kiln workers, he

highlights the tenuous relation of brick kiln workers to urban space and describes how

spaces and subjectivities are relationally co-constructed. The paper draws on the work

of Gidwani (2015) and Gidwani and Maringati (2016) and through ethnographic

research evocatively captures the lives of laboring bodies that materially produce

(peri-)urban spaces. Thus, Mishra reminds us that the periphery is “a heterogeneous

category that has been traced across multiple sites and scales—at the urbanizing edges

of expanding cities, disseminated across the fragmented physical and social structures

of the core city, at distant sites of extraction along extended but discontinuous

geographies of urbanization, and at the scale of the body, of socially stigmatized

workers who do the hard, dirty work” (Mishra, this issue, paragraph 2) of city-building.

24 In the peripheries of metropolitan regions, both established and “new” residents of

various backgrounds—ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional—find themselves

inhabitating common residential spaces. Liubing Xie undertakes to study patterns of

urban relationalities that emerge between different social groups in conjunction with

the built environment. To do so, he juxtaposes selected study sites from the peripheries

of Chengdu in China and Hyderabad in India, two megacities actively engaged in

strategies to position themselves in global economic networks, to use comparison as a

heuristic for examining urbanization across national contexts. Inspired by work on

urban assemblages (Farias and Bender 2010), Xie deploys the concept of “assemblages

of living together” to show how in the wider context of socio-economic change taking

place in these sites, new configurations of sociality emerge. On the basis of preliminary

field research, he identifies three emblematic configurations common to both sites:

interspersion of auto-constructed communities and gated communities; internal

heterogeneity within residential communities; vertical cohabitation between migrant

tenants and villager landlords. His exploratory research aims to interrogate how

materiality, embodied in these distinct residential configurations, articulates with

sociality. Xie shows how certain practices common to both cases, like the erection of

physical barriers, are put in place to ensure social distancing and how certain forms of

cohabitation engender or reproduce unequal relations of interdependence between

social groups.

25 In the Afterword, Xuefei Ren undertakes to situate the collection in relation to the

broad contours of urban scholarship in the last few decades. Hypothesizing a

“peripheral turn” in urban studies, she observes that city-centric perspectives, as

exemplified by the Chicago School’s concentric model of urban growth, have been

progressively challenged, most notably by urban scholars studying the global South.

These scholars have trained their sights on the periphery, such as suburbs, small towns,

and the sprawling hinterlands outside metropolitan regions. Her essay goes on to

discuss what can be gained by shifting the analytical lens from the city center to the

periphery, and from Western cities to cities in the global South. Drawing on new

scholarship on urban peripheries in India, Ren also identifies three major avenues for

further investigation: comparative methodology, center-periphery relations, and “ways

of life.”


12



Concluding remarks

26 This special issue has been conceived in support of the research agenda dedicated to

the study of the periphery as a distinct “problem space.” We have argued that instead

of a residual space, the periphery emerges as an important site of investigation and

sheds light on “other” situated processes and practices that are central to

understanding urban transformation in the global South and beyond. This collection of

papers, focused on India, has demonstrated this in several critical ways. First, with

regard to governance, it has underscored how overlapping administrative boundaries,

often linked to “rural” and “urban” classifications, contribute to ambiguous

jurisdictions and “voids” that tend to work in favor of powerful interests and against

more disadvantaged groups. Cities, although not exempt from such territorial

dissonance, do not generally face the same degree of institutional fragmentation as the

periphery. Second, the question of land, its conversion and acquisition, and as an object

of speculation, is critical in the city and in the periphery but in the latter, the frenzied

nature of land transformation, especially the conversion of agricultural land to other

uses, brings more directly into play the urban-rural interface as regimes of land

undergo significant transformation. In particular, the question of land articulates in

distinct ways with the complex politics and changing relations of caste on the urban

frontier. It was shown that these agrarian-urban entanglements are critical for gaining

an understanding of how, even as the entrenched relations of caste and land change,

they remain constitutive of the caste-based politics of land, and how they inform the

calculations of compensation and recognition, or not, of land titles. Third, in the

rapidly changing landscape of work, mobility, and migration, there are new social-

spatial arrangements of cohabitation that emerge and offer insight into complex

relationalities that take shape in the periphery. Whereas migration and social

heterogeneity are both mainstays of the urban experience, some specific features,

already flagged by Caldeira and others, can be witnessed in the periphery, notably the

distinct modes of production of space. Self-built neighborhoods co-exist alongside

developer-built gated communities, and this residential cohabitation raises key

questions about sociality. Thus, by presenting grounded analyses of the complex

functional, territorial and social re-compositions playing out in the periphery, the

collection not only directs us to the unfolding social-spatial dynamics of urbanization

but it also provides an opportunity to anchor research on the periphery more

prominently within urban theory.

27 Moving forward, one of the key contributions of the special issue is to invite scholars to

remain open not only to new conceptual anchors and foster interdisciplinary

conversations but to also reflect on our methodologies that may otherwise obscure

certain (read subaltern) perspectives and experiences. Incorporating mixed methods

that are collaborative, multimodal, and engaged, the special issue calls for research

that is attentive to governmental maps and plans as much as to oral histories and

memories to open up possibilities for future research design and a renewed

understanding of the periphery and with it of the urban. Such comprehensive and slow

scholarly work may yield reports and articles but it may also generate visual collages,

documentary films, blogs, and multi-media installations that can allow us to continue

to build up urban theory from the periphery. In other words, in centering the

periphery as the site for developing a robust approach for investigating, interpreting


13

and comparing the complex processes of urbanization, the collection strives to sustain

and further the dialogue between different disciplinary approaches and also extend a

call to experiment with diverse methodological approaches to study the urban in all its

heterogeneity.

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NOTES

1. The authors are grateful to Ashima Sood, co-editor of this special issue, for sustained

engagement on the topics discussed in this introduction. We also wish to thank the reviewers for

their careful reading and constructive comments, which were very helpful in revising the initial

draft. The usual disclaimers apply.

2. Planetary urbanization designates a body of theory, inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre,

elaborated notably by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (see, for instance Brenner 2014;

Brenner and Schmid 2014; Brenner and Schmid 2015). In addition to generating a large body of

research, it has sparked critical debates in urban studies, a review of which is beyond the scope

of this editorial introduction. See for instance, Roy (2016) and Storper and Scott (2016).

3. In Aihwa Ong’s words (2011): “Any hope we have to grasp the particularity and variability of

the great urban transformation demands situated accounts of how urban environments are

formed through specific combinations of the past and the future, the postcolonial and the

metropolitan, the global and the situated, but is not dominated by any single mechanism or

principle” (p. 9–10).

4. The panel was part of the annual RC21 conference of the International Sociological Association

held in Delhi in September 2019. The overall conference theme was "In and Beyond the City:

Emerging Ontologies, Persistent Challenges and Hopeful Futures." Our panel, co-convened with

Ashima Sood, was entitled "The Peri-urban Question: Renewing concepts and categories." The

editors thank the participants of the panel, paper presenters, discussants and the public, for their

rich inputs and the lively exchange.

5. In Schindler’s words: “the epistemology of planetary urbanization risks re-centering the

essence of urbanity to the North Atlantic. If urbanity is all-pervasive, it can be studied in one’s

backyard, so why bother researching it in Swaziland?” (Schindler 2017:2).

6. For scholarship engaging with the notion of world-class cities in India, see, for instance,

Baviskar (2006), Kennedy (2007), Zérah (2008), Kennedy and Zérah (2008), Arabindoo (2011),

Dupont (2011), Kennedy and Zérah (2011), Roy (2011b), Ellis (2012), Ren and Weinstein (2013),

Schindler (2014), Das (2015), Follmann (2015), Ghertner (2015).

7. This agenda was advanced through the international research network COMPASS (2016–2019),

coordinated by Loraine Kennedy (CNRS, EHESS), Karin Pfeffer (University of Twente), Fulong Wu

(University College London), Peter Dannenberg and Alexander Follmann (University of Cologne).

8. Indeed, for some observers, academia has not sufficiently acknowledged just how critical

urban-related issues are for addressing the world’s most pressing problems including sustainable

development; they contrast this to the policy domain, for example the 2015 UN Sustainable

Development Agenda, which focuses explicitly on urban areas or city-led initiatives like the Paris

climate agreement (Acuto et al. 2018).

9. Ever more sophisticated quantitative techniques are being developed and used for measuring

and making comparisons on the basis on particular metrics such as fragmentation and

integration. These include machine learning algorithms for developing fragmentation metrics in

remote sensing communities, e.g. Anees et al. (2020). Also see https://uwaterloo.ca/atlas-of-

suburbanisms/about

10. There is a growing body of urban research that integrates ethnographic approaches. See for

instance Simone (2004); De Boeck and Plissart (2014); Anand (2017); Searle (2016).

11. It is important to recall that apart from governments, which use state machinery to forcibly

acquire land from private owners or bring common lands into the market, other, “ordinary,”

stakeholders also take part in this broad transformation, including owners of micro-plots who

sell them off to be subdivided for residential use (see, e.g., Denis 2018).


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INDEX

Keywords: periphery, urban peripheries, peripheral urbanization, peri-urban, urban studies,

urban co-production, ethnographic methods, global South, India

AUTHORS

SHUBHRA GURURANI

Department of Anthropology, York University, Toronto

LORAINE KENNEDY

CNRS Research Director, Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (CNRS-EHESS), Paris


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Caste at the City’s Edge: LandStruggles in Peri-urban BengaluruCarol Upadhya and Sachinkumar Rathod

This paper draws on fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2020 as part of the project

“Speculative Urbanism: Land, Livelihoods, and Finance Capital,” in collaboration with the

University of Minnesota, funded by the National Science Foundation [grant

number BCS-1636437]. We thank our colleagues Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman, Hemangini

Gupta, Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner, and other members of the research team for many

discussions and debates. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Third Annual

Research Conference of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, January 10–12,

2019; in the panel on The Peri-urban Question: Renewing Concepts and Categories at

RC21@Delhi, September 18–20, 2019; and at the French Institute of Pondicherry, February 13,

2020. We are grateful to the organizers and participants of those conferences for their valuable

feedback, as well as to the anonymous referees for their constructive comments. All photos are by

Pierre Hauser, who we sincerely thank for allowing us to use his work.

1 On one of our first days of fieldwork on the south-eastern fringe of Bengaluru, we

encountered two individuals who became key interlocutors in our study of the peri-

urban land transition. While driving around the area observing land use changes, we

spotted four men who had parked their motorcycles, and were walking into an empty

plot of land adjacent to the road. Thinking that they might be discussing a land deal, we

tried to strike up a conversation. It turned out that two of the party were indeed local

brokers—“Shekhar,” a young man, and his uncle “Nagappa”1—who were inspecting a

plot of land for sale. After we told them about our planned research on real estate

development in peri-urban villages, they agreed to speak with us and we settled down

on the steps of a closed shop. With little prompting, Shekhar and Nagappa began telling

us about the rampant “land-grabbing” that was occurring in the area, especially

“encroachments” on government land by members of the powerful Reddy community.

Offering to show us an example, they led us down a lonely rural road till we came to a

large barren piece of land on which a number of cricket pitches had been marked out.

Shekhar explained that this was once gomala land (common land used for grazing or

other public purposes), which had been appropriated by a local Reddy family by bribing


21

the Village Accountant to manipulate the land records. The usurpers first planted

eucalyptus on the plot, but later decided to turn it into a cricket ground. The “owners”

rent out the pitches to “techies” (software engineers) employed in nearby IT parks,

who come to play cricket on the weekends. As we continued to drive around the area,

they pointed out other examples of encroachments, especially gomala land turned into

residential “layouts.”

2 Subsequently, during our fieldwork, we heard about many such cases of “land-

grabbing” (the English term has been absorbed into ordinary Kannada speech), and we

also learned about the struggle that was being waged by local Dalits against what they

view as the illicit activities of Reddys. Prompted by these stories, we began to

investigate the caste conflict that seemed to be unfolding on the canvas of a booming

land market. While there are many dimensions to the peri-urban land transition, in this

paper we focus on the contested appropriation and conversion of land by powerful

actors and the caste politics that has crystallized around these processes. In the stories

about the urban land transition that we recorded, caste appeared time and again—as a

form of social power that has allowed certain actors to capture the most benefit from

the activation of land markets, and as the language through which struggles around

land were narrated and pursued. We describe the contestations that have erupted

around land as it is transformed from a productive asset in an agrarian economy to a

key financial asset in a speculative urban economy (Goldman 2011), and explore how

caste is reconfigured, invoked and respatialized through these struggles.

3 In the next section, we locate our ethnography in relation to recent work on

postcolonial urbanism, land struggles and the peri-urban in south Asia. Section 3

describes Bengaluru’s real estate-led urban transformation, the changes in this peri-

urban site, and the engagement of Reddys and Dalits in the land market. It also

provides a brief background on the agrarian political economy of the Mysore region to

contextualize the discussion that follows. In the fourth section we describe how “land-

grabbing” takes place, situating the dispossession of Dalits and the privatization of

common lands within the wider politics of land in Bengaluru. Section 5 explores the

modalities through which Dalits have challenged the social power of Reddys in this

context, and reinserts these land struggles in their regional context by exploring the

place-embedded caste identities that inform struggles around land. The paper

concludes by arguing that caste should be at the center of analyses of urbanization and

the land transition in India.

Agrarian Urbanism and the Land Transition

4 Postcolonial urban scholars have argued that received theories of urbanization are

inadequate to capture the complexities and varieties of urban forms in cities of the

global South (Robinson 2016; Roy 2011), where the “urban question” is also the

“agrarian question” (Roy 2016). Gururani (2019) proposes the concept of “agrarian

urbanism” to capture an “urbanism in which agrarian regimes of land and property

endure and coproduce the urban” (p. 14). This concept is particularly relevant on the

“urbanizing frontiers” (Gururani 2019) of south Asia where the “feverish non-

metrocentric remapping of the urban-agrarian hinterland” is marked by a

“heterogeneous politics of land” (Gururani and Dasgupta 2018:41).


22

5 To capture the entanglements of the agrarian and the urban, we need to be attentive to

the specific regional locations and histories of south Asian cities (Nair 2013). In

postcolonial settings, the urban transition is highly uneven and non-linear, socially as

well as spatially, such that regional “agrarian regimes of territory, land and property

are implicated and inscribed in ongoing urban land use changes” (Balakrishnan 2019:2).

Landholding and agricultural production have historically been grounded in caste

(Lerche and Shah 2018; Mosse 2018), albeit with significant regional variations

(Lerche 2015), which means that such an analysis must attend to the intersections of

caste and land within particular agrarian formations. To develop a deeper

understanding of the contemporary politics of land in urbanizing peripheries, we need

to draw on the large body of work on caste in sociology and social anthropology as well

as the long tradition of agrarian studies in south Asia (Gururani 2019).

6 Work on peri-urban sites across south Asia have provided fine-grained illustrations of

how the social logics of older agrarian formations are reconstituted and reflected in

new contestations, as rural communities are absorbed into expanding cities and

agricultural land is commoditized (Anwar 2018; Kundu 2016; Sarkar 2015). The

activation of speculative land markets by urbanizing processes or land acquisition has

complex and contradictory outcomes (Cross 2015; Shatkin 2016; Upadhya 2020), but

most research points to the widening of class and caste inequalities. While large

farmers may profit significantly from skyrocketing land prices, landless workers and

marginal and tenant farmers tend to lose their livelihoods and access to land (Agarwal

and Levien 2019; Vijayabaskar and Menon 2018). In addition, erstwhile cultivators and

landlords often benefit from their new roles in the expanding peri-urban economy—as

brokers, moneylenders, real estate agents, or rentier landlords (Cowan 2018;

De Neve 2015; Dubey 2018; Nelson 2018; Sampat 2017). Not surprisingly, local actors

who mediate the insertion of rural economies into multi-scalar circuits of accumulation

are usually drawn from the dominant landowning castes (Balakrishnan 2018; Das 2019;

Kennedy 2019; Levien 2015; Pati 2017), who transform their control over land into new

forms of “caste capital” (Bandyopadhyay 2016; Deshpande 2013).

7 This literature highlights the reproduction of economic inequalities and caste power as

agriculture is disrupted and land becomes primarily a source of financial value, yet the

shifting intersections of caste and land as rural communities urbanize have not been

closely mapped. As Gururani (2019:14) suggests, more attention must be paid to the

mutual constitution, reconfigurations and fracturing of the relations between land and

caste in peri-urban villages, and to how these changes “produce an uneven geography

of spatial value.” For example, Balakrishnan (2019) shows how agrarian elites in the

Maharashtra sugar belt have leveraged their accumulated political and social capital to

become “key protagonists in the making of urban real estate markets in liberalizing

India” (p. 15). Theorizing these processes as “recombinant urbanization,” she argues

that “agrarian-urban land transformations are undergirded by the persistence of caste

networks” (p. 14).

8 While other scholars have similarly conceptualized the operations of caste within the

modern Indian economy as social networks that create monopolies in particular

markets, Mosse (2018:432) argues that reducing caste to social networks elides the

multiple ways in which power and resources (especially land) are sequestered and

deployed through caste (cf. Mosse 2019). More work is needed to understand the

protean nature of caste and its multiple manifestations in changing contexts. In this


23

paper we explore how caste, as a key “social structure of accumulation” (Harriss-

White 2003) in the agrarian economy, is repurposed to capture value from

(financialized) land and also becomes the major axis of struggle against such

accumulation.

9 Recent work on the politics of caste in India’s “new land wars” illustrate the diverse

ways in which claims to land “shape realigned or reimagined caste identities”

(Nielsen et al. 2020:685). These studies show that “caste consistently mediates land

transfers … by pre-empting, undermining or fuelling processes of social contestation”

(Nielsen et al. 2020:684–85). The authors argue further that while “caste has historically

shaped control of and access to land, recent changes to the political economy of land

have had a direct bearing on caste as social relation and practice” (Nielsen et al.

2020:685).

10 Building on these insights, in this paper we explore how the historical relations that

bound different caste groups to land—and to each other—have shaped strategies of

accumulation and resistance on the edge of a rapidly growing city. We trace the

reconfigurations of caste and land by understanding their inter-connections

“diachronically and conjuncturally,” as “recursively linked categories that are

produced and reproduced in continuous interaction under the influence of the larger

political economy” (Nielsen et al. 2020:685). We are particularly interested in how caste

identity and social power are invoked, reconstituted or sharpened on an urban frontier,

as land enters volatile real estate markets and is transformed from a factor of

production in agriculture to a key source of financial and speculative value

(Goldman 2020). Specifically, we ask how caste is reconfigured as a mode of

accumulation as well as an axis of struggles around land. In doing so, we contribute to

an understanding of the processes by which urban peripheries are co-produced by the

social interactions of various groups, whether acting in concert or at cross-purposes.

Urbanizing Villages, Financializing Land

11 Bengaluru’s spectacular growth and transformation since the 1990s as it became a key

center of India’s software outsourcing industry forms the backdrop to this paper. The

rising demand for commercial and residential properties accelerated the spread of the

city into its rural periphery, swallowing up thousands of hectares of agricultural land—

a spatial expansion that is periodically reflected in the redrawing of the metropolitan

boundary and the master plan (Sundaresan 2017). Between 1971 and 2011, the

geographical area of the Bengaluru Metropolitan Region (which includes Bangalore

Urban and Bangalore Rural districts) expanded four times to 710 sq km, while cropland

shrunk to 7 percent of the area (Purushothaman and Patil 2019:121). The population of

Bengaluru increased from 6.5 million in 2001 to 9.6 million in 2011, to an estimated 12.3

million in 2020. Much of this demographic growth was due to the incorporation of

surrounding settlements into the city. In 1991, 189 villages of Bangalore North and

South districts were brought under Bangalore Urban Agglomeration (Nair 2005:147),

and another 110 villages were incorporated into the city in 2007 when the new

municipal authority, Greater Bangalore Municipal Corporation (the BBMP), was

created.

12 The rapid expansion of Bengaluru into its hinterland has been driven by government

land acquisition for infrastructure and industrial projects and by private market


24

transactions for real estate development—both leading to the widespread alienation

and financialization of agrarian land (Goldman 2020). Bengaluru’s “neoliberal

urbanization” (Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2009)2 is most visible in the sprawling IT

(information technology) campuses and upscale residential and commercial complexes

that dominate the landscape of newer areas of the city, particularly on the southern

and eastern fringes. But villages even far beyond the city’s official boundary have also

been transformed, as land aggregators and real estate companies created “land banks”

in anticipation of future demand. The spiraling demand for land and water has led to

the decline of agriculture in numerous villages surrounding the city and to the

conversion of large swathes of agricultural land into (actual or anticipated) urban real

estate.

13 While numerous studies have documented the consequences of compulsory land

acquisition for infrastructure development, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and real

estate projects (Banerjee-Guha 2010; Levien 2018), there has been less research on the

more piecemeal and incremental processes through which agricultural land is

transformed into urban real estate (Ghertner 2014). Goldman (2020) points to the

extensive appropriation and conversion of smallholder farmland and the rural

commons on the northern fringe of Bengaluru, a process that requires a “deeper

understanding of social, political, and institutional dynamics, rural and urban” (p. 3). In

this paper we describe these quotidian, small-scale, “informal” and “illegal” modalities

through which agrarian land becomes real estate, and the caste struggles that have

erupted around the land transition in one peri-urban site. This process of change, as in

similar cases elsewhere in India, is marked by “relentless negotiations, speculations,

contestations, displacements, and dispossessions [that] produce new urban subjects

and social formations” (Gururani and Dasgupta 2018:42).

14 The paper draws on three years of fieldwork in several villages on the southeastern

edge of Bengaluru. This area was selected for a larger study because it is the location of

one of the city’s largest apartment complexes, “Lakeview Haven,” developed on over

100 acres of land acquired from farmers and landowners of “G-halli” (see Figure 1). A

major aim of the research was to understand how land was assembled for the Lakeview

Haven project, tracing the chain of intermediaries who facilitated the process (Gidwani

and Upadhya N.d.). However, we soon discovered that agricultural and common lands

were being converted for other purposes as well, in diverse and more incremental ways

—especially informal (and even “illegal”) practices and transactions.3 The ever-

increasing demand for land has pulled “outside” money into local land markets, driving

up prices and attracting a range of investors and speculators. Apart from gated

communities such as Lakeview Haven, the area is dotted with numerous modest

apartment blocks and high-end “villa” projects, as well as empty “layouts” advertising

plots of land for sale (Figure 2).


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Figure 1: View of Lakeview Haven, a large gated community

Figure 2: View of urbanizing village on periphery of Bengaluru

15 This paper is based mainly on research in two villages—G-halli and a neighboring

village, “H-puram”—carried out between 2017 and 2019.4 G-halli is a village of around

580 households with a geographical area of 793 hectares, of which 32 hectares is

government land and the remainder private land.5 H-puram has 258 households and

covers 257 hectares. The major landowning group in these villages are Reddys,6 who are

much less populous in Karnataka compared to Vokkaligas and Lingayats (the main

landholding and politically powerful castes), but occupy a similar position of social and

economic power in the villages where they have settled.7 The other important castes in


26

these villages are Dalits (Adi Dravida and Adi Karnataka), Kurubas, Tigalas, and

Lingayats.

16 We do not have detailed empirical data on the distribution of land by caste for these

villages, but interviews indicate that Reddys are by far the major landowners, followed

by Kurubas and Tigalas. The Village Revenue Officer estimated in 2018 that only 5

percent of the land in G-halli was held by Scheduled Caste (SC) households. This region

is characterized by small peasant farming: nearly half of agricultural holdings in

Bangalore Rural district in 1998–99 were “marginal” (below 1 hectare). In the taluk

where our study villages are situated, 57 percent of the holdings were marginal, while

only 4 percent of holdings were 4 hectares or above (Government of India 2005:18).

Although Reddys and Kurubas are the major landowners in these villages, it appears

that many Dalit families at one time held small parcels of land, mostly land granted

under various land distribution programs. But as we detail below, their access to land

has been eroded over time while the hold of Reddys has strengthened.

17 Agriculture on the southern Karnataka plateau is dependent on rainfall and tank

irrigation and is carried out primarily on small family farms which produce food grains

(especially ragi) for consumption as well as some cash crops (Purushothaman and

Patil 2019). Prior to around 2005, farmers in G-halli grew staple crops such as ragi, rice

and pulses, produced vegetables and fruits for the market, and engaged in dairying and

sericulture. Around half of the cultivated land was irrigated with water from tanks,

lakes and borewells, while the rest was rainfed. However, agriculture has been largely

abandoned and most of the land converted to other purposes. Land sales in these

villages have been driven largely by lack of water for irrigation: tanks and lakes dried

up as run-off channels were blocked by construction activities, and the water table has

declined drastically due to excessive extraction of groundwater—first for eucalyptus

plantations and later for sale to the city’s “water mafia” (Ranganathan 2014).

Cultivators also cite labor shortage as an important reason for giving up agriculture,

reflecting the movement of Dalits out of the agrarian economy and dependence on

Reddy landlords. In K-puram, some land is still under cultivation, but rather than

cultivating multiple crops as in the past, many farmers grow only a single crop of ragi

during the rainy season, or simply leave the land fallow. Several farmers have switched

to dairying because fodder is more easily available (collected from the nearby lake) or

can be grown without irrigation.

18 With the decline of agriculture and rapid urbanization, most households in G-halli have

switched to other economic activities. Most of the younger generation of Reddy

landowning families have been educated to college level and are employed in white

collar or professional occupations in Bengaluru and other cities of India (as well as

abroad). Reddys belonging to the older generation have moved into local business

activities such as land brokerage and moneylending, or they have become rentier

landlords—constructing apartment blocks with small rental units. Most Reddy families

have sold at least some of their land and used the proceeds to purchase urban

properties or agricultural land farther from the city where prices are lower.

19 When agriculture was still the mainstay of the village economy, most Dalits worked as

agricultural wage laborers, cultivated their own or leased land, and/or were engaged in

other livelihood activities such as dairying. With the mushrooming of apartment

complexes, schools and commercial ventures in the area, they now prefer to work in

the new service economy as gardeners, security guards, or housekeeping staff. Others


27

have taken up informal employment as construction workers, petty vendors, or

domestic help. Several younger Dalits have received higher education and shifted to

urban and white-collar occupations or, like Reddys, have become land brokers.

20 An important new source of income for both groups is land brokerage, or “real estate

business”—as all kinds of land-related activities are called locally. Reddy landowners of

G-halli were the first to enter this business, becoming land market intermediaries and

inserting themselves into the multi-scalar networks that link local land markets into

wider circuits of accumulation (Gidwani and Upadhya N.d.). Some have become small

builders or contractors while others specialize in making layouts and selling the house

sites. While large land deals are brokered mainly by Reddys, Dalit agents such as

Shekhar tend to handle smaller transactions—particularly the sale of house sites or the

mediation of property disputes. “Mallesha,” a Dalit real estate agent from a

neighboring village, explained that customers (even Dalits) prefer to work with Reddy

brokers: “They think Reddys know everything and everyone in the Revenue

Department offices, so they trust Reddys more.” However, Shekhar said that he handles

cases for people of different communities, including Reddys and Kurubas. Shekhar’s

work takes him to the local Revenue Department and Sub-registrar offices where, like

other village-level brokers, he negotiates with lower-level officials and engages “touts”

to access relevant documents and get the clearances needed to cement land deals.

21 In the following section, we detail the roles of brokers in the agrarian land transition.

To contextualize our findings, we first provide some details on the history, agrarian

structure and political economy of the Mysore region.

Land and caste in Mysore: Regional political economy

22 Before the formation of Karnataka state in 1967, the “Southern Maidan” region (where

Bengaluru is located) formed part of the Mysore princely state. The land revenue

administration system in Mysore derived from the precolonial “Palegar” (poligar)

system, in which semi-autonomous provinces were administered by officials appointed

by the king to collect taxes, protect villages, and maintain tank irrigation systems. At

the village level, the “Ayagar” (ayagar) system institutionalized the traditional

occupations and duties of the various castes.8 Hereditary households from each caste

carried out services for the village and were remunerated with a share of the harvest or

the grant of inam lands (Wilks 1810:118, cited in Kashyap and Purushothaman 2017:9).9

While Vokkaligas, Kurubas, Lingayats and other cultivating castes controlled the

agrarian economy of Mysore, the former “untouchable” castes—mainly Holeyas and

Madigas—provided the labor. These castes also had designated “traditional”

occupations—the “right-hand” Holeyas were village servants while the “left-hand”

Madigas (now Adi Karnataka) were leather workers.10 As a consequence of social reform

movements in the early 20th century, Holeyas are now known as Adi Dravida and

Madigas as Adi Karnataka. Holeyas also use “Chalavadi”—a name recently revived

through a caste assertion and unification movement.11

23 Thus, the rural economy as well as the governance of land in old Mysore were clearly

structured by caste, a legacy that is reflected in contemporary caste relations, identities

and struggles. However, in contrast to the irrigated rice-growing belts of southern

India where the “untouchable” castes were mainly agricultural laborers not permitted

to hold land (Kumar 1965; Viswanath 2014), in Mysore it appears that lower-ranked


28

groups could take up land for cultivation, at least in the dryland areas (Kashyap and

Purushothaman 2017:11). However, the structure of landholding remained sharply

stratified by caste, with most land held by middle-ranking castes such as Vokkaligas,

Lingayats and Kurubas.

24 During the colonial period, the intersections of caste, political power and land were

reconfigured in important ways. Although the “Ryotwari” system of land revenue

administration introduced by the British created individual property rights in land and

a direct relation between the cultivator and the state, Manor (1989) argues that the

“processes of land settlement and revenue collection tended to be mediated through

the village headmen and their close allies who in the large majority of villages were

drawn from the dominant landowning groups” (p. 328). He traces the consolidation of

the social power of the propertied agrarian castes to this period, when the “traditional

prerogatives of the land-owning groups” were upheld by the state (Manor 1989:330). By

the mid-20th century, Gowdas (Vokkaligas) had gained control over land in most

Mysore villages, and these “dominant castes” (Srinivas 1959) gradually forged wider

networks and became powerful actors in state-level politics (Manor 1989).

25 The region was characterized by smallholder family cultivation, with a relatively high

proportion of owner-cultivators and a low incidence of landless laborers (Manor

1989:328). Dalit and other lower-caste households held or leased small parcels of land,

which they cultivated with family labor, in addition to working as wage laborers (Damle

1986:1904; Manor 1989:334). Despite the skewed distribution of land, Dalits in

Karnataka have had greater access to land compared to other south Indian states

(Manor 1989:359). Although land reforms in Karnataka during the 1960s and 1970s were

not very effective, they may have led to a more equitable distribution of agricultural

land in the southern dryland region (Damle 1989:1903; Manor 1989:344–45). A village

study in Bangalore district in the 1990s found that most SC households had acquired

lands through land distribution programs, but the land grants had been negotiated by

their Vokkaliga patrons who then purchased the land from them (Karanth 1998:96)—

harbingers of the contemporary practice of “grabbing” Dalit lands discussed below.

26 To sum up, the agrarian political economy of Mysore allowed some scope for Dalits to

hold land, but the structuring of the village economy by caste created relations of

inequality and dependence as well as place-embedded cultural identities that still find

expression in the region.

The Great Peri-urban Land Grab

27 The land market in this peri-urban site started to heat up in the 1990s, when two major

real estate companies started buying up land. In such contexts, sleepy agricultural land

markets with relatively stable prices are suddenly shocked into motion, pushing up

land values and tempting farmers to cash in on their land. However, due to

jurisdictional differences between G-halli and H-puram, land markets operate very

differently in the two villages.

28 G-halli was incorporated into Bengaluru municipality when the boundary was

expanded in 2007, bringing the village into the “yellow zone” of the Revised

Comprehensive Development Plan 2015.12 This important administrative change meant

that agricultural land could more easily be converted to non-agricultural uses,

attracting speculators and developers. By the time of our research (2017–20), around 80


29

percent of the agricultural land in G-halli had already been sold, including 120 acres for

the Lakeview Haven project, and 60 percent had been legally converted to non-

agricultural purposes. In contrast, H-puram remains in the “green belt” (but located

just outside the municipal boundary) where the sale, conversion and development of

agricultural land is prohibited, except for specified purposes. Nonetheless, land is

rapidly changing hands and being converted to non-agricultural purposes in this

village as well.

29 While farmers in G-halli were able to sell their land to developers or legally convert it

for other purposes, land-use change in H-puram has taken place largely through illicit

or quasi-legal procedures pursued by local landlords and politicians, reflecting the

“frontier urbanism” of such transitional zones (Gururani and Dasgupta 2018). Our

interlocutors spoke mainly about two kinds of land-grabbing—the occupation of gomala

or government lands and the illicit appropriation or purchase of Dalit lands.

Capturing common lands

30 The progressive appropriation of gomala and other kinds of public land forms a key part

of the Dalit subaltern history of dispossession in Karnataka. Such land (which is

supposed to be controlled by the panchayat) was traditionally used by all communities

for grazing cattle and other livelihood activities. But gomala and other vacant lands are

often cultivated informally, especially by Dalits.13 In G-halli, gomala lands had been

gradually converted to other uses before the land rush (mainly through panchayat

decisions), such as providing house sites for the poor or creating graveyards or

recreational grounds, while some had been captured by local leaders by manipulating

land records. But H-puram still had some gomala lands, which became the target of

land-grabbing after 2005. For example, Reddy landlords have built educational

institutions, clubs and marriage halls on such lands—a permitted use with government

permission (obtainable for those with political connections). More significant has been

the creation of unauthorized layouts on these open lands (Figure 3).14


30

Figure 3: Residential layout at H-puram

31 The conversion of agricultural land into layouts has historically been an important

route for the creation of new housing in Bengaluru (Nair 2005:160), as is evident in the

many “revenue layouts” that dot the city.15 Revenue layouts are usually formed without

government sanction but over time become “regularized” or attain quasi-legal status,

often through political influence (Balakrishnan and Pani 2020; Benjamin and

Raman 2011). One way in which layouts are created in the green belt is under certain

panchayat rules that allow change of land use, but technically this does not constitute

legal conversion of agricultural land.16 A second method of land use change (for plots of

more than 10 acres) is called “DC conversion,” i.e., with the permission of the District

Commissioner. Layouts in peri-urban areas mostly remain vacant—house sites are

purchased mainly by middle-class urban residents for investment rather than to build

homes. The spectacle of barren plots of converted agricultural land on the outskirts of

growing cities (Upadhya 2018) mirrors on a smaller scale the vacant land left by unbuilt

infrastructure projects through a process that Goldman (2020) terms “dispossession by

financialization.”

Dispossession of Dalits

32 The second major issue highlighted by our interlocutors was the appropriation of Dalit

lands. Several Dalit interlocutors claimed that their communities used to own a

significant amount of land in these villages, which gradually fell into the hands of

Reddys. They outlined several routes through which this land grab was accomplished.

33 First, Dalit holdings were often grant lands, which legally cannot be sold or alienated

but often change hands informally, leading to ambiguities of ownership.17 Developers

avoid buying “SC lands” because of their lack of “clear title,” which means that Dalits

are excluded from the more lucrative land deals (such as for Lakeview Haven) and are

forced to engage in informal transactions if they wish to sell land, often at below

market prices.18 Those who purchase land from Dalits generally have the political clout


31

to get the sale regularized and the land registered, after which they can sell it to

another party at a higher price. Our interlocutors said that many Dalits in these villages

had sold their land to Reddy landlords in this way—usually because they were in

financial distress or were coerced through various means.

34 “Santosh” is a Dalit activist from a neighboring village. He is affiliated with “DPA,”19 a

city-based Dalit association and has been leading the local struggle against this kind of

land-grabbing. He told us that Dalits in his village had experienced extreme “dabbalike”

(exploitation) and “dourjanya” (oppression/violence) over the past twenty years

because “local leaders” had made them sell their land cheap: “If a piece of land was

worth one crore they gave the Dalits twenty lakhs.” When asked why Dalits would sell

at this price, he responded, “We wouldn’t have seen lakhs [of rupees], no?” Illustrating

this process, he said that his own family had sold 2.5 acres to a developer in 2007: “Back

then, we did not know what was happening, but now after so many years, things are

becoming clear.” He spoke about the underhanded tactics used by brokers, working on

behalf of developers, to prise land from farmers, for instance by creating “fights

between brothers.”

35 Second, Reddys have acquired land through moneylending, appropriating land pledged

by Dalits as collateral when they were unable to repay the debt. Several respondents

recounted cases where Dalits took loans from Reddy landlords to cover marriage or

medical expenses and then lost their land: “Like this, the poor farmers give away their

lands for their loans which will be accumulated by the rich, who then sell it for crores.

The rich become richer and we are becoming poorer.”20

36 Third, Dalit lands can be appropriated by bribing Revenue Department officials to

falsify land records (cf. Reddy and Reddy 2007), especially because such land tends to

have unclear or “fuzzy” titles (Pati 2019). Our interlocutors spoke often about the

venality of Revenue officers: “Duddu maadod onde guri [their only motive is to make

money].” Dalit activists believe that “anything can be done with land” if one has

enough money, and that Reddys have the greatest capacity to persuade government

officials to ignore land use violations or manipulate land records.

37 In summary, the urban land transition in our site has disproportionately benefited

Reddy landowners, due to their legacy control over land and their involvement in “real

estate”—an outcome that is reflected in the ostentatious new bungalows built by

several Reddy families (see Figure 4). But they would not have been able to carry out

such activities without solid political support, as we outline next.


32

Figure 4: House of a rich Reddy in G-halli

Politics of land-grabbing

38 The broader context of the conflicts that we observed in these peri-urban villages is the

long-standing entanglement of political power with land in Karnataka, known for its

“real estate politicians” (Pani 2017) who have built their careers on wealth gained from

land deals and on creating housing layouts for their “vote banks” (Balakrishnan and

Pani 2020). The stories that we recorded in these peri-urban villages draw on wider

narratives about corruption that circulate widely in the city (Doshi and

Ranganathan 2017), especially after land-grabbing became a major public issue in the

1990s. Numerous cases of illegal encroachments and constructions on government land

(including water bodies) came to light and were blamed for the city’s increasing

congestion and rapid environmental degradation. The committee that was appointed to

look into the matter, headed by A.T. Ramaswamy, found that 45,000 acres of

government land worth 50,000 crore rupees had been encroached (Joint House

Committee, Karnataka Legislature 2006, 2007). The report also revealed that politicians

had participated in land-grabbing at all levels and across party lines. Dalit

organizations in Bengaluru have been active in monitoring land-grabbing in the wake

of these revelations, yet it continues largely unchecked due to the involvement of

powerful politicians. Nagappa told us that anyone who questioned such activities would

be targeted by “rowdies.”

39 The connections between political power and land became starkly evident in our study

villages, albeit on a smaller scale. Several interlocutors spoke about the “network” of

corruption that enables the accumulation of land in the hands of a few, asserting that

everyone from the Minister, Revenue Secretary, MLA (Member of the Legislative

Assembly), and District Commissioner (top state officials) down to the local Revenue

Inspector, Tahsildar and Village Accountant all play a role in facilitating such

transactions, taking their cut out of the bribes paid. This “network,” which includes


33

local landowners and brokers, became apparent in the case of “G-halli Club.” This

private recreational and social club, situated on a road leading out of G-halli and

surrounded by open fields, was established by a group of Reddy residents with the

support of the local MLA. They were granted six acres of gomala land by the

government on a 30-year lease.21 The club has become an important place where local

residents, party workers, and real estate agents meet to discuss politics and land deals

over food and beer. The club is frequented by affluent local Reddys but rarely by Dalits.

The gatherings we witnessed at the club illustrate how Reddy landowners and brokers

cultivate caste and party connections to oil the wheels of their real estate businesses.

40 Members of the “big” Reddy families already had political connections before the

recent land boom because they occupied most of the local elected positions when G-

halli was still governed by the panchayat system. Reddy landowners in H-puram

similarly benefit from patronage relations with city- and state-level politicians. These

political networks are manifested in various ways. For instance, local Reddys may serve

as “benamis” (proxies) for big politicians, who use land deals to generate election

funding and launder “black money,” in return for which they get support for their land

dealings. Whenever we asked about land transactions, our interlocutors (of all castes)

would mention the local MLA, who is said to have purchased 300–400 acres in the area,

all in the names of his supporters. “This is a new mafia that is making crores of rupees,”

Nagappa exclaimed.

41 The importance of political patronage became clear during the 2018 Karnataka State

Assembly elections, when both Reddys and Dalits campaigned vigorously for their

candidates for the position of MLA. Reddys in these villages mostly support the

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (which has been in power in Karnataka for several years),

while Dalits usually vote for the Congress Party. Reddy brokers and landlords donated

substantial funds to the campaign of the sitting BJP MLA because, as they told us

frankly, they had done well during his last three terms in office. They were also

determined to defeat the Congress candidate because they feared that their real estate

businesses would be adversely affected if he were to win. Conversely, Dalits

campaigned vigorously for the Congress candidate because they viewed defeating the

BJP as central to their battle against land-grabbing. Despite their efforts, the BJP MLA

was re-elected for a fourth term.

42 While Reddys cultivate political networks beyond the village to shore up their real

estate activities, Dalit youth do the same—but mainly through Dalit associations rather

than mainstream political parties. Several Dalit brokers of these villages also work as

activists with city-based Dalit organizations. Indeed, it was noteworthy that the most

politically active individuals in these villages—both Reddys and Dalits—make their

livings as land market intermediaries. For Reddys this is not surprising, given the close

linkages between land and political money in Bengaluru. Although we were puzzled at

first by this convergence in the case of Dalits, the logic eventually became clear. In the

next section we show how Dalit brokers draw on city and state-level Dalit organizations

to help navigate the land bureaucracy, and also utilize their knowledge of the land

business and connections with government officials to contest land-grabbing.


34

Fighting for Land, Contesting Caste

43 From long interviews with several Dalit brokers, we learned that their involvement in

the real estate business is not driven only by economic motives but also by the desire to

challenge Reddy dominance. For example, Nagappa said that his 15 years of experience

as a broker had given him an understanding of Revenue Department procedures which

enabled him to collect evidence of land-grabbing. He could recite from memory the

survey numbers of all the contested plots of land in his village and recount the cases in

detail—of encroachments on Scheduled Caste grant lands, gomala (common) lands,

lakes and ponds, and temple lands—and who was involved. Nagappa had collected thick

files of paperwork to prove his allegations.

44 The life histories of Dalit broker-activists further help to unravel how Dalit politics

have become entangled with the land market. Shekhar had studied in a local English

medium school and then enrolled in college, but he dropped out before finishing and

joined a private company. It was never his intention to get into “real estate,” he said,

but he got involved in the business after fighting a court case that his family had filed

against a powerful local Reddy landlord. “Subba Reddy” had been acquiring land in the

village on behalf of a developer. When Shekhar’s father refused to sell, Subba Reddy

“grabbed” the land by producing a faked General Power of Attorney (GPA).22 Shekhar’s

father filed a case against him, which languished in court for years until Shekhar took

it up and finally won. Shekhar explained that it was fighting this case that made him

aware of the extent of land-grabbing in the area, and he began helping other Dalit

families to reclaim land they had lost. This in turn led him to join “ADP,” a Bengaluru-

based Dalit organization, to draw on its support in fighting these cases.

45 Although he makes his living a broker, Shekhar spends most of his time on land-

grabbing cases. Like Nagappa, he says that fighting a land case gave him the experience

to work as a broker, while working in real estate in turn has helped him to oppose land-

grabbing. Indeed, these two activities are practically inseparable: Shekhar revealed that

when he discovers cases of Dalit lands that have been transferred to other names, he

approaches the original owners and offers to file a case on their behalf. If they agree, he

covers the costs of litigation himself, and if he wins the case he takes part of the

recovered land to cover his costs and remuneration. Thus, contesting the illicit

appropriation of land is a part of his “real estate business.”

46 Similarly, Santosh (introduced above) fights against land-grabbing with the help of

DPA. He explained that being a member of DPA gave him the confidence to approach

government authorities, and that he is able to “get work done” because officers in the

BBMP ward office or panchayat offices know and respect him. Santosh also mentors

local Dalit youth who have “put cases on land,” suggesting that this is a common

activity. According to Santosh, the Reddys had anticipated that prices would rise in this

area and therefore started buying up whatever land they could. Later, when Dalits saw

that their land was being resold at a profit, they felt they had been “cheated” and

began to file cases to reclaim their property (by showing that the original land

transaction was illegal). Shekhar, Santosh and other Dalit broker-activists specialize in

such cases.

47 One day, Sachin accompanied Shekhar and four other residents of H-puram to a

meeting at the Deputy Commissioner’s (DC) office that had been arranged by

“Manjunath,” the state president of ADP. The recently appointed Deputy Commissioner


35

had agreed to the meeting after the ADP had protested his lack of attention to Dalit

concerns. In a strong voice, Manjunath—a confident and straightforward man in his

fifties—explained each issue to the DC, handing over files that had been carefully

compiled to support their claims. The issues ranged from atrocities against Dalits and

the need for basic infrastructure in Dalit colonies, to the allocation of house sites,

encroachment of common lands, and “cheating” of farmers by developers. Manjunath

also requested the DC to take action against corrupt officials, whom he named. As the

cases were presented one by one, the junior officers at the meeting appeared

increasingly uncomfortable as they had to answer tough questions from both the DC

and Manjunath. On almost every matter raised, the DC agreed that Manjunath had a

valid case and directed his officers to “take action against these illegal activities.”23

48 The way in which this meeting unfolded suggests that Dalit organizations have some

political leverage with the government. By aligning with these organizations, activists

such as Shekhar are able to frame land-grabbing as an issue of caste exploitation. Thus,

while Reddys have profited from the land boom by deploying caste networks or “caste

capital,” Dalit activists contest such accumulation by drawing on their own networks.

Specifically, they call on a political identity that has been created and reinforced

through a long history of Dalit mobilization in the state (Davidappa and

Shivanna 2013). In the city of Bengaluru, such mobilization has been particularly

focused on land and housing rights for the urban poor (Benjamin and Raman 2011:41;

Kamath and Vijayabaskar 2014). In this struggle, Shekhar and his allies are not just

protesting against the appropriation of Dalit and common lands through illegal

machinations and the political influence of Reddys—they are making a collective claim

about caste power and using their identity as oppressed Dalits to “hail the state”

(Mitchell 2018), to insist that officials attend to their grievances and discharge their

responsibilities. As Shekhar said:

Ambedkar is like a railway engine and we are like railway compartments. When wego through Dalit organizations, our land-related work will be done immediately.Otherwise, it would have been very difficult.

49 This discussion reminds us that, historically, claims to land have been collective, in the

sense that dominant landowning castes assert their collective right to control land (as

well as the labor of the lower castes) in their villages. Although land is converted into

real estate through numerous individual negotiations and transactions, the urban

transition can proceed only by activating or building on social connections—of caste,

but also patron-client relations with powerful politicians and state functionaries.

Similarly, Dalit resistance to land-grabbing is mounted collectively, by invoking an

historically embedded consciousness of caste oppression and utilizing knowledge and

practices that have been honed through long-standing struggles for land rights and

social justice. While rural Dalits draw on the experience of urban Dalits in claiming

rights to land in their urbanizing villages, locally dominant caste actors reinforce their

hegemony by rescaling their political networks.

Materiality of caste and land

50 Dalit activists’ passionate fight against land-grabbing might suggest that their struggle

is primarily about social justice and to challenge the power of Reddys, yet a closer look

reveals that the situation is not so straightforward. For example, even as Shekhar

contests the formation of unauthorized layouts by Reddys, he himself had participated


36

in creating a layout on greenbelt land and selling the house sites. When we asked

whether he would get into trouble for this, he confidently replied that there is no

“dispute” on the land and that the buyers can easily get their plots regularized.

However, it appears that this venture did not go smoothly, for on another occasion he

told Sachin angrily, “Reddygalu maadidre okay, aadre dalitaru maadidre rocchigeltare [if

Reddys do illegal things it’s okay, but if Dalits do the same, it infuriates them].”

51 Shekhar not only makes his living as a broker, he has also engaged in dubious activities

like those of the Reddys he criticizes. Similarly, his fight to recover his family’s

property (described above) was motivated by the potential to profit from the land,

which had been worth little prior to the land boom. After Shekhar succeeded in

recovering the land (a plot of just under 1 acre), he sold it to Subba Reddy’s son for one

crore rupees. This example suggests that the Dalit struggle in these peri-urban villages

is not only about contesting accumulation by Reddys, but also reflects a desire to

participate in—and benefit from—the new land market on the same footing. Indeed,

Shekhar mentioned that it was only when he fought the case that he realized the value

of the family land they had lost.

52 More broadly, Shekhar and other activists are not critical of the rapid urbanization of

their villages nor of the repurposing of common land for monetary gain—rather, their

fight is against the monopoly of Reddys in these processes. To them, fighting against

land-grabbing and profiting from the land market are not antithetical activities. As

Manjunath (the ADP leader) told the group gathered at the DC’s office that day: “Sanna

putta kelasa madisikolli, sanghatane kattri. Maadbeku, dudibeku, matte neevu beliri, summne

kudilike hogbedri [get small things done (from the DC’s office) and build the

organization. Work, earn well, grow and don't spend it all on drinking!]” This

statement suggests that a collective movement against caste oppression and for land

rights, fighting individual land cases, and generating value from “real estate” are not

contradictory goals for these Dalits. Shekhar and other local activists have learned

from the experience of city-based Dalit organizations, which have long carried out

struggles for rights to the land on which informal settlements (largely occupied by

Dalits) are built, thereby staking claims to property ownership rather than just housing

rights or citizenship. As Roy (2017:A3) argues, subordinated groups may assert rights

through a “politics of property” rather than political mobilization alone.

53 This account of a land struggle in peri-urban Bengaluru brings us back to the question

of caste and land, highlighting the materiality of caste. Questioning why higher caste

groups should monopolize the benefits of urbanization and the booming real estate

market, Dalit activists challenge caste power on multiple levels—by appealing to the

administration and the courts for justice, by uncovering and contesting cases of illicit

land-grabbing, and through electoral politics and social movements. However, they

know that they remain relatively powerless in a context where state actors and

political leaders are at the center of the “land mafias” that control these processes of

dispossession.

Entanglements and genealogies of place and land

54 The land struggle described here could be read as an example of “subaltern citizenship”

or “insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2008; Nilsen 2016), where marginalized groups

assert their rights as equal citizens. However, while making claims on the state through


37

the language of rights and on the “terrain of the law” (Nair 2015), these Dalit activists

consistently foreground the caste basis of land-grabbing. Several researchers have

suggested that caste identity may be strategically articulated as a political tactic in

making claims on land (Benjamin and Raman 2011:42; Nielsen et al. 2020:7; cf.

Oskarsson and Sareen 2020), but we argue that the invocation of caste in this case is not

just instrumental. Rather, it reflects the specific and very material ways in which land

has been historically embedded in caste in this region, the continuation of caste as a

social structure of accumulation, and the history of Dalit struggles in Karnataka and

Bengaluru around the land question. Further, for actors such as Shekhar, land is not

only a key resource from which they have been excluded, but is also symbolic of their

exclusion as Dalits (cf. Steur 2015).

55 When asked to describe how their villages have changed over the last two decades,

Reddy and Dalit interlocutors alike would begin their stories not in the 1980s or 1990s

but at some time in the distant past. They told us about how their ancestors were

granted land in these villages by a king (in the case of Reddys), or about the honored

place they once held as messengers and tax collectors for the king (Dalits). Dalits

related how land they had received from Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar was snatched

by Reddys: “During Raja’s time, everything was fine, there used to be rules and

regulations, but now wealth is going in the reverse direction, i.e., back into the hands of

the upper caste (kottirodu reverse hogbittide).” While such stories are often interpreted as

caste “origin myths” that explain low status in the caste hierarchy (Deliege 1993), they

could also be read as sedimented memories, or subaltern histories, that anchor

communities to particular places—especially through their connection to land.24

56 One day, while sitting with Shekhar and Nagappa in the former’s small “sheet house”25

in H-puram, they related the story of the Chalavadi community (to which they belong),

which was traditionally the guardian of the right-hand caste order. One Chalavadi

family in each village held the hereditary post of village servant or watchman (thoti),

who represented the king. The duties of the Thoti included convening panchayat

meetings, collecting taxes, making official announcements, and guarding the village

(Karanth 1998:88). This authority was symbolized by their possession of the gantebattalu

—an ornate brass bell and ladle connected by a chain—which was used to collect taxes.

This instrument is mentioned in the 1911 Census Report, which describes how the Thoti

would convene meetings of the Right-hand castes by going

…. forth carrying a brass cup and chain as insignia, the cup having on it engravedthe badges of different castes composing this section, such as the plough of theVakkaliga, the scales of the Banajiga, the shears of a Kuruba, the spade of a Vodda,the razor of a barber, the washing stone slab and pot of an Agasa and the wheel of aKumbara. (Aiyar 1911:167)

57 To our surprise, Shekhar brought out a beautifully crafted gantebattalu that had

belonged to his grandfather, showing us the symbols of the various castes inscribed

along its arm and proudly demonstrating how the instrument was used. For him,

possession of this gantebattalu was proof not only of the important role that his

community and family had once played in village society, but also of their claim to the

inam land that had been granted to his ancestor (Figure 5).


38

Figure 5: Chalavadi Gante Battalu, inherited from Shekhar’s grandfather

58 Dalit narratives about their dispossession by Reddys move beyond living memory or the

recent past, expressing a deeper truth about the historical and contemporary relation

between caste, land and power. By foregrounding their honored position in precolonial

times and highlighting the role of Reddys in their downfall, they seek to legitimize

their claims to land while contesting the social power of Reddys. These place-embedded

histories inform the struggles that have crystallized more recently around land as

villages are absorbed into the urban fabric. Although land has become detached from

agriculture, the agrarian caste formation continues to structure accumulation through

land, but in new ways. Thus, for Reddys and Dalits alike, land is central to caste identity

as articulated in these histories. The social and symbolic values of land are not erased

or submerged by the disintegration of agrarian life and the financialization of land, but

are reworked and reappear in new ways, as in the contestations described above.

Conclusion: Revaluing Land and Caste

59 In this paper we have explored how the intersections of land and caste are reconfigured

in the agrarian-urban transition in Bengaluru, as land is turned into a financial asset

that produces new kinds of value as well as conflicts. We show how the social matrix of

agrarian production, and the historical relations that different caste groups held to

land and to one another, inflect processes of accumulation as well as struggles around

land. Caste identity not only structures who can participate in, and prosper from, the

urban land transition—it is also refashioned and deployed in new ways as peri-urban

land markets are activated. Our analysis also uncovers the reshuffling of the relations

between the state, political class, and caste identity as agrarian communities urbanize.


39

60 The analysis shows that while caste inequalities persist, they take on a different form in

these rapidly urbanizing villages, as Dalits move away from their prescribed role in the

agrarian economy, access education, and enter new occupations. Reddys retain their

economic power due to their control over land and other forms of capital, but their

social power and relation with Dalits—now less dependent on them for employment or

patronage—has shifted. Caste solidarity becomes a base for Reddys to forge multi-scalar

political networks that transcend a particular caste, even as they reinforce caste

domination at the local level. Sale of land for real estate projects has enriched Reddy

landlords, who accumulate additional wealth by capturing Dalit land, converting

common land into layouts, and acting as land market intermediaries. Thus, caste

remains a central axis of accumulation even as it works in diverse ways at different

scales.

61 Dalits have opposed this caste-based mode of accumulation by marshalling the political

resources available to them. They draw on the experience of Dalit movements to

engage with the state on its own terms—invoking the language of law and rights and

foregrounding the government’s obligation to protect Dalits from exploitation and

discrimination. This is not just a politics that uses caste identity in pursuit of other

agendas, but one that derives from an ingrained sense of belonging and rights to land

and recognition which builds on subaltern histories of oppression and struggle. Their

involvement with Dalit movements leads to a reconfiguration of caste identity, one that

draws on an imagined past but strongly engages with contemporary social movements

and aspirations of mobility. At the same time, Dalits—like their Reddy adversaries—

have participated in quotidian processes of urbanization and aspire to engage in similar

strategies of accumulation through land.

62 The deep historical entanglement of land and caste that is illustrated by this study has

been well documented in agrarian and rural studies, yet is only recently coming into

focus in urban scholarship. The conflicts that erupt as agrarian villages urbanize have a

clear genealogy in caste-based agrarian structures and colonial and postcolonial

regimes of land governance, illustrating the importance of mapping how regional

political economies are refracted in processes of urbanization. This paper also suggests

that caste should not be understood as simply another axis of social and economic

inequality or a basis for political identity that is deployed in certain situations. Rather,

we need to reanimate the notion of caste as a social structure of accumulation, whose

particular characteristics are defined by regionally specific histories of development,

modes of production, systems of political authority, and collective memories of

oppression and struggle. From this perspective, we can better understand how caste is

repurposed or reassembled as agrarian land takes on new values and affordances—as a

site of speculative investment, a source of investible wealth and social power, and an

axis of struggle.


40

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NOTES

1. Names and identifying features of all people and places mentioned in the paper are

anonymized. We retain the name Bangalore in relevant contexts.

2. Following other scholars, I use this term to capture a range of urban and economic reforms

undertaken in India since the 1990s, which dramatically transformed the major cities. The

opening up of the real estate sector to 100% foreign direct investment in 2005 was particularly

consequential (Halbert and Rouanet 2014; Searle 2016) for real estate development and the

financialization of land.

3. Of course, large-scale professional land aggregation and real estate development also involve a

range of informalities and illegalities (Sundaresan 2017), but here our focus is on the smaller-

scale operations of the peri-urban land market.

4. Most of the fieldwork was carried out by Sachin Rathod and Kaveri Medappa, with additional

interviews conducted by other members of the research team between February 2017 and

February 2020. Sachin lived in G-halli almost continuously for eight months, from August 2018

through March 2019, conducting interviews and participant observation in a small cluster of

villages. This sustained presence allowed him to build good rapport with interlocutors from

different caste groups. Although we rely here mainly on conversations with Dalit interlocutors,

their stories of land-grabbing were corroborated by Reddy and Kuruba informants and

documentary evidence.

5. G-halli now forms part of a municipal ward—the smallest unit of Census enumeration for

urban areas—so we do not have official village-level demographic data. The ward in which G-halli

is situated has a population of 54,625, of which 8,734, or around 16 percent, are Scheduled Caste

(Census of India 2011; https://sw.kar.nic.in/PDF2018/Census2011Village/Bangaloreurban.pdf).

H-puram had a population of 1,056 in 2011, of which 30 percent belonged to the Scheduled

Castes.


45

https://sw.kar.nic.in/PDF2018/Census2011Village/Bangaloreurban.pdf

https://sw.kar.nic.in/PDF2018/Census2011Village/Bangaloreurban.pdf

6. Reddys are a large caste category of cultivators found mainly in Andhra Pradesh and

Telangana. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, they are placed in the “general category”

(Forward Caste) as they are the major landowning caste in many districts (although some sub-

castes are land-poor), but in Karnataka they are classified as OBC (Other Backward Classes).

Reddys hold substantial land and properties in and around Bengaluru, which may also reflect

more recent investments by Reddys from Andhra Pradesh.

7. Because of Bangalore’s location contiguous to Tamil-, Telugu- and Kannada-speaking regions,

the city and its surrounding rural areas have a complex linguistic and caste composition. Reddys

are found mainly in villages to the east and south of the city, while Vokkaligas are the major

landowners on the western and northern sides (Narendar Pani, personal communication, January

21, 2021). The history of Reddy migration to the Mysore region is unclear, but our interlocutors

claimed that their forefathers were granted lands by a king in the precolonial period. Reddys and

Dalits in these villages speak Telugu as well as Kannada, indicating their origin in the Andhra

region. The 1897 Gazetteer of Mysore lists “Reddis” under the broad category of “Wokkaliga”

(Vokkaliga), a label that was applied to a broad swathe of cultivating castes. They constituted

one-tenth of the total Wokkaliga population of Bangalore District at that time.

8. Twelve hereditary positions were defined, each linked to a particular caste—Shanbhog (village

accountant, a Brahmin), Patel or Gowda (village leader), artisans such as Kammara (Ironsmith),

Madiga (Shoemaker), and Kumbara (Potter), and village servants such as Toti/Talliari

(Watchman) (Rice 1987:576).

9. Shekhar’s family had 2½ acres of land that his grandfather had received as thoti inam because

he held the position of village watchman.

10. Our interlocutors often used the term “Dalit” while speaking about their political struggles,

but also referred to themselves as Adi Karnataka, Adi Dravida or Chalavadi.

11. In Mysore, as in much of southern India, castes were traditionally divided into left- and right-

hand categories.

12. The terms “yellow belt” and “green belt” derive from the Bangalore Comprehensive

Development Plan (CDP), in which yellow designates land zoned for residential purposes while

green is for land (mostly on the periphery of the city) reserved for agriculture or other non-

urban uses (see Nair 2005:158–61). Villages brought into the BBMP in 2007 were automatically re-

zoned as yellow, setting off a land rush in peri-urban areas.

13. Benjamin and Raman (2011) note the increased competition in Bengaluru for land categorized

as “common” or kharab (unsurveyed vacant land). Such lands were earlier distributed to the

poor, but since the 1990s it has been increasingly allocated to infrastructure and real estate

projects. Cf. Nair (2005:160).

14. A layout is a development carried out on agricultural land which has been partially developed

and divided into plots for sale. Such plots are considered by middle-class urban residents to be

good investments, as land prices (in the popular imagination) “always go up.” The phenomenon

of agricultural land turned into empty layouts—a common sight on the outskirts of smaller cities

as well—points to the democratization of “speculative urbanism” and the popularization of land

as a key site of accumulation (Upadhya 2018, 2021).

15. The term refers to residential colonies formed on land in the records of the Revenue

Department (mainly agricultural land).

16. Buyers of such plots receive “B-khata” documents, which they can later use to regularize the

property. “B-khata” refers to a separate BBMP register where irregular properties are listed for

tax purposes (the “A-khata” register is for authorized properties). Such conversions are common

in Bengaluru (526,000 properties are currently listed in the B-khata), hence the BBMP periodically

tries to regularize these properties to generate tax revenues, a move that has been opposed by

civic activists (see: https://www.deccanherald.com/city/bengaluru-infrastructure/bbmp-could-

legalise-25-lakh-b-khata-properties-to-generate-revenue-827922.html). The state government’s


46

http://www.deccanherald.com/city/bengaluru-infrastructure/bbmp-could-legalise-25-lakh-b-khata-properties-to-generate-revenue-827922.html




Akrama-Sakrama (“illegal-legal”) regularization scheme has met with similar opposition. The

constant pressure to regularize properties created in violation of laws and planning norms

illustrates the entrenched informality of urban development (Roy 2009).

17. Grant land carries only conditional rights. For example, land can be transferred only within

the same eligible category (such as SC) and after a specified period of time (usually 25 years).

However, there are many ways to circumvent these restrictions, as we show here.

18. Gomala and “waste” lands have periodically been distributed to landless households

(Karanth 1992), but Dalits and other marginalized groups may also hold “encroached” land which

has been regularized, which is known as “Bagair Hukum” (Gopal 2015:149). Title to both kinds of

land tends to be unclear because of their complicated genealogies. According to Benjamin and

Raman (2011:49), the land record computerization programme in Karnataka reduced numerous

forms of land tenure to a single category, such that only one type of document—one that many

marginal cultivators may not possess—is now considered legal title by the courts. They argue

that this change facilitated the accumulation of land by dominant groups while further

marginalizing groups whose titles to land were unclear.

19. The names of the specific organizations with which our interlocutors are associated are

anonymized with acronyms. Units of several Dalit organizations are active in G-halli and

neighboring villages, including Dalit Sangharsh Samithi (DSS, the oldest Dalit association in

Karnataka), Ambedkar Wada (a Congress Party-affiliated organization), Bhima Wada, and others.

We have not provided more background on Dalit movements in Karnataka or their engagements

in land struggles in the city because it is beyond the scope of this paper and the Special Issue,

although this wider context would be important to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the

complex connections between the land transition and Dalit activism.

20. One crore = 10,000,000; one lakh = 100,000.

21. While recreational facilities for the village can be developed on green belt land with

government permission, the prohibitive membership fees at G-halli Club (2 to 3 lakh rupees per

year) clearly exclude all but the richest villagers.

22. The GPA is a document often used in informal transactions through brokers as an

intermediate step to conveying the land to the final buyer. GPAs are also used to hold land in

“benami” (literally, “without name”). The quasi-legal domain constituted by the circulation of

such instruments helps to explain how caste power works in tandem with (or against) the

(fractured and porous) state in quotidian practices of accumulation. This is an example of what

Gururani (2013) terms “flexible planning,” in which informal and formal processes and

institutions are deeply interdigitated.

23. We are not aware of the outcome of these cases.

24. We cannot verify to what extent Dalits actually held land in the past or how or when they lost

it. However, the fact that several Dalit respondents related the same story of how Dalit lands fell

into the hands of Reddys—about how they went into debt due to heavy expenditure on the village

festival—this seems to be more like a caste “origin myth” than a collective memory. These

narratives merge into accounts of more recent land-grabbing by Reddys, for which there is

sufficient documentary evidence.

25. “Sheet house” refers to the use of corrugated metal or asbestos sheets for roofing, a marker

of poor housing.


47

ABSTRACTS

Building on recent literature that explores how the social logics of older agrarian formations are

refracted in processes of urbanization, the paper foregrounds the significance of caste in rapidly

changing peri-urban spaces. Drawing on extended fieldwork in several villages on the outskirts

of Bengaluru, it shows how the twin scaffoldings of agrarian society—caste and land—are

reconfigured as the values of land change in this zone of transition. Caste identity not only

structures who can participate in, or prosper from, the transformation of agrarian land into

urban real estate—it is also refashioned and deployed in new ways, especially through the politics

of land. This study demonstrates why caste should be understood as a social structure of

accumulation, whose specific modes of operation are defined by regionally rooted histories of

development and memories of oppression and struggle.

INDEX

Keywords: agrarian transition, peri-urban, land markets, caste, Bengaluru, India, accumulation

AUTHORS

CAROL UPADHYA

National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India

SACHINKUMAR RATHOD

National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India


48

Seeing the Urban from the Agrarian:Emerging Forms of AgrarianUrbanization in IndiaAnkita Rathi

Introduction

1 There is an extensive body of literature, especially in the context of South Asian

urbanization, dedicated to investigating the “urban” beyond the “city” (Brenner and

Schmid 2015; Roy 2011, 2015; Gururani 2019; Kennedy and Sood 2016; Denis,

Mupkopadhyay, and Zérah 2012; Zérah and Denis 2017; White 2016; Sircar 2016, 2017,

2018). Assessed from the standpoint of diverse conceptual lenses such as “subaltern” or

peripheral urbanization, these studies make a critical intervention in the examination

of urban processes, in places that have largely remained ignored by the dominant

discourses on urbanization (Sircar 2016; Ong and Roy 2015). There is mounting interest

in studying the unfolding urban dynamics in the peripheries of large metropolises as

well as in small towns in India. The 2011 census of India data revealed the appearance

of 2,532 new “census towns” in India. “Census towns” are primarily small urban centers

that are deemed “urban” in the national census but continue to be governed by a rural

local government body (Panchayats). Works by scholars such as Denis et al. (2012) and

Zérah and Denis (2017) have shown that the urban dynamics of these settlements

remain autonomous from big cities and metropolitan centers.1 They coined the term

“subaltern urbanization” to describe the processes of urbanization that take place in

small towns, far from metropolitan centers. The urban dynamics of small census towns,

as Zerah and Denis (2017) argue, exceed and do not fit into the familiar urban forms

and processes in “global” or “world” cities. The dynamics underway in these

settlements are rooted in endogenous structures, incorporating knowledge, politics,

and situated logics and relationships that differ from the global city. However, such

settlements have remained “peripheral,” and mostly “unacknowledged” by existing

urban theories and state planning (Roy 2011; Simone 2010; Sircar 2016, 2017, 2018).2


49

This paper attempts to contribute to this body of work by showing that the urban

exceeds the existing territorial boundaries of the city and agrarian relations, histories,

politics, and knowledge shape the social geography of the small town.

2 21st century India is witnessing a process of urban transformation in places beyond the

city, an aspect that is also referred to as a non-metro centric approach to urbanization

(White 2016). While it has been assumed that megacities and metropolitan urban

centers are engines of growth, it is increasingly recognized that urban peripheries are

engaged in dynamics that merit attention in their own right. Kennedy and Sood (2016)

argue that, while policymakers position cities as “growth engines,” the period

post-1990s has experienced rescaling of urban and economic development to urban

peripheries in places like Chennai, Hyderabad, and New Delhi. The extensive

urbanization occurring in suburban or peri-urban villages, rural areas, and small towns

in India over the last three decades presents a clear case for the significance of

peripheries in shaping the urban landscape. Considering small towns as forms of

“peripheral” and “subaltern” urbanization, this paper argues that the current process

of urbanization in India is entangled with the rural, and its historical and

contemporary processes of agrarian change. This stands in sharp contrast to the

territorial approaches that have predicted the gradual decline of the rural through the

capitalist process of urbanization. By precisely focusing on agrarian histories of land

and caste, the paper traces the urban transformation of Patran into an agro-

commercial town and argues that the urban is a historical category that is continuously

made and unmade at different phases of agrarian change. Agrarian changes driven by

the existence of a feudal type of land-tenure system, regional peasant movement and

state driven land reform and the green revolution have transformed the agrarian

regimes of land ownership, property rights and caste relations in Patran and created

the condition for the growth of trade and commerce. This paper reveals that such a

form of urbanism, is propelled by socio-political changes in the rural and entangled

with transformations in the social fortunes and aspirations of the regional caste

groups, leads to the coproduction of the rural and the urban (Gururani 2019). The land-

based negotiations, investments and work strategies in these places contour the social

geography of both rural-urban areas and incorporate labor relationships that have

exacerbated caste-based hierarchies, thereby suggesting that the contemporary urban

is a “dynamic continuity” of agrarian social relations.

Agrarian urbanism: emerging form of peripheralurbanization in India

3 There has been little attempt to formally bring in the rural while conceptualizing the

urban and urbanization. It is only very recently that Gururani (2019) developed a

conceptual framework of “agrarian urbanism” to study the process of social-spatial

changes occurring in the urban peripheries. By focusing on the urban peripheries of big

cities, the framework makes an explicit intervention in the current work on

urbanization in the global south by arguing that the urban is entangled with the

agrarian histories of the formation of land, caste-class identities, and global capitalism

(Gururani 2019). Existing studies as well as the macro trends of urbanization in India

confirm that the classic transition pattern of agriculture-to-industry and rural-to-

urban has not occurred, thereby indicating that the rural agrarian economy has


50

developed complex and dynamic relationships with the urban (Shah and Harris-

White 2011). Despite the continuous population movement from rural to urban spaces,

along with the ongoing changes in the agriculture sector in India (in terms of

contribution to the national GDP and economic growth), the agriculture sector employs

around 50 % of the total rural main workforce, and the rural continues to be the

primary habitation for 70 % of the total population in India (Census of India 2011). This

signals that the process of agrarian transformation and urbanization is occurring

simultaneously and the two shape each other in complex ways. In his work on agrarian

changes in Punjab and Haryana, Jodhka (1991, 2014) shows that the processes of green

revolution unleashed new aspirations and uncertainties within the dominant

landowning castes. As the agrarian economy could no longer fulfill the hopes and

aspirations of rural youth, they started to look for options beyond the rural. Along

similar lines, I have argued elsewhere that the rural landed class and castes employ

differential work and migration strategies and land investments that contour both

rural and urban areas to meet the changing conditions in agriculture (Rathi 2020).

4 With its widespread relevance for understanding the nature and process of capitalist

development in rural areas, the centrality of the agrarian question for urbanization is

starting to be recognized by urban scholars in the global South (Gururani and

Dasgupta 2018; Roy 2015). There is a growing body of work that focuses on the renewed

importance of the agrarian land question for South Asian urbanization (Gururani 2013,

2019; Gururani and Dasgupta 2018; Anwar 2018; Dubey 2018; Roy 2015; Cowan 2018;

Balakrishnan 2018). By focusing on the peripheries of large cities and metropolitan

centers, this research captures the crucial ways in which the agrarian histories of land

regimes, caste relations and hierarchies are interwoven into the making of peripheral

urban villages. By accounting for the complex, heterogeneous and informal

arrangements between agrarian and urban communities, state, and private actors, this

body of work draws attention to the ways in which agrarian questions of land and

peasant differentiation are central to understanding the transformation of rural land to

make neo-liberal dreams of rapid urbanization come true.

5 On the other hand, there are works that also engage in studying the urban dynamics of

small towns in India (Zérah and Denis 2017:6; White 2016; Krishnamurthy and

Witsoe 2012; Chari 2014). Although primarily focusing on the economic and socio-

political dynamism of small towns, these efforts showcase the vital ways in which

agrarian histories of work, in which land and caste support the specific regional

processes of capital accumulation and urbanization. Using subaltern studies as a

theoretical standpoint, researchers in these strands of work have embraced the local

embeddedness of the process of urban-in-the-making, its agrarian dynamics and its

engagement with caste and community politics, among others (Chari 2014;

Gidwani 2008; Sircar 2016; Krishnamurthy and Witsoe 2012; White 2016; Basile 2011).

This form of urbanization remains intertwined with the rural and its agrarian

dynamics.3 For instance, in their study of rural migrants in the city of Delhi and

Hyderabad, Gidwani and Ramamurthy (2018) observe that even as they gain a foothold

in the city, their orientation remains largely agrarian.

6 In engaging with the aforementioned literature on agrarian urbanism, this paper

presents a case study from a small agro-commercial town in Punjab. I argue that the

making of the “urban” and attendant urbanisms is embedded in the historical and

contemporary process of agrarian transformation. In particular, I show how feudal


51

forms of the land tenure system and relationship, the peasant movement and state-

augmented agriculture development strategy through land reform and the green

revolution are instrumental in shaping the distribution of land among different groups,

which in turn influenced Patran’s distinct trajectory of urban transformation.

Importantly, this form of urbanization not only emerges from the agrarian or is linked

to the agrarian but is deeply entangled with the changing agrarian social relations of

land and caste. In other words, the rural, a socio-spatial category with its distinct

agrarian logics of land, caste, work, and politics is an essential supplement of the

unfolding urban in contemporary India (Roy 2015). Thus, the agrarian politics of land-

caste and identity and the agrarian questions of: Who owns land? Who works the land?

Who gains from land? And what are the diverse arrangements through which everyday

practices of labor, profit, speculation, and credit are constitutive of urbanization in the

small towns. Furthermore, it is shown that this form of “agrarian urbanism” is not just

fuelled by neo-liberal dreams of the global city, but is also constitutive of agrarian

aspirations, needs and demands emerging from the changing nature of agriculture in

the rural. Agrarian urbanism, as Gururani (2019) argues, involves the coproduction of

the “urban” and the “agrarian” as local communities engaged in work and investment

beyond the urban into the rural, thereby reinforcing and exacerbating caste-based

hierarchies that both mirror and differ from rural agrarian social relations. This form

of urbanism confirms that, far from assimilating the rural, agrarian urbanization in its

present form instead enables the “rural” and the “urban” to sustain and co-produce

each other.

Locating the case study and research methodology

7 The site for my study is a small agro-commercial town named Patran, located in the

Patiala district of Punjab.4 I draw on data collected from diverse sources and combine

both quantitative and qualitative methods for studying urban transformation. To

demonstrate the agrarian-urban entanglement of small towns, I adopt a mixed method

of data collection, which provided a distinct advantage of both generalization as well as

capturing specific, subjective, and historical experiences of individuals and

communities. This comprised both statistical data collected from a household survey as

well as in-depth and semi-structured interviews with prominent traders, seasonal and

full-time wage labor and old-generation families residing in and around the town. The

quantitative data was based on a structured questionnaire sample survey of 500

households in the town. This household survey provided macro data on the socio-

economic demography of the town. More specifically, the household survey collected

information on occupational changes, education, caste and religious demography,

details of land ownership, tenancy and land rights, the farm and non-farm investments

undertaken by the household and the nature of credit practices, both borrowing and

lending. The household survey data was analyzed in order to describe the socio-

economic demography of the town. Applying qualitative methods, 20 in-depth

interviews were conducted with old generation families residing in Patran and its

adjacent villages to trace the changes in land-caste and work dynamics during periods

of land-reform and the green revolution. To understand the social, economic, and

political dynamics of the agriculture market, 30 semi-structured interviews were

conducted with prominent traders and manufacturers in the town. This generated

information on the social organization of work and production in the agro-marketing


52

sector. In addition, in-depth interviews were also conducted with the seasonal migrant

and local labor who worked in the local agriculture market and the construction sector

to make sense of their urban experience and the diverse ways in which they responded

to the urbanization process.

Situating Patran

8 Patran is a small agro-commercial town, classified as a class three urban center.5 It

currently has a population of 30,000. It is well-connected to the nearby cities and

towns. The National Highway-1 and State highway-10 eased the mobility of goods and

people to and from the town. Located on the south-western edge of Patiala district,

Patran is surrounded by Sangrur district in Punjab and proximate to the Jind and

Fatehabad districts in the bordering state of Haryana. (See Fig 1) Until the 1980s, it was

one of the agriculturally less developed parts of Patiala. It was given the status of a

“notified area committee” or NAC6 in the year 1971, when a central marketing agency

(Food Corporation of India) and a state regulated agriculture market or a mandi were

set up in the town in 1966 and 1968, respectively. By the 1990s, Patran was officially

designated as a Nagar Panchayat7 because of its vital role as an agro-marketing/

purchase center of paddy and wheat and the presence of agro-related input and output

dealers. The town is currently a designated municipal council.8

Figure 1: Location of Patran Town

Source: Using Google Earth geo-reference points in ArcGIS.

This map was prepared by the author with the help of Dr. Anand.

9 Patran’s trajectory of urbanization can be traced to the period of agrarian prosperity

brought in by the process of green revolution during the 1960s.9 At first glance, Patran


53

appears to be primarily an agricultural town dealing in paddy, wheat and other agro-

allied goods and services. Its agrarian character is most prominent during the two

harvest seasons when farmers from the nearby villages bring in tractors and reapers

full of paddy and wheat to the agriculture market. In fact, some individuals in the

community also described the town as kasba, (small town) while referring to the

smallness of the town in terms of the persistent link to agriculture and the rural. The

aerial view (Google Earth) of the town in Figure 2 below, taken in 2020, shows that the

town is surrounded by agricultural fields and villages, and together with the

agriculture market, these attributes give the town its agrarian character. However, the

anaj mandi (grain market) co-exists with a vibrant consumer market, a bazaar economy

that deals in diverse forms of goods and services. This caters to the local people as well

as to the agrarian population in the nearby rural areas. While primarily known to be a

trading or a business town, more recent agrarian uncertainties in production have

created the seeds of a slump and stagnation in the agro-commercial sector.

Figure 2: Aerial location of Patran

10 Approximately 60 % of the total households in the town identify as Hindus. The

Baniyas, especially the big agro-traders and processors are key economic players and

wield significant political power in the local administration and politics. Other Hindu

groups include Pandit, Khatri and Arora castes. Additionally, there are other

communities, those belonging to the Jat Sikhs caste and Scheduled castes. The Jat Sikhs

are either involved in public sector jobs or are small agro-traders who have continued

to maintain agrarian links with their land in the village. The scheduled castes,

primarily belonging to Ramdasia and Mazabhi caste groups, work as casual wage labor

in the local agriculture market.

Changing regimes of land, caste and work

11 The urban transformation of Patran can be traced to its historical agrarian-ecological

conditions, mass peasant movements and state driven agrarian reforms of land and

market that transformed the agrarian regimes of land and caste and created aspiration

for new places of capital accumulation and survival beyond the rural. As I show below,


54

diverse agrarian histories encompass heterogeneous experiences of communities and

individuals and their struggles, resistances, and negotiation strategies were central to

Patran’s agrarian transformation and its urbanization.

12 Patran was part of the princely state of Patiala10 and Patiala and East Punjab state

Union (PEPSU). The princely rulers and rich landlords, who held positions of power and

maintained an aristocratic control over land and the land revenue system vastly

impacted the economic condition of the peasantry in this region (Mukherjee 2001). The

feudal condition of tenancy and labor relations gave rise to a powerful and the most

impactful peasant movement11, which started in the 1930s and persisted till the post-

independence period (Mukherjee 2001). In contrast to British Punjab, which

experienced intensive agricultural development and peasant protest, the princely state

was governed by autocratic princely rulers and the agrarian condition of the peasantry

in this part of Punjab remained extremely feudal (Mukherjee 2001). Ecological

constraints on cultivation such as arid and sandy soil with erratic and low rainfall co-

existing with feudal forms of sharecropping-based tenancy arrangements contributed

to peasants’ hardships and agrarian underdevelopment in the region.

13 The PEPSU region comprised two prominent forms of land tenure system, i.e.,

Bhaichara and Biswedari (Sandhu 2001). The Bhaichara form entails an arrangement

where the peasants are primarily owner-cultivators and possess proprietary rights to

the land. They paid taxes directly to the state. In the Biswedari form of land tenure, the

landlords or Biswedars, locally called Sardars held revenue-collecting and proprietary

rights to the land. The tenant cultivators only had cultivating rights to the land and

paid rent to the Biswedars (Mukherjee 2001). According to Sandhu (2001) almost 30 %

of the total landholdings in the princely state of Patiala were controlled by the

Biswedars (Landlords) and Patran was a Biswedari village that had a long history of

feudal relationship between the landlords and the tenants (Mukherjee 2001;

Sandhu 2001). The landlords belonged mostly to the dominant Jat Sikh caste. Other

than the Jat Sikh landlords, there were also a few owner-cultivating peasant

proprietors from the Jat Sikh and Pandit castes, and a few small traders and

moneylenders belonging to the Baniya caste. However, the landlords controlled the

land, revenue rights and tenancy arrangements in the village. During the first Regular

Settlement System of Patiala in the first decade of the twentieth century, these

landlords, who previously only held revenue-collecting rights, gained proprietary

status over the land cultivated by the tenants (Mukherjee 2001). This reduced the status

of the Gujars, who held hereditary cultivating rights to the land, to that of occupancy

tenants and the Dalits to that of tenants-at will. (Mukherjee 2001; Sandhu 2001). The

revenue records classified them as “occupancy tenants” and declared the landlords as

“Ala Malik” or super-lord (Walia 1972). This led to frequent tensions between the

landlord and the tenants. Interviews conducted with a few of these older Gujar

landowners in the town and nearby village revealed that the landlords and tenants had

frequent disputes regarding crop sharing and rent. The landlords extracted a larger

share of the produce and the tenants faced social harassment for hiding the produce.

According to an interview with one such Gujar landowner residing in the town:

The Sardars in Patran and the nearby villages had close ties with MaharajaBhupinder Singh during the princely rule. This is how they got our land. We had togo to the Sardars’ house after the crop was harvested for crop sharing. Thelandlords often accused us of hiding the total produce.


55

14 Social harassment of the tenants also existed through other arrangements, like the

Kankut system 12 (Sandhu 2001). Through the early half of the twentieth century, the

peasants in the princely states of east Punjab13 faced an economic crisis due to

declining agriculture prices during the Great Depression and the world wars,

indebtedness, lack of industrial, communication and educational development, the

extreme burden of land revenue and water tax and control by the urban moneylenders

and landlords (Walia 1972). They relied largely on the meager surplus from the

landlord’s land, and cattle rearing. The emergence of the PEPSU in 1948 and the

dissolution of princely rule also did not alter the agrarian condition of the peasantry,

especially in the south-western parts of Patiala (PEPSU 1951). Much of the industrial

and development activities were concentrated in the erstwhile developed and

politically important belts of the district, i.e., the central and eastern parts consisting

of the capital city of Patiala and Nabha, both of which had strongly princely

connections (PEPSU census 1951).

15 Feudal forms of agrarian relations, ecological and climatic constraints and uneven

geographical and economic development created a fertile ground for the radical

peasant movement that started in the 1930s and lasted until the 1950s. Patran and

many villages witnessed massive peasant protests organized by the Praja Mandal and

the communist party in the state (Sandhu 2001). During in-depth interviews conducted

with old-generation families in the town, it was revealed that during the period of

peasant agitation, several landlords were forced to give away their land to the Gujars as

the movement took a violent turn.14 These interviews reveal accounts of Gujars

compelled to take on the land of the landlords. According to an interview conducted

with an old generation Gujar residing in the nearby village, “One-third of Patran’s land

belong to the landlords from the nearby village. It is the Lal party (referring to the CPI

(M)) headed by Teja Singh and Kirti Kisan Union that had asked the tenants to not pay

the rent.” My field interviews with these families during 2015–2016 exposed accounts

of land negotiations that occurred between the landlords and the tenants. For instance,

many landlords negotiated with the tenants and sold parts of their surplus land to the

tenants at a fixed rate.

16 The most notable change that occurred during the period of peasant protest and land

reform was of the rise of Hindu caste groups, especially the trading caste, locally

referred to as Banias. The Banias were able to purchase large tracts of land from the

landlords, many of whom had migrated out to the nearby towns and villages. Some

landlords who stayed behind continued to own land even as they lost their previous

social and economic status as sole owners of the land. At this juncture, Banias

consolidated their position as a non-cultivating class of Hindu traders and landlords

and began to directly invest in non-farm work like small-scale trade in machine tools,

flour mills, commodities and iron spare parts. The Jat Sikh landlords, who also did not

cultivate their own land, invested in small-scale transport and agri-businesses. With

the rise of non-cultivating landlords, the caste-based hierarchies were further

reinforced as the Dalits did not gain any land and became the new class of agriculture

labor, also known as Siri, and provided full-time agricultural services to the landed

class in return for a fixed wage. While conducting fieldwork, I learned that only a few

Dalit families gained 1 or 2 acres of land, which was then sold to the Hindu traders, who

had the economic capacity to cultivate their land. It in this milieu of land-caste changes

and the consolidation of land in the hands of a few landowning castes, who were also


56

beginning to diversify in non-agricultural ventures, that we can locate the Patran’s

trajectory of urban transformation. The changes in landownership, proprietary rights,

and tenancy rules not only reinforced existing inter-caste hierarchies but it also paved

the way for the uneven growth of business and trade during the period of green

revolution.

17 Amid concerns over food security and making India self-sufficient in food grains in the

1960s, the government embarked on a strategy to make agriculture efficient. This idea

of development had relied on the assumption that the surplus generated in agriculture

could support industrial development and pave the way for economic growth

(Macrae 2007). Popularly known as the “Green Revolution” and locally referred to as

Hari Kranti, its primary objective was to make agriculture productive through private

and public investment in advanced technology, consisting of hybridized seeds and

fertilizers for high-yield crops. In the Patiala district of Punjab, private investment in

tube-well irrigation and the development of the Bhakra irrigation project in 1963

brought large tracts of uncultivated land under cultivation. As a result, the total

irrigated area in the district increased from 38 % in 1962 to almost 65 % by 1972

(District Census Handbook Patiala 1961, 1971) and led to the increase in total cropped

area from 518 thousand hectares in 1960–1963 to 560 and 680 thousand hectares by

1970–1973 and 1980–1983 (Statistical Abstract of Punjab 2002). For the same time

periods, the total cropped area under paddy increased from 32.3 thousand hectares to

75 and 205.5 thousand hectares respectively (Statistical Abstract of Punjab 2002).

18 The process of urbanization in the Indian state of Punjab coincided with the above

agriculture development strategy of the state (Kundu and Bhalla 2002). The decadal

growth rate of urbanization in the state increased from 2.92 % between 1961–1971 to

almost 17 % by 1971–1981 (Primary Census Abstract, Punjab 1961, 1971, 1981). The new

agriculture policy created demand for agro-based trade and manufacturing, agriculture

implements, housing and infrastructure facilities and units, which boosted the growth

of many industrial and trading towns in the region (Kundu and Bhatia 2002). Agrarian

changes brought in by the process of modernization in agriculture created a dispersed

pattern of urbanization and linked the rural agrarian economy to the small and

medium towns. For instance, investment in the urban industrial corridor along the

Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar highway and the Grand Trunk (GT) road from

Ludhiana to Delhi not only boosted the growth of industries in existing big cities like

Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Amritsar and Patiala, but also created manufacturing prospects

for many small and medium towns, like the growth of steel re-rolling activities in

Gobindgarh town in the Patiala district, Khanna mandi in the Ludhiana district, the

grain market town of Samalkha in Haryana and several cycle, steel and engineering

industries in the region (Kundu and Bhalla 2002). Although the major industrial

activities concentrated in and around former princely and industrial cities like Patiala,

Nabha and Rajpura, growth in agriculture production of paddy and wheat in previously

less-developed parts of the district supported the growth of agro-trading towns like

Patran.

19 However, the new agriculture policy recalibrated the existing land-caste relationship in

the rural. It not only reinforced the existing capital and labor disparities but created

internal differentiation within the peasantry by favoring large and middle-sized

farmers (Judge 2015; Jodhka 2006; Sinha 2019; Dhanangare 1987; Dutta 2012; Bhalla and

Chadha 1982). Land and agriculture constitute essential marker of the Jat Sikh identity


57

in the state. Pettigrew (1992), Jodhka (2006) and Kaur (1986) have argued that the Jats

take great pride in rurality and agriculture and despised the townspeople for not being

physically brave. Jat Sikhs emerged as the prime beneficiary of this agriculture

modernization strategy (Jodhka N.d.). Prosperity brought in by the agricultural reforms

created a new sense of identity and confidence within the Jat Sikhs.15 By investing in

technology and leasing land from the small and marginal farmers, they dominated the

rural and regional politics. In the neighboring state of Haryana too, it is the Hindu

counterpart of the Jat Sikhs and a segment of Ahir Yadavs, a middle caste that

benefitted significantly from the green revolution and agriculture policies of the state

(Bhalla 1976; Gururani 2019). The Dalits, on the other hand continue to be landless,

working as casual agricultural laborers for the dominant castes in the village. In

Punjab, only 5 % of the total main workers belonging to the Scheduled Castes are

cultivators and approximately 32 % of them work as agricultural labor, signaling the

persistence of caste-based hierarchies (Census of India 2011).

20 Agrarian prosperity brought in by green revolution created demand for agro-markets

and linked the agrarian economy to the urban. (Mukherjee 1998). The Punjab

Agriculture Procurement and Marketing Centre act (APMC) that was passed in the year

1961 required setting up of market yards and purchase centers at various locations.

These purchase centers deal with bulk purchases of agriculture commodities from the

farmers (Krishnamurthy 2011). The powerful traders in Patran nearby villages utilized

their caste-based economic networks and their contacts in the local administrative and

political sphere to setup a state regulated purchase center.16 The agriculture market

created demand for trade, commerce, and business in Patran, thereby creating

opportunities for the rural traders and artisans. The demand for skilled-based work in

the purchase centers enabled the non-cultivating trading and artisan castes in rural

areas to look for options beyond the rural (Judge 2015). An interview with an agro-

trader whose family has been residing in Patran for a long period revealed that the

Gujars and the Jat Sikhs sold large tracts of their land to the Banias, who then further

invested in agro-based trading and processing of paddy and wheat. The commission

agents, rice millers and wholesale traders are the key players in the agriculture market,

who also wielded significant economic and political power (Sinha 2019). They not only

procure and process paddy and wheat on behalf of the state but are the primary source

of credit to the rural peasantry. Rural peasantry of all size class relies on the urban-

based agro-traders, locally called arthiya, for production- and consumption-related

credit, thereby linking the agrarian economy and the urban.

21 The prosperity brought in by the process of modernization in agriculture was, however,

short-lived and could not be sustained for long (Dutta 2012; Gill 1984; Jodhka N.d.,

2006).17 The decline in the role of the state in the agriculture sector, especially

post-1990s in terms of price, credit, subsidies and procurement, amplified the

uncertainties of the rural peasantry (Jodhka 2006; Mukherjee 1998). Inflated material

aspirations and consumerism, on one hand, and decline in the productivity of

agriculture on the other challenged the previously dominant position of the

landowning Jat Sikhs in rural areas (Judge 2015; Singh 1987; Jodhka 2006). As the

agrarian economy could no longer satisfy their material aspirations, the rural landed

castes started to look beyond the rural. (Jodhka 2014). They aspired to urban lifestyles

and infrastructure that the village could not offer. Additionally, the changing socio-

political situation in the state during the 1980s and 1990s in the form of a rise in the

Sikh separatist movement18 transformed the social environment of the villages. The


58

primary household survey reveals that many Jat Sikh families migrated into the town

during the 1980s and 1990s because of communal tensions in the village. The changed

social environment in the village due to mass killings, extortion, social isolation, and

security concerns led many families to migrate out of the village to the nearby towns.

This is reflected in the nature of migration into the town. Table 1 below shows that in

the period after the 1980s, the town witnessed a significant inflow of Sikhs. The major

sub-group within the Sikhs are the dominant Jat Sikhs as well few others from the Dalit

caste of Ramdasia. Jat Sikhs invested their agrarian capital in the agro-trading sector,

notably into the transport business, agro-input workshops, and/or as small-scale

commission and property agents. Caste, kinship, and access to agrarian networks in the

rural areas enabled them to enter the agro-trading business, thereby sustaining the

rural-urban links of the town. Their historically dominant position in the state’s

political and cultural sphere also enabled them to access public sector jobs like those in

the state’s police department, electricity, and agriculture and in administrative offices

such as the agriculture market committee and tehsil office. The big capitalist farmers,

who were able to consolidate their position in the rural, channeled their agrarian

surplus into low-priced urban land that could be assetized for future residential and

property investments.

22 Although the majority of those who migrated to Patran were small and medium

farmers, migrants were also big landowners for whom the rural was no longer a space

of power and prosperity. Migration to the town by the dominant Jat Sikhs was a means

to enhance their social and economic position, which had begun to change with the

changing conditions in agriculture. For the Dalits, belonging to the Ramdasia caste,

migration to the town was driven by the declining opportunities for wage work in

agriculture, landlessness and the limits to social and economic mobility that motivated

them to look to the urban as a place for survival and the means to enhance their social

and economic position, one that remained unchanged in the village. It is against this

backdrop of changing land-caste and agrarian relationships that the urban

transformation of Patran can be located.

Table 1: Distribution of migrant households across religion and caste over time

Religion Caste

Time

PeriodHindu Sikh Muslim

Upper

Castes

Other Backward Classes

(OBC)

Scheduled

Castes

<1961 83.33 16.67 0.00 50.00 33.33 16.67

1961–1971 60.87 34.78 4.35 43.48 43.48 13.04

1971–1981 71.24 28.10 0.65 60.78 20.92 18.30

1981–1991 63.43 35.07 1.49 63.43 18.66 17.91

1991–2001 51.04 47.92 1.04 56.25 25.00 18.75

2001–2011 36.23 62.32 1.45 62.32 15.94 21.74


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>2011 15.79 84.21 0.00 63.16 10.53 26.92

Source: Primary Household Survey, Patran, 2015–2016

Agrarian-urban entanglements of land, labor, creditand work

23 The urban in-the-making can be situated at the intersection of differential phases of

agrarian transition that occurred in the region. As I show below, agrarian transition

and the making of the urban has occurred simultaneously, with each reinforcing the

other. This stands in variance with studies on urban peripheries of large cities where

the process of agrarian-urban transformation is fuelled by global development dreams

(Cowan 2018; Gururani 2019). In two inter-related ways this form of agrarian-urban

entanglement has led to the co-production of the rural and the urban. In the subsection

below I show this through the nature of land investment and the social relationship of

labor that exists in the urban agro-trading sector.

Differential geographies of land investments

24 Land investments in Patran can be linked to changing agrarian aspirations as well as

the rise in uncertainty in agriculture. Agrarian prosperity brought in by the process of

green revolution and the growth of trade and commerce led to the rapid rise in the

price of agricultural land in Patran. Even in rural areas adjacent to Patran, the price of

such land increased rapidly. The market price of land in Patran increased from 500 to

5000 INR per acre by the early 1960s.19 Investment in land commenced even before its

formal designation as a regulated state assured purchase center. The booming land

market motivated both agrarian and the non-agrarian castes in the town to engage in

multiple and differential forms of land purchase, sales, and rental arrangements. The

markets and the growth of trade and commerce increased the value of the low-quality

arid and barren land in Patran and its adjoining villages.

25 With the coming of the agriculture market and the opportunity associated with growth

in trade and commerce, the barren and uncultivated surplus land, which was thus far

considered to be low-quality became attractive for urban development and investment.

As also observed by Gururani (2019) in the urban villages near Gurgaon, the value of

land in Patran was no longer just determined by irrigation and technology but by the

market and its ability to attract trade and commerce. The rise in price of land became a

lucrative means to accumulate capital. At this juncture, the Gujars, who had attained

land during the land reforms, found it profitable to sell their small landholdings to the

Hindu traders, who wanted to kick-start trade and commerce. Mostly, the Gujars

landowners who sold their land in Patran to the Hindu traders settled in the nearby

villages and were able to capitalize on soaring land values as well as enter the urban

non-farm sector. Additionally, for the Gujars, whose land rights historically remained

contested and who faced the social harassment of tenancy, the opportunity to increase

their landholding in the urbanizing area was an important means for achieving

mobility in their economic and social status.


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26 This strategy of selling and reinvesting in agricultural land has also enabled the Gujars,

as in the case of Gurgaon, to get a foothold in the urban and enter its non-farm sector.

For instance, one of the Gujar landowners, who provided land for the Food Corporation

of India (FCI) storage center in the town, was able to purchase better quality land in the

nearby village and secure a government job in the local FCI office. The more

entrepreneurial among the Gujars have been able to buy more land, build bigger

houses, buy productive assets like tractors, and enjoy conspicuous consumption. Some

of them also now hire agricultural labor to cultivate their land. Similarly, Gujars with

small landholdings combine agrarian work with non-farm work in the town to

compensate for the precarious and seasonal nature of the agricultural work. An

interview conducted with a family that resides in a village adjacent to the town

revealed that in many Gujar families, male members work as casual wage labor in the

rice mills and the agriculture market.

27 The Jat Sikhs have in similar ways engaged in differential forms of land sale and

purchase that span across both rural-urban areas. During the period of agrarian

prosperity brought in by the green revolution, Jat Sikhs took great pride in rurality and

invested heavily in agricultural land, but with the soaring land prices, they too sold

their barren and uncultivated land in Patran to purchase less priced and better-quality

land in the nearby villages. It enabled them to consolidate their social status as the

dominant landowning castes in the region.

28 Agrarian uncertainties, especially in the period after the 1980s have transformed the

existing social position of the Jat Sikhs. The risks associated with dependence primarily

on farming as well as aspirations to urban services and consumption have led to

diversification into the urban non-farm sector. The entry of the agrarian castes from

rural areas into the urban has not, however, cut off agrarian ties associated with land,

agriculture and the village. Most of the farmers who live in towns like Patran continue

to own agricultural land in the village. Primary household survey data conducted in

2015–2016 suggests that 79 % of the total Jat Sikh households in the town own

agricultural land in the nearby villages. For instance, the Jat Sikhs landowners I spoke

with, who migrated from the agriculturally poor and unirrigated districts of Haryana

(Karnal, Hissar and Jind) and western Punjab (Bathinda and Mansa) spoke of agrarian

distress associated with dry and arid land and uncertainty associated with cotton

cultivation and the small size of landholdings. By selling their property and

agricultural land in their native villages, they were able to purchase good quality fertile

land in villages closer to the town. As the Jat Sikhs enter the urban non-farm sector,

their agriculture land in the nearby village is mostly cultivated with the help of

seasonal or full-time agricultural labor or Siri. They only supervise and monitor

cultivation, as agriculture work is primarily done using agricultural labor by employing

modern technology. In this way, agrarian changes have transformed the social identity

associated with land. In their work on transnational migration in Punjab, Taylor, Singh,

and Booth (2007) argue that “land ownership is still central to izzat (honor) and caste

dominance within the contemporary transnational Punjabi community. However, high

izzat no longer primarily derives from the agricultural cultivation of land but is

asserted by using land for migration-derived consumerism” (p. 332).

29 The influx of agrarian and trading capital heightened the demand for material goods,

as well as conspicuous consumption. In Patran, this is signaled by the nature of

borrowing by the households. The primary household survey shows that, other than


61

business-related investment loans, credit was taken for housing construction as well to

meet immediate household expenditures and consumption needs. This has implications

for the transformation of land and the social geography of the town. The agrarian and

trading surplus was utilized to buy plots for real estate, property, and rental purposes.

The elite and economically powerful Hindu agro-traders invested their trading capital

in commercial plots, palatial homes, property, villas, and vacant plots of land for future

sales. Figure 3 shows the residence of a big agro-trader and property builder in the

town. In contrast to other localities that are referred to as Basti, this settlement is

locally called “model town,” and is popular for being the grand upper-class colony in

the town. Similarly, Figure 4 shows a settlement where Dalit and OBC casual wage

workers reside. The land belongs to a powerful and rich agro-trader and is rented out

to low-income families. Most property dealers, builders and contractors in the town

belong to the Hindu Bania caste. They have been able to leverage and channel their

agro-trading capital in the urban construction sector, thereby dominating all forms of

major agro-based and non-agro based sectors in the town. Additionally, some of the

major property agents/developers assist real estate contracts on behalf of state urban

planning institutions, such as PUDA. For instance, PUDA or the Punjab urban planning

and development authority,20 approved a residential and commercial complex, Sun

City, in the town in 2012. The real-estate agent responsible for this project also belongs

to the Bania caste.

Figure 3: A house in Model Town in Patran

30 Agrarian uncertainties in production also impacted the business and growth prospects

of the agro-traders. The big agro-traders in the town have continued to reinvest part of

their trading capital in agriculture. This was an important means to maintain a steady

flow of agricultural produce at a time when production witnessed a gradual slowdown.

Limited opportunities to grow beyond agriculture and agro-trading further reinforced

urban-agrarian linkages. Semi-structured interview surveys of prominent traders and

manufacturers in the town indicate that 80 % of the interviewed agro-traders own

agriculture land. An interview with a big rice mill owner, who produces export and

high-quality parboiled rice, revealed that he owns 50 acres of agricultural land in a

village approximately 10 km from Patran. The land is cultivated using full-time


62

agricultural labor from among the Dalits. Typically, most of the big agro-firm

proprietors own agricultural land in the ancestral village they migrated from. They

have also purchased more agriculture land in the nearby villages for business and

investment purposes. For instance, as agro-trading and commercial units are located

within the urban, most agro-processing units have dispersed to the nearby villages.

31 These land investments have reinforced and exacerbated the caste-based hierarchies

that existed in the rural and are expressed in contemporary labor and hiring practices.

The agro-commercial investments undertaken by the big agro-commercial paddy

processors and traders in the town have relied on new models of labor hiring

arrangements and used agricultural land to reach corporate and commercial goals like

the export of parboiled rice. The plants, known as SELA rice plants, relied on

differential labor hiring arrangements to accumulate capital that has reinstated caste

hierarchies and agrarian dependencies.21

Table 2: Distribution of households across caste and occupation (% of HH)

Caste/Sector Trade Manufacturing Regular Wage Work Casual Wage Work

Upper Castes 78.13 62.00 72.00 27.00

Other Backward Classes 22.00 38.00 12.00 17.10

Scheduled Castes 0.00 6.25 16.00 57.00

Source: Primary Household Survey, Patran, 2015–2016

32 The big agro-processors hire both full-time and casual contractual wage labor to

produce par-boiled rice.22 The causal wage labor is mostly hired with the help of

contractors, locally called thekedar. They are male seasonal migrant laborers from the

states of Bihar, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh. Most of them belong to the Dalit caste, who

directly assist in the production of par-boiled rice alongside other tasks like loading

and unloading of paddy.23 To survive and maximize their wage earning resulting from

the migration, they often engage in seasonal agriculture work along with urban wage

work during the paddy and wheat sowing and harvesting season. The nature of a

migrant being seasonal in nature, the migrants stay close to agricultural fields during

the agricultural work season. Sometimes they live in thatched black sheet huts near the

mandi or inside the mills and processing units in small quarters provided by the millers.

In the construction sector as well, labor is mostly hired locally with the help of local

contractors. Casualization of wage work and the recent slump in property/construction

work in the town has forced them to undertake agricultural wage work in the lands of

the upper castes in the nearby villages and has kept the casual seasonal and local wage

labor tied to agricultural wage work. Additionally, it has reinforced interlocking credit

contractual agreements between the upper castes and the wage labor.24 The urbanity of

the town, in this sense, is what Sircar (2016) referred to as the “dynamic continuity” of

the social relations of the agrarian social order.


63

Conclusion

33 Through the conceptual lens of agrarian urbanism, I show that the contemporary

processes of urbanization in places go beyond the “city” and are deeply embedded in

the rural and its changing agrarian dynamics. By tracing the agrarian histories and

relationships of land and caste in Patran, a small town in Punjab, the paper highlights

that the urban is meshed with the different phases of agrarian change. The historically

dominant feudal land tenure system, and the regional peasant movements to end

landlordism transformed the existing property rights, patterns of landownership and

caste relations, thereby producing uneven geography of trade and commerce in Patran.

It is observed that this form of agrarian urbanism is responding to changing agrarian

aspirations and needs and not just fuelled by neo-liberal and global dreams. The

agrarian prosperity brought in by the process of green revolution created

opportunities for the rural caste groups to get a foothold in the urban and expand trade

and commerce. The rising precarity and uncertainty in agriculture, have, however, not

withered agrarian ties to land, agriculture and the rural as urban caste-groups continue

to own land and invest in agriculture even as they gain entry into the urban non-farm

sector. Thus, the agriculture sector, despite experiencing uncertainty provides a useful

safety-net for urban groups. This, I argue is a crucial intervention in the existing work

on urbanization that has traditionally ignored the dynamics of the rural in our

contemporary understanding of urban beyond the “global” and “world” city.

34 Furthermore, this form of urbanism that is rooted in the agrarian does not assimilate

the rural but leads to its coproduction. The land investments and work activities

undertaken by the urban groups in Patran span across both rural and urban areas. The

land and economic investments in the urban incorporate new models of labor hiring

arrangements and utilize agriculture land for corporate actors, each of which have

persistant caste-based hierarchies. The economic relations maintained through a

differential form of labor hiring arrangements have reinstated caste-based hierarchies

that existed in the rural, thereby showcasing a “dynamic continuity” of rural social

relations, an issue that has bothered scholars from both urban and agrarian studies.

Thus, the form the urban takes both mirrors as well as differs from rural agrarian

relations of land, caste and labor.

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NOTES

1. Through her ethnographic investigation of census towns in West Bengal, Sircar (2016) argues

that the urban dynamics of these settlements are deeply embedded in the rural and its agrarian

dynamics.

2. In fact, Simone (2010:14) and Roy (2015) have insisted on the need to break away from a metro-

centric understanding of urbanization and study the urbanism of cities that are at the periphery

of urban analysis and have thereby remained largely ignored.

3. Studies, especially those based in India show that the process of rural to urban migration is a

non-linear process as communities continue to locate work, credit, land, and labor in both rural

and urban areas through new forms of seasonal migration into the city (Gidwani and

Ramamurthy 2018; Shah and White 2011).

4. The fieldwork for this paper was conducted for nine months starting in August 2015 as part of

my PhD thesis at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.

5. According to the Census of India, a class three urban center is a settlement whose population is

between 20,000–49,999.

6. A notified area committee is a partially or fully nominated local body for which notification

has been issued.

7. Nagar Panchayats are administrative local bodies for transitional areas experiencing rural to

urban transition (Census of India). In Punjab, the Nagar Panchayat are usually settlements with a

population of 5,000 and above and an income of less than 15 lakh (Punjab Municipal act 1911).

8. A municipal council is a local administrative body for smaller urban areas, or a Municipality

constituted under subsection (2) of section 4 of the Punjab municipal act, 1911 for a smaller

urban area.

9. The population growth rate during the 1961–1971 period was 29.76 %. It declined thereafter

from 9.57 % for the 1971–1981 period to almost 2.61% for 2001–2011 (Census of India 1961, 1971,

2001, 2011).

10. Patiala was the capital city of Patiala and East Punjab state Union (PEPSU). PEPSU was merged

with the rest of Punjab in 1956.

11. The origin of this movement dates back to the first regular settlement of Patiala, when the

Biswedars (local landlords), who only had revenue-collecting rights claimed, due to their growing

influence in the administration, proprietor status over the land belonging to the cultivating

proprietors (Mukherjee 2001).

12. In this system, standing crops were assessed by the committee consisting of a state official

and the landlord. It fixed the share of the produce to be paid to the landlord or batai

(Mukherjee 2004; Sandhu 2001).

13. East Punjab implies that part of British Punjab which came to India after partition in 1947.

East Punjab states covered by Walia (1972) in his study consisted of Patiala, Nabha, Kapurthala,

Jind, Faridkot, Malerkotla and Kalsia.


68

14. According to Mukherjee (2001), the period witnessed violent clashes between the tenants and

the landlords. The tenants refused to pay the batai or share of their crops and attempted to

forcibly encroach upon the landlords’ land.

15. It is only after the green revolution that the Sikh image came to be identified with the Jat

Sikhs (Pettigrew 1995).

16. Interviews revealed that Jat Sikhs landlords and landowners strongly resisted this, as they

feared the rise of Hindus in trade and commerce at the cost of agriculture.

17. Referring to it as “Punjab problem” and “agrarian crisis,” studies have observed the impact of

rising costs of inputs, sub-division of landholdings, slow growth of the market price of major

crops, declining state-support to the agriculture sector and falling returns from agriculture on

the economic and socio-political transformation which occurred in the rural (Dutta 2012;

Leaf 1985; Jodhka 2006; Sidhu 2002; Singh 2017; Alam 1986).

18. The Sikh separatist movement, widely known as the Khalistan movement comprised of Sikh

mobilization seeking a separate nation of Khalistan. Many studies on the Khalistan movement in

Punjab trace the emergence of the movement to the rising economic inequality and political

economy of the green revolution in Punjab (Oberoi 1997; Shiva 1991).

19. Interview with a commission agent, Patran, 2016

20. It is an apex institution established in 1995 for balanced urban growth in the state of Punjab.

It was established for creating planned residential, commercial, and industrial spaces.

21. Sircar (2017) argues that “the caste relations, which are also labor relations, have been

modified to fit the emerging forms of economic organization but not transformed in terms of the

flows of power and authority” (p. 16).

22. The full-time laborers are upper-caste males belonging to the Pandit and Baniya caste. They

either reside in the town or commute from the nearby village and primarily undertake skilled

jobs like banking, accounting, communication and I.T. in these firms.

23. Landlessness, unemployment, and limited opportunity for social mobility in their home

village led them to migrate and search for employment outside their state (Sharma 2005;

Haan 2002; Wilson 1999).

24. They often rely on advance credit borrowings from the agro-traders, processors, and

landowners to manage their cost of living in the off-season period. The advance payment is

repaid through intense wage work during the peak season.

ABSTRACTS

Conventionally, the city has been the dominant conceptual basis for understanding urban

processes. The rural, on the other hand, is assumed to be external to the city, which is

supposedly subsumed by the global forces of capitalist urbanization. Such a conceptualization

underestimates the complex ways in which the rural, with its distinct agrarian dynamics of land,

labor and capital, is significant in understanding the processes of urbanization that are anchored

in geographies beyond the city. Using the framework of “agrarian urbanism” (Gururani 2019),

this paper focuses on a small town, Patran, located in the Patiala district of Punjab and argues

that contemporary processes of urbanization are deeply entrenched in the rural and its agrarian

dynamics of land and caste. By focusing on agrarian changes that were driven by colonial policies

of land rights and ownership, and state-led agrarian development strategies in post-independent

India, this paper argues that instead of assimilating the rural, urbanization in predominantly


69

agricultural contexts both mirrors and differs from the old forms of agrarian relations and leads

to the coproduction of the rural, albeit in new ways.

INDEX

Keywords: agrarian, urban, agriculture market, land, caste, agrarian change, small towns

AUTHOR

ANKITA RATHI

Research Fellow, Institute of Rural Management Anand, Gujarat, India.


70

The Speculative Frontier: RealEstate, Governance and Occupancyon the Metropolitan PeripheryAshima Sood

Introduction: speculative frontiers

1 In July 2017, a domestic worker went missing in Mahagun Moderne, a middle-class

gated community in Sector 78 of Noida or New Okhla Industrial Development Area, a

satellite township on the eastern periphery of Delhi National Capital Region (NCR)

(Dey 2017).1 The maid Zohra Bibi was eventually found within the boundaries of the

development after her husband and neighbors entered Moderne by force to search for

her. But the episode did not end there. Over the course of the next ten days, informal

shops and shanties in the vicinity of Moderne, where Bibi lived, were demolished based

on the complaints of Moderne residents (The Hindu 2017).

2 The basti (slum) residents’ defiant transgression of the rules of separation enforced by

the gated community and the subsequent retribution by the homeowners activated the

anxieties that shape the interface between India’s elite enclaves and their

surroundings. With nearly 2,800 flats, of which about 2,000 were occupied as of July

2017 (Dey 2017), settings like Mahagun Moderne present a peri-urban territory that is

being remade by real estate capital (Gururani and Dasgupta 2018:42). Built by private

capital and inhabited by an assertive middle class, Moderne exemplifies in many ways

the unfolding of the Southern “real estate turn” (Shatkin 2017) in metropolitan

peripheries across India.

3 The social, political and economic implications of the Moderne case, as well as the

larger phenomena it embodies, have been widely investigated. However, this paper

takes as its point of departure two dimensions of this case that have received relatively

little attention. First is its location in a rapidly transforming satellite city outside the

metropolitan core of Delhi, a spatial periphery being reshaped by the dynamics of real

estate capital flows. Second is the nature of its local governance under the jurisdiction


71

of the Noida Authority, a planning parastatal that doubles as a (non-representative)

municipal government. What can these aspects of the Moderne case tell us about the

larger landscape of peripheral urbanization in India?

4 This paper theorizes these parallel dimensions of this “speculative” frontier—new peri-

urban geographies being created by the forces of real estate development and the

transitional and specialized forms of local government emerging in these territories.

5 In other words, the term “speculative” is used here in two senses. First, it describes the

shifting, half-made but also conjectural territories of real estate capital that anchor

new modes (and nodes) of place-making in the post-2000 peri-urban landscape

(Kundu 2016). The geography of this speculative frontier is outlined through a novel

database of investments in real estate capacity that present an essentially metropolitan

landscape of privately—and largely nationally—financed housing construction and

commercial projects. Findings from our database buttress scholarship that highlights

the pivotal role of Indian private capital in building these real estate projects (Rouanet

and Halbert 2016; Raman 2016). In this way, the paper trains a quantitative lens onto

the “frontier urbanism” theorized by Gururani and Dasgupta (2018)—“a volatile and

active landscape, caught in a vortex of change, a place full of potential but also of

perils,” “simultaneously inside and outside of the regimes of capitalist accumulation”

(p. 42).

6 Second, the paper examines how forces of “speculative urbanism” (Goldman 2011a,

2011b)—defined by local government responses to real estate financial flows—play out

in the peri-urban. In doing so, the paper contributes to an understanding of speculative

“peri-urbanism,” by highlighting how the form of local government shapes

“speculative governance,” i.e., how “state relations, urban citizenship, rights and rules

of access” are being reconfigured in the wake of city-making projects on the “rural”

periphery (Goldman 2011a:556).

7 In institutional economics terms, governance is understood broadly as the rules that

regulate allocation and distribution of resources to end uses and users. This paper

draws attention to the form of local government as the key dimension of governance.

The diversity of specialized and provisional governance arrangements seen in the

Hyderabad case as well as the exceptional reign of the Noida Authority helps establish a

typology of the modes of government that characterize the speculative frontier (also

see Shaw 2018). This typology of specialized and exceptional modalities of government

is best understood in contrast to the municipal governments expected to manage urban

areas, especially with the enactment of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act

(Kennedy and Sood 2019; Sood and Kennedy 2020; Follmann 2015).

8 As Samanta (2014) reminds us, the statutory and census definitions of urban

settlements do not necessarily converge. If the urban is the area administered by the

municipal government that embodies the norm of the 74th Constitutional Amendment,

the peri-urban almost by definition lies outside the jurisdiction of this norm.

9 To understand this dichotomy, it helps to pay attention to the official routes through

which areas are declared “urban” in India. These constitute two major categories—

statutory towns and census towns. The former has an urban local body (ULB) such as a

municipal corporation, municipal council, municipality or a Nagar Panchayat, based on

population criteria defined under the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act. 2 The

designation of census town, however, comes through a determination by the Census

authorities that an area meets its tri-fold definition of the “urban” based on


72

population, density and non-farm profile of the male workforce (Pradhan 2013). In the

metropolitan core of agglomerations like the NCR or Greater Hyderabad, the municipal

corporation(s) serve as statutory ULBs. On the peripheries, however, this disjunction

between the census and the statutory gives rise to the phenomenon of “unrecognized”

or “denied” urbanization—“territories [that] have been declared ‘urban’ by the census,

but have not been declared ‘statutory urban’ by the state” (Samanta 2014:55).

10 The disparate geographies of Noida and Greater Hyderabad are, thus, settings where

the census and statutory definitions of the urban i.e., the modality and norm of

governance come to diverge. Peri-urban spaces, in this analysis, thus emerge as the

arena where the tensions between urban growth and its governance unfold. Even more

simply, the peri-urban is the arena where local bodies that meet the 74th CAA’s

requirement of representative ULBs in urban areas are missing or unstable.

11 The two case studies of Greater Hyderabad and Noida instantiate seemingly opposed

trajectories for the transitional and exceptional modes of government that characterize

the speculative frontier relative to the metropolitan core. In the former case, the

multiplicity of these local bodies and parastatals can lead to fragmentation and

jurisdictional gaps. In the second case, the concentration of municipal powers and

functions within the ambit of the Noida Authority encourages functional overreach.

12 In this way, this paper further characterizes how modalities of governance are shaped

by investment in the speculative frontier as “a zone beyond which further expansion is

possible” (Moore 2000 quoted in Gillespie 2020:15). Like Dupont (2007), this paper sees

the peri-urban “as a space whose use corresponds to diverse and often conflicting

stakes, indicative of processes signifying a political and societal vision of the city and

access” (p. 89).

13 In particular, I argue that in both the cases of Noida and Greater Hyderabad, these

speculative peri-urbanisms serve to undercut occupancy (peri-)urbanisms by subaltern

groups. Empowering and responding to propertied and entrepreneurial agendas, they

further undermine the most disempowered citizens. The absence of elected and

responsive representatives to adjudicate the claims of migrants and working-class

denizens in places such as Mahagun Moderne thus places the larger problematic of the

right to the city in jeopardy—the “call to all inhabitants in the city to contribute to ‘the

production of urban space’” (Lefebvre 1991) and “appropriate its uses” (Zérah

et al. 2011) in peri-urban India.

Occupancy and Speculative Peri-urbanisms

14 Engaging with the theme of this special issue, this paper asks—what is urban about this

putative terrain of the peri-urban? The paper’s contribution lies in delineating an

interpretive framework informed by a macro-portrait of the speculative frontier and

elucidated through case studies of governance dynamics in the two settings of Greater

Hyderabad and Noida. Drawing its basic conceptual scaffold from the theses of

speculative and frontier urbanism, the paper is interested in both the precise

modalities of speculative governance as well as in their repercussions for the political

economy of the peri-urban.

15 In this endeavor, I bring into conversation several literatures that have spoken to one

another rarely, if at all, especially against the backdrop of the peri-urban. In particular,

the paper connects three broad bodies of scholarship. One is the broader debate around


73

the “real estate turn” described by Shatkin (2016) and defined in a later section. The

work of Rouanet and Halbert (2014), Raman (2016) and Goldman (2011a, 2011b) fall in

this rubric. Second is incipient literature on the political economy of “unrecognized” or

“denied” urbanization alluded to above (Samanta 2014; Pradhan 2013). In tracing out

the repercussions of speculative governance on the peri-urban frontier, the notions of

internal and external governance prove useful (Sood 2015:1362). And last but not least

is the framework of occupancy urbanism (Benjamin 2008), which underlines the role of

“vote bank politics” in helping poor groups in both “claiming public services and

safeguarding territorial claims” (p. 720). Scholarship on the frontier and speculative

urbanisms has been preoccupied with matters of land assembly, planning and policy

(Shatkin 2011; Goldman 2011a, 2011b; Balakrishnan 2019; Gururani and Dasgupta 2018;

Gillespie 2020). This paper aims to recenter questions of local governance in debates

around the peri-urban frontier (cf. Dupont 2007; Kennedy 2007; Idiculla 2016;

Sood 2015; Shaw 2018).

16 In analyzing non-statutory or denied urbanization in the two cases of Greater

Hyderabad and Noida, this paper draws on Samanta’s (2014) argument that the

resolution of these tensions lies not in statistical or administrative fixes but political

decision-making. What kinds of political contestation are evident in the two case

studies analyzed in this paper? Although there has been no local elected body in Noida

over the past four decades since its development, recent attempts by the state

government to introduce a municipal corporation have faced pushback. Similarly, in

Hyderabad outgrowths, where a variety of local governments jostle each other, this

instability often arises in the political economy of real estate-led peri-urban

development itself.

17 The Greater Hyderabad case further reveals how the salience of real estate dynamics

shapes the territoriality of this peri-urban terrain. The spatiality and history of peri-

urban transformation in these locations, I contend, have the potential to illuminate

wider trajectories of speculative government on metropolitan peripheries. An

important manifestation on the speculative frontier are tussles around the “politics of

classification” of urbanizing areas (Samanta 2014). In turn, this political economy of

government form leads to a multiplication of local bodies, with varying degrees of

autonomy and democratic accountability. These often share jurisdictional borders but

lack clearly defined channels for external governance that would allow coordination

across functions “such as public infrastructure and collective goods provision, regional

and spatial growth planning and management, public finances, natural resource

allocation, among others” (Sood 2015:1363). In contrast to the multiplicity of agencies

on the peri-urban frontier, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation allows for

clearer institutional channels for communication and coordination across adjoining

“circles.” In some ways, it can be said to define the central jurisdiction in the

metropolitan region, the urban core against which the peri-urban multiplicity can be

defined.

18 These governance regimes have implications for the right to the city in profound ways

for the most vulnerable populations as the Noida case underlines. The nature of local

government remains central to this mediation, as theorizations of occupancy urbanism

remind us (Benjamin 2007, 2008) because they determine how citizenship can be

negotiated in domains ranging from public spaces to water access (Gajendran 2016).


74

19 The relative paucity of comparable data sources means that subsequent analysis largely

draws on secondary sources, supplemented with longstanding primary fieldwork in the

Greater Hyderabad area. Although the analytical methodology in the two case studies

of Noida and Greater Hyderabad differs substantially, the two cases together offer

illuminating contrasts and continuities when it comes to the typologies and effects of

local government. The paper combines secondary and primary data, both qualitative

and quantitative, to advance the characterization of this peri-metropolitan speculative

frontier. This methodologically eclectic approach is necessitated by theoretical and

empirical gaps in current debates on the peri-urban in India and the Global South more

generally. Thus, this paper begins by sketching a hitherto unexplored macro-landscape

of real estate investments in India before turning to case studies of peri-urban

government that shape this frontier.

20 The quantitative contours of the speculative frontiers, mapped in the next section, are

based on a database of medium to large-scale investments in housing or commercial

real estate capacity. The following section revisits the Noida case through news-reports

and documentary sources to examine the role of local governance vis-à-vis occupancy

urbanisms. The case of Greater Hyderabad, drawing on fieldwork over several years,

subsequently synthesizes primary fieldwork and secondary sources to sketch out the

emerging landscape of governance frameworks on the speculative frontier.

Peri-urban/greenfield: Gauging the speculativeFrontier

21 If real estate activity is a major driver of outcomes on the speculative frontier, what is

its geographic scope and spread? There have been relatively few attempts at answering

this question.3 The paper aims to fill this gap by drawing on data from a database of

investments in productive capacity created by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian

Economy (CMIE). This database tracks investments in productive capacity in projects

exceeding INR 10 million (or one crore) across sectors. For the analysis reported in this

section, out of the multitudes of sectors contained in the database, the focus was on

two related real estate verticals—housing construction and commercial complexes.

22 The CapEx database analyzed here compiles information from a variety of sources in

the public domain as well as direct contact with promoters. It covers the period from

1996–2018, with most projects becoming visible only in 1998.4 As the CMIE data tracks

investments rather than completed projects alone, it helps glean an “intent” to

urbanize as revealed through investments undertaken in housing and commercial

developments. Many investments can and do fail.5 Accordingly, the twenty-year span of

the analysis presented here categorizes projects by their status, coded into completed,

outstanding or under construction, as well as abandoned or shelved. The database also

contains information on promoters, co-promoters, associates, life-cycle events as well

as location, among other variables.6 Since CMIE captures project information through

media reports as well as some interviews with developers, it is subject to issues in

reporting and may represent an undercount of projects across all status categories.

23 Although the larger aim of the database analysis was to identify the largest urban

integrated megaprojects (UIMs) (Shatkin 2011), this section presents findings from the

larger populations of projects.7 Note that the investments analyzed here include more


75

quotidian examples of city-making in contrast to megaprojects such as the

infrastructure corridors, which have received more scholarly attention (Sami and

Anand 2016; Balakrishnan 2013; Nair 2015). In our analysis, the largest UIMs are a

fraction of a larger incursion of private capital into the built environment in India’s

metropolises. About 6% of projects in the database have been shelved (Figure 1), but in

the Greater Hyderabad districts, this number is closer to 10%. Worth noting is the sheer

preponderance of Indian relative to foreign promoters, state or public-private

partnership actors (Figure 2). National and local capital circuits are, as argued

elsewhere, the key to “landing” real estate financial flows (Halbert and Rouanet 2014;

Rouanet and Halbert 2016; Raman 2016). As Figure 2 shows, across status categories,

projects led by private Indian promoters average well over three-fourths of all projects.

Although the database also provides information on other Project Associates,

international and public-private partnerships (PPPs) represent small proportions of the

total. (PPPs appear slightly more likely to have failed in these summary statistics.)

Figure 1: The majority of projects in the database were outstanding or under construction as of2018, all-India

Source: CMIE; Author’s database

Note: The database comprised 2,745 completed projects, 3,983 outstanding projects and 401 shelvedprojects.


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Figure 2: All projects by ownership and project status are predominantly privately promoted, all-India


Note: All projects by project status should add up to 100%, though there may be rounding errors.

24 Perhaps the most relevant findings from this database pertain to location. Nearly two-

thirds of all completed real estate housing and commercial construction projects with

an investment of over INR 10 million across India are located in one of India’s top eight

metropolitan regions (Figure 3; see also Figure 4).8 For projects of equivalent size and

scope that were “outstanding” or under construction, the corresponding figure

dropped to about 60%. Together these eight metropolitan areas comprise just about a

quarter of India’s urban population of over 460 million in 2018.9 The sheer spatial

concentration of real estate construction activity makes it abundantly clear that this

phenomenon is a feature not simply of urban but more specifically metropolitan India.


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Figure 3: The large majority of projects, regardless of project status, are located in million-pluscities, all-India


Notes: All projects by project status do not add up to 100% because the chart does not include urbanareas outside million-plus cities. *Ahmedabad does not include the adjoining Gandhinagar UrbanDevelopment Authority area. Hence these numbers may be undercounted.

Figure 4:Completed Projects show clear clustering in top eight million-plus urban agglomerations,all-India.

Source: Map by Shreya Basu, based on a database compiled by Ashima Sood and Tarun Jain, withhelp from Prerna Dokania.


78

25 To reiterate the highly concentrated nature of this activity, one more data point

deserves mention. About 16–17% of India’s urban population lives in million-plus cities

outside the top eight metropolitan areas, according to the 2011 Census data on urban

agglomerations.10 This is roughly in line with the representation of projects in these

sites in this database (Figure 3). However, combining data from all million-plus urban

agglomerations, it would appear that only about a quarter of outstanding projects are

coming up outside million-plus urban centers. These smaller urban centers that house

over half of India’s total urban population actually house an even smaller proportion of

completed projects, though they have a higher proportion of what appear to be failed

projects.

Figure 5: Completed Projects by Ownership show that publicly promoted projects are moregeographically dispersed, all-India


26 Figure 4 and Figure 5 confer nuance to the forces driving this spatial concentration.11

First, as Figure 5 shows, projects sponsored by central, state and to a degree, local

governments are spatially more dispersed. However, the fact that the map of projects

completed even in 2013–19 misses large swathes of central and eastern India suggests a

“spatial rift” in India’s regional geography that mirrors other axes of disadvantage

(Balakrishnan 2020).

27 What does it mean that housing and commercial capacity construction is so

overwhelmingly a metropolitan phenomenon? These findings offer provocative insight

into what the future map of urban India may look like, based on current patterns of

predominantly private, but also a public investment into building capacity. Informal,

sometimes illegal yet indubitably private initiative has always shaped the once peri-


79

urban frontier, whether in the Sangam Vihars of Delhi, the gunthewadis of

Maharashtra or the Bombay Hotels of Ahmedabad (Bhide 2013; Desai and Sanghvi 2017;

Dubey 2018). The spatiality of the speculative frontier outlined here suggests other

facets to peri-urban, and especially peri-metropolitan, India (Also see Arabindoo 2009;

Raman 2016; Rouanet and Halbert 2015).12 It must be noted that the peri-urban

landscape outlined here is in many ways far from the vision of autoconstructed

peripheral urbanization that makes possible claims to citizenship (Caldeira 2017). To a

large extent, this reflects our focus on the spatial imprint of organized and capital-

intensive real estate-led peri-urbanization.

28 These modalities of local government can be crucial to the unfolding of the policy

agenda embedded in the real estate turn.

Occupancy Urbanism in the Urban Periphery

29 Consisting of completed, under construction or abandoned projects, the real-estate

portrait mapped out in a previous section is primarily a phenomenon of the

metropolitan periphery. This section focuses on the unusual forms of local government

that proliferate in these settings. In so doing, it gives substance to what Shatkin (2016)

describes as the “real estate turn”: “the reform agendas” that encourage “a more

commercial orientation in their land management” (p 142). Unlike peri-urban

Hyderabad, Noida benefits from a unified governance framework in the form of the

Noida Authority. Much more responsive to builders, owners and industrialists than it is

to workers, this is a government that renders occupancy urbanism ineffectual

(Benjamin 2008).

30 A planned satellite city inaugurated during the inauspicious days of the Emergency

(Schindler and Kishore 2015; Dubey 2018), Noida has evolved from a planned

agglomeration for small-scale industry to a hub for India’s high-end information

technology and enabled services economy (Schindler and Kishore 2015). The result is

an uneven mix of high-end residential and commercial development interspersed with

industrial clusters and working-class bastis. Situated on the eastern quadrant of the

Delhi NCR, Sector 78 is not far from the center of the NOIDA. In maps, Sector 78 shows

up as a squat battleship shape, a world of gated communities, with names like Hyde

Park, Morpheus Green and Windsor Court, including many Mahagun developments. A

mosque juts out in the far northwest corner of the Sector 78 map (See Figure 6).13


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Figure 6: Sector 78, NOIDA

Source: Google Maps

31 With its many conflicting, shifting accounts, the Noida Sector 78 episode highlighted at

the outset of this chapter appears to be a generative setting for investigating the

governance dynamics in the speculative frontier. As I argue below, a link may be made

between the proliferation of private residential development aimed at middle-class

Indians, the exceptional form of urban government in Noida and the viability of

occupancy peri-urbanisms.

32 The denial of occupation rights witnessed in the Mahagun makes it possible to

delineate these logics. While recent scholarship on the Noida Authority views its

function through the lens of planning (Dubey 2018), the reading here revisits

contestations around occupancy as issues of (internal and external) governance. In this

way, it aims to re-inscribe local government as the arena where the political economy

of urban development is enacted. Home to enclaves created by spatially targeted

infrastructure development and maintained in some ways by the instrumentalization

of urban governance modalities (Kennedy and Zérah 2008), the speculative frontier

emerges as a deeply divided territory, one that actively subverts the possibility of

occupancy (Benjamin 2008; Chatterjee 2004; Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011).

33 These two worlds came into conflict in Mahagun Moderne when a ragtag group

stormed the high gates of the development after the domestic worker failed to return

from her daily shift (Gupta 2017; Dey 2017; Mohan 2017). After the domestic worker

Zohra Bibi was found, accounts of the events that led up to her disappearance rapidly

took on a “she said, he said” character, as Zohra Bibi and her employers, the Sethis,

exchanged claims about whether it was Bibi’s wages or the Sethi’s cash that was stolen

(Gupta 2017; Dey 2017; Mohan 2017). Even more remarkable, even the site and

circumstances of Bibi’s recovery became contested. While Bibi herself claimed to have

been held captive by the Sethis, the police countered that she was found in the

basement of a building where she had taken shelter after being assaulted (Dey 2017).


81

34 Indeed, the facts of the case seemed calculated to assemble the most combustible

political elements of the contemporary political moment. The employers were upper-

caste Hindus and the maid was a Muslim migrant from West Bengal. To Mahagun

Moderne’s upwardly mobile middle classes, torchbearers of Hindu nationalism, the

political border between Cooch Behar and India’s eastern neighbor notwithstanding,

the low-income communities were all “Bangladeshis” (Ghosh and Mehta 2017).

35 Subsequent events predictably clarified the lay of the land as far as the sympathies of

state authorities were concerned. First, several of the protestors who had led the forced

entry into Mahagun Moderne were rounded up and arrested by the police

(Maanvi 2017). Then informal establishments that serviced Moderne and the shanties

which housed the domestic workers’ community were razed to the ground by the Noida

Authority (The Hindu 2017; Express Web Desk 2017). This followed a reported visit by

Mahesh Sharma, then Member of Parliament from the Gautam Buddha Nagar

constituency to Moderne, to express solidarity with the gated community residents

(Express Web Desk 2017). “Noida is the city of our dreams,” Sharma was quoted as

saying. “The case is clear that an armed mob came with an intent to attack the family.

We are with you.”

36 Mahagun Moderne thus became a Rorschach test, allowing multiple narratives to be

spun. On the one hand, the right-wing commentariat hinted darkly at the role of non-

governmental organizations protecting an “armed mob” under the pretext of human

rights. Other commentators underlined the risk to domestic workers’ livelihoods in the

homes of metropolitan India’s assertive middle classes in the absence of employment

protections. Yet, as the literature on urban politics in post-liberalization India

reiterates (Coelho et al. 2013; Ruet and Tawa Lama-Rewal 2009; Ghertner 2011), the

ascendance of these class interests needed a vehicle in the legal and institutional

channels provided by the “participolis” of Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs)

(Coelho et al. 2013). Theorizations of urban politics explain how modes of urban

governance embody these interests (Goldman 2011a, 2011b).

37 The visual vocabulary of Mahagun Moderne may be one of self-containment,

manifested in the architecture of boundary walls and high gates (Maanvi 2017;

Dey 2017). At the same time, for all their physical, social and recreational facilities,

developments like Moderne remain deeply reliant on the “survival circuit” of the flow

of labor and materials from their surrounding areas (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011:44).

Through the 1980s, this interdependence between the Indian middle classes, who

powered the accumulation economy, and actors in the subsistence economy, found

expression first in the politics of patronage and then in competitive “vote-bank”

politics (Chatterjee 2004).

38 However, the remarkable alignment of central, state (police) and local governments

(Noida Authority) on the side of the Moderne residents in 2017 speaks directly not just

to the changing political economy of Indian cities but also the framework of local

governance through which it is articulated. Dubey (2018) has previously analyzed the

Noida Authority’s hostile stance towards organic informal growth in Khora village.

“City of our dreams,” Noida may represent the bourgeois frontier of civil society, with a

politics mediated through the genteel auspices of the Resident Welfare Association

(RWA) and industries and trade associations (Coelho et al. 2013).

39 Despite having a population of over 600,000 (Census of India 2011b), Noida lacks an

elected municipal government (Express News Service 2019). Instead, the Noida


82

Authority, constituted under the Uttar Pradesh Industrial Development Act of 1976,

performs many municipal functions in addition to its mandate as a planning and

development agency (see also Dubey 2018).14 Noida’s RWAs have, in recent years, played

a complicated role in upholding this regime.15 When the idea of a municipal

corporation for Gautam Buddha Nagar comprising Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna

Expressway was first mooted, several RWA bodies, as well as industry and trade

associations, came out against the proposal (TNN 2017a). At a meeting convened in

December 2017, a larger array of groups—ranging from the Federation of Noida

Resident Welfare Associations (FONRWA) to the Noida Entrepreneurs Association (NEA)

and the local chapter of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Association of

India (CREDAI)—opposed the need for a municipal body. Instead, it was reported that

the demand was for “civic byelaws … to fix the accountability of residents and the

Authority towards the city” (Bahl 2017).

40 Other reports indicated at least some sections of the RWAs and local “social

organisations” were pressing for the creation of an elected municipal government

(TNN 2017b).16 Interestingly, the debate on the proposed municipal body was revived in

2020 on the insistence of urban villages under the Noida Authority’s jurisdiction

(TNN 2020) who complained about a lack of hearing in the authority’s offices with

village heads stripped of their mediating role.

41 Noida thus instantiates the speculative frontier, as a territory not only constructed by

but also governed in meaningful ways by propertied interests such as RWAs and

industry associations. The resistance by the basti dwellers at Mahagun Moderne and the

fierce reaction to it putatively highlight the emerging socio-spatial frontier of the peri-

urban as “an oppositional site” (Benjamin 2007:539). In more subtle ways, however,

they call the limits of this resistance into question. The Mahagun Moderne episode

suggests failure of processes that might embolden “de facto tenure” and occupancy by

poor groups (Benjamin 2007:552).

42 In the occupancy urbanism framework, resonating with Chatterjee’s (2004)

conceptualization of “political society,” vote bank politics alludes to claim-making by

poor groups that are supported by access to “voter lists in municipal elections”

(Benjamin 2008:719). The modalities of representation also have a role to play, as

Benjamin (2007) points out:

The importance of local councillors is not just that they are part of a democraticsystem shaped by voting (and perhaps Constitutional decentralisation), but ratherthat they are embedded in society. (P. 550)

43 The analysis here suggests that the local “vote bank” politics that would offer a

counterpoint to the majoritarian interests of the central and state governments may

have been undercut by the absence of a municipal corporation. The absence of

representative local politics in Noida Sector 78 manifested itself in a lack of

institutional platforms that would otherwise encourage electoral contestation between

propertied and non-propertied interests within the territory of the Noida Authority. In

other words, this lack of politics undermined internal governance, “the actors,

institutions and mechanisms available for the realisation of collective goals within the

… township” (Sood 2015:1362). Instead, the institutional void showed itself as a gap in

external governance. It allowed the gated community to wield more substantive power

through the levers of the state precisely in opposition to collective action by the basti’s

migrant community.


83

44 In the next section, the case of Greater Hyderabad helps to further trace the contours

of this speculative frontier.

Governance in Peri-urban Hyderabad

45 The scenes of overt conflict in Noida Sector 78 are far from typical on the peri-urban

interface, where forms of co-habitation, even if uneasy, often prevail, as Kundu’s (2016)

study of place-making on Rajarhat new town as also Xie’s (this issue) comparative

analysis of Hyderabad and Chengdu demonstrate.17 In Greater Hyderabad, the evolution

of governance arrangements on the speculative frontier has been a messy and

contested process with fragmentation as its outcome.

46 In this section, the case of Greater Hyderabad thus delineates the range of exceptional

and provisional governance regimes that shape the frontier. Greater Hyderabad’s

speculative frontier typifies the bourgeois landscape of the “post-industrial globalized

metropolis” (Chatterjee 2004). It pinpoints more precisely the spatial location of the

pan-Indian metropolitan focus of construction activity. No more than just over a

quarter of completed, outstanding and shelved projects in the five districts that wholly

or partially comprised the metropolitan area were in the core city of the erstwhile

Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad. Nearly a third were clustered in the erstwhile

municipalities of Serilingampally and Kukatpally, which were incorporated into

Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) at the time of its formation in 2007,

and continue to be the hub of high-end real estate. Though the numbers presented here

may overestimate the number of projects located in core municipal areas, they remain

valuable for conferring rare insight into the magnitude and spatiality of the speculative

frontier.18

47 In Greater Hyderabad, however, the state government and not the municipal

corporation has been the entrepreneurial actor shaping the process of land

transformation for purposes of IT-led development (Kennedy 2007; Kennedy 2014;

Sood 2016; Mitra 2018). As in Goldman’s Bangalore (2011a, 2011b), real estate plays by

both the state and private actors have underpinned this expansion. The Growth

Corridor on either side of the Outer Ring Road (ORR) that circles the city has unlocked

large parcels of land critical to the realization of these plans (Mitra 2018).

48 A sense of the spatial extent of this frontier as defined by real estate projects is given in

Figures 6 and 7. The comparison between completed versus outstanding projects

illuminates its gradual movement overtime. The increasing prominence of state

government projects in the core city has accompanied a westward clustering of private

projects in Narsingi Municipality and its neighbors in Rajendranagar Mandal. While

Figure 7 and Figure 8 highlight the spatial spread of housing construction projects from

the database, Table 1 maps the intersections of planning and governance regimes that

mark this terrain.


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Figure 7: Completed housing construction projects 1995–2018 in Greater Hyderabad are clusteredoutside the core pre-2007 Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) areas


Figure 8: Outstanding housing construction projects as of 2018 show increasing dispersion outsideGHMC boundaries



85

49 Focusing on localities that abut the growth corridor along the western stretch of the

Outer Ring Road, this section attempts to highlight the fluid, uneven and fast-evolving

jurisdictions that govern this geography. In so doing: it aims to answer two questions.

First, to what extent does the definitional divergence in population and government

criteria along the speculative frontier in Greater Hyderabad implicate the political

economy of real estate? Second, what are the spatial manifestations—and repercussions

—of the multiplicity of local bodies that crowd this frontier?

Speculative Governance on the Peri-urban Frontier

50 If the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation defines the pivotal urban local body

i.e., the municipal corporation, the variety of local governments on the metropolitan

frontier have often arrayed themselves in opposition to it. It is useful, therefore, to

recognize—and categorize—the diversity of government forms on this speculative

frontier: exceptional regimes such as the Industrial Area Local Authority (IALA),

transitional rural bodies such as Panchayats in census towns as well as municipalities

which carve out smaller urban areas.

51 The first form of local government is an exceptional regime, the IALA, which in many

ways resembles the Noida Authority, albeit on a smaller scale. It dots the territory of

the GHMC, as Table 1 shows, in the Serilingampally circle but also beyond it (Kennedy

and Sood 2019; Sood and Kennedy 2020). Devolving the powers and functions of the

municipal government to the state’s Industrial Infrastructure Corporation in industrial

parks across Telangana, the IALA has been a critical “zoning technology” applied by the

state government to advance its entrepreneurial agenda (Kennedy 2014; Ong 2006).

This is an instrument that leverages a variety of “exemptions” and “flexible planning”

modalities to shape land use and ease building regulations (Kennedy and Sood 2019;

Sood 2016). Its chief use, however, lies in its public finances model, which allows the

majority share of property tax collections to be retained for use in the tiny enclaves,

while a smaller share is disbursed to the GHMC.19

Table 1: Select Settlements in the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA), Census2011

Administrative UnitStatutory

ClassificationCurrent Status (where known)

District: HyderabadGreater Hyderabad

Municipal Corporation

SerilingampallyGHMC; part of

Rangareddy district

Municipality incorporated into GHMC in

2007; parts fall under IALA.

Kokapet, Mandal:

RajendranagarOutgrowth Part of Narsingi Municipality

Manikonda, Jagir and Khalsa,

Mandal: RajendranagarOutgrowth

Parts still classified as a village; some parts

fall under IALA. Parts of Manikonda form a

new Municipality


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Puppalguda, Mandal:

RajendranagarOutgrowth

Some parts fall under Manikonda

Municipality

Narsingi, Mandal:

Rajendranagar*Census Town Part of Narsingi Municipality

Tellapur, Mandal:

RamchandrapuramOutgrowth Tellapur municipality

Source: Census of India (2011a; 2011b; 2011c); TNN (2018); municipality websites20

Note: *Narsingi now appears to include VN Pally village, mentioned below.

52 Even beyond the territory of the IALAs, tax considerations as much as land availability

appeared to have shaped the governance dynamics in this stretch of Greater

Hyderabad. Incorporation into a larger municipal body such as the GHMC may confer

benefits but it also threatens to siphon away real estate surpluses in the form of

property taxes elsewhere. This is the key tension that appears to guide the statutory

classification of localities on this speculative frontier, as I show below.

53 Rural local bodies or panchayats (villages), are the second form of transitional

government that exist on this speculative frontier. The census category of outgrowths

—“viable units which emerge adjacent to, but outside the administrative limits of

[statutory towns] … not complete settlement units, like an entire village” (Pradhan

2013:43) represent a related typology. Panchayats often lack the capacity or the

incentives to regulate land and their built environment, unlike the GHMC. In places like

Manikonda and Puppalguda, this has encouraged the rise of unauthorized settlements

amid suspect land deals. The resulting lax regulation proves useful for real estate actors

at all scales (Staff Reporter 2013; Deccan Chronicle 2016).

54 There have been repeated attempts to incorporate these areas into the GHMC. One of

the earliest such notifications came in 2011 when GHMC included Manikonda,

Shamshabad, Vattinagulapally (VN Pally)21 and Narsingi in a list of 30 villages to be

annexed (News18 2011). Despite the plan being revisited in 2013, it remained a non-

starter (Special Correspondent 2013) in the face of legal challenges, particularly by

villagers from Manchirevula and Manikonda (TNN 2013). As late as 2018, news reports

suggested the state government intended to merge the so-called IT corridor, consisting

of Manikonda and Shamshabad, with the GHMC. Several other gram panchayats

adjacent to the Nehru Outer Ring Road (ORR), including Puppalguda, Kokapet, VN Pally,

Narsingi and Manchirevula were also proposed for the merger (TNN 2018a).22 However,

just a few months later, the plan was dropped after Members of the Legislative

Assembly (MLAs) from these areas came out in opposition to the tax implications of the

merger. As TNN (2018b) reported, ruling party “leaders from the erstwhile Rangareddy

districts protested saying that such a move would lead to higher taxes and turn the

people against them.”

55 It is worth noting that many of these settings do not merely adjoin the territory of the

GHMC.23 In some cases, they are even tucked into it and host prominent real estate

projects, e.g., the Reliance-led Hyderabad Trade Towers project in Manchirevula and

Kokapet SEZ.24 These are sites of ambitious but delay-ridden anchor projects facilitated

by state government agencies such as the state industrial infrastructure corporation

and the metropolitan planning authority (Reddy 2018).


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56 As Table 1 shows, gram panchayats such as VN Pally and Tellapur were eventually

partially or fully absorbed into newly formed municipalities in 2018. These

municipalities are the third form of local bodies that characterize the speculative

frontier. As Figure 8 shows, this stretch is buzzing with ongoing housing construction

projects.

57 Proposed as a compromise solution, according to a 2018 news report, 18 new

municipalities were formed in peri-urban Hyderabad, including Shamshabad and

Manikonda, Narsingi, Ameenpur and Tellapur. In a revealing move, the Department of

Municipal Administration and Urban Development committed not to levy new taxes in

the newly formed municipalities for at least a couple of years (Mahesh 2018).

58 Narsingi municipality, which hosted a population of over 25,000 even as of the 2011

Census, is a good example of such a settlement. Like its neighbors in Rajendranagar

Mandal, Manikonda and Shamshabad, Narsingi avoided statutory status even as it met

and exceeded census population norms (News2018 2011).25 Puppalguda, home to many

high-end gated communities being developed by well-known real estate actors such as

Prestige, may offer one window into the political economy of statutory status for these

sites. Manchirevula, where locals went to Court to fight incorporation into the GHMC, is

similarly the site of luxury villas and expansive plotted developments.26

59 What advantages do these municipalities offer compared to outright incorporation into

the GHMC? In the case of Bangalore, scholars such as Kamath, Baindur and Rajan (2008)

and Goldman (2011b) have argued that municipal expansion diluted representation as

fewer elected representatives served much larger populations. However, as Sood and

Kennedy (2020) have argued, smaller jurisdictions also allow for tighter control over

public finances compared to the GHMC which pools revenues as well as expenditures

across circles and wards. The “get what you pay for” principle of the IALA may not have

an airtight application when it comes to the municipalities (Reynolds 2004). In effect,

however, the smaller populations of the new municipalities and their far less efficient

property tax collection apparatuses probably reduce diversions of revenues to areas

outside their jurisdictions.

60 Worth noting is the fact that the GHMC was itself constituted by incorporating a large

number of municipalities located on its periphery in 2007. Indeed, contestations around

this annexation have continued over the past decade in places such as Manikonda,

where both local panchayats and the industrial infrastructure corporation have

resisted incorporation into the GHMC (Sood 2016; Kennedy and Sood 2019).

Nonetheless, this sub-section has argued that the governance arrangements emerging

and dissolving in this speculative frontier bear some imprint of real estate agendas.

61 Rouanet and Halbert (2016:9), among others, have carefully traced the extraordinary

sway of local real estate developers and their “capacity to build contemporary

cityscapes, along—or, as we will show, in competition—with public authorities.” The

entrepreneurial agendas of the Andhra Pradesh and now Telangana state government

make it especially friendly to these interests and willing to instrumentalize urban

governance in pursuit of the goals of urban growth (Kennedy and Zérah 2008; Sood and

Kennedy 2020; Mitra 2018). The form of local government may thus represent one

important dimension of such “self-empowerment.”


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Incongruent Jurisdictions

62 Institutional and spatial fragmentation is an important part of the trail these real

estate agendas leave in this peri-urban geography. To understand the territorial

configuration of this speculative frontier on the ground, there is no location better

than Q City Road. Named after the high-end Technology Park located in the Financial

District, under the “exceptional” IALA form of government, Q City Road connects ISB

Road (named for the Indian School of Business) on the east to the erstwhile villages of

Gowlidoddi to the west. Key to my argument is how this road juxtaposes the diversity

of local government forms that shape the larger universe of speculative governance on

this margin. In each direction, it connects disparate regimes of governance and

collective goods provision.

63 Running North-South, alongside the Financial District, IT Parks and independent SEZs

and IT campuses, ISB Road is a key artery in the premium spaces of the Nanakramguda

IALA.27 The property tax collections in the IALA largely support the high levels of road

and other infrastructure within the zone (Kennedy and Sood 2019), reflected by the

well-serviced and manicured spaces of the Financial District and IT Park.28 Emblematic

of the globalized premium spaces promoted by the state government in the western

Cyberabad development of Hyderabad, this is an arena of wide roads and high-quality

infrastructures that will eventually house a major international consulate in

Hyderabad, alongside hotels and national banks’ headquarters (Sood 2016).

64 To the west, Q City road leads to the old village of Gowlidoddi, which was incorporated

into the GHMC in 2007. Officially classified as a slum, large parts of Gowlidoddi are

rapidly transforming into a service economy of small-time hotels, hostels, paying guest

accommodations and retail and eateries that cater to the IT workforce of the area

(Sood 2019). Hidden away in less conspicuous corners of Gowlidoddi are vast swathes of

housing for lower-income migrants and locals who provide the housekeeping and

domestic workforce for the Financial District and its neighboring SEZs and IT Parks.

With the meteoric rise of real estate values in this area, occupation rights for the most

vulnerable communities in the mass of villages incorporated into the municipal

corporation in this vicinity—Nanakramguda, Gopanapalli, Gopanapalli Thanda,

Gachibowli—have proved precarious (see Kennedy et al. 2020).

65 The poor-quality roads and water woes of the village/slum of Gowlidoddi testify to the

splintered spatial geography of this frontier. Underlying these differences are the

invisible lines across jurisdictional boundaries, both between the GHMC and the IALA

but also those that separate the GHMC area from the gated communities in its midst

(Sood 2019). Other evidence suggests other jurisdictions beyond these two may be in

the mix, adding to the jurisdictional confusion in this terrain.29 Elsewhere towards the

south of ISB Road and the so-called Anvaya Convention Road (named after a private

convention centre)30 is surreal geography that gives concrete imagery to the notion of

the speculative frontier. Till 2015 and later, close to the ORR, Anvaya Convention Road

was lined on either side by gated compounds housing nothing but wilderness (Figure 9

shows an example), real estate waiting to be realized in land value.31 The southern

reaches of ISB Road also encompassed till recently a not-so-clandestine groundwater

extraction operation on private (and erstwhile agricultural) lands close to the Outer

Ring Road.32


89

Figure 9: A gated compound behind Hyderabad Financial District, 2015

Image credit: A. Sood, 2015

66 At the same time, the multiplicity of governance modalities serves to create and

maintain vastly different levels of service provision on water access, among other

matters. Although water supply in most of western Hyderabad is supplied through a

parastatal, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board,33 the high

ramparts of the gated communities and IALA areas are protected from the worst water

shortages. The most vulnerable communities on the other hand must resort to supply

through tankers, which they can ill afford. It is worth noting the local water board

office is located in the Financial District, impacting access to more distant

communities.34 Similar scenes are echoed across the Cyberabad developments and their

surrounds in Madhapur village (Das and Skelton 2019).

67 The central argument in this section has been that the primacy of real estate interests

on Greater Hyderabad’s speculative frontier is tied to jurisdictional multiplication and

institutional voids which mark its territory. “Who is in charge?” is a question to which

the answer remains obscure, allowing state actors considerable power without

accountability. Channels for collective action or political mobilization by poor groups

may be curbed by hazy jurisdictional boundaries and the information gaps they

produce, as Kennedy et al. (2020) show.

Conclusion: Speculative Peri-Urbanism

68 This paper advances three distinct but interconnected theses about the speculative

frontier. First, a pan-India mapping of the investment activity reveals a speculative

frontier that is concentrated on metropolitan peripheries, creating new pan-India

geographies of exclusionary urbanization (Kundu 2009; Balakrishnan 2020).


90

69 Second, speculative forms of governance on the peri-urban frontier unfold through

transitional and specialized modes of urban government and these often valorize the

interests of propertied groups at the expense of migrants and working-class

communities. Shatkin (2017) asks, “Can the political empowerment of elites through

the formation of new civic organizations break the power of ‘vote bank’ politics?”

(p. 129). In response, this paper proposes that the mode of government in itself can

function as an instrument for elites to counter occupancy urbanism and its street

politics. If the “lack of institutional spaces for the adjudication of urban claims” in

Indian politics instead force “urban spatial relations” to be settled through “collective

action or ad hoc assertions of power” (Shatkin 2017:128), the events at Noida represent

a decisive victory of political power exercised by the accumulation economy.

70 Third, the definitional gap between census and statutory on the peri-urban frontier i.e.,

the lack of institutional arrangements to manage and direct real estate-led growth to

public ends generates jurisdictional interfaces that reflect and uphold patterns of

urban splintering. On the other hand, a census town of Noida’s size is by no means

unique. Census (2011b) lists roughly 20 such census towns of over one lakh population,

many of which are industrial townships. Also included in their ranks are cities such as

Navi Mumbai Panvel Raigad (Census of India 2011b)

71 The salience of private Indian actors revealed in our database also has repercussions

for the speculative frontier. As Rouanet and Halbert (2016) note, real estate actors in

Bangalore have been influential in shaping the spatial course of the city by pushing the

development of exurban areas but also by directing policy, planning priorities and even

the imagery of the ideal city along certain lines (also Searle 2010). This paper argues

that their influence in the entrepreneurial agendas of state governments also impacts

modes of urban governance on the peri-urban frontier not only during, but also in the

aftermath of construction.

72 Located on the edges of municipal boundaries and the larger metropolitan

development areas, the speculative frontier is riddled with institutional interfaces—

and voids—across private and public agencies, such as development authorities or

gated communities and a variety of local government forms. They typify India’s urban

predicament: “the Indian city remains undergoverned even as it is subjected to

extensive (albeit ineffectual) planning and regulation” (Weinstein, Sami, and Shatkin

2014:43; quoted in Shatkin 2017:145). Territorial and functional disputes across as well

as within multiple agencies—issues of internal and external governance (Sood 2015)—

constitute the defining features of a fraught and uneven speculative frontier.

73 This speculative frontier complicates the vision of auto-constructed peripheral

urbanization offered by Caldeira (2017). Shaped by real estate dynamics, the

governance of the speculative frontier has repercussions even for more organic and

informal peri-urban growth. Regardless of the specific typology or multiplicity of urban

governments, our two case studies would suggest that the speculative frontier is hostile

territory for the occupancies that help realize the right to the city in urban India. The

two scenarios of jurisdictional blurring, as in Greater Hyderabad, as also the lack of

locally embedded and elected representation, as in Noida, hinder claim-making by

vulnerable and migrant populations on the speculative frontier. Valorizing the rural

and urban propertied classes, moreover, and often influenced by real estate interests,

the makeshift and/or exceptional governments on the speculative frontier serve to


91

undercut occupancy urbanisms (Benjamin 2008), as the unhappy outcome for the basti

in Noida Sector 78 case demonstrates.

74 Connecting the dots across sometimes disconnected literatures, this paper has laid out

an agenda for future work to attend, as Samanta (2014) advises, to the political

economy of the transitional and exceptional forms of local government on the peri-

urban frontier. Yet, the political question remains alive and ever-more relevant in this

post-COVID world.

75 The scale of the infrastructure being constructed on the speculative frontier of

metropolitan peripheries draws and relies on massive flows of migrant labor. Yet, what

if any channels for protection, support and appeal do state apparatuses afford

communities like Zohra Bibi’s? The peri-urban may be heir to all the contestations and

contradictions that beset the Indian city. Yet, the urban governance on the speculative

frontier may also serve to undermine the possibility of citizenship for those who

construct it.

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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/noida/rwa-body-opposes-noida-municipality-plan/articleshow/61280736.cms




https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/noida/rwa-federation-rls-demand-municipal-corporation-for-noida/articleshow/62151540.cms




http://www.sacw.net/article13390.html




https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/more-ranga-reddy-medak-villages-into-ghmc/article4497860.ece




https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/in-manikonda-any-deed-is-valid/article4397644.ece




https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/noida-razes-shanties-of-those-who-vandalised-apartments/article19298713.ece




https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/noida/civic-body-for-noida-officials-hold-meeting/articleshow/74143263.cms




https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/illegal-layouts-galore-in-manikonda-poppalguda/articleshow/18424164.cms




http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/22194326.cms

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/22194326.cms

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/hyderabad/it-corridor-to-soon-merge-with-ghmc/articleshow/62467438.cms




Xie, Liubing. 2021. “Assemblages of Living Together: Residential Cohabitation in Peri-urban Areas

of Chengdu and Hyderabad.” SAMAJ 26. Retrieved April 28, 2021 (https://

journals.openedition.org/samaj/7334).

Zérah, Marie Hélène, Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, Veronique Dupont, and Basudeb Chaudhuri.

2011. “Introduction: Right to the City and Urban Citizenship in the Indian Context.” Pp. 1–11 in

Urban Policies and the Right to the City in India: Rights, Responsibilities and Citizenship, edited by M. H.

Zérah, V. Dupont, and S. Tawa Lama-Rewal. New Delhi: Centre de Sciences Humaines.

NOTES

1. This paper owes a debt of gratitude to many organizations and individuals. The database

presented in this paper was funded by a Research Grant from Azim Premji University. Tarun Jain

collaborated on this project. Ashish Andhale and Leja Mathew provided early research assistance.

Sneha Kuraikose was an intern. I am very grateful to Prerna Dokania for all her help in creating

the database. Shreya Basu created the maps. Parts of this work were presented at ISEC,

Bangalore, RC21, Delhi and IIAS, Shimla. Some of the fieldwork in the Hyderabad leg of this study

was conducted as part of a Research Fellowship from the Centre de Sciences Humaines in Delhi.

Loraine Kennedy’s mentorship, collaboration and insights have been invaluable in the research

agenda that informs this paper. Ram Mohan Chitta, Debdatta Chakraborty, Rajkumar Paseddula

and RaviTeja Sangeetha were marvellous young collaborators. Thank you also to Gopa Samanta

for her comments on an early draft and to Ram Mohan Chitta for his close reading of later drafts.

2. However, exceptional ULBs such as Cantonment Boards may also lead to statutory status

(Pradhan 2013).

3. A rare example comes from Halbert and Rouanet (2014), which provided a thematically and

geographically narrower lens focused on financialized real estate. These authors created a

database of foreign direct investment (FDI) deals in business property between 2005 and 2011.

Shaw and Satish (2007:153) also employed data from the same CMIE source but focused on

different parameters, excluding “investments in the residential sector” since they represent

“only asset creation and no capacity creation.”

4. CapEx Knowledge Base

5. Project status can be coded into several different discrete categories. The categories of

“outstanding” and “shelved” were derived variables, created by combining relevant categories.

Capex Knowledge Base, “What is project status?”

6. Although the CapEx database contains rudimentary location data, latitude-longitude data was

obtained from another CMIE database.

7. Due to limitations of space, this section does not enter into the definitional criteria and

analysis conducted on UIMS.

8. Publicly available data from the respective urban development authorities was used to identify

districts and villages falling in these metropolitan regions.

9. The data for India’s urban population in 2018 is taken from Index Mundi, Retrieved March 6,

2021 (https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/india/urban-population). Census (2011b) data is more

dated.

10. Calculations by the author based on Census 2011 data on 53 Indian million-plus urban

agglomerations.

11. All maps were created using QGIS software by Shreya Basu.

12. Our analysis also points to a deeper set of questions about the nature of the urban in India.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of organic “subaltern” urbanization in determining

the urban “map” of India (Denis, Mukhopadhyay, and Zérah 2012). The scale of investment on the


97





http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/india/urban-population

http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/india/urban-population

speculative frontier seems to lend truth to the conventional wisdom that city-making continues

to be a matter of concerted investment in India (Bhagat 2004:65). It also helps explain the

metrocentric bias of existing scholarship on the peri-urban frontier (cf. Gururani and

Dasgupta 2018).

13. While many of these developments are part of the database presented in the previous section,

separating out projects based in Noida’s jurisdiction is not possible, in the absence of geospatial

data.

14. Retrieved March 6, 2021 (https://noidaauthorityonline.in/en/page/about-noida)

15. Though the discussion remains outside the scope of this paper, this model resonates with

Ferguson’s (1990) notion of an anti-politics.

16. Particularly murky is this context is the position of the FONRWA, which first came out against

and then in favour of the municipal corporation (Sinha 2017a; TNN 2017b).

17. Nonetheless, the Mahagun Moderne case also shows how the “street politics of the need

economy” have been frustrated and repressed (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011:47).

18. The Greater Hyderabad database is a subset of the larger database presented in Section II.

19. The ensuing fight over the jurisdiction and revenue between the state industrial

infrastructure corporation and the GHMC is documented in Kennedy and Sood (2019) and Sood

and Kennedy (2020).

20. The “draft delimitation of wards” given on the websites of the respective municipalities—

Manikonda, Narsingi, Tellapur—were consulted.

21. The spellings of this settlement vary in official and non-official sources. Hence the

abbreviation VN Pally is used.

22. There were also plans to introduce another zone in the Municipal Corporation to incorporate

30 such villages including “Poppalguda, Kokapet, Vattinagulapally, Narsingi and Manchirevula”

(Deekshith 2018)

23. Manikonda municipality website.

24. Telangana State Industrial Infrastructure Corporation, “Development of Trade Tower &

Business District.” Retrieved February 23, 2021 (https://tsiic.telangana.gov.in/pdf/CBD.pdf).

Reliance Infrastructure, “Real Estate Development for a New India.” Retrieved February 23, 2021

(https://www.rinfra.com/real-estates-sez).

25. Narsingi Municipality website.

26. Field visit, Manchirevula, February 2018.

27. It must be added, however, that not all campuses along ISB Road fall within the

Nanakramguda IALA jurisdiction, though others such as Wipro SEZ may be subject to specialized

tax regimes from time to time.

28. Interview, YSR Bhavan, 8 January 2016. Layouts of TSIIC properties in the Cyberabad Zone,

including the Financial District, were provided to the author.

29. The new Narsingi Municipality Draft Delimitation of Wards shows Old Gowlidoddi village as

part of Vattinagullapally 2 ward. The fact that part of Gowlidoddi lies under a different

jurisdiction was also mentioned at an interview at Gowlidoddi Angadwadi in January 2016.

However, a Serilingampally Circle map from the GHMC shows Gowlidoddi lying within it.

30. Parts of the Puppalguda village define the boundaries of Manikonda Municipality, according

to the Draft Delimitation of Wards.

31. Primary fieldwork and documentation, November 2015, July 2017.

32. Primary fieldwork and documentation, November 2015, July 2017.

33. Interview, Gowlidoddi Angadwadi, January 2016.

34. Fieldwork as part of the project “Data justice through the prism of occupation rights on the

urban fringe: a case study in Hyderabad, India,” March 2019.


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https://noidaauthorityonline.in/en/page/about-noida

https://noidaauthorityonline.in/en/page/about-noida

https://tsiic.telangana.gov.in/pdf/CBD.pdf

https://tsiic.telangana.gov.in/pdf/CBD.pdf

http://www.rinfra.com/real-estates-sez

http://www.rinfra.com/real-estates-sez

ABSTRACTS

What is urban about the peri-urban? This paper explores the speculative frontier of volatile real

estate investments and exceptional and transitional forms of local government that characterize

this peri-urban terrain. By definition lying outside the municipal norm of the metropolitan core,

the peri-urban frontier that is outlined in this analysis through a novel database of large-scale

investments in residential and commercial capacity across India represents an arena where the

statutory definition of the urban, i.e., elected municipal governance, is politically contested.

Drawing on case studies of Greater Hyderabad and Noida in the Delhi National Capital Region,

this paper traces the divergent modalities of peri-urban government. In Greater Hyderabad, the

trajectory leads to institutional fragmentation. In Noida, it results in the concentration of powers

in non-representative agencies. In either scenario, I argue that the speculative frontier remains

hostile to claim-making by poor groups through the channels of occupancy, even as it empowers

propertied classes.

INDEX

Keywords: urban governance, urban local bodies, peri-urban, census towns, Noida, Greater

Hyderabad, real estate

AUTHOR

ASHIMA SOOD

Anant National University, Ahmedabad


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The Making of Urban Peripheriesand Peripheral Labor: Brick Kilnsand Circular Migration in andbeyond Greater DelhiPratik Mishra

1. Introduction

1 Different genealogies of the term periphery can be traced within the social sciences. It

is foremost a relational concept, framed through a dialectical relation of “otherness” to

the center. For Simone (2010), the periphery is a space of insufficiency and

incompletion, “never brought fully under the auspices of the logic and development

trajectories that characterize a centre, and therefore embodying an instability that is

always potentially destabilizing of the centre” (p. 40). Such a figurative conception of

the periphery informs this paper, where the periphery is not necessarily spatial but

rather corresponds to “a range of fractures, discontinuities, or ‘hinges’ disseminated

over urban territories” (Jacquier 2005:24 cited by Simone 2010:41). The other important

framework within this paper, to understand the periphery, emerges from a political

economic perspective, in which market-related metrics of value determine which

activities have worth, and which are relegated to the margins. Urban scholarship has

often engaged with the periphery on these terms, by looking at unequal regimes of land

and population, livelihoods and values (Gururani 2019; Cowan 2019a). In this

framework, the periphery becomes an essential component of capitalist accumulation

that is flexibly produced through urban development politics seeking to turn the city

into a conducive space for the flow of capital (Roy 2011).

2 Within urban studies literature, the term “periphery” has most prominently come to

the fore in studies of geographies of the Global South. Much of this work has focused on

the process of land transformation at the rural-urban interface and the complex state-

society relations inscribed therein (Gururani 2019; Dubey 2018). The periphery has


100

emerged as a heterogeneous category that has been traced across multiple sites and

scales—at the urbanizing edges of expanding cities, disseminated across the

fragmented physical and social structures of the core city, at distant sites of extraction

along extended but discontinuous geographies of urbanization, and at the scale of the

body, of socially stigmatized workers who do the hard, dirty work of reproducing the

city, even sometimes at the cost of their own reproduction (Gidwani 2015).

3 This paper considers the periphery from a labor-centered reading, wherein its

relational geography is indexed to the mobility of marginalized migrant workers and

labor processes. Brick kilns are revealed to be a key site within these extended

geographies of labor mobilities and show how the processes of exclusionary

urbanization produce migrant workers as peripheral subjects, as a “people out of

place” (Menon 2018), who keep switching between different low-wage occupations in

the city and the kilns. This paper builds on a new and growing body of scholarship on

labor-centered approaches to urbanization, and extends such work to the brick kilns as

a specific entry point for capturing labor geographies of the urban. In particular,

Gidwani’s (2015) work on the critical “infrastructural labour” done by workers within

the waste processing economy (also extended in Gidwani and Maringati 2016) is

foundational to this paper.1

4 This paper attempts to rethink how the urban periphery can be reconceptualized from

the vantage point of brick kilns and brick kiln workers. It considers the historical

process of peripheralizing brick kilns (as an industry), shifting them away from the

city, in tandem with brick kilns as a space to and from which workers circulate

precariously. The paper, firstly, looks at the outward displacement of brick kilns from

Delhi to its peri-urban villages through legislation, judicial rulings, and planning

discourses. These actions were purportedly concerned with the objectives of

maintaining economic land use, protecting public health and mitigating environmental

pollution, but were underwritten, I argue, by a socio-spatial conception of the city that

excluded certain categories of workers, livelihoods, and forms of work. I borrow from

Sheetal Chabbria’s (2020) research historicizing slum dwellings in Mumbai to

understand brick kilns as social and spatial peripheries “incorporating and marking the

edges of the city, that is not physical perimeters, but spaces and bodies of illegitimate

or migrant labourers” (p. 18).

5 In continuing the understanding of peripheralization of brick kilns, the paper then

turns to contemporary forms of circular migration and explores the various factors

conditioning circular migration. It seeks to understand the reasons for which workers

circulate between the brick kilns and different urban occupations at different moments

in their lives. The myriad personal circumstances of the coming and going of kiln

workers are structured along some key processes—meeting big expenditures through

the brick kiln’s lumpsum wage advances, managing bodily damage from strenuous

labor, keeping one’s family close or seeking escape from familial ties, being

dispossessed of a painstakingly assembled urban livelihood or finally just managing

kiln work and precarious urban employment side-by-side through the year. Workers

find themselves in these circumstances or moments of vulnerability, as the paper

describes, in such a recurrent and predictable manner so as to consider them

structurally determined rather than simply personal contingencies or failures.

6 The paper analyzes as a single articulated process both the displacement of brick kilns

to the peri-urban and the precarious migration of brick kiln workers, and offers a


101

spatial reading of these processes to highlight the tenuous relation of brick kiln

workers to peri-urban space. By participating in different low-wage infrastructural

economies, brick kiln workers provide vital services to the city but their cheap laboring

bodies are kept peripheral and marginal to urban space, circumscribed within peri-

urban brick kilns, through the mechanisms of urban development politics. Brick kilns

emerge here as, what Gidwani and Maringati (2016:113) have described as an “infra-

economy,” one that is denied recognition by state and civil society (except as an object

of condemnation or reform) while also being critical to the production of urban space.

The urban periphery understood from the perspective of brick kilns and the circulation

of migrant kiln workers thus appears to be crucial and co-constitutive of the center.

7 The research draws on eleven months of doctoral fieldwork conducted between

October 2018 and December 2019 in the village of Khanda in Sonipat district in Haryana

on the northern edge of Delhi. The findings are based on the life histories of male brick

kiln workers, particularly brick molders, collected through open-ended interviews.

Brick molders or pather constitute over 80 % of brick workers in any kiln and are the

focus of my research. Throughout the paper, I use brick molders and brick workers or

kiln workers interchangeably. My respondents were overwhelmingly male with only a

handful of female interviewees.2 Male kiln workers enthusiastically presented me with

rich travelogue-like accounts of the many different occupations and the corresponding

geographies of these jobs. The patterns and motives that guided their migration

trajectories emerged organically from over 150 unstructured interviews in which the

collection of life histories was an important methodological orientation. In the

discussion on circular migration, I present vignettes from different life histories and

suggest they be taken anecdotally, so that their specificities are not lost to us, but also

structurally as reflective of broader patterns.

2. Locating the study: Khanda and brick work

8 This section contextualizes the peri-urban fieldwork site of Khanda village, the work of

brick-making and the social profile of the brick workers in this research. It then turns

to the processes that led brick kilns to be shifted out of Delhi to places in the urban

periphery, such as Khanda.

9 Khanda is a village located in Sonipat district, which is part of the National Capital

Region (NCR). Though many villages in Sonipat have seen steeply rising land rates, the

plotting and construction of multi-storied residential towers, industrial and

educational zones, Khanda remains largely insulated from these processes. It is 29

kilometers away from the arterial Grand Trunk Road (or NH44) along which much of

Sonipat’s current urban development is centered (see Figure 1 for a map of Khanda).

Khanda’s peri-urbanity is instead manifest most significantly in the form of

approximately 70 brick kilns, which were established by various private entrepreneurs,

starting in 1997 but more actively between 2010–2015. The rise in number of kilns

corresponds to the growth and expansion of Delhi and the NCR, which in turn produced

a construction boom and a rapidly rising demand for bricks. Of the three major kiln

clusters supplying bricks in the metropolitan region, Khanda is the second largest,

providing employment to thousands of workers.3 By rough estimate, a population of

around 30,000 migrants work and stay in these kilns for a full brick season, i.e. eight


102

months from November to June. Across India, brick kilns employ between 2 to 10

million workers (sources vary).4

Figure 1. Location of Khanda in relation to Sonipat and Delhi.

10 Brick kiln work is divided into different occupations. Roughly 80 % of brick workers in

any kiln are molders or pather who mold the wet soil into the shape of bricks and lay

them out to dry. Other categories of workers in the kilns, such as jalaaiwala (firemen),

buggiwala (horse-cart transporters) or beldar (stackers) usually belong to different caste

groups, are subject to different politics of work and have other opportunities in terms

of mobility than the pathers.5 Pathers usually live and work with their families, in

scattered settlements on leased agricultural lands located near the kiln ovens. This

decentralized production of bricks is carried out adjacent to the space of reproduction,

in temporary jhuggis (huts) or tin-roofed shanties. The workers are predominantly from

the landless and socially stigmatized Dalit or Scheduled Caste (SC) communities from

Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Uttar Pradesh. The major caste group is of Musahars from

Bihar who are among the most marginalized castes in India, even among Dalits. There

are many other caste groups from so-called “backward” communities (Scheduled

Castes or Other Backward Classes) such as Paswan, Chamar, Kewat, Beldar from Bihar

and Satnami, Rohidas from Chhattisgarh.


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Figure 2. Children turning over bricks laid to dry while a man works on molding them, and their jhuggi (makeshift dwelling) is in the background (Photo taken with permission, Source: the author)

11 Brick work or molding is remunerated on a piece-rate basis of per thousand bricks

rather than a daily wage or salary. During my fieldwork in 2019, Pathers would get Rs.

450 (excluding labor contractor’s dues) for making a thousand bricks with pre-

processed clay, and Rs.550 per thousand bricks if they prepared the clay manually

themselves. The wages for brick molding are paid, however, under a debt bondage

arrangement. Though unlawful under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976,

the system of the debt bondage, marked by the wage advance or peshgi, persists almost

universally in the kilns (See Guerin 2013). Workers are recruited through labor

contractors by paying a lumpsum advance at the beginning of the brick season in

October. The wages from making bricks then accumulate against this advance and a

fortnightly expense that the owner provides for buying rations, alcohol, medicine, and

other necessities; the full wages are only paid in lumpsum at the end of the brick

season in June, once the advance and all expenses have been deducted.

3. The peripheralization of brick kilns in Delhi-NCR


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Figure 3. Exposed brick walls in a slum in Delhi (Source: Wikimedia Commons by Thomas Jessica)

12 Most buildings in Delhi are constructed from red clay bricks. In a report on the waste

generation of construction and demolition in India, the share of bricks in Delhi was

over 40 % by weight, the highest among major Indian cities (GIZ 2015:25). Exposed

brick-and-mortar walls of red and grey are prominent in the urban landscape of slums

and unauthorized colonies in Delhi, where 76 % of the city’s population live in informal

settlements (Government of Delhi 2009: Table 1). Despite their vital importance for

Delhi’s urbanization, brick kilns have had a tenuous presence in Delhi’s urban space.

This history of this presence is marked by persistent effort on the part of the state to

relocate kilns outside of the city while also negotiating the need for bricks in the city.

In the colonial and early postcolonial period, the kilns were a mix of traditional clamps

(puzhaayas or desi bhatta) and the more modern bull’s kiln with a movable chimney (Eil

et al. 2020). Technology and means of communication made the made the efficient

management of brick supply from peripheral areas challenging, so businessmen

preferred to use vacant spaces throughout the capital to set up kilns close to key

residential areas with high construction activity.

13 The first attempt to regulate brick kilns was made under British administration in 1941

under the Delhi (Restriction of Use of Land) Act which provided for compulsory

licensing of brick kilns (Delhi State Archives 1941). The aim of this regulation was to

protect public health, not from smoke pollution but from the hazard of malaria, as

mosquitoes bred in stagnant pools that formed over excavated land (brick fields) from

which kilns drew soil. Colonial authorities had previously expressed alarm over

unregulated new brickfields popping up in central areas of the city; the old brickfields

(in the area south of Lodi road) had left the land uneven and the authorities estimated

the expense to refill it would be substantial (DSA 1938:8). Placing restrictions on the

excavation of soil, the 1941 act also established an annual renewal fee for kiln licenses

that implied kilns were a temporary establishment (DSA 1941).


105

14 Independence and the violent Partition of 1947 transformed Delhi as well as the kiln

industry. Brick kilns sprung up all around Delhi, responding to the burgeoning demand

for housing, while struggling with coal shortages and commodity control laws. The

Partition not only increased demand for housing, but also displaced erstwhile brick kiln

owners from Pakistan who came to Delhi as refugees and set up kilns. In a 1953 letter to

the first Chief Minister of Delhi, the Delhi Brick kiln owner’s association mentioned

that there were 175 registered kilns in Delhi out of which 50 were operated by Partition

refugees and the kilns collectively employed 30,000 laborers (DSA 1953:34). The

industry sought to project its critical role within the nation-building project and gain

concessions from the state, as owners faced constant bureaucratic pressure with regard

to non-renewal of licenses and displacement. In 1951, Delhi’s Health Directorate had

passed orders to disallow kilns within 2 furlongs (400 meters) of village and road

boundaries (DSA 1953:23). Complying with this order proved difficult as continuous

construction of new roads and colonies kept placing kilns in violation (DSA 1953:35).

15 Brick kilns were designated nationwide as a small-scale rural industry, and while the

Ministry of urban development had a division to improve technological productivity

and fuel efficiency of the kilns, the Khadi and Village Industries Corporation (a

Government institution that promoted rural industry) provided loans for brick kiln

entrepreneurs (Parliament Digital Library 1991a). There was a consistent drive to locate

brick kilns out of the city. As India’s malaria incidence dropped substantially in the late

1950s and 60s, air and smoke pollution became the dominant rationale for regulating

brick kilns. The 1962 Master plan mandated that brick kilns be located beyond half-a-

mile of the 1981 urbanizable limits of Delhi (DDA 1962). However, the actual project of

removing brick kilns from the city remained incomplete, and proceeded at a gradual

pace. New planned industrial districts that were plotted for Delhi to relocate “offensive

and dangerous industries” and relieve congestion, instead of removing plants from the

central city, became sites for the development of new industries (Sharan 2014). Despite

the gradual peripheralization of brick kilns, in 1974–75, there were 400 brick kilns still

located in Mehrauli, a locality on edge of South Delhi, and at least a few kilns continued

to operate there until 1996 (Lucassen 2006:565).

16 The major relocation of kilns outside of the territory of Delhi state was the result of a

Supreme court judgment in 1996 in the landmark case M.C. Mehta vs. Union of India

(Kathuria 2001). The case was filed as a public interest petition to implement the 1962

Master Plan, to complete the process of relocating polluting industrial units out of

Delhi. Brick kilns were categorized in this case among the Category-H (noxious,

hazardous) industries, and all 246 kilns operating in Delhi were ordered to close by June

30, 1997. This judgment also marked the end of operation of the highly polluting and

outdated movable chimney kilns, still widely used at the time, as all the kilns located

around Delhi had to build the fixed chimney bull’s trench model. The 1997 judgment

finally effected the relocation of brick kilns out of Delhi, decades in the making, and

resulted in the kilns being firmly relegated to the peri-urban, if not rural, belts on the

edges of Delhi. The clustering of kilns in places like Khanda and Badli today are the

result of that ruling; they are spaces that were produced out of those wider urban

development politics in conjunction with the changing geography of the city.

17 Thus, the peri-urbanization of brick kilns in Delhi was mainly based on public health

and pollution arguments and labor’s stake in this displacement was rarely a matter of

concern. The welfare of labor did feature in some of the orders but appears secondary.


106

The 1941 Delhi (Restriction of use of land) Act made minimum provisions for laborers a

requirement for gaining a license but, in line with the public health concerns of the

Act, this was motivated more by sanitary concerns, like the prevention of diseases, than

labor welfare.

18 Historically, the actual implementation of labor rights and welfare in the brick kilns

was limited, as the sparse archival materials show. One issue was the persistent

undercounting of laborers. The 1962 Masterplan lists only 10,000 workers engaged in

brickworks in Delhi, whereas the representation from the owners’ association in 1954

mentions 30,000 workers. The number of kilns in Delhi in 1988, as per the state

administration, was 388 and the Labour Ministry gave an estimate of 25,000 workers

(PDL, 1991b; PDL, 1991c). This figure (64 workers a kiln), appears unrealistic given the

usual density of workers.

19 Interestingly, the M.C. Mehta judgment in 1996 provided for payment of full wages and

a “shifting bonus” of one year’s wage for workers in industries affected by relocation.

Whereas on paper this would provide brick molders compensation under the unskilled

monthly minimum wage rate, in practice the actual wages in Delhi were based on

piece-rate per thousand bricks. In any case, employee muster rolls were not maintained

or were inaccurate (they still are) and kiln owners could easily circumvent this order by

laying off casual laborers, who make up almost all the kiln labor force (See

Baviskar 2012).

20 This historical indifference to the condition of labor in the displacement of brick kilns

carries over to the present, at a time when a new round of outward displacement of

brick kilns is underway, this time out of Khanda and the whole of the region of NCR

into districts like Kurukshetra in Haryana, 150 km away from Delhi. In this

contemporary round of peripheralization, the kilns are to be shifted out because of the

stringently implemented air pollution measures that order the closure of all kilns in

NCR till the start of February, i.e. 4 months later than start of the usual brick season

(October).

21 This is being implemented under the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP) formulated

as a set of emergency measures to reduce air pollution in Delhi as the Air Quality Index

turns “severe” in Delhi-NCR during the winter months. In 2018, the enforcement of this

shutdown was lax and there was not much disruption to kiln work except around the

festival of Diwali, when levels of pollution are especially intense (The Hindu Staff 2018).

However, in the winter of 2019, the ban was stringently enforced, non-complying

owners were fined and work was severely disrupted from October 15 till January 30,

2020 (fieldwork 2018, 2019). I observed that owners were unable or unwilling to build

up inventory and stopped kiln workers from molding further bricks. This pushed kiln

workers into a deep crisis, unemployed while their debt accumulated from both the

lumpsum advance and the fortnightly stipends. Workers, who were afraid of not being

able to work off the cumulative debt through this season, cut down consumption

sharply. This also led many workers to activate their networks, and especially for

young male workers to flee from the kilns to other work sites. Workers with families,

however, were forced to stay.

22 The air pollution crisis emphasized how urban politics and environmental policies can

adversely affect workers whose spatially distanced livelihoods depend upon the city

and who get caught in the fallout of its policies. The city is identified as a privileged

space, i.e. the beneficiary of the state’s commitment to ensure the right to clean air for


107

its residents, as opposed to protecting the livelihoods of thousands of workers engaged

in a “noxious industry” such as the brick kilns. While some wealthy kiln owners with

inventory could offset the loss from the pollution ban by selling bricks at a higher price

(as demand overshot supply), workers bore the greatest brunt of the shutdown. The

event also underscored the importance for workers of maintaining connections in

different sites, of being able to circulate between kilns, and urban-based factories, and

workshops.

4. Producing peripheries through labor mobility

23 This section delves into contemporary forms of peripheralization experienced by brick

kiln workers, while taking into account their migration pathways and life histories.

This approach to understanding peripheralization through mobility allows a direct

engagement with different urban economies across which kiln workers circulate and

their major motivations in doing so. In Khanda, the city is never far from view because

the brick kiln cluster here exists primarily to service the urban metabolism of Delhi-

NCR.6

24 Even while taking brick kiln molders as a category of labor in this analysis, the paper

establishes the occupational fluidity of this group between different city-based

occupations and the kilns. Brick kiln molders in Khanda, belonging to different

Scheduled Caste or Dalit communities of Bihar and Chhattisgarh, work in different

periods of their lives (or seasonally) at construction sites, in waste processing, in

factories, in addition to working in their native villages as agricultural laborers or

marginal farmers. Kiln workers are therefore not clearly distinct in their migration

trajectories or householding strategies from many other workers who constitute, as

Breman (2010) describes, a reserve army of footloose labor in (peri-)urban India. The

aim of this section is to examine the ways in which brick kilns serve as crucial nodes for

specific social groups of workers, as they move across different sites of employment,

navigating marginalization and precarity.

Exclusionary urban processes

25 The brick industry is an undesirable prospect for many workers. Kiln work carries low

status, is associated with unfreedom (residing at the work site), poor living conditions

(cramped temporary shacks) and the inability to educate children, thereby locking

families into inter-generational poverty. For many kiln workers, permanence and social

mobility is sought elsewhere, often through improvised and painstakingly assembled

urban livelihoods amidst precarious attempts to survive in the city. Even as mobility

can impart agency, workers always travel and labor as their casted and gendered selves

and are often placed within relationships of dependency that render them precarious.

Migrants who are from the social groups of kiln work often participate in

infrastructural labor (Gidwani and Maringati 2016) crucial to the reproduction of urban

space, but who, under an exclusionary urban regime, become anomalous figures “who

cannot be dispensed with and who cannot be settled” (Samaddar 2016:53). The brick

kilns, located in the distant peri-urban, become a part of this paradoxical “de-settling”

of certain workers and their survival strategies.


108

26 Parmeswar, along with his brother, lived in Anand Parbat, a working-class

neighborhood of central Delhi, before moving to a kiln in Khanda. He had started a

raddi (scrap paper) business, setting up a warehouse on 5 kattha (around 6,500 square

feet) of Government land, that he had however “purchased” from a previous occupier.

The surrounding area contained many such warehouses, and they had established it as

a “Bihari colony,” an address where the post office had begun delivering letters. Work

was hard, and the contractors often rejected their collection for being too wet.

Nevertheless, they occasionally had good months of profit and were looking to expand.

However, in 2012, the Delhi Government carried out a slum demolition drive in Pandav

Nagar (a colony in East Delhi) and designated their warehouse area in Anand Parbat for

the resettlement of the displaced dwellers.

All our lands were taken. We protested, slept overnight in the site in the open,media had come, and police used lathi-charge and used tear gas on us on thedemolition day. We had gone to every politician we could find. We met the head ofthe DDA [Delhi Development Authority], he would have given us 2–6 months extrato remove all the goods from the godown [warehouse], but he asked for a lot ofmoney. I had taken up loans from a co-operative society for my business that Icould not repay. My children used to go to school, now they are with me in thekilns. I hope I never come back here again and am able to restart my business in thefuture. (in-person interview, 2 February 2019)

27 Parmeswar’s story alludes to Gidwani’s (2015) and Gidwani and Maringati’s (2016)

conception of infra-economies, which particularly referenced stigmatized waste and

sanitation work within the city and at landfills at the edges of the city. Parmeswar’s

marginal enterprise and the neighborhood waste economy inhabit, for Gidwani (2015),

a “permanent border area of primitive accumulation” (p. 575), where it is constantly

threatened as a devalorized activity, which takes up precious urban space that can be

put to more profitable use. These micro-enterprise workers and owners, lacking any

form of social security or employment protection, inhabit the thin line between

survival and failure, and Parmeswar’s migration to the kiln is an instance of the

aftermath of dispossession and displacement for marginalized workers in the city.

28 For Parmeswar, his emotional investment into growing roots in Delhi was frustrated,

though he was still determined to renew this effort. The relentless eviction of the urban

poor leaves “even long-standing migrants in the city … with a lasting sense of

impermanence” (Shivanand 2020:4). For Menon (2018), who draws on the hinterland, a

similar relational-spatial category as the periphery, the limits of the city come into

view in respect to the dispossessed urban population, produced as a people out of place.

The time-sensitive churning produced through acts of dispossession turn people into

cheap, mobile labor productive for capital (before their eventual disposal) (Cowan 2020)

and keep workers switching from construction work to street vending to other

occupations, as well as turning to brick-making.

Debt bondage and peripheral labor regimes

29 Although migration to the kilns is often distress-related, it can also be strategic, as the

labor regime and wage relations offer some advantages compared to other low-wage

informal economies of the urban. The focus here turns to the wage advance system, a

manifestation of debt bondage in kilns, underscoring how it is perceived by workers as

continuous with other relations of informal employment in the city. Although


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technically illegal, the wage advance arrangement remains a resilient type of wage/

labor regime and is ubiquitous in brick work (Guerin and Venkatasubramaniam 2020).

As workers explained, the wage advance can provide a bridge, acting against the

“deficiencies” of other forms of urban work, enabling them to reproduce themselves,

manage difficult life circumstances and even pursue modest accumulation. My field

research highlights that the harsh distinction drawn between bondage and other forms

of urban work, though not corresponding to these dynamic ground realities,

nevertheless powerfully informed and continue to inform the peripheralization of kilns

and kilnwork outside the city.

30 Manoj is a 55-year-old brick molder in Khanda. He started working in the kilns when he

was very young. His parents were also brick-workers and he has spent most of his life

working at brick kilns. During his life, he tried various occupations including different

stints as a construction worker. For a year, he also worked as a cleaner in a private

hospital in Delhi, away from his family. During that time, he was paid ₹12,000 monthly,

of which he would spend ₹6,000 on groceries, ₹3,000 on rent, ₹500 on electricity bill

and be left with only ₹2,500 for all other expenses. There was no scope for saving or for

coping with a major expense. Urban employment for Manoj represented an

improvement in his standard of living over the brick kiln shanties, but was

accompanied by insecurity, long work hours and loneliness (akelapan). He joined the

kiln as he needed to use the lumpsum cash from the wage advance for the

hospitalization of a relative.7

31 In a recent paper, Guerin and Venkatasubramaniam (2020) compare the lived

experience of workers within the wage advance arrangement in brick kilns against

other market-based debts which are proliferating alongside the increased

financialization of the domestic economy of migrant workers and their growing

indebtedness. In understanding how one form of debt is articulated in relation to other

forms of dependence, the authors draw out how unfreedom manifested through the

wage advance relation is clearly differentiated by workers from older hereditary forms

of bondage, mostly in agrarian settings. The wage advance system allows a degree of

flexibility in managing the debt repayment, although it can also double up with market

debt (Guerin and Venkatasubramaniam 2020). Laboring in the brick kilns under the

wage advance arrangement carries significant risk as well. Because workers are paid on

a piece-rate basis, periods of idleness because of rain or extraneous circumstances

(such as the air pollution ban or COVID) exacerbate indebtedness both from the initial

advance and the fortnightly maintenance stipend, and the entire eight-month season is

often insufficient for workers to work off this debt (See Mishra 2020).

32 Chhabria (2020) looked at how colonial authorities sought to delimit the city of Bombay

as the space of free labor (whether in industry or commerce) as opposed to the space of

village as that of unfree labor (predominantly related to the agrarian). As I argued

earlier, a similar conception of the urban underpinned attempts in Delhi to transfer

industries such as brick kilns out of the city and to the peri-urban. Seeking to

demarcate free and unfree labor, through methods such as approaching brick kilns as

sites of debt bondage and modern slavery (see Davidson 2015), not only ignores the

complex articulations of different forms of debt throughout the economy, but also risks

perpetuating spatial practices that further disadvantage migrant workers in their

circulations. Indeed, the illegality of the wage advance system, alongside its ubiquitous


110

presence serve as a starting point in relegating brick kilns to a grey zone of

unregulated activity in relation to labor rights.

Bodily management

33 A final manifestation of exclusionary urbanization that I discuss is in relation to the

circulation of workers between different work economies and the kiln in embodied

terms, as a corporeal strategy of preserving, managing, and repairing the body. The

material (re)production of the built environment under capitalist urbanization is

crucially dependent upon the reproduction of the low-waged migrant workers

performing the labor of making bricks (see Buckley 2012). This includes not only paying

wages but preventing workplace injury and protecting the worker’s body against

intense wear and tear. Workers likewise are heavily invested in managing their bodies,

which are crucial for their labor-intensive livelihoods (Waite 2007:227).

34 For low-wage informal workers in India, however, the competition for wages and the

extreme power differential between capital and labor means that they have to

participate in systems of work that tend towards destroying their bodies or at least

rendering them obsolete in exchange for basic (read: meager) or slightly premium

wages. Migrant urban workers face this corporeal risk within several of the peripheral

work economies where they are routinely exposed to hazardous and strenuous working

conditions. The management of their vulnerable bodies is carried out through the

everyday negotiation of bodily threats, but also by alternating between different kinds

of embodied labors within different occupations. Because of its distinctly embodied

labor, kiln work also becomes a part of the circuit through which workers churn across

the rural and the urban in pursuing employment while managing their bodies (with

attributes of strength, skill, injury) as primary assets.

35 Undertaking work as a pather (molder) is distinguished here by the form of concrete

labor embodied in producing bricks. The work of pathaai or molding is one of

dedication and repetition, its most significant aspect being the prolonged hours of

squatting—systematically loading soil from a nearby lump into the mould, discarding

the excess soil and laying the set soil-brick on the ground to dry, while moving

sideways slowly for each new brick. This rhythm is painful for the first few months—

new workers experience restricted blood flow to the feet, painful clots and knee pain

from prolonged squatting. The speed of laying bricks also develops with experience,

and so new workers only produce about half as many bricks as experienced workers.

However, given that kiln work usually involves migration as a family, most kiln

workers are inter-generationally socialized to this work, having worked alongside their

parents as adolescent children.

36 Bablu is 40 years old, thin and balding with white hair, and previously worked in a

granite shop in Bengaluru for 8 years. He worked in loading and unloading granite but

had started apprenticing as a helper to learn “cutting-fitting” or the job of laying

granite slabs. The wage on loading-unloading was decent at ₹700 daily (or ₹21000

monthly) and the work was only for an hour or so every day, though it was very hard

labor. One morning his right arm suddenly lost its strength; he could barely lift it up.

The doctor said it was because of his heavy lifting work and recommended that he do

some other lighter work. Having worked in the kilns before, he returned to Khanda. He

knows kiln work well and makes up to 2000 bricks in a day, which is more than what


111

most workers manage. The long hours of molding bricks, squatting on his feet is

strenuous but he does not want to return to Bengaluru. His arm has meanwhile

recovered fully.8

37 Workers who are unable to cope with the bodily demands of work or wish to avoid risk

often seek to change occupations. This act of escape can however impose a deep

financial penalty upon workers. Human bodies are built out of our roles as paid

workers (Guthman 2015) and this construction of bodies in line with occupations is

crucial to the ways in which expertise is embodied and articulated within various

manual labor jobs (see Sargent 2020). Brick work can often become a stage of

employment after youthful energies are spent in more strenuous and higher-paying

work. Most brick workers are middle-aged with children, proportionately fewer are

young people in their 20s and 30s. Many brick workers continue till they are in their

60s before they retire to their village to do agricultural labor in their own marginal

holdings or upon others’ land.9

38 The analytic of bodily management focuses attention not only on the socio-ecological

processes converging upon the body within the extraction of labor power, but it also

allows us to understand the reproduction of labor in the city as a multi-sited practice.

Cowan (2019b) discusses the urban villages in Gurgaon as crucial infrastructural nodes

that are embedded within migrant workers’ daily reproduction as mobile labor power.10

The brick kilns, with opportunities for a differently embodied form of labor, similarly

become sites of managing the corporeal burden of work, embedded into the social

reproductive strategies of certain marginalized social groups.

5. Sociality and seasonality in the urban periphery

39 The previous section on exclusionary urbanization highlighted the distress aspect of

kiln migration in relation to failed attempts to grow roots in the city or maintain stable

migration links to the city. These attempts in themselves underscore the importance of

considering both strategic and affective dimensions of migration, and how migration

decisions are mediated by social and cultural aspirations. I propose to understand

mobility between the kiln and the city in relation to maintaining and escaping social

ties. Migration scholars in India have examined various social dimensions of migration,

not limited to economic calculations or as a coping strategy in the context of

vulnerability. In the context of brick kilns, Shah (2006) looked at brick kiln migration

by young adivasi men and women from the state of Jharkhand in Eastern India as a

means to gain independence from parents and live out prohibited intimate

relationships.

40 In the case of Khanda, I was drawn to kiln sociality as an entry point to investigate the

under-representation of a certain age group of young male molders in the kilns, those

between 18 and 30 years of age. These were unmarried young men whose parents and

siblings may be working in the kiln, but they were instead doing jobs in the city or the

factory at this stage of their life. Brick kiln work, because of its association with

bondage, is considered to be among the least prestigious parts of the laborscape (Waite

2005:424) and young men seek to do “factory work” or other occupations in the city for

social distinction though they may be less lucrative.

41 The following is from a conversation with Amarnath, 16 years old, who aspires to work

in the city: “I don’t like it in the kilns (man nahi lagta). A person becomes black (dark-


112

skinned) working here. Person becomes spoilt, drinking, eating tobacco, smoking bidis.

The height also stops growing here. I like working in the city. You cannot study here,

though you cannot study in company work also. But there is a difference, there is no

growth of intelligence in the kilns (yahaan akal nahi badhti).”11 Amarnath frames the city

as a place where one can become hoshiyar (intelligent; tactful), as opposed to the

mundane straightforward way of life in the kilns.12

42 For those who grow up working within the kilns alongside their parents, the

connection to the kilns is rarely lost as extended family members continue to migrate

there, and also because every year during the recruiting season, they must face the

decision of whether to return to the kilns or not. The return may be made on grounds

of restoring a stability of life, and on affective grounds of experiencing loneliness and

wishing to live alongside family members. With marriage and children, male workers

become more inclined to migrate to the (peri-urban) kilns instead of the city. Nagina-ji,

a middle-aged worker from Nalanda in Bihar, articulated the major advantage of

working in the kilns as the opportunity to keep family and children close at hand, so

that any major incidences and adversities are not communicated by phone from

hundreds of miles away.

43 Kilns thus become a key site within the translocal householding strategies for families

who rely on spatially stretched relations of social reproduction. The distribution of the

household across locales is not only a strategy of survival, a process of hedging as

Simone (2021) suggests, but also one of mediating aspirations, of seeking a temporary

or permanent escape towards a more respected urban occupation, or, under the

pressure or desire to maintain family ties, settling for the brick kilns amidst the drab

peri-urbanity of it all.

Seasonality of mobility

44 Against these longer-term motives and patterns of migration, we now turn to shorter-

term mobility, especially seasonal mobility, among brick workers. Against the routine

flow of workers from the peri-urban to the urban in the form of the daily commute, the

occasional short-term migration of many brick workers between the peri-urban kiln

and the city nevertheless establishes a further aspect of how urban regions are

dependent upon peri-urban economies and flows. Tracking the ways by which brick

kiln workers participate in diverse urban occupations, most notably at the end of the

brick season, is important for understanding different labor markets in the urban

economy.13

45 Brick kiln migration in India itself is mostly takes on the form of short-term mobility of

less than six months. Short-term migrants in brick-kilns constitute the second largest

segment of the non-farm workforce after those in the construction sector (Roy and

Kunduri 2018). This is not so however in North India and around major cities where the

rain season is shorter, and where larger kilns manage greater brick demand and

require long-term migrants for 6–8 months. While most kiln workers classified as

“rural-to-rural migrants” return to their village after the brick season, many workers

intermittently continue as migrants in some years, looking for other occupations. Some

stay on in Khanda and do odd jobs while others work in Delhi or Sonipat over this

period, cutting down their annual visit to Bihar to just a few days rather than four


113

months. This extension may or may not be distress-driven but is usually pre-planned

and structured around stable networks of short-term employment.

46 My final vignette is of Vijay Kumar who is 42-years old from Nalanda district in Bihar.

He is among the few molders who had come to Khanda with a male colleague, not with

his family.

47 I ply a rickshaw (cycle taxi) during the choumasa (monsoon) when there is no work in

the kilns. I have a wife and two young kids in the village. Money is still not enough. The

people who have big families where all are working have bigger incomes, I am alone

here while my wife looks after my parents and the kids. I send money most every

fortnight to my family from the kharcha, and so there is hardly anything left over at

the end. If I have a good season, where I return with Rs.10–20,000, then I will not ply

the rickshaw anymore. Or if there is any good work at home.

I drive the rickshaw in Azadpur in Delhi, within a radius of 5 km or so. I pay ₹50daily rent on the rickshaw. In a day, after all expenses, I usually make around ₹200.We rent a room, around twelve of us from my village and stay in Azadpur. The lastseason was bad, so I did the rickshaw work and only visited my family for 2 weeks.(In-person interview, 2 December 2019)

48 Vijay’s situation is atypical of the kilns because he did not migrate with his family but it

is not rare. The seasonal work as a rickshaw-puller is not surprising—because of low

barriers of entry, it is seen as a relatively easy livelihood for short-term work in the city

and is pursued by the poorest among the various urban informal workers

(Samanta 2016; Begum and Sen 2004). Although it appears to be a form of self-

employment, the drivers have no ownership or control over the means of production,

often ply the rickshaw illegally against urban regulations, and so are akin to sellers of

labor power (Samanta 2016).

49 Many kiln workers do not return to their home villages during the monsoon. Jobs on

construction sites, especially less-skilled occupations like bricklaying (chinai) draw

from the same pool of workers as the kilns, and many kilns engage in construction

work during this period. In the entanglement of brick and construction labor, it is

useful to keep in mind the impact of migrant circulation in construction work upon the

seasonal fluctuation in brick prices.

50 Around the month of April, the wheat harvest across North India takes off in full swing,

causing widespread labor shortages. Many construction workers who are not tied to

long-term projects but employed on a flexible basis, leave the city to take part in the

harvest in their villages. Much of the construction labor force in our cities, as described

in Samaddar (2016), works as roving bands of laborers moving from one construction

site to another. For instance, they work for 20 days harvesting wheat in Punjab, Uttar

Pradesh, and Haryana, and often do not return to construction work until they have

exhausted their money. The one to two-month disruption produced by this

phenomenon slows down construction work significantly, especially individual house

building and repair work on which most of the brick industry is dependent. When the

demand for bricks falls kiln owners reduce prices to offload excess inventory, marking

the lowest-price point for the year (for 2019, below Rs.4,000 as opposed to a normal

price point of Rs.4,500 for first-grade bricks). Conversely, the high-price season for

bricks (above Rs.5,200) is after the monsoons in September, when construction work

resumes in full swing, while brick stocks are low and kiln labor is still just beginning to

come in. Thus, the seasonal fluctuation in brick demand is closely tied to migrant


114

circulation, and is likewise observed in the urban periphery, where settlements and

activities swell and contract in rhythm.

6. Conclusion

51 This paper has attempted to rethink the urban periphery from the vantage point of

peri-urban brick kilns and brick kiln workers, in other words, to consider the periphery

from a labor-centered perspective using a relational geography approach. It has drawn

a parallel between the displacement of brick kilns from Delhi to peri-urban villages in

Haryana and the precarious migration of brick kiln workers as related processes,

highlighting the tenuous relation of brick kiln workers to urban space.

52 The Haryana village of Khanda is connected to Delhi-NCR because it is part of its

urbanizing frontier, and also because of the hundreds of millions of bricks it supplies

every year for the construction and repair of a wide variety of buildings, from slum

dwellings to middle-class apartments to glass and concrete office buildings and malls,

to public roads and canals. The paper argues that the presence of brick kilns and their

historical outward displacement from Delhi implicates Khanda within a series of

temporary peripheral landscapes through different periods of Delhi-NCR’s growth. Brick

kilns are marked as spaces of “otherness,” considered both harmful to the city’s

residents and environs and out of place with regard to spatial conception as a

globalizing city. The gradual peripheralization of brick kilns came about as a result of

urban development politics, manifested through laws, judicial rulings and planning

discourses. This process displaced kilns to the periphery, and also rendered

“peripheral” thousands of workers, which is also apparent from their relative absence

in the archival record on brick kilns.

53 The paper complements this historical register with specific aspects of labor migration

to brick kilns in the contemporary moment. Brick kilns, as a large-scale system of

employment, are sustained by, and set into motion a circulation of laboring bodies that

ties together disparate sites, from the remote hamlets of Bihar to the brickfields of

peri-urban Khanda, to small urban enterprises such as scrap dealers and granite shops.

By revealing some of these connections, I argue that brick kilns not only produce bricks

as a commodity but are also an important node in the circuit of migration of low-waged

marginalized workers whose infrastructural labor is crucial to the production of urban

and peri-urban space. Migrant workers invest their labor power and in conjunction,

their embodied selves into those destinations that become available through their

social networks of trust, basing their choice not only upon the differing mixes of

aspiration and security that these destinations offer but also perforce in dealing with

various life circumstances.

54 The research paid specific attention to these different economic and life circumstances.

Mirroring the disparate sentiments of azadi and akelapan (freedom and loneliness) that

Sethi (2011) poignantly explored within the laboring life of a casual laborer in Old

Delhi, my research also encountered a range of emotions—contentment, frustration,

boredom—that could only be partially explored within the paper. The paper sought to

bring out the spatial bearings of these decisions and emotions and locate them along

the peri-urban co-ordinates of the kilns or the co-ordinates of various city-based

occupations. It has argued that exclusionary urbanization processes, in tandem with

migrants’ life cycle choices, have contributed to the production of migrant workers as


115

peripheral subjects while simultaneously co-producing the urban periphery. The

periphery, read through a register that juxtaposes urban development politics against

brick workers’ circulations, allows us a deeper understanding of the forces against

which workers seem powerless and those that they actively resist.

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NOTES

1. Other compelling studies in this vein include Roy (2003), who centered her research in the

urban peripheries of Kolkata on the politics of migrant workers’ livelihoods based around

squatting and commuting within the city. Also, Buckley’s (2012) rich intersectional scholarship

on construction workers in Dubai ties gendered relations of production and social reproduction

of construction workers into the politics of urban construction and foregrounds the role

migrants play within capitalist processes of urbanization.

2. It was difficult to hold conversations with the few willing women kiln workers because

invariably, when I asked a question of a women, a man nearby stepped in to answer the question

from his perspective or on her behalf. As a cis male researcher, I found it difficult to persist in my

attempts to engage with the women workers.

3. Badsa cluster in Jhajjar district and Baghpat cluster are the first and third largest clusters

respectively. Large brick kilns have a production capacity of more than 30,000 bricks a day. See

Mishra (2020) for a discussion of the emergence of Khanda as a kiln cluster based on its proximity

to Delhi and the availability of cheap land predicated on the history of agrarian decline in

Khanda.

4. 2.1 million according to the NSSO 68th Round, 2011–12 (NSSO 2014) and 10 million according to

International Labor Organization estimates (PCLRA 2012:10).

5. In these other occupations, the men belong mainly to the OBC (Other Backward Classes) or the

erstwhile peasant and pastoral castes and may be from neighboring districts of Uttar Pradesh or

Haryana.

6. A separate paper (Mishra 2020) looks at the situated, everyday laboring and soil extraction

processes within Khanda as a manifestation of extended urbanization.

7. In-person interview, 11 December 2019.

8. In-person interview, 16 November 2019.

9. These figures are indicative; it was my intention to collect quantitative data among workers,

but this plan was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

10. See also Schling (2017) who takes the space of employer-provided workers’ dormitory as a

(degraded) space of repair, one that is deeply inscribed into a bodily regime that produces

disposability.

11. In-person interview, 18 November, 2019.

12. The quest for urban employment is also highly gendered and mediated by naturalized tropes

of the masculinized laboring body (Mezzadri 2016). Ideologies and practices of mobility

incorporate young male kiln workers tightly into processes of flexibilization of labor within

industrial production regimes in towns and cities, where workers are required to constantly

move across firms, contractors, tenements and the city (Cowan 2020).

13. A focus on short-duration circular migration is especially important because, as Griffiths,

Rogers and Anderson (2013) lay out, decisions to migrate are “on-going, complex and often

opportunistic rather than planned” (p. :16). Mobility is nonlinear and mediated by such factors

such as repetition, simultaneity, seasonality, and cycles (Griffiths et al. 2013:16).


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ABSTRACTS

The paper proposes a reading of the urban periphery from a labor-centered perspective,

according to which its relational geography is indexed to the mobility of marginalized migrant

workers and labor processes. Specifically, it attempts to rethink the urban periphery from the

vantage point of peri-urban brick kilns and brick kiln workers. The paper draws parallels

between the displacement of brick kilns to the peri-urban and the precarious migration of brick

kiln workers by highlighting the tenuous tie between brick kiln workers and the urban space

embedded in both. The paper first outlines the historical process of the outward displacement of

brick kilns from Delhi to peri-urban villages in Haryana as a result of various pieces of legislation,

judicial rulings and planning discourses. It then turns to contemporary forms of circulation

between the kilns and the core city. Drawing from fieldwork data generated out of kiln workers’

life histories, it explores the various factors conditioning mobility and the reasons why workers

circulate between the brick kilns and different urban occupations at different moments in their

lives. The paper argues that exclusionary urbanization processes, in tandem with migrants’ life

cycle choices, produce migrant workers as peripheral subjects while they contribute to the

production of the urban periphery.

INDEX

Keywords: circular migration, periphery, brick kilns, peri-urban, bondage, body

AUTHOR

PRATIK MISHRA

Department of Geography, King’s College London


120

Assemblages of Living Together:Residential Cohabitation in Peri-urban Areas of Chengdu andHyderabadLiubing Xie

Introduction

1 The current pace of urbanization in Asia, especially in China and India, is

unprecedented in human history (e.g. Kanbur and Zhuang 2013; Swerts and Denis 2015;

Xie, Swerts, and Pumain 2018). Much of the newly added urban population congregates

in the peripheries of existing cities. In emerging urban scholarship such peripheries are

no longer considered transitory spaces between the rural and the urban but rather

distinct spaces worthy of attention in their own right (Caldeira 2017; Keil 2018, 2017;

Ren 2021). Chinese and Indian cities such as Chengdu and Hyderabad—the focus of this

paper—are increasingly globalizing their industrial, real estate, and tourist sectors,

driven largely by the ambitions of their local and regional governments. With many of

these globalizing projects situated in the peri-urban areas, the built environment is

increasingly fragmented by both planned development and self-built communities.1 At

the same time, the in-migration of professionals and rural migrants introduces

constant changes to the social make-up of these spaces.

2 Various aspects of peri-urbanization have been observed and studied, including

migration and the growth of informal settlements (Wu, Zhang, and Webster 2013),

infrastructure-led growth (Schindler and Kanai 2021), e.g., through the development of

hi-tech industrial parks (Kennedy 2007) or export zones (Jenkins et al. 2015), the spread

of gated communities (Caldeira 2000; Deng 2017; Dupont 2016), and the interspersion of

segregated residential areas (Garrido 2019). Research suggests that contemporary peri-

urbanization processes do not follow the patterns observed in more established cities

in the global North (Roy 2011; Wu 2020). In many parts of the global South, parallel


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urban processes of autoconstruction (Caldeira 2017) and the extension of new built-up

spaces, e.g., gated complexes, produce an increasingly diverse ensemble of residents

and communities in the peripheries. With disparate residential areas coexisting in the

same vicinity, heterogeneous social groups that previously had little contact now reside

in proximity and have to learn how to live with each other. The peri-urbanization

processes in the global South thus embody a profound change in the urban social and

material fabric. Residential cohabitation is the prism through which I propose to study

this change. The term residential cohabitation refers here to the spatial proximity and

shared living spaces of heterogeneous social groups in the increasingly fragmented and

differentiated territories of peri-urban areas.

3 In the peripheries of both Chengdu and Hyderabad, I observed the physical proximity

and boundary-making practices of middle-class residents, villagers and rural migrants,

while asking the following questions. How do both the old and new residents of the

urban peripheries adapt to the material and spatial conditions of the peri-urban spaces

that are always in-the-making and constantly being altered? What are the new patterns

of urban relationalities that emerge between these different social groups? The aim of

the article is not to strictly compare specific attributes as similar or dissimilar

variables, which is essential in variable-based comparison, but rather to take a mid-

range scope (Ong and Collier 2004) in order to explore the similar or different

combinations of various elements, conditions and processes. Following Caldeira (2017),

it aims to use juxtaposition of two seemingly different cases to consider how two

different histories and sets of local conditions may lead to similar outcomes.

4 Research on this project started in 2018 and preliminary fieldwork was conducted in

selected peri-urban areas of Chengdu and Hyderabad from December 2018 until the end

of March 2019.2 I conducted approximately 30 semi-structured interviews with

residents throughout different residential communities in Hyderabad, and

approximately 30 semi-structured interviews with residents and officials from resident

committees in the Chengdu case.3 The paper is intended as a starting point for future

research, and the arguments made here aim rather to generate hypotheses than make

wide-ranging claims about residential cohabitation in urban peripheries around the

globe.

Positioning the research

5 A rich literature on peri-urbanization processes in the global South has emerged, much

of which is devoted to explaining how global capital (Cowan 2015; Shen and Wu 2017)

or state policies (Kennedy 2007; Shen and Wu 2017) have contributed to these

transformations. However, relatively few studies have paid attention to how the

residents in these places interact with the evolving built environment and cohabite

with other social groups in close proximity. Several exceptions stand out. In his

research on the metropolitan area of Manila, Garrido (2019) has captured a “patchwork

city” constituted of classed spaces, particularly gated enclaves and slums; and he

argues that the proliferation of slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity

have worsened class relations and intensified unequal social interactions.

Kundu (2016)’s work on Rajarhat New Town at the urban periphery of Kolkata has

examined how the new town is fragmented into a formal network of roads and gated

communities and dense urban villages with traditional housing patterns, and how the


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residents deploy various strategies of place-making in response to the loss of sense of

place, including incremental expansion of houses, developing service sectors and

organized resistance to land acquisition by both villagers and gated community

residents. This article aims to continue the inquiry on forms of relationalities between

heterogeneous social groups, particularly in relation to the transformation of the

material and spatial conditions of peri-urban areas.

6 For reflecting on the association of the social and the material, the human and the

technological elements that constitute peri-urban spaces, the notion of urban

assemblages developed by Farias and Bender (2010) is particularly instructive.

Latour (2005) suggests using the notion of “assembling” to understand how the social is

formed through the associations between human and non-human actants. Introducing

the Actor-Network-Theory4 into urban studies, Farias and Bender redefine the

ontological status of the city as emergent processes of becoming through the multiple

enactments of the social and the material at concrete sites and contexts of practice.

Although departing from a very different tradition, Doreen Massey (2005) similarly

suggests that space is a product of interrelations and spheres of coexisting

heterogeneity in the processes of being made; that “multiplicity and space co-

constitute each other” (p. 9). Both Farias and Bender and Massey note the coexistence

of distinct trajectories and contemporaneous plurality, thus socio-material assemblages

do not indicate a coherent whole, rather multiple becomings that are “discontinuous,

even contradictory and mutually exclusive” (Farias and Bender 2010:14). Inspired by

the concept of urban assemblages, this article proposes the notion of “assemblages of

living together” to analyze the encounters and associations of heterogeneous social

groups as well as the socio-spatial configurations and transformations that involve

multiple material and social aspects in the urban peripheries of Hyderabad and

Chengdu.

7 Based on preliminary field work, I identified three emblematic configurations of

residential cohabitation in the peri-urban areas that I will explore here. The first is the

interspersion of gated communities and autoconstructed communities, which is

characterized by geographical proximity and physical separation, often marked by

physical boundaries such as walls, gates, green areas and wide streets that demarcate

the territories of residential communities; the second is the internal heterogeneities

and separate living of different social, ethnic, and/or religious groups within the same

residential areas, either gated communities or autoconstructed communities; the third

is vertical cohabitation within the same building of petty landlord and tenants, mostly

villagers who have developed multi-story rental housing and migrants who rely on

them for cheap living space. I analyze how social processes interact with different types

of residential communities in the peri-urban areas of Chengdu and Hyderabad to

produce assemblages of living together, which are shaped and in turn mirror various

trans-local and trans-human dynamics. I argue that each of these configurations of

residential cohabitation is formed by the interweaving of globalizing forces and various

situated local norms that are constituted historically (Ong and Collier 2004).

Assemblages of living together in peri-urban areas

8 This research focuses on the lived experiences of the peri-urban residents, while

situating them in the built environment that is lived, socialized, and in some cases, also


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built by the residents themselves. When heterogeneous groups of people converge and

are concentrated in rapidly changing peripheral spaces, their mode of coexisting and

vivre ensemble are entangled with the evolution of the patterns and spatial relations of

the built environment. I propose the concept “assemblage of living together” to engage

with the essential transformation of people’s living and socializing practices in the

peri-urban areas, the fragmentation of human territoriality and the co-habitation of

social groups. Following Benjamin’s (2008) critique on the literature that fosters over-

determinism of capital or market, I root my analysis in the materialities that interact

with both global forces and local norms. I emphasize that space and built environment

are not static and peri-urban residents are not only passive recipients of macro-level

policies, instead, both space and residents are actants in assembling different material

and social elements and shaping the (peri-)urban realities. And these realities are often

plural, multiple and open-ended.

9 With a similar population size and similar positioning in the respective Chinese and

Indian urban systems as regional centers, both Chengdu and Hyderabad stand as

examples of the strategic role played by urban regions, and they have experienced

extensive peri-urban development led by state initiatives over the past few decades

(Das 2015; Qin 2015). A juxtaposition of the two city-regions or more precisely, selected

neighborhoods in their peripheries can serve as a heuristic device to advance our

understanding of peri-urbanization processes across national contexts.

10 As the capital of Sichuan province, Chengdu is a major city in Southwest China with a

population of 16.6 million in 2019 in the metropolitan area. Since 2003, Chengdu

Extended Urban Region (EUR) has piloted the program of “urban and rural

coordination” (chengxiang tongchou fazhan) designated by the State Council. During this

period, Chengdu’s urban built area has radically expanded, as a result of real estate

development and industrial parks in the peri-urban areas (Webster et al. 2004). As for

the part of the Jinniu district where I conducted fieldwork, the redevelopment of

villages began in 2006, and gained momentum in 2012 when Chengdu announced its

ambitious Beigai (Renovating the Northern City) project. The local government claimed

that the goal of the Beigai and the redevelopment of urban villages under the project

was to regulate and regularize the urban peripheries and upgrade the living conditions

of the residents in the area. Projects such as “Happy Valley,” which I will discuss in

detail, are part of the efforts to economically and aesthetically upgrade the Northern

peripheral area.

11 Hyderabad is the 6th largest metropolitan region in India with a population of 9.7

million, and serves as the capital of Telangana State. Starting in the late 1990s, regional

political elites sought to transform greater Hyderabad into a dynamic economic region

oriented toward global growth sectors through carefully designed industrial policies

(Kennedy 2007). On the western peripheries of the city in particular, the establishment

of HITEC City, a large-scale industrial park, and the Financial District within a newly

created “Cyberabad Development Area” dramatically transformed the fabric of these

peri-urban spaces (Das 2015). Two field sites were selected in this location.

12 In both Hyderabad and Chengdu, the rapid extension of the built environment into the

hinterland has formed a patchwork of differentiated spaces that accommodate various

social groups, particularly local villagers, migrants from more far-flung rural areas, and

“migrants” from both the core city and from other urban areas, professionals, but also

semi-skilled workers attracted by employment opportunities in the rapidly expanding


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service industries. For instance, in the peripheries of Chengdu’s Jinniu district, there

has been a parallel development of themed amusement parks and high-end gated

communities on the one hand, and dense urban villages on the other hand. The theme

parks and residential gated communities have attracted middle-class residents from

Chengdu’s inner city, from other parts of Sichuan province and even from other

provinces, who are seeking their “private paradise.”5 Rural migrants who are essential

for the dynamic economy of Chengdu can only afford to rent rooms in the villages in

the vicinity, where local villagers have autoconstructed multi-story rental housing.

Similarly, in the peripheries of Hyderabad’s Financial District, global enterprises have

attracted not only foreign expatriates, white-collar professionals, young graduates, but

also rural migrants who work in the construction and service sectors. The large influx

of personnel associated with these large enterprises has fueled the development of

exclusive gated communities. At the same time, to accommodate the young entry-level

professionals and the rural migrants, local landowners around Financial District have

either constructed multi-story rental housing, similar to their Chinese counterparts, or

collaborated with real estate companies to build paying-guest (PG) accommodation.

13 My research in Chengdu and Hyderabad suggests that the various configurations of

assemblages of living together mirror broader global forces and local conditions, and at

the same time articulate between the materiality of the built environment and the

sociality of the various social groups present. The materiality of the built environment

is the crystallization of the aspirations and agency of a specific set of actors; sociality is

shaped by the geographical distance or separation that embodies social distance

between individuals and social groups. Autoconstructed housing, for example, as

Caldeira (2017) suggests, reflects the agency of residents: houses and neighborhoods

grow little-by-little through improvising bricolage and complex calculation, thus

becoming the material embodiment of the notion of progress. The physical boundaries

erected in the peripheries constitute another example of the socio-material connection.

Walls and wide roads stand as the crystallization of the attitudes—e.g., fear, distrust,

scorn—of some residents towards others and the consequent effort to implement social

separation or exclusion. The processes of transformation of peri-urban built

environment are thus entangled with the formation and alteration of the relationalities

between the different social groups. Therefore, I suggest that both spatial

configurations and residents enact the assembling processes, and the materiality and

sociality co-constitute each other. The living together of heterogeneous social groups

involves multiple processes of assembling and becoming. I engage with three key social

processes that emerged from my research and that occur in the various types of

residential cohabitation and form three configurations of assemblages of living

together in the peripheries: first, the constitution and reconstitution of heterogeneities

in the new built environment by assembling different social groups who have had little

contact with each other before, or reinforcing the preexisting social differentiation;

second, the establishment or consolidation of physical and social borders, boundaries,

social distancing through practices of border building and socio-economic exclusion;

third, the development of highly unequal relations of interdependence based on

economic connections such as landlord-tenant relations and employment relations.

These social processes constitute three configurations of assemblages of living

together, and they are mutually reinforcing. In the next sections I will discuss these

processes for each of the three types of residential cohabitation.


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The interspersion of the autoconstructed communitiesand gated communities

14 As indicated above, an interspersion of autoconstructed communities and up-market

enclaves is observed in the peri-urban areas of many countries in the global South.

Caldeira (2000) has analyzed a new segregation pattern of the proximity of fortified

enclaves and working class autoconstructed communities in the peripheries of São

Paulo. Garrido (2019) documents the fragmentation of Manila into an interspersion of

spaces defined by class, particularly slums and middle-class enclaves. In China and

India, large-scale projects such as Special Economic Zones (SEZs), industrial parks,

entertainment parks driven by both globalization and state policies have given rise to

new urban spaces, driving up the real estate prices of surrounding areas and attracting

both the rich and the poor to live and work there. The interspersion of the

autoconstructed communities and gated communities is associated with the first

configuration of assemblage of living together, which is the co-production of the

official planning regimes and the peri-urban residents’ agency and calculation in

capturing the use value of the land or the real estate surplus value. Moreover, the

various practices of boundary building demarcate spaces of separate socialization, and

are emblematic of strategies to control space and people (Sack 1986).6 In this section, I

will explore both types of development in Chengdu and Hyderabad for outlining the

heterogeneous and interconnected peri-urbanizing processes and the formation of

socio-spatially divided and interspersed peri-urban landscape.

Living together around a global tourist destination in Chengdu

15 At the fringe of Jinniu district of Chengdu, one of the central projects for the official

planning in the area is “Happy Valley,” a themed amusement park modeled after

western theme parks. Chengdu has been promoting its image as a global destination for

tourism with its abundant natural and cultural heritage sites.7 As part of the “Happy

Valley” project, a series of gated communities were developed contiguous to the

amusement park, advertising a lifestyle of global standards (see Figure 1). Developed by

Overseas Chinese Town Co., Ltd, a large state-owned company,8 Happy Valley is one of

the important projects of Chengdu’s tourism industries.9 The development of the

amusement park and associated gated communities has transformed the peripheries of

Jinniu district from a largely rural area to a tourist destination with the highest (5A)

ranking given by Chinese Administration of Culture and Tourism. However, situated

among and beside the world-class tourist attraction and residential areas are urban

villages, a situation which exhibits the persistence of rural administration and the dual

land system (He et al. 2010; Wu et al. 2013; Zhou and Ai 2016), and the sociality that is

organized by the rural collectives (Zhang et al. 2003; Hsing 2010; Zhou and Ai 2016). The

tensions between the globalized western-style gated communities and urban villages

are partially reconciled by the city’s endeavor to redevelop urban villages into

resettlement housing communities that resemble gated communities in many aspects,

e.g. high-rise apartment complexes (see Figure 2).10


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Figure 1. The OCT gated community and the artificial lake that separates it from the rest of theurban peripheries in Jinniu district, Chengdu11

Figure 2. A resettlement housing community in Jinniu district, Chengdu

16 The urban villages in Jinniu district not only house thousands of rural migrant workers,

they also actively engage in the economic activities of the city. Huaxin village, once the

largest urban village in Chengdu, was partly demolished during the time of my


127

fieldwork. The villagers in Huaxin village vertically expanded their houses to rent extra

rooms to migrants.12 The built environment became very dense, although not without

order. The houses are organized in rows of three-story buildings, mostly in

homogeneous colors of gray concrete and white ceramic tile (see Figure 3). Between the

rows of the buildings are alleys and streets. The ground floor is equipped with sliding

metallic doors, and can be used for commercial purposes. The tenants of the

autoconstructed housing and the owners of the restaurants and shops at the ground

floor are mostly from rural areas outside of Chengdu city.

17 Before the demolition, Huaxin village used to be a hub for retail and services.13 Local

residents told me that in addition to regular markets and shops, monthly fairs were

also very popular. A high-school girl14 who still lives in Huaxin village recalled the fair

and its acrobatic performance with obvious nostalgia; an elderly barber-shop owner15

proudly told me that on the days of monthly fair, there would be still crowds till 10

o’clock at night.16 The small retail businesses in Huaxin village provided opportunities

for encounters and interactions between the OCT residents and village residents, albeit

unequal and limited. The vegetable and fruit markets were popular among OCT

residents. The elders especially, who were used to frugal lifestyles, preferred to buy

vegetables from the village markets, rather than more expensive supermarkets. Mrs.

Zhang17 from the OCT gated community used to buy vegetables from Huaxin village

twice a week and she liked the narrow streets and lively street scenes of the village.

Some other OCT residents also liked to take a walk in Huaxin village. However, these

limited encounters between villagers and OCT residents have been eliminated since the

markets were demolished.

Figure 3. The autoconstructed housing and a shop at the ground floor in Huaxin village, Chengdu

18 The planning of the world-class Happy Valley amusement park and gated communities

set up clear boundaries with urban villages. At each gate of the enclave, an access


128

control system is set up, allowing in its residents only, to whom pass cards are assigned;

and a guard station was added with one or more guards, who surveil cars and people

entering and leaving. Walls are not only used to separate the gated communities from

the urban villages, but also to circumscribe the territories of urban villages and hide

them from the passers-by. When the redevelopment project of Huaxin village started

around 2016, one of the first steps of the project was to build walls to enclose the

previously open and lively Huaxin village.18 The bustling commercial activities of

Huaxin village were thus silenced and the bulldozers transformed parts of the village

into piles of brick pieces and cement blocks. Green belts are another, more

sophisticated technique that is deployed to set boundaries. Along the major roads by

the side of Zhuwa village, a strip of hills on which trees, bamboo and bushes are planted

perfectly block the view of the urban village from the sight of passers-by. The green

areas alongside the roads contribute to the beautification of the city as a world-class

tourist destination, and at the same time to erase the sight of the urban villages that

undermines such an image and status.

19 The planning of boundaries is further extended to primary education in the area. While

children from the OCT gated community are given priority for the bilingual Golden

Apple kindergarten and well-ranked Renbei primary school, both of which are part of

the gated community project as per the school district system, the villagers’ and

migrants’ children who live in neighboring urban villages and resettlement housing

communities mostly go to Fansheng primary school, which is among the worst-ranked

of all primary schools in Jinniu district.19 A young mother Mrs. Liu20 from the OCT said

that part of the reason why they chose to buy an apartment in the gated community is

so their children could attend the good schools that are associated with the OCT gated

community. The differentiated schooling of the middle-class children of the OCT and

the local village and migrant children exemplifies the spatialized inequality, and the

corporeal politics of quality (suzhi) (Anagnost 2004).21 The differentiation of schooling

has thus reproduced the spatial disparity of potential and value in the next generation.

And the demarcation of rich and poor school districts corresponds to the patterns of

interspersion of gated communities and autoconstructed communities characterized by

geographical proximity and physical separation.

Living together around hi-tech industrials in Hyderabad

20 Hyderabad has been initiating a series of policies and projects to promote its economic

development and global importance. Inspired by international models of

infrastructure-led growth from East Asia and Southeast Asia, the political elites of

Hyderabad sought to engage with the global market through carefully designed

industrial policies and the provision of “world-class” infrastructure, which often takes

the form of enclaves (Kennedy 2007; Prasad and Ramachandraiah 2008; Bunnell and

Das 2010). My field site in Hyderabad is near the new Financial District, developed in

the former village of Gachibowli, that houses various multi-national companies such as

Microsoft, Infosys, Wipro, Capgemini, Polaris, and the prestigious Indian School of

Business (Das 2015). The peri-urban landscape of Hyderabad is characterized by a

patchwork of special purpose enclaves including gated communities and office building

complexes, and autoconstructed communities of bastis and villages (Kennedy and

Sood 2019; Sood and Kennedy 2020).


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21 As mentioned above, the growing connections with the global flow of technology and

capital have attracted expatriates and high-profile IT professionals, but also opened up

the job markets for IT workers in entry-level positions. Moreover, with emerging

companies and gated communities there are service job opportunities, such as security

guards, drivers, domestic help and so on.

22 Ridge Estates is an established gated community, located near the Financial District,

providing luxury living conditions for expatriates, middle and upper-middle class. It

has 62 stand-alone villas, each with its own garden space and inhabited by a single

family. The gated community is equipped with a well-managed utility supply, and

amenities such as gyms, a swimming pool, tennis court, and kids’ playground. Around

half of the villas are inhabited by expatriates of French, American, Australian, and

South Korean nationalities, the other half by Indian families. Many of the residents in

Ridge Estates work in upper management positions in transnational companies, others

practice law and medicine.

23 Mountain View is another gated community near the Financial District. In contrast to

the low-density villas in Ridge Estates, Mountain View is comprised of many high-rise

apartment buildings (see Figure 4). Within its gates, Mountain View has set aside a

large strip of land between the high rises as the common spaces for the residents to

congregate or walk around. The spacious roads inside the gated communities serve as

walking and running tracks as well, protected from the dust and traffic of the public

roads. While most of urban India is extremely deprived of public space, these private

“public spaces” are especially valued by the residents. Like Ridge Estates, Mountain

View is equipped with all sorts of sport facilities, the mere existence of which is a status

symbol. In addition, there is a large supermarket within the complex, which includes

an imported food section, featuring, for example, chocolates and wines from Europe.

Moreover, the private management of all kinds of utilities is particularly valued by

residents. Amit, a retired bank clerk who had been living in Mountain View for a year

at the time of our interview,22 praised the private management of the utilities, which he

felt suited senior residents like him. He noted that instead of having to go to different

agencies to pay his bills, he just had to pay the management company of the gated

community and call them when there were problems, and that they are much more

efficient than public agencies. Most importantly, the private management of water and

electricity allows uninterrupted services through storage and the use of backup

generators.


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Figure 4. The high-rise gated community of Mountain View, Hyderabad

24 Similar to urban villages in the Chinese case, villages in the periphery of Hyderabad

serve as one of the most important sources of affordable housing. To accommodate the

large influx of both lower rank professionals and rural migrants, villagers have adopted

similar strategies to build up three- to five-story rental houses like their counterparts

in China (see Figure 5), and some of them also sold land to developers who have

constructed paying-guest (PG) accommodation to rent mainly to young IT workers (see

Figure 6).

25 In the village of Devenderpally (pseudonym) across the road from Ridge Estates,

farmers used to own and cultivate plots of land. I was told that around the year 2000,

some realtors and politicians who knew about the plans for a Financial District

approached villagers, asking them to sell land. Some of these villagers used the money

to construct rental houses for migrants on their residential plots, which they did not

sell. Others villagers who did not accumulate enough capital from selling land

partnered with developers to build PG houses. The agreement was that the revenue

generated from the land and property would be evenly shared by the original

landowner and the developers.

26 According to a member of the local panchayat,23 there now stand around 200 auto-

constructed rental houses and 100 PG houses co-developed by developers and farmers.

The rental houses and PG houses are built in rows and the streets between them are

well-paved.


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Figure 5. Autoconstructed housing with a courtyard in Devenderpally village, Hyderabad

Figure 6. A paying-guest house in Devenderpally village, Hyderabad

27 To summarize, in Chengdu and Hyderabad, different types of residential areas exist in

close proximity; however, they are separated by various physical boundaries. Walls are

the first type of boundaries that are built by gated communities to divide the inner and


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outer space, and to separate the community residents from the dusty and wide roads

that are “unfriendly” to pedestrians. Among the several types of residential areas

observed, the villages at the peripheries of Chengdu and Hyderabad are spatially and

socially the most open housing communities, with high levels of population mobility,

and generally not regulated or surveilled by public or private security systems. Wide

roads and green belts are the second major physical barriers that delineate the

boundaries of the different residential areas. In both cities, a common planning

practice is to build wide main roads, sometimes accompanied by a strip of green area at

each side. These roads often correspond to the boundaries of different types of

residential communities.

Internal heterogeneity within residential communities

28 In this section, I will discuss internal heterogeneities within a given residential type, either

gated communities or autoconstructed communities. It is commonly assumed that gated

communities in the peri-urban areas are emblematic of a middle-class lifestyle. As

Zhang (2010) and Wu (2010) suggests, middle class Chinese perceive gated communities

as a private paradise; purchasing and moving into a gated community is to join a club

based on middle-class status. In India, tapping into the middle class’ aspiration for

security, a healthy living environment, exclusivity, elitism and social homogeneity,

secured enclaves have proliferated in major cities like Delhi (Dupont 2016). On the

other hand, autoconstructed housing communities are often associated with

informality and the congregation of the urban under-class (Wu et al. 2013; Bhan 2016;

Roy 2009; Kochan 2015). This simplistic demarcation tends to neglect the heterogeneity

of the residents within the same residential areas, either autoconstructed communities

or gated communities. Based on my observations in Chengdu and Hyderabad, social

heterogeneity is apparent not only between the residential communities, but within

them, and inequalities are often inscribed according to various norms that are largely

historically constituted. The politics and norms around various social categorizations

such as religion, caste, class, rural/urban sensibilities24 shape residents’ attitudes and

subjectivities; in doing so, they order and reorder the spatial and social positioning of

the bodies that are defined by these norms (e.g. Sandercock 2000; Young 2011). Another

fracture line is drawn by homeownership. In this section, I introduce the second

configuration of assemblages of living together of heterogeneous social groups within

the same residential communities. Two processes are particularly prominent. The first

is that the pre-existing heterogeneity and differences within the community is

reinforced or reconstituted in this moment of social-spatial change. The second process

involves the assembling of different social, ethnic, religious groups who had little

contact earlier with each other. Both processes are entangled with a contemporaneous

constitution of the built environment and the sociality within the residential

communities.

29 It is well established that Indian villages are socially segmented along caste and

religious lines, and that local caste configurations are a major determinant of access to

land and other resources.25 In Devenderpally village, I observed that the differential

relations of residents from different caste groups with landed property have shaped

their access to opportunities and consequently their residential conditions, status, and

social relations. In particular, the relations between herders and farmers, the two main


133

groups in the village, have undergone changes since the acceleration of the peri-

urbanization processes in the area. The groups have evolved different strategies to

materialize and maintain prosperity: while the farmers sought to buy land, the herders

have increased the size of their buffalo herds. However, with the prosperity of the

farmers’ group in real estate and some other small businesses leveraged by the selling

of land since the 2000s, the farmers are increasingly benefiting from the real estate

market and the disparity of wealth and income between the two groups has been

widening.

30 The herders are increasingly marginalized at a time when land value is drastically

increasing in the area. Most of these families still live in one-story houses, with a

courtyard for their buffalos (see Figure 7). In this part of the village, buffalos can be

seen over the lows walls that surround the yard, and manure is sometimes dried in the

yard to be used as fuel. The lanes between houses are not paved, in contrast to the well-

paved roads in the remaining part of the village. Seeing the success of the farmers,

some families from the herder caste have also started to participate in the real estate

market. However, due to their relative lack of land resources, they were only able to

sell or rent part of their residential plots to developers.

Figure 7. A herder’s house with the buffaloes in Devenderpally village, Hyderabad

Image credit: L. Kennedy, 2020.

31 Thus, over time the village’s two main groups have become increasingly distanced

socially because of the increasing gap in wealth. Coexisting in the village, the herders

and farmers reside in separate spaces and the interactions between the two groups has

decreased. As a middle-aged herder26 told me, the members of his family do not have

much interaction with farmers anymore; they are not even invited to festival

celebrations and weddings. He remarked that the farmers keep their distance from the

herders’ places as they dislike the smell of buffalos. He then suggested that the farmers


134

kept their distance from them for the same reason, because they also stink. The herder

seemed to be saying that the farmers now consider themselves superior to the herders,

and that buffalo rearing has become socially stigmatized.

32 Gated communities in the peri-urban areas of Chengdu and Hyderabad show internal

heterogeneities as well. Although the majority of the Indian residents in gated

communities of Hyderabad are Hindus, there are also Muslims and Sikhs. In addition to

differences of religious affiliation or regional background, one important characteristic

that sets apart different residents is property ownership. Similar to the situation in

villages where land ownership sets apart the local villagers and in-coming rural

migrants, in gated communities the socio-economic status of tenants and house owners

can vary greatly. For example, in the high-rise gated community of Mountain View, a

large proportion of the flats are inhabited by employees of IT firms in entry-level

positions. They rent flats owned by business people or overseas Indians, who bought

them as an investment. Often several young bachelors rent one flat together,

cohabitating in the complex with the more affluent homeowners.

33 Interviews in Chengdu’s OCT gated community indicated that the residents are not

socially homogeneous either. They are mostly well-to-do urban-to-urban migrants,

working as company employees, civil servants, doctors and so on. A small proportion of

the residents are displaced villagers in Jinniu district who are relatively better off than

most displaced villagers, who still live in urban villages or the resettlement housing

communities. They have used the apartments they obtained as compensation in

resettlement communities as leverage access to better housing by either renting or

selling them. In the OCT gated community, I also encountered one family of rural

migrants engaged in the air conditioning business. After many years of moving from

one urban village to another, the family finally rented an apartment in the OCT gated

community. Although they appreciated living in a relatively privileged environment, it

required more financial effort on their part, compared to urban locals, to maintain a

similar living standard.27

34 Compared to the more conspicuous borders between the gated communities and

autoconstructed communities discussed in the previous section, the physical

boundaries between heterogeneous social groups living within the same residential

communities are more implicit, and have more to do with social distinctions. Here,

historically constituted norms and the distinction between the haves and have-nots of

homeownership play the role of separating, positioning, and ordering the residents in

the village of Devenderpally and the gated communities of both Chengdu and

Hyderabad.

The vertical cohabitation between migrant tenants andvillager landlords

35 The planning of Chengdu’s global tourism destination and Hyderabad’s IT hub have

carved out special globalizing spaces. Outside of these spaces, some local villagers have

leveraged their land resources to develop rental housing for capturing the real estate

surpluses and some of them have started small business. In this section, I especially

discuss the assemblages of living together of petty landlords and their migrant tenants.

In both Chengdu’s urban villages and the multi-story rental houses in Devenderpally


135

village in Hyderabad, the families of the landlords often live on the ground floor, and

migrant workers live above them, thus forming a vertical cohabitation.

36 In all my study sites, migrant tenants outnumbered villager landlords.28 Migrant

workers pursue mostly manual jobs or small business in Chengdu. In Hyderabad, in

addition to manual jobs, most of the rural migrants work in the service sector, while

local farmers take up small business supported by the revenue from their rental

property.29

37 The migrants in the village of Devenderpally rent rooms from the landowning farmers,

either as families living in one room or as several bachelors sharing a room. Many

young migrants come as couples, with both working, mostly in the service sectors. In

an interview, three migrant women,30 working as domestic servants, expressed their

frustration with the constantly rising rent and the fact that most of their income went

towards rent. Although they have a rather friendly relationship with their landlords,

their rents were regularly raised. They said that they could not leave the village

because other places in the vicinity would demand even higher rents.

38 Similarly, in Chinese urban villages migrant workers who rent from local farmers in

Huaxin village normally work in small business or as manual laborers or service

workers. Domestic help is not as common in China as in India; most of the service

workers work in restaurants, or as security guards or sanitation workers. Mr. Liu31 is an

electrician and has lived alone in Huanggang village for six years now, where he rents

one room of around 10 square meters. Mr. Liu is very satisfied with the urban village

housing since it is cheap enough for him to save some money to send to his family

members in the countryside, however with the demolition and redevelopment of the

village expected in the near future, he is facing increasing anxiety about finding

another apartment the more distant suburbs. With the below-average salaries, urban

villages thus serve as a refuge for migrant workers. Only with some extraordinary

success in business, allowing them to accumulate savings, could they afford to rent or

buy better housing types such as the apartments in resettlement housing communities

or even commercial gated communities.

39 Although relations between landlords and tenants sometimes appear friendly and

harmonious, they are intrinsically unequal in both Chengdu and Hyderabad. As the

housing shortage is severe, the landlords are in a position to raise the rent frequently,

and still find tenants. Migrants have inferior social status and are in a disadvantaged

position in the bargaining of rent prices. Oftentimes, the villages in the peripheries are

their only options for cheap housing.

40 The vertical cohabitation of the villager landlords and the migrants exemplifies

another configuration of assemblage of living together where different social groups

share living spaces but are separated by social categorization of locals and migrants,

landlords and tenants, or insiders and outsiders. The spatial patterns of landlords living

on the ground floor and residents living on upper floors not only separates the living

spaces of the two groups but also allows landlords to easily surveil their migrant

tenants as they enter and leave the premises, and observe their behavior, a topic I turn

to in the next section.


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The relationalities of heterogeneous social groups

41 In the peri-urban areas of Chengdu and Hyderabad the assembling of heterogeneous

social groups and fragmentation arising from boundary building and sociality practices

has occurred. I have introduced three configurations of living together as modes of

residential cohabitation or coexisting heterogeneity, to use Massey’s (2005) term: living

together of heterogeneous social groups between gated communities and

autoconstructed communities, within the same residential communities and the

vertical living together within the same building. The cohabitation of heterogeneous

social groups does not indicate a static terrain, but contentious trajectories of

assembling processes. Two types of relationalities emerged from my research between

and within these assemblages, each with its own paradox. The first is the absence of

social interaction despite geographical proximity: different social groups are physically

proximate but socialize separately according to norms that often materialize as

physical boundaries such as walls, roads, and different floors of the building. The

second is unequal interdependence: when forms of interdependence occur between

different social groups, it tends to be based on unequal interactions, expressed through

attitudes or even discrimination. I suggest that the relationalities between

heterogeneous social groups are the key component of the coexisting heterogeneity,

and these relationalities and the built environment co-constitute each other. I have

described the paradoxical proximity and separation in the previous sections, in this

section I further elaborate on the new kind of relationalities characterized by unequal

interdependence.

42 The interdependence of residents is materialized in for instance employment and

landlord-tenant relations between different social groups. The interdependence

between villager landlords and migrant tenants provides affordable housing to migrant

workers, and the main source of revenue for many petty landlords. Thus the

interdependence of the two groups engenders relations of mutual support. However,

my research suggests that the interdependence does not develop into further social

solidarity.

43 In the villages in Chengdu’s and Hyderabad’s peripheries, the local villager landlords

and migrant tenants share living spaces and have many daily interactions. In Chengdu’s

urban villages, several village landlords mentioned the shared “farmer” identities

between villagers and migrants; both are rural hukou holders who have long suffered

discrimination in the framework of the rural-urban divide in China.32 The shared

identities become a source of landlords’ compassion towards the migrants, in some

cases, within the setting of vertical cohabitation. However, class differences, which are

clearly manifested between landlords and tenants in both Chengdu and Hyderabad,

sometimes lead to discriminatory attitudes. In Hyderabad’s Devenderpally village, I

found that the ethnic, cultural and class differences between the villagers and migrants

are more prominent factors than shared rural sensibility in determining the modes of

interaction. There, the migrants are more often considered as strangers and outsiders.

For example, when talking about his migrant tenants, Shankar33 complained about the

difficulties of living together with them since they have very different mentalities and

behaviors. In particular, he complained that the tenants do not keep their rooms tidy

and drink alcohol, which he claimed went against the moral standards of a “good”

Hindu. Similarly, a daycare school teacher34 in Devenderpally village commented that


137

the young women who work in nearby companies and rent rooms in the village are

morally corrupt as they stay out late at night and wear inappropriate “Western”

clothes.

44 Migrant tenants are often portrayed by the villager landlords as less cultured, morally

corrupt and potentially dangerous in both Chengdu and Hyderabad. In Chengdu’s

resettlement housing communities, villagers often comment about the migrant

tenants’ “lack of quality” (suzhi di) or “lack of civility” (bu wenmin). Villagers complain

that migrants do not take care of the facilities and environment in the communities,

and that they do not keep things clean. Moreover, in both Chengdu and Hyderabad, the

villagers often implied that the influx of migrants undermines the security of the

neighborhood. When a security issue occurs, especially theft, the migrant tenants are

the first to be suspected.

45 On a broader scale, the employment relations between the middle and upper middle

class who work, live and socialize in enclosed enclaves and the residents in

autoconstructed communities is central to the prosperity of the globalizing space. In

both Chengdu and Hyderabad, gated communities and other special purpose enclaves

such as office buildings and malls heavily rely on service workers for domestic help,

maintenance workers and security guards.35 The spatial patterns of the interspersion of

gated communities and auto-constructed communities reflect this interdependence.

However, the interdependence is built on highly unequal relations.

46 In Hyderabad’s peri-urban areas, domestic workers, predominantly migrant women

who come from marginalized sections of Indian society, have frequent and prolonged

interaction with the socially elite residents of gated communities; however, they may

also face severe discrimination. According to several interviewees, domestic workers

are commonly accused of stealing from the household where they work, while other

male service workers of the enclaves do not face the same degree of stigmatization. In

many gated communities, techniques are deployed to surveil and intimidate domestic

workers. Domestic workers are not allowed to carry anything except for cell phones

and a small purse. They need to carry a particular card assigned to them to pass the

gating system, and a specially designed smart phone app is used by residents and

security guards in both Mountain View and Ridge Estates to track domestic workers’

coming and going. Both have set up an additional checkpoint behind the main gate

specially to check the personal belongings of the domestic workers when they enter

and leave the gated communities. Normally male security guards are assigned to this

task, and the process often involves bodily contacts that are considered particularly

humiliating.36

47 The migrants who are at the same time “unskilled” workers and tenants are often

stigmatized by gated community residents and the villager landlords who cohabit the

urban peripheries with them. The unequal interdependence between heterogeneous

social groups is revealed often in aggressive and discriminatory ways. While the cheap

labor from migrant workers is highly desirable and contributes to the prosperity of

globalizing spaces and the urban economy in general, these individuals are

simultaneously undesirable. Following Anagnost, this carries over to the body: their

“lower-quality” and “less-cultured” bodies are undesired (Anagnost 2004). The

contradictory desirability of the labor and bodies has thus contributed to on the one

hand the exploitation of migrant workers through rents or employment relations, and

on the other hand uneven distribution and severe surveillance of their bodies.


138

Conclusion

48 Driven largely by state-led globalizing projects, the peripheries of Chengdu and

Hyderabad have undergone rapid urbanization and dramatic transformation of the

built environment. They have emerged as distinct spaces that bring into proximity

middle class gated community residents, villager landlords and migrant tenants who

have previously had little or no contact with each other. The aim of this research, of

which this paper is a preliminary outcome, is to interrogate the types of sociality

generated by this residential cohabitation. This article contributes to enriching the

existing literature on social interactions in the urban peripheries (e.g. Garrido 2019;

Kundu 2016) by exploring the forms of relationalities between heterogeneous social

groups, particularly in relation to the transformation of the material and spatial

conditions of residential spaces.

49 Inspired by the conceptual framework of urban assemblages (Farias and Bender 2010)

and coexisting heterogeneities (Massey 2005), I have analyzed the cohabitation of

heterogeneous social groups in three main residential settings, all of which are

emblematic of the urban peripheries of Chengdu and Hyderabad. I proposed the notion

of assemblages of living together to discuss concomitantly the materiality of the built

environment and forms of sociality of heterogeneous social groups, to apprehend how

the materiality and sociality co-constitute each other. I identified three key

assemblages of living together associated with three forms of residential cohabitation

in the peri-urban areas: the interspersion of autoconstructed communities and gated

communities, heterogeneity within the same residential communities and vertical

cohabitation of villager landlords and migrant tenants.

50 I have argued that each of these configurations of residential cohabitation is formed by

the interweaving of globalizing forces and various situated local norms that are

constituted historically. Thus, categories of religion, caste, gender, regional origins,

rural/urban sensibilities, alongside the haves and have-nots of homeownership, play a

significant role in separating, positioning, and ordering heterogeneous social groups.

However, other types of social processes are also observed, and they interact with the

built environment and with deliberate boundary building practices to co-produce

forms of sociality. Between and within the various assemblages of living together, I

have observed that two main types of relationalities between residents have emerged

in the urban peripheries of Chengdu and Hyderabad: 1). different social groups are

physically proximate but socialize separately according to certain norms that often

materialize as physical boundaries such as walls, roads, and different floors of the

building; 2). at times interdependence between different social groups emerges, but it is

based on unequal interactions. These observations suggest that residential cohabitation

in peri-urban spaces, which brings into close proximity diverse social groups and

increases interactions, does not automatically generate new forms of sociality. More

research is needed to better understand the conditions under which specific residential

patterns and spatial configurations in the built environment give rise to more socially

integrated assemblages of living together.


139

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NOTES

1. However, I do not suggest that informal, self-built settlements are unplanned development; as

Roy (2009) argues, informality is an integral part of official planning in regulating and allocating

land resources.

2. This research was carried out as part of my Master’s degree at the École des Hautes Études en

Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the fieldwork was partly supported by a travel grant from the Asian

Studies Master’s program. I am grateful to Sarath and Syam for assistance with some of the

interviews in Hyderabad.

3. To protect interviewees’ privacy, all their names are replaced by pseudonyms, and most of the

specific place names are also replaced by pseudonyms.


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https://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/publications/periurbanization_in_chengdu_western_china_from_third_line_to_market_dynamics






https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2003.00491.x

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2003.00491.x

4. Developed by French sociologists Latour (1987) and Callon (1980).

5. Borrowing anthropologist Li Zhang’s (2010) phrase in her monograph In Searching of Paradise.

6. Following Robert David Sack (1986), human territoriality is “the attempt by an individual or a

group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and

asserting control over a geographic area” (p. 19).

7. And it marked the city’s success in this regard by hosting the 22nd General Assembly of the

United Nations World Tourism Organization in 2017; see for example a report from China Daily:

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/m/chengdu/wenjiang/2017-10/20/content_34015480.htm

8. Overseas Chinese Town Co., Ltd is under the direct control of State-Owned Assets Supervision

and Administration Commission of the State Council; the company has developed amusement

parks, hotels, and gated communities in many Chinese cities.

9. The oxymoron of a state-owned developer named Overseas Chinese Town, hereafter OCT,

suggests the particularity of real estate development and the mode of globalization in China. The

characteristics of being “international” or “overseas” are perceived by Chinese society as modern

and advanced. The Chinese state and its state-owned companies have appropriated the discourse

of globalization, modernity, and “world-class” into their development agenda, creating a kind of

globalizing project without the direct participation of foreign capital. In contrast to the past,

when foreign direct investment was the major driver of the country’s modernization and

globalization processes, in recent years, it is the state and domestic companies that carry the

banners of globalization and increasingly play leading roles in the making of world-class cities.

10. However, some of the village collectives or individual households still resist the

redevelopment project. For example, some households in Fansheng villages were still staying put

at the time the fieldwork was conducted. They are the ones who are not satisfied with the

compensation the government provided and chose to stay and continue negotiations in hopes of

better compensation packages.

11. Unless otherwise mentioned, photographs were taken by the author.

12. The city of Chengdu is not required by law to provide housing for rural migrants, because

their household registration (hukou) status is not “urban.” Consequently, they must find cheap

housing.

13. Other urban villages in the peripheries of Jinniu district also serve either the function of

accommodating rural migrants or supporting petty commercial activities, and in some cases a

combination of both. Fansheng village was largely comprised of stand-alone rental houses that

are extended from scattered farmhouses. The houses and yards of Zhuwa village are mostly

rented by printing, paper manufacturing, alcohol making, building material manufacturing

factories, and so on, and some companies also rent them as warehouses.

14. High-school girl who lives in Huaxin village in Chengdu, interviewed on January 6, 2019.

15. Elderly barbershop owner in Huaxin village in Chengdu, interviewed on January 6, 2019.

16. Since the start of the Huaxin village redevelopment processes, the monthly fairs are no

longer organized.

17. Elder retired resident of [either “an” or “the”] OCT gated community in Chengdu,

interviewed on 16 Jan. 2019.

18. Information from multiple interviewees.

19. According to a ranking of all primary schools in Jinniu district (https://www.chinaxqf.com/

gopschool/510106.html), Renbei primary school is ranked the third among 52 schools; on the

other hand, Fansheng primary school, which recruits mostly villagers’ children and migrant

children, is ranked 43th.

20. Young housewife in OCT gated community, age 23, interviewed on January 22, 2019.

21. Anagnost argues that the body of the urban, middle-class only child is fetishized as the site

for the accumulation of value embodied in the quality (suzhi) of a person, while the rural migrant

exemplifies its apparent absence.


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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/m/chengdu/wenjiang/2017-10/20/content_34015480.htm

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/m/chengdu/wenjiang/2017-10/20/content_34015480.htm

http://www.chinaxqf.com/gopschool/510106.html




22. Interviewed on March 1, 2019.

23. A member of the panchayat in Devenderpally village, male, age 39, interviewed on February

23, 2019.

24. And in the Chinese case, the hukou (household registration) system has institutionalized the

rural-urban divide.

25. See Balakrishnan (2019), Gururani (2020), and Upadhya (2020) among others who

demonstrate that the urban real estate market in India is built on a prior uneven agrarian land

market shaped by land-based caste/class relations.

26. A middle-aged herder in Devenderpally village, male, interviewed on 10 March 2019.

27. Mr. Wang who lives in the OCT gated community, interviewed on January 22, 2019.

28. Both the migrant workers and the local villagers were originally farmers, what sets them

apart is whether their land could be capitalized in the rapid urbanization process. With the land

locating in the rapidly urbanizing areas, the villagers in Devenderpally villages or Chinese urban

villages turned themselves into petty landlords and entrepreneurs, however, the farmers in

remote regions could only leave their land behind and rent from other villagers’ autoconstructed

housing in urban peripheries to benefit from the better-paid employment opportunities in cities.

29. For example, Shankar, a shopkeeper and landlord in Devenderpally (male, interviewed on

February 25, 2019) has also started to sell water barrels in the village, and a member of the

panchayat has started a building materials business. The villagers turned entrepreneurs have

accumulated capital from selling land and building autoconstructed rental houses, and then

running small businesses. However, some villagers who have not managed the wealth from

selling land well in the first place, have to work as security workers or auto drivers like the

migrants.

30. Migrant women working as domestic workers, interviewed on February 24, 2019.

31. Migrant worker working as a technician, age 40, interviewed in Huanggang village on January

24, 2019.

32. For example, Mrs. Xie, 67, a resettled villager living in a resettlement community,

interviewed on January 23, 2019, said to me, “Migrant workers are like us. Before we also were

farmers, after all we are the same… We live side by side harmoniously. We depend on them and

they depend on us… Honestly, although our apartments are not that good, they came to us

because they want cheap housing, and at the same time we want some revenue. Like this, both

sides benefit. If they didn’t come to rent our apartments, our life would be difficult.”

33. Shankar, a shopkeeper and landlord in Devenderpally, male, interviewed on February 25,

2019.

34. Daycare school teacher in Devenderpally village, female, interviewed on February 25, 2019.

35. Sassen’s (2006) notion of survival circuits is relevant to reflect on the relations between

global cities and the globalizing unskilled workers, particularly low-wage women workers.

36. This information about body searches of domestic workers was not directly communicated to

me, a male foreign researcher, in my interviews with the domestic workers. Rather it came from

a focus group discussion with four expatriate housewives of Australian, American, and French

nationality in Ridge Estates, on March 14, 2019. According to these women employers, the

domestic workers complained constantly about the aggressive “preventive measures” imposed

on them by the gated community.


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ABSTRACTS

At a time when China and India are urbanizing rapidly, the transformation of the urban

peripheries has brought into close proximity social groups who previously had little or no

contact with each other. In this article, I approach the question of residential cohabitation by

investigating similar types of residential areas in Chengdu and Hyderabad, which are emblematic

of those found in the urban peripheries: autoconstructed communities and gated communities.

Inspired by research on urban assemblages, and on the basis of fieldwork conducted in each

setting, I introduce the notion of “assemblages of living together.” I have identified three key

assemblages associated with three distinct forms of residential cohabitation: the interspersion of

autoconstructed communities and gated communities, heterogeneity within the same residential

communities, and vertical cohabitation of villager landlords and migrant tenants. Between and

within the various assemblages of living together, I have observed two main types of

relationalities between residents: different social groups are physically proximate but socialize

separately according to certain norms that often materialize as physical boundaries such as

walls, roads, and different floors of the building; at times interdependence between different

social groups emerges, but it is based on unequal interactions.

INDEX

Keywords: residential cohabitation, peri-urbanization, autoconstruction, gated community,

rural migrant

AUTHOR

LIUBING XIE

PhD Student, University of California, Berkeley


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The Peripheral Turn in GlobalUrban Studies: Theory, Evidence,SitesXuefei Ren

1 On the leafy campus of the University of Chicago sits the eminent Gothic-style Social

Science Building, where one can find the original concentric map of urban expansion,

hand-drawn by urban sociologists Robert E. Park and E. W. Burgess in the 1920s. As

founding members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, Park and Burgess

proposed this map to capture universal patterns of urban growth—that is, growth

radiating from the center (i.e., downtown) to the periphery (i.e., suburbs) (Park and

Burgess [1925] 2019). They applied the concentric model beyond Chicago to study cities

as far away as China, India, and Brazil (Ren 2019). In their view, the center was the

beating heart of the city, the site for prominent government institutions and powerful

corporations. As one moved away from the center, one encountered other settlement

types, such as working-class neighborhoods, ethnic enclaves, and sleepy residential

suburbs on the urban periphery. For the first generation of the Chicago School, the

center dominated the periphery, as the most important urban activities all pivoted

around the center—in the case of Chicago, the “Loop.”

2 The Chicago School’s concentric model of urban expansion was continuously

challenged in the second half of the 20th century. Among its major critics were the

members of the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, who proclaimed that it was

the periphery that reorganized the center. As evidence, they pointed to the sprawling

Los Angeles, where downtown played a minor role in the social and economic life of the

metropolitan region (Dear 2002). This deliberate shift away from the center has

continued since the intervention by the L.A. school in the 1990s, and more recent

examples include the scholarship on global suburbanism (Keil 2017; Hamel and

Keil 2015; Güney, Keil and Üçoğlu 2019) and planetary urbanization (Brenner 2014), as

well as studies on urban peripheries in the global South (Kennedy and Sood 2016;

Gururani 2020), including this special issue on India. A century after the invention of


146

urban sociology, the paradigm of urban studies has been inverted, with the “periphery”

taking center stage for urban inquiry.

3 This special issue on Indian urbanization, curated by three leading scholars on India, is

the latest intervention in the peripheral turn in global urban studies. The collection of

essays examines wide-ranging socio-spatial transformations unfolding on the urban

periphery of Indian cities, such as labor migration, land grabs, property-led

development, residential segregation, and shifting governance institutions. Based on

mixed methods—historical analysis, oral history, ethnography, quantitative analyses,

and visual documentation—these studies spotlight the incompleteness of city-making

on the urban edge, and they argue that inherited social structures, landholding

patterns, and agrarian economies in Indian villages strongly shape the nascent urban

development on the periphery. In this essay, I situate the new scholarship on peri-

urban India in the larger field of global urban studies by discussing two issues: first,

what can be gained by studying the urban periphery—both in India and other places—

and second, what the blind spots are in the peripheral turn that merit further

investigation.

Where is the periphery?

4 The term “periphery” is used in this collection of essays in at least four different ways,

which well represent its wider use in global urban studies in general. First, it denotes

peripheral locations, such as the fringe areas of large cities, small towns, and the rural

hinterlands. This approach, which shifts the focus away from downtown (or the city

center), is consistent with the Los Angeles School’s critique of the Chicago School, in

pointing out the integration of suburbs and other settlements on the urban edge into

the world economy. In addition to studying the urban edge of large cities, the special

issue also pinpoints the significance of studying small towns and villages, which have

been undergoing in-situ urbanization and becoming increasingly incorporated in the

national and global urban networks. Prioritizing small towns and rural villages is

especially relevant in the Indian context, where nearly one third of the urban

population growth in the last two decades took place in urbanizing small towns, as

locals moved away from agriculture and took jobs in manufacturing and services (Bhide

and Burte 2019). Consistent with the perspective of “subaltern urbanization”—urban

transformation in small towns (Mukhopadhyay, Zérah and Denis 2020)—the authors in

this special issue underscore the importance of studying the bottom-up urbanization

happening outside India’s major cities such as Delhi and Mumbai. Attention to smaller

settlements can deepen our understanding of the variations in urban structures and

processes in large and diverse countries such as India.

5 The second meaning of “periphery” here denotes the global South. This approach can

be traced back to Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on the world-system perspective in the

1970s, which divided the world into three zones—the core, the semi-periphery, and the

periphery (Wallerstein 2004). The peripheral zone included the late developing

countries that heavily relied upon exports of raw materials for foreign currency, with

which these countries purchased advanced machinery and technologies from the core

countries. Wallerstein’s world-system perspective was masterfully adopted by urban

scholars in the 1980s, as seen in the scholarship on global cities (Sassen 1991). However,

as rightfully pointed out by scholars such as Jennifer Robinson, much of the global city


147

literature has focused on the most powerful financial centers and ignored smaller cities

“off the map” (Robinson 2002, 2006). Since the mid-2000s, there has been a strong

pushback against the global city literature that focused on the financial powerhouses.

As much of urban population growth has been happening in the global South, it is a

natural form of awakening to study non-Western cities in developing countries, a

peripheral zone that was neglected until recently. Therefore, the new urban

scholarship on the global South complements the global city literature and concludes

the full circle of adapting Wallerstein’s world-system perspective to critical urban

studies.

6 The shift of research gravity to the global South is also a theoretical move. By studying

locations in the global South, such as India, scholars argue that Western-centric urban

theory can be liberated to allow more innovation. This leads to the third meaning of

“periphery”: the periphery of urban theory, or theorization from the margins, such as

sites outside North America and Western Europe. Indeed, the contributions to this

special issue show ample evidence of new theoretical frameworks emerging from

studying Indian cities. For example, Sood (this issue) proposes a typology of governance

of urban peripheries, based on studies of Noida and Hyderabad—specialized, privatized,

transitional, and exceptional. These logics of governance can be observed, to varying

degrees, in suburbs and urban peripheries in Western cities as well—from Chicago to

Toronto, from Los Angeles to Paris. Xie (this issue) complicates the notion of

segregation—a key concept derived from American cities with entrenched racial

inequalities (Garrido 2020). He shows how segregation takes different forms in cities in

China and India, such as interspersion of gated communities and informal settlements,

mixed-income living within the same residential compound, and vertical cohabitation

in individual buildings. Key concepts that originated from North American cities, such

as segregation, should be opened up to account for more diverse patterns of urban

structures and processes (Garrido, Ren and Weinstein 2020).

7 The last meaning of “periphery” is metaphorical and refers to marginal populations

and their precarious living. The essays in this issue study many such disadvantaged

groups, such as migrants working in kiln workshops on the outskirts of Delhi (Mishra,

this issue) and Dalit farmers trying to eke out a living in the midst of Bengaluru’s real

estate boom (Upadhya and Rathod, this issue). With fragmented municipal institutions,

the poor and marginalized are unlikely to succeed in challenging the exploitative

systems in which they are embedded—whether it is the lack of job security and social

safety net for casual laborers, or land assembly for real estate development, which is

dominated by the upper castes. The balance of power clearly tilts toward the

propertied class, who have the social, political, and cultural capital to forge

connections with state bureaucracies and private investors, in order to benefit from

land speculation on the periphery.

What can be gained?

8 Studying the periphery—read as urban fringes, the global South, theoretical margins,

and vulnerable populations—can yield insights into local particularities and can also

lead to theoretical innovation. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, focusing on

the periphery can deepen our understanding of the people and communities living on

the metropolitan edge and in small towns; furthermore, it leads to important first steps


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for theorizing about urban structures, governance, and social relations in these rapidly

urbanizing communities.

9 This special issue identifies three features of social relations and governance apparatus

on the urban fringes of Indian cities. The first is the inherited caste system that

perpetuates the reproduction of inequality. Unlike in large cities, where residential and

occupational mobility has rendered caste-based politics less palpable in urban life, in

the rural communities on the urban periphery, local life and the political economy still

pivot around the rigid caste hierarchy. While the upper castes can diversify their

financial assets across sectors—in trade, agriculture, manufacturing, and real estate—

the lower castes are less able to do so and tend to lose out in property-led development.

However, the latter are not entirely powerless, as in-depth ethnographic work by

Upadhya and Rathod (this issue) tells us: some Dalit farmers have become land brokers

and political activists, and through the court system, they increasingly challenge the

encroachment on common land by upper caste groups.

10 The second feature of urban fringes in India is the extremely fragmented governing

structures. Compared to other countries, India is known for its weak municipal

institutions (Ren 2020). The institutional void is even more pronounced on the urban

periphery, which often falls outside the jurisdictions of municipal governments. This

vacuum of authority has given rise to an array of power brokers who jockey for

influence—such as non-representative para-statal agencies, newly formed municipal

authorities, and existing village panchayats. The lack of a consolidated metropolitan

authority further poses challenges for delivering adequate infrastructure and services

to communities, who are already victims of environmental degradation, land

dispossession, and state neglect (Sood, this issue).

11 A final distinctive feature of India’s urban periphery is the semi-permanence of the

rural. The rural economy, lifestyle, governance structures, and social relations still

stubbornly persist, and they render the city-making process incomplete, as collectively

argued by the contributors in this issue. In this regard, the urban peripheries in India

differ from metropolitan edges in other countries such as China, where middleclass

new towns and manufacturing zones have wiped out rural settlements, governance

structures, and ways of life. Scholars have conceptualized the incomplete urban

transition in India as “agrarian urbanism” or “subaltern urbanization,” to underscore

how the urban and rural seep into each other (Gururani 2020; Mukhopadhyay, Zérah

and Denis 2020; Rathi, this issue).

12 These empirical insights are important first steps for further theorization of urban

structures and processes in India. Here, theorization can be read as abstraction,

generalization, and contemplation (Levine 1997). From the empirical, the particular,

and the practical (e.g., policy recommendations and implications), we can proceed to

urban theory construction, including but not limited to (1) articulating and

disambiguating major concepts, such as segregation; (2) constructing conceptual

frameworks to explain processes such as land assembly in Indian cities; (3) developing

typologies, such as typologies of metropolitan governance; (4) problem-finding, such as

how governance is possible without governments, as in the case of census towns on the

peripheries; and (5) identifying new analytical angles, such as revisiting “caste” and

examining how the persistent caste hierarchy co-produces the urban in India.


149







What is next?

13 The peripheral turn presented a paradigm shift in global urban studies. So much can be

gained—in both empirical discovery and theoretical construction—when we shift our

focus from the city center to the urban edge, from global cities to ordinary cities and

rural hinterlands (Robinson 2016). However, with every analytical strategy there are

blind spots, and the scholarship on urban peripheries is no exception. I identify three

issues that can be better attended to by scholars writing about urban peripheries; two

concern topics of investigation, and one concerns methodology.

14 The first is the question of how the periphery articulates with the center, in the form of

city centers (downtowns), central cities (such as global cities), or “nerve centers” of

policy making, such as bureaucracies within different levels of the government. By

focusing on the outlying areas on the metropolitan edge, the scholarship on peri-urban

India tends to leave out the center. The periphery is linked in multiple ways to the

center, and what happens at the center invariably shapes the urban structures and

processes on the periphery. Therefore, instead of focusing on “either” the center “or”

the periphery, it is more constructive to study the linkages and connections between

the two and examine how they reshape and reproduce one another. To take the

example of Mishra’s essay on marginal laborers working in kiln factories on the

outskirts of Delhi, as the author indicated, these workers’ livelihood is deeply

intertwined with the building cycles in the national capital region; labor policies made

by the government and judicial decisions regarding pollution control from the Indian

Supreme Court have had significant repercussions on these migrant laborers (Mishra,

this issue).

15 A second issue that needs attention is comparative methods. Many use comparisons in

their investigation into urban peripheries, but the comparative method can be made

more effective with some theoretical guidance (Storper and Scott 2016). In this special

issue, some authors have incorporated a comparative gesture: segregation in

Hyderabad is compared with that in Chengdu, China; upper caste farmers are compared

with Dalit peasants in their struggle over land in Bengaluru; and the governing

structures of Noida new town are compared to those of the Greater Hyderabad region.

Although these comparisons have yielded substantial insights, there is still

considerable scope for strengthening comparative methods. As a good starting point,

we need to have a theoretical sense of the significance and properties of the cases

before comparing them (Scott and Storper 2015). For more structured comparison, we

should attend to at least four issues: case selection, identification of a central puzzle,

incorporation of a historical perspective, and articulation of wider implications

(Ren 2020b). More specifically, cases need to be selected to reveal social structures and

mechanisms (Steinmetz 2004); the research, ideally, should be guided by a puzzle, in

the form of a causal question; a historical perspective—identifying historical junctures,

critical events, and turning points—is necessary to shed light on the contemporary

development outcomes; and we need to go beyond our small number of case studies

and think about wider implications—how conclusions from the cities we study can be

applied to other places, and if they can’t, why not. More structured comparisons can

further advance the peripheral turn in urban studies.

16 Finally, the changing culture of communities living on the urban periphery also needs

to be studied. By “culture,” I refer to the changing lifestyles, traditions, and norms in


150





urbanizing small towns and villages. As the Chicago School reminded us, the urban

should not be defined only in terms of population size, density, and heterogeneity;

instead, it should be studied from a cultural perspective, such as “ways of life”

(Wirth 1938). The same can be said about the inquiries on India’s urban periphery,

which is the site for rapidly changing communities who adapt their ways of life as their

towns urbanize. From the urban India scholarship, we have learned much about these

communities regarding land speculation, migration, and political patronage, but we

don’t know how various groups—the middle class, migrants, farmers, and power

brokers—make sense of the social changes that they live through, and how they change

their ways of life to ride the wave of urban growth, or merely to survive.

17 By way of conclusion, I share an ethnographic encounter in a village on the outskirts of

Delhi, to illustrate why cultural change needs to be studied. In 2017, I accompanied

Shubhra Gururani, one of the editors of this issue, during her fieldwork in the urban

villages in Gurugram. We visited a well-to-do family of farmers belonging to the Jat

caste. While Gururani interviewed the family’s elder about the landowning patterns in

the village, I conversed with the two little boys, five and six years old, who were

incredibly curious about me—a foreigner—in their house. Both boys spoke English, and

they showed me their favorite toys, including Doraemon, a Japanese anime character

hugely popular in Asia; then they guided me to their bedroom, which had a dedicated

study space, with a small desk and a chair tucked in a corner, and textbooks neatly

organized on top of the desk. They showed me framed pictures of family trips to ski

resorts in north India and to the sunny beaches in Goa. For a few minutes, I forgot I was

visiting a “rural” family in a “village” in India. These two boys had more in common

with other middle-class children in China and the U.S. than with their peers in the

impoverished parts of rural India. When we left, I couldn’t help wondering what the

boys would be doing when they grew up. They have a whole world of possibilities in

front of them and staying back in the village is an unlikely option. Ways of life are

rapidly changing in the communities on the urban periphery, and they need to be

studied if we want to gain a deeper understanding of the social change engulfing these

communities.

18 India’s urban transition is incomplete and fraught with tensions, as made clear in this

special issue with in-depth ethnographic studies on governance, land acquisition, and

segregation. These investigations, firmly grounded in the urban political economy

tradition, can benefit from incorporating a cultural perspective. By being mindful of

not only infrastructure, but also culture, we can gain a holistic understanding of the

urban transformation sweeping through India’s small towns and villages and anticipate

fresh insights and theoretical gains along the way.

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ABSTRACTS

The field of global urban studies has witnessed a “peripheral” turn since the 1990s, first led by

the Los Angeles School of urban geographers, with a more diverse group of urban scholars who

study the global South following. Challenging the city-centric view, as exemplified by the Chicago

School’s concentric model of urban growth, these scholars train their lens on urban peripheries,

such as suburbs, small towns, and the sprawling hinterlands outside metropolitan regions. This

essay discusses what can be gained from shifting the analytical lens from the city center to the

periphery, and from Western cities to cities in the global South. Drawing upon the new

scholarship on urban peripheries in India, it also identifies three major avenues for further

investigation—the comparative method, center-periphery relations, and ways of life.

AUTHOR

XUEFEI REN

Associate Professor of Sociology and Global Urban Studies, Michigan State University


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Engaging the Urban from the Periphery - OpenEdition Journals

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