Entangled Urbanism : Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon 9780198099147, 0198099142

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Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i) Entangled Urbanism (p.iii) Entangled Urbanism

(p.iv) Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India © Oxford University Press 2015 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the Page 1 of 2

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Epigraph

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Epigraph (p.ii) ‘[Focusing upon] the genealogies of the city form, cosmopolitan imaginaries, and transnational processes, Entangled Urbanism is a superb exploration of the intimacies, antagonisms, boundary making, and porousness of life through which the urban poor and the rich come to be connected in Delhi and Gurgaon. Sanjay Srivastava is an eclectic thinker, and the book is an illuminating study through which we can discern the working of the state and the market on the one side and making of intimate relations on the other. Delhi has, indeed, found a worthy biographer in Srivastava.’ –Veena Das Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore ‘Sanjay Srivastava takes us on a spectacular journey through Delhi, from the old slums and the Delhi Improvement Trust … [and contemporary] battles for survival, to the new consumerism of our times. Srivastava's ethnographic eye surveys Resident Welfare Associations, gated communities, the Akshardham Temple, and the shopping malls. He brings a deep and subtle analytical focus on middle-class fantasies of community… but is equally attentive to consumerist fantasies among the poor that make life in the big city such an emancipatory promise for many. A tour de force.’ –Partha Chatterjee Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York; and Honorary Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta Page 1 of 2

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Epigraph

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Dedication

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Dedication (p.v) For Radha, Ishana, and Ilika (p.vi)

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Dedication

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Dedication (p.vii) My City My city is like a long debate. Its roads like pointless arguments lead to blind alleys, its contentious streets thrust aggressively, in myriad directions. Every house is like a clenched fist, with its walls gritting their teeth, as its epileptic drains froth at their mouths. This debate started with the dawn, and warmed up, in the heat of the rising sun. Then from the mouth of every door, clanging wheels of cycles and scooters, hurled out like abuses with bells and horns pouncing upon each other. Every newborn child would ask: what is all this yakking about? Even his question would turn into an interrogation mark conceived in the encounter of one argument with another. When they met on a shady lane, walking the streets of my city. (p.viii) Conchshells and kettledrums lost their voices. Came the night, troubled our minds and carried on. But even in sleep the argument was endless. My city is like one long debate. Page 1 of 2

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Dedication Amrita Pritam (From: Punjabi Poems of Amrita Pritam. 2009. Translated by Khushwant Singh. New Delhi: Star Publications.)

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Acknowledgements

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

(p.xi) Acknowledgements My grateful thanks to the following for their feedback, provocations, friendship, and hospitality: Michael Allen, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Amita Baviskar, Ian Bedford, Devika Bordia, Christiane Brosius, Partha Chatterjee, Lawrence Cohen, Gillian Cowlishaw, David Curry, Veena Das, Steve Derné, Michaela Dimmers, Tom Ernst, Rachel Heiman, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Zakir Husain, Bodhisattva Kar, Manju Khan, Viv and Alex Kondos, M.D.G. Koreth, Mangesh Kulkarni, Nita Kumar, Mark Liechty, Rozanna Lilley, Neil MacLean, Professor Nita Mathur, William Mazzarella, Deepak Mehta, Sudesh Mishra, Philip Oldenburg, Caroline Osella, K.J. Patel, Sujata Patel, Ira Raja, Kalpana Ram, Ursula Rao, Raka Ray, Srirupa Roy, Sebastian Schwecke, Sunila Srivastava, Holk Stobbe, Veena Talwar, Lalit Vachani, Paromita Vohra, Patricia Uberoi, Dr Kiron Wadhera, and Kerry Zubrinich. Surit Das and Parul Baghel Rajput’s critical assistance in the editing process and Ram Ashish Yadav’s valuable help in several technical aspects of producing the manuscript is gratefully acknowledged. Mrs Aradhya Bhardwaj’s assistance with my journal editing tasks has helped secure extra time for this book. The company of the following has provided frequent shelter from many urban storms: Amit Baruah, Minu Jain, Binoo John, Rebecca John, Uma Khan, Murali Krishnan, Gitu Mathrani, Alka Misra, Seema Misra, Jhampan and Sheema Mukherjee, Chitra Padmanabhan, Rohini Prakash, Shishir Sharma, Vijay Thapa, and MK Venu. I also wish to acknowledge the following children of the city: Amaya, Antara, Anushka, Revathi, and Sayuj. I hope they will contribute to the making of a humane and inclusive urbanism. Page 1 of 2

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Acknowledgements (p.xii) My family, Radha, Ishana, and Ilika, have contributed in unstinting and invaluable ways to the making of this book. This acknowledgement can hardly capture the true nature of their contribution. I thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript. Their detailed comments and genuine engagement with the book have been invaluable in the process of revision. I also thank Oxford University Press, New Delhi, for professional support. My greatest debt of gratitude is to the residents of Nangla Matchi who gave so freely their time: their contribution to this book is immeasurable. I wish I could list them by name but, for various reasons, that is not possible. My continuing association with them is both a source of friendship and shared knowledge about the entangled nature of urban life.

Author’s note Names of people and places have been changed wherever appropriate. Parts of Chapter 1 have been previously published in Economic and Political Weekly (Sanjay Srivastava. ‘A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer: Between the Market, the State, and “Community”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2011, XLVI (51): 44–53). An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in Thesis 11 (Sanjay Srivastava. ‘Duplicity, Intimacy, Community: An Ethnography of ID Cards, Permits and Other Fake Documents in Delhi’, Thesis 11, 2012,113 (1): 78–93); retrieved from http:// the.sagepub.com/content/113/1/78. abstract.1 Chapter 11, now revised, was originally published in Contributions to Indian Sociology (Sanjay Srivastava. ‘“Revolution Forever”: Consumerism and Object Lessons for the Urban Poor’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2010, 44 (1–2): 103–28).2 Notes:

(1) . The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Thesis 11, 113 (1), 2012, by SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright © Sanjay Srivastava. (2) . Copyright © 2010 Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.

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Figures

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

(p.xiii) Figures I.1: Advertisement for DLF, 1956 xxvii I.2: Toilet Map of Delhi xli 5.1: Gates to Model Basti, North Delhi 115 5.2: Window to the World: Gated Community Advertisement 118 6.1: Honda Publicity Stall 165 7.1: ‘Dandiya Night’ Dancing 176 8.1: Akshardham Temple 196 9.1: Ambience Mall Gurgaon’s Interior 234 9.2: Premier City Arcade ‘Arts and Crafts’ Market 236 11.1: Revolution Forever Office 280

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Abbreviations

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

(p.xiv) Abbreviations ACORD Asian Centre for Organization Research and Development AICPS All India Crime Prevention Society ASI Assistant Sub Inspector AT Akshardham Temple BAPS Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha BJP Bharatiya Janata Party BPL Below Poverty Line BR Birla Report BRT Bus Rapid Transport CA Chief Architect CAPTH Campaign Against Power Tariff Hike CBI Central Bureau of Investigation CGHS Cooperative Group Housing Scheme CRPF Central Reserve Police Force Page 1 of 5

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Abbreviations CWG Commonwealth Games DDA Delhi Development Authority DESU Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking DIT Delhi Improvement Trust DLF Delhi Land and Finance DMRC Delhi Metro Rail Corporation DND Delhi-Noida-Delhi DSO Direct Selling Organization DTDC Delhi Tourism Development Corporation DUAC Delhi Urban Arts Commission DVB Delhi Vidyut Board EIUS Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums FIR First Information Report FMCG Fast Moving Consumer Goods (p.xv) HUDA Haryana Urban Development Authority IIT Indian Institute of Technology IITF India International Trade Fair ISBT Inter-State Bus Terminus ISKCON International Society of Krishna Consciousness ITO Income Tax Office JD Janata Dal LGIE Large Group Interactive Event Page 2 of 5

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Abbreviations LIG Low-Income Group LOA Land Owning Authority LUA Land Using Authority MCD Municipal Corporation of Delhi MCG Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon MDC Modern Delhi Corporation MLA Member of the Legislative Assembly MLM Multilevel Marketing MNC Multi-National Corporation MP Member of Parliament MTA Market Traders Associations NCAER National Council for Applied Economic Research NCC National Cadet Corps NDA National Democratic Alliance NDMC New Delhi Municipal Committee NDS No Documents Shown NGO Non-Government Organization NOIDA New Okhla Industrial Development Area NCR National Capital Region NRI Non Resident Indian NSS Nagarik Suraksha Samiti OBC Other Backward Classes Page 3 of 5

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Abbreviations P–98 Persons Deemed to have Settled After 1998 PAC Provincial Armed Constabulary PCA Premier City Arcade PR Public Relations QRT Quick Response Team RAF Rapid Action Force RBI Reserve Bank of India RDD Revolution Diamond Distributor RED Revolution Executive Distributor RF Revolution Forever RGD Revolution Gold Distributor (p.xvi) RMD Revolution Management Distributor RPD Revolution Platinum Distributor RSD Revolution Silver Distributor RWA Residents Welfare Association RWAJF Residents Welfare Association Joint Front SDM Sub Divisional Magistrate SC Scheduled Caste SDO Sub-Divisional Officer SHO Station House Officer SP Superintendent of Police SPA School of Planning and Architecture Page 4 of 5

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Abbreviations ST Scheduled Tribe SWSJU School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University TTE Travelling Ticket Examiner URJA United Residents Joint Action VCD Video Compact Disc

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Introduction

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

(p.xvii) Introduction Slums, Criminal Suburbs, Urban Bodies, and ‘Superb Housing Schemes’ for People with ‘Modern Outlook’ I bade goodbye to Rame Gowda saying that I would return as soon as I had word from him, and walked down to the brick and mortar platform built around the trunk of the huge peepul (Ficus religiosa) tree, to wait for the bus to Mysore. The bus took some time coming. As I sat on the platform, I could not help looking towards the East, the direction from which the bus was expected. The Mysore–Hosur road snaked its way up towards Gudda village which occupied the crest of the rise. Gudda itself was not visible— the road, after zigzagging for a while like a drunk, disappeared into the blue sky flecked with white, cotton-wooly clouds. A furlong from where I sat was the Big Tank, a stretch of shimmering silver and blue, walled in on the south by a huge stone-and-earth embankment whose flattened top was the bus road. Around the tank were orchard trees. The silver and blue of the tank, the blue-flecked-with-white of the sky, and the green of the orchards somehow blended with the brown of the terraced plots where paddy had been harvested only two or three weeks ago. Someone was making jaggery in a nearby field—a smell compounded of sugarcane juice and of cane tops being burned for fuel reached me. It was a beautiful morning, sunny but not too warm, typical of January in this part of Mysore. I then and there decided that Rampura was the village for me. M.N. Srinivas, 1976, The Remembered Village, p. 8.

(p.xviii) A City Like an Argument How does one study ‘the city’? How is it even possible to construct an ‘arrival scene’ to a place that—in the sheer, sprawling, gigantic physicality of its presence—escapes the mind’s eye as the ‘typical visage’ that seduces and Page 1 of 24

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Introduction convinces one to stay? Such inaugural moments as those indicated by Srinivas’s evocative description are, in the case of the city, impossible to articulate; they are, quite simply, beyond ethnographic capacity. Rather than a totality, then, a city might best be understood through focusing on specific spaces and times, and on processes that make urban spaces and temporalities the viscous form within which human lives unfold. This book is about Delhi (population approximately sixteen million in 2011) and the immediate area surrounding it that, along with Delhi, is referred to as the National Capital Region (NCR) with a population of approximately twenty-two million.1 The district of Gurgaon located in the state of Haryana—that is a key focus—falls within the NCR. ‘The locatedness of the original concept of modernity and the hegemonic position of Western urban experiences in framing intellectual fantasies of city life has’, Jennifer Robinson points out, ‘left cities in poorer countries … to be apprehended through a static, non-dialectical lens of categorization as other (non-Western, African, Third World)’ (2006: 39). However, it is just as important to remember that ‘modernity’ as a tool of imagination has also had a very long career in the non-Western world, and this career has not been hampered (or exclusively framed) by the meanings of this term in the West. The urban aspects I explore in this book draw upon this connected but autonomous history of modernity. The ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ split that Western urban theory builds upon has, Robinson also points out, led to representations of the Western metropolis as ‘creative, dynamic, modern places’ (2006: 4), whereas ‘developmentalism has functioned to make the experience of cities in developed and developing, or underdeveloped contexts appear broadly incommensurable’ (2006: 5). Leaving aside the problematic nature of such categories, while I accept the need for a thoroughgoing revision of ways of theorizing the urban experience in our time, a criticism of the modernity–development split may not be adequate to this task. For, as I will show in different parts of this book, it is the twinned (p.xix) discourse of modernity–development itself that constitutes the postcolonial urban experience. That is to say that while, as Robinson argues, the non-Western city has been excised (or hierarchically positioned) within Western urban theory, ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ are powerful terms that have been localized in the Indian context and carry great value towards an understanding of Indian urban life. And, in this sense, the task of ‘post-colonializing urban studies’ must attend to the post-colonial experience within its own terms. The present work is a specific engagement with the cultures of one particular urban region on its own historical and social terms. It is for this reason, then, that my use of the ‘modernity-tradition distinction’ in different parts of the book should not be understood—as Robinson says of Western urban theory—as reinforcing the notion that ‘certain cities and urban cultures’ lie ‘outside the realm of the modern (and the urban)’ (2006: 9). If we were to deal with postPage 2 of 24

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Introduction coloniality on its own terms, it would be clear that in ‘other’ parts of the world, terms such as ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ carry meanings different to those contained in critiques of the ‘Chicago School’, and things may not be as straightforward as viewing the opposition of ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ as ‘a flaw that we can trace through many accounts of the modern’ (2006: 66). Further, as I will show in discussions on gated residential developments, anxieties over meanings of modernity do not primarily play out in terms of whether ‘New York and other powerful Western cities’ should be regarded ‘as sources of an originary version of modernity’ (2006: 77), and that contemporary Indian modernity is being increasingly recast in terms of a home-grown ‘cosmopolitanism’. Finally, while it is entirely correct to state that ‘wealthy cities should not get to determine what it means to be urban’ (2006: 170), parts of this book show that while ‘wealthy cities’ do inform imaginative horizons within postcolonized spaces such as India, this happens through a complex interplay of class, nationalism, and a variety of shifts within political and cultural economies. It is, then, in its attention to historical specificity—of concepts and processes— that this book is properly anthropological.

Disparate and Connected On a cross-road near Shivaji University in the sugar-belt city of Kolhapur in the state of Maharashtra, there is a mother-of-the-nation tableau in (p.xx) which a purposeful woman in a blue sari points to the distant horizon, as two children— national made-to-order boy and girl—dressed for school keep pace with her. We might reinterpret the pointing gesture of the mother–pedagogue as something more than an exhortation to the children to advance towards horizons of learning and knowledge. Situated within a barely grassed and ill-flowering traffic roundabout, surrounded by incessant and horn-blowing traffic, and gesturing towards localities that perhaps did not exist when the tableau was erected, the woman of cement has something to say about the nature of engaging with the city. We are always in the middle of urban life as it swirls around us, perhaps desperately seeking out familiar places in the distance, even as every other day (and sometimes hour) the dizzying rate of spatial transformation—a shopping mall here, a flyover there—mocks that gesture of knowing the city. The anthropologist is like one of these cement-children— clutching school-bags, dwarfed both by the putative mother and the surrounding buildings—hoping to capture something of that which makes a city; and, as is the case for children, the view is always partial, obscured by a bewildering array of structures, bodies, and processes. Cities are made, Ҫinar and Bender (2007) say, ‘through the act of collective imagination, [hence] we need to look for the city in such media of the collective imagination as literary texts, popular media, the daily discursive reality of inhabitants, and numerous other forms of the public culture of daily life’ (2007: xv). This book has been imagined on something along these lines. It ranges across a number of urban sites in order to explore their connections. And, for Page 3 of 24

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Introduction this reason, I have chosen sites that appear to be quite disparate, for a city is not a collection of independent realms—the slum, the up-market gated community, the shopping mall, the ‘resettlement colony’—but a series of interconnected spaces and processes (see Amin 2013 for a discussion on the significance of viewing the city as a series of connections). How do the pleasures of the gated residential enclave encompass the pain of the demolished slum locality? How do localized rituals of suburban life incorporate the symbolic procedures of the nation-state? What processes link contemporary manifestations of consumerism, the middle classes and the urban poor? What kind of a city is produced through relationships between ‘illegal’ settlements such as ‘slums’, the traffic in fake documents that seek to stave off slum demolitions, and (p.xxi) representatives of the ‘legal’ city such as Residents Welfare Associations (RWA)? What can the increasing visibility of RWAs in the quotidian politics of the city tell us about new notions of citizenship and the emergent relationships between middle classes the state, and the market? And, what is shared between new forms of urban religiosity, the desire for a ‘global’ city, and new consumer cultures? These are the key themes the book seeks to explore in order to underscore the idea that, rather than essence, the city is a series of overlapping meanings produced at points of conjunction. The issues raised in the above paragraph connect with an important perspective regarding the experience of the city. ‘To what extent must one expect a city to be defined’, Amita Baviskar asks, ‘as a singular community sharing a common identity and a public culture?’ (1998: 3102). Baviskar herself provides an answer to this. ‘Surely, a metropolis is, by its very nature’, she says, ‘many things to many people, marked by composite cultures and multiple life worlds?’ (1998: 3102). ‘It is precisely the heterogeneity of Delhi’, she concludes, ‘which is the hallmark of contemporary urban experience everywhere’ (1998: 3102). My intent in this book is to explore the multiple and contingent meanings of the city and their political dimensions, including the disputed nature of urban spaces that make the city a contested locality (Desai and Sanyal 2012). It is for this reason that fieldwork for this book has ranged over slums and resettlement colonies, government departments, offices of pyramid selling schemes, ‘urban villages’, shopping malls, living rooms of the middle and upper middle classes, gated communities, RWAs, religious theme parks, government offices, ‘international trade fairs’, ‘citizen–state cooperation’ workshops, and the Delhi state archives. Somewhere, in among all these sites, are the experiences of the metropolis. As considerable scholarship for both Western and non-Western contexts demonstrates (King 1976; Kusno 2000; Massey 1994), ‘spatial strategies’ (Deshpande 2000) constitute one of the most significant ways in which social processes are both expressed and experienced; modern Delhi is a good example of this. From the making of New Delhi, the establishment of the Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT) in 1937, through to its successor body the Delhi Page 4 of 24

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Introduction Development Authority (DDA), established in 1957, and then to current real estate behemoths such as the DLF corporation (established in 1946), urban spaces have (p.xxii) been significant sites for expressions of numerous ideologies of community life. In this book, I am interested in spatial strategies that concretize significant contemporary social and cultural processes. These, to gloss the material of the different chapters, include histories and strategies of ‘informal’ populations as they move across the national space in search of livelihoods and claim space in the metropolis; relationships between the urban poor, the state, and the market in the making of the informal city; the politics and cultures of slum demolitions, and the making of a ‘global’ city; the rise of a middle-class ‘activism’ and its role in delineating realms of legality and illegality in the city; middle-class consciousness and its manifestations in new forms of residence, consumption and leisure; the changing nature of the relationship between the state and urban middle classes; and discourses of consumerism as they travel across the registers of class, nation, gender, and citizenship. Scholarship on the relationship between urban residential patterns and class has, of course, a well-established history (Castells 1977; Kurtulus 2007; Sandhu 2003; Soni 2000; Thrift and Amin 1987) and I do not wish to add to it. I am, instead, interested in a more generalized context of the social uses of space. My project in this book is perhaps more akin to the one recently pursued by de Kooning (2007), who explores the making of ‘new upper middle class identities’ (de Kooning 2007: 66) in Cairo through focusing on upmarket ‘American’ style coffee shops. The new-style Cairo coffee shops, de Kooning says, ‘function as a prism through which one can view the way local and global come together to create specific configurations of hierarchy and distinction, closeness and distance, and implement specific spatial regimes based on social segregation’ (2007: 66). The remainder of this chapter outlines similar contexts of discussion for India through exploring the prismatic nature of different spaces where the refractions are a series of contests about urban ‘improvements’, spatialized identity politics, the state’s attempt to shape the city through bureaucratic dicta, and projects of transformations that seek to conjure both the ideal urban body and idealized topographies.

Improving Delhi: Public–Private Partnership in the Early-Twentieth Century The 3,000-acre privately developed Delhi Land and Finance (DLF) City is located south of Delhi, immediately across the border, in the (p.xxiii) Gurgaon district of Haryana. Beginning in the mid-1980s, DLF City was constructed by the DLF corporation, and is regarded in both scholarly (Brosius 2010; Dupont 2005; King 2004) as well as popular writing (Jain 2002) as a significant site for the making of contemporary cultures of transnational urbanism in India. Chapters five, six, and seven provide an ethnography of specific sites within DLF City. Its ‘hyper’ malls, gated residential communities, and corporate offices (occupied, among others, by call centres, business process outsourcing forms, and prominent Multi-National Corporations or MNCs) speak of an urban transformation that is Page 5 of 24

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Introduction also the making of new ideas of the modern—‘middle class’—Indian self. However, notwithstanding its current image as a significant force in the making of a ‘twenty-first century’ India (DLF’s corporate slogan is ‘Building India’ and both corporate and official promotions refer to Gurgaon as ‘Millennium City’), there is a longer—and instructive— history of spatial modernity and urban improvements that involves this private entity and the state. The DLF corporation was established in 1946 by Chaudhury Raghvendra Singh, a civil servant and landowner belonging to the agricultural caste of Jats. Until the mid-1950s, DLF had a significant presence in the private real estate market in Delhi. The key aspect of its business strategy was its ability to both surmount as well as manipulate the extraordinary layers of land and ‘planning’ regulations instituted by the colonial state (Hosagrahar 2007; Legg 2007). The background to this lay in the control the state exercised over vast tracts of Nazul lands, namely, ‘the Delhi Crown lands denoting property which has descended to Government either as successor of former Government, or by escheat, in absence of heirs to legal owners’ (Gazeteer of Rural Delhi, Delhi Administration 1987). The colonial government had, in 1874, ‘handed over the administration of Nazul estates to the Delhi Municipal Council as well as all income accruing there from’ (Hume Report 1936: 3). Hence, private entities in the real estate business such as DLF had two ways of acquiring land for their commercial activities: buying from large landholders (zamindars) whose properties escaped the Nazul regulations, or acquiring lands falling under the Nazul areas through negotiation with the DIT. The latter body was established in 1937 in the wake ‘of a report by Mr. A.P. Hume, ICS, on congestion in Delhi city’ (Annual Administration Report of the Delhi Province for 1937–1939: 26–7). In February 1938, it ‘notified’ its first (and best (p.xxiv) known) urban improvement scheme, namely, the Delhi Ajmeri Gate Slum Clearance Scheme (Delhi Improvement Trust 1941; Legg 2007). Covering an area of 68.21 acres, the Scheme, as Legg (2007) suggests, was produced through ‘adjustments’ to ‘European, liberal, welfare policies to the colonial context’ (Legg 2007: 191); these adjustments related to ‘a reluctance to invest [in the colonized society and] a landscaping urge that sought to separate and contain the potentially threatening native population’ (Legg 2007: 191). There were two specific contexts to the formation of the DIT. The first relates to a body of thinking on urban development and policy that had been circulating in the Euro-American world for quite some time, slowly finding its way to various transnational contexts. This included the ‘garden city’ movement (Ward 1992; see Lu 2006 for its application in China) and strategies for slum-clearance based on ‘scientific’ methods. So, in 1938, while proceeding on leave to England, the first Chairman of the Trust, A.P. Hume, applied for financial assistance so that ‘he might take the opportunity of studying the methods adopted for the removal of congestion in cities in the United Kingdom and the Continent’.2 Second, as scholars have pointed out, ‘congested’ native domains of settlement—seemingly

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Introduction impermeable to the colonial gaze—also came to be regarded as potential sites of political danger (Kenny and Chatterjee 1999; Legg 2007). From its inception, the Trust was armed with extensive powers which included those of compulsory acquisition of land (via the Land Acquisition Act of 1894) and the implementation of a plethora of ‘improvement’ schemes. In principle at least, the Trust assigned itself the task of ‘improving’ a colonial citizenry through acting to improve—since apparently, it refused to do so itself—the spaces of its dwelling, leisure, and commerce; the Trust ensured its ken extended the most minute spatial blemish (‘remedying defective ventilation’), to magisterial territorial ambitions (‘the acquisition of any land’). However, it aimed not at spatial egalitarianism, but a hierarchy of new—improved—spaces: the very poor, the poor, and the middle classes were to be allotted in their own spaces, each with its own characteristics (Hosagrahar 2007). So, the redevelopment of Basti Harphool Singh in North Delhi would not require ‘public bathing places’ since it was to be occupied by ‘middle-class populations’,3 whereas the nearby Ahata Kidara locality—meant for the ‘labouring classes’ and located (p.xxv) in vicinity of lime kilns—would have them.4 In any case, all new spaces—irrespective of their social characteristics—required constant official vigilance to thwart indigenous propensities to subvert planned modernity by altering specifications of area, height, and proximity, and ‘defeating’ the ‘objects of making … a good layout’.5 Delhi residents who dealt with DIT narrated, however, their own tales of woe regarding its activities. A significant complaint related to the monopolistic nature of Trust’s powers, which was, as in the following case, expressed in language that invoked familiar structures of oppression. In 1947, Mr Devraj Verma, ‘Engineer and Contractor’, wrote to the Minister of Health, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (given its focus of ‘sanitizing’ the city, the Trust fell under this Ministry) that the Trust leased out ‘thousand of small plots to middle-class and poor people, and that: This method puts the Trust in the position of a big zamindar [feudal landlord] and the lessees into the position of serfs, continually being harassed and placed entirely under the heels of the petty officials of the Trust…. The leases deeds …. are changed at every renewal according to the whims of the officers of the Trust. Copy of letter dated 30 September 1947, from Devraj Verma, Engineer and Contractor, to the Hon’ble Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Minister for Health, Government of India. File 1/133/1947/Delhi State Archives. Others complained that the Trust was unmindful of the economic condition of lessees when it sought to recover ‘damages … for unauthorized occupation of land’. So, Kaushalya Devi wrote that she was ‘a refugee and a widow [and that] Page 7 of 24

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Introduction it is not possible for me to pay so much amount [sic] … as intimated in the above quoted letter within a very short period of four days’.6 It was also a common complaint that the Trust frequently cancelled leases by using the Premises Eviction Act (1950) without properly determining the facts of the case.7 Apparently, it did not display the same alacrity when it came to approving building plans by individual applicants, and in 1954, Mr Asa Ram, resident of Sarai Rohilla locality, was forced to write to the Delhi state government that he had been waiting for over a year to hear from the Trust.8 During the 1940s and 1950s, private corporations such as DLF that hoped to profit from rapidly expanding demand for real estate9 had to deal with a formidable state apparatus, and their business ambitions were significantly circumscribed by the seemingly infinite ambitions (p.xxvi) and powers of the DIT. In addition to the Nazul lands it had acquired in 1937 (on which it carried out ‘Nazul schemes’), the Trust further consolidated its holdings through land purchases (often compulsorily) from private owners (which became sites of the ‘Trust schemes’). ‘Builders’ and ‘colonizers’ such as DLF could gain permission to build in one of the Town Expansion Schemes of the Trust10 by agreeing to develop public infrastructure ‘to the standard and satisfaction of the Improvement Trust’.11 Further, the colonizers were to ‘transfer to the … Trust free of cost the land under roads, public places and parks etc.’ and pay a fee per square yard.12 Private developers objected strongly to the above terms, and their representative body—the Delhi Colonisers Association—tried its best to gain concessions. This included the plea that since private individuals who built on their plots were not expected to ‘pay anything by way of provision of essential services’, neither should the commercial developers.13 This appeal was not successful and in 1954 it was reported that DLF had begun to lay ‘essential services’ in the areas it was developing. By 1949, DLF had ‘developed some of the first residential colonies in Delhi such as Krishna Nagar in East Delhi’.14 The social imaginary that DLF sought to conjure for its localities was one animated by a curious mixture of American and British stylistic references. Figure I.1 shows a DLF advertisement from 1956 for some of its key projects in Delhi. Here, in a city still pock-marked by the scars of the post-partition trauma and regulated by the dicta of the DIT Building Manual, is a vision of joyful, cartoonish intensity. A man-about-town preens near a fountain in North-West Delhi, an insouciant young couple goes boating in North Delhi, a Hollywood starlet-like figure prepares to descend into a swimming-pool in West Delhi, an ‘Oxford’ don welcomes a school-boy in South Delhi, and a prosperous elderly couple surveys manicured domains in Central-South Delhi. It is a fantabulous vision of post-partition utopia wrenched from the ascetic reaches of the FiveYear Plan state, and distant from the messianic—‘slum-clearing’—gaze of the DIT. There is a striking continuity of aspirational themes between mid-twentieth Page 8 of 24

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Introduction advertisements such as these, and the ones for twenty-first-century, gated residential communities that show images of ‘modern’ men and women jogging on private tracks, swimming in private pools, and enjoying privatized educational facilities (see Chapters four to seven). Real estate development in India (p.xxvii) has been a prime site for the making of the consumer-citizen, an idea I will discuss in later chapters. Further, as I point out in Chapters five, six, and seven, the current phase of middle-class ‘activism’, in the shape of RWAs, also owes much to urban spatial transformations initiated by companies such as DLF, which gained ground in the wake of economic liberalization policies put in train by the Congress party through its New Industrial Policy in 1980 (Dutta 2004; Sengupta 2008).

The utopian—and commodified —urbanism conjured by DLF was founded on a keen grasp of spatial-bureaucratic ‘realpolitik’, and the company was adept at finding its way around the maze of official rules

Figure I.1 Advertisement for DLF, 1956 Source: Delhi State Archives

and regulations that stood in the way of its commercial ambitions. There is a hint of this in the complaint of an aggrieved plot owner of Rajouri Garden, one of the DLF-developed localities in West Delhi, to (p.xxviii) the Chief Minister of Delhi in 1954. Mr Jamnadass Wahi, a resident of Bazar Sitaram (Old Delhi) wrote that he had purchased a plot from DLF in 1952, and had been assured by the firm that ‘the Rajouri Garden scheme has been approved and there will be no hindrances in building a house there’. However, even after two years of submissions, the DIT had not approved the plans. On the other hand, DLF had been constructing ‘houses in scores in Rajouri Gardens and … asking everybody to give them [a] contract for erection’.15 It appeared to Mr Wahi that DIT had approved DLFs plans ‘through the back door’ while discriminating against individuals who wished to construct on their own: I think so far DLF belongs to rich party (sic) and some monied people have interest in the DLF that is why they are erecting and in other words DIT

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Introduction forcing (sic) the public to give the erection work to DLF and not accepting plans directly from the public…. Letter dated 23 March 1954, Plot No. 181 “J” Rajouri Garden, Najafgarh, from Jamnadass Wahi, 1411 Bazar Sitaram, Delhi, to the Chief Minister, Delhi State. File 1/26/1954/LSG/DSA. The possibly illicit relationship with the state also stretched in other directions. Hindustan Colonisers and Modern Delhi Corporation (MDC) were two smallscale companies involved in land transactions in the prestigious locality of New Delhi South Extension. MDC was a family-run firm which had substantial land holdings in the area and had appointed Hindustan Colonisers as its agent. The latter sold around fifty plots, mainly to overseas Indians residing in ‘British East Africa’. However, in July 1955, the lawyer for Hindustan Colonisers informed the Chairman of DIT that MDC had entered another agreement with DLF to alter the layout of the area and effect new sales.16 The original plan of ‘plotting’ had been overseen by DIT, and we can only speculate that DLF—alive to a lucrative commercial opportunity—had managed to ‘convince’ some level of DIT bureaucracy to avert its gaze from the new circumstances. Negotiations with the state in order to further private enterprise were, then, a crucial aspect of the urbanism nurtured by DLF; its urban spaces and citizenry were those created through treating the state as a facilitator of individual choice. DLF’s ‘colonies’ were carved out through combating the professed ‘socialist’ and anti-consumerist proclamations of the state. It is this relatively long history of the consumer-citizen, nurtured among the processes of private urban development, that (p.xxix) forms the background to contemporary contexts of urban middle-class activism which I will discuss in other parts of the book. This parallel history—that sits alongside that of the centralizing state with its emphasis on curbing consumption in order to invest in productive industrial capacity—allows an understanding of the present as both an accumulation of the past as well as a break from it. This history is also crucial to an understanding of the relationship between the state and the market in the making of ‘civil society’. That is to say it allows us to explore the intrinsic connectedness between the three realms. The manner in which this relationship contributes to the making of ‘public interest’ has been the focus of analysis in different fields including ‘educational reform’ (Kamat 2002b, 2004), ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ (Baviskar 2002; Baviskar et al. 2006), and middle class ‘environmental activism’ (Mawdsley 2004). In 1957, the soi-disant dreams of an alternative spatial modernity—marked by swimming pools and buxom beauties, lakes, and carefree couples, ‘flower bedecked’ roads, and their patrician crowds—came to an end. For, following a highly critical report of an inquiry into the functioning of the DIT published in 1951, the government promulgated The Delhi (Control of Building Operations) Page 10 of 24

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Introduction Ordinance of 1955, leading to the establishment of the Delhi Development Provisional Authority. The Provisional Authority was, in turn, succeeded by the DDA in 1957.17 The Ordinance of 1955 elaborated a magisterial vision of urban control, transcribing its writ across the brisk and erratic ambitions of the living —and the moribund spatiality of the dead—for not only did the DDA hold sway over all areas that fell outside the jurisdiction of local authorities (such as municipal committees), and that were covered by the DIT Town Expansion Schemes, it also declared ‘all graveyards in Delhi State to be controlled areas’.18 While 1957 marks the formal termination of the spatial project of producing the consumer-citizen—aspiring to secure appropriate and exclusive urban spaces— the background to this was more complex, for there were both continuities and ruptures between the Hume Report of 1936, and the Birla Inquiry of 1951 that gave birth to the DDA. In effect that led to the establishment of the DIT, we can read the Birla Report (BR) as an early instance of middle-class activism that advocated a far more inclusive and considerate attitude to the urban poor than what was to follow. So, for example, even though it subscribed (p.xxx) to the DIT discourse on the linkage between environment and character (though now ‘national’ character), the BR differed in two significant aspects in recommending a new ‘planning and controlling Authority’ (BR 1951: 26). First, the Committee was clear that ‘slum clearance’ should take place only once alternative accommodation had been found for the evictees—not always the practice with DIT—(Hosagrahar 2007)—and that ‘private enterprise’, rather than the mooted Authority, should be encouraged to construct alternate accommodation within a reasonable distance from the original place of habitation. Partha Chatterjee (2004) suggests that middle-class sympathies for slum dwellers—expressed in the ‘widespread revulsion’ (Chatterjee 2004: 134) against slum demolitions during the 1975 Emergency period—are of late twentieth century provenance. However, the idea that the poor ‘had a right to a habitation and a livelihood in the city and that government authorities could not evict or penalize them at will without providing for some sort of resettlement and rehabilitation’ (Chatterjee 2004: 136) has, as the BR shows, a longer history. At the dawn of the postcolonial era, the Birla Committee sought to re-inscribe a humane urbanism, simultaneously as it attempted to extricate post-colonial urban space from bureaucratic authoritarianism. As we will see in Part 1 of the book, the current situation is a far cry from this. With the establishment of the DDA, the small window offered to private developers was firmly shuttered and even ‘while the DDA was in the process of preparing a Master Plan for the city, the government announced a freeze on all vacant undeveloped land within the urbanizable limits’ (Kacker 2005: 72). Further, ‘establishing itself as the sole agency legally authorized to develop and dispose of land, the State left little, or no [,] role for the private land

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Introduction developer’ (Kacker 2005: 72). By December 1977, DDA had acquired an area of 39,455 acres ‘for the planned development of Delhi’.19 The spectre of ‘planning’—with its connotations of the centralizing state and deterrents to private enterprise—seemed to indicate the demise of the consumer-citizen. However, there is another spatial history that indicates otherwise. This is the history of consanguineal capitalism—a specific set of social, economic, and cultural strategies that form the background to both contemporary urban developments as well as the middle-class activism that define the city in particular ways. This history, concerning India’s most famous private real estate (p.xxxi) development—DLF City—will be explored in Chapter six. DLF City, in turn, provides an entry to some of the key topics that the book is concerned with. The reshaping of urban spaces and the changing role of the state and private interests within this are important to an understanding of contemporary Indian modernity itself. It is in this context that the book explores connections between new urban spaces, ideas of cosmopolitanism, gender politics, new forms of religiosity, middle-class family life, and the place of the urban poor within imaginations of ‘global’ cities.

Official Controls and Private Claims: The State, Identities, and the City The modern spatial history of Delhi—that which includes the state as well as private interests in land—is an account of contests over space and identities between an extraordinary variety of claimants to the city and the state. Throughout the twentieth century, the ‘state’, however, was no monolithic entity with clearly defined objectives and methods of control and consent. A number of bodies—scattered across a number of government departments—sought to exert their writ over the administrative and political centre of the country. These included the DIT, the Notified Area Committee, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC), Imperial Delhi Municipal Committee, the Department of Education, Health and Lands, the Office of the Chief Commissioner of Delhi, and after 1947, the Ministry of Rehabilitation. The ethnographic part of the book is also an account of the scattered state— appearing in various guises across the city—in our own times. In accounting for the state, the discussion also addresses the lives of the ‘people’: urban poor and the bureaucracies that deal with them, and middle-class residents and the ebb and flow of their engagements with official bodies. The DLF advertisement from 1956 provides a vivid sense of some of the claims upon the city, that of prosperous urban residents suspended between the ‘savings’ strictures of the Five-Year Plan state and the consuming desires of modernity. Those residents of the city who were not as privileged as the ones represented in the advertisement experienced the city differently, mostly as a series of mechanisms of control and discipline. This history of control of urban spaces is crucial to an (p.xxxii) understanding of the contemporary enthusiasm for gated communities and other contexts of restricted access. It provides the Page 12 of 24

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Introduction background to discussion in different parts of the book on the relationship between the privileged and the poor, ‘beautification’ programmes and slum clearance, and urban fear and its proposed solutions. Control of the street—occupied by the working classes for both work and residential purposes—was a crucial area of concern. In 1941, the bye-laws of Notified Area Committee of the Civil Lines area that related to ‘hand carts’ used by street hawkers began with the proviso that hand carts were ‘not to be propelled along the streets from half an hour after sunset until half an hour before sunrise’. Further, the bye-laws specified that carts could not be kept ‘stationary in any street or place in order to wait for customers’.20 The street and its key occupants were also subject to regulations that defined offences through the idea of public hygiene. In 1941 as well, the Notified Area Committee of Mehrauli specified that ‘no licence holder [in the meat and fish trade] or his servant shall carry meat or fish through any street or public place except in … such a manner that the meat shall not be seen by passers-by.’21 The aesthetic regulation of the street extended, however, beyond concerns of corporeal hygiene to those of moral and civic sensibilities. Given the nature of the punishable acts—and the sites where they were committed—it was clearly the poor who were the target. In 1941, the Punjab Suppression of Indecent Advertisements Act was extended to Delhi, and the Chief Commissioner of Delhi was clear as to its jurisdiction: … any advertisement, interpretation relating to syphilis, gonorrhaea, nervous debility, or other complaint or infirmity arising from or relating to sexual intercourse shall be deemed to be printed or written matter of an indecent nature. Further that, whosoever affixes to, inscribes or stencils on any houses, building, wall, hoarding, gate, fence, pillar, post, board, tree, or any other things whatsoever so as to be visible to a person being in or passing along any street, public highway or foot-path, and whoever affixes to, or inscribes or stencils on any public latrine or urinal, or exhibits to public view in the window of any house or shop, any picture or printed or written matter which is of indecent nature, shall, on conviction, be punished with (p.xxxiii) imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to six months or with fine which may extend to five hundred rupees, or with both ….22 Urban confinement—an aspect that currently expresses itself through middleclass (and upper middle-class) gated enclaves—was part of early twentiethcentury urban discourse in a different register: its objects of confinement were

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Introduction quite different from the populations that have retreated behind walls and fences at the present time. In 1938, soon after the formation of the DIT, it was decided to develop the Karol Bagh area to the West of the city as part of the residential Western Extension Scheme. However, as the Trust saw it, there was a serious obstruction to its plans, for Karol Bagh was home to a Reclamation Colony, a delimited area that contained members of ‘Criminal Tribes’, with strict rules that restricted their movements beyond the boundaries of the colony. Colonial discourse and regulation of Criminal Tribes, as Radhakrishna (2001) points out, was built upon European debates regarding the ‘criminal classes’ and the possibilities of their ‘rehabilitation’ into dutiful citizens. In the Indian context, its logic was based ‘on the notion … of crime as a profession passed on from generation of criminal caste to another’ (Radhakrishna 2001: 5). Twentieth century regulation of criminal tribes was based upon the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and its subsequent modifications in later years. The Act of 1871, as Sanjay Nigam also points out, was the culmination of a number of already existing processes through which the state sought to place curbs upon a variety of communities that were deemed to be ‘criminal’ in their psychic and cultural make-up (Nigam 1990). Residents of Reclamation Colonies were required to ‘report … at fixed intervals to notify [their] absence or intended absence from [their] place’.23 In the archival sources from where this material is drawn, there is extensive discussion of a member of the Sansi ‘criminal tribe’. Tellingly, the only name official documents give him is Jangli (‘the wild one’/‘of the jungle’). There are echoes of the above scenario closer to our own time, where official plans regarding the regulation of urban spaces have followed explicitly authoritarian frameworks. In early 2008, the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi, Tejendra Khanna, issued a directive that Delhi residents would be required to carry identity cards as proof of residence and that police constables would be authorized to make ‘random (p.xxxiv) checks’.24 The directive—put forward as a ‘security’ measure to put a check on ‘suspicious’ and ‘undesirable’ populations —came under heavy criticism from a variety of sources. The Chief Minister of Bihar (from where many poor people migrate to Delhi) described it as an attempt to turn Delhi into a ‘police state’. The ensuing controversy led to the withdrawal of the directive. Chapters one, two, and three provide a discussion of that section of the urban population—the poor, those without the means of providing ‘proof’—that is most vulnerable to the demands of the state, such as those formulated by the Lieutenant-Governor. The discussion of these chapters explores the life-worlds of the urban poor and their contribution in the making of the ‘formal’ city, the constant and frequently enforced threats of displacement (via ‘slum demolitions’, for example), and their never-ending efforts at securing a foothold within it (say, through purchasing fake identity cards). These chapters bring together the cultures of itinerant labour, insecure habitation, and strategies of counterfeiting as urban contexts that are indispensable to an Page 14 of 24

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Introduction understanding of the post-colonial city. As Chapter two investigates, official attempts at regulation of movement and residence elicit myriad responses from economically and socially marginalized sections of the poor which, in turn, help to produce complex senses of community. Notwithstanding the fear and anxiety generated by non-metropolitan populations, as I discuss in different parts of the book, the village has an important place in the modern Indian urban imagination. Whether in the case of ‘slum-dwellers’ (Chapter four), gated communities (Chapters six and seven), or shopping malls (Chapter nine), a particular idea of the village animates a great deal of thinking about urban life. This is not, of course, the actual village, but rather, the romanticized ‘model village’ idea drawn both from colonial and nationalist discourses about ‘essential India’ (Inden 1990). It was this perspective that led Major W.H. Crichton, Assistant Director of Public Health for Delhi Province, to outline his plan for the construction of a ‘model village’ at Nangli Razapur in Central-South Delhi in 1937. The ‘model village’ was to accommodate 104 families and serve as a showcase of standardized modern planning procedures that would, in turn, conjure an organic and well-balanced ‘village community’. In addition to appropriate planning for sanitation (‘public health’ was a significant rationale underpinning urban policy), the village was to have spaces (p.xxxv) for workshops, wells, panchayat (village committee) house, temples, and ‘cowbyres’. It was hoped that ‘the proximity of Nangli Razapur to the Imperial Capital would afford an opportunity for many people to visit the village’ as a learning experience.25 Though Major Crichton’s plans never got off the ground on financial grounds, we will see later in the book that ideas of ‘rural idyll’, and ‘genuine’ and ‘inauthentic’ villagers continue to play an important role in the ways urban life ways are imagined and played out. ‘Model villages’ and their model populations notwithstanding, it is irreconcilability and expropriation that appear as the dominant motif of urban life. In the former case, different castes sought to live among their ‘own’, Hindus sought separate spaces from Muslims and ‘respectable’ post-partition refugees asked for separation from ‘disreputable’ populations.26 With respect to the expropriation, the construction of New Delhi led to forcible removal of hundreds of villages, the DIT frequently ‘deprived [villagers] of their most precious belonging’ in pursuit of its ‘schemes’,27 and in the wake of the partition, rural populations complained bitterly that land acquisition under the Resettlement of Displaced Persons Act of 1948 had forced them to leave ‘our ancestral homes where we have lived for ages’.28 In our own time, irreconcilability and expropriation have shifted to other spatial registers, those which relate to walled spaces of residence and attempt to ‘transform’ the National Capital Region from an ‘ordinary’ (Robinson 2006) to a ‘global’ space. As Chapters four to seven explore, gated communities manifest a politics of space that, simultaneously as it is facilitated by the state, signifies a Page 15 of 24

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Introduction lack of confidence in the state’s ability to provide security and everyday infrastructure, the strong sense of a middle class under threat from urban ‘under-classes’, and the overwhelming perception that such threats can only be countered through creating highly regulated spaces. As for the will to transform, it is a narrative that threads its way through all parts of the book, in terms of both the desires of the agents of transformation and the fate of those who might be caught at its sharp end.

Transforming Spaces The Indian urban ‘transformation’ narrative is part of a global one. If the stated rationale for ‘colonial urban development’ and governmentality (p.xxxvi) was to encourage change among native populations, post-colonial states position urban transformations within frameworks of national pride, middle-class aesthetic sensibilities, and increasingly, the tourist dollar. So, if in Delhi, global trends in residential design, consumerist practice, and leisure activities manifest in the construction of gated communities (Chapters five, six, and seven), Disneyfied temple complexes (Chapter eight) and shopping malls (Chapters nine and ten), and the government wants to ‘clean up’ the Yamuna riverfront by cleansing it of ‘unsightly’ slum-dwellers, in Cairo, ‘The major bazaar area of Khan al-Khalili has been “gentrified” and cleared of residual residents’ (Abu-Lughod 2004: 141). However, as Chapter eleven explores in the context of a ‘pyramid’ selling scheme popular among Delhi’s poor, ‘residual residents’ do not simply depart the ‘global city’. Rather, they invent localized means of taking part in the transnational processes that ebb and flow among them as rivers of dreams, possibilities of change, and endlessly alluring senses of the city. Of course, the capacity to endure the travails along the yellowbrick road varies from person to person. In post-colonial cities, discourses of urban transformation are most palpably experienced through actions upon space. Hence, soon after the end of colonial rule, ‘the government of India put forward a policy on the removal of the statues of the British colonists [that occupied key locations in New Delhi]’ (Alley 1997: 973). Further, ‘members of Parliament pressed Cabinet Ministers and the Prime Minister to act quickly to change the names of roads and rid landscapes … of colonial icons’ (1997: 973). There was overwhelming agreement among parliamentarians ‘that landscapes in Delhi … were to become the arenas for projecting the new nationalism to the people’ (1997: 973). Along with debates on spatial nomenclature, the modernist and nationalist imagination of the city was also preoccupied with the question of the ‘appropriate’ kind of person to occupy the capital city, in order that the transformational narrative—from native to citizen—might become reality. In 1952, Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) Jag Parvesh Chandra (later to become the Chief Executive Councillor) sought to introduce the ‘The Delhi Students’ Compulsory Manual Labour Bill’ in order ‘to help in the all-round development of the youth of the state and thereby its one-sidedness and to assist Page 16 of 24

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Introduction the national effort to achieve [the] planned development of the country’.29 The Bill recommended (p.xxxvii) four hours of manual labour per week per male student. A certificate to the effect was to be produced in order to take annual examinations for promotion to a higher grade. In keeping with the gendered nature of the ‘suitable’ urban body, the Bill made provision for exemptions to female students. The Bill was unable to muster adequate support and was not passed.30 A significant development at the current time bears upon the reconsideration of the figure of the ideal urban citizen through the insertion of the urban woman in discourses of urban modernity. A key context for this is the consolidation of new narratives around consumerism (I will explain its ‘newness’ in subsequent chapters). In Chapters five, seven, and ten, I explore the specific ways in which the ‘middle-class woman’ has emerged as a public figure in contemporary discourses of spatial modernity. Whereas Chapters five and seven focus on the public woman of the gated community, Chapter ten outlines the making of a gendered consciousness of the city that is linked to new spaces of consumption such as shopping malls. Persons ‘fit’ to occupy urban terrains deserve appropriate urban terrains to occupy. This has been the most significant narrative thread that links Delhi’s immediate past to its present. The various excisions and exclusions that constituted the improvement strategies of the DIT find echoes in our own time, not least in the vocabulary of ‘slum-clearance’. In January 2005, the then Minister for Tourism, Jagmohan (a key figure behind the drive to remove slums and illegal settlements in Delhi), noted that the Yamuna river ‘used to be a part of city life. [But that] over the years, it has been relegated to the background’.31 Jagmohan’s comments were related to a plan to ‘relocate’ a number of slums (or, bastis—hamlets—as their inhabitants refer to them) that dotted the riverbank. In order to, once again, ‘connect Yamuna to Delhi’, the plan entailed the redevelopment of ‘The over 220-acre Yamuna bed … [into] a “national hub”, with memorials, tourist spots and historical monuments’. ‘The idea’, the Minister noted, ‘is to imaginatively integrate and prepare a symbol of India’s rich civilization based on the synthesis of our culture’: We will connect the river to India’s ancient history which is the Indraprastha rhe Indraprastha ruins, medieval history which means the Red Fort and contemporary history, which is represented by the August Kranti Park from where the Prime Minister addresses the nation on August 15.32 (‘No Slums, Walk Along Yamuna’, Prarthana Gehlote, The Indian Express, 11 January 2005). (p.xxxviii) Some months later, plans for ‘cleaning up’ the riverfront had moved beyond making it a showpiece of ‘Indian civilization’ to more global concerns. The Delhi Tourism Development Corporation (DTDC) had engaged a consultancy Page 17 of 24

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Introduction firm—Fairwood—that presented a report on converting ‘7000 acres of the Yamuna riverfront … into sporting spaces ahead of the [2010] Commonwealth Games (CWG)’.33 The report talked of spaces for jogging and cycling tracks, ‘dirt biking’, and golf courses: Fairwood says the thrust of the plan is to release social spaces for Delhiites and make the capital a sporting destination for the whole country. ‘We have as our benchmark riverfront development along rivers like the Thames, Potomac, Danube, Singapore, and even rivers in Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia,’ Director [of DTDC] Ranbir Saran Das said. Nowhere is the river front and the river left to decay like here, he added. (‘Batting by the Yamuna’, Sreelatha Menon, The Indian Express, 11 July 2005). Neither a part of the national mainstream, nor of global flows, the Yamuna riverfront was presented as stasis personified (see Baviskar 2012 for a counter argument). We do not know how justified the Delhi government felt in remunerating Fairwood, given that no further action was taken and the report’s key role appears to have been to supplement global urban fantasies. More significantly, however, the Fairwood report and the Yamuna plan formulated by Minister Jagmohan prepared the grounds for later demolitions of settlements along the river through adding to ‘public opinion’ on the importance of reintegrating alienated urban tracts and rejuvenating ‘decayed’ topographies. The social life of urban settlements referred to as slums is, as Chapters one to three explore, an intrinsic part of the making of Indian urban and national life. They are not products of an aberrant urbanism and city planning gone wrong; rather, they constitute parallel histories—sitting alongside those of national monuments and middle-class housing—of relationships between the state, the markets, and different forms of entitlements that are otherwise homogenized under ‘citizenship’. Later in the book (Chapter eleven), I will return to an investigation of the complex ways in which the urban poor are significant sites of transnational processes, simultaneously as observers characterize ‘slum dwellers’ as the antithesis of dynamic globalism and as decay.

(p.xxxix) Finding the City: Master Plans, Heritage Maps, Green Maps, Talk Circuits, and Toilet Maps I opened this chapter with the question ‘How does one study the city?’ So far, the discussion has sought to indicate that this query makes greatest sense when positioned alongside another: ‘Where do we find the city?’ That is to say, what different maps constitute the cities of actual habitation, practices, and performances? The cover of the book Unruly Cities, edited by Pile et al. (1999), has an appropriately ‘unruly’ picture of an Indian street scene. Perhaps it’s a town in Rajasthan. From whose point of view this street might appear unruly is not explained. The footpaths are chock-a-block with stalls, push-carts, bicycles, Page 18 of 24

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Introduction shoppers, and stopped traffic. What space remains on the street is taken over by rickshaws, tempos, scooters, and other kinds of vehicles. There are people and objects everywhere. The streetlights are festooned with flags (perhaps of a political party) and the buildings are a jumble of designs, colours, materials, and heights. ‘Unruliness’ as the leitmotif is the essence of cities such as those depicted on the cover of the book. This book suggests that attention to specific contexts—rather than a particular spirit that putatively captures the ‘essence’ of a city (‘cosmopolitan Mumbai’, ‘cultured Lucknow’, ‘unruly X’)—is also the simultaneous formulation of methods of studying the fleeting tableau of urban life. There are multiple maps that confront us in our everyday lives as observers and occupants of urban landscapes, and I will conclude this chapter with a brief survey of the territories outlined by a small number of the imprints of the urban imagination. In 2006, the India Habitat Centre in Central Delhi—a prominent hub for exhibitions, conferences, conventions, as well as housing several non-profit organizations—was the venue of a fascinating exhibition on Delhi that forms the first example of the three, among several, maps of Delhi I wish to point to as well as counterpoise to other outlines of the city. The exhibition was entitled ‘Imagining Delhi’. It was organized by the Delhi Urban Arts Commission (DUAC), a body established in 1973 to advise the central government as well as local bodies ‘in the matter of preserving, developing and maintaining the aesthetic quality of urban and environmental design within Delhi’.34 Held in an open courtyard, the exhibition consisted of seventy-two panels with (p.xl) photographs, sketches, and text, each panel professionally designed with high production values. Arranged along a temporal sequence, the exhibition began with the seventeenth century history of Delhi, with the first panel entitled ‘1638: The Founding of Shahjahanbad [Old Delhi]’. Other panels were as follows: ‘1911: Delhi Becomes the Capital of British India’, ‘1947: Delhi, the Capital of Independent India’, ‘1962: The first Master Plan for Delhi is Conceived’, ‘1990: Liberalization of the Economy Transforms the City’, and ‘2021: What Kind of Delhi will the Century Bring?’ Graphic illustrations of historical ‘milestones’ gave way in other parts of the exhibition to an engagement with spatial concerns. So, images of ‘Green Delhi’, ‘Streets and Public Areas’ sat alongside those on ‘Built Form: Making Delhi a World Heritage City’, and ‘Housing: The Scale of the Problem’. Other panels outlined proposals for the city as a series of linked spaces (‘East Delhi Network: Develop Neighbourhood Parks on Vacant Pieces of Land’ and ‘Grand Open Spaces: Networking Green Spaces for Tomorrow’), reclaimed spaces of leisure (‘Promenade Linking the Green Belt along Drainage Channel’), and global aesthetics (‘Enhanced Imageability: Appropriate Street Furniture’).

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Introduction Another map of Delhi can be read off the weekly listings of art exhibitions, lectures, and a variety of formally organized cultural performances such as classical dance and singing. Let us call this the intelligentsia map of the city. The ‘Art Listings’ section of Delhi: First City magazine is a rough and ready guide to this. It consists of a vast listing of art exhibition spaces—Academy of Fine Arts and Literature, Triveni Kala Sangam, All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, and the National Gallery of Modern Art among them—along with a description of the exhibitions (Delhi. First City, August 2004: 91–5). The ‘Talks, and Lectures’ section outlines a contiguous space of concrete sociality. Here, the Aga Khan Hall (‘celebrating the best of Indian Handlooms’), the India Habitat Centre (‘Book Club Readings’), Rabindra Bhavan (‘Translating Poetry. A Symposium’), India International Centre (‘Some Reflections on Nationalism in South Asia and Europe’, by … Senior Associate Member, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford) signify urban spaces where the ‘local’ and the transnational mingle with ease. Finally, there is a map which both brings this chapter to a close and prepares the ground for the rest of the book through reiterating the logic of conjunction and overlap that informs this study of the city of Delhi and the adjoining Gurgaon locality. This is the ‘Toilet Map’ of (p.xli) Delhi prepared by Sulabh Shauchalaya, a non-government organization (NGO) that has been active in constructing pay-per-use public toilets around the country. The map (Figure I.2) can be found at the organization’s International Toilet Museum in North-West Delhi. It seems uniquely appropriate that a toilet map of Delhi—showing facilities that are largely used by the poor—graphically overlays Delhi’s genteel landscapes of seminar halls and performance spaces, art galleries, and venues for book club readings and handloom displays with its view of the urban terrain. This underground map of the city—subterranean in more ways than one— uniquely captures the sense of the urban as a series of entangled spaces: where the lives of people of different capacities come together in the most fundamental ways. It is a reminder that the formal city in the non-Western world—that of art shows and conferences, for example—is inextricably linked to the exertions and activities of the occupants of its putatively informal spaces. This book is an exploration of the ties that bind the city, simultaneously, as they appear to produce self-contained realms.

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Introduction Notes:

(1) . In addition to Delhi, the NCR consists of parts of the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The NCR was formed under the National Capital Region Board Act of 1985. The Board was established with the aim of encouraging and overseeing a variety of planning and economic development objectives. (2) . ‘Settlement of Bills for Out of Pocket Expenses incurred by Mr. A.P. Hume, Chairman, DIT, for study of Slum Clearance

Figure I.2 Toilet Map of Delhi Source: Photograph by Author

Problem During Leave in England’. 902/1938/LSG 6-7/DSA. The ‘garden city’ idea came to be applied slightly later with measures for a ‘green belt’ around Delhi that would define the limits of urban development. In 1947, some 12,000 acres of village lands were earmarked for the green belt (‘Green Belt Scheme of the DIT’, File 1/67/1947/ DIT/DSA). (3) . Question of Grant-in-Aid to the Municipal Committee, Delhi, for the Acquisition and Development of the Slum Area in Harphool Singh ki Basti. 4/141/1935/LSG/DSA. (4) . Ibid. (5) . Ibid. (6) . 1/111/1954/LSG/DSA. (7) . ‘In the Court of the Chief Commissioner, Shri Ram Gopal, Appellant vs. the State of Delhi. Respondents’ (File 1/71/1955/LSG/DSA). (8) . 1/26/1954/LSG/DSA. (9) . While the term ‘overcrowding’, when used within a colonial context, is a loaded one (Naidu 1990), a number of factors led to a more active real estate market during the first half of the twentieth century. These included the decision to locate the imperial capital in Delhi (1911–12) and the subsequent construction of New Delhi, and the massive dislocation and movements of populations caused by the partition in 1947. Government and other reports of the period point to Page 21 of 24

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Introduction concerns over both official accommodation ‘a Memorandum on the Present Position of Government Accommodation in Delhi’ (File 17/1/1947/DSA), as well for non-official sections of the population (ref.). In 1947, the government passed the Delhi Premises (Requisition and Eviction) Ordinance as part of measures to deal with the acute pressure on accommodation resources. Keeping in mind that it was established in 1946, the partition was the most immediate context from which DLF might have hoped to benefit and its founder accurately predicted the need for increased housing to settle newly displaced persons arriving into Delhi. Soon after 1947, Delhi’s population swelled by the addition of some 500,000 displaced persons, stimulating a massive re-housing effort (Kacker 2005: 71). (p.xliii) (10) . By 1954, the Trust had earmarked 30,000 acres for various Town Expansion Schemes (1/26/1954/LSG/DSA). However, its actual field of activity— that consisting of ‘sanctioned schemes’—was far less, being around 2,700 acres. (11) . ‘Copy of Resolution No. 100 Passed at an ordinary Meeting of the Delhi Improvement Trust’ File 1/26/1954/LSG/DSA. (12) . 1/26/1954/LSG/DSA (13) . Ibid. (14) . Refer to www.dlf-group.com; accessed 26 July 2009. (15) . 1/26/1954/LSG/DSA (16) . Letter from Paramjit Nayar to The Chairman, Delhi Improvement Trust, dated 25 July 1955 (File 1/27/ 1955/LSG/DSA). (17) . The inquiry was constituted under the chairmanship of the leading industrialist G.D. Birla and the report came to be known as the Birla Report (BR). In blunt terms, it concluded that ‘the story of the Trust is the story of failure’ (BR 1951: 7); that its record of slum clearance had been ‘meagre’ (1951: 3); the Town Expansion Schemes had merely resulted in the ‘freezing’ rather than ‘development’ of considerable land areas (1951: 3); it had commissioned neither a ‘civic survey’ nor a ‘Master Plan’; and its strategy of selling land to the highest bidder had only exacerbated the ‘housing problem’ (1951: 4). (18) . Letter from the Secretary, Delhi Development Provisional Authority, 11 August 1955 (File 1/142/1955/LSG/DSA). (19) . DDA’s land acquisition and housing policies have come in for a great deal of criticism for their inherently anti-poor nature (for a representative discussion, see Maitra 1991). Gazetteer of Rural Delhi 1987: 144. (20) . File 4/56/1941/Local Bodies/ DSA.

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Introduction (21) . File 4(76) /41 LSG/ DSA. (22) . Letter from Chief Commissioner, Delhi to Deputy Commissioner, File 4/62/1941/General/DSA. (23) . File 189/1938/General/DSA. (24) . ‘Identity Card Proposal Sparks Political Row’. www.indiaenews.com/ politics/20080107/90133.htm; accessed 27 August 2008. (25) . File 6/54/1937/Education/LSG/DSA. (26) . In a letter of complaint in February 1950, the Secretary of the Committee of Displaced Persons of Light Building, located on Garstin Bastion Road (the city’s historic ‘red light’ area), asked: How long are we expected to live in this atmosphere where we have no peace of mind at any hour? Could you not pay us a visit and look into our difficulties personally? Has partitioned India achieved independence, to condemn displaced persons to share a common stair case with goondas [‘toughs’], badmashes [‘bad characters’] of the type of Inder Pal and Chirag Din [reputed ‘pimp’] and (p.xliv) prostitutes, forever? How long is our agony to continue? Letter to Deputy Commissioner (File 97/1950/Deputy Commissioner’s Offie/DSA). (27) . The villagers also pointed out that the DLF Corporation had secured exemptions for its lands ‘because of the high influence the persons managing it [DLF] wielded’. (28) . File 15/138/1955/LSG/DSA. (29) . ‘Letter from Govind H. Seth, Secretary, Education, Delhi Government, to A.N. Banerji, Director of Education’ 21 March 1952. File 6(291)/1952–Education. (30) . See Rosselli 1980 and Alter 2000 for important discussions on the significance of ‘physical culture’ in nationalist contexts during the colonial period. (31) . ‘No Slums, Walk Along Yamuna’, Prarthana Gehlote, The Indian Express, 11 January 2005. (32) . Perhaps Jagmohan means to refer to the lawn in front of the Red font as ‘August Kranti [Revolution] Park’. (33) . ‘Batting by the Yamuna’, Sreelatha Menon, The Indian Express, 11 July 2005. (34) . Refer to www.duac.org/what_history.html; accessed 17 September 2010. Page 23 of 24

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Introduction

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer ‘Slum’ Lives between the Market, the State, and ‘Community’ Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords The history of 20th century Delhi is an intertwined history of the city and the slum. This chapter explores strategies of survival and belonging deployed by the urban poor in the Delhi basti of Nangla Matchi, which was demolished in 2006, through focusing upon three varied individual biographies. These are treated as sites of meanings regarding processes of the state, unstable contexts of livelihoods, and histories of intra-national displacement. The chapter also seeks to make an ethnographic contribution to studies of the urban margins by examining the overlapping careers of ‘margin’ and ‘centre’ in urban life. The lifestories described in this chapter thus concern the ways in which the metropolises of power, comfort, pleasure, and hygiene are built over and through the provinces of powerlessness, pain, suffering and displacement. Keywords:   urban biographies, slum leaders, the urban poor and the state, livelihoods

And this Capital city! Everything here is ours, it belongs to our country … but there is nothing here that is ours, nothing that belongs to our country. There are many streets on which he could have walked, but those streets don’t lead anywhere. There are houses and settlements on them, but he couldn’t have gone to any of the houses. There are gates outside these houses that come with warnings about guard-dogs, prohibitions about

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer plucking flowers, and the compulsion of simply waiting after ringing the bell. Kamleshwar, 2008, ‘Lost Directions’, Anthology of Hindi Short Stories, p. 103. As indicated in the Introduction, the modern history of ‘improvement’ schemes in Delhi is closely tied to colonial and post-colonial projects of producing clean spaces—through ‘slum clearance’ and the demarcation of ‘criminal’ spaces, for example—and the making of urbanized bodies to occupy urban spaces. Hence, slum-clearance was the raison d’etre for the establishment of the DIT, and its successor body, the DDA, also sought, through a variety of means, to cleanse Delhi of its unwanted spaces such as slums (Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008; Ramanathan 2006). The history of twentieth century Delhi is then an intertwined history of the city and the slum, for, early twentieth century projects such as the building of New Delhi (King 1976) (p.4) and more recent infrastructure related activities—the DDA’s own residential housing programmes, the construction of public facilities such as the Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds, and the various tasks associated with the 1984 Asian Games and the 2010 Commonwealth Games, to name just a few—have invariably attracted poor migrant labour from different parts of the country (See Rao and Desai 1956 for a mid-1950s perspective on ‘immigrant’ Delhi; Dupont 2000 on ‘Main Migration Flows’ since 1947; and Tarlo 2000 on ‘resettlement colonies’). Indeed, it was the monopolistic and speculative activities of the DDA that led to artificially inflated land prices in Delhi, thereby disenfranchising large sections of the urban population from the housing market (more on this in Chapter three; see also Dasappa-Kacker 2005; Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008). The history of the growth of the Delhi ‘slum’ is also, then, the history of the state’s ‘nation-building’ activities and its urban policies. To paraphrase Sennett (1996), the flesh that drapes the stone in India’s national capital is veined with ‘informal’ settlements that—in a city of some 16 million— are home to approximately three million people ‘living in six lakh (hundred thousand) jhuggis (hutments) in 1,100 jhuggi jhompri clusters’ (Ramanathan 2006: 3195). This chapter seeks to explore the spaces of ‘informal’ Delhi through means other than enumeration of populations, accounts of material depravation, or inventories of poverty reduction programmes. Through exploring life-histories located at the margins of the city, the discussion seeks to connect them to the categories of ‘nation’, ‘state’, ‘city’, and ‘class’, in order to view the latter as both ground and yield of individual biographies. R.W. Connell’s discussion of the importance of the ‘life-history’ (Connell 1995) is of relevance here. Connell points out that attention to social, historical, and cultural contexts of individual lives is the most fundamental manner in which subjectivity can be captured as

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer both individual and social. It is the intertwined nature of the individual and the social that interests me in the present discussion.

The Multiple Histories of Nangla Matchi Before it was demolished in June 2006, the basti of Nangla Matchi (‘Nangla’) stood just off Delhi’s Ring Road, on the western banks of the Yamuna river near the International Trade Fair grounds known as Pragati Maidan (‘The Field of Progress’). The term basti is Hindi for (p.5) ‘settlement’ and, following MenonSen and Bhan (2008), I adopt this usage in preference to ‘slum’ in order to avoid spurious judgments regarding illegality, criminality, and lack of industriousness inherent within such spaces. Use of the term ‘slum’ denies the fact that as home to workers, producers, and consumers, such spaces are ‘inextricably bound up with the morphology of the city’ (Tarlo 2003: 15), and are ‘not so much marginal to (the city’s) history as marginalized by it’ (Tarlo 2003; emphasis in the original). It also associates their existence with illegality, an attribute that rarely affects the manner in which residents of richer localities that have been illegally constructed are represented (Soni 2000). As is true of many such settlements in non-Western cities, the basti of Nangla Matchi was the product ‘of the strategies of low-income groups to position themselves in the labour, consumption and production sectors of the metropolis and the neighbourhood surrounding them’ (Askew 2002: 143). In Solomon Benjamin’s terms, Nangla was a site of ‘occupancy urbanism’, a term that indexes a view of the city ‘as consisting of multiple, contested territories inscribed by complex local histories’ (Benjamin 2008: 720). My interest in Nangla grew out of previous research that explored the ways in which a section of the urban poor—mainly recent male migrants to Delhi— sought, gained, and utilized information about urban modernity (Srivastava 2007). In that work, it became increasingly apparent that one of the ways in which one might understand the city is through treating the apparent fissures in the urban social and spatial topography—the legal and the illegal, the ‘civil’ and the ‘political’ (Chatterjee 2004), the formal and the informal, and so on—as infact, sites of intimate connections between these realms. This book is about the erratic sutures that knit the city into an entangled topography. It attempts to speak of the connections between the gated enclave and the street, the airconditioned shopping mall and the open-to-the seasons bazaar, and the basti and the nation-state; and this chapter outlines a series of urban biographies that introduce the idea of linkages between different realms. These biographies are full-bodied narratives of experiences of work and unemployment, settlement and displacement, violence and its cessation, intimacies and stranger-hood, and the myriad cultural economies of the city through which poor women and men negotiate life, death, and the pleasures and sufferings that fall in between. I present these accounts from the cultural and economic (p.6) margins of the city in order to foreground the fact that ‘margins’ are ‘sites that do not so much lie outside the state but rather like rivers, run though its body’ (Das and Poole Page 3 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer 2004: 13). The life-stories presented here are about the significance of the margins—both as ‘life and labour’ (Das and Poole 2004: 15)—to the making of the centre. While I provide a gloss on the narratives below, I hope also to leave open the possibility of reading the ‘negotiated possibilities’ (Roy 2003: 89) of being in the city in as many different ways as possible. The men and women—mostly migrants to the city—who appear here will make further appearances in other chapters of the book. But, for the present, I will interfere minimally with these accounts of making a home at the edges of the city. A serious attention to biography has, as Judith Brown suggests, much to tell us about ‘the nature of individual and shared identities and the ways these develop over time in different contexts, the nature of agency in the historical process, and the local and global webs of connection within which people live and work, within and across national boundaries’ (Brown 2009: 588).

Chamkili Pradhan: Sakhi, Leader Stretching across approximately five acres of river-front land in the shadows of the coal-fired Indraprastha power plant, Nangla Matchi rested on the fly ash remains of the raw material that lit up and warmed Delhi. The land had been the dumping ground for the plant’s waste products. By the time I had gotten to know Nangla in early 2005, the ash had been cemented and bricked over with houses, mosques, temples, and narrow pathways, though pools of strangely coloured liquid—discharge from the plant, I was told by some—still lapped the settlement from one side. But before the cement and the yellow brick paths, when the entire stretch was a sea of fly ash, there was Chamkili Pradhan. Almost everyone I met in Nangla told me that it was Chamkili who founded the settlement, and that she had been instrumental in settling people there from the late 1970s. When the first settlers began to arrive, the ash was exquisitely fine: like dull coloured butterflies, slowly descending upon the river bank and easily stirred into swirling clouds by the slightest gust, flavouring all food, and smearing the freshly bathed. Chamkili Pradhan (the ‘Shiny Head-Man’) describes herself as a sakhi, or literally, ‘girl-friend’. Kalu Ram, who owned a cigarette shop (p.7) in Nangla, once said to me: ‘That hijra (eunuch) is called “Chamkili Pradhan” since she has the (illegal) contract for supplying electricity to Nangla. As long as I have known her, she has been the electricity supplier’. Pradhan translates into ‘chief’ or ‘head’, and the village pradhan headed the panchayat (the traditional all-male village council), settled disputes among villagers, and mediated between the village and higher levels of authority, such as regional or more powerful rulers. Virtually all bastis in Delhi have one pradhan or more. The number of pradhans any one basti has depends upon competing ambitions as well as politics of identity. So, several men may stake claim to being pradhan and possessing the capacity to mediate with the outside world on behalf of basti residents. The Page 4 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer demonstration of such capacity can lead to being elected to the position, or being proclaimed pradhan by a group of basti residents. If there are several men who aspire to the position, then it is not unusual for a basti to have more than one head, each with his own factional following, and constantly seeking to expand his sphere of influence. Attempts to show up other claimants to the position are intense and never-ending; however, just as frequently, one pradhan may relinquish his title in favour of another, ceding his authority and following the latter. And, if a basti has more than one ethnic community among its population, as is common, then each community also elects its own pradhan, who may or may not recognize the authority of other basti pradhans (see also Jha et al. 2007).1 Hence, the urban pradhan is a master of the hybrid cultural and social economies of the city that relate to the poor; or at least that is what he tells his fellow residents, on behalf of whom he negotiates with the world beyond the basti. Chamkili was pradhan of Nangla Matchi for seven years, having been elected three times by popular vote. There were two versions of the story regarding how Chamkili came to be Nangla’s founder. In the first, she came to Delhi in the late 1970s and worked for a contractor who built ‘bundhs’ (embankments) along the Yamuna. Though originally from Bihar, Chamkili had left her home state as a teenager in search of a job, moving to different parts of the country, finally to settle in Delhi. ‘At that time’, she told me, ‘there was no one at Nangla.’ She built a hut for herself on the river bank, not far from the original (and still existing) village of Nangla Matchi from where the basti got its name. In addition to building the Yamuna (p.8) embankment, Chamkili also worked in other parts of the Delhi, including Pragati Maidan. And as she moved from one part of the city to another, she met individuals and families newly arrived in Delhi and told them to come to Nangla and set up home there. They were keen to do that as the area is in a central location and very well connected to public transport. The second version regarding Chamkili’s arrival has it that she was employed as a driver for a prominent Congress politician who held the contract for collecting ash from the power plant and dumping it at Nangla. What is common to both accounts is that Chamkili would charge a ‘fee’ for ‘allotting’ a plot of land. No one could say how she was able to take money and give ‘permission’ for new hutments to be built on land that, as everyone knew, was owned by the government. But then no one—not even the men—ever said anything about Chamkili’s obvious demeanour as a hijra, that she wore a sari but spoke in a heavy male voice, and was adorned with large earrings and peppered every second sentence with ‘sister-fucker’. In the manly world of basti pradhans, Chamkili held her own in Nangla Matchi as well as those other places—police stations and offices of the DDA’s Slum Wing, for example—that impinged upon basti life. Nangla was a hybrid kind of space—not solid earth but fly ash, owned by the state, but mysteriously under Chamkili’s provenance, within the city but also at its cultural and economic margins—so having a hijra as progenitor is Page 5 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer appropriate lineage. Of course, it may also say something about the levels of tolerance regarding gender and sexual identities in bastis that can be contrasted to the ‘heterosexist normativity’ (Butler 1999: 186) of the wider city. ‘Chamkili’, a longtime resident of Nangla told me, ‘could deal with any one … the police were scared of her … if ever they wanted to arrest someone from the basti, they first went to ask for her permission … she would swear at them, and they would beat a hasty retreat!’ Chamkili had an aura of profane power, and the police left her alone. The aura that gathered around Chamkili was particularly notable in situations where she was not around to provide direct assistance. Take the case of Ram Prakash who owned a clothes-ironing business in Nangla. His shop, on Nangla’s main street, was attached to his bedroom. On the first floor was another small room—accessed by a rickety ladder—which was being rented out. Ram Prakash and his wife slept in the bedroom while their two sons, five and eleven, used (p. 9) the ironing section as their bedroom. The entire structure occupied an area no more than 15 square feet. Originally from Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, Ram Prakash came to Delhi around 1983 and lived near the Tilak Bridge area, in central Delhi, before moving to Nangla Matchi around 1992. A friend convinced Ram Prakash to move to Nangla, as there was more space— given the active patronage of the local Member of Parliament (MP)—and less likelihood of being evicted. Ram Prakash was introduced to a man called Idris who claimed to be a pradhan. Idris asked for a sum of Rs 1,700 to find a ‘suitable’ plot in Nangla, Rs 300 of which was to be paid to the police. They did not approach Chamkili as Idris had ensured them he would ‘look after everything’. Prakash went ahead and constructed a jhuggi (hutment). However, despite Idris’s assurances, the police had not been paid their share. So, soon after, some policemen came and demolished Ram Prakash’s jhuggi. Ram Prakash frequented a temple near Tilak Bridge where he would meet his friends and where he met an Assistant Sub Inspector (ASI) from the local police station. He told the ASI that he was a ‘friend’ of Chamkili Pradhan: ‘Oh, said the ASI … Nangla falls under my area [of jurisdiction] … here, take this letter and give it to the Station House Officer (SHO) of the Tilak Road police station’. Later, the Police went to Idris and said he had better put up a jhuggi as Ram Prakash knew the ‘higher-ups’. That’s how Ram Prakash got his jhuggi back.

Pradhan Basti pradhans have specific qualities which are located on a continuum that includes charisma, kindred warmth, persistence, and the ability to issue promissory notes that have no maturity date. They must always promise to get things done, and must simultaneously have a bagful of reasons for lack of success. Their position in the urban political economy—economically marginal inhabitants of the city, illegal occupiers of ‘public property’, among others— makes it impossible to fulfill all promises; when the elections come around and Page 6 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer the local politician asks for a truckful of votes in return for paved roads or delaying basti demolition, the pradhan is on surer grounds in terms of his power. Otherwise, he must constantly dissimulate. (p.10) Pradhans usually have a modicum of education and, most importantly, a deep familiarity with the bureaucratic geography of the city. Their city is occupied by the premises of Ministry of Food and Supplies (that deals with a variety of ‘ration’ cards for purchasing food at subsidized rates) and that of Urban Development, the MCD, slum bureaucracies, the DDA, offices that issue voters identification cards, police stations, court houses, and offices of politicians and corporators. As I will discuss through a specific example in the next chapter, gaining access to such spaces is usually quite a difficult affair, and a pradhan must also be versed in the arts of passing and faking in order to secure entry. Indeed, the ability to convince those who guard the portals of bureaucratic power that someone who looks and talks like a poor person might actually carry some indefinable weight of authority—‘perhaps he knows someone who knows someone’—is an ability worth many votes in basti elections. The pradhan, and those who aspire to the position, must move across a number of erratic and uncertain contexts of making contacts and connections. She must carefully map out those interstices within bureaucratic check-points where strategies of dissimulation can secure access to desired realms. In the midst of the neo-liberalism that seeks to build a ‘global city’ through removing the working poor from it, the pradhan—in her deep intimacy with the state—is a committed Nehruvian urban subject. She knows that at the edges of bureaucratic and political formations—at those points where they meet the basti —there are ways of gaining access through seemingly impenetrable walls of permission slips and departmental checkpoint. That is what makes a pradhan. Chamkili Pradhan tells me that her ‘ashram’ is in the city of Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh—the mythological site of Krishna’s flirtatious love-play—where, as she put it, ‘hundreds of sadhus and sants (ascetics) are fed’. Chamkili has an aura of sacred power that is also part of her appeal to the people of Nangla. In Nangla, the sacred sits alongside stories of witchcraft, headless men who hunt for children, and mysterious thieves in the night with thickly oiled bodies that evade all attempts at capture. Chamkili’s sacredness draws upon the ritual position of the hijra in Indian society (Nanda 1990; Reddy 2005), but also exceeds it in as much as she can, seemingly, best profane forces. In the city, you never know which of your powers you may need to call upon.

(p.11) Connections By the time I met her in early 2005, however, Chamkili was no longer a pradhan. In fact, she no longer lived in Nangla, occasionally visiting to keep an eye on her electricity business, which had become a significant source of income.2 By then, there were several people—some elected and others self-proclaimed—who were Page 7 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer referred to as ‘pradhanji’. The people of Nangla Matchi recognized three distinct settlements within the locality—Devi Nagar (the earliest), Sant Nagar, and Kali Basti—and different pradhans tended to have uneven jurisdiction over the different areas. Sant Nagar and Kali Basti had a very mixed population, both in terms of religion and place of origin, whereas Devi Nagar was predominantly Muslim. Residents of Sant Nagar and Devi Nagar considered Kali Basti a place of great danger and a ‘difficult’ place since, as they put it, it had a large population of ‘unruly’ Balmikis, the caste of sweepers—who ‘are both very violent and don’t listen to any one’. Devi Nagar was where Chamkili began her ‘settlement’ activities. At the time of its demolition in 2006, Nangla had a population of approximately 25,000. Before coming to Delhi, Chamkili had worked for a company that manufactured electricity transformers and poles in the town of Panki, near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh. She travelled around India as a member of the group that installed the equipment. Hence, she told me, she visited ‘Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Almora-Pithoragarh … to install electric poles’. ‘I have helped to supply electricity to all parts of the country’, she once mentioned. By the time she arrived in Delhi in the late 1970s, she was world-wise person: her search for a living had taken her all over the country, she had acquired a modicum of technical expertise through making and installing transformers and other electrical equipment, and had met a wide variety of people with whom she learnt to defend and negotiate her ambiguous gender identity. Having settled in Delhi—at Nangla—Chamkili utilized her rapidly growing urban connections to secure a ‘contract’ for supplying electricity to part of the basti. She installed a mini-transformer in her—by now pucca (permanent)—house, bought electricity from the government-owned electricity body (the erstwhile Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking, or DESU), and sold it at a profit to Nangla residents. Chamkili was one of three such contractors in Nangla. According to (p.12) Nassim, who owned a small tea shop, Chamkili had got the electricity ‘contract’ during the Chief Minister-ship of Madan Lal Khurana (1993–6). Khurana belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Chamkili had been a BJP supporter and activist for quite some time. After some years of sole ownership, Chamkili went into partnership with another Nangla resident, Bilkees Begum. Nassim mentioned that a few years ago, some DESU officials had come to Nangla and charged everyone Rs 320 for permanent and direct electricity connections, bypassing private suppliers such as Chamkili. However, the permanent connections never materialized and the electricity supply continued to be through Chamkili and two others; perhaps, some said, Chamkili had managed to pay off the state employees who were to carry out the work. The cost per unit of electricity in 2005 was Rs 3.50. Nassim complained that this is far more expensive than in other parts of Delhi.

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer Chamkili had moved out of Nangla around 2002, appointing a man everyone called ‘masterji’—he provided private tuition to school-children—to look after his electricity business. Masterji supervised new connections, maintenance of the equipment, and collection of tariff. Chamkili visited about once a fortnight to collect the money. Chamkili had built a house on a plot of land near Sonia Vihar in the northern extremities of Delhi, about forty kilometres from Nangla. She has also begun a real estate business there. Nassim thought that, given Chamkili’s pradhan-ship, she had ‘inside’ knowledge about Nangla’s impending demolition and so bought elsewhere. Others said that Chamkili and some other pradhans from Nangla were directly responsible for the demolition by getting residents to take part in the government survey that was intended to identify those who were ‘eligible’ for alternative land at a ‘resettlement colony’ in the village of Savda-Ghevda (Savda), some forty kilometers away, on the northern edges of Delhi. They believed that the pradhans had beens bought off by the same politicians who in the past had saved the basti from demolition as it was an important vote bank (Batra and Mehra 2008; Risbud 2009). There were rumours that the government agency that owned the land (and wanted it back) paid the politicians, who paid the pradhans, who in turn convinced many at Nangla that it was in their interests to take part in a government survey, paving the way for the basti’s demolition. The pre-demolition ‘survey’ is one of the most momentous events in the life of a basti, engendering fear, anxiety, and hope (more on the survey (p. 13) below and in the next chapter. See also Batra and Mehra (2008) for a discussion of the survey and other processes leading up to demolition and eviction). Suraj Chandra, a former pradhan of Nangla, now living in Savda Shevda Resettlement Colony, noted that: … we didn’t know who owned the land on which Nangla was situated. However, later we found out that in 1986 or so the Pragati Power Company had paid (names three prominent Congress party politicians, an MP, an MLA, and a municipal corporation functionary) around nine crore [million] Rupees to buy the land from the Delhi Development Authority. So at the time of the demolition, the land belonged to Pragati Power. However, Delhi Jal [Water] Board also put up a sign that a part of the land was theirs. Then we found out that that the land actually belonged to the people of the [original] Nangla village nearby. This is a very old village and listed in old British period records. Now there is a case going on between the Nangla village residents and Pragati Power. That’s why nothing has been built upon the land [after the residents had been evicted]. There was a dispute over the property when it was being demolished and if we had known, they could not have removed us. However, no one told us, as everyone was making money out of it.

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer Erratic Passages Sonia Vihar, where Chamkili now lives, lies at the North–Eastern extremity of Delhi on the banks of the Yamuna river, near the locality of Wazirabad. Located at the border with Uttar Pradesh, it is perhaps best known as the location of a large-scale water treatment plant that is touted as the solution to Delhi’s perpetual water shortages. Beyond the Inter State Bus Terminus in North Delhi, the National Highway makes it way past a number of what were earlier ‘unauthorized’ colonies, which have since been ‘regularized’ by the government. The traffic becomes heavier as one approaches the Grand Trunk Road, with a large number of interstate buses and trucks clogging the various junctions. The old Wazirabad bridge crosses the Yamuna river towards the Sonia Vihar settlement. After crossing the river, there is a left turning that takes us on to the river bundh (embankment), along which lies Sonia Vihar. The locality is an extended settlement of red-brick pucca houses, small shops, repair workshops, and small-scale factories. The bundh road is serviced by mini-buses as well as three-wheeler auto-rickshaws. There (p.14) is farming in the dry portion of the river bed. The Delhi government plans to erect a ‘Signature Bridge’ at this point ‘as a style statement of Delhi’.3 According to a newspaper report, ‘The 1,000acre expanse around the bridge site will be converted into an entertainment park that will include water games, eateries, an ice-skating rink, and wellness centres’.4 Chamkili’s house is a few kilometers beyond the settlement, in an area of farmlands. It is a three-storied structure, with a single room at the top. It has a high ceiling and there are religious posters stuck to the wall almost at ceiling level. Chamkili is associated with the local branch of the BJP. Normally, I would run into Chamkili as she rushed around Nangla collecting dues for her electricity business and my visit to her Sonia Vihar residence was the first chance of meeting her at leisure. I began by saying that I had heard that she had a reputation as a very successful businessperson. But she interrupts me, saying that she started her working life in a ‘sarkari naukri [government job] in the electricity department in Dehradun’, later moving to work on ‘electric trains’. She then joined a ‘company’ that offered to send her to Saudi Arabia to do daktari as a practitioner for Unani medicine, in which she had undertaken a course of study. However, this didn’t work out: The ‘company’ used to train people to become doctors and then send them to videsh (foreign lands). But [about me] the ‘company’ said ‘this man has an illness’, so we can’t send him overseas, so I left and moved to Kanpur. Chamkili’s erratic passages across professional and geographical registers reflect the conditions of life for many in her situation. Additionally, as a poor sakhi, she was disadvantaged both on economic and sexual grounds. In Kanpur, Chamkili joined the Swadeshi Cotton Mills: Page 10 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer At the time, Morarji Desai was the Prime Minister, and there had been firing by the PAC (Provincial Armed Constabulary), so I left that job and managed to get a job in DDA (the central government’s Delhi Development Authority) … then I left that job and got another at Pragati Maidan (exhibition grounds), as a chaukidar (security guard), whereas in the DDA I used to work as a gardener. At Pragati Maidan, I worked in ‘Karnataka’ [state pavilion] as a chaukidar during trade exhibitions …. (p.15) The ‘firing’ that Chamkili speaks of most likely refers to an unprovoked attack by the police on striking workers at the Swadeshi Cotton Mills in Kanpur on 6 December 1977. From 1974, mill workers had had to resort to strike action to recover unpaid wages. Throughout this period, the mill owners—the Jaipurias —employed various strategies to avoid paying the workers, including assetstripping and sale of the concern to another corporation. According to an independent report, ‘a very large number’ of workers were killed in the shooting by the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) (Chakravarty et al. 1978). It is not clear whether Chamkili ever actually worked for a government department or was employed by contractors who supplied the department. Her position both at DDA and Pragati Maidan was most likely as a casual daily wage labourer. Indeed, Pragati Maidan was a significant source of casual (or kachcha) employment for many residents of Nangla when they first arrived in Delhi. Later, in the mid-1970s, a major strike at Pragati Maidan resulted in permanent jobs for some, and retrenchment for others. Chamkili’s invocation of the sarkar (government/state) as part of her professional biography was significant in the context of a precarious job market for provincial migrants to the city. Everyone at Nangla knew that Chamkili had once been a ‘government officer’, and hence was a person of some importance. Citizens consider the state a blight for its arbitrary and opaque dealings with them, but simultaneously desire its intimacy and gaze. Chamkili’s professional biography converted easily into a personal one as the ambivalence of her gender identity was counterbalanced by her past as a state ‘official’: Chamkili could ‘handle’ the state because having worked for it, she had secured some of its aura. The aura of the state derives, in part but significantly, from its ability to lay claim to land as well as the ability to allow or restrict its usage; in the late nineteenth century, the colonial state was quick to declare vast tracts in Delhi as Nazul (‘crown’) land, thus proclaiming an unambiguous spatial sovereignty. Moving within the contexts of a subaltern modernity of modest technical expertise, postcolonial hybrid corporatism, the developmentalist state and its public works, and an ambiguous gender and sexual identity, Chamkili’s passage from itinerant job seeker to urban ‘Big Man’ also unfolded through spatial politics. Upon arriving in Delhi, she met a man called ‘Arjun’, who ‘lived at Turkman gate’ in Old Delhi.

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer Arjun was a thekedar (contractor) (p.16) and was ‘involved in the construction of a pushta (embankment) from the Wazirabad bridge to Badarpur’, … and I started working there. There were other labourers who then settled in what is now Devi Nagar [in Nangla Matchi]. Then, slowly, others began to arrive. In this manner, I started settling people. They came from Bihar, Bengal, U.P., Madras, and many other places. Slowly, I got plans passed for the kharanja (brick-paved laneway), public toilets, water connection, ration cards…, I got the place settled … Then, the netas (politicians) started coming and ‘vote cards’ (election ID cards) were made, and eventually things became pucca (there was greater certainty). The fragile certainty of basti life—oscillating between politicians’ promises, court judgments ordering their removal, and middle-class aspirations for a ‘global city’—came to an end in June 2006, when Nangla was demolished. It is the difficult task of the pradhan to make the illusion of permanence last. Everyone loves suspense, though some pay more for it than others. Almost all my conversations with Chamkili drifted towards stories of her kindness towards those around her. She was, as she suggested in different ways, both a protector against the state’s depredations as well as a translator of its rules and regulations. If bureaucracies savage the hapless, they also make for the creation of the web of neighbourhoods, kin-like relationships, and intimacies of various kinds. Chamkili narrated how she arranged for electricity and water supply, built temples, paved the lane-ways, fought with exploitative contractors and the police on behalf of residents, and performed dharnas (sit-ins) against demolition. The basti that rose out of the ashes of the power plant has a complex relationship to the spaces represented by the plant, the pucca localities, and the state. It is aligned to narratives of desire as well as distance from the state. Both Tarlo (2003) and Das (2004) urge that the manner in which we think about the relationship between the poor and the structures of state power must move beyond the sterile binary of ‘passive victims’ and ‘heroic rebels’. However, given the inescapable relationship between the poor and the state, it is one that does not quite present in the same manner as for other class fractions in the city. For, while Tarlo (2003) is right to point out that the market ‘far from operating outside the state often features as the vernacular idiom through which ordinary people negotiate with local agents of the state’ (2003: 12), (p.17) for basti people, the market is a ‘via media’ rather than a destination. That is, it is the state that is the most significant site for the dramas and desires of having, being, relating, consuming, acquiring, and social mobility. Basti residents are unwitting statists, for the market only seeks their attention when they display the capacity to consume. However, simultaneously as basti residents are at the mercy of the unpredictable pastoralism of the state, there is also great disdain for its corrupt Page 12 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer and arbitrary ways (Osella and Osella 2000). Given this context, there is an identity politics that is—as I discuss in the concluding section—in the nature of a ‘relay’ between ‘statism’ and ‘communitarianism’. This suggests another line of theorizing beyond the victim/rebel dichotomy. Chamkili would often tell me how the mahaul (atmosphere) in Nangla had deteriorated. Hence, whereas earlier the police hardly visited the locality, ‘now they are there twenty-four hours’. However, the regulatory presence of the state was not its only form. For, ‘the police used to come and demolish [the jhuggis], this would keep happening, and we would rebuild’. But now the mahaul had become so bad, she insisted, that the only solution lay in another act of state: it was now best to demolish the locality altogether. The state—simultaneously a site for all that is good and bad—is ultimately, inescapable. ‘All those who say that they will not allow the “survey” to proceed [in the hope that this may stall demolition]’, she said, ‘are only fooling themselves. Is there anything that can stand in the way of the will of the sarkar?’ I have noted earlier that Chamkili was a member of the BJP, and that she became an electricity contractor during the reign of a BJP-led state government in Delhi. So, during this period, and at least for Chamkili, the nation and the sarkar coalesced into a coherent and favourable configuration. However, and ironically, it is the intense presence of the state in her life (and in that of fellow basti dwellers) that precludes any straightforward relationship with it: SS: Do you think the BJP will come back into power?

Chamkili: It’s going to come back like a giant wave, all over India. They lost because they opposed foreign capitalists … also because of coalition politics … this [names senior BJP politician] is no good, that sister-fucker … mother fucker, he is of the [names ethnic group] quom (community) … when you were fifteen did you ever hear of Babri Masjid [mosque, demolished in 1992 by Hindu fundamentalists]? Instead of making a mandir (temple) or a masjid (mosque), they could have just made a (p.18) government hospital, and anyone could go there…. Nowadays the country is full of Muslims from Bangladesh … the politicians only want votes, whether it’s [from] Pakistanis or Bangladeshis … how will they fly in their helicopters if they don’t get the votes? But one day, Ravan will be punished … Kans [Lord Krishna’s maternal uncle who sought to kill him, hence a figure of great revulsion in Hindu mythology] was killed one day, Hitler was gotten rid of one day….

It is perhaps appropriate that statist, national, party-political, ethnic, mythic, communal, xenophobic, and transnational imagery intermingles in the same discursive breath, for it is the double bind of the relationship with the state— wanting and not wanting its embrace—that engenders both the intensity of the Page 13 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer relationship as well as the desire to ‘expose’ its duplicity and ferocity across multiple registers. If it is to the state that one must turn for securing bodily, territorial, legal, and sexual integrity, then the relationship with it is bound to be of a loving hatefulness: Chamkili: I came to Delhi at the time when Indira Gandhi had imposed nasbandi (enforced sterilization, see Tarlo 2003) and chakbandi (‘land consolidation’, referring to slum demolitions) … during the Emergency … the mahaul was wonderful … there was no robbery and thieving … the police didn’t hassle anyone, there were no terrorists…. During nasbandi, the poor didn’t suffer in Delhi, though they may have outside Delhi … even if something had happened, I really don’t know…. I mean when I didn’t suffer at all, what can I tell you?

Under Suspicion: Bilkees Begum There are, however, others who are more willing to speak of the suffering that accompanies intimacy with the state. Bilkees Begum, who had earlier shared in the electricity contract business with Chamkili, was one of them. I met Bilkees Begum in 2005 during preparations for a rally to welcome the newly elected Chief Minister of Bihar, Nitish Kumar, to Delhi. I had been wanting to meet her for quite some time, but none of the men I had become friendly with had ever offered to introduce me, despite the fact that she was an elected pradhan. Bilkees’s position within Nangla society outlines narratives of gender and ethnicity within the political economy of the city’s margins. Her identity as a ‘female Bihari’ pradhan was at the centre of her struggle to exert authority to gain respect. (p.19) A large number from Nangla was going to the airport to welcome Nitish Kumar. Bilkees directed me to a Maruti Gypsy vehicle of the District Chairman of the Janata Dal (JD) campaign committee, informing me that we were first going to the office of the Chief Minister’s party office in Connaught Place in central New Delhi. Sitting in the front seat and giving the driver directions, she was in charge. We reached the JD office and waited for instructions on proceeding to the airport. Among the hubbub, I found Bilkees sitting in one corner of the office compound and asked if she knew when we were to go to the airport. She shrugged her shoulders. Here in Connaught Place, Bilkees seemed lost, bereft of the bluster and self-confidence I had seen at Nangla. We finally left for the airport around 4 p.m., along with another truckful of ‘supporters’ from another part of Delhi. Bilkees mentioned that she was earlier with the BJP, and now she has ‘joined’ the JD. En route, our convoy got lost as no one appeared to know the way to the domestic airport where Nitish Kumar was arriving. ‘What is “domestic”’? Bilkees asked me, as we wound our way around the pylons of the (then) under-construction Delhi-Gurgaon toll-way.

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer Arriving at the airport, neither Bilkees nor any of her followers knew when Nitish Kumar was to arrive. It was getting dark and there was still no sign of the politician. Then, suddenly, a man was heard shouting from a gate that was some distance from where we stood: ‘He is here! He is here!’ ‘There?’ Bilkees turns around to me. ‘What gate is that?’, she asked. It was the ‘VIP Gate’. We ran towards it. Police sirens sounded, the gate opened, and a cavalcade of white Ambassador cars drove out. We caught a fleeting glimpse of Nitish Kumar, as he drove past and in a flash he was gone. Bilkees just about managed to throw some flowers in the direction of the speeding vehicles. ‘Garibon ka masiha!’ (‘The Messiah of the Poor’), she muttered to no one in particular. By now, the vehicles that had been part of our cavalcade had also disappeared and the Nangla group scrambled to find the nearest truck to take it back home. Bilkees turned to me to say that she didn’t want to miss a ride back, as she didn’t know the way from the airport to Nangla. In Nangla, Bilkees had a double storied and, by Nangla standards, a very commodious house. She lived with her husband, four sons, their wives, and a daughter. Two of her sons worked in her electricity re-distribution business. During our first meeting at her house—soon after the airport visit—Bilkees was besieged with an unending stream (p.20) of visitors with a variety of requests: help with getting new identity card made, replacement of lost ration-cards, removing ‘encroachers’ from one’s property, etc. To each, she offered a terse word or two, before dismissing them: ‘Have you been to the Food and Supply office?’, ‘Did you not know you had to fill this form in triplicate?’, and ‘Why did you go to those bastards (the police), rather than come to me?’. After about forty-five minutes into our conversation, she fixed me with a stare, and said, ‘now, tell me who you really are. Someone told me that you work at a university, but I told him that that’s not your real identity, and I know that I am right’. I was taken aback, as much at the image I might have presented, as also by Bilkees’s forceful directness. I asked her who she thought I was: ‘You’re a CBI (Central Bureau of Investigations) agent!’, she said, ‘I can tell’. I spent the next half-hour explaining who I was. ‘CBI’ and ‘vigilance people’, Bilkees told me, are very frequent visitors to bastis such as Nangla. They come, she says, to collect information on ‘terrorists’ and other ‘security’ issues. And, she adds, ‘they look more or less like you’. In the past, some of them have accused her of hoarding arms, selling drugs, and being a ‘Pakistani agent, because I am Muslim’. But, she says, ‘I know so many CBI and vigilance people myself, and they never believe these accusations against me’. Bilkees came to Delhi from Bihar in the late 1970s and her sister Razia Begum is married to local resident Ranjan Kumar, who converted to Islam in order to marry Razia. In the last elections for the pradhan-ship, Bilkees defeated Suraj Chandra to the position; the latter maintains that this is because she is a Bihari and now ‘Nangla is 50 per cent Bihari’.

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer Though the elected pradhan of Nangla, Bilkees must compete with others of equal—though unelected—rank in dealing with the state on behalf of her fellow residents. And, in addition to negotiating with it (to whatever extent possible), pradhans also seek to mimic the state. So, both Suraj and Bilkees frequently carried out a variety of ‘surveys’ that asked for different kinds of information, blurring the line between disciplinary and classificatory practices of the state and individualized attempts to sequester some of its aura. Sometimes a survey might be for the ‘issue of new ration cards’, and at others for ‘making new identity cards’. Bilkees’s surveys were located within the contexts of kinship, neighbourliness, conjugal arrangements, property rights, and ethnic and religious identities, each in turn positioning her as a progenitor of the (p.21) different worlds of urban possibilities. The surveys also established her as someone with the capacity to mediate and establish connections between these worlds and the state: the surveys were robust promises of putative entitlements. Within the confines of Nangla, my most enduring memory of Bilkees—within the confines of Nangla—is of a booming voice; a slim erect body; long, confident strides; and expletives that reached the boundaries of the basti. Even as she coaxed her Nangla neighbours to part with a variety of information based on her status as quotidian compatriot and classificatory kin, no one quite knew how the information gathered was to be used. But hardly anyone ever refused. There was always some ‘survey’ or another at Nangla, each offering the hope of recognition by the state, contextualized by a deep—and potentially empowering—desire for classification; to be surveyed was to have proof of entitlement. The uncertainty of the validity of the processes through which the information was gathered hardly affected the craving for certainty that the survey promised. It was as if the acts of surveying and gathering information transformed Bilkees into a powerful male, exercising control and guiding destinies over her fellow residents. Her situational masculinity was, however, frequently disputed. The questions mostly asked of it concerned her ability to pass as male within the multiple geographies of power she sought to occupy. So, one day, Suraj Chandra gleefully related a tale that, to him, demonstrated the pitfalls of operating in that porous zone of mimicry and impersonations where knowledge of borders—of identity and processes—is crucial. It concerned a survey Bilkees had carried out to enable a group from Nangla to apply for a ‘BPL’ (Below Poverty Line) card issued by the government. The card is one of several kinds that enable holders to purchase food and other household items from government controlled ‘ration shops’ at below-market rates. Having gathered information required to complete the application procedure, Bilkees marked the application forms with a newly acquired stamp that said ‘Bilkees Begum, Pradhan’. However, as Suraj reported, the examining officer, ‘the SDO (Sub-Divisional Officer) objected saying that government stationery was made void if stamped by a non-government authority’. So, after that, ‘people realized that they had made a mistake in Page 16 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer electing someone like Bilkees’. Seeking to consolidate her several identities— mediator with the state, urban potentate of diverse basti worlds, classificatory male—through insignia (p.22) of uncertain authority, Bilkees suffered a symbolic setback. She had not so much overstepped her authority as pradhan— for such faux symbols of authority are common enough—as transgressed the rules of gender. I will return to this theme in the concluding section of this chapter.

Rakesh Kumar: From Journeyman to a Man of Means Beyond the contested arenas of political leadership within bastis, there are, of course, other strategies of sustenance that have something to say about relationships between ‘community’, state, and commerce. Sometime in 1999, the then Minister for Urban Development, Jagmohan— otherwise infamous for his basti-demolition-and-urban ‘beautification’ drives— had a board put up at the main entry point to Nangla Matchi. It said, ‘Welcome to Adarsh (ideal) Basti’. Many in Nangla thought that this was the state’s imprimatur of permanence. However, when—through rumour, media reports, and court judgments (see Chapter three)—it became increasingly apparent that the bulldozers were not far away, a panicky energy spread out from the banks of the Yamuna to explore if the sign’s promises of permanence held any water. Of course, by the time of the rumours, the sign had long since disappeared— transformed into urban flotsam of worthless words and missing deeds—leaving behind the flimsiest of insinuations upon which were hitched multitude of hopes. As noted in the previous chapter, the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi is a prominent venue for conference, performance, and meetings. It also houses members-only restaurants, a bar, an art gallery, a library, and the offices of NGOs and other organizations (such as the Population Council and The Energy and Resources Institute) that work on ‘social’ issues. It is a hybrid urban space, where privileged liberal cultures of the city engage with fraught questions of what makes for privilege and its lack in a post-colonial city. In May 2006, when the air in Nangla Matchi was thick with rumours of its imminent demolition, the Delhi based NGO Jagori organized a workshop on the spate of urban ‘evictions’ and demolitions of bastis around the city. Key speakers included academics as well as prominent NGO activists. I had asked some people from Nangla if they wanted to speak about their own situation at this gathering. One person from the locality, Rakesh Kumar, was keen on the idea. (p.23) In one of the air-conditioned halls of the India Habitat Centre, as various speakers talked about ‘government accountability’ and the ‘filth’ that needed to be cleared from the city, Rakesh spoke about himself as the ‘model citizen’: I have done everything that the government has asked. I have taken part in ‘family planning’, I’ve installed a bijli (electricity) meter in my home, and am educating my children … and after all this, the government simply Page 17 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer wants to throw me out of my house without any guarantee of an alternative. If I am shifted to the ‘transit camp’, I will not be able to take any building material with me [since no permanent structures are allowed]. So, in the moving, I will be half dead, and then if I am allotted another plot, I will not be able to afford material to build another house as well as pay Rs 7000 [the government fee for a resettlement plot]. This will kill us completely. I cannot say if on that evening Kumar’s desperate evocations of a consistently model life was yoked to the irony of the fleeting presence of Jagmohan’s sign of the ‘ideal basti’. However, later in the fieldwork, as I discuss in Chapter two, I came to develop a better sense of the relationship between the evanescent promises of the state and the equally evasive strategies of dealing with counterfeit and fake worlds. Rakesh Kumar, around fifty-two years of age, came to Delhi around 1972 from Meerut in Western Uttar Pradesh. Rakesh’s father had worked as a ‘composer’ in a printing company. However, in mid-life, he lost his job as a result of unionbazi (trade-unionism). When Rakesh came to Delhi, he had recently completed his eighth class and his father wanted him to learn ‘composing’ as well. However, he wanted to be a ‘businessman’. Rakesh set up a small stall near the Town Hall in the Chandni Chowk (Old Delhi) area, where he sold stationery and handkerchiefs. He was convinced that he had launched himself into a successful career. However, Indira Gandhi put an end to that aspiration. When the Emergency was declared in 1975, the Old Delhi area particularly suffered the brunt of the ‘slum clearance’ drives initiated by Sanjay Gandhi, overseen by the then Vice-Chairman of the DDA, Jagmohan. The street traders of Chandni Chowk were also drawn into the demolitions net and Rakesh remembers being severely beaten by the police as part of the drive to cleanse the footpaths of ‘encroachments’. Soon after, he had to abandon his stall. (p.24) Now unemployed, Rakesh decided to complete matriculation. However, after four years of further study, and with a matric degree in hand, he was no closer to finding a permanent job. Desperately short of money, Rakesh became a rickshaw-puller. However, ‘being educated’, he soon managed to get a threewheeler auto-rickshaw license and worked as an auto-rickshaw driver for about twenty years. As he ferried passengers around the city, he would engage them in conversation. What did they do? Where did they live? Were they, like him, migrants to Delhi? What was a good business to be in? Could they tell him anything about other ways of making money? The erratic traffic of conversation between Rakesh and his passengers led to the next rung of Rakesh’s career in Delhi. ‘Someone’ told him about the Kuber Finance Corporation, a ‘chit fund’ company that had a huge clientele among the Page 18 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer urban poor. He joined the company as an ‘agent’, charged with securing ‘investment’ funds from residents of Delhi’s bastis. This was in 1997. He says he got the company ‘a lot of business’ through convincing many of his acquaintances in different bastis to invest their savings in fixed deposit in return for the promise that it would ‘triple in three years’. ‘The basti people’, Rakesh told me, ‘had a great deal of faith in someone who was just like them’, and the business prospered. He quit his auto-rickshaw job in order to devote more time to it. During the first year of his Kuber job, everything went according to plan: there was an increase in the number of clients, and the company gave him frequent bonuses. Then, sometime in late 1998, government regulators discovered several ‘irregularities’ in Kuber’s business practices and the apex regulatory body, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), ordered it to shut down (Mathew 1999). More importantly, it appeared that Kuber was not in a position to pay back either the principal or any returns to its investors. Almost overnight, the company shut its doors. Thousands of its investors—including those in bastis —suffered very significant financial losses. Rakesh lost about Rs 50,000. When Kuber folded, Rakesh Kumar was back on the streets. However, Rakesh once noted, ‘something good also happened during this time’: around 1988, he met an Assamese woman who was living with her relatives in Delhi. She mentioned that she was having ‘problems’ with them and turned to Rakesh for advice. They got to know each other well, resulting in a ‘love marriage’. Shanti, his wife, trained to be a crèche worker and became part of a government scheme to run a crèche (p.25) in Nangla. At the time of the demolitions, she looked after thirty children. Since 2000, Rakesh has mostly been unemployed, surviving on odd jobs and ‘fees’ for ‘social work’ such as filling out forms, and directing and accompanying fellow basti dwellers to various government offices. This had been the most specific outcome of his enhanced education. Ironically, it was the demolition of Nangla Matchi that led to an unexpected but highly lucrative source of employment for Rakesh. In May 2006, before the Nangla demolitions began, Rakesh and some of his friends decided to visit the village of Savda where they had heard they were to be relocated. I was invited to join them and made our way there in an auto-rickshaw. Savda is at the Northern end of Delhi, off the highway that leads to Rohtak—beyond the Metro route, the shopping malls, the traffic lights, regular bus services, schools, hospitals, police stations, and government office. Along the way, middle-class localities of Punjabi Bagh and Paschim Vihar give way to older resettlement colonies—such as those within Nangloi—and ‘unauthorized colonies’ that have been ‘regularized’. There is heavy traffic on the way to Savda, and we are soon passing through a string of opulent wedding venues. There is Nishika Garden Wedding Hall, Sun and Moon Vatika (garden), Shubham Vatika, Sarasvati Vatika, and Cosmic Palms. We cross a railway track and turn off onto a dirt road, coming to a stop near some bulldozers and road-rollers. There are men measuring the ground and inserting pegs at different distances. It is a vast open farmland. An MCD board Page 19 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer tells us that around 265 acres of land will be used for ‘transit camps’ and a resettlement colony for about 22,000 families. We approach a man to ask if land has been allotted for Nangla residents. He says no. He is an Assistant Engineer of the MCD Slum Wing. Two men approach us and want to know about the locality. They say that they are interested in buying katchi parchis (temporary documents indicating entitlement) from allottees. They are real estate dealers. In the past few weeks, Rakesh and his friends had been saying that Savda is in ‘the other end of the world’ and that, among other things, they would find it very difficult to find schools for their children. However, as we now walk around the locality, the group begins to change its opinion. Rakesh says that this place is a far better deal than, say, the resettlement colony of Bawana in North-West Delhi: it is nearer (p.26) to urban localities, and there is a rail-line nearby that connects to Delhi. By the end of the visit, everyone feels quite pleased about the place and the prospect of moving here. It is January 2007 and I am sitting with Rakesh at Savda where he has been allotted a plot. He has built a temporary shack on it but doesn’t live there. Instead, he has rented a room outside the resettlement colony. There is a vacant plot of land right next to his shack. Rakesh is hoping that he will be able to buy it. As we wander around the locality, he points out at various plots and their current prices. Corner plots are particularly valued, as are adjoining plots that are vacant and which can be made into ‘twins’ (judwa) and be sold either for a shop or for someone to build a substantial dwelling. Plots on the main road fetch the highest price. There is now an active real estate market: many original allottees never moved in and sold their ‘pink’ (allotment) slips to dealers, others have sold and moved nearer to their place of work, and still others have sold and gone back to their villages. Rakesh has become a real estate dealer. He says he tries to convince people not to sell and to ride out the tough times, because ‘Savda will become as well-connected as Nangla’, especially now that there is a metro rail-line around six kilometres from the settlement. However, if they still want to sell, he buys their plot with money borrowed from a ‘financier’. When selling, he gets a small cut. He tells me that this is the ‘best investment’ and asks me to seriously consider putting some money into it, as many ‘middle-class’ people from nearby localities have done. He is happy to act on my behalf. He says he is now fully occupied with his new business. He flourishes a ‘receipt book’ that has rows and columns for listing the names of buyers and sellers, the amount of deposit paid, amounts to be forfeited in case either party decides not to go ahead, and dates of ‘settlement’. ‘But buying and selling land here is illegal, isn’t it?’, I ask him. Yes, he says, of course, ‘but I mainly get my information on what is available via the MCD officials. So, we are all in it together’. Between the Chandni Chowk footpath, the Nangla dislocation, and settlement at Savda, Rakesh has learnt to mimic both the state and the market. The real estate negotiations produce a curiously warm sociality, for, as we will

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer see in the next chapter, Rakesh buys plots mostly from those he has known well to help in these times of financial distress. By the end of 2007, Rakesh himself owned two plots of land, one through the original allotment and the second bought from another (p.27) man who wanted to sell to go back to his village. The second plot is near a main road and hence more valuable. ‘The best way to make money’, he tells me, ‘is through buying and selling land’. As we walk around the locality, he stops to chat to another man on a scooter who is telling him about the availability of saleable land in Savda. ‘If I had more money to spare’, he says, ‘I would invest it all in land in Savda’. Plots of land which were given by the government at Rs 7,000 were (in 2007) selling for up to Rs 200,000, if near one of the main roads that run through the locality. There were no pucca roads yet, but a flourishing real estate market. As we walked around the locality one summer day—hot winds enveloping us in swirls of dust—Rakesh talked about how he discovered a sure-fire way to make money in the city.

Between the State and the ‘Community’ Within bastis such as Nangla Matchi, those who act as the state—the pradhans, for example—do so through adopting a manner where they both defer to it as well as treat it as an unwanted accretion upon the ‘real’ community (the samaj). Nigam suggests that ‘The spatial organization, as well as the specific histories of [Delhi’s poorer neighbourhoods] … ensures a kind of life where a community existence is reproduced on a daily basis and one that stands in sharp contrast to the atomized existence of middle class and affluent sections of the city’ (2002: 26). The remaining part of this discussion seeks to extend this insight through a modification. I will suggest that basti life is characterized by contexts of intimate entanglements with one’s neighbours that produces the basti as different from as well as linked to the ‘formal’ (here, the state) machinations that surround it. The imagination of basti residents produces their locality as of the city, but also beyond it, making for a situation of state mimicry as well as a rejection of the state in favour of ‘community’ life. Let us return to Bilkees Begum—the woman who would be a man—as a comment on this aspect. Suraj Chandra’s comment on Bilkees’s abilities (or rather, their lack) was linked to a number of long running disputes between the two, and their mise-en-scène tells us something about the strategies of moving between ideas of the state and the samaj (community). Sometime in 2003, a woman had come to seek Suraj Chandra’s help, stating that her plot of land in Nangla had been ‘taken over’ by a group (p.28) that claimed allegiance to Bilkees. Sensing a political opportunity, Suraj and some of his followers filed a police complaint against Bilkees. The latter—who never tired of telling me about her contacts with ‘the police and CBI officials’—retaliated by filing a counter-complaint against Suraj, accusing him of the murder of the woman’s husband. The husband had indeed been murdered some years ago, and

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer the police had been unable to solve the crime. His body lay as if in wait for Bilkees to conjure its ghost to her cause. A meeting was called to resolve the imbroglio. It was presided by Sohrab, a man in his early forties. Sohrab began by informing the gathering that he was earlier a resident of Nangla and now lived elsewhere. ‘In 1987’, he said, ‘I lived here and ate raakh (ash) … but now I am a rich thekedar (contractor) and employ two hundred people’. He lived near ‘Nehru Stadium’, he said, and had come to mediate between Suraj and Bilkees as he ‘spoke on no one’s behalf’. What interests me here is not Sohrab’s dispute resolution skills. But my interest lies in Bilkees’s self-positioning as an active agent occupying the interstices of the state and the samaj. Sohrab began by asking about the matbhed (dispute) between Bilkees and Suraj. The latter responded that Bilkees had been carrying out a number of surveys ‘without permission from anyone’. There was now an argument between Sohrab and Suraj, with the latter suggesting that Sohrab favoured Bilkees. Suraj went on to say that neither Sohrab nor Bilkees could be trusted (perhaps because they were co-religionists). ‘Do you follow the rule of law’, he asked, addressing Sohrab and Bilkees. ‘I do’, said Sohrab, ‘but if nothing else works, I use force, I have two hundred londas (hefty young men) to back me’. Bilkees smiled, nodding. The implied violence in the term ‘londa’, as Cohen (1995) points out, is infused with masculine sexual meanings. Specifically, it combines the contexts of masculine ‘fun and violence’ (Verkaaik 2004). As the arguments for and against different positions unfolded, Bilkees sat pensively in one corner of the hut. Finally, Sohrab turned to her, and then to Suraj: ‘what I can’t understand’, he said, ‘is why you had taken recourse to the law and not solved this problem at a samajik (community) level’. Bilkees—the bearer of the pradhan rubber-stamp, police confidante, and overseer of countless faux-surveys—smiled expansively: ‘exactly’, she said; there are times when you must become the state, and other times convey your role as guardian of the ‘community’, as one (p.29) with it. For, as I will further explore in the next chapter, it is the ‘community’ that possesses norms and standards of behaviour, whereas the state is seen as ‘inherently corrupt’ and without any norms (Osella and Osella 2000: 150). For basti residents, the search for intimacy with the state and assertions of distance from it constitute enmeshed strategies of securing the material means of life as well as the emotional comforts of fellow-feeling in a hostile urban environment. This constant calibration of identity—the relay between strategic statism and quotidian communitarianism—is the irreducible condition of life at the margins of the city. Notes:

(1) . Employing what they refer to as ‘participatory econometrics’ (which translates urban complexity into numbers through survey instruments), Jha et al. (2007) suggest that through facilitating access to bureaucrats and politicians, Page 22 of 23

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A Hijra, a Female Pradhan, and a Real Estate Dealer the urban pradhan furthers the ends of participatory democracy for the urban poor. As Chapter three on the eviction of Nangla’s residents and the demolition of the locality shows, this might be a somewhat impressionistic conclusion. The pradhan’s ability to secure the democratic rights of his followers is severely circumscribed by the myriad politics of local, national, and transnational decision makers, including bureaucrats, politicians, and judges. The making of a ‘global city’—which requires the removal of ‘unclean spaces’—easily does away with democratic rights, and the pradhan and his followers are, frequently, simply brushed off the urban map. (2) . Estimates by some Nangla residents, based on the number of household supplied and the price per unit of electricity, ranged between Rs 35,000–40,000 per month. This compared well with the salary of a mid-level bureaucrat, or a university lecturer. (3) . Available at http://www.delhilive.com/cvc-ok%E2%80%99s-delhi-signaturebridge-at-wazirabad; accessed on 8 March 2009. (4) . ‘Wazirabad Signature Bridge to ease traffic woes, attract tourists’. Available at www.cities.expressindia.com/fullstory; accessed 8 March 2009.

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Duplicity, Intimacy, Community An Ethnography of ID Cards, Permits, and other Fake Documents Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords Narratives of tricksters and counterfeiters have a long, popular, and cautionary presence in the annals of Indian modernity. This chapter explores the meanings that attach to certain contemporary acts of deceiving and faking, and the ways in which they are both produced by being in the city as well as producing certain kinds of relationships. The chapter focuses on the residents of the basti (slum) of Nangla Matchi and their various acts of producing fake identity cards and a variety of other documents. It offers a discussion about simulation and dissimulation, feigning and duplicity, and passing and pretending as significant contexts for gaining security of livelihood and residence in the city as well as constituting specific senses of community. Faking and counterfeiting, the article suggests, are arenas where the state both constitutes itself and contributes to the making of imagined non-state sensibilities of community. Keywords:   fake documents, identity cards, informal economies, slums, urban poor

Delhi city is a happy hunting ground for the professional cheat, and every form of deception seems to be practised from the ‘dropping jewellery trick’ which receives the rustic visitor, to the feats of the bogus company promoter which appeals to the more sophisticated. Annual Administration Report of the Delhi Province for 1937–8, Delhi, 1939, p. 5.

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community Given the extraordinary flux and uncertainty of life for the urban poor, as explored in the previous chapter, the task of acquiring the means to certainty is an unceasing one. One of the most significant ways in which the people of Nangla Matchi sought to secure a foothold in the city was through accumulating as many paper-documents that proved ‘identity’. For the urban poor, proof of identity is necessary for all manner of things: to demonstrate that one is not a ‘foreigner’ (read Bangladeshi) who wishes to take ‘advantage’ of the rights of Indians; purchase subsidized food and cooking fuels; secure access to free health care, education, and subsidized housing; and, of course, the chance to gain a permanent foothold through securing a plot of land in a resettlement colony. However, the task of proving identity is a particularly difficult one for the poor, given that their lives are dictated by movement—enforced movement to seek a better livelihood—which also diminishes the possibilities of enumeration and classification, and the chances of becoming the subject of governmentality. However, everyone needs proof. So, copies circulate: there are fake ID cards, ration cards, voter’s (p.31) cards, and BPL cards. This chapter is about the cultures of community and ideas of the state engendered by cultures of duplicity. It is also about the making of community life at a time of intense and ceaseless intra-national mobility. The efforts required to secure appropriate documents and paperwork that make for urban sustenance are surrounded not only by anxieties and apprehensions but also specific strategies and cultures of making the acquisitions. Narratives and instances of faking and trickery have a long, popular, and cautionary history within the annals of Indian modernity. These include law-andorder laments such as the one quoted in the epigraph, ‘civic-minded’ publications such as Pauparao Naidu’s 1915 book, The History of Railway Thieves: With Illustrations and Hints on Detection, and contemporary manifestations such as the cultures of ‘piracy’ within audio-visual industries (Manuel 1991; Sundaram 2009). But, what social insights do cultures and processes of counterfeiting and faking offer? In colonial police reports, particularly those that deal with fake currencies, the narrative ranges over a number of cities and neighbourhoods, involves Muslims and Hindus as machinists, financiers, and ‘utterers’, describes barter involving a variety of goods (such as ghee and silver), and lists the various kinds of social events (such as weddings and dawats or dinner parties) that are made possible by faking. Counterfeiting gives rise to a web of concrete relationships and the topographies of deception—including government offices, police stations, jails, ‘parade’ grounds, shops and marketplaces, and railway stations—outlined by colonial reports establish both its history as an aspect of modern industrial life, as well as the peculiarity of the city as the ‘scene of the crime’.1 With the modern memory of faking as background, I would like to explore the meanings that attach to certain contemporary acts of deceiving, and the ways in which they are both produced by being-in-the-city, as well as produce certain kinds of Page 2 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community relationships and ways of being in the city. This chapter, is then, about simulation and dissimulation, feigning and duplicity, and passing and pretending as significant contexts for gaining security of livelihood and residence in the city.

Senses of the Real In the world of art, the fake object signifies a diminution of artistic (Benjamin 1985; Radnoti 1999) as well as monetary value. The forger mounts an attack upon the socially (and economically) accepted (p.32) relationship between individual genius, creativity, and an audience that is the site of validation for both these aspects. The forger is deemed to create nothing, and destroy something. However, the anxiety and debate that the forgery leaves in its trail points to the analytically productive potential of such acts. The vibrant and everexpanding cultures of faking and forgeries in the city offer a way of understanding certain strategies of urban living, ones that illuminate relationships between the state, the market, and subaltern citizens. Public knowledge of the realm of fakeness spans many areas and—particularly among the middle classes—is constituted primarily through media reports that track attempts to police the activity. Faking and forging range across—and link— individual, local, national, and global contexts of being, becoming, desires, and aspirations. They constitute, for example, a significant project of transforming caste and ‘tribal’ identity. So, on 28 August 2005, the Indian Express newspaper reported that the ‘Economic Offences Wing of Delhi Police has arrested a father and son for allegedly submitting fake ST (“Scheduled Tribe”) certificates for getting a job in TRIFED, Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Foundation of India’. There are several other ways of securing government employment that also involve forged documents. These include appointment letters on fake letterheads of government departments such as the MCD as well as counterfeit ‘police verification forms’ required for such positions.2 Veering between ‘the rational and the magical modes’ (Das 2004: 244–5), the state itself, in the different ways it manifests in the lives of its citizens, is the site of the most elaborate schemes of faking and deception. Indeed, one of the most significant relationships between the urban poor and the state, as discussed later, is through mutually agreed upon fraud and deception. However, among the vast cross-cutting markets for certificates, visas, passports of dead people (‘Biomedical Engineer … Arrested for Selling the Passports of His Dead Wife’, The Indian Express, 30 June 2005) and fake identity papers, the state also offers assurances. It seeks to shore up the debased local coinage through recourse to global currency: MCD to make Delhi as ‘transparent’ as Chicago —

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community New Delhi, July 14: The Municipal Corporation of Delhi is taking a leaf out of Chicago City’s e-governance experience. It will adopt and (p.33) implement a module based on Chicago City’s movement (sic) to increase transparency in governance … (‘MCD to Make Delhi as “Transparent” as Chicago’, Esha Roy, The Indian Express, 15 July 2005). Notwithstanding the recourse to the ‘rationality’ of ‘transparency’, faking is one of the most significant ways in which the poor come into contact with the state. And while it constitutes a response to the spurious strategies of the state, ‘duplicity’ is an important category through which the poor make sense of their lives in general. So, in Guatemala, Nelson (2004) points out, ‘duplicity’ is invoked to explain how one survived state-sponsored violence, and is used as an accusation against women who work for indigenous cultural rights, and also forms the key ingredient in tales of illegal, cross-border migration. As I hope to show in this chapter, in Delhi too, ‘narratives of duplicity’ (Nelson 2004: 136) serve multiple purposes, carrying within them greater possibilities of capturing the ‘real’ (in Baudrillard’s [1988] sense of simulated reality) than ideas of ‘truth’ and transparency. Veena Das makes the important observation that ‘it is not that the mode of sociality to be found in the institutions of the state is based on clarity of rules and regulation and that these become illegible to the poor or the illiterate, but that the very persons charged with implementing rules might also have to struggle with how to read the rules and regulations’ (Das 2004: 238). In this chapter, I suggest that faking is both about the interpretive ‘struggle’ that Das refers to, and also the context within which the state secures its rationality and the urban poor their agency. Fakeness creates a sphere where a variety of exchanges between the ‘people’ and the state establish each other in their identity. My discussion also seeks to extend Das’s insights in another direction. The use of the term ‘struggle’ implies adherence to the notion of clarity—the state official struggles to discover the true intent of rules and regulations—whereas in this discussion, I will suggest that an additional aspect to consider concerns the ‘strategies of relating’ that different interpretations of the law make possible. In particular, the struggle to ‘truthfully’ interpret the rule of law in order to arrive at singular relationships between the people and the state, and other interpretations that open up the possibilities of multiple relationalities, are strategies of urban life that exist side by side as well as interpenetrate. (p.34) The discussion that follows regards the state as a ‘dispersed ensemble of institutional practices and techniques of governance’ (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001:14), where the state both struggles to constitute itself, and

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community contributes to the making of explicitly imagined non-state sensibilities of community.

Requiring Proof I got to know Amit Kumar, a former resident of Nangla, in mid-2007. When the locality was demolished in 2006, he had been moved to the Savda-Ghevda (Savda) Resettlement Colony. After having been ‘relocated’ from Nangla to Savda, Amit had become a pradhan (community leader) for many of Nangla’s exresidents who had also shifted to Savda. One day, Amit mentioned that he was going to the Delhi State Secretariat to talk to the Principal Secretary of the Department of Urban Development about ex-Nangla residents who had not received an alternative plot of land despite being able to prove their entitlement under the relevant government regulations. The Delhi High Court had issued orders in July 2008 that the government ‘re-verify’ the eligibility of a large number of basti evictees not provided with land in resettlement localities. The court had noted that the initial survey to determine eligibility was ‘defective’. However, Amit said, this file was ‘stuck’ somewhere in the Urban Development office and no action had been taken since the court order. I asked Amit if I could come along, and we met at the Pragati Maidan, the venue for the annual India International Trade Fair (IITF), which has been an important place of employment for many who lived at Nangla. He was here to meet some ex-Nangla residents whose non-allotment ‘cases’ he was pursuing. We then proceeded to the Secretariat. We enter the Secretariat building through electronic check points. Amit tells the receptionist that he wants to see ‘Mr Jain’, who is in charge of the ‘Bhagidari section’3 within the Chief Minister’s office. The receptionist looks at him with some suspicion—Amit’s trousers are shiny with wear, his shirtcollar is frayed, and he is carrying a tattered briefcase—and asks where he has come from. When he says ‘Savda Resettlement Colony’, she is on the verge of dismissing him from her presence. But, he urges her to call Mr Jain so that ‘I can speak to him personally’. Hesitatingly, she agrees and calls Mr Jain. After a few minutes of (p.35) conversation, Amit hands the phone back to the receptionist. We are soon issued a ‘chit’ that allows us to enter the complex. The Secretariat is a labyrinthine building with several different levels as well as layers of corridors. There are multiple entry and exit points which lead to an everproliferating number of passageways, wings, and alcoves. I can barely keep up with Amit as he moves with familiarity from one floor to another, criss-crossing corridors to find the shortest route. His knowledge of the location of different offices is as precise as that of his neighbourhood. Every now and then, he utters ‘water wing’, or, ‘bijli (electricity) section’. Soon we are at the office of the Principal Secretary, Urban Development department. ‘But’, I say to him, ‘you told the receptionist that you were going to the Bhagidari section’. He smiles and says that Bhagidari is the ‘softer’ part of the bureaucracy, and that if he had asked for access to ‘Urban Development’, he would have been turned back. However, we are told that the Principal Secretary Page 5 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community is in a meeting and will only be available around four in the afternoon. It is now 1 p.m. Amit says we should go and meet Mr Jain in the Bhagidari office. He tells Mr Jain that we had come to meet as I had been conducting ‘research’ on Bhagidari and was keen to meet him. Somewhat startled, I offered Mr Jain my gratitude for making some time for me. Jain is the Superintendent of the Bhagidari section and courteous in his responses. He seemed to be aware of Amit’s strategies for gaining access to government office. However, he also displayed, as much as I could make out, a genuine sympathy for such strategies. Jain says that he feels that as far as the poor are concerned, urban governance schemes for the poor such as Sajha Prayas (Collective Effort) have not achieved ‘very much’, but ‘we are trying’. He was, indeed, the ‘soft’ bureaucracy Amit could use as a bridgehead to get to the more unyielding sections. When we finish with Mr Jain, Amit suggests that we visit Mr Narang who is incharge of the Delhi government’s Sajha Prayas programme, which started in 2007 and seeks to replicate the Bhagidari idea with residents of bastis and resettlement colonies. We walk into Mr Narang’s tiny office and are, once again, treated with courtesy. He says that while he, in his official capacity, is not able to do much, at least he has the sense that he is trying to do ‘something’. So, he says, he makes sure that any one from a basti or resettlement colony can come to his office whenever they like. Of the 920 or so basti and resettlement (p.36) colonies in Delhi, he says, only twenty-nine are part of Sajha Prayas. Amit tells Mr Narang that he had dropped in as ‘Dr Srivastava, who has been researching on Sajha Prayas was very keen to see you’. Mr Narang smiles and offers us tea. Although these have cross-class dimensions, the economies of passing-asanother, ‘uttering counterfeit’, and forging documents speak with particular salience to the lives of the urban poor in as much as they play a far greater role in the making of the web of subaltern relationships. So, while Michael Taussig is right to note that ‘like the official and the “extra-official,” the true and the forged (are) flip-sides of stately being; neither could exist without the other’ (Taussig 1997: 18), the fake-realm does not quite create relationships between the state and the middle classes in the same way that it does of the urban poor. Though the intertwined nature of the real and fake create the state’s ‘mystique of sovereignty’ (Taussig 1997: 18), this does not itself explain how mystical sovereignty is implicated in constituting the dense and intimate webs of relationships either between the ‘people’ and the state, or that between the ‘fake’ and the ‘real’. Mr Narang’s knowing smile tells us that much. But before we get to the semiotics of Mr Narang’s smile, there is a necessary detour through the contexts of the anxieties over proof, identity, and the real.

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community During the course of fieldwork, I had gotten to know twenty-two year old Ramu, and his close friend, Prakash, quite well. Ramu is from the small town of Fatehpur in the state of Uttar Pradesh and had been living in Nangla for about four years. Around 1975, his father, Ramesh, moved from Fatehpur to nearby Kanpur to learn tailoring, and after a few years there, travelled to Kolkata to set up a tailoring business with a friend. However, the venture was not successful. He then found a job as a security guard at Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds in Delhi, leaving this job to work at a container terminal, and then again as a security guard. Finally, when I met him, he was employed in a textile factory in East Delhi. His wife lives in Fatehpur, and another son, younger than Ramu, studies in Kanpur. About ten years ago, Ramesh had built a hut in Nangla, which is where Ramu lived. Ramesh comes to Nangla as often as he can. I provide this background to Ramu’s family to reiterate the unstable grounds of livelihood and residence through which the urban poor (p.37) seek to meet the demands to prove constancy of work and abode. While Nangla’s population consisted of a wide mixture of religious, regional, and ethnic groups, it was not a concern over identity that produced—or fractured—the sense of community; rather, it was the obsession with obtaining an identity card (pehchan patra). Hence, almost invariably, stories of love and longing, home and the world, friendship and enmity, intimacy and distance, and locality and its loss devolved, in some irreducible sense, to narratives of the paperwork of being and the bureaucratic procedures of belonging. Neither Ramu nor his friend Prakash had any form of identity such as voter ID cards or the BPL cards that carry entitlements of cheap food and other goods at state run shops. It had been impossible for them to obtain any of these since the application procedure invariably required proof of residence, which they did not possess. Prakash mentioned that his brother had a BPL card: Prakash: His name is Ajay Kumar, maybe I can pass myself off as him and get my photo onto a driving license using his ration card for proof of residence…. I don’t mind being known as Ajay Kumar if I can get a driving license, then I can get other ID cards made. Or, my uncle has a ration card, his name is Ram Ashray Singh, maybe I could pass as Ram Ashray Singh. Though I am on the voters list in Uttar Pradesh, I have never voted….

Ramu: Neither have I. Here (in Delhi) we can do everything in the private sphere, but nothing if it involves government work … we are completely private people! Anyway if the government doesn’t bother with us … not giving us any form of identity, why should I bother with it? It is not difficult to get a duplicate ID card made … but why bother? I have absolutely no identity here! My identity is entirely linked with private activities, nothing to do with the government. I can do whatever I want as a private person! I have filed an application for a BPL Page 7 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community card, three or four times, but nothing ever happens. I’ve even been to Patiala House (the Delhi High Court premises) in this connection.

The apparent rebuff to the state by Ramu is the simultaneous expression of an intimacy with it; like a lover who will not reciprocate, making one suffer despite numerous supplications. For, the problem is that if the state does not certify that love, the market spurns any relationship with even greater disdain. So, Ramu told me that he: … once went to Laxmi Nagar [a locality in East Delhi] to become an agent of the Revolution Forever (pyramid selling scheme) company and they (p. 38) asked for my ID card … and I didn’t have any (other) proof of residence, so they didn’t allow me to join. Emma Tarlo points out that ‘the poor in Delhi relate to [the] state principally through the market’ (2003: 11), and that, ‘Basic amenities such as land, jobs, electricity, water, and paving are things not provided, but purchased in exchange for votes, money, or, in the case of the Emergency (1975–7), sterilization certificates’ (Tarlo 2003: 11). To reiterate a point made in the previous chapter, I suggest that whereas for the middle classes the state is an entity of ferment, for the urban poor it is the strategies for dealing with it that are mutable. The state itself remains a consistent spectre in their lives, making appearances in different aspects: as provider of cheap food and other domestic goods, erratic legal succour, education, medical aid, residential spaces, and arbitrary regulatory force. In each of these contexts, neither the ‘mystique of sovereignty’ (Taussig 1997), nor the mediation of the market diminishes the need for multiple strategies for dealing with the state. We might say, borrowing Taussig’s discussion of an entirely different context, that for Ramu (and his friends), the relationship with the state is one where ‘skepticism and belief actively cannibalize each other’ (Taussig 2003: 288). That, perhaps, is the tragedy of unrequited love. A significant aspect of Taussig’s (2003) discussion of shamanistic discourse and practice is focused upon the relationship between ‘the various shadings of gullibility and trickery, faith and skepticism’ (Taussig 2003: 299). In particular, he points to ‘the continuous anxiety about pretense and the continuous excavation of fraud through revelation of the (failed) secret’ (2003: 289) in the face of ‘native’ scepticism about shamanistic magic. A significant aspect of my discussion is the absence of anxiety regarding pretence and fraud: perhaps this is what differentiates shamanistic magic and its subjects from that of my contemporary urban contexts—that tales of magic do not circulate in the bastis; far from it. However, stories of magical women such as churails—notorious as mistresses of disguise and evil tricksters—are only one of many kinds that the people of the bastis encounter (see, for example, Nigam 2002 on Delhi’s ‘Monkeyman’). They sit alongside tales of the state, and the anxiety that ensues Page 8 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community relates not to exposing trickery as fraud, but to one might be excluded from the circuits of trickery, and hence be harmed by it. This—not being able to secure a much needed document—is a matter of life and death. (p.39) Prakash once told me that he had got an ID card issued by a private security company that operated at Pragati Maidan. His brother-in-law who worked for the firm got the card made for him. ‘I never worked as a guard, but I got the ID card made from the Red Star Security firm!’ he said. ‘Genuineness’ is often established through fakeness: a fake proof of residence can ensure a genuine BPL card, and a fake ID card can—at least that is why Prakash got it made—be a passport to something more real, perhaps a voter ID card. In the great chain of documents of proof, the fake and the genuine often change places, and the point at which the fake has provided access to the genuine is seldom clear. The state and its documents—couched in bizarre language, written on expensive ‘stamp-paper’—are, of course, intimidating strangers. But strangers become intimates through the local acts of reproducing their image and the circulation of such reproductions among friends and neighbours. Unlike art, however, such reproductions of an ‘authentic’ presence (Benjamin 1985) do not depreciate its authority or aura. The constancy of the state’s presence in the life of the people ensures its undiminished power and its unflagging aura. That is the art of the relationship between the (basti) people and the state. Copies circulate due to lack of access to the original and also because the copy serves the purposes of the original. Technology—colour photocopying in particular—makes it possible to make exact copies of the original, thus doing away with the danger of losing the original if it is a document that needs to be carried upon one’s person; it can be left at home. At Nangla Matchi, public spaces—lanes, mosques, and temple precincts, shop-fronts, tree-shades, verandas (for those who had them)—were frequent sites of discussion regarding the processes of obtaining, faking, selling, and circulation of originals and their shadows. Ansariji is from the town of Dildarnagar in Uttar Pradesh and came to Delhi in 1987. Before that, he worked in Patna as a ‘state bank naukar (servant)’. From Patna, he moved to Gazipur, and was involved in the illegal felling of trees in that area. Arrested by the police, he was sent to jail. After being released, he came to Delhi and settled down in Nangla. Being literate, he is frequently called upon by fellow residents to assist with paperwork. He also has extensive knowledge of different kinds of government documents, those which might be required for particular purposes, and the calamitous consequences of losing an ‘original’. One day, as Ansariji and I sat near Nangla’s main mosque—he was (p. 40) fielding queries about paperwork and I was his unofficial assistant—an acquaintance came by to make small talk. An ID card was visible from his shirt pocket. Ansariji laughed and told him that he should be more careful in case he is pick-pocketed or the card fell out. The man took out his card and showed it to

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community us. He said that he only carried a (laminated) photocopy, leaving the original at home ‘just for this reason’. Even as its documentary manifestations are endlessly reproduced as fakes, the aura of the state remains untarnished. And, it leads to the internalization of the most troubling of all its demands: to ‘provide proof!’ In basti interactions, this frequently becomes a challenge similar to ‘prove your manhood!’; scepticism and faith in the state coil around each other. Many young men in Nangla were keen to become members of a pyramid selling scheme promoted by the Revolution Forever (RF) company (Chapter eleven) since it appeared to promise quick—and incredibly large—amounts of money in the shortest possible time and with apparently little effort. The first time Ramu had visited the company’s premises, there was a man giving a bhashan (lecture). The man said he used to be a ‘TTE’ (Travelling Ticket Examiner) for the Indian Railways, but he had given it up to work as an agent for Revolution Forever. Now, he said, he was a very rich person and owned a Honda City car. This is how, the man said, industrialists such as the Ambanis and Birlas became rich. A young man from Uttar Pradesh’s town of Gonda was in the audience. After having heard the bhashan, he got up and, according to Ramu, demanded that the speaker ‘show proof’ of all the payments he had received, and also show his car. If he was able to do this, the man from Gonda said, he was willing to pay the Rs 8,000 joining fee ‘on the spot’. The speaker was taken aback and said that he could hardly be expected to carry around such ‘proof’. By now, the crowd had joined in, chanting demands for proof. The man from Gonda was invited into a private chamber for a discussion but refused, saying ‘everything must be discussed in public’. Everyone needs proof. But even the most routine acts of obtaining such documents can go wrong. It is not unusual for an individual to be registered under different names on different documents: admission card for exams, ration cards, ID cards, BPL cards can carry different versions of the same name. ‘You write your name one way on the application form’, fifteen year old Girish said to me, ‘and when your final document comes back, it’s written in some other way’. So, he (p.41) said, his father’s name—Mani Ram—was written as ‘Monkey Ram’ in a government document: ‘we all know about the problems this creates later on’, Ramu says. He adds that everyone must make sure that they have just one name on all documents: ‘otherwise, you wander around with many names and none of them works!’ But everyone needs proof, so the form-filling must go on. Ramu says that whenever he asks Nassim—who has vague contacts with the Samajwadi Party with its power base in Uttar Pradesh—for help in getting a ration card made, the latter asks him for a photocopy of the ‘original’: ‘but I don’t have an original!’, Ramu responds. So, he may have to pay someone to get his card made. However, they all know about the drunk official of the MCD and think that he may be able to help.

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community A Fake State of Affairs I first met Raj Kumar, a clerk of the MCD, at Suraj Chandra’s house. I thought he was a local since he seemed very friendly with many of the residents, forever providing advice about some official matter or another, talking about the problems of the jhuggi jhopri (‘slum’) localities, and generally holding forth about the ‘corrupt officers’ in terms no different than Suraj Chandra and other locals. And, invariably, whenever I ran into him, he seemed slightly drunk. In fact, till our fourth or fifth meeting, I had no idea that he was actually an official of the MCD’s Slum Wing. He could normally be found in the shack owned by Suraj Chandra, located on Nangla’s main road that came off the Ring Road. The shack had no door but a sack-cloth curtain that was only occasionally drawn. It contained two wooden beds and a few broken chairs, and on most mornings, Raj Kumar could be found reclining on one of the beds, drinking glasses of tea, and slurring over his conversation. As people passed by the shack, some would wave, and others wander in to make an inquiry regarding a ‘government’ matter. Usually, apart from Suraj Chandra, Raj Kumar would also be surrounded by a group of the latter’s friends. To a passerby, it seemed like a gathering of acquaintances from Nangla, each waving different bits of paper, and animatedly discussing how to make one’s way through the bureaucracies where these papers originated. Raj Kumar seemed just one of the participants in the tableau of Suraj Chandra’s shack, where the state was open to the street, and at one with it. (p.42) Nangla was Raj Kumar’s ‘beat’, and he had been assigned to carry out one of the many surveys that were always in progress. He would sit in Suraj Chandra’s shack, collecting information from whoever happened to come by. Of course, the fact that he sat in his space garnered Suraj Chandra a certain amount of prestige. The latter, recently defeated in the pradhan’s election by Bilkees Begum, sat next to the body of the state, soaking in its whisky-drenched aura. This is one kind of daily state, within reach and part of the conviviality of locality. This state—through feigning intimacy, and aligning itself with local ‘big’ men such as Suraj Chandra—is part of a process where the struggle to interpret laws (Das 2004: 238) gives way to the possibilities of negotiating outcomes as well as identities. Raj Kumar’s easy accessibility—where the body of the state simulates the life of the people—touches upon a number of contexts. First, it dulls the edges of bureaucratic indifference and hostility through a symbiotic relationship with ‘non-state social networks’ (Corbridge et al. 2005: 89), frequently merging with the latter. Second, everyone knew that Kumar would only really get ‘work’ done if he was bribed and that Suraj Chandra got a ‘cut’. In this way, Nangla residents could rest easy that Surja Chandra’s embeddedness within locality would ensure that the bribe would produce a result. However, no one was ever sure about his ‘influence’ upon Kumar, and this formed another level of feint between the state and the people. The opaque relationship between Suraj Chandra and Raj Kumar Page 11 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community allowed Nangla residents to maintain their sense of distance from the formal state since their representative’s relationship with it remained vague; the ‘people’—a term whose valence derives from the malevolence attributed to the state—remained distinct from the state. Basti notables such as Suraj Chandra parade their intimacy with various low-level government officials who are part of the ‘porous bureaucracy’ Benjamin (2004) speaks of, but are also keen to represent themselves as linked to ‘community’; and, as I discuss below, the idea of ‘community life’ emerges out of the complex relationship with the state. But what about the quotidian state? Simultaneously as Raj Kumar got drunk with the people, his continuing efficacy depended on his ability to maintain a sense of statist sobriety, where the state’s identity could be represented as possessing a rationality beyond the atavistic sensibilities of the crowd. One morning, I found Raj Kumar surrounded by a large (p.43) group of men and women, each pleading that he examine and submit a variety of forms on their behalf. He sipped tea while casually glancing at the scores of forms being thrust at him from different directions. ‘You know’, he said, ‘most people don’t even know why they are filling up a form. I have come today to do verification for the voter’s list; however, they think it’s for a ration card, so they’ve filled in an application form, and this causes more confusion’. Someone from the crowd asked him where his ‘form’ was. ‘It’s lying in a cupboard at a friend’s house’, he responded. Then— with an exasperated look on his face—he glanced at me, as if to interpret my presence as kindred to his state-ness, and turning to the questioner, said: ‘I can’t keep carrying it around, can I? Do you think a form will travel with me in a bus?’ Unlike basti people, government documents do not travel in buses. For them, what would differentiate the state from the people? However, the multiple modes of meeting the state—in cars, buses, shacks, and grand buildings—and its multiple ruses—Principal Secretary of a government ministry, Slum Department Secretary, survey official, a drunk MCD official—create spaces for countersubterfuge. Twenty-five year old Nangla resident Gyan Dass worked at a small restaurant in Old Delhi. Dass had tried to get his voter ID card made, but the officials had told him he must first provide proof in the form of a ration card. By paying a dalal (broker) Rs 500, Dass managed to have his name endorsed on his brother’s ration card for this purpose (it would have taken a long time to obtain one in his own name). He then re-applied for a ‘voter’s card’ and was told that the ration card did not have his house number, but only the locality. In order to have his house number included on the ration card, he needed ‘proof’. However, the only proof of residence he had was from another locality, from where he had shifted to Nangla. Ram Prakash, the ironing man, explained to me that there have been three ‘numbering’ episodes at Nangla since 1995. The first (in 1995) was to enroll residents as voters, and, with the support of local politicians, all houses were Page 12 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community given a unique number. Then, as part of the 2001 Indian census, houses were renumbered. Finally, in July 2005, houses were given yet another set of numbers during a survey carried out by the DDA and officials of the Pragati Power company, which ‘owns’ the land on which Nangla is situated. Ram Prakash says that he has kept paperwork related to all the numbering schemes, since ‘you never know (p.44) when you might be asked to show any one of them’. However, he adds, ‘people are confused about which might be the relevant numbers, and often don’t fill in any on the official papers’. He asks if I might accompany Gyan Dass to the electoral office to talk to the relevant officials. I agree and a few days later, we are at the electoral office. Dass hands in his application form through the window as I stand next to him. The man behind the window peruses the sheaf and says ‘but these are incomplete’. Dass points to me and the clerk asks if I am from a government office. I begin to formulate a sentence along the lines of ‘His papers are complete and he has a right to a voter’s card’. But before I can say any of this, Dass says, ‘Yes! A government officer’. The clerk stamps the papers. A few days later, Gyan Dass received his card. Finally, in this context, I have noted in Chapter one that simultaneously as Bilkees Begum paraded her putative intimacy with the local police and other low-level government officials, she was also keen to represent herself as linked to ‘community’. Suraj Chandra—a man of the ‘people’ and yet close to the state —embodies a similar expression of the relationship with the state; he is close to the state, but since the extent of the intimacy is never quite clear, he is able to represent himself—depending on the situation—as a ‘man of the people’. The relationship between Raj Kumar and Suraj Chandra leads us to a significant context in which senses of community are constituted in localities such as Nangla Matchi, a context that has a bearing upon some recent ethnographic explorations of the relationship between the ‘state’ and the ‘people’ in India. Hence, the material of this chapter shares common ground with investigations of the ways in which the state becomes legible through everyday practice that suggest that ‘at the local level the boundary between the state and society is a blurred one’ (Fuller and Harris 2000: 12–13). Within this vein, Akhil Gupta describes how the post-colonial state’s developmental agenda is vivified through ‘local politics’ (1998: 106), the Osellas speak of the ‘quotidian intimacy of the state’ (Osella and Osella 2000: 157), and Das and Poole seek it out through tracking its ‘penetration into the life of the everyday’ (2004: 15). Even for those for whom the state exists apart from the ‘people’, whereby ‘tangible institutions of the state may be helpless against the intangible force of historically sedimented cultural understandings of ordinary people’ (Kaviraj 1997: 235), its pervasive presence is not really in question. So, Kaviraj concludes that ‘from an agency (p.45) which was spectacular, mysterious and distant, the state has become something vast, overextended, extremely familiar at least in its sordid everyday structures’ (Kaviraj 1997: 243). We need, however, to insert a caveat Page 13 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community between the anthropological observations of blurred boundaries and the political scientist’s idea of ‘sordid’ interaction despite the deep embrace with the state, the quotidian relationship with it is marked by an ambivalence that derives from a suspicion of its form and ‘personality’ (see also Gupta 1995). Most significantly, even those who know it well (and get drunk with it and have the ability to admonish it), such as Suraj Chandra and Bilkees Begum, like to be able to represent their positions as distinct from the state, and of the ‘community’. For it is the ‘community’ that possesses norms and standards of behaviour, whereas the state is seen to consist of ‘ceremonial moves’ without any serious intent (Kaviraj 1997: 240). However, as I will now discuss, the state is—ironically— fundamental to the making of ‘community’ life for the urban poor.

To Fake is to Make: Duplicity, Intimacy, Community Nietzsche’s take on trickery, Taussig (2003) says, is organized around two separate points: [Firstly is] … his often-repeated assertions about the long-term well-being provided by error and untruth in human and social life, the second being the injunction for us not to labor under the illusion of eliminating trickery on the assumption that there is some other world out there beyond and bereft of trickery, beyond and bereft of what has come to be latterly known as power/knowledge and the artistry associated therewith, but to practice instead our own form of shamanism, if that’s the word, as philosophy and as search for understanding, if that’s the word. And come up with a set of tricks, simulation, deceptions, and art or appearances in a continuous movement of counterfeint and feint strangely contiguous with yet set against those weighing on us. (Taussig 2003: 278; emphasis in the original) In this section, I explore the relationship between ‘feint’ and ‘counterfeint’ that produces ‘social life’ and, further, investigate the ways in which we might ‘understand the fraudulent as not only true but efficacious, the trick as technique’ (Taussig 2003: 281). The ‘trick’, I suggest here, is the technique and a significant context for the making (p.46) of neighbourly bonds and social intimacies. That is to say that while cultures of copying are part of ‘networks of disorder that are endemic to contemporary urbanism’ (Sundaram 2004: 70), an ethnography of faking also affords a view into its ‘ordering’ effect. Processes and objects that form part of this context involve intense, long-term, intimate, and frequently opaque interactions. These also follow pre-established norms familiar to those who take part in them: about the etiquette that is proper to neighbourly bonds, taking and giving offence, valuing ‘local’ relationships, and trust. In the following discussion, I will focus upon specific senses of community and neighbourliness that permeate the acts and narratives of faking and passing. These include ideas of tariqa (method or protocol), the necessity of depredation Page 14 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community upon one’s own to provide care against the arbitrary callousness of outsiders, assimilating and making intimates of strangers, and male camaraderie. The discussion also incorporates the residents’ view of the state as a series of processes that lack any sense of ‘impersonal norms and values’ (Fuller and Harris 2000: 14), and hence to be dealt with through entirely ad hoc and contingent means, of which faking is both the most elaborate and the most frequent. Tariqa and Norms

One day, as I sat around with Ansariji outside the mosque, several people carrying different pieces of paper came to ask about their ‘case’. These included ‘cases’ concerning the issue of ration cards, voter ID cards, BPL cards, and several other kinds of documents. One man was accompanied by Raj Kumar, the MCD official we have met above, and who wanted Ansariji to put his signature upon an application form. Raj Kumar also asked Ansariji to sign the document. But, Ansariji exclaimed, ‘Come later, illegal work can’t be done in broad daylight!’ ‘Illegal’ has an interesting position here: it is publicly mentioned as such, and is allocated a particular time for when it can be carried out, rather than rejected out of hand as beyond the pale. However, more significantly, though it is a regular part of life at Nangla, it is also a potentially dangerous activity: if caught, counterfeiting can incur a wide range of potentially lifealtering penalties. Further, acts of counterfeiting involve an entire chain of participants—for example, middle-men, procurers, information-gatherers, transferees of ‘originals’, and beneficiaries—and (p.47) carry risks of disrupting closely established links within neighbourhoods and settlements. Hence, the most admired members of the community are those—such as Ansariji —who possess the capacity to do ‘illegal work’ in its ‘own time’, minimizing or eliminating the risk of damage to communal life. But, not only this, the ‘proper’ conduct of ‘illegal work’ also ensures the life of the community: it is the grounds upon which everyday life—food, education, health, employment, and accommodation—is based. Soon after the above episode, Ansariji was approached by a young woman who asked about her ‘form’. ‘I’ll take back my Rs 20’, she says, ‘unless I get the card immediately’. Ansariji turns to me and says that he is deeply offended by these comments. Then, turning to the woman, he tells her that her ‘work’ would not now be done, since ‘even though we are neighbours, you don’t trust me to do your illegal work properly!’ A friend of Ansariji joins the discussion and tells me that this is all bachpana (childishness): ‘look at all the effort that goes into getting all this work done’, he says, ‘and all these people can talk about is Rs 20– 30’. ‘What about all those young men’, he continues, pointing to a group of locals, ‘who are helping to verify and fill up the forms. They are educated, their parents have spent huge amounts in educating them, yet they give of their time freely’. Another man now approaches our group and asks Ansariji to help him fill up the ID application form. ‘Go to that other place’, he is ordered, meaning the Page 15 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community rival Bilkees Begum group (at this point Ansariji was aligned with Suraj Chandra). A by-stander offers to fill up the form. ‘Let’s see if you can!’ Ansariji shouts out. An elderly man sitting next to us now speaks up, saying: ‘You don’t only need education but also a tariqa; after all the engineer makes the plan, but it’s an illiterate mazdoor (labourer) who executes it. You need tariqa’. Ansari then turned to the supplicant: ‘There are forty-five columns to be filled up’, he says, ‘miss a single one and the form is invalidated!’ The man quietly withdrew. Why does one need tariqa to deal with the counterfeit world? Tariqa and trust make a community in the face of arbitrary rules and regulations that must be engaged with on their own terms. Tariqa and trust ensure that even though the well-being of the community depends on mimicking the arbitrariness and dishonesty of the state, this does not translate into the community becoming like the state. For the state has no norm. Several months after the above episode, when Nangla had (p.48) been demolished and the lucky ones had been allotted plots at Savda, I was talking to Rakesh Kumar about the ‘P–98’ designation that had denied large numbers a resettlement plot, and was also being contested through the courts. I had been told by a worker belonging to a NGO that worked in bastis and resettlement colonies that legal challenges to P–98 cases were far more numerous among Nangla residents ‘because Nangla people seem to be far more aware about their rights and willing to fight for them’. I asked Rakesh his opinion. ‘No’, he said, ‘this [P-98] also applied to other bastis that were being demolished’. However, he continued, … you know that the government has a gupt (secret) system of codes, and in each basti it uses a different system. So, during a survey (leading up to demolition), they may just write one, two, or three in their paper work, but it (plot entitlement) is really decided in their offices…. Our conversation then moved on to his new ‘real estate business’ as well as the problems faced by ex-Nangla residents who had been given plots in Savda, but were unable to live there as they found it difficult to commute to their places of work, often up to forty kilometres away: Rakesh: There is an old woman who comes here every week. She was allotted a plot here (in Savda Ghevda) but works as a domestic in Kailash colony (in South Delhi). She can’t leave her job there as that’s her only source of income. But she also doesn’t want to sell her plot as this is her only asset in her old age. Her allotment was cancelled … as a government ‘survey team’ came to see who had actually occupied their plots, and which ones were lying vacant … hers was vacant, so her allotment was cancelled. She didn’t have enough money to put up a permanent structure, and whatever she had put up was stolen by others. Anyway, she doesn’t want to sell.

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community As Rakesh’s description of the woman’s predicament appeared to contain a peculiar anomaly regarding a cancelled allotment that the allottee ‘didn’t want to sell’, I probed further: SS: But how can she sell in any case, her allotment has been cancelled, right?

Rakesh: But she doesn’t want to sell …

SS: But she can’t, can she?

Rakesh: Who knows? A property dealer can go to the relevant MCD official and get it allotted in someone else’s name and pay off the official. (p.49) Who knows? I want to help those genuine allottees whose allotments got cancelled …. It is my duty.

The state has no norms, as evidenced by the arbitrariness of its procedures that its subjects encounter: gupt and hence inscrutable. And even as one counters the state through mimic-procedures, it is important to not become the state, and to remain of the people. It is here that particular kinds of neighbourly bonds take shape when neighbours ‘help’ each other, in the manner that Rakesh sought to assist the old lady by selling her property which was not hers to sell; it was his duty. It is preferable to be preyed upon by one’s own rather than be left to the mercies of the depredatory state. In the former case, the bonds of intimacy are strengthened as well as ensure a result in one’s favour. Neighbours with the Kindest Cuts

I met Abdul Sattar in 2008 through Rakesh. Sattar has lived in Delhi since 1984. He came to Delhi from Khagaria district in Bihar, and has worked at the Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds. He had no farming-land in his home village, and only a tiny plot on which stands a hut that he calls ‘home’. His brother is a landless labourer. Sattar lived at Nangla Matchi before it was demolished and was Rakesh’s neighbour. He had been allotted a plot of land at Savda in the wake of the demolition, but did not move there as he did not have the funds to build a house. Sattar tells me that he has a two-year old son. He is a very small and thin man, has a deeply creased face, several missing teeth, and walks with a limp. He looks to be in mid-60s, but tells me that he is ‘around forty’. About twelve months ago, he says, he was suffering from ‘typhoid’ and that he had given up hope of surviving. His wife went from ‘house to house’, asking people for money for treatment. Eventually, Rakesh lent him Rs 40,000 and said that he would not charge any interest, and that he could return the money whenever he could

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community manage. In the meanwhile, Sattar had also borrowed money from others and was paying back small amounts from his salary. After some months, Sattar realized that he would not be able to pay Rakesh back the money, so he offered him his Savda plot as payment in kind. Rakesh, Sattar says, told him that he would take the land, and that whenever Sattar had the money, he could return it and take back ‘his’ property. Since he was unable to sign his name, Sattar put his (p.50) thumb impressions on ‘some papers’, handing over the land to Rakesh. The land did not legally belong to Rakesh, and under government regulations, it was a criminal offence to sell it. However, given Rakesh’s experience as a real-estate broker, he drew up an ‘agreement’ between Sattar and himself, stating that the latter had borrowed money and had offered his land as collateral. Then, sometime later, Rakesh obtained all of Sattar’s documents that proved the latter’s ownership of the land and altered vital information, inserting himself as owner. This was done with Sattar’s knowledge: ‘I have complete trust in him’, Sattar repeated several times to me. Some more time later, Sattar told Rakesh that, given the ongoing expenditure on his medication and his general state of penury, he was now certain that he would not be able to pay back the money, and hence that Rakesh should consider the Savda land his own. Rakesh told me that he always tried to convince ex-Nangla residents to not sell their new allotments at Savda, even if it meant some hardship in the short term, such as having to commute long distances to their work and disruption in their children’s schooling; that ‘if they held on for a while, things would get better’. However, if they were going to sell, Rakesh said, ‘they might as well’ sell to someone like me who they can trust, I will never betray them’. Having ‘sold’ the land to Rakesh, Sattar’s troubles multiplied, but, he said to me, ‘I can’t tell you how kind Rakesh has been to me. He is one of the kindest persons I know’. Sattar now lives about two hours from his place of work in an ‘unauthorized’ settlement. He must change three buses to get home. Some time ago, he borrowed money to buy a plot of land near where he now lives, but lost it all as it turned out that the real estate agent had actually sold off government land. And yet Sattar could hardly stop singing Rakesh’s praises. Sattar’s take on his miseries is instructive. Rakesh exploited his extremely vulnerable economic condition to purloin his sole asset, exposing him to further exploitation and ongoing wretchedness. Yet, Rakesh’s ‘trustworthy’ operations in the counterfeit real estate market—that appear to have left Sattar permanently disadvantaged—struck Sattar as a deepening of neighbourly bonds, and a fulfillment of community obligations; to be made predictably wretched by one’s ‘own’ is nevertheless deliverance from the arbitrary havoc of outsiders.

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community Sattar’s forlorn comfort in the depredation of intimates leads us, once again, to the question of norms, for I believe that what lies at (p.51) the heart of Sattar’s attitude towards Rakesh is his belief that unlike ‘outsiders’, Rakesh’s exploitation of him operates according to a norm, one that will secure a degraded package of ‘benefits’ that may not otherwise be forthcoming. This norm gives one a sense of community in a hostile and arbitrary urban environment. Indeed, the range of strategies utilized by the urban poor when dealing with the state—pretending to have political and bureaucratic as well as underworld connections, for example—are expressions of their understanding of the arbitrariness of the state. Under such conditions of life, it is imperative to rely upon those who would convert the capricious economies of faking and counterfeiting into some minimal advantage through the bedrock of neighbourliness and community feeling. Indeed, the cultures of faking make community possible. Let us turn, one final time, to another way in which the ‘norm-lessness’ of outsiders—particularly the state—is experienced and expressed. This account comes from Nassim, the tea-stall owner from Nangla. When Nangla was being demolished in 2006, Nassim was away in his village in Bihar, and his fifteenyear-old son was looking after the tea shop. Prior to the demolition, when the ‘survey staff’ had come to ask for proof of residence, the son, Nassim said, ‘got nervous and wasn’t able to show all the papers. So, they put “P–98” against my name’. Notwithstanding this, Nassim succeeded in getting another plot in his name, only to discover that ‘a clerk in MCD’s Slum Wing had sold it to a (real estate) dealer’. Some days later, Nassim was contacted by a police constable who offered to ‘sort out’ the problem. Nassim told him that he himself had been a political ‘leader’ and if the constable ‘messed’ with him, he might ‘end up losing his vardi (uniform)’. Nothing came of it, however. Nassim: My problem can only be solved by the ‘slum commissioner’. There is no honesty now! I have wasted a lot of time running after this or that politician….

SS: But you must have gotten to know the police quite well?

Nassim: Even when I was in Nangla, I never ‘saluted’ the police; I was always against them, badi kharab jaat hai (it’s a very vicious species) … I am in J block right now, just staying like that….

Nassim’s ‘problem’ is the result of placing too much trust in the state; he is disillusioned despite his knowledge of the viciousness of (p.52) the ‘species’. However, it is precisely because of his perception that the state does not possess any norms that he is willing to attempt different strategies to engage with it, and Page 19 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community secure whatever concessions possible. Hence he threatened the police with his ‘leadership connections’ (a casual worker—no more—for the Samajwadi Party), sought to impress them with his ‘natural’ intelligence regarding the nature of genuine and coerced thumbprints, was willing to defer to the power of the state (in the form of the ‘slum commissioner’), pursued his case with politicians, emphasized the bonds of kinship in the face of bureaucratic obstacles, and feigned insouciance in the face of overwhelming regulatory and disciplinary might. The arbitrariness of his strategies is an expression of his understanding of the arbitrariness of the state. Infusions and Foreign Bodies: Strangers into Intimates

I arrived at Nangla one June morning to find a group of people crowded inside Suraj Chandra’s tent. Three men were seated on a chauki (wooden bed) and a crowd had gathered around them. Women and men were thrusting forward pieces of paper, shouting out names and jostling each other, trying to catch the attention of the men sitting on the chauki. Nassim told me—and I was barely surprised—that a ‘survey’ was being conducted. Copiously sweating supplicants swatted flies and made their case at different decibels, a man squeezed sugarcane juice outside the tent, and the heat and crush of eager bodies made for a stifling and breathless atmosphere. I spied Ansariji outside the shed. He explained that the ‘survey’ was being conducted by their ‘own’ men, that is, men belonging to the faction loyal to Suraj Chandra. Some time ago, basti residents had filled up forms for ‘identity cards’. These were then sent to the ‘SDM (Sub Divisional Magistrate) office’ for ‘verification’. Now, the forms had been given ‘serial numbers’ and sent back for final verification before the issue of the cards in question. This meant that Suraj Chandra’s men had to ‘verify’ the information on the forms by calling forward each applicant, and asking ‘Is this your name?’, And ‘Are these details correct?’ Hence, what was transpiring in Suraj Chandra’s shed was of enormous significance in the lives of those Nangla residents who, in some cases, had waited years for the issue of a state document that would entitle them to a variety of ‘privileges’; of course, as I have (p.53) discussed earlier, such documents are also the means of establishing one’s being in the city and take on meanings beyond the material benefits attached to them. So, this was a crucial step, both in the life of the basti residents and of the paperwork that would give them a life. However, and just as crucially, the responsibility for verifying a locality—who lives there, how many, for how long, and various other details of everyday life—was being performed not by the state but by those in control of the situation on the ground. The limits to the state’s intervention are determined by bureaucratic elasticity and the uncertainty regarding the best way of surveying the field of dominion; nothing can be further than the notion of panoptic surveillance that smoothens the way for disciplinary mechanisms. At the edge of the city, the state and its people leak into each other’s lives in unavoidable but erratic ways. Here, who is a ‘Bangladeshi’ and who is not was largely dependent upon the goodwill of one of the two factions— Page 20 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community Suraj Chandra’s and Bilkees Begum’s—in the basti. The state neither always knows nor is able to determine ‘authentic’ identities, and leaves these to be verified by the ‘community’, and at this level, individual negotiations between different participants produce identity. One of the most common causes of disputes between the different factions centred on claims and counterclaims over the number of Bangladeshis who were passed off as Indians, with each group suggesting that the other had swelled its factional—and monetary— strength through passing off strangers as intimates. Personal relationships— alignment with one faction or another, ability to secure patronage, friendships etc.—are crucial if ‘foreigners’ are to be passed off as one of ‘us’. Hence, forged identities are simultaneously the forging of community bonds through including strangers into its boundaries, and faking is crucial to the making of community life. The new blood that periodically infuses the body of the community through seemingly inert papers that float incessantly through the locality, changing content and form as they encounter different needs, need not only be that of foreigners such as Bangladeshis. Other groups might also be incorporated into the webs of community and kinship through counterfeit technologies of inclusion. ‘Chaudhury Kalu Ram’, Nassim points to a man sitting near us on the day of the survey episode above, ‘has been living here since 1990, yet he hasn’t (p.54) yet managed to get his ration card done’. This is because ‘the person from whom he bought his plot (in Nangla) took his ration card with him’. Nassim explained that since many of the buyers of property in Nangla were those who had no ‘proper documentation’, it was not uncommon for the seller to ‘help’ out the buyer by including his or her name on their (the seller’s) ration card as a relative. This is seen as the first step to the buyer eventually applying for and (hopefully) obtaining an independent ration card, which would serve as the ground for access to other kinds of documents. It is also an incentive to purchase in a property market that does not operate on the basis of ownership: for land in basti cannot be bought or sold, as it is not owned by those residing upon it, but ‘illegally’ occupied. But, most crucially, the possession of a ration card is the only guarantee of obtaining a resettlement plot should the basti be demolished. What can Kalu Ram do? Nassim: Now he is trying to reactivate (chalu karwana) a card that belongs to the woman who was the original owner of the plot … the one who sold to the man Kalu Ram bought from ….

Kalu Ram showed me a very old card that, apparently, belonged to the woman who ‘sold’ the house to the man he had transacted with. A brand new photograph of Kalu Ram’s had been stuck on to the old and tattered card. It also listed the names of Kalu Ram and his family members. The woman—still residing Page 21 of 23

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community in the locality—had offered the card once she heard about the ‘callousness’ of the second-owner. Kalu Ram told me about his neighbour who managed to include the names of several of his tenants who did not have ration cards, on his own card. ‘Everyone does “fraud”, so this is normal’, he told me. The woman has willingly lent him her card in the hope that it can be ‘reactivated’ and he can ‘register’ himself. In the meantime, he said, he also asked Raj Kumar, the MCD official, about the various ‘applications’ he had made for obtaining different documents of identity. Raj Kumar told him that he had no idea about the fate of the applications. Kalu Ram’s only hope, he said, was that he was able to ‘reactivate’ the old card with the help of some of the ‘leaders’ in Nangla. The neighbourliness that ‘illegality’ produces is the most tangible source of succour.

(p.55) An Inescapable State The relationship between basti people and the state is one where the state is both the final court of adjudication as well as the most consistent tormentor. It is a relationship of the double bind, of wanting and not wanting the state. For while the market does not pretend to be interested in anything other than making a fast buck, the state speaks the language of care and compassion. Referring to the work of the anthropologist Jonathan Parry (2000), Fuller and Harris (2000) speak of Parry’s ‘bold claim that the impersonal norms and values of the modern state have been widely internalized by ordinary Indians—lowerlevel bureaucrats, local politicians, and ordinary citizens alike’ (Fuller and Harris 2000: 14). However, the perspective outlined by this chapter is closer to that outlined by Sudipta Kaviraj (1997) and Osella and Osella (2000). Kaviraj points out that in the early days of Congress rule, The long-term historical memory of the peasant society in India showed politics to be a highly arbitrary use of power in which there was, against a background of a social system that was unchangeable, a perpetual distribution of benefits for individuals and small groups by manipulation of the only stable principle of political life—the fickle and transient favour of rulers. (Kaviraj 1997: 240). And, based on their ethnographic work, Osella and Osella state that ‘The common understanding is that politicians and state officials are inherently corrupt; that even potentially upright individuals end up as corrupt once involved with politics and government’ (2000: 150). Hence, I would like to suggest, it may not be so much that ‘The state idea (of the modernizing elite) … is not part of ordinary Indians’ understanding’ (Fuller and Harris 2000: 9) as that ‘ordinary Indians’ understand the state only too well, choosing to engage with it through the Nietzchean dictum ‘about the long-term well-being provided by error and untruth in human and social life… (and) the injunction for us is not

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Duplicity, Intimacy, Community to labor under the illusion of eliminating trickery on the assumption that there is some other world out there beyond and bereft of trickery’ (Taussig 2003: 278). (p.56) The trickery of the poor seeks to produce a world of permanence. Confronted with the will—and trickery—of the state, however, its work is reduced to rubble. The next chapter explores this fate. Notes:

(1) . As outlined, for example, in the Special Police Report, 1941. Delhi—‘Special Report of an Offence, 29 May 1941. Uttering Counterfeit King’s Coins. Section 241/242 I.P.C., Bagichi Sat Narain, about 1/4 mile North East of Kotwali Police Station, Delhi’, Delhi State Archives, File number 7(13) Vol. II. (2) . The Indian Express, 15 July 2005, ‘MCD Inspector Arrested for “Arranging” Jobs’. While all newspaper reports in this chapter are taken from various editions of the Indian Express, similar stories can be found in virtually all other English language newspapers, as well as non-English ones. (3) . The Bhagidari scheme—sponsored by the Delhi government—is a programme of ‘state–citizen’ partnership that involves residents of middle class (‘authorized’) localities as well as associations of traders. Bhagidari is discussed in Chapter four.

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At First Remove

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

At First Remove Rumours of a Demolition Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords Over the past two decades, demolitions have become the most favoured manner of dealing with the issue of housing the urban poor and transforming Delhi into a ‘global’ city. This chapter explores the processes leading up to, and including, the demolition of Nangla Matchi. It explores the quotidian dealings of the urban poor with the state, their understanding of its ‘moods’, and attempts to stave off demolitions. Through the process of demolitions, the city is experienced as a series of connections across varied spaces: slum wing office, the chief minister’s secretariat, court houses, offices where ration cards and ID cards are issued, NGO offices that provide support of different kind, the scattered geography of resettlement colonies and basti clusters, and offices of political functionaries of various kinds. Keywords:   slum demolitions, poor and the state, resistance, housing problems

Slum clearance: … the policy of the government, as well as of the (Delhi Improvement) Trust, was that no one should be dehoused until alternative arrangement for his accommodation had been made. Letter from Chairman, Delhi Improvement Trust, dated 27 August 1954, to Shri K. Ram, ICS, Principal Private Secretary to the PM, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, New Delhi. D.O. No.: G6(6)53, p. 2. Delhi State Archives, Delhi.

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At First Remove Imagine a Yamuna lined by parks, orchards, tennis courts, golf courses and other sports stadia. Using the 2010 Commonwealth Games as a platform for a long-term project, that’s exactly what the Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation (DTDC) has dreamed up in a recently-unveiled proposal to change the 7000-acre riverfront between ITO and Okhla barrage. ‘Delhi Tourism floats a Yamuna Gameplan’, The Indian Express, 16 May 2005, Sreelatha Menon.

The Lie of the Land and the Mood of the State Demolition—for which the ‘survey’ discussed in the Introduction and Chapter one is the preparatory exercise—is actually only one of the three options available to the state when it considers what to do with a basti. The others include ‘in-situ upgradation’ and ‘Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums (EIUS)’ (Batra and Mehra 2008: 397). Whereas the former relates to ‘tenure regularization’ and the improvement of housing (p.58) and related infrastructure at the original location (Risbud 2009), the latter refers to the provision of temporary amenities such as toilets, taps, and street lights (Risbud 2009: 188). However, over the past two decades, demolitions have become the most favoured manner of dealing with the issue of housing for the urban poor (Ghertner 2008). Also, ‘whereas the decision to raze a slum was previously the almost exclusive domain of Delhi’s various land owning agencies’, Ghertner (2008: 57) says, ‘the primary avenues by which slums are demolished today begins when a residents’ welfare association (RWA) files a writ petition praying for the removal of a neighbouring slum’ (Ghertner 2008: 57). Ghertner also suggests that the judicial discourse characterizing slums as a ‘city-wide public nuisance’ (Ghertner 2008: 61) and sites of ‘overcrowding and moral decrepitude’ emerged in the 1990s. However, given the relatively long history of debate and discussion on the ‘slum’ in Indian urban and nationalist discourse, this perspective has been around at least since the opening decades of the twentieth century. As already noted, the DIT was established in 1937 to carry out a variety of ‘slum clearance (that is, demolition) schemes’, and the well-known 1958 study of Delhi slums by the non-government organization (NGO) Bharat Sevak Samaj spoke unequivocally of ‘the degeneration of many parts of the city into slums of the worst kind’ (Bharat Sevak Samaj 1958: 8). Irrespective of the manner in which the grounds for slum demolition have been prepared, it stands in stark contrast to the state’s dealings with illegal occupation of lands by the rich for residential purposes. These, as Soni (2000) points out, pass into the realms of legality due to the influence wielded by their owners. In December 2008, The Hindu newspaper reported that the Delhi’s ‘posh’ Sainik Farms area was to be supplied with ‘legal’ electricity supply. Established in 1967, residents of Sainik Farms generated their own electricity throughout the period by using diesel generators, as they fought off various Page 2 of 22

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At First Remove attempts to evict them from the locality. The discussion in Chapter eight on Delhi’s Akshardham temple complex—built after the government of the day overruled a variety of environmental and landownership concerns—outlines some of the contexts within which urban illegality is tolerated as an aspect of creating ‘modern’ spaces. Post-independence initiatives have intensified the pre-independence push towards the demolition of slums as a means of urban planning. So, while the DIT’s Delhi-Ajmeri Gate Slum Clearance Scheme had made little (p.59) or no progress between 1938 (when it was announced) and 1951 (when the Birla Committee reviewed the Trust’s activities), the period since then has witnessed a greater sense of purpose. It is difficult to provide precise figures regarding the numbers of people affected by slum demolitions, except to say that numbers approximate the size of medium-level townships. One study suggests that for Delhi alone, between 1999 and 2007 itself, 100,000 ‘shanties have been demolished’ (Batra and Mehra 2008: 406), whereas another points out that 150,000 people were evicted from New Delhi in 2004 alone (Risbud 2009: 181). If we add the figures for, say Mumbai, the scale of evictions is truly mindboggling: between 1994 and 1998, the tally for demolished slum dwellings stood at 360,326 (Mahadevia and Narayanan 2008: 561). The post-colonial state has sought to effect programmes of urban ‘renewal’ and ‘beautification’ through the ‘sustained orgy of demolitions’ (Mahadevia and Narayanan 2008: 561) that unites different political parties, the legal system, environmental groups, and ‘educated’ opinion that yearns for a ‘global’ city (Baviskar 2008; Mahadevia and Naryanan 2008; Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008; Risbud 2009). Writing in 1967, the demographer Ashish Bose noted that ‘in urban Delhi house rents have risen so high in the last few years that a person with an income of Rs 200 per month has to spend 70 per cent of his income on house rent alone …. Putting food and house rent together one arrives at a figure which is 140 per cent of the income! The inevitable result is a cutting down on housing and taking refuge in slums and unauthorized structures in unauthorized colonies’. (Bose 1967: 997). The DDA had been founded, as noted in the Introduction, in order to remedy the shortcomings of its predecessor body, the DIT, in different contexts of urban planning. One of these concerned the ‘housing problem’ (Birla Report 1951: 4) that DIT had not only been unable to address in any significant manner but had, according to the Birla Committee, significantly made worse through its policies of land acquisition and disposal that favoured the well-off. Subsequent to its establishment, however, the DDA’s target of building low-cost housing has never been achieved. So, whereas the first Master Plan for Delhi (1962) had proposed that 40 per cent of housing to be built during the plan period be reserved for Page 3 of 22

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At First Remove ‘economically weaker sections’, the figure actually achieved was around 30 per cent (p.60) (Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008: 17). On the other hand, of the proposed 25 per cent allotment for the ‘high income group’, around 23 per cent was achieved, and though 5 per cent was the proposed figure for ‘self-financed schemes for high-income group’ (where payments are made in instalments as construction progresses), the achieved percentage was around 19 per cent (Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008: 17). Further, even accommodation that was meant to be for those in the ‘low income groups’ found its way to those in other economic categories: A survey conducted by [the Delhi NGO] Hazards Centre found that middleincome families in fact occupied 80 per cent of low-income group (LIG) flats constructed by the DDA. This is not surprising, considering that the average cost of these flats is Rs 200,000, an amount far beyond the reach of any working-class family. (Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008: 17). There is another significant way in which official actions on urban space have favoured the well-off. This concerns the indirect transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. Demolition activities that lead to the use of the ‘freed’ land for use by the well-off (whether as spaces of residence, commerce, or leisure) are one of these. Based on information contained in DDA’s own reports regarding demolitions, Batra and Mehra conclude that between 2001 and 2004, ‘basti evictions has led to the transfer of at least Rs 4,000 crores from the slum dwellers to DDA’ (2008: 406). The growth of jhuggi jhopri localities in Delhi is, then, significantly linked to a historical trajectory of state capitalism that encompasses the ‘improvement’ strategies of the colonial era DIT and the post-colonial policies of the DDA. In both instances, state-sponsored speculation in land and the inherent subsidy on housing for urban middle and upper-middle classes have been key strategies. The ‘speculative state’ that Goldman (2011: 571) speaks of in the context of contemporary Bangalore has, then, a much longer history. A significant consequence of state-led speculation in Delhi has been the steady growth in the residential immiseration of its labouring populations. So, ‘In 1951, there were 199 “jhuggi jhopri” clusters comprising of 12,749 households in Delhi. By 1961 these numbers rose to 599 and 78,346 respectively’ (Maitra 1991: 344). However, another study, published in 1958, suggested that within the areas of the Old Delhi itself, around 225,000 persons (p.61) could be categorized as living in dwellings that could be characterized as slum-like (Bharat Sevak Samaj 1958: 12).1 By 1988, the number of ‘slum clusters’ had risen to 688 (Editorial/ EPW 1988: 2193), whereas there were forty-four resettlement colonies that ‘were created during the Emergency [imposed by Indira Gandhi from 1975–7] to cleanse the posh localities of the capital of slums and shift the slum dwellers far Page 4 of 22

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At First Remove away from the centre of the city—often beyond the Jamuna river’ (Editorial/EPW 1988: 2193). In a survey carried out in 1994, Delhi was reported to contain ‘1,080 jhuggi jhompri (shanty house) clusters … which were housing approximately 2,400,645 persons’ (Risbud 2009: 181). At the present time, approximately 18 per cent of Delhi’s population is estimated to be living in slums. According to the 2001 Census, ‘22.6 per cent of the urban population of the states/Union Territories’ (Risbud 2009: 179) could be classified as living in slums. However, ‘only 40 per cent to 60 per cent of the urban poor live in slums or squatter settlements. The rest live on pavements (close to sources of income), overcrowded tenements, or commute daily to and from peri-urban areas’ (Risbud 2009: 186). Irrespective of the mix of the urban poor populations that live within and outside slums, there are good reasons why cities such as Delhi are home to migrant populations that are willing to countenance the insecurities and the miseries of ‘slum-like’ conditions. For, as Gupta and Mitra (2002) point out in their study of migrant slum dwellers in Delhi, ‘although the decline in the incidence of poverty is not in proportion to the rise in the duration of migration … with a rise in the period of stay, migrants are able to improve their standards of living’ (Gupta and Mitra 2002: 168; see also Desai 2003). The historical experience of ‘improvement’ is, simultaneously, linked to multiple organizations of the state and their differing personalities. I use the word ‘personality’ when speaking of basti dwellers’ engagements with the state to augment the point made in Chapter two. That is, I suggest that their dealings with it are contingent ones, calibrated according to perceptions of different kinds of moods and traits that characterize different state organs. As Hansen and Stepputat (2001) point out, ‘If subjected to an ethnographic gaze, a strict Foucauldian view of modern governance as the inexorable global spread and proliferation of certain discursive rationalities and technologies tends to crumble’ (Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 37, emphasis added). The remaining parts of this chapter focus upon the several events, sites, and contexts that relate to (p.62) the varying expressions of the state as it moved towards the removal of the Nangla Machi basti from its location upon the banks of the Yamuna river, and the calibrated responses, ultimately in vain, of those whose lives faced dislocation.

Character and Certificates: Lakes, Gardens, and Slum Bureaucracies The resettlement colony of Dakshinpuri in South Delhi was established as a result of slum demolitions that took place during the years of the Emergency (1975–7) imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The Emergency was a period of suspension of a number of constitutional rights, press censorship, and mass arrests of—and violence against—Mrs Gandhi’s political opponents. In Delhi, it was a time of widespread slum demolitions that aimed to ‘beautify’ the city through removing slums—and their residents—from various locations and relocating them in resettlement colonies specially designed for the purpose (Dayal and Bose 1977; Tarlo 2003). The Dakshinpuri branch of the Slum Wing of Page 5 of 22

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At First Remove the MCD is home to a wide range of files and records that pertain to the establishment of the locality, details of the original allottees of land, subsequent transfers of property, proforma documents relating to taking up or relinquishing allotment, and terms and conditions for residential and commercial rights to property. In a dusty, ill-lit room with rusting cupboards for storage space, and clerks who have the look of out-of-favour subalterns banished to the furthest fringes of empire, lie congealed histories of yearnings for a foothold in the city and of the frequent violence of the negotiations with the state that accompanies the processes of making a home in the metropolis. Slum Wing records indicate that all original allottees of land at Dakshinpuri shifted there between 1975 and 1977. They had earlier lived in slums in different parts of Delhi, including Chanakyapuri, Talkatora Gardens, Moti Bagh, and Humayun Road (upmarket localities in South-Central Delhi; Chanakyapuri is the diplomatic enclave). Of the 24,276 residential plots carved out in the contiguous resettlement colonies of Dakshipuri, Sunlight Colony, Tigri Colony, Khanpur, Dakshinpuri Extension, and Madangir, 5,772 were allotted in Dakshinpuri to eligible persons who had been ‘relocated’ here. File number ‘3/52/DP/R/B-342/83’ is in the name of ‘Purushottam (p.63) Bhatt, son of Tara Bhatt’, who came to Dakshinpuri in 1976. Apart from papers that relate to Purushottam Bhatt gaining ownership of the land, there is also another set that indicates subsequent transfer of ownership. Purushottam Bhatt died in April 1985, of his four heirs; three of whom, subsequently ‘relinquished’ their rights of inheritance in favour of the eldest sibling, Gopal Bhatt. The paper trail provides a piquant instance of the manner in which the multiple personalities of the state are perceived. Most of the documents that relate to the Bhatt property are, indeed, the kind we might expect in the serious business of transacting the most fundamental unit of possessive modernity. So, there is an ‘Affidavit’ where the new owner (Gopal Bhatt) declares that he has not mortgaged the property or entered into any kind of ‘agreement’ with respect to the property; an ‘Indemnity Bond’, where the DDA (the land allotting authority) is indemnified ‘against loss or damage that it may sustain or any action that may be brought against it’; and, an ‘Undertaking’ that provides ‘full assurance to the Authority to the effect that Gopal Bhatt shall abide by the terms and conditions that are set forth in the DDA (Management and Disposal of Housing Estates) regulations, 1968’. Other documents include ‘Legal Heirs Proof’, ‘Death Certificates’ of both Purushottam Bhatt and his wife, and identity proof and educational certificate of the person (Gopal Bhatt) who was seeking to transfer the property in his name. These are dry, unsentimental documents that ask for a ‘factual’ accounting of the uneven ledgers of human life. They are the life-blood—if that is the right term—of bureaucratic procedures, and the contractual incarnation of the state that must both be comprehended and placated.

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At First Remove However, among this collection, there is another piece of paper that is titled ‘Deed of Relinquishment’, and an extract from the Deed provides a different snapshot of the multiple ways in which the state (and its personality) is understood: Deed of Relinquishment: And whereas the Executants herein above out of their love and affection, without any consideration, and without any force, pressure, coercion, allurement etc. of any nature whatsoever from any corner have agreed to relinquish their respective shares in the aforesaid property in favour of their brother Shri Gopal Bhatt, son of late Purushottam Bhatt, resident of B-342, Dakshinpuri, New Delhi. (p.64) Emma Tarlo suggests that the language of the documents utilized by the urban poor reflects an ‘idiom which officials of the Slum Department understand’ (2003: 78) and respond to. It might also be said that the language seeks to capture the different personalities of the state. The contractual aspect is but one of these; the state that speaks the language of the loving family is another. And, in addition to words, there are other ways of engaging with the familial aspect. Another file relates to forty-five year old Ratani whose husband (the original allottee) died in 1976 and who (in 1978) wanted the plot transferred and registered in her name. Among the photographs that are used to complete her application is one that includes all surviving members of Ratani’s family. Here, Ratani, her three sons, and two daughters-in-law sit in front of a studio backdrop that shows a scene from Kashmir: there is a lake, chinar trees, and clouds touching mountain peaks. Another file from 1990 relates to a successful transfer-of-ownership application by Dakshinpuri resident Mohar Singh. However, Mohar Singh was unable to pay the transfer fee at the time of approval and made payment some two months later. The paperwork relating to completion of transfer proceedings also contains a photograph of Mohar Singh and his family. Mohar Singh, his wife, mother, and four children sit against a backdrop of a grand winding staircase, next to which is a window that gives a view of a garden of flowers outside. The men, women, and children sitting on the other side of the camera look anxious and serious, and are invariably well dressed. But mountains and lakes, clouds and trees, stately staircases and picturesque gardens among the ‘Allotment’ and ‘Transfer’ files? How else to understand them but as attempts to gauge the multiple personalities of state as ‘family man’, landscape nationalist, and domestic aesthete, and, present oneself as part of these worlds? Basti lives shuttle between phantasmagorical studio landscapes that address the state and those other sites where it is reified. That is, where the ‘stateidea’ (Abrams 1988: 82) is sought to be made concrete. The Slum (or jhuggi jhopri) Wing of the MCD is located behind the Income Tax Office (ITO) complex in Central Delhi. There is a wide and filthy drain that runs the length of the office compound, which must be crossed in order to enter the compound. Page 7 of 22

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At First Remove Ironically, the complex itself reproduces a slum-like environment. The MCD has done several studies, including ‘Study of Socio-Economic Survey of the Slum Dwellers in 10 Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters on Yamuna River Bed (p.65) (Western Bank—Pushta)’ (2000). In the wake of constant rumours that Nangla Matchi was to be demolished, I had become a regular visitor to these premises, hoping to meet officials who could confirm details of the demolition. I had also hoped that, someone might provide information on the intended future use of the ‘cleared’ land. On most days, the corridors of the complex resemble a ramshackle government hospital: anxious men and women stride up and down, peering into empty offices and asking after this or that official, while others sit or lie upon wooden benches in various states of disrepair waiting for an appointment, not daring to abandon their station should their turn come and they miss out when they are away. It could be a very long time before another appointment might be secured, or perhaps never. In the corridors of the Slum Wing offices, time careers in between the people, the benches, the rusting steel cupboards, and the grimy window bars through which visitors must approach officials. Supplicants wait patiently, desperately hoping that their time has not simply passed them by, been allocated to someone else, or simply evaporated. At other times, it flows like lava, slowly and thickly enveloping all in its path, draining energies, producing ennui: visitors wait quietly in this vast quantity of time, up to their necks in it, but unable to disentangle. A massive iron pipe runs along the drain outside the jhuggi jhopri office complex. It darts in and out of the ground like a burrowing, rust-ridden, serpentlike creature with over-sized nuts and bolts as spinal protuberances. This is not quite the ‘salubrious complex’ Tarlo (2003: 67) describes. Opposite the drain and the metal serpent, there is a dense and bustling footpath bureaucracy that mimics and serves the formal bureaucratic apparatus that resides in the vicinity. The Slum Wing’s office is a stone’s throw away from the appropriately Byzantine ITO complex, the Delhi Police Commissioner’s Office, and the extraordinarily ugly erstwhile headquarters of the DDA that stands on the Ring Road like a diseased architectural pustule. Along the footpaths near the office complex one can buy a variety of forms: for tax returns, affidavits, police petitions, changing one’s property from ‘leasehold’ to ‘freehold’, those ‘praying’ for allotment of land in a resettlement colony … the list is coeval with the requirements of governmentality. In daylight hours, the footpaths are alive with the solicitations of the typewriter-shop owners offering to formulate an application—any application—in the arcane Hindi or English, the metallic slamming of the ‘Return’ lever, (p.66) and the confused questioning of visiting supplicants (‘do I really need six photos?’). Most such businesses are no more than a typewriter and a table affair, with some lucky or forceful owners having secured shaded ‘office’ spots under the rare tree that survives. The jhuggi jhopri office complex is about a twenty-minute ride away from the India Gate—Lutyens-planned New Delhi—area, and the drain most likely skirts those salubrious spaces. And, it is Page 8 of 22

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At First Remove very near the Delhi High Court, which, as we will see later, was a great convenience in the days when the Court ordered Nangla’s demolition, and the jhuggi jhopri office carried it out. It hardly took the residents any time to shuttle between Nangla—about fifteen minutes away by bus—the jhuggi jhopri office and the High Court, trying to prevent the inevitable. Thank god for small mercies. I ask at the jhuggi jhopri complex if I can speak to someone about Nangla, and am directed to a building called Punarniwas Kutir (Resettlement Cottage). There is a room that displays a board which says ‘Sociologist SUR’ (Slum and Urban Rehabilitation). I am delighted to stumble upon a kindred spirit. The room is occupied by Mr Juneja. He tells me that the slum department has three functions: ‘Upgradation, Relocation, and Providing Civic Amenities’. He has been with the department since 1974, before which he was an ‘ad hoc’ economics lecturer at a college in Haryana; interdisciplinarity, much derided by academic purists, has apparently been a state project for quite some time. Earlier, Mr Juneja said, there were sociologists who would carry out ‘welfare-related surveys … how many times do you wash etc.’ However, now all surveys are done ‘purely for the purpose of relocation’. For the occupants of a slum, there are currently two ‘cut-off’ dates that relate to the allotment of land in a ‘resettlement colony’ once their locality has been demolished. These have to do with providing proof of the length of their residence in the city. These dates are ‘1990’ and ‘1998’. If a resident can prove— by providing, say, a ration card or a voter identity card—that she or he has been living at the now demolished locality since before 1990, then she becomes entitled to a plot of land measuring 18 square metres. The other category of claim is for residence after 1990 and up to 1998, which entitles the resident to a plot of 12.5 square metres. There are no entitlements for those who do not have appropriate papers or can only prove residence after 1998 (though the processes of duplication and faking described in Chapter two (p.67) strive to circumvent this regulation). There can, however, be a great gap between the processes of land allotment and actual possession, a gap that is created by functionaries of both state and market. This makes for ghostly real estate transaction, where the ‘magic of the state’ (Taussig 1997) and the cunning of the market combine to conjure entire populations of the poor from the ranks of the well-off. But that story of resettlement—where the dead come alive and photographs change identities—will come later. The survey section of the slum department comes into the picture once the ‘Land Owning Authority’ (LOA) or the ‘Land Using Authority’ (LUA) decides that it wants to use the ‘encroached’ land. Then a survey is carried out to determine the status and resettlements claims of those currently residing on the land. Subsequently, the LOA or the LUA must prepare and pay for relocation expenses. Survey days bring with them truckful of rumours: the demolition of the basti is Page 9 of 22

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At First Remove imminent; some of the pradhans (community leaders) are in cahoots with state authorities and have been allotted more than their share of ‘relocated’ land in exchange for ensuring that demolitions go off without a hitch; the survey is being carried out to detect ‘illegal’ (Bangladeshi) immigrants; and, most of the alternative plots to be offered to residents have already been (illegally and at great profit) sold to private real estate dealers by officials in the slum department. At any particular time, all—or some combination of the above is true. In the early days, Mr Juneja says, the basti people being surveyed were very respectful of the officials, but now they are dismissive and show no respect. Often, they refuse to give information. This is because they have access to politicians. A very common practice is to get multiple identity cards made in the name of different family members, so that more than one plot can be secured at the time of allotments. During the Emergency period, Mr Juneja tells me with a nostalgic look, it took just three months to decide upon the demolition process: So, once [Mr. Juneja said] the then head of the Delhi Development Authority, Jagmohan [who in a later incarnation as tourism minister floated a plan to ‘redevelop’ former slum-sites as river-front parks, see Introduction] decided to carry out a survey … a notification was issued and demolitions were ordered. Jagmohan had established twenty-seven resettlement colonies during his tenure as DDA Vice Chairman. Nowadays (p.68) all the politics gets in the way. There is a Bangladeshi dominated jhuggi jhopri cluster where all the occupants have declared themselves ‘Bengali’. Why didn’t we send the police to verify where these Mohammedans had come from? However, the police also took protection money from the Bangladeshis. The beat constable would come at night to have sex with the women as well as take money. I asked Mr Juneja if I could photocopy of some of the Survey reports, but he was extremely reluctant; he said many of the recommendations had not been adopted and hence the reports did not constitute a ‘baseline’ document for action.

Mood Swings The idea of a ‘public sphere’ in Habermas’s writings, Nancy Fraser says, ‘permits us to keep in view the distinctions between state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations, distinctions that are essential to democratic theory’ (1990: 57). And yet, everyday experiences of life under conditions of democracy in India also ask us to take account of a public sphere where ‘the people’ interact with the state on grounds where the ‘atmosphere thickens’ (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 37) through an erratic history of the experiences of the state. This history is a history of the personalities and moods of the state.

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At First Remove The varying moods of the state are experienced at different times and places. What is certain is the experience of uncertainty itself, and the uncertainty of the encounters is also the ground for the strategies of cajolements, enticements, and skirmishes that form the erratic and long term relationships with the state. Moreover, there is the quotidian perception that the state is itself part of a counterfeit context, rather than the font of a natural order of things. During the days when rumours of demolition erratically roamed Nangla’s lanes, I asked expradhan Suraj Chandra if he could tell me something about the history of his locality. ‘The government says’, he began animatedly, … that we are encroachers here and wants us thrown out. But, how did the government itself get the land? There were three villages here [a pre-1947 government document lists the village of Nangla Matchi as part of the planned ‘Green Belt’ that was to encircle Delhi], and all those people were evicted, and that’s how it got the land. This is not just prakritik [natural] land … it has been occupied by various people, including the (p.69) government, so how can they throw us out? They do not have a single document to show that they have bought this land from any one; let them prove this to us. Ram Prakash—who ran an ironing business in Nangla—thought he knew the mood of the state. He used to think that even though he lacked proof of ownership of land in his home village near the Uttar Pradesh city of Faizabad, he knew the MP from Faizabad well enough to seek his help if ever he needed it. The MP was always pleased to see him in Delhi, expressing fellow-feeling towards someone from his home-town. Some years ago, during the time that he have been in Delhi, a group in his village had ‘captured’ his land and has been farming it since then. Ram Prakash approached his MP to help him regain his property. The MP asked Prakash to meet him at his office in Faizabad. Prakash travelled to Faizabad and rang his office from the railway station. The MP told him that he was on his way to the state capital of Lucknow. ‘He was only ten minutes away from Faizabad but refused to turn back’, Prakash said. The MP said, ‘come and see me tomorrow’, so Prakash hung around till the next day. The MP met him and rang the District Magistrate of Faizabad to tell him to assist Prakash in regaining his land. However, for several months after that, ‘nothing happened’. Prakash shows me photocopies of the various letters he sent. Prakash made another appointment to see the MP, who had now been allotted a flat on Delhi’s North Avenue, where MPs are provided official accommodation. When he arrived at the MP’s flat, he was told that he had gone off to Faizabad. Most recently, he asked a local ex-teacher (who was in-charge of Chamkili Pradhan’s electricity business) to draft a letter that he intended to deliver to the MP so that he might forward it to the ‘proper’ authorities in Faizabad.

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At First Remove The intersection at which proper and improper authority meet is the one where Nangla Matchi’s Mukesh Raut has lived for quite some time. Raut came to Delhi around 1990 from Paharpur village in Motihari district in Bihar. Since then he has worked in a chemical factory, as a parking attendant, and an auto-rickshaw driver. He now runs a phone booth and also rents out pirated copies of video compact discs (VCDs). In 2000, Raut’s brother was murdered in his village. Since then, Raut has accumulated a vast file of paperwork connected to the case. There are First Information Reports (FIRs), affidavits, and letters from Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs), Personal Assistants to MPs from (p. 70) Bihar, village panchayat (‘assembly’) heads, and SDOs; in carefully maintained plastic folders, there are also post-mortem reports, doctor’s reports, photocopy of ration cards, and a variety of identity cards. The papers in his possession—lovingly, but also hopefully, preserved like dried petals between book pages—are signs of the intent to speak to the statist mood of the state, to be at, one with its—apparent—sense of itself. Does not the state require that its formality be met by the dry sentiment of paperwork? Raut’s dead brother’s wife was a witness to the murder. The police and the upper-caste ‘Rajputs of the village’ (who form the dominant caste; Raut is from a ‘backward caste’) attempted to make sure that the widow would not be able to give gawahi (evidence) in court, and Raut himself was offered various amounts of money to withdraw the case. But he said, ‘I have told the police, the government vakil (lawyer), and the court that I will not sell my brother’s body, no way’. The state may demand formality, but did it also not have mood swings, oscillating between hard edges of contract to more malleable sentiments of kinfeeling? That is what Hari Raut thinks, trying to account for mood swings.

Marked Men and Women Rumours of impending demolition had been circulating in Nangla for almost as long as anyone could remember. Indeed, around the time I became acquainted with the locality in early 2005, there was a barbed fence of rumour that entangled and identified putative outsiders. So, while Bilkees Begum once harboured suspicions that I was a ‘CBI agent’ (Chapter one), at other times I was also taken to be a government official carrying out a pre-demolition survey. And, as the media and the Delhi government combined to talk up the 2010 Commonwealth Games as an overwhelming reality, Nangla’s anxieties about its future became increasingly acute, for along with public discussions about the Delhi government’s plans for what was to be built for the Games, there were concurrent pronouncements about what needed to be removed in order for Delhi to be presented as a ‘global city’ worthy of hosting a global event; slums were at the top of this list. And, increasingly, the courts had also begun to add their voice against the ‘illegal’ occupation of land by slum-dwellers and the necessity of their removal so that (p.71) legality and civic decorum might be restored or perhaps, reclaimed (Ghertner 2008). To add to all this, if the residents of Nangla looked just across the river—towards its eastern banks—they were easily able to Page 12 of 22

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At First Remove see the slow but steady materialization of the site for the Games Village, where the river mud was giving way to more permanent structures. The bitumen and concrete on the other side further served to conjure dire visions of Nangla’s own fate. Throughout my fieldwork at Nangla, there were different ways in which its residents sought to stave off its perceived fate, even as many sought to deny it through braggadocio that acted as passing comfort: like Nassim, the tea-stall owner who would always shout out to me that he was going to be here ‘at least till 2010’ and then he’d ‘see after that’. But braggadocio is the river being compelled towards a dam. Beyond this, there were more concrete efforts at blockade and feint towards anything that portended demolition, particularly surveying activity. At one of several meetings to prevent demolition, there was a discussion about Nangla’s future: Nassim: We will not allow the survey to be carried out … the survey is the sword to cut our heads off with. We have done our verification. We want to join the Bhagidari system [the ‘state-citizen partnership’ scheme for middle-class residents. See Chapter four] with the Delhi government. We have eaten our food in this place while watching thigh-bones being extracted from the ground in front of us [Nangla might have been an informal burial ground]. What kind of law is it that we cleanse the ground of impurities, make it livable, and then the government ‘reclaims’ it? We intend to stay here. We will stop the survey at all cost.

As Nassim spoke, we were joined by the predictably inebriated Raj Kumar, the MCD official we have met in Chapter two. He said, somewhat mysteriously, ‘Yes, let’s do the verification of all those who can be helped’. The plan, it appears, is to conduct a survey before the (actual or imagined) official one, and then dispute —or at least muddy—the latter’s findings. A man brings a suitcase which is opened to reveal three different piles of ‘verification’ forms. Suraj Chandra calls out, ‘Is there a padha-likha aadmi (educated man) here?’ A young man rummages through the contents of the suitcase, calling out names in the hope that some of these might be of those standing around. The loudspeaker from the mosque opposite us announces that from 5 p.m. onwards, (p.72) ‘all those suffering from piles and various other ailments can meet a doctor at Nassimbhai’s tea-shop’. Nassim takes up a thread that had been interrupted: The ‘slum commissioner’ had wanted a ‘survey’ done in order that land could be allocated to people elsewhere in Delhi. An area near Badarpur border (in eastern Delhi, on the border with Haryana) is preferred, since another option being offered is too far away. However, (we) did not permit the ‘survey’ to be conducted. ‘Why don’t you allot places to us here’, we asked.

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At First Remove Rumours of demolition wound around official pronouncements, visits of politicians and various other ‘powerful’ people, discussions among residents, attempts to forge city-wide alliances with other basti-dwellers, and multiple strategies of resistance by locals. In January 2006, an NGO working in Nangla organized a three-day workshop at a research institute in Central Delhi. A small group from Nangla had been invited to listen to the experiences of another group whose basti had been demolished and many of whom had been resettled in the Bawana Resettlement Colony in North Delhi. A group of about sixty women and some children had come from Bawana. In addition, some of Delhi’s leading NGO activists were on hand to explain the processes that led to the removal of a basti and the entitlement of basti dwellers in the wake of a demolition. In these discussions, the survey took on a double role: as bureaucratic scythe and subaltern succour. Activists explained that in the wake of demolitions, residents must ensure that they are given ‘demolition slips’ and ‘possession slips’ that (in principle, at least) ensure a ‘resettlement plot’. Several women from Bawana narrated their varied activities of haranguing survey officials until all ‘eligible’ residents were enumerated, asking for proof of identity from officials, paying bribes when necessary, and photographying instances of bribe-taking. Proof and disproving, wanting and not wanting the survey, resisting and interrogating agents of the state, thwarting and acquiescing in the bribe, and ensuring that correct paperprocedures are followed as well as seeking to confound the process: these are personal peculiarities of the state grasped as enduring strategies of survival. In mid-March 2006, I happened upon a meeting organized by Rakesh Kumar, Bilkees Begum, Ram Prakash, and some other residents of Nangla. There was a new rumour that Nangla was to be demolished (p.73) on 4 April and the meeting was called to discuss strategies for delaying the demolition. As we talked, a man walked in, saying that he lived in another basti, but that he was a lawyer in the Delhi High Court. He suggested that he may be able to fight a legal case on behalf of the group. ‘You have nothing to worry about’, he said, ‘they cannot just come and demolish your houses. I will find out about a stay order’. When he left, Qasim, a member of the group, talked about how he had ‘run around for three years’ in order to have a post-box installed in the locality. This way, he said, residents could send and receive letters which would carry their Nangla address, thus ‘ensuring a proof of residence’. But, he lamented, hardly anyone used the mail-box. ‘Just think of all the “proofs” we might have had if people had used it’ he, added, sadly; the post-box, with its apparent assurance of locality and identity, now lies rusting, in fading official red, like manifold promises of durability that come and go. The (Hindi language) Amar Ujala newspaper of 2 March 2006 reported that the Delhi High Court had asked the DDA why the Nangla Matchi cluster had not

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At First Remove been so far removed, since the court had passed the first order to demolish in December 2001. During a hearing in [the presence of] Justices Vijendra Jain and S.N. Agarwal, it was established that DDA had settled people on this land…. On 16 March, a NDMC [New Delhi Municipal Corporation] official came to Nangla Matchi as DDA had asked NDMC why it had settled people on this land from Teen Murti, Sangli …. [that] about 300 jhopris [hutments] had been established in 1993. The bench expressed annoyance and said that despite the area being declared a ‘dumping station’, the jhuggis had still been allowed to be established there. DDA has been asked to remove the jhuggis as soon as possible. (Amar Ujala, 2 March 2006). Some days prior to this news report, some Nangla residents had been called by the SHO of the nearby Tilak Marg police station and told that the ‘authorities’ had asked for a ‘battalion’ in April, and that they (the residents) should not create any ‘problems’, and that Nangla would be demolished by May. However, the rumour that Nangla was to be demolished on 4 April persisted. And, on a visit to the locality on 20 March, I ran into Mr Juneja, the sociologist from the Municipal Corporation’s Slum Wing. He was there as part of a ‘survey team’. Rakesh Kumar told me that this (p.74) time some houses were being ‘marked’, while others were left untouched. All those whose houses were not being marked, he added, were worried about ‘being left out’. Different notations were being used: ‘NDS’ (No Documents Shown), ‘C’ (Commercial), and ‘P– 98’ (for those who were deemed to have settled after 1998). We followed one of the survey teams around the locality that was led by a woman. She said, ‘if your house is not being marked, you are fine … that’s the best thing’. The confusion was even greater now. How could lack of ‘marking’ be a good thing? Would this not mean that these households were not being included in the census and hence would not receive alternative land following demolition? No one knew the answer. There seemed to be three groups of surveyors, one each from the Delhi Municipal Corporation’s Slum Wing, the NDMC, and the DDA. An NDMC official asked Juneja for any ‘list’; Juneja replied he did not know about it. A young man from the locality walking with me asked various people what they have on their walls, in terms of the markings, saying he has ‘NDS’ on his, and many around his house have ‘P–98’. Some of the latter respondents seemed quite happy, saying that ‘P’ stood for ‘permanent’. They laughed and made jokes, and congratulated each other. Later, someone told me that Razia Begum—ex-pradhan Bilkees Begum’s sister— had run after the survey team saying that ‘nothing’ had been written on her door and that they must write ‘something’. On being told that it was best that way, Page 15 of 22

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At First Remove she disagreed and insisted and got angry. They wrote ‘NDS’ on her door, so she didn’t get an allotment. There were battalions of the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) walking around the locality. After a while, it began to rain and I took shelter inside Ram Prakash’s ironing shop. There was another man there. He was from the MCD Slum Wing. He told us that those with ‘P–98’ on their doors are the most vulnerable. Rakesh Kumar and Ram Prakash felt very happy. Their houses had not been surveyed. Only those houses about which there was a ‘doubt’ at the time of the last survey (July 2005) were now being surveyed. Kumar and Prakash were happy to be left out. All around us, there were people running around the lanes, clutching various pieces of paper, identity cards, ration cards, certifications provided by employers, and whatever else seemed easily available. People asked each other about what to do. A young woman came to Prakash’s shop clutching a birth certificate. They told her to go back to her house and get some other document.

(p.75) Rumours of Some Trouble: Bulldozers, Courts, Lawyers On the night of 29 March 2006, I was travelling back to my house in one of the vans that are used as taxis when they are not engaged in ferrying call centre staff. The van’s radio was on high volume. The announcer was presenting a ‘traffic report’, asking motorists to stay away from Bhairon Marg (Road), as there was ‘some trouble near the slum cluster of Nangla Matchi’. I rang Rakesh Kumar, who told me that ‘demolitions had started’, and that ex-Prime Minister V.P. Singh had tried to prevent the bulldozers from marching onto Nangla. Next morning I went to Nangla. Four bulldozers rumbled through the narrow lanes of the locality, knocking down shops and dwellings whose owners were not entitled to receive any alternative plots of land. Men, women, and children scurried around with almost anything they could salvage: sheets of tin roofing material, plastic water tanks, cloth, shoulder-bags stuffed with clothes, water cooler shells, bits of wood and iron, and mattresses. A little girl was carrying a bag full of old clothes, desperately trying to keep pace with her father as they headed out of the locality. Streams of people were rushing about, loading trucks with their belonging, battalions of Rapid Action Force (RAF), and the para-military CRPF mingling among them. There were rows of small trucks piled high with household goods and people, though not many seemed to know where they were going. The paramilitary forces—many carrying tear gas canisters—and members of the Delhi police kept watch. The entire stretch of the Ring Road on which Nangla stood had been blocked to traffic. I ran into Chamkili Pradhan and we walked around the locality like archaeologists of the present confronted with ruins-in-the-making. ‘This is all the result of misinformation’, she told me. ‘The survey people wrote “Locked” on my door, even though I have all the documents. It’s all because some neighbours are jealous of me’. We came across Nassim. ‘We tried everything and everyone’, he Page 16 of 22

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At First Remove told me, ‘but no one has been of help. Thank you for coming to express your sympathies’. ‘Why didn’t you do anything?’, he asked Chamkili. She muttered, ‘This is what happens if you vote for the Congress’, and that ‘it will change when the BJP comes back into power’. They started to argue and as Chamkili walked away, Nassim called Chamkili a daku (robber). She turned and rushed back at him, threatening to hit him. There was a (p.76) posse of policemen nearby. One of them called out: ‘Don’t worry—they are constructing multi-storied apartments for you at Vasant Kunj (an upmarket middle class locality in South Delhi)!’ Another laughed and added ‘Behenchod (sisterfuckers), I’ve spent thirty years in Delhi and haven’t managed to build a house….’ Enormous puffs of dust enveloped the streets as concrete slabs that were walls of houses tumbled to the ground. Demolition officials urged residents to move out of the way even as people rushed out of their homes with bits and pieces of household goods and furniture. Two women crying on each other’s shoulders consoled each other; one wailed ‘Will we ever meet again?’ There was a woman sitting right in the middle of the rubble of her house. Another old woman—crying silently—told me that she had brought up all her children here, got them married, and now could do nothing but wait for her house to go up in dust. A middle-aged woman followed one of the officials from lane to lane, pleading that her house was actually an ‘old’ construction and so should not be demolished. She said she didn’t know why it was not included in the survey. There was no notice given for the ‘demolition drive’, and the only indication was newspaper reports saying that the High Court had ordered the Delhi government to clear the area within the next thirty days. Perhaps, someone said, there was a notice, but our pradhan didn’t pass it on; pradhans have their own stakes in demolition (Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008): an extra resettlement plot, some money passed under the table … who can say? There are scrap dealers wandering the locality. ‘When a jhuggi jhopri colony is demolished’, Nassim said, ‘it’s a great day for scrap dealers.’ The latter wander the locality with scales, weighing metals of unrecognizable shape, form, and age. Almost anything that has any value—and cannot be transported—is sold: rusting bicycle parts, out-ofshape gas stove covers, car parts, metal bits from toilet cisterns among them. I came across a girl sitting on a charpai (hessian bed) in one of the lanes. She was looking at a pink-coloured flyer from a real estate agent. It had black and white photos of European chalets, upmarket Indian housing, and a map of an unknown urban locality printed off the internet. The flier invited people to book plots in Sonia Vihar on the Northen edges of Delhi (where Chamkili has built her house), saying these were of varying sizes, with uninterrupted water and electricity supply. The contact person was ‘Vakil Bhai’, who provided only his mobile number.

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At First Remove (p.77) I met fourteen year old Manoj in the main street, whom I had come to know during fieldwork. He was in a rush. He said his family was moving out to Sonia Vihar where they rented a place. His house in Nangla had been properly ‘surveyed’, so his family was eligible for a plot. However, they would find it difficult to live among the demolition activity that was going to happen over the next month or so. So, they were moving out. I confirmed his mobile number, and he walked off into the billowing dust against a setting sun, towards the remains of his house. Ram Prakash and Rakesh Kumar were expecting their houses to be demolished sometime in April. A policeman sitting at Prakash’s shop pointed to his electricity meter and said, ‘You’ll be fine. You have a meter in your house’. It was 4 April and the initial rounds of demolitions had been completed. Nangla was the picture of a curiously splintered serenity: the remaining residents unmindfully picked their way through the rubble, as if part of sight-seeing group that had come across a minor obstruction on its way to the final destination. Ram Prakash said that since the demolitions began, many people, even those who expected to receive plots elsewhere, had moved out. He was also thinking of moving out to Jaitpur, near the Delhi border with Haryana where he owned a plot of land. At the time there was no bijli (electricity) or water there, but he was hoping to get the hand pump working in a few days. ‘I just don’t feel like staying here anymore’, he said. In the wake of the demolitions and the rubble that was now everywhere, Nangla was still full of dust. Prakash said he had cleaned his house five times since morning but there was still a layer of dust on the floor. When he moved to Jaitpur, he would probably have to take up some other line of work, as there was already a long-established ironing business there. Smashed houses now intermingled with those left standing, and the narrow lanes were full of piles of rubble. People built bridges out of bits and pieces of roofing material over the rubble, and as they crossed over, the brick and mortar crunched under their feet. In one corner, between broken houses and strewn brick, wood and metal, there was a large pink canopy where a wedding ceremony was taking place. And, all the while, there was movement of people, carrying whatever they could from their houses, out towards the Ring Road. About ‘75 per cent of residents’, Ram Prakash said, ‘have moved to Ram Park (in Sonia Vihar), whereas others have gone to Mithapur, also an outlying area of Delhi.’ (p.78) Ram Prakash said that there was a court judgment due on 5 April and he would decide what to do after that. If he was going to move to Jaitpur, then he wanted to break down his house himself, so that he could extract as much usable material—girders, wooden planks, etc.—as possible. If the MCD did it, he said, there would be nothing usable left.

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At First Remove In mid-April, Rakesh Kumar and Hari Prasad held several meetings in the neighbourhood to persuade residents to move the court to allot as many as possible land elsewhere, and to contribute to hire a lawyer to do so. Initially there was great deal of scepticism, but slowly people began to be convinced by their argument. They managed to gather around 700 families who each contributed Rs 100 in order to hire a lawyer. The lawyer had been recommended by ex-Prime Minister V.P. Singh. In the meanwhile, Rakesh, Ram Prakash, and Suraj Chandra also arranged a meeting with the municipal councillor for their area, and who had recently become the Mayor of Delhi. There was vague consensus that the Mayor might help as ‘his political birth was in our area’, and also because his mother—a Congress party politician—had been the local MLA. I accompanied the group to the Mayor’s office, where he promised to ‘get electricity re-connected and the entire place cleaned’. But nothing materialized by the end of April, and the group appealed to the Delhi High Court for ‘relief’. However, their lawyer asked them to gather more information regarding others who may be eligible for land but had not received any proof of entitlement after the demolitions. Rakesh Kumar, Ram Prakash, and Suraj Chandra knew of some people who had moved to the Bawana Resettlement Colony from Nangla, and had to buy land in the ‘open market’ (it is illegal to buy and sell land in a resettlement colony). So, they travelled to Bawana to meet some of the local leaders to see if they are able to obtain any paperwork that would help in the process. Their lawyer told them that he needed more ‘proof’ in order to make their case stronger. The group sought out sixty-five year old Mohammad Hanif who has been in Bawana for about five years. He was moved here from a basti near Raj Ghat, the site of Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial. We sat at a tea shop and he told me that almost all the plots on the main road of the colony were now owned by people who are not original allottees. This happened in at least four different ways. First, many who are (p.79) allotted plots are enticed to sell to someone else, as the resettlement colony is too far away from their place of work. Second, while a basti is being surveyed, survey officials carrying out the task are in touch with real estate brokers. Then, during the survey, some residents are declared ‘ineligible’, and their plots are sold to brokers. Third, some others are notified that they are eligible, but that ‘the process of getting land would take a long time’. This group is offered a few thousand rupees each as ‘compensation’ and persuaded to give up their right of allotment. Officials then ensure that these are allotted in fake names to brokers, receiving hefty bribes in return. This process involves, as Hanif describes it, giving birth to new populations: You need fake photos, ID cards, and what have you … sometimes of people who might be dead are pressed into service and the allotment is made in the name of a made-up person. They can allot to anyone, the photo can be

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At First Remove made up: sar kisi ka, pair kisi ka [the upper part of the body may belong to one person, and the lower to another]. Entirely new people, you see…. There is a fourth way, Hanif said, through which property passed into other hands. So, a group of people had recently been moved to Bawana from Delhi. However, they were told that there had been ‘double allotment’, and that the land on which they had set up their shanties—before building a more permanent structure—was ‘actually’ allotted to others and they would have to move to another resettlement colony. Eventually, this land would pass on to brokers. We were then joined by Suleiman Bhai who, Rakesh tells me, was associated with the Communist Party. There was an argument between Suleiman and Hanif, when the latter says that ‘our own people (the original allottees) have cut their own throat by selling to others’. The market in ‘slum’ real estate seems to be feature shared by many other similar localities around the world. In the ‘squatting area’ of Ford, in the township of Chaguanas in Trinidad, Daniel Miller says, people often sell land ‘to which they had no right’ (1994: 40); and speaking of Bangkok, Marc Askew notes that ‘Slum-dwellers occupy homes on the basis of purchasing housing rights (kammasit or sit) in an invisible real-estate system, regardless of the legal tenure status of individual settlements’ (2002: 145). The Nangla group decides it would be a good idea to walk around the locality to see if it could meet those who may (p.80) know of recent settlers from Nangla, whose ‘papers’ the lawyer requires. The locality baked in forty-two degree heat. We wandered through the by-lanes, but were unable to locate families from Nangla.

Endings, Moods, Friends It was May 2006, and the semi-demolished Nangla Matchi site presented a dappled topography of green, where wild grass grew, and a dull red of rusting metal. I find Rakesh Kumar sleeping in the place that was earlier a ‘crèche’ run by his wife. He said that there are just over a thousand families left in Nangla and that many others have rented accommodation elsewhere, leaving most of their possessions in locked rooms in the locality. Burglaries are quite common and many have lost whatever little they salvaged from the ruins. There was no electricity in Nangla and the ‘stolen’ connection that cost Rs 20 per day—supplied by a paramilitary camp next door—only lit one tube light per house. Late at night, when demand for electricity is less, some were able to operate evaporative coolers. Rakesh said some people were displaying symptoms of mental instability because of the tension and the stress of living in Nangla. They stood around flaying their arms and shouting. Rakesh had heard that the Supreme Court has granted a ‘stay’ on further demolitions until 9 May, when the case would come up for hearing. He and his friends also expected to hear from their own lawyer about the case filed in the High Court, financed through their contributions. He said he had been told that Page 20 of 22

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At First Remove the officials would come today to hand out parchis (demolition slips), so that they could be moved to a ‘transit camp’, to await a decision on settlement plots. However, they had decided to not accept the parchis as they fear that once they moved out of Nangla, they may also be thrown off the other land, and eventually, get nothing. Across the Ring Road from Nangla, a large colourful shamiana (marquee)—the kind used in weddings—fluttered in indecipherable celebration. It was for the officials who had to deal with post-demolition formalities. However, there was no one there. Perhaps they had got wind of the Supreme Court’s stay order. Do I think he should accept the parchis, Rakesh asked. But, he continues, if he does, and agrees to move off the land to a transit camp, who knows if he will ever get something ‘permanent’? I am unable to provide any advice. (p.81) However, Rakesh himself provides an answer: if he doesn’t accept the parchis, then the officials might later say ‘We had gone to give you parchis, but you didn’t accept, now there is nothing we can do’. How to read moods? We walk back from the empty shamiana to what is left of Rakesh’s house. He takes out an old photo album. There is one from about ten years ago: a group of young men, including Rakesh, are playing cards. There are several others that show him with his arms around his wife, standing in front of their house; two of Rakesh and his wife sitting on the roof of their house, with Nangla as background. There are studio photos of families, pujas (religious ceremonies), and various other functions. As we leaf through the pictures. Rakesh said he became very fond of photographs after his marriage, as he ‘had a love marriage’ with his Assamese wife. Photos were all that were left of a map of sentiments, but the business of claiming real territory requires more unsentimental proof. In late May, we are back at the MCD’s Slum Wing Office near the ITO; Rakesh and his friends wanted to get more information that might allay their fears about their resettlement plot. We ran into Ahmad Ansari, another resident from Nangla who was there as he had heard that parchis were being given out to those who lived in a demolished basti in the East Delhi locality of Laxmi Nagar. They would be moved to the same transit camp as that offered to Rakesh and his friends. The parchi stated that no one was allowed to build any permanent structure at the camp, and that eventual allotment would depend on certain ongoing court cases being settled. Ansari was talking to an auto-rickshaw driver, Arun, who had just received a parchi. He told him that that no one must ‘sell’ their parchis to real estate dealers. I asked him how it was possible for allottees to sell their parchis since this concerned transit accommodation, and no one was allowed to build even semi-permanent structures there; only tents being allowed. Ansari says that dalals (brokers) had been accosting those who have come out of the MCD office with parchis. They offered Rs 10,000–15,000 for the katchi parchi (nonpermanent demolition slips, for those who must wait till their entitlement status is legally clarified). Once they sold, the photo of the original allottee was Page 21 of 22

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At First Remove changed. The reason for buying ‘impermanence’ was that MCD officials told the dalals that the Laxmi Nagar group would eventually get permanent plots elsewhere, hence whoever bought the katchi parchis—and got the photo changed—would get pucca (permanent) allotment. (p.82) As we stood outside the Slum Wing office, there was a great deal of laughter, residents of different bastis and resettlement colonies met long separated friends and greeted each other with joy. There were rounds of tea and paan; we could have been sitting in someone’s house or courtyard, swapping tales. There was also the swapping of stories; what is happening in your area, what has happened to so and so, and so on. It was the peculiar poetry of fellowfeeling sprouting on the grounds of bureaucratic fallowness. The city, here, is experienced as a series of connections across varied spaces: Slum Wing office, the chief minister’s secretariat, court houses, offices where ration cards and ID cards are issued, NGO offices and research centres that provide support of different kind, the scattered geography of resettlement colonies and basti clusters, offices of political functionaries of various kinds, and impermanent shamianas that speak of ambiguous intent. ‘Nangla Matchi’ might also be seen as the site of an effort to knit these geographies in order to be able to take part in a continual reading of the different moods of the state, to be in the continual presence of its Janus-like countenance, to both deflect and profit from its gaze. In the chapters that follow, I will turn to another context, one where the city is increasingly imagined as a series of discrete spaces, and one where the distinctions between ‘private’ and ‘public’ life are beginning to be reinforced through a variety of mechanisms. The chapters outline the narratives of ‘clean’ spaces that emerge from demands for removal of ‘unclean’ ones such as Nangla Matchi. Notes:

(1) . The study pointed out ‘We have no precise definition for the word “slum”’ (Bharat Sevak Samaj 1958: 214).

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Post-Nationalism

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Post-Nationalism Urban Spaces, Consumerism, and Middle-Class Activism in Delhi Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords Slum lives are entangled with those of the middle classes. Middle-class RWAs, as demonstrated in Chapter 3, have played a significant role in agitating for slum demolitions. This chapter explores the middle-class city through focusing upon RWA activity in two contexts. The first relates to a protest movement against a hike in electricity tariff, and the second concerns the Delhi government sponsored ‘Bhagidari’ movement that brings together representative of RWAs, Market Traders Associations and state functionaries. The chapter suggests that while empirically there may not be a singular middle-class identity across Delhi, RWA-activity is itself part of the process of producing the notion of a homogenous middle-class in the city. It is, further, aligned to the notion of the consumerist family located in legally defined spaces, in touch with a transparent and responsive state machinery. It also produces narratives of ‘threats’ to the formal city from urban under-classes. Keywords:   middle class activism, Residents Welfare Associations, Delhi Bhagidari, middle-class identities

People’s Action is the response of citizens who have paid their taxes to the state and won’t accept anything but the best for themselves and their cocitizens. These are people who want Delhi to be the world’s finest city. Sanjay Kaul, President, People’s Action–NGO.

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Post-Nationalism Active Middle Classes in the City Basti residents’ lives are entangled with middle-class ones in direct ways. Middle-class Residents Welfare Associations (RWAs), as the previous chapter noted, have played a significant role in agitating for slum demolitions. This is not a peculiarly Indian story. In American cities, Davis (1992) points out, ‘Homeowners’ Associations first appeared on the political scene in the 1920s as instruments of white mobilization against attempts by Blacks to buy homes outside the ghetto’ (Davis 1992: 161). And that by the 1920s, ‘95 per cent of the city’s housing stock … was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians’ (Davis 1992: 161). While the politics of exclusion—differently expressed—is also a significant aspect of the functioning of RWAs of Delhi that this chapter takes up for discussion, there are two other aspects that are just as important. The first has to do with securing a certain standard of material conditions of living, either through private means or through negotiations with the state, and the second relates to (p.86) the ways in which RWA activity is itself a claim on ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ middle class. This chapter explores both these issues in order to explore the making of the ‘global city’: the city which requires the removal of bastis (hamlets) such as Nangla Matchi in order that actually existing spaces match the urban imagination of globalism. The discussion will proceed through an investigation of two contexts. First, it will explore the case of a ‘protest’ movement spearheaded by the RWAs of Delhi that represent a variety of middle-class localities. The RWAs present themselves as citizens’ groups—seeking to locate their actions in the realm of ‘civil society’—that self-consciously speak for ‘middle-class’ interests in urban affairs. In addition, the RWAs also collaborate with particular NGOs—such as People’s Action, mentioned in the epigraph to the chapter—that also self-identify as the voice of ‘middle-class’ India. It is important to remember that the term ‘middleclass’ has a complex history in India, being part, as it is, of prolix linguistic, regional, rural-urban, caste, occupational, and religious histories (Deshpande 2004; Fernandes 2006; Mankekar 1997; Rajagopal 1999). In this chapter, I am not concerned, however, with trying to ‘objectively’ define what a ‘middle class’ is. Rather, I suggest that it is more analytically productive to reflect upon what it means to claim such status. Hence, while the localities Delhi RWAs represent vary widely—the super-expensive South Delhi suburbs do not have much in common with the more modest localities in the east of the city—what their residents share is the claim to middle-classness (see Kamath and Vijayabaskar 2009 on RWAs and the different kinds of ‘middle-classness’ they represent). And, while we must be mindful that ‘RWAs constitute an increasingly mixed bag, with enormous variations in composition, concerns, modes of engagement, and political relations’ (Coelho and Venkat 2009: 358), and that they reflect ‘the fractured, and at times contradictory nature of claims made by different sections of the middle class’ (Kamath and Vijayabaskar 2009: 369), they nevertheless articulate a common set of issues that are seen to affect all ‘middle-class’ people, Page 2 of 23

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Post-Nationalism including the growth of slums. And, while empirically there may not be a singular middle-class identity across Delhi, RWA activity is itself part of the process of producing the notion of a homogenous middle-class in the city. RWAs are crucial to the process of consolidating an urban consensus around middleclassness, and the politics of space is crucial to the making of this consensus. (p.87) The second site of focus will be the Delhi government sponsored Bhagidari (‘sharing’) programme that brings together representatives of the RWAs, Market Traders Associations (MTAs), and key government officials at periodically organized workshops as well as regular monthly meetings. The meetings and workshops are intended to re-imagine the city as a space of cooperative endeavour, one where ‘citizens’ play an active role in formulating and implementing policies, and the state responds through ‘transparent’ mechanisms of urban governance. Discussions at Bhagidari workshops range over difficulties regarding civic amenities, ‘urban problems’—such as crime— and their solution, and the role of the family in regulating urban life. Participants also sing and dance to Bhagidari ‘anthems’ (praising ‘citizen-state cooperation’), while wearing specially designed baseball caps and waving colourful flags. This vision of the city marries the idea of the consumerist family located in legally defined spaces to that of a transparent and responsive state machinery. It also produces narratives of ‘threats’ to the formal city from urban under-classes. The decline of the—‘socialist’—Nehruvian state and the consolidation of newer cultural and political economies of ‘liberalization’ are significant contexts for negotiations of middle-class identities. At present, new class identities engage with a transnational context that is different from that prevalent in the era of centralized planning that succeeded the colonial one. The case of middle-class activism provides an important entry into contemporary ideas of ‘revolution’, ‘change’, and ‘freedom’ in the absence of the ‘moral’ backdrop of anti-colonial nationalism. In particular, the chapter will outline the processes and politics of imagining a ‘civil society’ where ideas of a ‘people’ and the ‘state’ move across the registers of consumer culture, new urban spaces of leisure and residence, the logic of economic privatization, a de-emphasis on production processes, and imaginations of the ‘global city’. It will explore contemporary ideas regarding civil society and transformations in its relationships with the state as these are articulated through discourses of public activism in the context of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘post-nationalism’. I will have more to say on the latter concept, later in the chapter. The discussion seeks to position middle-class activism within broader cultural and social landscapes that also produce ‘an entrepreneurial citizen identity’ (Kamat 2004: 164). The focus on middle-class (p.88) activism on behalf of itself seeks to make a link to the consolidation of new contexts of consumerism, and discourses on ‘choice’ and the ideal relationship with the state. Privatized production of spaces of residence and Page 3 of 23

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Post-Nationalism leisure (and commerce) is a significant context in the making of middle-class activism since it also gives rise to a broader set of ideas about the identity and rights of the consumer-citizen. This chapter hence links the making of such spaces to the consolidation of an activist consciousness that seeks to delineate middle-classness.

Suburban Activism: Urbanism and the Residents Welfare Association Middle-class activism in public affairs is not, of course, a recent phenomenon. The most significant example of such activism was the nationalist movement. Further, different kinds of ‘social reform’ movements of the nineteenth century were also important sites of public activity by the ‘educated classes’. The reformers tackled a wide variety of issues, including ‘elimination of or change in certain caste regulations and rituals; the sati system, widow remarriage, child marriage, status of women, girl’s education, prohibition, etc’ (Shah 2004: 224). Hence, the idea of an activist middle-class as an agent of change has been a significant one both during the colonial (Joshi 2001) and post-colonial eras. A particular transformation in the nature of middle-class activism during the postcolonial period concerns the re-focusing of energies towards assisting poor populations in obtaining a foothold in the economic (and cultural) mainstream. This has most visibly expressed itself in the massive proliferation of NGOs in the post-1947 period. As Kudva points out, ‘the growth of the NGO sector during the post-colonial period was influenced by a combination of factors whose roots lay in late nineteenth and early twentieth century processes’ (2005: 240). Irrespective of different ‘phases’ of growth and diversification of NGO activity during the post-independence period, one aspect of NGO activity has, until recently, remained constant, namely, the commitment to working with economically and socially marginalized populations. The discussion of this chapter suggests that a relatively new politics of urban space is leading to rethink of the role of middle-class activism in national life. This relates to the perception that such activity ought also (p.89) ‘protect’ and represent middle-class interests through a renegotiation of the relationship with the state which has historically represented itself, and has been popularly understood to be ‘pro-poor’. The engagements with the state are taking place against the background of increasingly intense engagements with the market. One of the clearest examples of the evolving relationship between middle-class ‘activism’ on behalf of itself, the state, and the market relates to the activities of Delhi’s RWAs, and those of the Delhi government sponsored Bhagidari scheme. In his research on Chennai, Harris makes the important point that the ‘new politics’ of RWA-linked activism tends to be exclusionary ‘in relation to the informal working class’ (2007: 2717). This chapter explores the cultural politics of the imagined and actual relationship between the ‘people’ and the state that is the ground upon which the exclusionary politics of the city are played out. RWAs, as the name suggests, are intended to promote the interests of families Page 4 of 23

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Post-Nationalism and individuals who share specific space of residence. RWAs in Delhi are generally of two types: those that are attached to bounded spaces, usually gated communities of apartments (Chapter six), and others that cover residential localities consisting of independent and semi-independent houses. Whereas RWAs of the first kind emerge from physically bounded spaces, the latter create a bounded space through defining the territory of their remit. That is, even nongated localities have become gated ones through the practice of barricading major thoroughfares (Chapter five). In either case, such visual acts upon space are designed to create communities of common interest. Historically, RWAs have dealt with issues of common concern such as ‘security’ (through appointing private guards at key entry points), maintenance of local infrastructure (such as parks and gardens), resolution of localized disputes, and the organization of social and cultural events for their members. Compared to the ‘open area’ RWAs, those of the gated communities have (as we will see in subsequent chapters) far greater leeway in producing imaginaries of desirable public-ness. In almost all cases, RWA office-holders are elected to their positions (of President, Secretary, etc.), with elderly males constituting a substantial number. There is a tendency to favour retired officers of the armed forces as RWA functionaries, perhaps seeking to attach the aura of military discipline to that of the modern housing locality. Until recent times, RWAs have been content to operate below the level of the (p.90) various official bureaucracies, functioning as mechanisms of localized conviviality, and often self-representing as crucial elements of ‘civil society’. Given the nature of the residential localities where such associations are formed, and the fact that the only RWAs ‘recognized’ by the state are those that represent ‘authorized colonies’ and are registered with the Registrar of Cooperatives, they have invariably articulated the concerns of very specific segments of the urban population. In 1999, soon after being elected to office, Delhi’s Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit, ‘called for an active participation of RWAs in governance’. The rationale for this was the ‘failure’ of ‘civic agencies’ to carry out their normal tasks. The Chief Minister’s Secretary noted that the call to actively involve RWAs in urban governance heralded a new era, marking as it did ‘the first step towards a responsive management of the city’ (Ojha 1999: 1). Making a distinction between the state and the ‘community’, it was further noted that the ‘failure’ of ‘civic agencies’ meant that ‘it’s really time for the community to be given direct control of managing the affairs of the city’ (Ojha 1999: 1). Subsequently, the government consulted a variety of RWAs from across the city and decided to ‘empower’ them to ‘take certain decisions on their own’. It was proposed that RWAs be given control over the management of resources such as parks, community halls, parking places, sanitation facilities, and local roads. A more direct relationship between the state and RWAs was also mooted through the idea of joint surveys of ‘encroached’ land—that is, land that had been illegally Page 5 of 23

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Post-Nationalism occupied—with the possibility that all illegal structures would ‘then be demolished in a non-discriminatory manner’ (Ojha 1999: 1). Finally, it was suggested that RWAs be allowed to impose fines on government agencies that failed to carry out their normal tasks. Since 2004, RWAs have become particularly active in a number of wellpublicized campaigns that seek to engage with and influence state policy relating to urban issues. These included plans to privatize water supply (Kanbur 2007; Mehdudia 2005), and policies relating to the commercial use of residential property (Mehra 2009). The Delhi Residents Welfare Association Joint Front (RWAJF) was formed in 2005, following a decision by the Delhi state government to raise power tariffs by 10 per cent. At the time of its formation, the Front consisted of 195 separate member RWAs from around the city, with membership increasing to 250 in 2009 (Chakrabarti 2009). (p.91) The increase in power rates for domestic consumers was the second one since the state-owned electricity body (the Delhi Vidyut Board or DVB) was ‘unbundled’ in June 2002 as part of power sector ‘reforms’. As a result, three privately owned companies secured contracts for electricity distribution (Sethi 2005). There was vigorous protest over the price rise and, in addition to the RWAJF, NGOs such as People’s Action also joined the campaign. People’s Action referred to its agitation as the Campaign Against Power Tariff Hike (CAPTH). Under the aegis of CAPTH, individual RWAs instructed their members to refuse payment of the extra amount, while RWAJF lobbied the government, and organized city-wide protests. The protests gained wide media coverage, not least because of the involvement of a number of ‘prominent public personalities’ (such as actor Roshan Seth, who played the role of Nehru in Richard Attenbourough’s Gandhi). However, the most striking aspect was the media perception of the involvement of ‘common citizens’: Contrary to the claims of the Sheila Dikshit Government and the private power distribution companies in the Capital that it is the political parties that were distorting facts on privatization of the power sector in Delhi, it is the common citizens and prominent personalities who are on the warpath with the Government. […] It is felt that for the first time during the Congress rule in Delhi, the common man [sic] has come out on the streets in protest against the policies and programmes of the Congress Government in Delhi with respect to power and water situation. Not only are the RWAs asking questions about power and water issues, but they have also started doubting the intentions of the Government on the Bhagidari scheme itself. (Mehdudia 2005). Page 6 of 23

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Post-Nationalism While the protests utilized publicity strategies linked to the technologies of late modernity, a significant aspect of the language of remonstration borrowed from early twentieth-century Gandhian anti-colonial discourses. Most significantly, the organizers were reported to have deployed ‘the ideas of “civil disobedience” and “people’s power”’ (Sethi 2005). Indeed, the parallels sought to be drawn between the Gandhian anti-colonial moment and the present time were even more explicit with the Convener of the RWAJF referring to the protests as ‘nonviolent Satyagraha [resistance]’ (Sirari 2006: 5).1 (p.92) Eventually, the Delhi government backed down and the price rise was shelved. According to Sanjay Kaul, President of People’s Action, the success of the protest heralded the making of a ‘middle-class revolution’ (Sethi 2005). Just as significantly, and through processes of repetition and emphasis, the terms ‘middle-class’, ‘common man’ (sic), and ‘common citizens’ became both conjoined and naturalized. A wide cross-section of Delhi’s population—otherwise separated by economic, cultural, and other peculiarities—joined hands to produce a narrative of ‘common’ middle-class interests. There are echoes of this in the Anna Hazare led ‘anti-corruption’ agitation that gripped the media in late 2011; and the complicated historical relationship between the ‘people’, the state, and the market should be taken into account when considering the significance of the Hazare movement. While it is not possible to discuss the full significance of the agitation in this chapter, it is worth noting that consumer-citizenship—and the apparent disenchantment with the state by the middle class that, till recently, was their key benefactor—is an indispensable backdrop to it. Poulomi Chakrabarti points out that while ‘neighbourhood associations have been in existence for many decades’ (Chakrabarti 2009: 19), their active involvement in urban politics (whether putting up candidates in municipal and parliamentary elections or in campaigns such as those described above) is a very recent phenomenon. This, she says, can be attributed to legal measures aimed at the decentralization of the procedures of urban governance. In effect, this has created a context where RWAs are able to both access funds from political representatives (such as the local MLA) as well as those levels of bureaucracy that oversee different types of locality-specific affairs (water and electricity supply, for example). The legal and administrative conditions that make for greater RWA involvement in urban affairs are, of course, important aspects to consider. However, they do not alone explain why RWAs choose to be more active now than before: after all, the right to vote has not translated into higher turnouts of urban middle class voters. (Jaffrelot 2008). In order to supplement materialist analyses of the pre-conditions of greater RWA involvement in urban politics, it is important to turn to the conditions of possibility constituted by the realm of ideas—developments in the realms of political, legal, as well as cultural economies that have conjured the notion of the consumer-citizen in the period of post-nationalism.

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Post-Nationalism Let us return to the agitation over the hike in power tariffs. The circulation of the ideas of ‘civil disobedience’, Satyagraha and ‘revolution’, and the consolidation of the notion of a ‘people’ contesting the state occur in a context that might be called post-national. This indexes a situation where the moral force of these terms—earlier provided by anti-colonial sentiment—no longer holds. In an era of post-Nehruvian economic liberalization characterized by consumerist modernity (see Fernandes 2006; Mazzarella 2003; Srivastava 2007), the moral universe of the anti-colonial struggle is no longer part of popular public discourse; indeed, the ‘colonial ambience’ is the stuff of popular marketing strategies.2 Also, within this context, neither do the ideologies of the Nehruvian state, with their emphases on the ethics of ‘saving’ and delayed gratification for the ‘national good’, find any resonance in contemporary popular discourses on the role of the state. The term post-national does not mean to imply that the nation-state is insignificant as a context of analysis, or that we now live in a ‘post-patriotic’ age where the most significant units of analysis are certain ‘post-national social formations’ (Appadurai 1993: 411)—such as NGOs— that putatively problematize nationalist and statist perspectives. My deployment is also different from another recent usage. Here, it is posited as ‘a distinct ethico-political horizon and a position of critique, and a concept ‘that can be instantiated by suspending the idea of the nation as a prior theoretical-political horizon, and thinking through its impossibility, even while located uncomfortably within its bounds’ (De Alwis et al. 2009: 35). Post-nationalism, in my usage, is the articulation of the nationalist emotion with the robust desires engendered through new practices of consumerism and their associated cultures of privatization and individuation. The most significant manner in which the post-national moment resonates within the politics of urban space signified by groups such as RWAJF concerns the repositioning of the language of anti-colonial nationalism from the national sphere—an abstract space—to the suburban one, namely, the sphere of the neighbourhood. This, in turn, also indexes the move from the idea of the ‘national’ family to the nuclear one, and the translation of the idea of nationalist solidarity to (middle) class solidarity. These are not, in themselves, rejections of nationalist (p.94) sentiments. Rather, they represent, in different ways, the recasting of this sentiment within the framework of consumerist modernity. Here, the middle-class consumer-citizen, installed as a representative of the ‘people’, is imagined as the intermediary between the market and the state. As many newspaper reports covering the anti-price increase protests pointed out, the RWAs were not against the privatization itself (which was understood to be behind the hike); rather, they wanted a ‘better’ and more ‘transparent’ privatization process. The making of the ‘people’ in a time of consumerist modernity has specific consequences: it unfolds through differentiating ‘good’ consumers from the ‘bad’ ones, in turn identifying the ‘good’ citizen from ‘his’ antithesis. An aspect of Page 8 of 23

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Post-Nationalism middle-classness is the self-identification as ‘good’ consumers. Visible manifestations of the making of good consumers are inscriptions upon urban space—the various acts of gating—that announce the presence and work of an RWA. However, RWA discourse in Delhi also acts in other ways to produce the ‘uncivil’ other. The ‘power’ agitation is a case in point. In the states of Odisha, Karnataka, and Himachal Pradesh, where the urban poor’s access to electricity was low, privatization has lowered it further—and drastically (Sihag et al 2002, quoted in Sethi 2005). That is to say, ‘reform’ in the power sector has mostly benefited the well-off. Since the state’s power network does not cover areas of the city that are designated as being under ‘unauthorized’ occupation, the urban poor secure access through informal arrangements with municipal authorities, often aided by local politicians seeking to secure vote banks. However, with privatization, these arrangements come to an end. In many other cases, the private supplier does not deem it profitable enough to supply these areas (Sethi 2005). However, with the consolidation of the idea of the consumer-citizen and the broader context of consumeristmodernity, issues of social equity have most commonly been cast as those of the ‘correct’ forms of consumption. So, a frequent justification for the agitation against the increase in electricity charges was that the hike could have been avoided had the government been more vigilant against slum-dwellers who obtained power through illegal, and unpaid for means. And that, ‘power theft’ meant that ‘honest’ citizens were subsidizing dishonest ones. There are three other aspects to the post-national movement of middle-class activism in Delhi that are of relevance. The first concerns (p.95) the accumulating discourse on ‘village India’. ‘Nearly every book that tries to capture the fundamental characteristics of India for its readers in whatever sphere of human activity’, Ronald Inden has noted, ‘includes a statement about the Indian village. It is one of the pillars of these imperial constructs of India’ (Inden 1990: 132). This ‘imperial construct’ has found a new life through contemporary consumer culture. Through a number of contexts, the Indian village has become a significant site of the urban middle-class imagination. So, discourses of leisure, aesthetics, spirituality, health, and housing—among others —draw upon romanticized images of village India; there are purpose-built ‘ethnic villages’ to experience ‘authentic’ rural food and entertainment, ‘living museums’ to watch ‘tribals’ producing handicrafts (Greenough 1995), clothing designed to reflect rural exuberance, and gated enclaves that promise rural idyll (Dupont 2005). The earlier colonial and anthropological preoccupation with the ‘village India’— though the two are not always the same (Madan 2002)—has, more recently, transformed into newer enterprises of the middle-class imagination. So, ‘Star hotels … organize special regional festivals…, where efforts are made to re-do everything—from décor to food, costumes to music—with elements from that Page 9 of 23

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Post-Nationalism particular region. [Here] rural Rajasthan [is] reproduced within the premises of Best Western …. The rural ambience is, of course, carefully free of cow-dung (or cows), gutters or flies in this case thus rendering it a safe bucolic experience’ (Nayar 2006: 189). In some cases, the village has, with peculiar irony, also become an urban site for illustrating ‘feudal virtues’ that have, quite simply, come to be represented as ‘Indian culture’. The 2009 Durga Devi Namastute contest organized by The Times of India newspaper for the best tableau during the Durga Puja festival (that honours the Goddess Durga) was won by a pandal (marquee) in the East Delhi locality of Mayur Vihar: What made the pandal stand out from the rest was its rural setting with houses made of mud and bamboo, the brass utensils and earthen ware. [One of the organizers told the reporter that] ‘We wanted to show the younger generation how a zamindar (feudal landlord) would have celebrated Durga Puja more than a hundred years ago. Most of the youngsters would not have even seen a village’. (Times News Network 2009: 4). (p.96) There is a particular manner in which the context of slum demolitions discussed in the previous chapter relates to the middle-class idealization of the ‘rural’. This relates to the rising hostility towards ‘debased’ villagers: the urban working classes and slum-dwellers who do not fulfill their vocation as material for the urban imagination. The slum-dwellers are, in this sense, ‘improper’ and ‘inauthentic’ villagers, out of place, threats to civic life, and hence, not deserving of sympathy. Hence, the slum is not so much ‘the reinvented “compassionate” village’ (Nandy 2001: 20) as the site of middle-class anger at the dismantling of its rural imaginary. Secondly, there appears to be in train a process of rethinking the state (Kamat 2004) such that it is increasingly imagined as a ‘friend’ of the middle-classes. The post-colonial state in India has most significantly been imagined as a benefactor of the poor, with ‘development’ as its most significant policy focus. Indeed, the ‘development’ focus of the state has been a defining feature of perceptions of post-coloniality itself (Chatterjee 1993a; Gupta 1998; Moore 2003). As Gupta points out, ‘development became the chief “reason of state” in independent India’ (1998: 107). Investment in ‘heavy industry’ was, further, seen to be an important aspect of post-colonial development (Roy 2007) and this, in turn, led to a perception of the state as pro-industrialization and anticonsumption. RWA activities, such as those discussed above, have become sites for the reformulation of these well-entrenched notions of the state and its relationships with different class fractions. These neighbourhood and city-level activities unfold in tandem with the broad national thrust towards ‘deregulating’ the economy (Derné 2008; Gupta 2000)—including a shrinking public Page 10 of 23

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Post-Nationalism sector and easy loans for consumer purchases—and produce a palpable sense of amity between the ‘people and the state’. Curiously, however, the increasing role of RWAs in urban life may be the result of two seemingly contradictory processes. Political scientist Gurpreet Mahajan (2003) points to a ‘deepening of democratic sentiment’ that is accompanied by demands ‘for a more direct and active role in decision making’ (Mahajan 2003: 20). The ‘public sphere’, she goes on to say, ‘is sought to be strengthened through a decentralized system of administration and involvement of people in governing themselves, at least at the local level’ (Mahajan 2003: 20). Hence, acts of exclusion—the urban fortification trend—sit alongside (p.97) inclusive —‘democratic sentiment’—tendencies. Further, if we view RWAs as part of new movements of self-governance, their activities also seek to delineate the characteristics of urban citizenship and the kinds of spaces where it thrives. In these ways, RWAs negotiate the relationship between the state and the middle classes. Finally, in this context, RWA activism also partakes in redefining notions of ‘civil society’. In the present context, the term may no longer signify an independent realm that interrogates the state (see, for example, the contributions in Kaviraj and Khilnani 2001). Rather, ‘civil society’ is imagined as an instrument to make the state stronger, simultaneously as the latter is called to account for its actions that affect middle-class lives. RWA activism works within this contradictory context. The quotidian reformulation of the relationship between the state, the market, and the ‘people’ is at the heart of middle-class activism in Delhi. Such collective action constitutes the consolidation of a consciousness of middle-classness— across population groups with differing characteristics—that, in turn, have specific consequences in terms of producing narratives about those who are not ‘middle-class’. Hence, what unites the middle classes represented by RWAs is not actual internal homogeneity but a sense of difference from the perceived outside through unequivocal allegiance to the idea of being middle class which, in a circular manner, is itself engendered by RWA activism. Partha Chatterjee (2004) suggests that ‘a field of continuous negotiations between the authorities and the population group’ and ‘the game of strategic political negotiations with the authorities’ is a peculiarity of urban ‘political society’ that lies outside the realm of ‘civil society’; ‘political society’ is the realm where the poor live out their lives through ‘other’ means (2004: 138). However, RWA activism of the kind above is also part of ‘a series of strategic negotiations’ with the ‘authorities’, seeking to secure ‘benefits’ for members of what Chatterjee would define as ‘civil society’. The mechanisms for such negotiations are also strikingly similar: pressure upon political parties, the offer (or threat) of voting as a bloc, and mobilization of ‘community leaders’ (heads of RWAs) as negotiators, with the general objective of securing material gains for the represented community Page 11 of 23

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Post-Nationalism as a whole. The key aspect to keep in mind is the role of ‘negotiations’ in dealing with the state. Under such conditions of urban life, a sharp differentiation between (p.98) the ‘political’ and the civil’—of the kind that Chatterjee suggests—is often difficult to maintain; ‘citizens’ have increasingly encroached upon the deliberative terrain of the ‘non-citizens’ (see also important correctives offered by Fernandes 2006; Kamath and Vijayabaskar 2009; Wood 2012). The discussion thus far has outlined contexts of dissent and contestation from the point of view of the representatives of the ‘people’. The next section is an account of the manner in which the state itself organizes dissent—also through the agency of the RWAs—and participates in producing a specific idea of the (consumer-) citizen with whom it seeks to enter negotiations about life in ‘Actually Existing Democracy’ (Fraser 1990).

Dancing with the State: The Bhagidari Movement I have noted above that all RWAs do not share concerns and interests (Kamath and Vijayabaskar 2009). So, the effect of above-ground metro rail lines in reducing land values due to diminished urban aesthetics that concerned the RWAs of South Delhi who filed a ‘Public Interest Litigation’ to argue for a largely underground system in their areas, did not much concern those of less well-off East Delhi localities who were pleased to have any form of comfortable and reliable public transport in their area.3 As the Secretary of East Delhi’s Ahshan Colony RWA told me, the metro line had meant an increase in land values in his locality. However, rather than present RWAs as typified by ‘fractured’ concerns and hence not particularly useful as a site for exploring notions of middle-class identity, this discussion on Delhi government’s Bhagidari programme builds upon the suggestion that while empirically there may not be a singular identity of the kind, RWAs’ activity is itself part of the process of producing the notion of a homogenous middle class in the city. That is to say that even though government programmes such as Bhagidari clearly bring together residents from very different socio-economic spheres on a common platform, and that the residents have different and sometimes competing interests in seeking facilities and concessions from the state, what they come to share is the notion of middleclassness and its cultural manifestations. The Bhagidari scheme—described as a Citizen-Government partnership programme—was inaugurated in 2000. Through this, (p.99) representatives of the RWAs and MTAs interact with key government officials at periodically organized workshops and at regular meetings in addition to the workshops. The unit of operation is the ‘authorized colony’, and the workshops bring together RWA and MTA members, officials of the police, water, and electricity bodies, the taxation office, the MCD, the DDA, and the heads (Deputy Commissioners) of different administrative ‘zones’ of the city. In 2005, the Bhagidari programme won a UN Public Service award.4

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Post-Nationalism In the foreword to the first Bhagidari Working Report (Bhagidari Report 2001), Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit noted that ‘The participation of citizens in governance is fundamental to democracy …. Successful and meaningful governance cannot be achieved without their [citizens] participation. To this end, I had initiated the concept of “Bhagidari”: the Citizen–Government partnership’. The Report went on to say that the key Bhagidari public event—the workshops—would be organized around the principle of ‘The Large Group Interactive Event (LGIE) … [and] must span at least two-and-a-half days (if not three) with two nights in between. This is based on interesting findings from sleep research, that during sleep, the day’s discussions and experiences in the small and large group, are “processed” by the participants (sic) “sub-conscious” minds. Only after such “sub-conscious” processing for two successive nights does the phenomenon of “paradigm-shift” (or “change in the mindset and attitude”) take place in 80 to 90 per cent of the participants at the “experiential level”’ (Government of Delhi 2001: 7). An NGO, Asian Centre for Research and Development (ACORD), is in charge of organizing the workshops, and the Bhagidari Cell in the office of Delhi’s Chief Minister oversees the programme from the side of the government. According to the Report, ACORD has experience in the area of ‘Real Time Strategic Change’. Further, it noted, ‘Since people do not function based only on logic and reasoning, the LGIE smoothly processes both reason and feeling simultaneously, to create “consensus” and “ownership” (left-brain/right-brain integration of logic and emotion)’ (Government of Delhi 2001: 9). The LGIE, it goes on to say, has been tested in a number of global contexts, including the Municipal Corporation of Mexico City, Public Health Department of Minneapolis, Boeing, and Ford. Through a series of meetings and workshops since 2000, a ‘Steering Group’ has been established. (p.100) The Bhagidari administrative team consists of the Chief Minister of Delhi; Chief Secretary, Delhi Government; Principal Secretary, Urban Development; Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister; and heads of various civic and utility service organizations, which include MCD, DVB, NDMC, Delhi Jal (Water) Board, and the Department of Environment and Forests. Since its inception, the Bhagidari programme has considerably expanded to include a greater number of RWAs’ activities, as well as an elaborate system of programme implementation and evaluation. At present, Bhagidari works through a network of over ‘2000 citizens groups’ that includes RWAs, MTAs, and a variety of NGOs. There are approximately 1,984 ‘authorized’ residential localities that are included in the programme as Bhagidars (‘shareholders’). Operating at the level of the revenue district (with the District Commissioner as the nodal officer), the programme is reviewed at monthly and quarterly intervals by senior government officials as well as a steering committee chaired by the Chief Minister. In recent years, the list of activities under Bhagidari has expanded to include RWA involvement in government schools in their respective areas, NGO involvement in providing assistance to poor women, anti-littering Page 13 of 23

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Post-Nationalism campaigns, ‘reforms in hospital management’, policies for the elderly, and a scheme to involve the corporate sector in feeding the homeless. The set of ideas on urban citizenship and space that has emerged through Bhagidari is linked to the rapidly proliferating connections between bureaucracies, RWAs, and the non-governmental and the corporate sectors. Such connections are both a consequence of the consolidation of wider discourses on middle-classness as well as part of the process of producing them. They are also characteristic of a city that, unlike Mumbai and Kolkata, struggles to conjure a sense of itself as a site of belonging and affection; there are many who live in Delhi, but hardly any who might think of themselves as Delhi-walas (residents of Delhi). It is perhaps in this breach that the Bhagidari scheme produces its own version of urban citizenship and space that, in the process of finding ‘cooperative’ solutions to urban problems, also reinforces the link between the state and ‘authorized’ spaces and their residents (Ghertner 2011). Inspired by global theories of corporate governance, and psychological theories of human interaction, Bhagidari workshops elaborate significant visions of the contemporary city. As noted (p.101) above, participants at workshops are encouraged to sing and dance to a specially written Bhagidari anthem, each wearing Bhagidari baseball caps and waving Bhagidari flags. It is a fascinating vision that marries the idea of the consuming—perhaps ‘McDonaldized’ (Ritzer 1993)—citizen to a transparent and responsive state machinery. Here also, the citizenry and the state are tightly entwined through the ideas of legality, cooperation, criminality, transparency, and the right and responsibilities of the citizen with respect to the city. Bhagidari workshops are usually held at a Convention Centre owned by the Sai Baba religious sect in Central Delhi. The workshops begin with a ‘Bhagidari song’: Hawa sudhar gayi, sadak sudhar gayi…. har mushkil ki hal nikali, Bhagidari se bhagidari nikali…. Meri Dilli main hi sanwaroo … Officer aye, etc. etc. (the air is cleaner, the streets are better … a solution has been found for every problem, Bhagidari has led to sharing … I will nurture my Delhi … Officers attended etc. etc.). This is the Bhagidari ‘anthem’ and is based upon a ‘village/ folk’ tune. An ACORD employee told me that it had been devised to encourage a view of the city as a community of village-like neighbourly bonds; the song, she said, could well be imagined as being sung by a wandering bard. On the first day of a workshop, senior officers of various government departments are introduced and the audience is encouraged to write down questions it wants answered, and hand these to the officials. Subsequently, there are discussions on a number of issues. So at one of the workshops I attended, the topics included: (i) police and RWA cooperation; (ii) servant verification; (iii) RWAs informing police about those houses where both husband and wife went out to work (that is, where houses are vacant during the day), and ‘inspection’ of all unoccupied houses; (iv) drawing up a list of maids, hawkers, plumbers, etc. in Page 14 of 23

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Post-Nationalism order to only allow ‘authorized’ people into the locality; (v) the ‘security’ threat from slum dwellers; and (vi) ‘surprise checks’ (by the police) on the private security personnel employed by the RWAs. It was also suggested that the MCD and the police should be informed about ‘those families that do not pay attention to the RWA’, and that these should be ‘challaned’ (penalized). The RWAs, it was further agreed, must have a list of all families within their purview. Over the three days of the workshop, participants drew flowcharts, shared tables with their local Station House Officer (SHO, a police (p.102) official) and various other state functionaries, and listened to responses to their queries. The Chief Minister arrived an hour before the closing time on the final day and addressed the gathering as well as mingled with it. The workshop ended in a party like atmosphere: all the participants were given Bhagidari baseball caps and flags of different colours. The official Bhagidari song was played and the entire gathering joined in. Some people came to the dais in front and performed a kind of Bhangra dance. They cajoled the Chief Minister to join them and this group led the rest of the hall in the singing and the dancing. The final song, in Hindi, extolled the virtues of Bhagidari, and was played to the tune of ‘Old Macdonald Had a Farm’, along with enthusiastic clapping from the gathering. The Bhagidari scheme is a guide to the contemporary consciousness of the official city through—foregrounding as it does—the relationship between the market and the state; ‘authorized’ and ‘unauthorized’ spaces; the domestic sphere, the state, and the market; and visions of the metropolis that link urban planning to aspirations to be ‘global’. The 2010 CWG formed an important backdrop to the city beautification drives that RWAs were also exhorted to join.

Model Bhagidars (I): The Sangam RWA The Sangam Phase II Housing Society (‘Sangam-II’) is located in South Delhi, at the juncture of a busy intersection of key arterial roads. The intersection sports a newly built flyover, one of several constructed in the past decade. The recently constructed Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system also runs by the locality. There are three residential blocks (‘pockets’) in Sangam-II—J, K, and L—and the complex was completed by the DDA in 1979–80. The combined population of the three pockets is around 10,000, half are owner-occupiers and half tenants.5 The Sangam-II RWA has been part of the Bhagidari scheme since 2003 and won the ‘Best Bhagidar Award’ for 2005–6. Mr K.P. Verma, the Secretary of the RWA, is originally from the Uttar Pradesh town of Gonda, but his family has been in Delhi since 1942, when his father moved to take up a government job as a clerk. Verma is in his mid-forties and has worked in a variety of private concerns, mainly in the electronics industry. He currently works for the entertainment company Sony-BMG. At our meeting in 2011, the President and the Treasurer of the RWA—both (p.103) retired men in their late sixties—were also present. However, it was Verma who did most of the talking, the other two deferring to his abilities and knowledge. The Vermas had moved into Sangam-II soon after it Page 15 of 23

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Post-Nationalism was built and, in addition to the flat in which they live, own another in the locality which is occupied by a relative. The flats in Sangam-II are smaller than in Phase-I, having been designed for those on low incomes. The Vermas, and the others who moved into this locality, were mainly employed in lower level government jobs (such as clerks) and small-business occupations. The flats were some of the earliest to be constructed by the DDA and, given their size, were most likely ‘Janata’ apartments meant for ‘LIG’ (Lower Income Groups). At present, these flats command very high price as the locality is well situated in terms of public transport as well as access to key commercial and office sectors. Verma is unequivocal in his praise for Bhagidari and considers it ‘the only platform for citizen’s voice’. Indeed, he is effusive and tells me how, ‘in every instance’, Bhagidari has helped him deal with bureaucrats and politicians and how they have responded to the requests of the RWA with alacrity. ‘Before Bhagidari’, he says, ‘it was impossible. We did not manage to get anything done’. Further, ‘Bhagidari was begun in 2000 and we joined in 2003, and in these years we have achieved an extraordinary amount and also won the Bhagidari award in 2006’. Just the day before, Verma tells me, he and his fellow office-bearers went to meet the head of the DDA and another senior official of the same organization. They were ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the reception they received from the Chairman and his colleague ‘who offered to help … in whatever way possible’. In particular, the RWA wanted help in setting up a co-operative store which would sell everyday goods to residents and use the profits towards enhancing local infrastructure and other activities that would benefit residents of the locality. Verma expects to make a profit of Rs 100,000 per year. The scheme they have in mind is based on an earlier one where the RWA would buy 300 litres of milk every day from a large dairy company, and sell them to residents at a small mark-up. The RWA employed a ‘supervisor’ and there is now an office that looks after its commercial activities. The RWA has many such plans, Verma tells me, to generate income through entrepreneurial activities. In the case of Sangam-II RWA, Bhagidari has enabled a closer relationship with different organs of the state. This is interpreted as a boon (p.104) since, in the ‘contact’-driven world of Delhi life, to not have any is to be consigned to the never-ending queue of bureaucratic promises and deferrals. Since Bhagidari is the Chief Minister’s ‘pet’ project, it is generally acknowledged that even though many bureaucrats (and local politicians) take it as an ‘affront’ that RWAs that represent residents of modest economic backgrounds are able to demand services of them, they frequently comply, or at least offer a hearing. However, simultaneously as Bhagidari has enabled a foothold in the corridors of power, it has also engendered a bond between entrepreneurship and urban citizenship, Page 16 of 23

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Post-Nationalism with a great deal of emphasis on developing relationships with private enterprise. Corporate enterprise is, indeed, an increasingly significant factor in several Bhagidari schemes. In many localities (including the gated communities of Gurgaon, Chapter five), the rain-water harvesting schemes have been sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company, which was recognized for its contribution by a ‘Special Commendation’ in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. Other significant corporate entities involved in different aspects of Bhagidari include the DLF Corporation and the Taj Group of Hotels. The Vermas and his fellow office bearers represent a very specific segment of the middle class: ideologically committed to the privatization and freemarket models of neoliberal economic policies and yet reticent about its cultural consequences. So, the RWAs are in general male dominated—with ‘special cells’ for ‘women’s’ activities—and women very rarely take a leading role. The exceptions are some older English-speaking women who are able to interact with men on reasonably equal terms. A senior official of ACORD—the NGO overseeing Bhagidari—noted that women representatives of the RWA found it difficult to travel with their male counterparts without attracting adverse comments. Here, to be middle-class is to be equidistant from the cultural excesses of the ‘westernized’ middle classes and the pre-entrepreneurial ‘backwardness’ of feudal remnants. This is another kind of claim of middleclassness that is invoked.

Model Bhagidars (II): Ahshan Colony RWA The East Delhi locality of Ahshan Colony—across the river Yamuna—is almost at the border with Uttar Pradesh, and is surrounded by a number of jhuggi jhopri settlements as well as resettlement colonies. (p.105) The adjoining Ahshan Garden locality consists of larger houses located on substantial land holdings. A recently completed metro station links the locality to Inter-State Bus Terminus (ISBT) that borders Old Delhi, across the river. The Ahshan Colony RWA is considered one of the most successful bhagidars (partners) and has been recognized by several Bhagidari awards. The Chief Minister has visited it several times to inaugurate different schemes relating to infrastructural development undertaken by the RWA as well as social activities. Most recently, it has become a kind of showcase of ‘citizen-government’ partnership, and in February 2007, a group of ‘probationary officers’ of the Indian Administrative Service visited the locality: […] to take an on spot [sic] inspection of the various projects. RWA representatives … [we] gave a detailed presentation on Bhagidari projects of the colony. The young officers were impressed with the pace of development under this yojna (plan) when apprised that the colony was without any basic amenities for the last fifty years. Trainee officers took a keen interest in seeing the various ongoing Bhagidari projects in the colony. In the presentation it was emphasized that Bhagidari Movement Page 17 of 23

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Post-Nationalism has acted as bridge between the common man and the administration. It has also changed the mindset of Government officials and well as public representatives. (Ahshan Colony Residents Welfare Association information sheet, no date: 5). There are approximately 2,500 houses in the Colony, and it has a total population of around 20,000 people. The RWA membership is 600 households. The RWA was the recipient of the First Prize in 2003–4 and Special Jury Award in 2005–6 of the Bhagidari scheme. Javed Sherwani, the President of the RWA, moved there in 1992 and works in a clerical position in the Ministry of Defence. He earlier lived in a government flat in Lodhi Colony in Central Delhi. He is unusual in that he is the only Muslim I came across as head of a RWA in a Hindu dominated enclave. Sherwani tells me that when he moved to Ahshan Colony in the early 1990s, there was no sewerage system, no regular water supply, and almost no pucca roads in the locality. He showed me photographs where after heavy rain, the entire area resembled a large pond. The RWA’s first task was to have the sewerage work done. Because several of the residents worked in the government—though mostly at clerical, lower levels—they managed to get the work done through their (p.106) personal contacts. It is, as one resident mentioned, far more important to know the Junior Engineer rather than the Chief Engineer if you want a sewerage system installed. The relationship with Bhagidari has led to an intimate understanding of the minutiae of the state’s mechanisms, those along which flow the processes of ‘works’ and ‘contracts’: Sherwani: The greatest problem (in getting any work done) is the MCD, since it doesn’t come under the Delhi government and is one of the most corrupt bodies in India. We manage to get our work done, but typically this is how the procedure works: we submit a project to the MCD for, say, laying a drain. This then goes to the AE (Assistant Engineer), then to the JE (Junior Engineer), then to the SE (Superintending Engineer), then to the CE (Chief Engineer), then to EiC (Engineer in Chief), then to the Finance Committee, and then it is sent for tender. However, in the meanwhile, the tender cost may have gone up, so the process has to start all over again! If we can’t get work done through official Bhagidari channels, then we go through the MLA or MP. However, the problem is that there might be splinter RWAs that are floated by party sympathizers (belonging to different political parties in the area) and they will favour politicians of one or the other party. So, we have to work our way through that.

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Post-Nationalism The deep enmeshment in the entrails of the state—through the citizen having to carry out his part of the contract with it—has also provided insights into the arbitrary nature of its functioning: procedures bend and warp as much as the cost of a tender. It is here that ideas of a common middle-classness are given shape: Sherwani: Since we are surrounded by slums and resettlement colonies, we decided to construct gates at different points in the boundary wall. We erected twenty-eight gates. However, there is no legal sanction for it, as even the High Court has ruled against it.

And according to a recent newsletter: Due to existence of resettlement colonies and jhuggi jhopri clusters in the surroundings of the colony, frequent incidents of theft, chain snatching, thefts of cars etc. were taking place. Inspired by the ‘Bhagidari Yojna’ [‘Bhagidari Plan’] of Delhi Govt., RWA took initiative [sic] for installation of iron gates on the periphery of colony and collected Rs 3 lakhs [three hundred thousand] from the residents for this task. Accordingly, twenty-eight iron gates were installed on the periphery of the colony in a very (p.107) short time. The installation of gates has significantly reduced the cases of theft, car theft, chain snatching in the colony. This was achieved with the cooperation of the police authorities. Now the RWA has appointed four security guards for the security of the colony. (Ahshan Colony Residents Welfare Association information sheet, no date: 4). Sherwani also informs me that the erection of the gates is seen as part of Bhagidari, and though even though it is ‘illegal’, no ‘official’ objections have been received. In this way, we might say, the civil, the political, the legal, and the illegal come together. I have deliberately chosen to focus upon two localities that have, historically, had strong links to the state, both in its role as an employer and as a focus of uncritical affection. This is in order to illustrate the convergence of ideas regarding urban life—under the aegis of the liberalizing state—between these localities and their more up-market counterparts in other parts of the city. With respect to Sangam-II and Ahshan Colony, there are two specific ideas that relate to the consolidation of middle-class identities in the city. The first concerns the spatial engendering of the consumer-citizen and an entrepreneurial sensibility where urban social life is increasingly expressed in the language of the market, where boundaries between civic action, corporate strategy, and state Page 19 of 23

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Post-Nationalism responsibility are increasingly blurred. The second relates to the idea of ‘securing’ spaces which, as we will also see in Chapters five and six on gated residential enclaves, is a significant aspect of emerging ideas of middleclassness. Of course, the two are not distinct realms and each feeds off the other. Finally in this context, simultaneously as Bhagidari is the site of a ‘group consciousness’ of the city, it also engenders a regional—if it could be called that —identity. That is, it generates a spatially delimited version of middle-classness, even as it gives rise to a wider urban topo-graphy of what it is to be thus. Hence, beyond Bhagidaris’ city-wide platform (the periodic workshops), there are regular interactions between RWAs located within similar socio-economic bands, and RWAs from a particular district (North–East Delhi, in the case of Ahshan Colony RWA) meet each other regularly to share and exchange information. It is here that points of difference between different regions of the city—such as those for and against an above-ground metro line—take shape. Beneath the level of the state, there is an accumulating body of (p.108) dialogue that acts to both support and interrogate it. This also provides the context for a mutually reinforcing dialogue about the nature of the state, the relationship between citizens and the state, and the threats and succour to ‘civil’ life from a variety of urban worlds.

Carnivals of Caring: Showgrounds of the State In addition to Bhagidari workshops and other events related to it, the Delhi government also organizes a ‘Bhagidari Utsav’ (Bhagidari Festival) at Pragati Maidan, the exhibition ground established in 1982 on the eve of the Asian Games. Pragati Maidan also provided employment to many of Nangla Matchi’s erstwhile residents. The Utsav is normally held in either January or February. Pragati Maidan is the venue for a large number of ‘trade’ fairs, including the annual IITF which attracts mammoth crowds. While in the early years, the IITF showcased Indian industrial and commercial achievement, it has increasingly become organized as a national tableau with separate pavilions for different states that contain displays highlighting their industrial as well as ‘cultural’ aspects. Pragati Maidan shares some history with the venues built for the ‘great’ European industrial exhibitions and fairs of the nineteenth century (Bennett 1988; Breckenridge 1989; Hoffenberg 2001), though at present, it is a site for intense engagements with transnational consumerist modernity. So, perhaps more than the state pavilions, it is the stalls that display and sell a wide variety of consumer goods—mobile phones, MP3 players, TV sets, clothing, etc.—that attract the most enthusiastic crowds. In January 2008, Pragati Maidan was host to an automobile expo, where the star attraction was the ‘Nano’, the indigenously developed ‘world’s cheapest car’. And while this is an impressionistic observation based on my own visits to trade fairs from the 1980s to, most recently, in 2010, there has been a significant change in the background of the visitors to the exhibition. So, while it has always attracted visitors with Page 20 of 23

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Post-Nationalism modest economic backgrounds, in more recent times, this number has increased substantially. Perhaps as other forms of leisure activities become more expensive (the rise of multiplex cinemas, for example), the Maidan has become a key site of leisure and consumption for the urban poor and those a few ranks above them; those not poor, but certainly not the rich. I visited the 2010 IITF on a ‘free’ pass provided by a young man who had lived at Nangla Matchi; (p.109) his uncle worked at the grounds as a guard and had managed to get several of these which he distributed to friends and family. As in the past, visitors to a recent Bhagidari Utsav were those who had been sent invitations by their RWAs. Along with these, they were also provided meals and beverage coupons. In addition to the invitees, there were also school children and ‘helpers’ wearing red coloured ‘Team Delhi’ T-shirts and baseball caps. Outside the halls, there were dance performances by troupes from Rajasthan and Haryana, a Hindi film song performance, a street-play on theme of AIDS, and events involving school children making collage-art. A giant stage had been set up inside the main pavilion, and a series of abstract, electronically projected images danced on the screen that formed the backdrop. Cameras at the front of the hall transmitted the stage shows to large plasma screens that had been placed around the cavernous building. All around this and other halls were stalls of various departments of the Delhi government, including electricity boards, Registrar of Cooperatives, the Fire Brigade, Delhi Police, Ministry of Women’s Welfare, Ministry of Youth Affairs, and the Delhi Jal Board. Another hall contained the stalls of RWAs from different parts of the city, with small-scale models of their ‘colonies’ that showed the ‘positive’ effects of being part of the Bhagidari scheme. So, one tableau featured a model of an ‘encroached’ piece of land which was earlier used as a dumping ground and a commercial area, and which, after Bhagidari, had become a children’s park. The scene was depicted through a ‘Before’ and ‘After’ split. In the ‘After’ model, there was a miniature fountain, miniature swings, and miniature cars that sat neatly upon miniature roads. The two days of the Utsav were taken up with ‘cultural’ performances, outdoor shows, speeches, and award ceremonies chaired by the Chief Minister. Hence, members of the Punjabi Akademi cultural organization gave Bhangra performances, and a group of school-children took part in a Santhal (tribal) dance. In the evenings there were Qawwali performances. On the final day, Delhi’s Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit visited the RWA stalls and gave out a number of awards. Throughout the day, there was a festival-like atmosphere, and visitors appeared to enjoy the spectacle. Among the award-winners was the Sadar Bazar Traders Association for ‘Best Upcoming Citizens Group’.

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Post-Nationalism It is perhaps appropriate that the Bhagidari scheme borrows the cultural capital acquired by Pragati Maidan as a space of progressive (p.110) spectacles of the nation-state, earlier in its industrial phase, and now as facilitator of globalized consumerist modernity. Here, through the Utsav, the city is experienced as a lively place, an electronically advanced space, a welcoming space (the provision of free beverage and meal coupons), a place of collective effort (the RWA stalls showcasing their achievements), a place of transparent governance (various government departments advertising the ease of availability of information about their activities), and a space of hope and transformation. The Utsav provides a space—both symbolically and literally—where the city is experienced as undergoing transformation through integration to global cultural and commercial economy. Pragati Maidan is only a short distance from the nowdemolished Nangla Matchi slum cluster from where it drew a large number of its service staff. However, simultaneously as Bhagidari foregrounds the notion of the caring state through defining citizenship as an act of partnership between its various organs and the occupants of legally defined neighbourhoods, it also endorses and creates realms of illegality and exclusions. Further, the ideas of legality and illegality gather around the trope of the consuming family. The consuming —‘middle-class’—family is, in turn, seen to be the rightful claimant of strategically situated spaces of leisure such as Pragati Maidan, and the residential spaces of the ‘colonies’ represented by the RWAs. The middle-class family is endowed the right to separate itself from the processes of labour through seeking removal of labourers, represented as ‘threats’ to its life-ways. Finally, within Bhagidari, the consuming family is the moral fulcrum, one that will promote as well as keep check on a variety of activities such as cooperation with the state, and consumerism. In this sense, there is a particular relationship between citizens and the state that, while it is mediated by the market—where the MTA wins citizenship awards—also constitutes a dialogue on moral—familial and ‘proper’—consumption. In sum, there is now a conjoined urban topography of middle-classness—in both its city-wide and sub-urban versions—that stretches across the city, and is produced through RWA activism, strategies of refashioning urban spaces, and the emerging cultures of market-citizenship. This landscape relates to the procedures of the state, manoeuvres of the market, middle-class anxieties of urban life, and the positioning of the ‘family’ within these contexts. Ironically, this spatialized idea of middle-classness has solidified in spite of the ‘real’ differences between the different class fractions that identify as such. (p.111) The following chapter continues the discussion on spaces and social identity by moving from broadly defined (middle class) localities to specific places of residence. In particular, it provides a discussion on the ways in which gated communities—a key site of the making of middle-classness—are beginning Page 22 of 23

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Post-Nationalism to alter discourses of space and culture against the background of new consumer cultures and new narratives of personal transformation. Notes:

(1) . Chakrabarti (2009) points out that the RWAJF and People’s Action differed in their attitude on dealing with the government, with the latter advocating nonpayment and the former not supporting this stance. On a general level, this is true; however, the situation—as explained to me by a key figure in CAPTH—may have been more complex. The RWAJF and People’s Action began as cooperative movements, only later going their own way. There was a later split within People’s Action itself, with some of its members expressing disenchantment with the ‘political ambitions’ of the People’s Action head (who had been the media advisor to a senior BJP politician). Hence, the United Residents Joint Action (URJA) group which was made up of RWAs affiliated to People’s Action, and which was part of the anti-power hike campaign, later fragmented into a further sub-group, known as URJA-Bharat. (2) . So, the Spencer’s Department store in DLF City outlines its history through a series of billboard-size sepia photographs placed at the entrance. The photographs—of ‘fashionable’ European ladies shopping for fine goods at Spencer’s stores, etc.—are from the colonial period and represent an efflorescence of colonial chic in the Indian public sphere. Other contiguous sites include the five-star Imperial Hotel in Central Delhi, liberally decorated with ‘Delhi Durbar’ series of photographs, and themed restaurants such as ‘Days of the Raj’ and ‘Sola Topee’, also in Delhi. (3) . PIL filed at the Delhi High Court by E-Block RWA, Greater Kailash I, obtained through the RWA, in possession of the author. (4) . Though the Sheila Dikshit government was defeated at the polls in December 2013 and Bhagidari’s future is unclear, its significance as a site of citizen-state interactions remains undiminished. (5) . Information provided by Mr. K.P. Verma, Secretary, Sangam-II RWA. Sangam Phase I is nearby.

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords Focusing upon the rise of gated residential communities in New Gurgaon and other localities, this chapter suggests that there are two significant aspects to this development. The first relates to promises of spatial cosmopolitanism and new ways of relating to the transnational sphere. The second aspect concerns the role of domestic spaces in effecting an inner transformation in the lives of the middle-classes who occupy gated residential enclaves. The emergence of a discourse of a homogenous swathe of domestic territory across the national space is a significant and new aspect of the politics of space in India. Finally, simultaneously as the emergence of this territory is made possible by the state in its role as facilitator of large-scale private residential real estate developments, the latter are understood and represented through sentiments that represent them as both distinct from, as well as alternatives to, the activities of the state. Keywords:   gated communities, new urban spaces, private real estate, DLF City, Gurgaon, consumerism and space

Experience Freedom in Your Own Kingdom. Advertisement for gated community residents in the NCR by the Amrapali Group.

Gateways to the City In an extraordinary range of large and small cities across India, there is an accumulating body of discourses and aspirations that gathers around gated residential enclaves. It speaks of a sociality that is produced and reproduced Page 1 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens under tightly controlled conditions. The Lucknow based Sahara corporation has plans for the ‘world’s largest chain of well-planned, self-sufficient, high quality townships across 217 cities in the country’ (Ahmedabad: 104 acres; Coimbatore, Kerala: 103 acres; Lucknow: 200 acres); it has already constructed the Amby Valley township on 10,000 acres of land near the city of Pune in Maharashtra, which is described as ‘independent India’s first planned, self-contained, aspirational city, remarkable for its unsurpassed grandeur and plush signature features’.1 In the Rajasthan township of Bhiwadi, some sixty kilometres from Delhi, no less than eleven real estate companies have launched ‘gated’ residential projects in different price ranges, hoping to cash in the proposed development of a number of ‘Export Processing Zones’ and ‘Special Economic Zones’ by large corporations such as the Reliance and Omaxe corporations (www.indiarealitynews.com; accessed on 15 August 2009). The Omaxe group has residential projects (p.113) in twenty-two cities across nine states in North and Central India. These include the Omaxe Riviera (Rudrapur, Uttarakhand), and Omaxe Park Woods in Baddi (Himachal Pradesh), a township that is ‘home to companies like Nicholas Piramal, Bajaj Consumer Care, Ranbaxy, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Torrent Pharmaceuticals, TVS Motors, Colgate Palmolive, Dabur India, Cipla, Cadbury’s, Wipro, Wockhardt, Procter and Gamble, Marc Enterprises etc.’ (www.omaxe.com; accessed on 11 July 2009). The Omaxe Heights in Lucknow offers an ‘in-house club with swimming pool and wave pool, tennis court, basketball court, banquet/community hall, squash court, steam room, jacuzzi, gymnasium, and television lounge.’ In this chapter, I suggest that there are two significant aspects of the developments outlined above. The first relates to promises of spatial cosmopolitanism and new ways of relating to the transnational sphere. The second aspect concerns the role of domestic spaces in not affecting an inner transformation in the lives of the middle classes who occupy gated residential enclaves. The emergence of a discourse of a homogenous swathe of domestic territory across the national space is, I will suggest further, a significant and new aspect of the politics of space in India. Finally, as the emergence of this territory is simultaneously made possible by the state in its role as facilitator of large-scale private residential real estate developments, the latter are understood and represented as both distinct from, as well as alternatives to, the activities of the state. The phenomenon of installing gates that produce physically demarcated residential localities is not a new one in Delhi. Residents’ Welfare Associations (RWAs) have been particularly active in installing and maintaining gates at key entry points at several of Delhi’s residential ‘colonies’. The ‘gating’ of Delhi’s residential localities began in the mid-to-late 1980s (earlier than the late 1990s date that Waldrop 2004 suggests), and was carried out under the aegis of RWAs in different parts of the city. The gates were the earliest visible signs of the RWA’s increasing public presence as a formal entity in urban affairs. The raison Page 2 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens d’etre of RWA activity was the activist-citizen, marking out privileged, delimited and ‘secure’ spaces, where urban ‘civil’ life and consanguinity could unfold. Ostensibly based on the notion of collective action, RWAs, in effect, became the key vehicle for articulating an exclusionary urban politics of space. The result was the de facto privatization of public thoroughfares in residential localities by the installation of large iron gates at points where internal streets of the locality joined external (p.114) main roads. Installed under the aegis of the local RWA, the gates carried (and carry) signboards indicating hours of opening (normally dawn to sunset), with some permanently locked, a small trapdoor allowing individual access. This served, in effect, to reduce the number of entry and exit points to the locality through crossing notions of modern urban governance with those of a cordon sanitaire. Across Delhi, gates to residential localities index a number of contexts: the lack of confidence in the police to provide security, the strong sense of a ‘middle class’ under threat from urban under-classes, and the overwhelming perception that such threats can only be countered through localized and locality specific means that convert public thoroughfares into private and highly regulated spaces. In certain localities, such as Model Basti in North Delhi, small lanes that run off the main road have been barricaded to make a number of tiny enclaves (Figure 5.1). In others, such as Defence Colony in South Delhi, the gates guard wider and more impressive stretches of carriageways, parks, and shopping enclaves. In recent times, the trend of gating localities that had earlier been planned as relatively open neighbourhoods has given way to stricter spatial expressions of community, namely, the custom-built gated residential community. Hence, across the country, both in large and small Indian cities, a host of real estate developers —globally significant ones such as the DLF Corporation, that is the focus of this and the next chapter, as well as city- and region-specific companies—have begun to transform vast tracts of land into gated residential enclaves. These are frequently promoted through promises of personal transformations that will result from living within them. In any case, the new gated enclaves of Gurgaon have extended, rather than invented, the logic of separation that lay at the heart of the wave of gate-building that took place in different parts of Delhi in the 1980s. In her discussion of Sao Paolo, Caldeira (2000) refers to a wide range of new urban developments as ‘fortified enclaves’. These, she says, ‘include office complexes, shopping centres, and, increasingly, other spaces that have been adapted to conform to this model: schools, hospitals, entertainment centers, and theme parks’ (Caldeira 2000: 258). Further, They are private property for collective use, and they emphasize the value of what is private and restricted at the same time that they devalue what is

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens public and open in the city. They are physically demarcated and isolated by walls, fences, empty spaces, and design devices. They are turned (p.115) inwards, away from the street, whose public life they explicitly reject. They are controlled by armed guards and security systems, which enforce rules of exclusion and inclusion.

(Caldeira 2000: 258). In Chapter four, I have suggested that the politics of space in Delhi—particularly discourses of private and public spaces—is significantly linked to the growth and consolidation of the activities of RWAs in urban life. Further, I have argued that—through schemes such as Bhagidari—

Figure 5.1 Gates to Model Basti, North Delhi Source: Author

the state has played an important role in recasting the historical—‘developmentalist’—relationship between (middle class) citizens and itself into a consumer-friendly one. In this chapter, I will (p.116) outline the spatial dimensions of residential, gated enclaves, whereas Chapters six and seven will provide narratives and ethnographies of their occupation. The focus on particular gated communities is aimed at exploring what it means to occupy spaces of promise. Chapters eight and nine will focus on spaces of worship and consumption respectively that also display the characteristic of being enclosed spaces. The broader analytical context within which I focus upon these— strikingly corralled—spaces is, as I have noted at different times in the book, the rise of new consumer cultures, and changing relationships between the state, and different sections of its citizenry. Significantly, and in reference to Caldeira’s understanding of ‘fortified enclaves’, I seek to explore the ways in which enclosed spaces establish their meanings through the simultaneous acts of fencing and establishing connections with the worlds beyond the fences. So, as we see below and in the next chapter, there are similarities between gated communities in India and in other parts of the world (particularly China, Turkey, and South Africa), but also key differences. As a passing observation, unlike Sao Paulo, there are, thus far, no ‘fortified enclaves’ in India that are ‘controlled by armed guards’ (Caldeira 2000: 258), though ‘security’ is a key concern and part of a narrative (as I show in Chapter six) that envelopes the entire city through a Page 4 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens network of community organizations established to address this concern. Further, the gates that seek to regulate entry also seek to let in specific aspects of the external world. The following section explores this relationship between exclusion and desire in the making of contemporary Indian identities.

Drawing Rooms, Bedrooms, and Kitchens in the National Imagination ‘Living Space Crafted with Utmost Precision’ Imagine a drawing-dining room that is as vibrant as your evenings. Imagine bedrooms that provide blissful sleep. Imagine a kitchen that provides a playground for culinary delight. Imagine a life where aesthetics meets convenience. Imagine living in Parsvnath Castle. (Publicity Information, Parsvnath Developers Ltd; www.parsvanath.com; accessed on 30 July 2009). There is a variety of promises contained in the publicity material (above) for the proposed Parsvnath Castle, a gated residential (p.117) enclave in the Punjab industrial township of Rajpura (population approximately 85,000). As a great deal of scholarship has pointed out, narratives of space are produced out of the putative accomplishments of their pasts, possibilities of their present, and promises of their future (Feldman 1991; Foucault 1980; Kusno 2000; Lefebvre 1994; Massey 1994; Mehta and Chatterji 2001; Pow 2007; Rofel 1999; Soja 1993). Spaces are the sites for enfolding current and future occupants into conversations about the possibilities of individual and collective transformations. The most significant shift in spatial narratives in India over the past twenty years or so has been from imagining the nation as an affective site of belonging (Jain 2007; Ramaswamy 2003; Roy 2007), to envisioning drawing rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens as locales of identity. That is to say, if national spaces— the state-run educational system and factory towns, for example—were once the envisioned space of personal and familial transformation, that role now appears to have passed to the more intimate localities of residence (Figure 5.2). As I discuss below, the post-colonial era in India has witnessed earlier periods when residential spaces were part of the state’s imagination of social life and change. Nowadays, however, the state loiters outside the home, and relationships with it are of a different nature. In the following discussion, I explore the political and social spaces within which contemporary gated communities of the NCR are embedded, and the history of perhaps the most significant new urban development where many of them are located (Gurgaon in Haryana). The narratives of community life that circulate around these new developments will be explored in Chapters six and seven. Chapter six, in particular, supplements the discussion through an ethnography of one specific gated community in Gurgaon in order to explore quotidian spatial strategies that make for life within the walls, and the ideas of citizenship and statehood they enunciate. But before

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens that, an account of the post-colonial moment when spaces created by the nationstate were imagined crucibles of modern Indian identity is in order. The mammoth transformations of space currently underway in the contexts described above can be put alongside another similar experiment during the mid-twentieth century, namely, the construction of ‘steel towns’ by the postcolonial state. A comparison between contemporary—private—spatial transformations and mid-twentieth century (p.118) state-sponsored ones point to significant shifts in the imagination that conjures the ‘ideal’ citizen and his (sic) relationship to the state. From the late 1950s, the Indian state undertook construction of a number of industrial townships in different—usually economically underdeveloped—areas of the country that were intended to be ‘exemplary national spaces of the new India’ (Roy 2007: 134). Located within the larger framework of centralized economic development (whose most public manifestation was the Five Year Plans for economic Figure 5.2 Window to the World: Gated development), the townships were Community Advertisement the state’s attempts at postSource: Author colonial modernity where the modern citizen would work and live in an environment that ‘proclaimed the birth of the sovereign nation’ (Roy 2007: 138). Hence, ‘apart from innovations in urban design’ (Roy 2007: 143), (p.119) the thinking behind steel towns also addressed itself to the possibilities of engineering new ‘forms of subjectivities, practices, and social relations’ (Roy 2007: 143) that would distinguish these settlements from the ‘backwardness’ of their immediate localities, as well as the stasis afflicting national life: they were to be the spatialized models of a new national culture. The townships of Rourkela (Orissa state), Bhilai (Madhya Pradesh), Durgapur (West Bengal), and Bokaro (Jharkhand) thus came into being. Of course, as Roy points out, in subsequent years, the steel towns did not live up to the promise of sovereign modernity that was imposed upon them, but that is another story. Of greater relevance here are the unfolding narratives of citizenship, the state, and capital that links them to the contemporary spatial transformations of a similar—or greater—magnitude. However, while both steel towns and contemporary gated communities might be located within the world that promised a ‘new India’, there are significant differences in the nature of the new in each instance. These differences also tell us something

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens about the shifting relationship between national and global cultural and political economies, and the changing senses of being Indian.

Most significantly, the nationalist project of producing modern citizens related to external spaces—such as town planning, streetscape, and design of shopping spaces—through which residents were expected to pass. Surrounded by well delineated areas for industrial activity, ‘shops, schools, parks, and entertainment centres’ (Roy 2007: 142), the citizen was to absorb the spatial geometry, transforming it into personal discipline across a number of areas of social life such as democratic engagement, secular belief, and industrial work practice. The belief that spaces mould human characteristics has a relatively well established history in the annals of Indian modernity (see Srivastava 1998 on the spatial discourse at a ‘nationalist’ boarding school for boys). Discourses of transformation surrounding contemporary gated community, however, shift the focus to internal spaces. So, gated communities are presented as effecting transformations that significantly relate to domestic (kitchens, dining areas, bedrooms, etc.) aspects of urban living. Intimate spaces are more directly addressed, locating, as it were, the domestic sphere as the indispensable grounds for the making of a global Indian modernity. It is, as if, Indian private life must be aligned with global standards through public display of the spaces where this might happen. In this (p.120) way, the public exhibition of intimate spaces indexes an era where older nationalist dreams of modernity no longer suffice to define Indianness, for gated enclaves posit a model of post-national citizenship that constitute a particular gloss on the relationship between the state and its citizens in the backdrop of transnational consumerist modernity; the bedroom is a window to the world. The movement from post-colonial to postnational projects of citizenship also posits the journey from the ‘citizenworker’ (Roy 2007) to the consumer-citizen, just as it does from the spaces of national identity to those of suburban and domestic ones. Further, unlike steel-towns, it is no longer Indian and foreign nation-states that contribute to spatial transformations that are the putative sites of revolutions in personality and culture;2 rather, it is the relationship between the state, citizens, and various forms of capital—national and global—that is seen to be fundamental to the task of remaking national life. The emergence of the domestic sphere as the site of a new national (or rather, in terms of this discussion, post-national) identity relates, as implied above, to newer models of family life. What is the family ‘type’ that is being imagined through the focus upon domestic spaces as the new crucibles of national identity? Patricia Uberoi’s (2008) discussion of Indian ‘bridal magazines’ provides a useful entry into this topic. The magazines Uberoi takes up for discussion were launched mostly in the mid-1990s and address an imagined high-income consumer, not unlike occupants of an upmarket gated community. The following quote from an editorial in the inaugural (1997) issue of the Bride and Home magazine captures the social terrain that bridal magazines encounter, Page 7 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens and also allows us, via Uberoi’s discussion, to think about the discourses of domesticity in a new context of consumer culture. Arranging a wedding in India [the editorial says] has traditionally been a family affair, and so it should remain; but it is to offer choice that Bride and Home steps in and gives young couples a freedom to partake in the most important decision of their lives: marriage. (Uberoi 2008: 239). Bridal magazines such as Bride and Home, Uberoi says, address young women through the notion of ‘choice’ in a social context ‘where descent, succession, and inheritance are in the male line; post-marital residence is “patrivirilocal” … and authority resides with the senior males of the (p.121) family or lineage’ (Uberoi 2008: 245). And yet, within all this is the idea that the ‘modern’ form of marriage and domesticity—such modernity defined through an association with the good and services (including those of ‘marriage planners’)—is a key moment in the making of the modern Indian identity. How then to address the tension between older (and very real) structures of power and the apparent promise of consumerism-led liberation? Here, Uberoi suggests, the domestic sphere becomes a site of ‘adjustment’ to changes on a broader scale: it is a place ‘of the consolidation of this new, cosmopolitan culture of Indian kinship and marriage, that is self-consciously both “modern” and “ethnic”’ (Uberoi 2008: 245). Applying this insight to the present discussion, we might say that contemporary domestic nationalism conjures a family type based around a ‘couple’ whose modernity is based around its ‘freedom’ to make choices about the goods it might consume rather than, say, ‘spousal choice’ (Uberoi 2008: 241). That is, the emerging politics of domesticity—that which relates to the gated community as well as ideas of intimacy and marriage conjured by Bride and Home—consists of reformulations and reinstitution of older structures of power in a new era of consumerist modernity. The next chapter will supplement this line of discussion through an ethnographic account of the emerging relationship between ‘interior’ spaces and ‘inner’ identity’. Let us now return to Parsvnath Castles in Punjab to pick up the threads of conversation with which this section began. The Castles is being built by the real estate company Parsvnath Developers, which, in 2007, had residential projects in nineteen towns and cities of North India. It has also entered into an agreement with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC)—the semigovernment body in charge of constructing the light rail system in the national capital—to ‘construct eight malls along the railway tracks … in areas that are essentially occupied by the economically weaker sections of society’ (as detailed on the Parsvnath Developers website). Parsvnath’s ‘Metro Malls’—smaller than regular shopping malls—hope to capitalize on the changing ‘shopping habits of Indian people’, particularly the urban poor for, ‘when a customer can get his Page 8 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens branded requirements nearer home in the comfort of an air conditioned environment and that too at prices comparable with the local shop keeper, where is the need for him to go elsewhere’ (www.parsvnath.com). Unlike the Metro Malls that draw their inspiration from the (actual and imagined) changes (p.122) in the consumption needs of the urban poor (where ‘brands’ become ‘requirements’), Parsvnath Castle builds upon quite another history of space. For, with its ‘proximity to the erstwhile royal state of Patiala, Rajpura’s royal alliance is an acknowledged fact’, and ‘the Castle (has) … an inside [sic] loaded with royal luxuries’ (www.parsvanath.com; accessed on 10 October 2008). In other parts of India, the patina of regional royalty for newly enriched classes who can afford to invest in Parsvnath Castle competes with transnational assurances of spatial distinction. So, in Pune, Panchshil Builders’ Ssilver Woods condominium offers: […] extensive use of glass to accentuate the view, to the combination of style & comfort with innovative concepts like ‘Island Kitchens’, ‘Breakfast & Wine decks’ and ‘Central Conditioning’. (www.panchshil.com; accessed on 12 December 2008). One way of approaching the relationship between local and wider systems of prestige and distinctions is to consider the variety of civilizational debates that mark Indian consumerism. In one version, as I have discussed elsewhere (Srivastava 2007), this is presented as the strategy of maintaining Indianness simultaneously as ‘local’ patterns of consumption, dress, worship, commensality, leisure, and partnering begin to overlap with perceived transnational, or ‘western’ trends. A resolution to this ‘problem’ of consumer culture is to position oneself as being able to move seamlessly between (western) hyper-consumption and Indian ‘traditions’. So, for example, over the past twenty years or so, a number of Hindi language women’s magazines have begun to carry explicit discussions on sexuality, along with the usual articles on religious rituals and customs. This invokes a particular reader with the putative ability to move between transnationalism and localism. Through this, the magazines also seek to define an ‘authentic’ Indian middle class that—unlike the westernized middle classes—can ‘come back’ to its Indian roots (Srivastava 2007). Hyperconsumption here is the grounds for proving Indianness (further discussion on this in Chapters seven and eight). The civilizational narrative that infuses the publicity material for Pune’s Ssilver Wood condominium reformulates the debate in the vocabulary of an increasingly confident Indian cosmopolitanism. It speaks of an Indian modernity whose ‘modern-ness’ cannot solely derive from (p.123) transnational logic of distinction; it must simultaneously be endorsed by Indian incarnations of globalism:3

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens Every exquisite, east-west open apartment has something unique to offer. … And what adds a superlative grandeur to ‘Ssilver Woods’ is an exclusive touch by the multifaceted Shobha De, as all buildings flaunt a unique signature floor designed by her. The model, journalist, author, magazine editor, and chronicler of upper-middle class Indian life, Shobha De (b. 1948) has, over the past thirty years or so, established a significant public profile as both a critic and arbiter of consumerist modernity. In particular, De’s writings, which include novels as well as works of non-fiction, have gained her considerable reputation among the Englishspeaking urban public. De’s works have covered the apparent moral bankruptcy —and slavish devotion to ‘materialism’—among Mumbai’s super-rich (Socialite Evenings 1988), Bollywood’s sexual ‘underside’ (Starry Nights 1988), and contexts of lesbianism and sado-masochism (Strange Obsession 1994). ‘Although a large number of romances are published in the vernacular languages’, Rachel Dwyer points out, ‘De is the first in India to write “sex and shopping” novels’ (1998: 120). De’s non-fictional works include Surviving Men: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Staying on Top (1997), Spouse: The Truth About Marriage (2005; also translated and published in Hindi), and Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable (2008). De’s magazine and newspapers articles have ranged across fashion, films, and the preoccupations of the rich and the famous. She was also the founder of three English-language magazines that dealt with these topics. Extensively interviewed and reported on in the English-language media, her family life (two marriages and six children that form her ‘blended’ family) is invariably the stuff of her biographical detail, as if to emphasize both her status as an independent and ‘modern’ woman, but also the anomalous nature of her modernity as an Indian woman. In a 2004 interview, De characterized herself as a member of the ‘upper-middle class’ (Kennedy 2004). De’s symbolic presence at Ssilver Woods might usefully be linked to the ways in which her writings articulate a civilization debate that bears upon urban life, changing notions of the West, and the place of the Nehruvian ‘highart’ cultural sensitivity in post-colonial life. First, De’s writings articulate a vision of India that is strikingly different from the earlier nationalist ones where, in contrast to the ‘westernized’ city, the village was the symbolic site of ‘true’ Indianness. (p.124) For De, the city is the site of a new Indian—consumerism-led—renaissance. This echoes the discourses that gather around gated communities, ones that index transnational urbanism as both justification and style. As I have suggested in Chapter four, ‘city’ and ‘village’ have in themselves become sites of urban conversations about new class and cultural identities (Nandy 2001). Further, as Dupont points out with regard to the advertising material for the gated residential enclaves of Gurgaon, ‘Despite the enormous scale of certain housing projects, the promoters spare no efforts to expunge the urban dimension and play down city life by highlighting Page 10 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens the rustic/pastoral and ecological/environmental aspects’ (2005: 81). The appropriation of the putative innocence and purity of rural life as marketing tools seek to shift the focus of the desire for locality to the city: the city itself is now able to distill the pastoral essence, obviating the need for the actual village. This marks a significant change from those earlier (nationalist) debates where the village was either the site of all that was good (as in Gandhian discourses) or where the ‘colonial metropolis (was) the counterpoint to the village’ (Nandy 2001: 12). It is this cultural hybridization of the city—that is nevertheless about the unquestionable superiority of the city as a catalyst of modernity—that is the grounds of De’s uncompromising urbanism. It is also this which connects her writings with the intensification of newer urban developments such as the gated community of Ssilver Woods. Secondly, there is the cultural role of the ‘West’ in De’s writings. Within them, the West is just another place, ‘sketchy and unreal, more of a giant supermarket than a place of interest’ (Dwyer 1998: 124), rather than the site of an existential crisis as might have been expressed, say, in the writings of an earlier generation of privileged Indians, or in the Indian-English ‘art’ novel. Interestingly, one of the most striking aspects of the naming of many of the early gated enclaves around the country—but particularly in Gurgaon—was the almost exclusive recourse to upper-class English culture. It was as if the West that was most desirable was that which indexed the putative pre-capitalist and un-commercialized lifestyles of the English aristocracy; Gurgaon, for example, is replete with condominium names such as Ridgewood, Princeton, Windsor, Hamilton, and Oakwood. In more recent times, however, there has been a remarkable change in the patterns of naming of newer developments. So, gated enclaves currently under (p.125) construction—or recently completed—carry names such as The Icon, The Aralias, Park View, City Park, Uniworld Resorts, Nirvana Country, The Verandahs, World Spa, Emerald Estate, and Gardens Galleria. The toponymic reinscription of older geographies of Englishness with newer ones that signpost more global senses of prestige, luxury, and cosmopolitanism may also tell us something about the changing nature of the ‘West’ as an aspirational sign.4 A clue to this is contained in a conversation I had with thirty-four-year-old Anita Kapoor, who lives in a gated community in DLF City. Anita and her husband Deepak lived for many years in North America and England, moving back to India in 2005. Deepak worked for a prominent American bank, heading a team of fifty Indians whose task was to identify possibilities of ‘outsourcing’ the bank’s activities to India. The couple would live for a month or so in India, then move for six or so to New York, Brighton, Sydney, or wherever else the job demanded. Anita had a strong sense of her husband—and India—as being at the forefront of global change. I asked her if she had ever considered settling overseas. No, she says, never, because ‘my life

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens in Gurgaon is better than what might be “there”’. ‘You know,’ she went on to say, ‘most people who live in DLF’, … have international experience. I went to a newly established furniture shop—made to look like IKEA—and asked them what it would cost to fit out our flat. The owner said around two crores [million]! They don’t realize that most of us have international experience and have a good idea of what things cost! While the majority of residents of localities such as Ssilver Woods may not exactly share Anita’s lifestyle or her husband’s career path, what they do share is a gathering sense of self-confidence about the place of Indian culture and ‘achievements’ in the world. The new Indian middle classes—Anita seems to imply—are neither dazzled by ersatz Wests nor incapable of tabulating its ‘actual’ value. It is in this context that Shobha De’s representation of the West as a ‘giant supermarket’ (Dwyer 1998: 124), rather than a context of an existential crisis of Indian selves, becomes important. De directly addresses an audience that senses the world—its pleasures, comforts, and hierarchies of prestige— through the apparently democratizing milieu of the marketplace, where Indian identities need not (any longer) struggle to resolve a crisis introduced (p.126) by the encounter with the West; the West is just one way of making sense of the world, an idea that now exists alongside contemporary Indianness, rather than as a threat to the latter.5 Finally, De’s ‘signature’ at Ssilver Woods also marks the consolidation of another aspect of the civilizational debate, that which questions the cultural hegemony of an older ‘westernized’ middle-class. This ‘intellectual elite’ (Dwyer 1998: 129) was both the vanguard of post-colonial cultural nationalism and key ideologue of the state. It is, of course, too sweeping to say that newer fractions of the middleclass do not have ‘social’ and aesthetic interests that marked the older ‘intellectual elite’. However, it is noticeable that these concerns are expressed through different registers of political economy. The most significant aspect of this is the increasingly direct relationship with the corporate sector to achieve ‘social’ objectives, and the consolidation of forms of cultural consumption other than those inspired by ‘high art’ in the service of the nation. Hence, at Victoria Park enclave in DLF City, the rainwater-harvesting scheme is sponsored by The Coca Cola Company, whereas new forms of leisure practiced at religious theme parks (such as the one discussed in Chapter eight; see also Brosius 2010; Viswanath 2007) presage a change in the patterns of middle-class cultural consumption. Indeed, ‘corporate feel’ is a significant factor in the selling of new lifestyles: Parsvanath Developers present yet another breathtaking landmark ‘Parsvanath Pleasant’ in Dharuhera … experience the unforgettable whiff

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens of the countryside. Also witness its modern corporate feel with the state of the art plants set up here by big players like Sony and Hero Honda…. (www.parsvanth.com; accessed on 20 August 2009). Gated communities such as Ssilver Woods do not constitute the dominant residential form in India. They are, however, the currently most visible expressions of aspirations that result from the desire for material well-being (round-the-clock supply of electricity and water, say) changing relationships with the market and the state, and the desire for spaces that reflect transnational landscapes increasingly visited (and certainly viewed on television) by an expanding section of the population. A significant context of these transformations relates, as indicated earlier, to the increasing role of the private sector in different aspects of urban life, and perceptions of the effectiveness of private capital in getting things done’ are crucial to the realignments between citizens, the state, (p.127) and the market. Increasingly, domestic prosperity— measured through enhanced ability to take part in consumerism—is juxtaposed against the visible expansion of the activities of the private sector in those public spheres that were earlier the domains of the state. So, for example, in 2009, DLF won the tender to construct a light rail system that will cover certain areas of DLF City bypassed by the state-run Delhi Metro project that links Gurgaon to Delhi (completed in 2010). In the public mind, the genesis of DLF’s Rapid Metrorail is itself an example of the paradigm of—what might be called— efficient prosperity. The Executive Director of the DLF Metro, the body formed to undertake the project, noted that he did not envisage the kinds of delays that affected the state sponsored metro project that resulted from legal problems over acquiring land. ‘There won’t be any such problems in Gurgaon’, he noted, ‘[as] almost all the land where we will construct is owned by DLF’ (Joseph 2009: 2). Perhaps even more significantly, DLF has recently raised its own ‘police’ force, called the Quick Response Team (QRT), which consists of men dressed in black who patrol the locality on motorcycles. While the QRT’s relationship with the official police force is unclear, its visible public presence—and the ‘Quick’ in its title—adds to the lustre of the private sector as an efficient overseer of both public projects as well as private property. A significant aspect of contemporary middle-class identity is inextricably linked to an accumulating discourse of private and public spaces, the privatization of public spaces, and the concurrent dialogue on the role of the state in securing ‘citizens’ within private spaces. What is specific to the immediate present is the suturing of the discourse of consumerism—with its emphasis on privatized actions as reward for individualized effort—with that of urban citizenship. Given the emotional charge of terms such as ‘public’ and ‘private’, it is not unexpected that scholarship on new urban developments become entangled with a somewhat romantic view of the past. These relate to ideas regarding the Page 13 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens putative inclusiveness of past residential and consumption practices that are ‘now’ being undone; and that where ‘once’ all kinds of people rubbed shoulders in streets and markets, there is now a distance. New spatial strategies, facilitated by the actions of a state pursuing ‘neo-liberal’ economic and social policies, are seen to have an increasingly divisive effect upon the possibilities of collective sociality. So, as one commentator suggests, ‘the developing (p.128) fragmentation of social life is partly brought about through new forms of urban property development’ (Voyce 2007: 2055). Notwithstanding the entirely justified focus on the different ways in which contemporary urban policies and developments—such as ‘slum clearance’, urban ‘beautification’, and gated communities—affect the poor (Baviskar 2006; Fernandes 2006; Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008), the past is a poor primer on spatial social inclusion for, as has earlier discussed, modern urban planning in Delhi was premised on the notion of different spaces for different types—or classes—of citizenry (Hosagrahar 2007; King 1976; Legg 2007). The focus on the putative sociality that has been disturbed by new urban developments does not, therefore, seem to be a particularly productive avenue of inquiry; rather, an exploration of concerns, anxieties, aspirations, desires, exclusions, and inclusions that characterize newer forms of urban life may offer more fruitful lines of thinking about the politics of the city. My key concern in the remainder of the book is not the apparent destruction of an old harmony, but in questions of what cultural worlds result—and are invoked—through the changing relationships between the state, capital, ideas of citizenship, and consumer cultures as they inscribe urban landscapes with conspicuous territories of commerce, leisure, and residence. In the Introduction, I noted that DLF (established in 1946) was one of the earliest and most significant of private ‘colonizers’ of land in Delhi. DLF’s corporate history, as I also noted in that chapter, illuminates the complex relationships between the colonial and the post-colonial state, and the making of urban spaces and identities in India. Hence, the relationship between DLF and various organs of the state, such as its monopoly landholder, the DIT, was instrumental in the founding and consolidation of a thriving real estate business that, at its peak, bought, sold, built, and ‘plotted’ residential and commercial property across a diverse range of Delhi localities. The formation of the postcolonial state’s land monopolist and speculator, the DDA in 1957, led to an abrupt end to DLF’s business in Delhi. Regrouping in the 1970s under a different generation of leadership, DLF has emerged as the most powerful agent of urban transformation in the NCR that surrounds Delhi. It is the largest of all Indian real estate companies. DLF corporation’s most famous project is the 3,000 acre DLF City located in the district of Gurgaon in Haryana, on the southern (p.129) border of Delhi. DLF City is the best known of all privately developed residential and commercial precincts in India. The discussion that follows concentrates on DLF City. I have chosen DLF City in order to provide an account of spatial transformations that Page 14 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens illuminate new patterns of living as well as changing relationships between the state, private corporations, and the ‘people’. Of course, in addition to DLF, there are also other significant real estate companies with their own projects in Gurgaon district. However, none can match the DLF in terms of the size, popularity, and prestige of its projects.6

Consanguineal Capitalism and ‘Millennium’ Geographies Kushal Pal Singh (b. 1931),7 the present head of DLF, was born in a village near the town of Bulandshahar in Western Uttar Pradesh. After graduating with a science degree from Meerut College, Meerut, in Western Uttar Pradesh, Singh went on to study Aeronautical Engineering in England, eventually serving for nine years as an officer in the Indian army. Before joining DLF—the company founded by his father-in-law Raghavendra Singh—in the early 1970s, he was associated with the American Universal Electric Company, a joint venture enterprise, and Willard India, a manufacturer of car and electric batteries. The establishment of the DDA, in 1957, severely curtailed DLF’s real estate activities; Raghavendra Singh established Willard India in the wake of this curtailment (see Introduction). With DLF unable to ply its lucrative trade in Delhi—by the late 1950s it had developed some twenty-two private ‘colonies’ in Delhi—the relatively young K.P. Singh turned his attention beyond the city’s borders into the state of Haryana. This appears to have been prompted by two factors: that his father-in-law had landholding in Gurgaon (estimates range between twenty-five to forty acres), and DLF’s Delhi-strategy of ‘tapping into old family connections’ and appeals to community ties to acquire land could be replicated in Haryana. From the late 1970s, and under K.P. Singh’s initiative, DLF launched upon an aggressive policy of land acquisition in Gurgaon district, approximately thirty kilometres south of central Delhi, then a largely agricultural area occupied by a mixture of Jat, Ahir, and Gujar castes. Singh’s own Jat background appears to have been instrumental in his (p.130) practice of consanguineal capitalism as he smoothed the way for his company’s subsequent rise to a real estate behemoth. He outlined his strategy as follows: I set about identifying myself with each family whose land I wanted to buy. A team of seventy to eighty people were deputed to find out everything about these people: the size of their families, how many children, who was good in studies, any family disputes … every little detail. I did everything it took to persuade these farmers to trust me. I spent weeks and months with their families—I wore kurtas, sat on charpais, drank fly-infested milk from dirty glasses, attended weddings, visited the sick …. (Radhakrishnan Swami 2005).

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens Confronted with a context of small land-holdings (typically four to five acres) and multiple ownership patterns, Singh relied heavily on local knowledge to achieve his aims. Hagiographic accounts relate how obtaining clear title involved securing agreements with dozens of owners, a task achieved through invocations of bucolic trust and patrimonial obligation. Alongside this grassroots corporatism, Singh persistently lobbied the state to change laws against residential development on agricultural land. This was achieved through measures such as the re-classification of agricultural into ‘non-agricultural’ land. The blending of corporatist ambition with state patronage, communal bonds, and peasant cultural economy paid rich dividends, and by the mid-1980s, DLF had acquired some 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon—much of it on credit, with promises to pay later—and was ready to transform the rural hinterland into, as its publicity later proclaimed, the ‘Millennium City’. I have pointed out earlier (Chapter three) that ‘the recent state obsession in India with real estate speculation’ (Goldman 2011: 557) is not really that recent and can be traced—in the case of Delhi at least—to the activities of the DDA almost from the moment of its inception in 1957. What is new is the nature of the state’s entrepreneurialism in making New Gurgaon which—as I also suggest in different parts of the book—relates to the closer association with local and global capital (Harvey 2005), and changing perceptions on the part of middle-class citizens regarding the beneficial aspects of corporate engagements with everyday life (as pointed out in the discussion of Chapter four on RWAs and the Bhagidari scheme). As of December 2006, DLF projects (including residential, commercial, and retail) were spread across twenty-nine cities across India, (p.131) with ‘over 220 million square feet of existing development and 574 million square feet of planned projects’.8 Plans for mammoth shopping malls that putatively signpost the national journey from ‘stagnant third-world country’ to ‘an emerging economic super-power’ (Adiga 2004)9 are also in the pipeline, including a four million sq. ft Mall of India in Gurgaon. Through an extraordinary slew of numbers denoting colossal spatial transformations, and the discourse of ‘transformation’ itself, DLF has created the image of a nationalist-corporate alternative to the slothful and unreliable spaces of the bureaucratic state; this ‘new’ India fires the engines of economic creativity through etching its sharply defined motional intent upon previously inert landscapes. DLF’s selfrepresentation could be described as one based on a nationalist imagination beyond the nation-state, or, a post-nationalist position. It is this that is reflected in its corporate slogan, ‘Building India’. Population estimates for Gurgaon vary by the source. According to a recent report, the areas falling under the recently (2008) constituted Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (that includes DLF City as well as several other privately developed residential enclaves) contained around 1.2 million persons. However, RWAs dispute this estimate, claiming the true figure to be closer to 2 million. The RWAs suggested that the ‘true’ figure had Page 16 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens been suppressed so that the Corporation did not have to provision for the actual number of residents.10 There are two approaches to DLF City from Delhi: the Mehrauli-Gurgaon (M.G.) Road and National Highway Number 8 that skirts the locality on its way to Jaipur. Till recently (2010), M.G. Road was the site of large scale construction activity related to the overhead tracks for the Metro Rail network that has been extended into Haryana from Delhi, in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The Highway has been converted into a privately operated toll-way. Towards the Delhi end on M.G. Road, there are semi-demolished but still-shiny remains of a row of buildings that not too long ago housed high fashion boutiques owned by leading Indian designers. The cavernous structures—apparently illegally built— that once announced passage to the fashionable geography of DLF City now teeter precariously with their innards of wires and pipes exposed to the sluggish traffic. On the National Highway side, on the other hand, vehicles of every shape and description hurtle along smooth surfaces, largely unmindful of traffic regulations, with flashes of speeding metal occasionally captured upon the (p. 132) glass surfaces of the recently opened Ambience shopping mall which has seven floors, each approximately a kilometre in length. ‘Kilometres of Shopping!’, the Ambience advertising proclaims on large banners. M.G. Road enters Gurgaon via DLF Phase III, then crossing Phase I, which sits in no particular geographical relation to Phase II, and moving on to Phases IV and V, the latter being the latest to be developed by the company. The different ‘phases’—or sections—of DLF City are themselves located in ‘sectors’ carved out of the erstwhile farmlands by the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA). Phases I, II, and III mainly consist of independent houses built on plots purchased from DLF, and semi-detached bungalows built and sold by it. In Phase III, the DLF-built ‘White Town Houses’ are grouped around narrow streets with mock-Victorian street lighting, whereas in other areas, the designs of the independent houses have been borrowed from the wildest reaches of imaginations made joyous at the thought of owning a house-of-one’s-own. Near Silver Oaks Apartments (the first apartment block built by DLF) in Phase I, there is a large house built in a neo-Gothic style which is quite near another with a faҫade of a traditional Indian mansion, the haveli. Nearby, just beyond DLF Phase IV, there is an art gallery—whose exhibitions come from the private collection of an industrialist—that is housed in a startling (and recently finished) building designed like a massive rusting monolith, its exterior clad in metal and interiors fashioned to give an ‘industrial’ feel. Almost opposite this building is an under-construction hotel in red and pink sandstone that is a combination of Doric columns and ‘Indo-Saracenic’ balconies and cupolas. Next to the art gallery is a building that houses the offices of the white goods manufacturer, Whirlpool, with a swirling glass frontage that is a cross between a spaceship and a see-through washing machine.

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens Traffic in the locality—including DLF City as well as suburbs developed by other companies—flows along several main (‘sector’) roads and their tributaries, part of the infrastructure that has been constructed through a scheme of ‘privatepublic partnership’. Beyond DLF City, about ten kilometres further south into Haryana, are two areas that are the hub of current—and feverish—real estate activity. The first of these centres on ‘Nirvana Country’, a three-hundred-acre apartment-and-villa complex being developed by Unitech Builders. The main thoroughfare—entered through a gateway—is lined with semi-detached bungalows, collectively named Aspen Greens. Other areas include (p.133) Birch Court, the Close, and Espace. From Nirvana Country, moving in a southerly direction, past a patchwork of agricultural land overgrown with weeds and fenced-off with the markings of their new owners—a variety of construction companies—one encounters a highway that is crowded on both sides with a multitude of condominium and commercial projects still under construction. The traffic is joined by a seemingly endless line of trucks carrying building materials. Privately hired security personnel guard the perimeters of the building zones, and long stretches of the road-side have been taken over by semi-permanent offices of real estate agents. This is Sohna Road, which leads to the village of Sohna. Some prominent projects include ‘The Nile’ apartments (based on an Egyptian theme), ‘The Mansionz’ (bungalows in a French provincial style), and ‘Vatika City’, being designed by a firm headquartered in New York. Phases II, IV, and V in DLF City are home to what the locality is best known for: gated condominiums and shopping malls. The former are guarded and serviced, in the main, by Bihari men and Bengali and Bangladeshi women respectively, and the latter form a phalanx of aggressive consumerist intent along one key stretch of road. Apartment complexes differ in terms of the amenities offered.11 They contain one or more of the following: swimming pools, clubhouses, gymnasia, walking tracks, tennis and badminton courts, and shops selling basic provisions. The newer ones—some still under construction—are more likely to have all of the above, while still others—such as Ambience City—come with a shopping mall. In addition to residential spaces, the area between DLF City and the Sohna Road construction zone contains a variety of leisure, shopping, and commercial spaces. These include a ‘18-hole Arnold Palmer’ golf course, a number of members-only clubs, shopping malls, multiplex cinema halls, a Bollywood theme park, multi-cuisine restaurants and global fastfood outlets, and the offices of leading multinational companies and call centres. Fields of green have, within the space of some two decades, turned into spaces of global commerce and habitation fueled by changes in the economy since the mid-1980s. One of the most significant of these has been the rapid expansion of the retail banking sector and the relative ease of obtaining home loans. Aggressive market forays by both state-owned and new private entrants (including foreign bank) sought to target ‘young and highly educated professionals (p.134) who began their Page 18 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens careers through the 1980s, (but) could not afford to own their own homes’ (Khanna 2007: 107). Banks became increasingly cognizant of ‘an underserved market with a burgeoning middle class flush with disposable income … (where) the retail sector was expected to grow annually at 30 per cent (Khanna 2007: 107). Further, banks experimented with newer ways of accessing customers that were earlier outside the laws of ‘bankability’. So, ‘Following the example of mortgage-backed securities, ICICI (bank) decided to bundle $5.3 million of loans from India’s two best microfinance institutions, and sell them as securities yielding double digit returns’ (Engardio 2006: 14). In this way, ICICI provided a model for ‘connecting capital markets to India’s small entrepreneurs’ (Engardio 2006: 14). Interestingly, however, even though the banking sector vastly expanded the opportunities of taking out home loans, the purchase of properties still requires access to the unregulated ‘black’ market, for it is common practice that in transactions involving a ‘second-hand’ property (that is, not from the builder, but from a subsequent owner), the buyer must pay anywhere from 40 to 50 per cent of the total sale price in cash. This is the amount that is not shown on official papers in order to avoid payment of stamp duty by the purchaser and the capital gains tax by the seller. Hence, homebuyers who do not purchase from builders must have access to large amounts of cash. In effect, the construction boom in Gurgaon has facilitated the circulation of unaccounted funds that are generated in other economic transactions.12 *** The new localities of Gurgaon have been built out of a number of materials thrown up by the processes of cultural, social, and economic change over the past two decades or so. Such change cannot easily be described in terms of one succeeding the other but, rather, as intertwined processes and event. However, the most striking aspect of the locality is not, I suggest, the toponymic reinscription of the erstwhile farmlands of Haryana with the hybrid transnationalism of condominiums with names such as Regency Park, Windsor Court, Hamilton Court, and Malibu Towne; rather, it lies in the consolidation of a very specific social consciousness and self-identity. The social production of the space at DLF is coeval with the making of the identity of the citizen-consumer, one increasingly entangled in the processes of middle-class activism (p.135) discussed in Chapter four, and, in the process, further defining what it is to be ‘middle-class’ in India today. The ethnographic accounts of the chapters that follow further elaborate on this topic with reference to a specific gated enclave built by DLF, and occupied since 2001. Taken together with the discussion of Chapter four, this constitutes detailed engagement with contemporary urban spatial strategies and their relationship to ‘activism’ on behalf of ‘middle-class rights’, the cultures of social interaction within delimited spaces of residence and leisure, and the remaking of historically embedded relationships between the state, the private sector, and the citizen. However, the new spaces upon which these processes and events—the making and re-making of middle-class Page 19 of 21

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens identities—unfold are not merely inert or empty ones. The gated communities of Gurgaon and their various RWAs have been transplanted in spaces that are, in turn, sites of both actual and imagined relationships and transformations. The next chapter outlines some aspects of these. Notes:

(1) . It is important to note that the ‘aspirational’ here is shorn of pejorative taint, one that derives from the idea that the newly enriched classes aspire to possess the ‘tastes’ (Bourdieu 1982) of older elites through purchasing the external trappings of such taste. The advertisement appears to address an anxiety about the relationship between financial clout and cultural ‘refinement’ through suggesting that the former constitutes a legitimate means of acquiring the latter. Available at www.aambyvalleycity.com; accessed on 16 August 2009. (2) . The governments of Germany, the United Kingdom of Britain, and of the erstwhile USSR were significant contributors to steel-making technologies in these towns. (3) . Mazzarella suggests that global consumerism foregrounded ‘cultural selfrecognition’ (Mazzarella 2003: 159) that was nevertheless ‘still premised on a global scheme of value, that is, for this “Indianness” to be acceptable, it also had to be certifiably “world class”’ (Mazzarella 2003: 159). This is, of course, true. However, historically, ‘Indianness’ as a modern idea—religion, ‘science’, familylife, achievements’, etc.—has always been positioned against the backdrop of the ‘world’, or, the world that mattered, Europe. What is significant in the present time is the making of the world as a subset of Indianness, rather than the other way around. (4) . I am not suggesting that newer developments have completely abandoned the ‘English’ naming practice; rather, that in recent times, there has been a substantial change in this regard. (5) . Samuli Schielke (2012) similarly recognizes that with the emerging wealth in Asia and the Gulf region, middle-class aspirations are no longer tied specifically to the West, but are instead converging around a more global cosmopolitanism. (6) . Other prominent companies with substantial residential and commercial projects in Gurgaon include Ansals, Unitech, and the Ambience Group. (7) . Or, perhaps, 1929, as he notes in his autobiography (Singh 2011). (8) . As per details available on the DLF website: www.dlf.in/corporates/dlf_city/ overview.asp; accessed on 20 July 2007.

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National Identity, Bedrooms, and Kitchens (9) . As per details available on the TIME magazine website: www.time.com/time/ magazine/article; accessed on 22 August 2007. (10) . Sanjeev K. Ahuja, ‘11.53 Lakh Population: The Numbers Lie, Say Residents’, The Hindustan Times, 10 August 2010, p. 4. (11) . There are some walled complexes that have a mixture of free-standing bungalows, townhouses, apartments, and some with only the last two. The overwhelming majority consists of those with apartments blocks, and my discussion concerns these. (12) . Personal conversations also revealed that banks are increasingly willing to finance a certain percentage of the ‘black’ amount by showing these under headings such as ‘home improvement’.

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers People Want a Community, But Not Like a Mohalla Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords If New Gurgaon’s public spaces are imagined as the sites of plenitude through the flowering of new cultures of consumption and ‘partnerships’ between private corporations, there are also dark rumblings regarding another aspect: decrepitude. The ‘Dubaisaton’ of New Gurgaon is undergirded by an anxiety that the Dubai dream is forever haunted by the nightmare of Indian realities; fantasies of modernity cannot, at least in India, escape political economies of everyday life and there is no seamless transition from Dubai to Delhi. There are three (or, at least three) aspects to this: collapsing infrastructure and disease, ‘unwanted people’ whose presence threatens the making of a new sociality, and ‘criminality’. How do residents of New Gurgaon construct a community in spaces where the market is the most valourised source of identity and where residents speak nostalgically about the mohalla (traditional neighbourhood) but also reject it? Keywords:   gated communities, consumer citizens, spaces and consumer culture, urban fear, new and old localities

… more city came into being when speculators felt the urge to speculate. Richard Sennett, 1996, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, p. 359.

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers Plenitude Event: Independence Day celebrations, 15 August 2008. 10.30 am. Venue: a privately owned school in DLF City. A stage has been set up at the front of a medium size hall-like room, with chairs for parents and other relatives who are about to witness a variety of performances by children of classes I to V. As soon as the school ‘Director’—a former banker—arrives, the performances begin. There are poetry recitations, songs, dancing, and speeches. The children are dressed in costumes from different parts of India. A child gives a speech in praise of the nationalist movement, outlining aspects of colonial exploitation and racial humiliation suffered by Indians. If the Director—who is English—feels uncomfortable about the five-minute account of British colonialism, he does not show it. My attention is drawn to the banner that acts as the stage backdrop. It has a quote from Mark Twain’s 1897 travelogue, Following the Equator: (p.138) So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked. The banner does not include the remainder of Twain’s paragraph, for that might well have spoilt the celebratory atmosphere.1 But that is another story. It seemed strangely appropriate that in the ‘Millennium City’, an Englishman should oversee proceedings to commemorate India’s Independence Day, where suitably abridged sentiments of an American writer celebrating India as the cornucopia of sensory and other experiences formed the backdrop to the proceedings, for plenitude—of things, experiences, and processes—is a significant theme in the manner in which DLF City (or ‘New Gurgaon’) is imagined. To begin with, New Gurgaon is imagined as a place of expanded culinary horizons that—even as they face resistance from the ‘backward’ material upon which the new city has been built—create new rhythms, moods, and sensory experiences of space: The mood is jet-set even as one drives down the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road with its plush farm houses, designer outlets, and eateries. It is lasagna and pizza at Village Shop in Sikanderpur, Thai cuisine at Red Hot Curry, and drink and dance at The Buzz. Even the dhabas [roadside eateries] on the National Highway have been given a makeover. Come late evening and the boys and girls from call-centres are seen partying along the road with beer bottles in hand. Anita Singh, a young homemaker who is on the party circuit of Gurgaon, says: ‘Things are changing everywhere. And Gurgaon is no exception to the rule. In fact the local people here are so backward that they find the good life strange’. (‘Global Gurgaon’, The Tribune, March 19 2005). Page 2 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers As a place in the new urban imagination, New Gurgaon is no longer a site that one might come upon, or contemplate moving to. It is the definition of what it is to live in the ‘NCR’. It is a question that is answered by pointing to the plethora of choices that, apparently, define the new urban landscape: Noida [part of the NCR, located in Uttar Pradesh] or Gurgaon? If you haven’t asked yourself this question, then you don’t live in the NCR. Where to buy, where to drink, where to work, where to play, the list goes on. Ultimately, it’s a matter of choice, but the question of which one you prefer is central to any Dilliwala’s life …. (‘Suburban Brawl’, Time Out Delhi, 26 June–12 July 2007, Vol. 1, Issue 6). (p.139) The experience of plenitude extends to the kinds of people who now live in Gurgaon, which, in turn, further expands its cultural worlds: As a cyber-hub and a world class city, Gurgaon has lots to lure people from all over. So much so that it is fast becoming a city of mixed cultures and varied living styles. Along with the population explosion, there has also been an explosion of eating outlets to cater to varied tastes of the residents of the city [provides description of Gujarati, Punjabi, South Indian, North Indian restaurants]. (‘Gurgaon Live’, The Hindustan Times, 28 August 2008. p. 1). English-language cookbooks published from the late 1960s to the 1980s, Arjun Appadurai suggests, have been significant in the rise of ‘culinary cosmopolitanism in the cities and towns of India’ (Appadurai [1988] 2007: 292), an aspect that is related both to the making of a ‘national cuisine’ as well as the making of ‘middle-class ideology and consumption styles’ (Appadurai 1988: 6). ‘The interplay of regional inflection and national standardization reflected in the new cookbooks’, Appadurai also points out, ‘represents the culinary expression of a dynamic that is at the heart of the cultural formation of this new middle class’ (Appadurai 2007: 292). There is, of course, a substantial body of nonEnglish material (for Hindi magazines that deal with foreign cuisines, see Srivastava 2007) that could be brought into the discussion to round off this picture. However, what is undeniable is the significance of food as a marker of modern identity, and in the present discussion, an index of the cornucopian delights of New Gurgaon. Perception of plenitude extends in several directions. Sixty-eight year old Dr Mehta is a resident of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh and comes for occasional visits to DLF City where his son—who works for a multi-national bank—lives. I met Dr Mehta through another elderly resident, Mr Makhija, whom I would frequently encounter during early morning walks in the locality. Mr Makhija lives with his son in the gated enclave of Pinewood Estate, having moved from Delhi’s Page 3 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers congested Bhogal area—where he owned a shop—a few years ago. Mr Makhija would often say that after living in Delhi, he felt quite lost in DLF City, which, he would add, was ‘without any life’. His friend, Dr Mehta, however, had an opposite perspective. For him, Gurgaon had everything, particularly in contrast to older cities such as Kanpur. One morning there (p.140) was a heated discussion between Mr. Mehta and Mr. Makhija on the respective merits of DLF City and Kanpur: In Kanpur [Dr Mehta explained agitatedly] we live like keedas [insects]; there are no open spaces, no parks, no gardens, no decent places to shop, or to walk around. The same small stretch of roads has rickshaws, bicycle, cars, trucks … everything. Actually, one doesn’t live in Kanpur, one just survives. Here [in DLF City], there are places to walk, parks, and gardens … in Kanpur, if you go for a walk, you are likely to be robbed, or mugged … we live like animals there. Dr Mehta’s vision of DLF City is—as we will see in the next chapter—a widely shared one. In part, it has to do with a renewed—and in many cases, just new— relationship with the corporate sector, such that perceived shortcomings of the locality are imagined to be solvable through a vigorous relationship with private capital. So, as many residents would explain, the newly privatized highway and international airport showed the way for the future. A continuing concern in the locality is the rapidly falling level of the groundwater table as a consequence of the sudden and massive residential and commercial demand. Gurgaon’s impending ‘water crisis’ is frequently reported in both the national media as well as in newspaper supplements intended for Guragon residents. Hence, the head of a non-government organization (NGO) that encourages and builds rainwaterharvesting systems recently noted that ‘ground-water in Gurgaon has fallen by about two metres since 2006 and it is apprehended that Gurgaon may run out of groundwater by 2017’ (Jain 2009: 5). The NGO had tied up with the Coca-Cola Company and was in the process of installing rainwater-harvesting systems in a number of gated enclaves; it has already installed one in Victoria Park. An official of the RWA of the Victoria Park complex noted that ‘This project is an excellent example of the public-private citizen partnership’ (Jain 2009: 5).2 Another example of perceptions of plentitude attached to the idea of a more active role of the private sector may be seen in the ongoing ‘Rapid Metrorail Gurgaon’ that was mentioned in the previous chapter. As mentioned earlier, the project is being undertaken by the DLF corporation. The corporation had won the tender to construct a light rail system that will cover certain areas of the DLF City not covered by the state run (Delhi Metro) project that links Gurgaon to Delhi (completed in 2010); surprisingly, DLF’s was the sole bid. Rapid Metrorail Gurgaon (p.141) will run through residential and commercial areas that have been built by the company, and, in the case of commercial property,

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers owned by it. It will also run past a site earmarked for the ‘Mall of India’ that DLF proposes to construct. If Gurgaon’s public spaces are imagined as the sites of copiousness through the flowering of new cultures of consumption and ‘partnerships’ between private corporations and citizens, its domestic spaces also reflect this sense of plentitude. Rina Khanna, a trained architect in her mid-forties, lives in DLF City. She earlier worked with a prominent firm of architects in Delhi and now concentrates on her private practice, mainly dealing with residential interiors. She has designed her own house. The Khanna house has three levels of security: a guard, an electronic camera and an intercom at the front gate, and a similar device at the front door. The entrance lobby leads to a sitting area with a skylight, which is divided from a more formal sitting area by an enormous sheet of glass. An inner balcony looks down into the sitting area. Guests seated in the front room have an expansive view of the whole house through the pane of glass that nominally separates the different parts of the ground floor. The house has a large basement area as well. It contains a well-equipped gym, a large office, a table tennis room, a ‘library’ and a fully equipped twelve-seater theatre. Movie posters adorn the theatre and there is a popcorn machine at the entrance. There is a small backyard at the level of the basement, designed through extensive excavation. The upstairs (front) sitting room has a well-stocked bar, and there is marble flooring throughout the house. Rina says she wanted an ‘open-plan house’ as her visitors are known to her. Hence, she doesn’t mind that when they enter the house, they can see the dining area and other parts of the house. ‘Most people’, she says, ‘don’t like that’. She says she likes ‘clean lines’, and cannot do designs that are very elaborate. She explained with horror how another designer had done up a new flat with a ‘glass wall behind the bed in the main bedroom, with shells and stars embedded in the glass!’ In different ways, Rina establishes the distance from the mohalla (traditional neighbourhood) that many others in DLF City also spoke about. So, whereas the mohalla, though it keeps a watch on strangers, is also not unused to them, at DLF, the process of instituting locality is coeval with becoming unused to strangers: the gates and walls institutionalize unfamiliarity. Finally, in her comments (p.142) on the ‘shells and stars’, Rina expresses a horror at the community of the mohalla reproducing itself at DLF City. Rina often brings her clients to her house to show them the kind of designing she is comfortable with. She says that Gurgaon clients are much more ‘adventurous’ and understand her ideas more easily than the clients she gets in Delhi. ‘In Gurgaon, they’ve traveled around the world and are familiar with European designs, whereas my Delhi clients tend to be business people who have recently made money, but have no idea about design’. However, ‘the younger generation wants to re-do the family home, as they no longer want a Page 5 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers traditional house’. The most significant aspect of a ‘traditional’ house, according to Rina, is that it is not ‘open plan’, and that the family is not comfortable with outsiders being able to view areas of the house which are regarded as ‘private’, such as the dining room. ‘So, if my house was traditional’, she says, ‘I would have built a “buffer” between the front door to the sitting areas and the dining areas that are visible’. She points to a room upstairs where, she says, her daughter plays the piano: ‘being an open plan house, we can hear the piano all over the house. I always ask my clients: Are you really ready for an open-plan house, where you can see everything? Many say “no”.’ Rina provides an example in order to describe the nature of her interactions with clients. A young man, whose family lives in a two- storied building in the West Delhi locality of Janakpuri, saw Rina’s house and said that this is what he wanted for his own house. Currently, she says, his house is ‘traditional’: lots of ornate furniture, walls in different colours, and kitchens and toilets that have not been ‘updated’. The client was getting married later that year and wanted the house to be ready by then. Further, he wanted a full-scale bar in the basement that must look ‘commercial’, so that it’s ‘as if you have walked into a bar in a shopping centre. It must not look like a home-bar’. He had also come across ‘Versace tiles’ and had told Rina, disarmingly, that he wanted it to ’show off'. His family owns a business. When he and his fiancée looked at the ‘problem areas’ Rina had circled on a map of their existing house, their ‘immediate’ reaction was that these were precisely the areas that the couple had heatedly argued over, but ‘didn’t have quite the words to express what they wanted’. Upon seeing her (Rina’s) house, they had been able to find words for their desires. ‘So’, Rina said, ‘I am building them a house with clean lines’. However, she added: (p.143) I tell my customers that I no longer have the time or energy to work with carpenters, and hence strongly recommend modular and prefabricated material. Who has the time to deal with labour and all its hassles? They simply have no respect for my time. Everything in my house is modular or pre-fabricated; I simply refuse to deal with labour anymore. So, if my clients want to do it, that’s their hassle. Many of my friends are also using modular material. Clients such as those above, Rina says, often go to the city of Guongzhou in China and buy all their interior decoration items from suppliers there: They pay 30 per cent there, and the rest on delivery. So, they purchase furniture, bathroom fittings, wooden railings for stairs, lighting fixtures, curtains … and European reproduction paintings. The entire house is kitted out with Guongzhou products. It’s not very good quality, but the buyers are just as likely to replace it within next five years, so they don’t care.

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers The clean lines of the open-plan house that Rina speaks of, and the insouciance with which the global marketplace is traversed for both symbolic and functional materials for the household, are the grounds for a vocabulary of spatial and personal transformations that is part of the new cultural confidence at DLF City. It is also, of course, part of the process of distancing oneself from local labouring classes; the new cosmopolitanism seeks to avoid, as much as possible, the ‘troublesome’ aspects of local class relations through recourse to global consuming avenues that efface the visibility of relations of production.

Decrepitude Simultaneously as plentitude is invoked as a spatial metaphor, there are dark rumblings regarding another aspect of Gurgaon: decrepitude. While Christiane Brosius is correct to point to ‘Dubaizaton’—‘a utopian dream of luxury, efficiency, safety and leisure’ (Brosius 2010: 88)—as a significant aspect of the imagery of New Gurgaon, it is undergirded, as this chapter illustrates, by an anxiety that the Dubai dream is forever haunted by the nightmare of Indian realities; fantasies of modernity cannot, at least in India, escape political economies of everyday life and there is no seamless transition from Dubai to Delhi. There are (p.144) three (or, at least three) aspects to this: collapsing infrastructure and disease, ‘unwanted people’ whose presence threatens the making of a new sociality, and ‘criminality’. In DLF City, the lines of demarcation between state authority and private responsibility are very rarely clear. Often times, the DLF corporation suggests that certain tasks—say, sewerage disposal—are the responsibility of one government department or another, whereas the latter might refute such claims. This is linked to the peculiarly haphazard manner of urban development in the district where a private corporation was able to carve out a settlement on 3,000 acres of land, but the plans for who would be responsible for different aspects of the post-construction phase were never clearly spelled out. So, for example, garbage collection in many localities of DLF City is a privatized affair, the state government of Haryana provides uncertain electric supply (as a consequence of which privately run, diesel-operated electricity generators are the norm),3 and road construction and maintenance veers erratically between the DLF corporation and the Haryana government. As noted earlier, DLF has recently raised its own ‘police’ force (the Quick Response Team or the QRT) which consists of men dressed in black, who patrol the locality on motorbikes. The Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG) that is intended to more clearly delineate public responsibility was constituted as recently as July 2008. However, only 156 of the approximately 357 square kilometres that constitute Gurgaon have been handed over to the MCG. So, sectors 1–57 are MCG areas. However, in these areas, the MCG is not able to levy any house tax, as residents pay ‘maintenance charges’ to the private entity that has developed the area. Recently, MCG tried to levy a house tax in ‘builder areas’; however, as one resident said, ‘we refused to pay it as we are already paying maintenance Page 7 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers charges to the builder, so why should we pay another tax to the MCG?’ This context of governance—where the state meets the corporate sector in uncertain and mysterious ways—makes for perceptions of decrepitude beyond the condominium gates. Newspaper coverage of a recent ‘agitation’ by Gurgaon residents demanding an ‘empowered municipal corporation’ (Sukanya 2009: 7) that would provide a comprehensive solution to the ‘provision of essential services’ succinctly captures the public sense of a dilapidated state floundering in the streets and parks of the ‘Millennium City’: (p.145) Agitating residents said that the corporation had … failed to take over the provision of essential services like water supply, sewerage, roads, parks, and streetlights in most areas under its jurisdiction from other government agencies like HUDA, the public health department, the PWD (Public Works Department) among others. [A spokesperson] added that Gurgaon was like a child divided between many fathers. HUDA sectors are developed by the Haryana Urban Development Authority, the old city is managed by the municipal corporation, and the developer colonies like DLF are managed by the town and country planning department. (Sukanya 2009: 7). Reactions to ‘filth’ and ‘dirt’ are, as scholars have pointed out, significant ways of perceiving the world through multiple registers of cultural experience (Douglas 1970) and modernity (Chakrabarty 2002). However, unlike Chakrabarty, I wish to point to a broader thematic than the relationship between garbage and ‘the non-bourgeois subaltern citizen’ (Chakrabarty 2002: 69). Debates around filth and cleanliness in Gurgaon move erratically between ‘citizenship’, ‘civic’ responsibility, ‘public’ culture, and the fear of urban underclasses. These, further, illuminate shifting attitudes towards the state and private enterprise, ‘individualism’ versus collective life, and consumerist modernity and its antithesis. The Hindustan Times newspaper of 28 August 2008 reported that residents of DLF City ‘have apprised the HUDA authorities of the problem they are facing due to choked sewers’ and that this was the result of a ‘delay in connecting the drainage system to the main HUDA line’. That is to say, the houses had been constructed before any provision had been made for sewerage disposal. An earlier newspaper report had more clearly outlined another problem that was linked to the lack of appropriate sewerage connections. The Indian Express of 3 January 2008 had reported that ‘Residents of plush Gurgaon colony Belvedere Park, DLF Phase III, have been contending with an unexpected water feature these past four days—a stream of sewage floating outside their main entrance’, and, ‘according to real estate developer DLF, Belvedere Park’s sewage pipes are Page 8 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers not connected to the main sewage system. “This is why there is a backflow,” says DLF spokesperson Shalini Wadhwa. “HUDA should have shifted the sewer line to the green belt before they began construction (on a road project that is leading to the problem)”, she adds. (p.146) Sewerage was the context of another serious concern. In August 2008, the Hindustan Times carried a report which stated that ‘Mosquitoes in Gurgaon seem to have a grudge against the more affluent, with a majority of (dengue fever) cases this year being reported from posh neighbourhoods’ (Hindustan Times, 28 August 2008). A senior government official noted, ‘The two deaths plus the majority of dengue cases were reported from new Gurgaon and posh colonies’. The title of the news-report—‘Dengue Strikes Posh Localities, Spares Slums’—nicely captures the sense of an inexplicable threat, contiguous to the irrationalities of urban governance, both of which can only be guarded against in the most literal, concrete manner, through gates and walls. Signs of decrepitude extend beyond the infrastructural shortcomings: they also relate to certain populations, some old and some new, that share the locality with its gated residents. The recently urbanized spaces of Gurgaon continue to be located in a wider geography of rural life. The new locality sits on lands that were once farming areas, new toll-ways cut a swath through older rural localities with little concern for neighbourhoods that now become divided by them, and many of the young men from the villages work as drivers or in other positions generated by the gated enclaves and new commercial ventures. However, the villages are also part of other circuits of political and cultural economies. One of these is the politics of ‘reservations’. Constitutional provisions made by the post-colonial state for reserving a certain percentage of government jobs (at different levels) for socially and economically disadvantaged groups have, over the years, been a source of both upward mobility for certain groups, as well as criticism by others who see it, in turn, as an electoral gimmick, a deviation from ‘merit-based’ schemes of recruitment to public employment, and denial of opportunities to groups that do not fall into the ‘reserved’ categories (Menon and Nigam 2007). On the other hand, there are frequent attempts by groups that are not part of the ‘discriminated’ category to force the state to include them. As a great deal of scholarly and other writings (Deshpande 2002; Jaffrelot 2003; Pai 2002; Thorat and Umakant 2004) have shown, the categories of Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) have been sites of cataclysmic agitations. ‘In recent decades’, it has been pointed out, ‘in the context of reservations being held up as a palliative for community backwardness, categories of caste and tribe, and indeed the very notion of “backwardness”, have become (p.147) tools to ensure community advancement’ (Editorial/EPW 2007: 2132). A shard of this politics casts its shadows over DLF City.

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers In May 2007, the Gujar community of Rajasthan, an agricultural and cattleowning caste, currently classified as part of the category of the OBCs, launched an agitation to demand the status of ST. In Rajasthan, reservations for OBCs have tended to be cornered by one group, the Jats, and hence the Gujar attempt to ‘downgrade’ their status (Editorial/EPW 2007: 2132) in order to ‘move up’ (the OBCs are generally considered more economically and socially advanced than STs). The Rajasthan agitation soon spread to the neighbouring state of Haryana, and into Gurgaon, where protesting groups burnt tyres, and blocked roads as well as access to malls. The Gujar agitation sits alongside the topographic churning that is the changing landscape beyond the condominium gates. The latter affects spaces and communities, and consists of the vast array of MNC offices that are both a source of employment as well as markers of changes in the pattern of land usage. One recent study points out that ‘the total area under towns/cities have [sic] increased from 26.58 sq. kms. in 1996–7 to 124.15 sq. kms. in 2001–2. [And that] This is due to the urban expansion of Gurgaon town and [the nearby] Manesar township [approximately twenty kilometres away but rapidly being integrated into Gurgaon]’ (Chaudhary et al. 2008: 245). The ‘remarkable increase in urban area’ (Chaudhary et al. 2008: 252) that has been the consequence of the residential and industrial activity in Gurgaon has also been summarized in other ways. According to another study that utilized satellite mapping procedures, ‘three sub-categories of land-use have undergone substantial changes’ (Gupta and Nangia 2005: 7) over the past thirty years: The maximum change has occurred in Agro-land, which has declined from 63.35 per cent of the total land in 1971 to 5.84 per cent in 2003. Next in order is the ‘Built-up land’, which has improved its share from 11.36 per cent to 47.82 per cent. (Gupta and Nangia 2005: 7). The calm of the spaces within the gates is, then, ensconced within a larger restless geography; Gujar agitations, demanding ‘downward mobility’ in order to launch upon an ‘upward’ one, sit alongside the wider context of desire and understanding of change. The difference (p.148) between the Gujars and the occupants of the gated enclaves lies in the perceptions of such change. The following is an excerpt from a letter circulated by the Parents’ Association of a prominent private school in DLF city in 2007: Dear Parents, Reservations are at our doorstep! … Severe implications for our children … not 10 or 15 years down the line … but very likely this year … Page 10 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers Its [sic] time we took charge …! How many of us know that under the ‘Education for All’ Bill, 49.7 per cent of seats in private schools will be reserved for the SC/ST and OBC? Have you considered what quotas will do to your school? * Less seats [] With half the admissions not being on merit, teaching levels will have to be lowered to accommodate all the children’s capabilities. Government directives require that ALL children must be taught at their MINIMUM capability—leading to lower standards and teaching in the vernacular. […] * Come with ideas and information—Give your suggestions on what we can do, who we can approach and influence. Contact your class representative. Join the Movement! India Deserves Excellence! Regards, The PSA Team Letter dated August 2007. A final aspect needs to be noted in the context of the relationship between the turbulent and serene geographies of Gurgaon, one that also concerns ‘agitating’ villagers. ‘The restructuring of public space in liberalizing India’, Fernandes (2006) points out, is ‘not merely an effect of middle class desire but is also an aspect of new strategies of state-led development in the context of liberalization’ (Fernandes 2006: 155). However, as in other parts of the country that are subject to the ‘exercise of state power’ (Fernandes 2006: 155) with respect to land acquisition (Sen 2007; Sarkar 2007), it does not pass uncontested. So, in May 2007: About 3,000 Protesters from 130 Gurgaon Villages blocked NH-8 For 2 Hours Much to the chagrin of Haryana government’s claim [sic] that the state is a favourite destination for SEZ developers and industries, about 3,000 (p. 149) farmers from 130 villages from Gurgaon and adjoining areas blocked the traffic for two hours on Sunday on NH-8 near Manesar against land acquisition by the government.

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers ‘The government has moved ahead to acquire about 250 acres of land in Manesar village. Once the land is acquired people will have no place to live. We have demanded that the government must not forcibly acquire land to benefit industrial and corporate houses,’ said Surender Singh, Sarpanch of Garouli village.’ (‘SEZ Plan runs into Irate Farmers’, as accessed from Indian Traffic News website, 14 May 2007).4 Perhaps it is the perception of being encircled by a ring of decrepitude—against which the islands of plentitude must be guarded—that led to a serious discussion at a RWA meeting on September 2009 in Victoria Park about an action that seemed well within the reach of the residents. The discussion translated the broader geographies of perceived difference to the one of bodily differentiation and delimitation: Resident I: We have three lifts in our building and one is particularly meant for servants and pets. However, I find that the servants use the residents’ lift as there is a common button for all the lifts …

Resident II: Well, if I find a servant or maid using the residents’ lift, I simply ask them to leave …

Resident III: There is a very simple solution to this … we should have a separate button for the servants’ lift, so that they only press that one and use that lift …

Terrorists, Criminals, Neighbours: Landscapes of Fear In Sao Paulo Caldeira (2000) says, ‘a widespread aesthetic of security shaped by the new model [that is, ‘fortified enclaves’] simultaneously guides transformations of all types of housing and determines what confers the most prestige’ (Caldeira 2000: 257). ‘Urban fear’, as Low has (1997) pointed out, is also a significant narrative that circulates around gated enclaves in different parts of the United States. Davis (1992) speaks of the ‘obsession with physical security systems, and collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, (that) has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s’ (Davis 1992: 223). In other contexts, such as South Africa (Landman and Schönteich 2002) and China (Pow (p.150) 2007), the fear of the rural migrant or slum-dweller-turnedcriminal is frequently invoked for the ‘necessity’ of gated communities. In the non-western context, the contest between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ populations is also an important gloss. So, for example, in Shanghai, ‘Territoriality of gated communities is motivated and conditioned by the desire to keep out migrant workers who are seen to potentially violate the civilized moral Page 12 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers values (safety, order, hygiene, wholesome atmosphere) of gated communities (Pow 2007: 1533). In Gurgaon, there are local inflections of the global story. Hence, while ‘threats’ against property and life are frequent refrains, there are other aspects that touch upon urban cultures of surveillance and policing as well as national and global discourses of crime and terror. A significant aspect of the gated perceptions of the older communities of Gurgaon—its ‘unruly villagers’ whose lands were bought by the real estate companies for their projects—concerns their supposed backward nature and customs which, the thinking goes, spills over into criminality. Hence, the argument is usually framed in terms of a modernizing middle-class encountering a backward rural population. An example from the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, where the NOIDA (New Okhla Industrial Development Area) locality is undergoing a very similar transformation—rural hinterland transformed into metropolitan hub—illuminates this context. In January 2009, newspapers reported that a gang of ten young men raped a young woman in the NOIDA area. Press reports indicated that the men had come upon their victim as she sat in a relatively isolated spot with a man, perhaps her boyfriend. The gang had been returning from a match-winning performance in a cricket tournament. This is how the Hindustan Times newspaper reported the issue: With malls and university campuses crawling closer to the villages at a steady pace, sometimes even entering them, boundary walls can no longer prevent some common spaces where the villagers and the city residents meet. [A student at one such institute of higher education noted that] ‘We have studied in co-ed institutions from the beginning and being friends with a girl is not uncommon. But it is an issue in these villages. If I go out with a girl, local boys make it a point to harass us’. However, the report went on to say, ‘Women from the village [where the perpetrators live] blame it on city girls. “In our village, the women cover themselves up. Our girls do not make boyfriends. City girls come (p.151) to lonely stretches around the villages and indulge in obscene acts. Late night culture of the city has spoiled the girls”, said Asarfi Devi, an octogenarian from the village.’ There, however, is a wider context to this than the somewhat simplistic ‘modern city person’ vs. ‘backward villager’ angle. For, as one villager pointed out, ‘part of the reason was also the effort to keep villagers out. ‘Residents want boundary walls to keep out villagers. Are villagers untouchable? If you respect the villagers, they will respect you.’ In Gurgaon, the perception of the clash between different civilizational values is reinforced by the fact that the ‘crime issue’ is mostly taken up by RWAs as a Page 13 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers collective one on behalf of the residents of the New Gurgaon areas. It is not unusual for RWAs to ‘storm’ and gherao (blockade) a variety of government offices (particularly the police) to demand better security (The Hindustan Times 18 August 2008: ‘Gurgaon Residents Storm Police Chief’s Office’). Of course, the perceived untamed nature of the space that the new groups occupy is not the only source of threat. The RWAs also articulate the fear of the slum dweller. So, as another newspaper report in late August 2008 pointed out: There is a sense of insecurity among the residents of Sector 45 due to encroachments in and round the colony. […] The jhuggi [slum] dwellers are openly using the colony infrastructure like water, electricity, and roads. ‘These people have broken our water lines illegally. They have also taken illegal power connections’, said [Ram] Yadav [President of the RWA] … ‘We had settled here in pursuit of a peaceful life. If the chaos keeps on increasing we will be forced to leave this city forever …’ said Rajiv Pandit, an office bearer of the RWA, who migrated to Gurgaon a few years ago. The RWA has been requesting the HUDA to install a barbed wire around Sector 45 to keep a check on unwanted people. (Jha 2008: 4). The ‘migrants’ to Gurgaon—it was and, in many cases, still remains another country in the middle-class imagination—must face the many challenges of dealing with people with ‘backward’ customs, as well as others with illegality and ‘chaos’ as their defining characteristics. The landscape of fear created by the mutually reinforcing narratives of callous bureaucracies and marauding ‘felons’ occasionally—and ironically—produce discourses of another age to characterize the ‘Millennium City’: (p.152) Remember the seamy dark underbelly of the Victorian London [sic] as portrayed in the Dickensian novels? Gurgaon has one its own in the making at a 10-acre piece of land at the entrance of Sector 31…. Now the place has become a ‘dark patch’ for the residents. They fear to cross this stretch even during the day time. As if to help felons hide in this den, HUDA has dumped thousands of big iron pipes. ‘Several incidents of stalking, robbery, and even molestation have taken place at the stretch during nights. We really do not have any idea if anybody is hiding there. We never allow women of our family [sic] to pass by this site during night’, said Col. Man Singh, President of the Sector 31 RWA. (Sagar 2009: 4). Page 14 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers The national crime statistics compiled by the Bureau of Police Research and Development, a government body that falls under the Home Ministry, make for interesting reading when put alongside Gurgaon’s apparent crime graph. For the year 2007, for example, Gurgaon is not mentioned in any of the headings for criminal offences under which various cities and states with ‘abnormal’ incidence are listed. These include ‘Violent crimes’, ‘Crime against women’, ‘Crime against children’, ‘Crime against SCs/STs’, ‘Property crimes’, and ‘Cyber crime’.5 Notwithstanding this, there is an ‘aesthetic of security’ (Caldeira 2000) at DLF City that is derived from different global contexts and national and citywide narratives of crime and fear. These both prepare the grounds for, and make concrete, gated narratives of ‘threat’. Neighbours and Criminals

On a cool October afternoon, as I was driving out of Victoria Park, I heard a commotion near the fence that separates the complex from its neighbouring condominium, Buckingham Court. I stopped to inquire and saw that a boy, around sixteen or seventeen, had grabbed one of the security guards by the scruff of his neck, while the latter struggled to disentangle himself. Soon, the struggling pair was surrounded by four of or five other guards. The boy had a companion, also around the same age. It transpired that the boys, not residents of the condominium, had been trying to put up posters for a ‘street basketball’ tournament and had been asked by one of the guards (the one held by his collar) if they (p.153) had been given permission from the condominium authorities. The boys—from well-off families—had responded that they did not need permission, and also that they were not willing to be questioned by the guard. The latter sought to eject the ‘outsiders’ from the premises and matters came to a head when each threatened the other with violence. The boys dared the guards (for by then, other guards had joined the fray) to take physical action and warned them that should they raise their hands, they would be made to ‘disappear from this spot’. By now, the condominium manager—an employee of the Condominium Association rather than a resident—had been called for, but the boys were not any more mindful of him. It was at this point that one of the guards sought to lock the gate that might otherwise have allowed the boys to leave, and one of the latter grabbed him by his collar. The commotion soon attracted residents on their evening stroll, and a sizable crowd gathered around the boys, the guards, and the gate that had been locked to prevent the former from ‘escaping’. The boys continued to dare the guards to do their worst. Soon, the head of the guards arrived, shouting obscenities in Hindi. He took out his mobile phone and announced loudly that he was calling the police and that they ‘would take care of it’. The boys’ faces now took on a petrified look and they begged for forgiveness, saying ‘please think of our future, we didn’t know we had to ask permission’. The head-guard was now in full-flow: ‘How dare these bastards come here, I’ll show them!’, he shouted. The boys

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers cowered, a picture of abjection, the remaining basketball posters hanging limply from their hands. The crowd of residents now began to interrogate the boys: Who were they? Where had they come from? What were they doing there at this time of the evening? The boys’ faces took on an increasingly desperate look. During the questioning, an adult drove into the Victoria Park compound. He was the father of one of the boys. Apparently, the son had rung him on his mobile. The father leaned over the fence, standing on the Victoria Park side, unable to join his son on the Buckingham Court side where they had been apprehended because of the locked connecting gate. The boys were now being asked to sign a piece of paper giving their personal details and to write that they were ‘sorry’ for what they had done. The father pleaded with the crowd: ‘If they have done something wrong, punish them by all means, but treat them properly.’ A young man—a resident of Buckingham Court—had taken the lead (p.154) by now and was doing most of the talking. He asked one of the guards to take down the father’s car registration number (‘I have six cars’, the father snapped at the guard who asked him for the registration). The father continued to berate the head-guard for his rudeness to the boys. Finally after signing the ‘apology’ document, the gate was opened and the boys were allowed to join the father. As he walked away with them, I could hear him shouting at them, ‘I should really beat the living daylights out of you in front of the entire crowd. The way you’ve lowered my dignity in front of these “small” people [the guards].’ As the crowd dispersed, one of the residents, an elderly man, said to me, ‘we can’t be too careful. We had to do this; they could have been terrorists’. In the world of ‘safety’ and ‘security’, the making of middle-class spaces does not necessarily ensure the ‘dignity’ of middle-class people. The implicit understanding that the middle-classes share a common interest with respect to standing firm against urban terror breaks down in the face of an urban milieu where ‘trust’ circulates in ever decreasing circles of sociality and interaction. The middle-class identity of the boys emboldened them to think it unnecessary to treat the guards with any deal of respect; they were, no doubt, familiar with the marginal status of men who work in such positions. The police constable who might also have arrived on the scene would have come from a similar background to the guards, but he has the might of the state to back him. While on the one hand, the boys—having transgressed the inviolable cordon of ‘security’—were pitted against others of their own class, they were, on the other, also responsible for the situation through public demonstration of their class position; how dare the ‘lower’ class guards question middle-class people! This is another context in which broader narratives of ‘security’ constitute local sites for the articulation of the contradictions of spaces such as DLF City. It also demonstrates how class operates in contiguous and disjointed ways: aspirations

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers to middle-class identity can sometimes be the site for the undermining of the benefits that are sought to be secured. Ideas of security and insecurity do not circulate in Gurgaon without reference to other contexts. They seep in from surrounding landscapes and territories. The broader context upon which the DLF dialogue of security rests consists of multiple histories of neighbourhood networks that, simultaneously as they propagate measures to bolster ‘security’ and prevent ‘crime’, generate senses of danger and the need for collective (p.155) action against it. Organizations such as Nagarik Suraksha Samiti (NSS; Citizen’s Security Committee), sponsored by the Delhi Police, and the All India Crime Prevention Society (AICPS), an NGO, form two particularly dense—and frequently overlapping—webs of neighbourly interaction that are relevant to the present discussion. Ram Kumar Verma is a member of an NSS branch in Brahmpuri in East Delhi. Brahmpuri lies on the banks of the Yamuna river. As one crosses the river from the bridge near the Income Tax Office (where the Slum Wing of the Delhi Municipal Corporation is located, see Chapter three), there is a sharp turn left on to the pushta (the embankment) and, then, approximately a kilometre down the road, a right turn down a sloping laneway leads to an area known as ‘Pehla Pushta’ (the First Embankment). Here, the land is at the same level—and sometimes lower than—the river bed. Brahmpuri is a mish-mash of lanes, garbage dumps, decrepit government schools, myriad shops operating from houses, irregular house numbers, grassless parks, open air plastic and paper recycling shops, casually parked water tankers, and, on hot days, curtains of flies that swarm around moving and still bodies. Its material conditions are quite different from those in New Gurgaon, but its residents share the deep sense of concern with security. Mr Verma is in his late sixties. He came to Delhi in 1961 from Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh to work as a clerk with the Delhi Police. On most days when we met, he was in the company of two friends, Mr Chauhan and Mr Lal, both around the same age as Mr Verma, and also members of the NSS. The three friends had bought land in the locality in the 1960s and moved there after retirement. ‘No one wanted to live here then’, Verma said, and so, ‘land was very cheap … there were no facilities here’. Though relatively near to central Delhi, the area still did not seem to have attracted the attention of the municipal authorities. As active members of the NSS, Verma, Chauhan, and Lal hold regular meetings with various local police officials. One of their key tasks is to detect strangers in the locality, and those who might move around in a ‘suspicious’ manner. During one of our conversations, Mr Chauhan took out four different types of identity cards from his pocket to show me. One was from the local branch of the Congress party, another identified him as a NSS functionary, a third was issued by the local MLA (whom he had helped in ‘election work’), and a fourth that said Page 17 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers AICPS. (p.156) I ask if this was a government run organization: ‘No’, he said, ‘it is an NGO’. Mr. Chauhan says he uses each card at different points in time, according to need. I was curious to know more about the AICPS. Verma and Lal are also members of the AICPS, with the former being the District President. Members of the AICPS, Mr. Verma told me, work at the ‘neighbourhood level’, but also meet their counterparts from other parts of the city at annual events organized by the parent body. Their work concerns such aspects as getting pensions for widows, ‘helping with marriages in poor households’, getting water tankers to deliver water to the locality (since the government supply is irregular), informing police about ‘infringements’ (such as illegal alcohol sales, or itinerant merchants ‘who set up shops where they should not’). Verma tells me that they have easier access to the police as they are members of both the NSS and the AICPS. ‘We combine our roles in the NSS and the AICPS’, he further notes. ‘This [Brahmpuri] is a very ‘sensitive’ area’, he adds, and ‘we often keep the police abreast of any communal (Hindu-Muslim) trouble’. The three men suggested that I visit the AICPS in order to get a better idea of the ‘security situation’ in Delhi. The AICPS office is a small apartment in a multi-storied residential building in Katwaria Sarai, near Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Mr. Harish Singh, the office-in-charge, was bent over a number of files, poring over membership applications when I entered the office. There were no sign boards to indicate the identity of the office, and the front room—the ‘office’—was in a state of disarray with scattered files, empty tea cups, and out-of-date calendars. Mr. Singh was wary of my inquiries about the Society, an aspect that never really changed despite our several interactions. The AICPS was founded in 1951 in Lucknow, and its ‘Rule Book’ (2005) still lists an address in that city as its head-office.6 B.P. Singhal, a former police officer and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of the Rajya Sabha (Upper House of the Parliament) is listed as the ‘National Head’ of the organization.7 Its ‘Board of Governors’ includes the Vice-Chancellor of Allahabad University. The AICPS ‘objectives’, as listed in its Rule Book for 2005, include: … prevention of crime of every description and in all its various aspects and remifications [sic]…. [And] A wider and scientific study of: Delinquency and crime and the methods of effectively dealing with them, and criminal law and procedure and the method of effective enforcement. (p.157) The governing structure of the AICPS consists of state-, district, and branch-level office bearers. Delhi has been divided into sixteen districts and each of these into several shakhas (branches) that correspond to specific localities. For 2005–6, twenty-five out of the 125 office bearers at different levels Page 18 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers were women, and there were six Muslims (all men). The AICPS organizes a variety of annual events, including workshops and seminars where invited guests address members of the different branches of the AICPS from across the city. In a manner similar to that of the Bhagidari workshops (Chapter four), these events bring together residents of diverse localities and, in the process, provide a platform for the exchange of anxieties as well as solidarity against perceived threats to their life ways. ‘Special Guests’ include MLAs and MPs from various political parties, police officers, University Vice-Chancellors, and senior bureaucrats.8 Some of these events are also occasions for giving ‘awards’ to members of the AICPS, police officers, and ‘Public Men’. I asked Harish Singh if it was possible to meet any of the shakha adhyakshs (branch heads) in Delhi, and, after some persuasion, he suggested that I contact Mrs Rakhi Agarwal, Shakha Adhyaksh of the Mehrauli branch of AICPS. Mrs Agarwal is in her late forties and lives in a house behind the twelfth century Qutub Minar monument in the Mehrauli area. When we first met, she nodded understandingly when I told her that I was a sociologist. She said she had an ‘M.A. in Education’ and has also done an ‘M.A. in Political Science’. But now, she added, ‘I am primarily into social service’. We made an appointment for a longer meeting the next day. There is a large board of the AICPS outside the Agarwal house. When we next met, her husband was also there, and he sat through our entire conversation, joining in at various times. Mr. Agarwal was born in Mehrauli, where his family has various businesses. He started his working life with a coal shop, and then a ‘Fair Price Shop’ (part of the government’s Public Distribution Scheme for those below a certain level of income). He obtained a diploma from a technical college in Delhi and currently runs a footwear shop. He begins to tell me that he had recently read ‘somewhere’ that the Rajput King Prithviraj Chauhan—and not a succession of Muslim rulers as generally accepted—had built the Qutub Minar. Rakhi Agarwal joined AICPS in 2000 as a member in the nearby Chhatarpur branch. Later, she started a branch of her own in Mehrauli, (p.158) and it currently has around twenty members, her husband being one of them. She mostly deals with ‘family issues, marriage problems, eve teasing [public harassment of women by men], and dowry problems’. For this reason, she says, the AICPS has become very well known around the locality. The group also has regular meetings with the police, and is often called in by the latter for assistance. Further, it ‘also helps people if they are facing difficulty with the police, such as not being able to file an FIR (First Information Report)’. ‘The police listen to us’, she says. The Agarwals lamented the fact that ‘there is really nothing you can do about corruption, everyone is corrupt, and if we try to do anything, we are likely to be harmed. So, we stick to less dangerous issues such as family matters’. Right in front of the Agarwal house is a ‘Ramlila ground’ Page 19 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers where performances based on the Ramayan are held during the ‘Dussehra’ festival in October. The ‘ground’ is actually quite a tiny space and when I comment upon its size, Mr Agarwal says that as the population density has increased over the years, ‘people have slowly encroached upon open spaces, and that’s why it has got reduced in size’. The ‘congested’ nature of the locality, Rekha Agarwal later noted, is also the reason why the AICPS is needed to ‘ensure that we know there are no unwanted people here among all the crowd’. Crowds are an integral part of the ‘urban village’ of Kotla Mubarakpur (see Srivastava 2010) where I met Mr. Mittal who owns a small shop and is the Shakha Adhyaksh of the Kotla Mubarakpur branch of AICPS. Mr. Mittal says that the AICPS is better regarded than the NSS and its ‘Special Police Officers’ are appointed from the local population. He also suggested that the NSS is connected with the Congress party (though this may be because he himself may be aligned with the BJP). According to Mittal, most of the work of the AICPS concerns ‘crimes against women’. There is a large poster of the AICPS outside Mittal’s shop that carries his photograph and informs us about other local office bearers of the Society. As I stand outside the shop, it seems clear that outside the formal mechanisms of the state, connections are being made between local spaces, commerce, criminality, and extra-state policing. For someone like Mittal, the AICPS is a way of getting access to the police and different levels of the bureaucracy as well as an aspect of the making of ‘middle-class’ identity. So, ‘crimes against women’ may be solved through the intervention of the AICPS members without having to (p. 159) go through, say, women’s groups. It is also the process through which communities of common cause are built at the mohalla level. The activities of the AICPS and the NSS create ideas of locality and sociality through creating intricate networks along which conversations about crime, threat, and fear are generated. The web of interactions—among ‘common’ people—is also a way in which thick engagements take place among a homogenous group, or a group that comes to be represented as homogenous. In effect, then, and unlike Simmel’s notion of urban engagements, these are ways of engaging with the city through face-to-face interactions. Rather than operate in an urban space through the mask of ‘rationality’ that allows for distanced engagement (see Sennett 2008), there is intense dialogue among neighbours that creates the sense of neighbourhoods within delimited spaces, and the sense of similar neighbourhoods across the city facing similar problems. The dialogue creates spaces where criminality, community, thick engagements, and urban performativity come together. People do not look away, but find ways to peer into each other’s eyes in order to find similarities in a heterogenous urban environment. This, in turn, produces ideas about those that are different. It is also important to remember that AICPS and NSS activities unfold across myriad registers—marriage, domestic violence, ideal citizenship and the police as Page 20 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers friends, identification of strangers, self-discipline, and 'appropriate' gender behaviour, among others. Hence, crime and its prevention becomes the social glue whose viscosity defines social life itself. I do not, of course, mean to suggest a completely effective system of local surveillance, one without cracks and fault lines. Rather, I wish to point to the articulation of criminality and sociality that produces locality. It is this specific aspect of making of localities that finds play in the security consciousness of DLF City.

‘New’ Performances of Space: Not Like the Mohalla Beyond ‘security’, neighbourhoods (and mohallas) are imagined and instituted in other ways as well. During a conversation about life in DLF and in older parts of Delhi, a resident of Victoria Park said to me, ‘people want a community here, but not like a mohalla, not like those older localities in Delhi’. The idea of the mohalla—literally ‘neighbourhood’, but a term that is frequently deployed to suggest an old locality, with ‘village-like’ bonds and kin-like relationships among (p.160) its residents—is an interesting counterpoint to the idea of urban spatial modernity. In the Istanbul mahalle (to use the local term) of Kuzguncuk, Mills (2007) says, the space of the neighbourhood is created through the processes of everyday surveillance that inscribes it with ideas of the familiar, the strange, threat, and security. Significantly, the net of surveillance is woven out of the watchfulness of ‘women who are continually present at home’ (Mills 2007: 343; emphasis added) and act as lay sentinels. What kind of neighbourhood is Victoria Park? For a start, and unlike Kuzguncuk, it is the site of an extraordinary amount of comings and goings, for many of the apartments are rented out to employees of the several MNCs in Gurgaon. Further, several apartments have been bought by such companies, to be used as short-term accommodation for visiting employees and guests. Given the substantial transitory population then, the permanent—or long term—residents of the complex cannot fall back on individual observations to keep track of strangers and possible threats from them. Affluent strangers swarm the complex. In addition, constant movement serves to differentiate Victoria Park from the older localities of Delhi: it is intended to be a new kind of space, comfortable with transitions. How are senses of community instituted under such conditions of mobility? What characteristic acts constitute ‘the task of producing locality’ (Appadurai 1998: 188) here, and what anxieties and concerns underlie the making of a new community—and middle class identity—in DLF City? Let us begin with time. There are certain diurnal rhythms that structure temporality within and around Victoria Park. These are connected to the political, material, and cultural economies of DLF City. Early mornings and late evenings offer the best vantage points for observing the cadences of space that mark DLF City with its own peculiar sense of locality. Between 5 and 7 each morning, the streets around Victoria Park swarm with women and men who do Page 21 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers not live within the gates: women walking briskly in groups and singly, clutching plastic bags, others riding in rickshaws, and men with small cloth bags, some containing food and other small implements. This crowd appears almost magically between the above hours, making its way towards the high rise of the gated enclaves from tight clusters of single and double story tenement housing that can be seen from the skyscrapers. (p.161) These are the maids, servants, chauffeurs, and traders and other workers who reside in rented accommodation in some of the original villages that ring the condominium. The women in rickshaws are maids being ‘driven’ to work by their rickshaw-driver husbands. The workers—from Bihar, West Bengal, and, some say Bangladesh—live in tiny, ill-lit rooms located in spaces with potholed roads, open drains, and a variety of small-scale industrial workshops. As they make their way to the boom gates—and the immaculately maintained premises—of different residential enclaves, the women must produce identity cards that are examined by the guards at the gates, whereas the men are mostly allowed to pass without much fuss. By 7 a.m., the streets are empty of women in cheap, shiny sarees, and men in shiny trousers and shirts of fading colour. Given its origins in local material and cultural economies, there is another morning-time activity that is worth noting: there is a large number of women driving cars. Most of the women drivers appear to be in the 25–40 age group. They are either driving to or returning from a variety of morning activities: yoga classes run by individually contracted instructors, and calisthenics, aerobics, and other exercises in a number of gymnasia in the neighbourhood. The ones most frequented are in shopping malls nearby. A significant characteristic of public spaces in DLF City is the presence of women. The re-gendering of public spaces—given their historically masculine nature—is an important aspect of the making of middle-classness in DLF City. However, as I discuss below, the increased presence of ‘public’ women appears to be accompanied by an increased emphasis on their ‘home duties’. The private guards who regulate the entry of maids (and also visitors) to the complex also follow a routine. Every morning, around 7, a ‘supervisor’ arrives on a motorcycle to initiate a ‘change of guards’ that begins with a military style drill: those taking up duty for the day line up in formation, salute, and undergo ‘inspection’. They then disperse to take up positions, relieving the nightguards. Around the same time, many of the residents are being driven to offices as the working day, especially for those working in MNCs, begins early. There are also school children boarding buses—many of which sport ‘International’ or ‘Global’ as part of the name of the institutions painted on their sides—to begin their day. (p.162) The quiet of the day is punctured in the late evening by another set of rhythms that define space. The lawns within Victoria Park are filled up with four sets of residents: young children, teenagers in mixed groups, older women Page 22 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers sitting together on park benches, and live-in maids shepherding infants. Office workers—both men and women (there is a high proportion of working women)— have not yet returned from work, and the infants appear to be glad to be out of the house, being entertained by the maids. Those maids who work as daily— rather than ‘live- in’—workers make a quiet exit from the complex, melting into the darkness, their persons occasionally checked by the guards to make sure they are not carrying out any goods ‘illegally’. The temporal rhythms—and the making of locality—narrated above move along the contours of the post-national moment described earlier. They illustrate the processes through which quotidian life comes to be located within new contexts of work, leisure, and the valorization of the home as the site of consumerist cosmopolitanism. They also point to another significant aspect: that the making of community life—one that is not like a mohalla—is increasingly enmeshed in a relationship with the corporate sector, and moving away from the historically significant role of the state. Further, it is also produced by a post-national emphasis on the self and locality where both the techniques of locality and body are aligned to transnational flows that affect patterns of work, residence, and domesticity, as well as ideas about the cosmopolitan self. Finally, in this context, the community life described above is also based upon changes in employment patterns that affect not only middle-class women but also poor women. ‘In the era of globalization’, a recent report on urbanization and women’s employment points out, ‘it has become commonplace to argue that trade openness in particular generates processes that encourage the increased employment of women’ (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2007: 1). However, as Chandrasekhar and Ghosh go on to suggest, rather than in the much-cited IT and finance sectors, ‘the greatest labour market dynamism has been evident in the realm of domestic labour’ (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2007: 5). Indeed, women working as domestic servants—working for low wages under uncertain conditions—‘account for more than 12 per cent of all women workers in urban India’ (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2007: 4). The women who each morning make their way to the boom gates of (p.163) Victoria Park and other such enclaves— to look after young children, cook, and clean—are participants in this ‘dynamic’ labour market.

Commodity Cultures and the Making of Community In addition to the above, there are also certain rituals of space that impart a specific sense of locality and speak to the notion of the consumer-citizen referred to earlier. The (Hindu) festival of Holi that traditionally falls at the end of winter and involves the throwing of coloured powder and water is celebrated in many gated communities through activities organized by the respective RWAs. In the public imagination, popular celebrations of Holi frequently figure as contexts of unruly behaviour both towards women as well as ‘respectable’ citizens (Cohen 1995). The 2010 Holi at Victoria Park was an elaborate affair. A Page 23 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers stage had been set up on the main lawns and it was surrounded by large-scale music systems. Young men and women, as well as middle-aged couples, danced to Bollywood music being played by a 'disc jockey' hired for the occasion. There was also a ‘Bacardi Bar’ that handed out free alcoholic drinks, as the RWA had secured ‘sponsorship’ from the company, allowing it to put up a number of its banners around the complex. A few weeks before Holi, the RWA had also organized a cricket tournament that had been sponsored by a local car dealership (as the large banners installed for the duration of the tournament informed passers-by), and, as mentioned earlier, the ground-water-harvesting scheme has been sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company. The Janmashtami festival that celebrates the birth of the god Krishna is another popular event at Victoria Park. Celebrated ‘on the eighth day of the waning half of the lunar month of bhadrapad’ (Hawley and Goswami 1981: 62) that falls during August–September, the festival has elaborate local roots that draw upon networks of kin, neighbourhood, and religious ties. So, in the north Indian city of Vrindavan (strongly associated with Krishna’s childhood), Janmashtami celebrations involve a variety of priests, performing artists (who enact ‘nativity’ plays), and lay worshippers, each of whom draws upon and ‘contributes’ localized resources. Janmashtami celebrations at Vrindavan (not dissimilar to those in other parts of India) are also organized around acts of commensality— fasting and feasting—that further institutionalize community bonds through participation in a non-monetized ritual (p.164) activity (Hawley and Goswami 1981). For the past three years, the festival at Victoria Park has been organized by the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), founded in New York in 1966 by Srila Prabhupada. Residents of the Victoria Park complex who are ISKCON members persuaded the RWA to let ISKCON—and not complex residents—conduct the festival. In 2009, the celebrations began with a bhajan (prayer-song) by a group of ISKCON devotees who sat on a large stage that faced several rows of chairs. To the right of the stage, a projector connected to a laptop beamed colourful swirling images on a large cinema screen. As the lead bhajan singer repeatedly requested residents to join the gathering, the crowd built up to around a hundred and a group of women, including one from a Victoria Park family that is member of ISKCON, began to dance in an empty space in front of the stage. It was an improvised dance that followed ISKCON ‘street dance’ pattern in many western cities. The dancers exhorted others to join, and a few (all women) did so. A powerful sound system ensured that the singing reached all parts of the complex. Then, two male ISKCON devotees joined the dance, but to the right of the stage, away from the women. They were joined by a few other male residents of the complex. Whereas the women danced in gestures of bliss and devotion in front of the jharokha (tableau depicting Krishna as a child), the men—perhaps appropriately, given the association between masculinity and technology— danced in front of the laptop. Two specially attired girls also came forward to Page 24 of 28

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers dance to verses recited from the Gita, and an ISKCON devotee offered a discourse on the text. By now, the cinema screen was displaying 'Star Wars'-like graphics of flying machines, flaming arrows, a twirling globe, and a variety of psychedelic animation. The ceremony was building up to a crescendo. The dancing women improvised, doing Indian dances such as Garba and Gidda, popularized by Bollywood, as well as free form. The ceremony concluded with an aarti (lamp ceremony) and the cutting of a ‘Krishna birthday cake’ which was then offered as part of prasad (sanctified food). The screen was now showing scenes from American cities where American bhakts (devotees) danced, sang, and spoke about their lives as ‘Krishna bhakts’. The ceremony lasted some three hours, with the laptop uniting the Victoria Park space with an American one. The ‘West’ was here, via a confident cosmopolitanism that could include it in the broader tableau of Indian culture, a situation (p.165) unmarked by anxiety and angst regarding ‘cultural imperialism’. We ate our cake and dispersed. The suffusion of local space coupled with an easy familiarity with transnational cultures of commodities also happens in other, more obvious ways. One of the most common ways in which group interaction takes place is around a stall set up with signs of consumer goods manufacturers. Every other week, a mobile van or a portable tent promoting a variety of goods can be found within Victoria Park premises. In August 2009, the Honda Company advertised the newly launched ‘Jazz’ model by inviting residents to inspect the car, which had been parked next to an information booth (Figure 6.1). A young woman exhorted adults to ‘come down and see for yourself’, while children (p.166) took part in dancing competitions and were awarded for composing ditties about the vehicle. Some months earlier, an electronic goods company had put up a stall at the same spot.

The relationship with the market is fundamental to—but does not exhaust—the senses of space and community at Victoria Park. It generates specific ideas of sociality: one where men and women may dance together in public without the latter encountering the risks of the sexual economy of ‘fun’ that is common in Holi celebrations (Cohen 1995); a ‘liberal’ spatial aura where women may drink in public, a

Figure 6.1 Honda Publicity Stall Source: Author

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers public that is created by the private, that is liberated from the dangers and ‘backwardness’ of the old; a sociality where female bodily expression is a significant aspect of life within the gates: whether at Holi, Janmashtami morning walks, or other rituals, the female body is allowed considerable play on the ‘public spaces’ of the enclave; a space where children and adults sing and dance around and experience the physical sensuality of the commodity that comes to them, transporting the aura of the showroom, and becoming one with their domestic lives. Feminist writings on public spaces in India critically alert us to the gendered nature of such spaces and the restrictions upon the female body within them (Phadke 2007; Viswanath and Tandon Mehrotra 2007). Does the gated enclave, then, provide an alternative model of publicness with the apparent freedom of movement and participation in community life it seems to allow? This question might be more fully addressed through considering the different kinds of activities the women of gated communities take part in. The cosmopolitanism of the new ‘arts’ of the body—gym cultures, dancing in public alongside men, exercises of running and walking, for example—are combined with ‘older’ practices of religiosity, household duties, and participation in 'women-oriented' customary rituals that are also part of gated community life. As I have argued elsewhere (Srivastava 2007; Chapter seven), this presents us with a situation where ‘public women’ are offered the ‘freedom’ of public spaces in tandem with the demand to demonstrate the ability to return to the ‘home’. That is to say, unlike men, women’s access to public spaces is tied to their commitment to the private sphere: they must both be ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’. This too is the politics of the national-domestic I have earlier spoken of, and I have more to say on this aspect in the next chapter.

(p.167) Which Community? And yet, within all this, there are interesting ways in which ideas about wanting and not wanting an older version of community—the mohalla—also come to the fore. Let me return to Mr Makhija, my morning walk acquaintance whom we have met earlier in the chapter. I noted that Mr. Makhija often expressed his sense of loss of community after moving from Delhi to live with his son in a gated community in DLF City. One day, I asked him what he liked about living in DLF: Mr. Makhija: What’s here? Nothing really! No one talks to anyone, there are no people you run into as you go about your business during the day, no one says hullo to anyone…. Well, I suppose what I like about this place is that there is no bheedbhaad [crowds, congestion], and it is still relatively safe…. It’s peaceful. That’s all.

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers It would be easy to dismiss Mr Makhija’s statement as part and parcel with the gamut of contradictory statements that are the norm in ethnographic encounters. However, the contradiction is a significant pointer to the conflicting economies of urban sensibilities in the making. It tells us something about the emerging relationship with older and newer spaces, and hence with older and newer networks of social and cultural life. The spatial narrative of Mr Makhija’s life in Lodhi Colony (where he owned a small shop), Bhogal (where he lived, having obtained a ‘refugee plot’ after leaving Pakistan), and DLF City (where he lives with his son who works in the corporate sector) is a narrative of the conflicting desires for intimacy and privacy, and the changing loyalties to the state and the corporate sector. I explore some of these themes in the next chapter. Notes:

(1) . ‘Always when you think you have come to the end of tremendous specialities and have finished hanging tags upon her as the land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine … ’ (Twain 1989: 544). (2) . It has been suggested that one of the consequences ‘of Pepsi and Coke’s industries in India is that, because the companies get their water from the groundwater at their plant sites, contamination and depletion of water used by locals for farming and drinking occurs’ (Chamberlain 2007: 101–2). (3) . ‘In about 50 cases, the high-rise buildings (including commercial ones) run 100 per cent on captive power plants as the electricity board has failed to connect them to the mainstream power supply’ (Ahuja 2010: 2). Residents also increasingly rely on diesel-powered ‘community gensets’ that are pooled between a number of independent houses, thus creating a private power generation source. (4) . For complete article, refer to www.indiantrafficnews.com/2007/05/14/sezplan-runs-into-irate-farmers; accessed on 25 September 2009. (5) . Bureau of Police Research and Development, ‘Snapshot 2007: General Crime Statistics’. Available at www.bprd.gov.in/writereaddata/mainlinkfile/ File1659.pdf; accessed on 21 August 2009. (6) . The details regarding the AICPS have been culled from a number of sources, including publications such as the AICPS Rule Book for 2005 and the publication, as well as conversation from Society officeholders. (7) . Singhal passed away in 2012. (8) . Based on information from various issues of the Annual Magazine of the AICPS from 2003 onwards.

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Plenitude, Decrepitude, and Unruly Villagers

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ Gated Biographies Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This chapter in offers a series of biographical notes of residents of Gurgaon’s gated communities. It seeks to utilize biography as a method of understanding wider social processes. It suggests that ‘community’ is a complex idea and that it can ‘develop’ under a broad range of circumstances, even those which are characterized by a great deal of mobility and transience. The chapter explores a number of different lives. These include a villager who became a middle man for real estate companies who acquired land from villagers, two couples who have moved to a gated community from small towns, and a woman whose caste status does not quite fit the gated community profile. The chapter also explores the politics of gender within gated communities. The female consumer-citizen, it suggests, is offered a specific form of freedom, one that is linked to the ability to ‘return’ to ‘traditional’ roots. Keywords:   gated communities, gender and gated communities, modernity and tradition, middle class biographies, female consumer-citizen

We are living in joyful times indeed. There’s a lot to choose from, in lifestyle. Fashion, design, travel, cuisines, or entertainment. What happens on the ramp at Fall shows in Milan is reflected back in Delhi or Mumbai. Rachna Bhattacharya, 2007, ‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’, Design and Interiors.

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ People and Spaces People make spaces and the manner in which spaces are populated is, in turn, the mechanism for the making of social life. But, if the occupation of specific spaces is also the process of making culturally specific identities, those who come as occupants do so with their own biographies: lives previously lived, ready to unfold in the tumult of new contexts. This chapter is in the nature of a series of biographical notes, much like Chapter one, seeking to connect quotidian routine with the tempo of seemingly distant processes. Speaking of upscale gated communities where many of the flats have been bought by Non Resident Indians (NRIs) and where several of them might remain vacant for months on end, Christiane Brosius suggests that ‘Whether or not these new communities grow together as solidary neighbourhoods, and whether an identity beyond class develops in such residential housing colonies remains to be studied further’ (Brosius 2010: 85). The ethnography of this chapter suggests that ‘community’ is a complex idea and that it can ‘develop’ under a broad range of circumstances, even those which (p.170) are characterized by a great deal of mobility and transience. The key question this chapter seeks to address is: beyond DLF corporation, who made DLF City?

Raghubir Singh: Middle-Man for the Middle Classes Raghubir Singh was sleeping on a charpai (woven bed) in the veranda of his house when I went to meet him mid-morning in May 2008. There were several other charpais spread across the veranda. He apologized, adding that he was away in Chandigarh and only got back home in the early hours of the morning, having driven for most of the night. There is a new four-wheel drive vehicle in the driveway that joins a dirt track which leads to the main road. The house is surrounded by fields of mustard and wheat. However, there are also several plots of land which are overgrown with weeds, and appear abandoned, and others that have been fenced off with wooden posts of different colour. These indicate land acquired from local farmers by real estate companies for future residential and commercial construction. Singh’s house is of a square design with an internal courtyard and rooms that run around it. There are buffaloes tethered near the front veranda, though at night, all cattle are taken into the courtyard. Just beyond the veranda there is a well, and nearby a tractor in a state of disrepair. Raghubir Singh’s house is in a village that is at the edge of urban development in Gurgaon. Entering into Haryana from Delhi, one crosses the areas that have thus far been intensively ‘developed’—past the condominiums, shopping malls, and commercial complexes—until the sprawl gives way, almost suddenly, to agricultural lands, one lane roads, and swaying fields of wheat and mustard; it is like driving to the edge of a city and falling off the bitumen into another world of village lanes and wandering cattle. However, as we sit under the shade of the front porch, sharing plates of jalebis and glasses of milk, the skyscrapers of Gurgaon are clearly visible. As Singh’s ten-year old son serves us jalebis, I ask Page 2 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ him which school he goes to. He smiles shyly. ‘Tell uncle everything’, Singh exhorts the boy, adding, ‘I want him to be like you’. Singh is in his mid-40s and belongs to the Gujar (agricultural) caste. His family, he says, has been living in this part of Haryana ‘for as long as I know’. As a young man, he joined the rest of his joint-family in its traditional profession— farming. However, as his family’s holdings were (p.171) quite small, it was difficult to make ends meet. He had been looking for other ways of making a living. Then, sometime in the mid-1980s, he learnt that a ‘big company’ was looking to purchase land in the area in order to build ‘modern flats’. The company (perhaps DLF, though Singh does not explicitly mention it), he also learnt, wanted to appoint local agents who would be rewarded handsomely for facilitating acquisition. Singh became an ‘agent’, going from house to house on his bicycle looking for, and trying to convince, potential sellers. ‘I knew everyone by name’, he says, ‘and everyone trusted me. I was a local person (ghar ka admi)’. But, due to the small numbers of those willing to sell, the initial results were not very promising. In time, however, Singh was able to win over many of his fellow villagers: ‘It all has to do with trust. They signed over the land to me, I negotiated with the company on their behalf—since most of them are not educated people—and made sure that they got exactly the amount that was promised’. As Singh’s land bank increased in size, so did his income, and he was soon able to buy a scooter, which allowed him to range farther across to other surrounding villages in search for even more land. By the late 1990s, one of his neighbours told me, Singh had become a ‘crorepati’ (‘millionaire’) many times over; the new four-wheel drive vehicle parked in the driveway is one of several owned by him. Raghubir Singh is now launched upon the next phase of his career: he is seeking a ‘ticket’ from the Hindu-nationalist BJP to stand for election to the Delhi Legislative Assembly, and his visit to the state capital of Chandigarh was to meet the party’s senior officials. In fact, he says, he bought the four-wheel drive vehicle to be able to better cover the several villages he will need to visit as part of his campaign activities. Singh’s activities as a real estate middle-man for large corporations form the background to the emergence of a new class of local level entrepreneur—one whose activities, and success— are premised on the currency of ‘trust’ in the global marketplace. It is, of course, the same currency that DLF head K.P. Singh used to profitable effect in making his real estate empire (Chapter five). Within this transnational bazaar—where DLF-built premises attract both diasporic Indians and transnational corporations as investors and clients—trust converts easily into more lucrative currencies. It also links the village, the city, the nation, and transnational public spheres in a prolix and productive chain of exchange, aspirations, and desires.

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ (p.172) The Bhargavs and the Vermas: Exchanging Culture, Producing Gender The Bhargavs are residents of a tenth floor apartment in Victoria Park, which adjoins two other—more expensive—condominium enclaves of Hampstead Park and Beechwood Estate. There is a panoramic view of the surroundings from the main balcony of the apartment. The walls that surround Victoria Park, Hampstead Park, Beechwood Estate, and other such mini-suburbs mark the dividing lines of an extraordinary contrast between what lies within them, and that which is outside the gates; manicured gardens, fountains, well-equipped playgrounds, and sign-posted streets in good repair stand in tight embrace against the pot-holed roads, malfunctioning streetlights, and careering, chaotic traffic outside. There are guards at the boom-gates to regulate entry, and keep the outside out. Down below, there is also the ceaseless activity of gardeners, guards, cleaners, drivers, and maids at work or proceeding towards their places of employment. Completed in 1994 and designed by the Mumbai-based architect Hafeez Contractor, Victoria Park was one of the earliest of the apartment complexes in the area. Contractor has made a considerable name for himself in both commercial and new residential architecture, and his website describes the Victoria Park design as a ‘classical style to create a sense of place amongst the clusters in the neighbourhood’. Mrs Bharghav is in her early forties and grew up in the thickly populated Krishna Nagar locality in East Delhi which was, coincidentally, one of the earliest of DLF’s projects. When I rang to ask if we could meet, she readily agreed. However, she said, her husband would be at work and could only join us later in the evening. Mr Bhargav is originally from the Rajasthan city of Jodhpur, which is where he and his wife lived for three years after their marriage. The Bhargavs moved to Delhi about twelve years ago, renting in Anand Vihar (East Delhi) to be near Mr. Bhargav’s workplace, the office of one of India’s several newly established low-budget airlines. However, when the office shifted to Gurgaon, he found commuting very difficult and decided to move to the locality, first renting a flat in the nearby River Birch apartment complex. This was in 1998. Soon after, they bought their present apartment in Victoria Park. The aesthetics of the Bhargav apartment speaks of a strategy of adornment that is simultaneously attentive and indifferent. We enter through (p.173) an elaborately carved door—done in a ‘Rajasthani’ style—through to the sitting room which contains three over-stuffed sofas with brown velvet-like covering. In one corner there is a half-opened stand-alone wooden screen which partly obscures a framed testamur on the wall. Apart from the gold border, the testamur’s exact contents are difficult to decipher. The room also displays several other kinds of decorative objects scattered in an irregular array. There are large landscape paintings and small Mughal miniatures, flocks of soaring wooden ducks, and seated divinities rendered in the (South Indian) Tanjore style of painting. Three small clear glass coffee tables peep from the sides of the Page 4 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ sofas, and there is a tall brass lamp next to one of them. There is a larger smoked-glass table in the middle of the room, on which I am served tea and biscuits. The school that abuts the Victoria Park compound was one of the key reasons why the Bhargavs chose to buy a flat here. Another was the twenty-four hour ‘power back-up’; there are frequent disruptions in the official power supply and dark smoke from mammoth diesel powered generators serves as an ephemeral pennant of new lifestyles. As Mrs Bhargav pointed out, ‘Living here you just don’t feel the “load-shedding”. Sometimes, friends ring up and say “we haven’t had electricity for eight hours” and I am amazed since the back-up ensures that the power is not off for more than thirty seconds’. The physical environment converts easily into the symbolic, and the proximity to the school and the diesel generator are the grounds for other kinds of meaning about space and identity. In particular, they symbolize perceived transformations in life-ways and the possibilities of self-development. The Bhargavs have two daughters, Meera who is fourteen and in class nine, and twelve-year old Gauri, studying in class six. Their school is considered one of the most prestigious in the Delhi-Gurgaon area and each year there is intense competition for admission; both intending students as well as parents are ‘interviewed’ by school authorities.1 In localities such as Victoria Park, children’s ‘training’ for the dreaded admissions interview begins quite early and since fluency in English is considered an important predictor of success in admissions race, it is common for parents of pre-school age children to cajole their wards to exclusively converse in the language. Certainly, the language that saturates the public spaces of Victoria Park is English. However, not infrequently, I also observed toddlers react with incomprehension (p.174) to their parents’ commands in the trans-national language of power. While clearly pleased that her children have gained admission to the school, Mrs Bhargav tells me that she is concerned that the school does not believe in ‘competition’, ‘so it cannot bring out the best in children’. Gauri learns ‘modern dance’ and electric organ at the school, whereas Meera is learning art and Kathak dancing. Every Saturday, she is taken to the transYamuna locality of Mayur Vihar to receive extra lessons at a school run by the niece of a famous Kathak maestro. Mayur Vihar is approximately thirty kilometres, or approximately an hour and half drive away. ‘After my marriage’, Mrs Bhargav says, ‘I spent some time in Jodhpur, and the kinds of facilities my children have here … would have been simply unimaginable there, or even in Krishna Nagar. I am very happy living here’. ‘[One of the things] I like [about living here]’, she continues,

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ is that my two daughters can go out of the flat by themselves, play downstairs till quite late at night and I have no concerns. In Krishna Nagar this would have been unthinkable: my parents would never have allowed me to go out of the house anywhere by myself. Within the complex we have a very rich community life and most of my friends are from Victoria Park itself. The kind of freedom I have here is not something that would have been conceivable either in Jodhpur or in Krishna Nagar. Jodhpur is still a very conservative city. I ask her how her husband likes living in Victoria Park: He is from Jodhpur … and living here has certainly changed him. Initially, he was quite conservative in his ways, but living here he has become much more liberal. For the Bhargavs, the space of the condominium and the adjoining school is one of passage: here one kind of cultural capital—that of the small town—is exchanged for that of a globalized Indian modernity. More significantly, the condominium-space is also one where female identity is refigured as both ‘independent’ and possessing agency. The gendering of public space as male, and the restrictions and harassments to which the female body is subject are significant themes in scholarly literature (Phadke 2007; Ranade 2007; Rogers 2008). The condominium-space— scrupulously classed—is a homogenous one (p.175) where a variety of rituals (national days and religious days), bodily acts (walking, running, for example), and other forms of social interactions display equal participation by men and women residents. The perceived dangers of the open street are absent, leading to a specific sense of the possibilities of altered sociality. Indeed, as compared to men, women residents I spoke to were far more unequivocal in their fondness for life within the gates. So, for example, whereas elderly retired men felt a loss of independence in being reliant on their children in living with them, women of the same age group routinely talked of a new found freedom in their current situation. This was strongly linked to the range of ‘public’ events within the gates that—ironically—lead to a sense of the gated space as an open one where a vast array of religious, social, cultural, and political life unfold in sequence; the gates ensure the elaborate unfolding of events on the celebratory calendar with an intensity that control makes possible, and without the fear of ‘disruptions’ that the open-street holds (Figure 7.1). Hence, the RWA organizes events relating to Republic Day (26 January), Independence Day (15 August), popular religious festivals such as Diwali and Holi, dance competitions, sporting events, consumer-goods fairs, and a variety of women-centred religious rituals (such as Karva Chauth) that have been popularized by Bollywood cinema. Apart from Christmas—which has taken on the form of a secular festival of modernity—

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ there is no practice of celebrating non-Hindu festivals. The world—religious, national, and transnational—is here, and women are visibly a part of it. ‘I really love living in Victoria Park …. As you must have seen’, Mrs Bhargav tells me, ‘the RWA organizes various kinds of events such as Dandiya, Diwali mela, Ramlila events, etc.’ In Krishna Nagar, she says, … my parents refused to allow me to go out anywhere by myself to see any of these events outside the house whereas here, what I really enjoy is the strong sense of community life: going to Dandiya performances, Diwali and Christmas Melas, events connected with Holi, and things like that. When I lived in Krishna Nagar (before marrying), I really had no idea about the broader community, I didn’t even know what was happening in the next gali (lane). This sentiment—that the condominium space has actually enriched social interactions—was a commonly expressed one. Mr and Mrs Goel are in their midseventies and live in a rented penthouse apartment on the twenty-first floor of Beechwood Estate. Mr. Goel is a retired architect (p.176) who obtained a town planning diploma from Harvard University in the early 1960s. The Goels came to Delhi from a village near the Punjab town of Phillaur and Mr Goel’s career path was chosen by his father who was the principal of a technical institute. At first, the father built a house on Delhi’s famous Ajmal Khan Road, in the commercial-cum-residential locality of Karol Bagh. Upon returning to India from the United States, Mr Goel joined the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in 1963 as an architect and town planner. Later, he left DDA and established his own practice and designed many group housing societies in West Delhi.

Figure 7.1 ‘Dandiya Night’ Dancing Source: Author

The Goels live with their son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren; all three grandchildren study in the school that adjoins their (p. 177) condominium. They earlier lived in the South Delhi locality of Greater Kailash, moving to DLF City in 2002. They are building their own house in the Malibu Towne complex on Sohna Road, which is a major site of real estate activity in Gurgaon (Chapter five). The couple’s social life is conducted through Page 7 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ their membership of a number of different groups. Mr Goel belongs to (as he put it) a ‘stag group’ (a men-only group) that meets for exercises, dinners, and other events, and Mrs Goel is member of three ‘kitty parties’. They both belong to a Seniors’ Club, whose activities are also an important part of their social calendar. In August 2007, the Goels joined other members of the Club for a twoweek, seven-country tour of Europe that covered, among others, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Italy. ‘Our social life here’, Mr Goel told me, … is far busier that when we lived in Greater Kailash. We know far more people here, they say. In Delhi, we hardly knew the people living a few houses away. Almost all our friends live within the [Beechwood] complex and we now hardly ever go to Delhi. When I do go [Mr. Goel laughed], I always say to my wife ‘Why did you bring me here!’. Speaking of similar gated community developments in Bangalore, Carol Upadhya notes that ‘These modern apartment complexes and the lifestyles they promote, are helping to create a hegemonic and homogenized “new middle class” cultural style, while fragmenting older kinship—or caste-based neighbourhoods’ (Upadhya 2008: 68). On the contrary, given their primarily upper caste nature and the faithful reproduction of the Hindu ritual calendar, such complexes generate an intense sense of kinship that might be comparable to ‘caste-based neighbourhoods’; the difference lies in their alignment with the new economies and aesthetics of consumption. Let us return to Mrs Bhargav’s comment regarding her active involvement in the public life of the Victoria Park complex. She, and many other women, cited ‘safety’ as a significant context for their new found freedom. Feminist scholarship has usefully suggested that the discourse of safety that is companion to the issue of women’s access to public spaces is mired both in patriarchal and masculinist notions of ‘protecting’ women (and hence men’s honour), as well as classed notions of urban threats to ‘respectable’ women (Phadke 2007; SWSJU 2010). The contract of ‘safety’ seeks to guard women’s ‘reputation’, and hence brings with it, among other restrictions, a ‘desexualized’ version of (p.178) public visibility (Phadke 2007). The choice is clear-cut: women should be safe in public spaces, but this also entails ‘proper’ conduct on their part. Ironically, the controlled nature of gated communities does not—at the level of perception and quotidian experience—translate into ‘sterile and predictable patterns of inhabitation’ (Phadke 2007: 1515). Indeed, to generate a sense of community that caters to all senses of neighbourly life, the RWA—as also noted in the previous chapter—organizes a vast array of public events and activities and religious discourses by ‘renowned’ gurus that are not infrequently accompanied by ‘free demonstrations’ of the latest consumer goods. The haphazard encounters that the street offers—where temples are festooned with advertising hoardings—are even more intensely reproduced within the gated Page 8 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ community. What makes possible the ersatz pell-mell of the street is the directed circulation of the discourse of consumerist choice and intent that is uninterrupted by the ‘distractions’ of the street such as the need for constant vigilance against putative others. To build upon the discussion of Chapter six, it is within this crucible—where the street is not the street, but, for precisely that reason, enthusiastically embraced—that ‘public’ woman can be both the guardian of tradition and take part in the sexualized presentations of the self; women dressed in elaborate traditional clothing perform the rituals of Karva Chauth (to ensure their husbands’ well-being) at night and pace the condominium grounds the next morning on their exercise rounds, dressed in skin-hugging clothing. And, unlike the constraint placed on women at public celebrations of the spring festival of Holi, at the Victoria Park Bacardi-sponsored Holi mela (fair), men and women dance together to Bollywood songs on an open air stage. The broader context of the above is to elaborate upon a point also made in Chapter six, a particular kind of gender politics that relates to the perceived ability to move between the worlds of ‘tradition’ and modernity (Srivastava 2007) by exercising choice. Through the notion of choice, consumerist modernity and its spaces offer women the possibility of both maintaining their ‘reputation’, and taking part in ‘disreputable’ activities denied by the open street. It is in this sense that contemporary middle-class notions of urban citizenship—with its specific configuration of a manageably hybrid modernity—reformulates the ‘fraternal social contract’ (Pateman 2002) within its own terms (p.179) to include the consuming woman within its remit. Hence, the female consumercitizen takes on a significant role in RWA discourses of the making of the ‘global’ city and its inhabitants. There is also, in the present case, an important difference between the RWAs discussed in Chapter four who must seek to make ‘private’ previously public spaces and those in DLF City whose operations are, from the beginning, located within walled spaces. The RWAs of DLF City have far greater leeway in producing imaginaries of desirable public-ness than their Delhi counterparts. Hence, the sense of community that is produced through public performances of Karva Chauth, Bacardi-sponsored Holi revelry, and ISKCON-organized Janmashtami, Coca-Cola’s underwriting of groundwater harvesting schemes, and the saluting security guards made to stand as proxies for the military on ‘national’ days circulates among these localities in a far more intense manner than might be the case in the retrospectively barricaded suburbs of Delhi. The latter kind of locality is imperfectly barricaded and its territory, traversed by a mixed traffic of vehicles and people, defies strict policing, either of people or ideas. Notwithstanding this difference, however, what the two spaces share is the idea of a middle-class under threat from a variety of sources, including slum dwellers (in Delhi) and villagers (in Gurgaon). Gates are mechanisms for both producing and assuaging anxieties.

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ As I was about to leave Mrs Bhargav’s flat after our meeting, we were joined by Mr Bhargav. His office is in the nearby Global Corporate Park, about ten minutes away. He tells me he is a ‘finance person’. He is both full of pride and praise for the parent company that owns the airline he works for: The company is like a family, and (the owners) are just wonderful people. They treat all their employees like family members. So, just after 9/11 when there was a big down-turn in the travel business, not a single person was asked to leave or sacked. The company just bore the losses. Mr. Bhargav is keen to know about my experience of flying with ‘his’ airline, and appears genuinely delighted when I say that I thought it was better than some of the other budget airlines. ‘That’s what I wanted to hear!’, he responds. He describes in great detail the airline’s future plans for expansion, and also tells me that ‘just tomorrow’ it was adding the eleventh Airbus to its fleet. (p.180) The Bhargavs are active members of the RWA of Victoria Park. The RWA, Mrs Bhargav tells me, is important in that it both ‘protects our lifestyle’, and is also a site of sociality. The Bhargavs closely follow news regarding the activities of RWAs in Delhi, and are pleased to learn that the interests of ‘people like us’ are ‘finally’ being represented ‘in an activist manner’. As relatively new sites of sociality—poised between private governance, camaraderie, and sanctuary—RWAs were a frequent topic of discussion. They represented ways of articulating new urban relationships that both built upon ‘traditional’ senses of the togetherness as well as exceeded them. It was the RWAs’ task to reproduce the putative bonhomie of the small-town mohalla in an age of transnational capital: to stitch together, in other words, apparent memories of intimate localities left behind, and the imagination and processes of the metropolis now occupied. In this way, their task translates as the making of spaces ‘that are neither rural nor urban, but the result of a newly engendered spatial relationship between the two’ (Lefebvre 1994: 78). The term ‘relationship’ should be understood here to encompass both material and mental processes, that is, both the works of appropriating the countryside for creating urban effects, as well as a continuing imagination of the ‘rural’ as an idealized space. I met Suresh and Meena Verma in 2009 in the wake of interactions with Victoria Park residents who were active in the workings of the RWA. Meena was in charge of ‘social and cultural activities’ and could be seen at almost all public events organized by the RWA. She organized painting competitions for children, social and religious events, national day functions, and a variety of other activities that fell within the RWA’s realm. She was one of several women involved in the RWA, whereas the Condominium Association—that looks after legal and financial affairs of the complex—had just one woman on its committee. Page 10 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ Meena was to frequently note that women residents did not play a part in the ‘really serious’ affairs of the complex. The couple is in their early forties. Meena is originally from Jaipur whereas Suresh, like Mr. Bhargav, is from Jodhpur. They have two teenaged daughters. Similar to Mr. Bhargav, Suresh’s career has coincided with the immense opportunities that opened up in the post-economic liberalization period. Whereas Mr. Bhargav found employment with a private airline, Suresh Verma is an engineer and works for one of India’s (p.181) largest private telecommunication companies. The family’s economic journey has also taken them from their separate Rajasthan locations to various other parts of the country. As his employer’s phone, digital television, and internet business has expanded, the Vermas have made their home in various Indian cities and towns that are experiencing high demand for telecommunication facilities. Before moving to Gurgaon, they lived in Ahmedabad: Meena: We had lived in flats in Ahmedabad, and the main difference is that there people mixed much more than here (in Victoria Park). It’s the same between Jodhpur and here: when I go back it’s like an old mohalla, everyone invites you home, whereas here you have to make an appointment to visit. Once you close your door, that’s it.

As the discussion of Chapters five and six shows, spatial tumult—the making of new localities and the dismantling of older ones—is a frequent topic of discussion in spaces such as Victoria Park that are its consequence. Suresh Verma, in particular, reflected for a very long time on the concept of a mohalla, and how Victoria Park differed from the kind of mohalla they were used to, and how they missed that life: Whenever I think about it (he noted) it really fascinates me…. Even now, when we take the children to visit our relatives in the mohalla where my parents lived, it’s like nothing has changed … people come rushing out to greet us, we drop into whichever house we want, we are offered food … it’s like going back to your family … family home. Narratives of passage from the mohalla to the gated community—produced by a mixture of factors located within contemporary capitalism—are also indications of the excess of the cultures of locality; captured in the mind’s eye, but let go in the pell-mell of the tumult of dislocation and relocation, and hence enunciated through a logic of contradictions. The nostalgia for the mohalla was a recurring theme, expressing a wistful desire for an ‘authentic’ locality that also has echoes in other parts of the world (see Ghannam 2002 on Cairo’s poorer residents).2 So, Meena mentioned several Page 11 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ times that there were various groups of the elderly, ‘housewives’, co-religionists, and so on, that were very active as social groupings. Many of these even travelled together to other cities on holidays, hence reinforcing the sense of a togetherness that comes from collective interactions with ‘outsiders’. Further, Suresh’s employer (p.182) (which, at the time of writing, was negotiating to purchase an African telecommunications network spread across fifteen countries) has been part of the remaking of senses of locality through joining together scattered neighbourhoods. And, finally, the freedom of public space—in the manner public-ness has been discussed above—that Meena currently enjoys is considerably greater than that which might have been available to her within the confines of the Jodhpur mohalla. As Mrs Bhargav alluded in different ways, the kin-like bonds of the traditional mohalla—with its invisible but palpable boundaries of being—have been exchanged for the apparent autonomy of the market. And yet, the mohalla arises as a trope of belonging—to a community, a morality, an ethic of caring, and procedures of contact—that is both contrasted with and yet sits alongside newer aspirations of locality and autonomy. However, it may be too hasty to speak of any straightforward translocation of older forms of belonging into new formations of community. There are gaps and fissures: those contexts where the gated community is also the site of a repudiation of community one has ‘once’ known.

Sabitha: Casting Aside Sabitha lives on the sixteenth floor of Beechwood Estate, the complex adjoining Victoria Park. Beechwood Estate, Victoria Park, and Hampstead Park are part of a single Condominium Association (that deals with legal, financial, and other administrative affairs of all three enclaves), whereas each has a separate RWA (that primarily deals with social and cultural activities). Sabitha is married to a European businessman who has lived in India since 1990. They have one son, who is thirteen. Sabitha’s husband, Antonio, came to India to purchase textiles that he could sell overseas, and has been in the country since then. He now runs a ‘buying agency’ which acts on behalf of international clients in India, sourcing different kinds of goods, but primarily textiles. He and Sabitha met when she was working for a large government undertaking that was established in the 1950s and which played a key role in the pre-liberalization years in facilitating trade between India and countries of Eastern Europe. Antonio had been in touch with Sabitha’s organization as part of his fledgling business. The decline of the organization that Sabitha worked for coincided with the period of economic liberalization and the dismantling of part of the edifice (p.183) of the ‘licencepermit Raj’ that oversaw both local and international trading activities in India. Sabitha and Antonio’s growing intimacy paralleled the un-coupling of the longstanding relationship between the state and the economy.

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ Sabitha is originally from Chennai. She has two other sisters, one of whom is a doctor and the other a lawyer. She obtained a diploma in Human Resource Management from a prominent management institute in North India in the late 1980s and was, as she put it, the first person from her ‘community’ to do so. On completing her degree, Sabitha joined the government trading organization, where she worked for ten years. She retired early from her position in 1997. Then, she did not work for about six years. When I first met her, Sabitha was working for a garment exporter who was also a family friend. ‘He had started his own business which did not work out’, she mentioned. ‘Then, one year, he accompanied Antonio and myself to Europe—his first trip abroad—and we introduced him to some potential business contacts. Since then he has established his own, successful export business.’ The friend asked Sabitha —‘begged me’—to work in his business. However, Sabitha says, ‘it eventually seemed to me that I was there to provide respectability since I had qualifications from a reputable management institute. So, when bank managers came, I was asked to deal with them. One bank manager told me that he did not really understand how I fit into the culture of the place’. After about ten months, Sabitha stopped working there as the experience was ‘unsatisfactory’, and the ‘work culture was not to my liking’. Now, most of her time is devoted to her passion for yoga, and online share trading. She also pays a great deal of attention to the upbringing of their son. ‘I have no support system here in Delhi’, she says, ‘and I want to look after my son myself. We don’t like the maids to look after him. It’s either Antonio or me’. Unlike most of my other acquaintances in the condominium, with whom I shared certain forms of North Indian cultural knowledge, I had been unable to establish Sabitha’s caste background. Neither had I been able to ask, as it seemed that it was not something she wanted to discuss. However, this was information I did want, since the topic came up tangentially in many of our conversations, most specifically in Sabitha’s pointed references to her ‘community’ and its ways which, she would often imply, were substantially determined by a strong caste (p.184) consciousness. Within the precinct of Beechwood Estate, this seemed like an odd thread in our conversations, but one worth pursuing. But, how to explicitly broach caste in the condominium, a space putatively aligned to all those processes that speak of lives beyond such affiliations? One afternoon, as we talked about various things, Sabitha mentioned that Antonio had recently returned from Tirupur, the Tamil Nadu city that is famous for its knitwear industry (accounting for some 90 per cent of India’s cotton knitwear exports) and is popularly known as the ‘Manchester of India’. I mentioned that I had recently come across academic work on the agricultural caste of Gounders whose entrepreneurial activities had turned Tirupur into one of the most significant sites of knitwear production in India (Chari 2004; De Neve 2004). Sabitha was very keen to know what had been said about the Page 13 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ Gounders, a curiosity that struck me as slightly odd as I had not thus far come across condominium residents who had expressed any interest in sociological studies of caste. I explained that, among other things, I had been reading about how the position of women had changed, that they had gone from being agricultural workers till early twentieth century to being confined to the kitchen, to once again taking up roles in public life. ‘Yes’, she said, ‘they are a very conservative community’. As our conversation progressed, I asked her about her father. He was a lawyer in Chennai, though, she said, he had come to Chennai from a small village in Kanchipuram district in Tamil Nadu. His family were, she said, ‘agriculturalists’. Did he always believe that his daughters should have independent careers, I inquired. Yes, she said, ‘always’. Did he have any objections when she decided to marry a European? No, never, she responded. His only concern was that ‘given the high rate of divorce in Europe, whether Antonio might do the same’. In fact, she said, he didn’t even want us to have a religious wedding, since he is an atheist. ‘Have you heard of Periyar?’, she hesitatingly asked me about the founder of anti-caste ‘Self-Respect’ movement, E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker ‘Periyar’ (1879–1973; ‘Periyar’ is a Tamil honorific meaning ‘The Great One’). ‘My father’, she went on to add, ‘is a follower of Periyar’. It was then it struck me that Sabitha’s interest in scholarship on Gounders was something more than casual curiosity: she was herself a Gounder and the playing down of her caste identity had to do with the popular perception of Gounders as a ‘low caste’ community who were (p.185) ‘traditionally known as agricultural labourers and small cultivators’ (De Neve 2004: 68). Some of the most significant aspects of Sabitha’s personal biography had been shaped by her family background and her father’s strong adherence to Periyar’s ideology that was simultaneously organized around anti-Brahmanism and women’s rights. ‘Periyar’s trenchant criticism of Hinduism was influenced’, Anandhi (2008) points out, ‘by its role in legitimizing patriarchy’ (Anandhi 2008:392). Hence, the Self-Respect movement conducted marriages that ‘aimed to free the institution of marriage from Hindi [sic] rituals which emphasized monogamous familial norms and chastity for women, and thus legitimized patriarchy’ (Anandhi 2008: 392). The interior of Sabitha’s flat reflects a certain strand within Indian ‘cosmopolitan’ aesthetics. At the main door there is a ‘tribal’ metal-work art object, and the walls inside the flat are adorned with various pieces of abstract art. The sitting room has two low glass tables on which there is a vast collection of framed family photos, including several of Sabitha and Antonio’s wedding. In keeping with her father’s (and her own) beliefs, Sabitha did not have a religious wedding. However, her father said that they needed some kind of ‘proof’ that they had actually married. So, in the photographs she is dressed like a traditional Tamilian bride, with Antonio beside her in a veshti, the rectangular Page 14 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ unstitched cloth worn at the waist. They were married in a civil ceremony. She laughs and tells me that she had only recently been told by one of her sisters that many from her ‘community’ who came to her wedding thought that Antonio ‘would divorce her in two years’. Unlike Mrs Bhargav or Meena Verma, Sabitha does not have many friends within the condominium. This may not be simply a case of a South Indian woman not having much in common with what is, after all, a predominantly North Indian milieu. Her own reasons are linked more directly to her father’s socio-political beliefs, aspects of which have been adopted by the daughter. In one of our conversations, Sabitha noted that she had almost ‘no friends here as the majority of stay-at-home women were into things like satsangs (prayer meetings) and Karva Chauth’, and that, ‘since I, like my father, am also an atheist, I really have nothing in common with them’. Another way in which Sabitha expresses her difference from her co-residents has to do with her critical attitude towards residents’ treatment of domestic help: (p.186) The people living in the flat opposite used to have a young girl who worked for them. She was about ten or eleven. We noticed that at the end of the day, she was put out of the house to sleep in the foyer between our flats. In the morning she was let in again. This went on for a while till we complained to the RWA. […] One day last year we noticed that a young girl was hanging off one of the balconies on the eighteenth floor, threatening to jump off. We shouted, trying to dissuade her and one of us ran up to the flat and asked the occupant to open the door, which she refused to do. Apparently, the woman had been chasing the maid around the flat with a knife, and had eventually locked her out on the balcony. The girl had climbed over the railing as she had nowhere else to go. […] Of the two lifts that service this building, one has been made into a ‘servants’ lift’. This means that servants are not allowed to use the other lift. However, it was never meant to be a ‘servants’ lift’, but a ‘service lift’ intended for carrying up goods, tradespeople, as well as servants. One day one of my maid was going down with my son and she was asked use the other lift! She said that was accompanying a small child. Often when the lift open onto a floor and a servant is waiting to get in, he or she is told to use the ‘servants’ lift’. I find this very demeaning.

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ Sabitha’s also held strong opinions on the spectacles of power that specially mark out cultures of the Indian state, and serve to visibly reinforce secular hierarchies. These were also in keeping with what might be interpreted as the vestigial remnants of Periyar’s stand against the socially and economically powerful. She was frequently critical of the way in which the adjoining private school (where her son studies) countenanced certain activities: … one day we were walking into the school through the ‘Exit’ gate meant for cars. Suddenly we heard a loud siren and beeping horns. It was a police car with a flashing light on top, apparently come to drop off the son of the local Superintendent of Police (SP) or something like that. Both Antonio and I were very angry as the vehicle had almost run us over. So, my husband went up to the driver and told him that what he had done was wrong. The driver mumbled an apology. However, there was a man sitting in the back seat who, in Hindi, told my husband to get lost. I was infuriated and started to argue with him though Antonio told me not to as the man had a gun. Obviously he was the flunkey who accompanied the S.P.’s son to school. I also complained to the school. However, it is (p.187) regularly the case that VIP vehicles come into the school and it is very difficult to walk around them; even the school buses park outside as the VIP cars take their parking spots. When I complained I was told that there was nothing the school could do and that I would have to ‘get used to it’. This is the example we set for our children. The example that was set by Sabitha’s father sits oddly within the condominium where, for example, Periyar’s reputation and ideology are unlikely to be familiar to residents, or find much favour with them. In the majority of my interactions with Sabitha—mostly we met when her husband was at his office, and this never seemed a problem—it seemed apparent that her ideas on religion (or at least, religious orthodoxy), gender, and relations with poor people were a direct result of her familiarity with a movement that drew its strength from its open opposition to dictates of Hindu-caste milieu. However, in all our interactions, there was not a single occasion that comes to mind when Sabitha betrayed any signs of her caste affiliation. My reading—interpretation—of the entangled nature of Sabitha’s personal and political biography does not arise from pointed discussion on the topic between us. Rather, it is a reading of a struggle— articulated in tangential ways and through coded vocabulary—between the demands of projecting a middle-class, upper-caste identity along with maintaining allegiance to Periyar’s ideology. The ‘default’ caste identity in complexes such as Beechwood Estate is—as I have noted above—vehemently upper caste, a fact that is reflected in the religious rituals organized by the RWA as well as a very palpable sense of antipathy towards non-upper caste groups that are seen to make ‘unfair’ demands for positive discrimination (such as those related to the ‘reservations’ issue’ Page 16 of 18

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ discussed in the previous chapter). This also flows over into quotidian hostility towards non-Hindu contexts. The conversation reproduced below concerns domestic help. The condominium security guards are the most significant sources for procuring maids and residents turn to them in the first instance as the guards are frequently approached by women seeking jobs. I overheard the following exchange one morning between a guard, a resident, and the woman seeking employment. The venue was a lift lobby in Victoria Park: Woman to guard: I’ve come about that job, can you call them?

Guard: But, I’ve told you …

Woman: Can you ring them in any case?

(p.188) Guard on the intercom: Madam, you had asked for a maid, someone is here wanting to see you … but she is ‘Mohammadan’ … is that ok?

[Guard listens on the phone] Guard to Woman: I told you before, you’re not suitable.

[Woman shrugs her shoulders and walks away].

Another Community Sabitha responds to the specific sociality of this space, perhaps understandably, by exorcizing ‘caste’ from her identity, simultaneously as it structures her worldview as an oppositional narrative to those perspectives that otherwise suffuse the condominium space. She once expressed surprise that ‘professional women’ wore saris, saying that she herself had given up wearing Indian clothes altogether. ‘The problem with the sari’, she said, ‘is that it is too much hassle’. Most of the time, she wears ‘sporty’ clothing. She would frequently say that her family bought a lot of their food-stuffs from Europe, since Antonio visited his home country quite often. Unlike the Vermas, and others who spoke fondly of the mohallas and towns of their past, Sabitha’s ‘community’ was only a ghostly presence never given explicit voice, and only breaking the surface through narratives of difference rather than senses of belonging. Notes:

(1) . This practice has been a topic of intense media coverage in recent times, with the Delhi High Court outlawing it. Nowadays, the word ‘interview’ is avoided and ‘interaction’ substituted instead.

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‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’ (2) . ‘A forty-five year old woman who was born in the countryside and has been living in al-Zawiya al-Hamra (a relatively poor locality of Cairo) for more than twenty years, but who still thinks of herself as a “stranger”, explains that she prefers to befriend women who were born and raised in rural Egypt. She trusts them more than those who were born and raised in Cairo. Faalhin, according to her, do not play games; they respect traditions, are loyal to their friends, and can be relied on’ (Ghannam 2002: 85).

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes Citizens, the State, and Disney-Divinity in Delhi Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords This chapter focuses on the massive Akshardham Temple complex on the banks of the Yamuna river, completed in November 2005. Surrounded by a network of flyovers, highways, toll-ways, and new suburban developments that are home to the new middle-classes, the complex is designed in a manner of a high-tech religious theme park. It is a space that brings together new practices of consumption and urban space. It is also a site of the making of new middle-class identities that are engaged in a dialogue between being a modern consuming citizen, and yet remaining ‘Indian’ through adherence to religious practice. The complex is an urban site that that signals the making of a ‘moral’ middle-class located in the various processes of globalization. Keywords:   Akshardham, religious theme parks, religion and consumerism, new middle-classes, modernity and tradition

We owe the clearest cultural map of structural change not to novelist or literary critics, but to architects and designers. Their products, their social roles as cultural producers, and the organization of consumption in which they intervene create shifting landscapes in the most material sense. As both objects of desire and structural forms, their work bridges space and time. It also directly mediates economic power by both conforming to and structuring norms of market-driven investment, production, and consumption.

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes Sharon Zukin, 1993, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, p. 93

Gateways to Heaven This chapter continues the discussion initiated in previous ones regarding the uses of space in the making of urban identities. In particular, it is concerned with ideas that gather around the notion of a modern middle-class identity, and its relationship to ‘urban redevelopment’ projects. As noted in Chapter four, there are several self-definitions of what it is to be middle-class in India, and that a very large number of groups, with quite different socio-economic characteristics, describe themselves as such. This chapter moves the discussion of earlier ones (particularly Chapters four to seven) to another location. It explores the connections between contexts and processes already discussed— gated (p.192) communities, the rise of the consumer-citizen, gender politics— and new urban spaces of religiosity. It is important, however, to clarify that I am not claiming that Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA) activism, Bhagidari schemes, gated communities, and the topic of this chapter belong to a homogenous socio-economic context. Rather that, notwithstanding the diverse nature of ‘middle-class’ identities, a wide range of contemporary urban developments unfold in remarkably similar ways, borrowing upon a common pool of ideas on ‘global’ urban citizenship. The focus of this chapter is the massive Akshardham Temple (AT) complex of the Swaminarayan sect, located on the banks of the Yamuna river, that was inaugurated in November 2005.1

The Akshardham Temple Complex in Delhi The AT complex, spread over an area of around 100 acres, was constructed by the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), one of the major sub-sects within the Swaminarayan movement. The Swaminarayan movement is located within the Bhakti tradition, and its founder, Bhagwan Swaminarayan, was born into a Brahmin family in 1781, in a small village near Ayodhya in present day Uttar Pradesh. BAPS’s information on him tells us that ‘having mastered the scriptures by the age of seven, he renounced home at eleven to embark upon an eleven year spiritual pilgrimage on foot across the length and breadth of India’. And that ‘eventually settling in Gujarat, he spent the next thirty years spearheading a socio-spiritual revolution’ (BAPS Document n.d.: 3). During his travels, Ghanshyam—as he was then known—was bestowed with several names, including Neelkanth, eventually coming to be known as Swaminarayan. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Neelkanth met the ascetic Ramananda Swami and was anointed by him as his spiritual heir. However, he was to establish an independent following that culminated in the Swaminarayan sect. Neelkanth’s travels ended in Gujarat, the state which, along with Rajasthan, provides the largest number of devotees.

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes Since his death in 1830, doctrinal and other disputes have led to the emergence of a number of sub-groups of the movement founded by Swaminarayan. These include the ‘original’ Swaminarayan Satsang; BAPS; the Swaminarayan Gurukul; and the Shree Swaminarayan Gadi Sansthan. BAPS came into being in 1906, and is currently led by the fifth of the succession of gurus, Pramukh Swami Maharaj (born 1921). (p.193) All Swaminarayan sub-groups have a global following, with the largest numbers being Gujaratis, and there are temples belonging to the different groups in various cities in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe. These include New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington DC, London, Leicester, Birmingham, Milan, Paris, and Lisbon. Rachel Dwyer points out that the movement has become ‘the dominant form of British Hinduism’ (Dwyer 2004: 180) as well as ‘the dominant form of transnational Gujarati Hinduism’ (Dwyer 2004: 181). Williams (1984) estimated the global following of the movement to be around five million, though this figure is now likely to be much higher with BAPS itself estimated to have a following of over a million (Dwyer 2004). The BAPS’ backbone is an order of all-male Swamis, currently numbering around seven hundred, who carry out a variety of religious, ‘social’, and administrative tasks in various parts of India and globally. All Swamis are celibate and once they have broken ties with their families, they are forbidden to make direct contact again. BAPS regulations on recruitment into the order of Swamis require that applicants be over twenty-one as well as possess a university qualification. This rule was introduced quite recently by the head of the Delhi temple complex, who is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. BAPS’s activities include the organization of ‘International Cultural Festivals’, administering educational facilities and hospitals, ‘environmental care’, conduct of ‘mass marriages’ and ‘marriage counselling’, ‘tribal care’, and ‘Family Assembly Campaigns’.2 There is another AT complex in Gandhinagar (Gujarat), consisting of twenty-three acres of land with fifteen ‘interactive exhibitions, surround settings … 14-screen multimedia show—Integrovision … the world’s first spiritual multimedia show … [which] received the Bronze award at the International Audio-Visual and Multimedia Festival in 1993 at Munich, Germany’ (BAPS Document: 15). The Delhi temple, though on a larger scale, is modeled on the Gandhinagar one.

The Spirit of Things: Design, Construction, and Layout The Delhi AT lies within a complex that contains various other monuments and attractions. BAPS’s documents tell us that Brahmaswarup Yogi Maharaj, who preceded the current head of the organization, initiated the move to build a temple in Delhi in 1968. His successor, (p.194) Pramukh Swami Maharaj,

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes fulfilled this ‘wish’ through leading the process of land acquisition and construction. By 2000, BAPS had acquired around thirty acres of land at the present site, with the holding eventually increasing to 100 acres. There had been considerable controversy over the manner in which land had been allotted to BAPS and, during 2003 and 2004, newspaper reports suggested that the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA)—of which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the dominant partner—had smoothed the way for the Society to take over the land. In brief, there was a general belief that the ‘Hindutva leanings’ of the NDA facilitated the allocation of the tract to BAPS. Objections to the AT complex came from several quarters, including the Uttar Pradesh State Employees Confederation which mounted a legal challenge, arguing that the land belonged to the U.P. State Irrigation Department, and, since the land was in an environmentally fragile zone, temple construction would lead to long term damage to the river.3 It was also noted that: … [in 2002] the DDA [Delhi Development Authority] had bypassed norms and overruled objections by the Delhi Urban Arts Commission (DUAC) to allot fifty-eight acres for the temple of the influential Swaminarayan sect. [And that] the [Delhi] Masterplan was changed despite objections by the DUAC way back in 1997, when the project was first referred to them. Although its amended Masterplan specified that any socio-religious organization couldn’t get more than a maximum of fifteen hectares (approximately forty acres), the DDA had in 2002 allotted another twentyeight acres to the trust, ostensibly for a parking lot, and an additional religious complex.4 Notwithstanding the above, the Supreme Court decided in 2005 that the construction of the temple had been ‘lawful’, and that ‘all the Land Use Plans have been adhered to’.5 Construction of the complex began in November 2000 and a Chief Architect (CA) was appointed for the project. The CA, Mr Virendra Trivedi, had ‘already designed a number of beautiful temples in India and other countries including U.S.A. and U.K.’6 Temple architecture, it was further noted, ‘is in the “genes” of Mr. Trivedi, from where [sic] he has inherited the “creative talent” of temple architecture’. His grand-father ‘renovated the world famous “Delwara Temple” (sic) at Mount Abu’ and his father was responsible for the design of the Swaminarayan (p.195) Temples at Chicago and Houston. Swami Pramukh Maharaj had initiated the design process much before the construction began in 2000, and Mr Trivedi had been assigned the task of designing the monument as early as 1994.

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes From Delhi, the most direct approach to the temple is via the Hazrat Nizamuddin Bridge that spans the Yamuna. As one crosses over (eastwards) towards the localities of Mayur Vihar and then into Uttar Pradesh, in the distance, to the right of the Nizamuddin bridge, is the Delhi-NOIDA-Delhi (DND) tollway, which provides high-speed access between South Delhi and NOIDA (New Okhla Industrial Development Area). Located in Uttar Pradesh, NOIDA has become an important residential and commercial locality, gradually evolving into an outlying suburb of Delhi.7 The road that leads to the temple complex comes off the eastern end of the Nizamuddin bridge, across the river, on National Highway 24 that leads to Lucknow. The massive dome of the temple (Figure 8.1) is visible from some distance, and the turn-off to the complex is immediately before a new clover-leaf flyover that is another route to NOIDA. Not far from the complex is the site of the 2010 Commonwealth Games (CWG) ‘village’. From the CWG village, as well as the temple complex, there is a clear view of the rubble remains of the locality that housed Nangla Matchi. Nangla Matchi, we remember from Chapter three, was demolished in 2006 on the order of the Delhi High Court. An earlier round of slum removal from the banks of the river was, according to the erstwhile NDA government’s Minister of Urban Development and Tourism, Jagmohan, to pave the way for a ‘beautification’ drive which would see the construction of shopping plazas and arcades, promenades, and various leisure facilities.8 Visitors arrive at the AT complex by chartered bus, taxi, auto-rickshaws, or private vehicles. Buses and cars are directed to a massive parking area, not unlike those that surround large shopping malls in the United States. At the entrance to the car park, temple volunteers check underneath all vehicles with security devices. Others are at hand to direct vehicles to vacant parking slots. Additional parking bays are opened once those nearest the entrance are filled up. Frequent announcements of the public address system inform visitors that they cannot carry into the complex electronic goods such as mobile phones and cameras, or other objects such as water-bottles. On most days, long queues form at the security gates, kept in order by winding metal (p.196) barriers. Checking of visitors is carried out three times, including bodily frisking, and inspection with metal detectors. Finally, the well-patted and frisked crowd emerges on to the temple complex. Entrance to the complex is through the ‘Mayur Gate’, decorated with 869 peacocks. Also on display are eight water screens. Soon after the Mayur Gate entrance, visitors move into a large covered hall with marble flooring, dim lighting, potted plants, and information counters. Behind the counters sit well-presented young women wearing ‘corporate’ saris. Along the walls are various displays regarding the complex and BAPS. The hall has the feel of a five-star hotel lobby. Beyond the Mayur Gate and the lobby, the complex is divided into different sections, and some of these attract an entry fee. In particular, (p.197)

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes a combined ticket for the Hall of Values (also known as Sahajanand Darshan consisting of an ‘audio animatrix show’ (depicting various scenes from Swaminarayan’s life), Neelkanth Darshan (an IMAX theatre), and Sanskruti Vihar (a boat ride through ‘10,000 years of Indian history’) costs Rs 170. An area with musical fountain— Yagnupurush Kund—has an additional entry fee of Rs. 20, with a 27 ft. high bronze statue of Neelkanth (the young Swaminarayan) at one end, a ‘Garden of Values’, and the temple itself, surrounded by a moat, make up the remaining key attractions.

‘Mystic India’ in a Hundred Thousand Ways

Figure 8.1 Akshardham Temple Source: Author

Ramesh Swami (RS) is in charge of four of the major attractions at Akshardham. He oversees the running of the high-tech Hall of Values, the IMAX cinema, the ‘10,000 years’ boat ride, and the musical fountain. In his late twenties, RS was born in south London and decided to join the order at the age of 18. While still at school, he had visited a Cultural Festival of India organized by a BAPS chapter in the USA. During the course of fieldwork, I was told by the Akshardham Public Relations (PR) in-charge—Rajan Swami—that Ramesh Swami had also done some modeling for a clothing company while living in the U.K. His office is a massive, air-conditioned room, and at our first meeting, he sits behind a desk at one end of the hall, occasionally receiving calls on his mobile phone and giving out instructions. My work at the complex was made easier by the fact that both Ramesh and Rajan Swami are well-acquainted with Rajiv Kishore, someone I had come to know through fieldwork on an earlier project on schooling. Rajiv Kishore is now the headmaster of a private school in the East Delhi locality of Mayur Vihar, a stone’s throw from the temple. The school was established by the owner of a local construction company, which had made its fortune through the spurt of residential and other construction activity in East Delhi during the 1980s. Kishore mentioned that he wanted to introduce his students to a ‘different kind of Hinduism’, one that was ‘clean’ as well as ‘global’, and that he had made friends with the Swamis as he admired the way they were seeking to realign religious practice to the needs of a ‘new’ cultural and economic environment. The Akshardham complex is open on all days except Mondays, the day for maintenance as well as shivir (camp, gathering, or meeting) for (p.198) all Page 6 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes volunteers who work there. For six busy days of the week, Ramesh Swami must ensure the smooth running of a host of technologically complex machinery and computer systems that form the backbone of Akshardham’s key attractions. Most of the buildings are made of pink sandstone, with the temple itself a mixture of the sandstone and white marble. Ramesh Swami was keen to emphasize that all the design work during construction had been done by the Swamis, with the outside experts providing assistance. The other important aspect, he reiterated, concerned the Swamis’ ability to take quick decisions, using technology to achieve the planning objectives. At various times, Ramesh Swami would show me computer generated photos that were used in the design and construction process. ‘Several years ago’, he said, ‘Pramukh Swami (the BAPS head) noticed that it was very difficult to recruit Swamis, and he wanted to keep with the times in order to attract people to the order. Hence, he insisted on the introduction of the latest technology’. He went on to say that a group of Swamis visited Disneyland Park and Universal Studios during the planning of the temple complex, and that many of the ideas in the exhibition hall are based on these two theme parks in the U.S. However, he added, ‘our boat ride is twelve minutes long whereas the one at Universal Studios is only five minutes’. Those who choose to visit the fee-attracting sections begin with a show in the Hall of Values. The show begins in a semi-circular hall—dimly lit in the manner of a cinema hall—where the audience faces a large back-lit mock-granite monolith that turns 180 degrees to reveal a figure chiseling away at the rock. ‘Your life is in your hands’, the narrator intones, concluding with the key virtues of Bhagwan Swaminarayan’s personality and asking the audience to move to the next hall so that it might commence upon the ‘journey’ of getting to know about his life in greater detail. We are now ushered into a large cinema theatre and watch a brief film about Swaminarayan. At the conclusion of the screening, the group moves through four different exhibitions halls that together constitute the Hall of Values and contain scenes, events, and ‘lessons’ from Swaminarayan’s life. The life-size mannequins in each diorama are animated through a combination of robotics, fibre optics, and light and sound. As the audience takes its place, the mannequins spring to life, acting out scenes from, what we are told, eighteenth century India. There is the young Neelkanth performing miracles, giving wise counsel, being acclaimed by kings and (p.199) poor farmers, and rewarding those who stayed faithful to his cause. In the first tableau, standing amidst a pond, the boy Swaminarayan convinces two fishermen to give up their work and turn vegetarian. There are sitting mannequins that—startlingly—stand up, life-like scenes in the jungle, and village scenes depicting Swaminarayan in the acts of helping the poor, giving religious discourse, teaching students, helping the sick, etc. We arrive at the village tableau—the last exhibition in the Hall of Values—by Page 7 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes crossing a mock-rickety bridge, past a series of waterfalls and scenes depicting rainfall. The village exhibition is one where the audience gathers up on a semicircular balcony and looks down upon an idealized—mud and cow dung— courtyard. Different acts from Swaminarayan’s life are highlighted through the use of spotlights that light up, in turn illuminating a variety of tableaus showing activities involving Swaminarayan, accompanied by commentary in English or Hindi. Neelkanth Darshan, the IMAX show on an 85’ x 65’ screen, is next. The film charts the life of Bhagwan Swaminarayan from childhood to adulthood, focusing on key events. Both the adolescent and adult Neelkanth are portrayed by androgynous actors. The ‘adult’ Swaminarayan is slim, has high cheekbones and full lips. He is an almost perfect copy of the feminized imagery of Ram and Shiva, often to be found in calendar art (Jain 2009). The story is in the form of a travelogue that ranges across India: from Ayodhya, Neelkanth’s birth place, to Gujarat, where he was to eventually settle. A colonial map of India, with nineteenth century spellings of towns and cities, flickers across the screen, with footprints appearing in chronological order to indicate the places Neelkanth/ Swaminarayan passed through. The footprints trace a route along the east coast of India, then down to Kanyakumari in the South, and then up to the West coast, to end in Gujarat. There are spectacular shots of the Himalayas, valleys, rivers, and coastal locations. Aerial photography is extensively used. Indian and German film-makers who had been hired to make the film used computergenerated shots of Mansarovar Lake, as the Chinese authorities did not give permission for shooting on location in Tibet. Re-titled ‘Mystic India’, the film has also been screened in IMAX theatres around the world. The young Neelkanth is shown as travelling all over India, barefoot and without any belongings, and in all kinds of terrain and weather conditions, to finally reach Gujarat, where he took over the (p.200) math (monastery) from Swami Ramanand, and eventually established his own order at the end of the eighteenth century. Ramesh Swami explained the system of crowd management at the fee-paying venues as follows: ‘At the start’, he said, … we have about six or seven shows of about seventy people each in Hall 1 (Hall of Values). At the conclusion of these shows, we have gathered around 500 people. They are then allowed into the IMAX, and when this finishes, they move on to the boat ride, and the whole crowd is cleared in about 50 minutes. He was keen to emphasize the significance of ‘time-management’ in the smooth running of the venues. This, he said, helps to maximize the volume of the traffic. This aspect came up in various discussions, including one about the ‘record time’ in which both the musical fountain and the brass statue of Swaminarayan had been built. As he put it, ‘experts’ were amazed that the entire temple Page 8 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes complex had been completed in just five years. Amidst a numerical listing of the fountain’s features—2,870 steps, 108 small shrines, etc.—a temple document notes that ‘its perfect geometric forms testify to ancient India’s advanced knowledge in mathematics and geometry’. Following the Neelkanth Darshan IMAX show, we move on to Sanskruti Vihar, the boat ride which is advertised as a ‘journey into 10,000 years of Indian civilization in ten minutes’.9 These are long boats—much like those in theme parks—that run along underwater tracks. The fore and aft sections are designed such that the vessels look like swans, an image that borrows from representations of ‘ancient Hindu’ culture in Indian cinema. Once again, commentary is available in either English or Hindi. It consists of descriptions of the variety of life-sized tableaus along both banks of the ‘river’. We move from the ‘ancient’ period depicting, among other things, Indian ‘achievements’ in the fields of astronomy, medicine (including ‘plastic surgery’), armaments manufacture and warfare, astrology, ‘the functioning of democratic governance’, debating, schooling, ‘the world’s first university’, mathematics, cattle rearing, maritime trade, and ‘inventions by the great rishi-scientists of India’. There are also tableaus representing significant religious figures, and various other famous personalities from Indian history. There are no representations of Muslims, or Islamic contexts. The boat ride ends at a tableau where cardboard cut-outs of modern Indians look out (p.201) from houses and various other urban locations, and the commentary asks that ‘we’ build upon the heritage of ancient civilization for a better future. In addition to the above, visitors can wander without charge in the Garden of Values and, of course, the supposed centre-piece of the complex, the temple monument. The Garden—also called Bharat Upvan (Garden of India)—consists of manicured lawns and gardens containing a series of themed tableaus with lifesize bronze statues. Themes include ‘India’s Child Gems’, ‘Valorous Warriors’, ‘Freedom Fighters’, ‘National Figures’, and ‘Great Women Personalities’. As in the case of the boat ride, the children, women, and men are exclusively drawn from Hindu contexts. From the relatively serene surroundings of the Garden, one can observe the hurly-burly of the traffic as it comes off the Nizamuddin bridge, heading towards the vast new privately developed residential complexes of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, or taking the clover leaf flyover towards NOIDA. As mentioned earlier, the temple itself is visible from quite a distance, and at night, when brightly lit up, it presents a vision of a massive, glowing monolith. In particular, the white marble surrounded by a plinth of pink stone gives off a spectacular nocturnal effect. According to Ramesh Swami, some 11,000 volunteers, artisans, and sadhus (monks) contributed ‘300 million man hours’ towards the construction of the entire complex. The temple consists of:

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes … 234 ornately carved pillars, nine ornate domes, twenty quadrangled shikhars, a spectacular Gajendra Pith (plinth of stone elephants), and 20,000 murtis and statues of India’s great sadhus, devotees, acharyas, and divine personalities. (www.akshardham.com; accessed on 12 February 2007). The centre-piece of the temple is a statue of Swaminarayan in a sitting pose. It is surrounded by smaller statues of the five gurus who have guided the movement since Swaminarayan passed away. In different corners of the temple are tableaus of Hindu gods and goddesses, including Shiv-Parvati, Ram-Sita, and RadhaKrishna. The temple is built at a considerable height, and visitors can also walk around the plinth that surrounds it. Called the Gajendra Pith, it … [weighs] 3,000 tons, has 148 full-sized elephants, 42 birds and animals, 125 human sculptures and decorative stone backdrops of trees, creepers, and royal palaces. (p.202) The temple design, according to an architecture magazine, ‘is inspired by North Indian style [sic] called “Nagradi Shaily”, in which all the dimensions are very important as they depend upon facing of the building [sic] and Vaastu’.10 In descriptions by the Swamis, temple information brochures, and on the AT website, the complex is presented as a slew of numbers—a site made concrete by hundreds of this, thousands of that, and millions of those. The temple is surrounded by a moat—Narayan Sarovar—and there is a pink stone, colonnaded walkway that runs around the moat. The covered walkway allows for circumambulation. The walls and pillars of the walkway also have carvings of various kinds. The Narayan Sarovar that surrounds the temple ‘contains water from 151 rivers and lakes’, including Mansarovar. This, we are informed, is in keeping with ‘Vedic’ traditions of ‘water pilgrimage’. The walkway, with a total length of around 3,000 feet, is made of Rajasthani red stone, and consists of: 1,152 pillars, 145 windows, and 154 Samvaran Shikhars, amounting to a total of 53,956 stones …. You can hear the soothing sound of water issuing from the 108 Gaumukhs. The soft chanting of the holy names of God permeates the parikrama [the walkway], giving an experience of peace and divinity. The two-tiered parikrama is the first of its kind in India. (www.akshardham.com; accessed on 12 February 2009).

An Ancient Modernity Rajan Swami, the PR in-charge at AT, was my initial guide to the complex. On my first visit, he took me to the large and modern building where the Swamis live. The ground floor contains residential accommodation, a substantial lobby, and Page 10 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes large air-conditioned sitting rooms with plush sofas. Rajan Swami is in his thirties. He tells me that many of the sants (saints, a term used interchangeably with swami) are highly qualified people, with university degrees. The head of the Delhi complex at the time of this fieldwork (2008–9) from IIT Delhi in 1973 and took diksha (‘vows’) in 1975. Another sant in his late seventies is known as ‘doctor Swami’, as he has an MBBS degree, having taken diksha in 1960. Many of the younger sants walk around with Motorola walkie-talkies. They are in charge of different departments: daily prayers, exhibition halls, PR, food, security, etc. The complex runs like a corporate park. When I (p.203) am introduced to him, the IIT-graduate swami speaks to me in English. He was in charge of the London temple for ten years. Monday—when the temple is shut to the public—is the day for maintenance work as well as shivir for volunteers. During the shivir, there are pravachans (‘discourses’), question and answer sessions, films, skits, and sessions that exhort the volunteers to adhere closely to the aims of the movement. One of the shivirs I attended was held in a large, centrally air-conditioned hall with marble flooring. The hall has a stage decorated with life-size statues of Swaminarayan and of the five gurus after him, including the current one. Swaminarayan stands in the middle, surrounded by others in gestures of obeisance. A large sun, its rays fanning out across the cloth screen, forms the background. On one side of the stage is a small room with darkened windows which serves as the control room for the audio-visual instrumentation. A swami is in charge of this room. Most of the volunteers (lay adherents of BAPS) sat on the ground. Some elderly volunteers and the sants sat on chairs. There were approximately 500 people in the hall. The session began with a bhajan (prayer) sung by one of the volunteers who sat on the stage. Others in the audience joined him. At the conclusion of the prayer, a film was played off a video monitor on a drop-down screen. The film was about Akshardham and Pramukh Swami, the current head of the sect. It also showed the opening ceremony in 2005, attended by, among others, President Abdul Kalam, the BJP leader L.K. Advani, and the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi. The film explained how Bramhaswarup Yogiji Maharaj (the fourth guru, 1892– 1971) had always wanted a temple on the banks of the Yamuna. At the conclusion of the video presentation, the volunteers performed a number of short skits. There was good humoured sending-up of some of the sants who were in-charge of various sections of the temple. They had been given different names, which were obviously recognized by the audience. One particular skit concerned a volunteer who liked to listen to ‘Radio Mirchi’ (a Delhi FM station). The humorous episode was about how the worker was caught listening to ‘FM radio’ and was warned by one of the sants not to do so. At the end of this presentation, there was another skit called ‘Radio Akshardham’ in which a TV newsreader purported to report upon various activities within the complex and its workers. During the news-reading, there was (p.204) a ‘live cross’ to the Page 11 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes Akshardham premises with an ‘on-the-spot’ reporter’ speaking to visitors about how they felt about visiting the temple, and the impressions they took away with them. This pre-recorded film-clip was also shown on the drop-down screen. At the end of the clip, the on-screen ‘reporter’, dressed in exactly the same attire, walked on to the stage—as if having walked off the screen to include the audience into his technological world—and bid goodbye. The penultimate event was a pravachan by Doctor Swami, who began with asking ‘What’s this FR radio?’, and was quickly corrected by the audience, who shouted back ‘FM radio!’ He went on to admonish those who listened to it, saying ‘Isse apne dil se nikal do’ (‘forget about this thing’). He also said that if anyone found someone else listening to it, they must ‘report’ that person to one of the sants. All through this, the sants gave instructions on their walky-talkies, and worked the audio-visual system with aplomb. The shivir ended with an aarti (lamp ceremony) and prayers by Doctor Swami, and the current head of the Delhi temple, the IIT-graduate Swami.

Mystic India in the Time of Surplus and Moral Consumption Akshardham embodies a number of separate processes that are collapsed into the making of a new culture of consumption and urban space. How do we think about Akshardham in terms of a ‘particular constellation of social relations, meeting, and weaving together at a particular locus’ (Massey 1994: 154)? To begin with, I would like to refer to the processes of consumption around Akshardham as those of surplus and moral consumption. Secondly, another way of understanding the making of this new urban space is to see it as one strand within broader processes of contemporary urban developments that relate to the idea of becoming ‘middle-class’ through certain practices of residence and housing that I have identified in my discussion of RWA activism and Bhagidari (Chapter four), and gated communities (Chapters five to seven). In this section, I take up the issue of ‘surplus’ and ‘moral’ consumption. The AT complex is part of wider—and massive—socio-spatial transformations that are taking place in Delhi and various other metropolitan centres. In particular, the making of ‘clean’ spaces such as Akshardham proceeds apace with the removal of ‘unclean’ spaces (p.205) such as Nangla Matchi. According to one estimate, between 2000 and 2006, fifty-three different jhuggi jhopri or slum colonies were demolished in Delhi. These forced evictions affected approximately 79,000 families (between 400,000–500,000 people), with the majority being ‘re-settled’ in outlying areas of Delhi such as Savda-Ghevda (Chapter one).11 The ‘cleared’ land is to be put to various uses, including new leisure and commercial activities. As mentioned above, Akshardham sits just across the river from the erstwhile basti (slum) of Nangla Matchi, demolished in 2006. There is a telling relationship that each of these sites has to discourses of legality and illegality. Hence, whereas the politico-spiritual clout enjoyed by

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes Akshardham effaces the notion of ‘encroachment’, there is no such room for manoeuvre for the bastis. Based on observations over a number of months, it is possible to outline certain characteristics of the visitors to AT. Firstly, they are—apart from the sundry foreign visitors—almost exclusively Indian. They are also non-English speaking, and hence, as I will suggest below, from a specific class fraction within Indian social structure. That is to say, unlike visitors to theme parks such as Disneyland, the visitors do not appear to be from ‘the upper-middle classes, bosses rather than workers’ (Zukin 1993: 232). While on weekends and public holidays, the car park is frequently full, a good number of the vehicles carry taxi number plates and appear to have been hired by groups of visitors. Secondly, and following from this, extended family and larger groups predominate, individuals and ‘nuclear’ families being rarer as visitors. Thirdly, there is a very large number of women visitors, and all-women groups are not an uncommon sight. A young woman who works in an NGO in Delhi told me that she would never visit the complex as she was ‘ideologically’ opposed to it, while others from what might be labeled the English-speaking middle-class either told me that they had never visited the complex, or that it never occurred to them to visit. Quite clearly, if the temple complex is part of the making of urban middle-classness, it is a very particular fraction that is its audience and patron. It is in this sense, perhaps, that we might speak of a ‘new’ middle-classness that brings together the various strands of a new consumer culture, relations with the state and with religiosity, the discourses of clean and unclean urban spaces, and, as I discuss below, certain anxieties about the relationship between consumption and ‘true’ Indian-ness. (p.206) Scholarship on shopping malls in the U.S. suggest that mall designers incorporate a specific principle in their design brief: namely, the ability of the mall ‘to contrast positively with the experience of everyday environment in the surrounding space’ (Gottdiener 2003: 131). So, for example, malls designed around the ‘Olde Towne’ theme play upon the ‘nostalgic yearning for an idealized conception of small town life … within a metropolitan milieu where the actual small town and its distinctive social relations have disappeared’ (Gottdiener 2003: 131). Though Akshardham is part of the larger configuration of urban spaces which also includes shopping malls in Delhi and Gurgaon, its relationship to its patrons is not the same as that discussed above. Neither is it, I suggest, like those theme parks that seek to represent their enclosed spaces as absolutely different from what is on the outside (Goss 1999; Urry 1996; Chapter six).

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes This theme park, with its appeal to Indian antiquity and ‘ancientness’ is not, in fact, located within a context of nostalgia that separates its space from the outside. Akshardham’s appeal is related to the fact that its tableau of consumption (of objects and spaces) is understood by its visitors and represented by its promoters as contiguous with the world outside. Its selfrepresentation in terms of technological mastery, efficiency, punctuality, educational achievement, and the processes of contemporary consumerism links it with the world of toll-ways, highways, shopping malls, city ‘beautification’ and slum-clearance drives, and the creation of spaces of middle-class identity. Akshardham is, then, a space of passage, a threshold space, rather than a model of sharply differentiated ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (Chakrabarty 2002). The temple complex is in the midst of, rather than removed from, the processes of contemporary modernity; nostalgia has little appeal for an audience whose dominant memory of the immediate past might be of the license-permit regime of the Five-Year Plan state where material benefits were largely sequestered by an industrial-bureaucratic elite. This theme park is based around the process of surplus consumption: the collapsing of time and space, and the refusal to consume ‘rationally’. Surplus consumption refers to consumption behaviour that unfolds through recourse to cultural symbols, meanings, and strategies generated across a number of time spans. The goods and experiences that are the objects of consumption are, as if, wrenched from a number of different contexts which are then effaced—or collapsed into indistinction—through the acts of consuming them. Surplus consumption is the (p.207) ‘strategy of engaging with the intensity of social and cultural changes introduced by (a number) of global forces’ (Srivastava 2007: 185). In light of the descriptive material in the sections above, surplus consumption unfolds in a number of ways, and is part of the processes of the making of contemporary urban identities. To begin with, consumption is part of the Akshardham experience in the most literal sense. I have noted above that the entrance lobby to the temple is designed in the manner of a five-star hotel. This —to impart the sense of a five-star hotel lobby—is its key role. Further, visitors can supplement their experience through eating at the food hall that has the ambience of a localized McDonald’s: brightly lit neon boards display information on different kinds of vegetarian foods, and the staff rush around in baseball caps with ‘Akshardham’ emblazoned upon them. There is also the well-stocked Akshardham shop which sells a wide variety of temple related goods including audio and video cassettes, calendars and diaries, DVDs, books, key chains, models of the temple, three dimensional images of the current head of the sect (in which his eyes follow the viewer’s gaze), T-shirts, and, of course, Akshardham baseball caps. The shop also sells a wide variety of Ayurvedic and other herbal remedies. An advertisement in the Indian Express dated 18 August 2005 nicely encapsulates the developing relationship between consumerism and ‘tradition’. Page 14 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes Published by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, the advertisement shows the well-known tableau of Gandhi’s Dandi March, located at a traffic light juncture in South Delhi. The caption reads, ‘The time has come for us to stand up for our rights again’. The advertisement is part of a consumer awareness programme called ‘Jago Grahak Jago’ (‘Wake up, Consumer!’) and includes a television programme (on Doordarshan, national television) called ‘Lo Satyavama Aa Gayee’ (‘Here comes Satyavama’), and a programme of the same name on All India Radio. There are also more abstract forms of consumption at AT. As mentioned above, visitors pay a combined entry fee for certain attractions and then are shepherded from one venue to another, namely, the Hall of Values diorama, the IMAX theatre, and finally, the ‘ancient India’ boat ride. Here, the relationship between the audience and the attractions calls for some comment. As noted above, the Hall of Values consists of a number of tableaus from the life of Swaminarayan and, at (p.208) the conclusion of each ‘episode’, the crowd moves to the next room in order to view other parts of the story. However, after a while, a pattern of viewing is established: the audience senses when a particular show is about to conclude and, before it actually finishes, the entire crowd rushes out of the hall into the next in order to get the best seats. This carries on right until the last show. By this time, however, it is not clear if anyone is actually interested in the ‘message’, since no one stays around till the end of a particular ‘episode’. The rush to get the best seats in the next performance space—a pattern of activity borrowed from a number of different contexts of Indian life—largely obliterates the notion of a contemplative audience awaiting spiritual enlightenment; the audience seeks the experience of the ‘ancient’ through the strategy of contemporary market behaviour. The Garden of Values, the manicured series of lawns with tableaus of ‘Famous Indian children’, ‘Great Men of India’, ‘Great Women of India’, etc. is another key attraction. To get to the Garden, one must pass a small water pool with a pair of large marble footprints that represent those of Bhagwan Swaminarayan. Some onlookers stand in reverence, eyes closed, and then throw money into the pond, others discuss what boon they might ask for, and still others merely read the plaque and then move on. On one of my visits, I came across a group of male cadets from the National Cadet Corps (NCC, that operates under the aegis of the defence forces, to ‘train’ school and university students in a variety of defence procedures) wandering around the Garden of Values. As the group walked past the ‘Great Men of India’ display, one of them pointed to the statue of nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak—pointing to the sky—and loudly exclaimed: ‘He is saying, “Hey kids, you better study hard!’’’; then, looking at Nehru’s statue: ‘that’s not how you stand “at ease”!’; and, finally at Gandhi: ‘What a body, man!’. The group then walked past a statue none could recognize. One of the boys said to another, ‘hey, isn’t that your grandfather?’ Everyone laughed loudly and the cluster wandered off, with one of them proclaiming ‘there is no fun wandering Page 15 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes around here without girls, just imagine what fun it would have been had the girls wing also come’. Visitors to AT traverse spatialized sensoria marked by, among other things, intensely grounded mnemonics that foreground the body of Bhagwan Swaminarayan, (Hindu) nationalist interpretations of Indian history and its ‘values’, and globally inspired—and sourced—hi-tech (p.209) religious robotics and other visual displays. One of the most significant aspects of the overall experience of the interaction can be captured through the notion of glancing where the relationship between humans and gods is not structured by intensity —defined in terms of a sustained and focused temporal relationship between the devotee and the divine. Rather, it is in the nature of an ‘extensive’—or, surplus— relationship. Here, ‘indifference’ rather than deep attention is an important context in the relationship between humans and a putative realm of the divine, the temple complex. For, many of the devotees are, simultaneously, modern tourists, packed into buses and rushed through the temple complex to visit the next tourist site in Delhi. The experience of becoming middle-class is, here, tied up with indifference—which is a way of consuming multiple experiences—rather than an intensity of engagement with contemporary processes and sites. I have utilized ‘indifference’ as a category of analysis rather than judgement. So, Akshardham provides a space for building cultural identities through enhancing the capacity for multiple engagements with nationalism, technology, concrete, educational achievement, the cultures of diasporic Hinduism, modern building techniques, the management of time, the dominance of Hindu spirituality over modern technology, the beauty of flyovers, a discourse of environmentalism, global leisure industries, and, of course, ‘ancient’ Hindu culture. The interaction with the visual, aural, and concrete aesthetics at AT is also the making of a moral middle-class. This is a context where consumption is an important activity, but is also located within the context of an anxiety about it and the meaning of ‘Indian-ness’. So, Ramesh Swami, Rajan Swami, and Rajeev Kishore, my school principal friend, often resorted to a very particular discourse on the relationship between frugality, which they saw as a significant aspect of religiosity, and the patently extravagant nature of the expenditure that was incurred in constructing the complex. Their explanations cohere around what could be called ‘retractable modernity’ and the making of a moral middle-class (Srivastava 2007). The making of a moral middle-class, one that has control over the processes of consumption, and hence modernity, is, in fact, located in the processes of (surplus) consumption itself, for it is only through consumption that one can demonstrate mastery over it. So, one consumes a wide variety of products of contemporary capitalism—IMAX (p.210) cinema, the ‘Disney-fied’ boat ride, Akshardham baseball caps—in combination with ‘spiritual’ goods such as religion and nationalism. What differentiates the moral middle class from others Page 16 of 19

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes is its capasscity to take part in this diverse form of consumption, whereas a more deracinated (‘westernized’) middle class is imagined as only being able to consume the products of capitalism. Here, the refashioning of urban space tells us something about perceptions of different kinds of middle-classness and their perceived relationship to consumption practices. It is also a narrative of the perceived relationship between space and identity. I have explored this idea elsewhere in a discussion around ‘women’s’ magazines such as Grihalakshmi and Grihashobha (Srivastava 2007). There I have suggested that the juxtapositioning of extraordinarily explicit articles on sex and sexuality with those on religious ‘values’, rituals, and texts should be understood in the context of the process of moral consumption, that is to say, as the activities of a class that sees itself as ‘truly’ Indian because it is not defined by foreign modernity, but is, rather, able to define its own version; this middle class can take part in the processes of modernity, but also ‘pull back’ and return to ‘tradition’. And, the process of consumption is simultaneously that of establishing its ‘morality’: for it is only through the engagement with a wide variety of things—commodities, spaces, whatever—that the ability to withdraw to the realms of tradition can be demonstrated. Hence, it is in this sense that AT represents a space for the making of a moral middle-class identity simultaneously as it is located in the various processes of surplus consumption; unlike van Wessel’s (2004) informants, there are no anxieties about consumption itself, but only a concern with the ‘best’ way of consuming. Finally, moral consumption, while it applies to both men and women, is particularly able to account for women as new consumers. ‘Moral consumption’ provides a solution to the problem of women as consumers, an aspect that links the Akshardham complex with the gated communities of Gurgaon. For historically, at least in the Indian case—but also for Europe—(Rojek 1993), there has been a fraught relationship between women and consumerism: women are expected to be non-consumers, devoted to the welfare of the home and the nation, rather than indulging in self-pleasure (Chatterjee 1993b; Roy 1998 (Chapter five); Sarkar 2001; Sunder Rajan 1999). At Akshardham, however, women revel in its spiritual-commodity space, roaming in family groups or with other (p.211) women, secure in the knowledge of their capacity to withdraw to the realm of the family etiquette and ‘true’ Indianness. So, we might say that in this context, the class politics of ‘distinctions’ (Bourdieu 1982) takes a detour through the post-colonial politics of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ (Chatterjee 1993a). Surplus consumption—the collapsing of leisure, religiosity, ‘work-ethic’, sacrifice (‘volunteering’), ideas about new urban spaces (highways and toll-ways, flyovers), nationalist heroes, filmic landscapes, and slum redevelopment—is, then, a manifestation of the socio-spatial transformations currently underway in Delhi.

Have You Ever Been to a Shopping Mall?

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes Episode One

I was talking to a group of women from West Delhi about shopping malls in the city, and which ones they liked the best and why. All of them worked as clerical staff in a government department. All except one were regular mall visitors. The one who did not frequent malls said she found them too expensive, even as a place of leisure, as, for example, both food and cinema tickets were beyond her budget. Instead, she said, she preferred to go to the India Gate monument and Akshardham. ‘Once you enter the premises’, she said, ‘you don’t feel as if you are in the middle of a busy city … our lives have become so busy, but once you are there, you feel as if you are somewhere else’. ‘It’s not really a temple’, she continued’, ‘it’s about seeing’. Episode Two

In early 2010, a colleague was carrying out fieldwork for a research project focused on villages surrounding Delhi. She had been talking to a group of village women, about whether they had ever accompanied any of their menfolk to one of the several shopping malls that now dot the Delhi landscape. The women complained bitterly that while the men in the family frequently went to malls, they almost never allowed any of the female relatives to accompany them. There was a great deal of animated discussion about what the women felt they were missing out on. Then, one of the women seemed to remember: ‘I have been to (p.212) a mall!’, she cried out. ‘It’s the one with that huge temple on the banks of the Yamuna!’ There was a great deal of laughter and others pointed out that she had mistaken the Akshardham site for a shopping mall. The connections between a shopping mall and the temple are not, as this chapter has discussed and as the above comments indicate, as farfetched as might seem. The following chapters move to the mall directly. Notes:

(1) . My first visit to the temple was in June 2006. (2) . ‘To strengthen family bonds, 25,000 homes have been inspired to conduct family Assemblies, wherein all the family members daily sit together [sic] for half an hour to pray to God, discuss their day, and understand each other’ (BAPS Document, n.d.: 14). (3) . ‘SC issues notice on Akshardham’, The Indian Express, 10 August 2004. (4) . Ibid. (5) . ‘Akshardham Construction Lawful: SC’, The Tribune, 13 January 2005. (6) . This and the following paragraphs are based upon ‘Akshardham Temple, New Delhi. Creating Architectural Grandeur in Double Quick Time’ (no author)

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Classifying Spaces, Specifying Classes in the magazine Archi Design Perspective, Vol. III, Issue 9–10, March–April 2006. New Delhi: Montage India Cyber Media. (7) . Since the mid-1980s, when it first became popular as a residential destination, it has experienced marked increases in real estate values. (8) . ‘Tale of Two Cities’, The Hindu, 30 May 2004. (9) . Given the obsession with precise enumeration, it is not clear why the twelve-minute boat ride is advertised as lasting for ten. (10) . ‘Akshardham Temple, New Delhi. Creating Architectural Grandeur in Double Quick Time’ (no author) in the magazine Archi Design Perspective, Vol. III, Issue 9–10, March–April 2006. New Delhi: Montage India Cyber Media. (11) . ‘List of Forced Evictions’. Document prepared by the Hazards Centre, Delhi, 2006.

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots Shopping Malls and the Narratives of Space Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords Focusing on shopping malls, this chapter seeks to track the ways in which ‘social’ and consuming life are imagined within narratives of their design, operation, and use. It is concerned with competing and complementary meanings of space that circulate through the web of relationships between mall visitors and planners. It is through a discussion of spaces that the chapter explores the ways in which consumers are imagined as differentiated consuming units located between multiple binaries such as ‘global’ and ‘local, and ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’. Through explorations of spatial discourses of mall planners, architects, managers, and theoreticians (such as those who write in trade magazines)–the chapter seeks to outline what is specific about the ways in which Indian malls produce spatial ‘myths of identity’ Keywords:   shopping malls, mall designs, consumer cultures, tradition and modernity, the global and the local

Philosophically, we've all kissed Nehruvian socialism good-bye. Anuraag Chowfla, Partner, Mani Chowfla Architects and Consultants. ‘An Office Space Odyssey’, Paran Balakrishnan, www.rediff.com/money/ 2003/jan/11spec.htm; accessed on 24 July 2008. To say that the Indian consumers (sic) are evolving everyday would be an overstatement, but that they need to be understood as much, is not!

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots ‘Best Food Forward’, Editor’s Note, 2010, Progressive Grocer, Vol. 4, No.1. The Indian ‘multilevel marketing’ company (also known as a Direct Selling Organization or DSO), company, Revolution Forever, has an appropriate name in as much as cultures of consumption embody ideas about a break from the past and changing relationships with family, neighbours, the city, and the nationstate. This chapter focuses on the ways in which the growing clamour around the ‘new’ India in the wake of economic liberalization since the early 1990s (Brosius 2010; Fernandes 2006; Oza 2006) expresses itself through narratives of spaces. Focusing on shopping malls, the discussion seeks to track, in a preliminary manner—for they are still a relatively new phenomenon in India (Brosius 2010; Voyce 2007)—the ways in which ‘social’ and consuming life are imagined within narratives of their design, operation, and use. So, whereas earlier chapters (p.214) explored urban spaces where consuming subjects live (Chapters four to seven) and pray (Chapter eight), the present one is concerned with spaces where the key activity is understood to be consumption itself. In this way, this chapter is the culmination of the discussion inaugurated in Chapter four on ‘post-nationalism’ and the ‘revolutionary’ middle-class citizen. In Chapter eleven, I will focus specifically on the Revolution Forever company mentioned above to address those other strands in the book that are concerned with the place of the poor in the city and its consumerist milieu. To understand consumption, ‘what we need to avoid is the search for preestablished sequences of institutional change, axiomatically defined as constitutive of the consumer revolution’ (Appadurai 1998: 73, emphasis in the original). This, Appadurai (1998: 73) goes on to say, will allow for contextually specific investigations, rather than ones that rely upon ideas of ‘repetition’ and ‘imitation’ of Anglo-European ‘precedents’. This observation might be supplemented by noting that the popular (and sometimes scholarly) characterizations of Indian culture as indifferent or antagonistic to material goods rely excessively on Hindu textual perspectives rather than custom. The centrality of the ‘householder’ (as opposed to the ‘renouncer’) in Hindu life that Madan (1988) speaks of, and historian Romila Thapar’s observation that it is ‘debatable whether the seeming dichotomy between the householder and renouncer is as much of a binary opposition as has been made out’ (Thapar 1988: 274), are significant contexts for understanding Indian engagements with contemporary consumerism. Hence, while it is true that contemporary consumption practices—perhaps borrowing from Gandhian and religious ideas— are also sites of anxiety about their ‘moral’ effects (Srivastava 2011; van Wessel 2004), the observation that they are viewed as ‘illegitimate’ grounds of identity (van Wessel 2004: 104) appears to fix their meaning too easily. This chapter proceeds with the assumption that what is unique about Indian engagements with the material world—and its sensorium—is the manner in which

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots engagements with it are processed through the specifics of cultural and historical circumstance, rather than concerns over whether to consume. ‘While the locations are local’, Sklair (2010) says, the ‘phenomenon [of malls] is transnational, connecting the built environment to capitalist consumerism’ (Sklair 2010: 142). The ‘attempt to turn more or less public spaces into consumerist space’ (Sklair 2010: 152) also finds strong echoes in India. The specific task of the present discussion, however, (p.215) is to investigate the local-ness of a transnational phenomenon: what the cultural and historical meanings are that Indian malls both draw upon and give rise to, achieving, in turn, ‘local iconicity’, and hopefully, commercial success. Building upon insights from scholarship on shopping malls for, say, Australia (Morris 1993) and the United States (Goss 1999; Zukin and Smith Maguire 2004), this chapter explores the ways in which Indian shopping malls produce ‘myths of identity’ (Morris 1993: 297) from cultural and historical circumstances of Indian modernity. As scholarship on malls from other parts of the world indicates (Abaza 2001 for Egypt; Erkip 2003 for Turkey; and Lui 2001 for Hong Kong), local histories impact in complex ways upon this Western artifact of consumerist modernity. This is not to suggest that the ‘local’ is an autochthonous zone of activity; rather, that the Indian local (here, practices of consumerism) requires exploration with regard to its own historical peculiarities. Hence, delineating the capitalismspecific trajectory for Muslims in Kerala, the Osellas point to how ‘Regardless of the unevenness and ambivalence of migrants’ experiences, Dubai’s skyscrapers, Kuwait’s sprawling refineries, or Riyadh’s opulent neighbourhoods stand for a world where Muslims are both wealthy and self-confident, a stark contrast … to the circumstances of India’s many Muslims’ (Osella and Osella 2000: 212). Indian consumption practices, historical identities, and transnational imaginations intersect in complex ways. However, while this chapter—focused upon the spatial discourses of mall planners, architects, managers, and theoreticians (such as those who write in trade magazines)—seeks to outline what is specific about the ways in which Indian malls produce spatial ‘myths of identity’, the kind of specificities that appear significant to me are not in the nature of an ‘Indian’ spatial sensibility (or, ‘tradition’) that exists outside the processes of modernity, countering the ‘alienating’ tendencies of modern life. There is something of a communitarian tendency (Trentman and Soper 2007) that appears, for example, to stimulate Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thinking in his observation that ‘unlike the modern marketplace, the bazaar … is geared to the production of social life. Unlike its modern counterpart, it privileges speech’ (Chakrabarty 2002: 73). The ‘republican tradition of citizenship’ in Western Europe and North America, Trentman and Soper suggest, ‘provides a source for much contemporary communitarianism and post-Marxist disaffection with commercial society’ (Trentman and Soper 2007: 3). Communitarian (p.216) criticisms of consumption—while articulating fears of ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘superficiality’—do Page 3 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots not, however, offer accounts of consumption-in-practice. These, they suggest, can show us how ‘buying and using things is also a resource for shared identity, communication and social practice’ (Trentman and Soper 2007: 5). The significant issue appears to be not the absence of sociality in modern forms of consumption but, rather, an accounting of those forms, that is, what kind of sociality is it, and what are its terms of exclusion and inclusion? Drawing upon the work of Walter Benjamin, Jon Goss (1999) suggests that the twentieth century North American ‘megamall’ is designed to express ‘a spatial unity and temporal stability that contrasts with dynamic and discontinuous, fragmented and segregated reality beyond its bounds’ (Goss 1999: 45). At the Great Mall of America in Bloomington, Minneapolis, for example, spatiotemporal sensibilities are manufactured through ‘[T]he narrative of lost authenticity and its redemption [that] takes place in spatial settings [of] Public Space, Marketplace, and Festival…, and in temporal settings [such as] Nature, Primitiveness, Childhood, and Heritage’ (Goss 1999: 50). In the previous chapter, I have noted that though ‘theme-ing’ is an important principle of organizing experience at the Akshardham site, the high-tech medium through which history, heritage, and contemporary and ancient religiosity are presented, serves, in fact, to connect the enclosed site with the contexts of change, anxiety, and aspirations that characterize the society outside its walls (for discussions on new ‘heritage’ architecture in Egypt and Dubai, see Abaza 2001 and Khalaf 2002 respectively). In this chapter, I build upon this perspective in order to explore how shopping malls in India do not simply offer an experience of discontinuity— of distinct ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds—but, rather, the contiguous worlds of Indian modernity.

Seduction across Spaces I hope this report helps in some ways … to innovate and sustainably seduce the Indian consumer of tomorrow. (Amitabh Taneja, Editor-in-Chief, Malls of India, 2009). This chapter investigates the social life of consumerist spaces. However, rather than primarily focusing on the ways in which ‘shopping centers (p.217) produce a sense of place’ (Morris 1993: 298), it is concerned with the competing and complementary meanings of space that circulate through the web of relationships between different users of space, including their planners. It is through a discussion of spaces that the chapter will engage with the ways in which consumers are imagined as differentiated consuming units located between multiple binaries such as ‘global’ and ‘local, and ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’. The ‘culturally differentiated consumer’ (Mazzarella 2003: 243) is, of course, an important marketing tool utilized by Indian advertising firms when selling their own significance to international clients as ‘cultural guides’ (Mazzarella 2003: 234) to the putative riches of the Indian market; it is Page 4 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots also an identity that comes into play—in different ways, as we will see below—in discussions that surround new spaces of consumption such as shopping malls. The next chapter explores the context of mall visitors—women and men, young and old, those who purchase and those who cannot. It investigates the extent to which they behave as they are ‘meant’ to. That is to say, if a ‘shopping center is a place combining an extreme project of planning competence (efforts at total unification, total management) with an intense degree of aberrance and diversity in local performance’ (Morris 1993: 306), then, where do planning and performance meet, if ever? And, does it matter for our understanding of contemporary consumer cultures? The development of shopping malls in different towns and cities across India relates to a number of spatial transformations currently under way in a wide variety of contexts. Indirectly, as ‘lifestyle’ aspects, they relate to the consolidation of new patterns of residence and leisure discussed in other parts of the book; malls, gated communities, and theme parks are contiguous spaces of lifestyle activities that are imagined to be complementary. A succinct perspective on this is offered by the trade magazine Progressive Grocer: Referring to the organic foods segment, Sumit Saran, director of the SCS group says, ‘Cosmopolitan markets in India are ready for organic foods. One thing retailers really need to understand is that organic is a lifestyle and not just food. If one is selling organic foods to the consumers, one needs to give them an organic lifestyle—organic breakfast, organic lunch, and organic dinner. We still cannot see organic aisles at modern retail stores that are specifically meant for the organic consumer!’ (Misra 2010: 34). (p.218) ‘Lifestyle’ refers to a series of connections that, taken together, makes for an understanding of changing consumer tastes, as well as incorporating the idea that consumer activity is the grounds for ‘what life “should” be all about’ (Miles 1998: 59). This, as I will discuss later, also relates to the issue of affects: what kind of subjectivity is required for the success of a consumerist culture? There are some direct forms of spatial transformations that constitute the broader context within which the growth of malls can be located. These include American-style fast food restaurants and ‘mobile kiosks’ that sell a range of new food ‘concepts’, the establishment of national chain of ‘corner’ (known as kirana) stores owned by major corporations, and quite significantly, the targeting of smaller towns (the ‘tier II and III’ cities) as sites of medium-size ‘hypermarket stores’. In the context of the ongoing economic and social changes in India, ‘food and its consumption’, as Donner (2008) points out, ‘represents a prime site of struggles over meaning and new patterns’ (Donner 2008: 14). International food Page 5 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots chains such as Taco Bell (serving ‘Mexican’ food), McDonald’s, and Domino’s Pizza have begun to expand their presence across a range of locations. So, whereas Taco Bell recently (2010) established its first restaurant in Bangalore, McDonald’s, which entered Indian market in 1996, has opened its latest outlet in the Punjab city of Patiala, the tenth McDonald’s in Punjab and one of 169 across India. Domino’s is also emerging as a significant player. In 2010, it operated 274 stores across India, and planned another twenty-five in 2011–2012. ‘Mobile kiosks’ serving ‘international’ food are another recent development that articulate the rationale of their presence (and success) through a vocabulary of innovative spatial amendment: Leading foodservice operator Chilli Seasons Food & Beverages Pvt. Ltd. (CSFB) has launched yet another outlet of its mobile kiosk concept …. [The head of marketing said that] ‘We intend to bring the culture of international street food in India with quality, hygiene, value-for-money; hence we are expanding aggressively for this’. (Progressive Grocer, January 2010: 8). If the street is to be transformed—cleansed—through a transnational commodity-broom, the street corner is also becoming linked to a network of national and global spaces. It was reported in 2010 that the Future Group corporation, which currently operates 120 Big Bazaar discount supermarkets, ‘plans to open 850 to 900 KB’s Fair Price shops’ (p.219) (Progressive Grocer January 2010: 10). These stores are specifically imagined as ‘modern trade players in the neighbourhood space’. Finally, the sweep of new spaces, wending its way across metropolitan streets, street corners, and neighbourhoods incorporates the province—that space ‘marked by slowness, by absence of the new and recent’ (Kumar 2006: 397)— into the narratives of rejuvenation and efflorescence. Hence, V-Mart Retail Ltd.—the chain of medium-sized hypermarket stores with focus on tier II and III cities [has recently opened two stores] … … located in the districts of Sultanpur and Renukut in Uttar Pradesh. [The company chairman stated that] ‘It has been our constant endeavour to reach out to masses and offer world-class shopping experiences at affordable prices. Therefore, we have deliberately expanded in tier II and III cities’. (Progressive Grocer, January 2010: 14). V-Mart—with a presence in forty-three cities in northern and western India—is not the only company that has a feel for the province. Vishal Retail Ltd. recently (2010) opened its sixteenth store in the Punjab town of Nawanshahr in district Page 6 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots Shahid Bhagat Singh Nagar. Vishal Retail ‘also has presence (sic) across the cities of Amritsar, Patiala, Bhatinda, Phagwara, Khanna, Abohar, Sunam, Sangrur, Batala, Manimajra, Gurdaspur, Sirhand, and two stores each in Ludhiana and Jalandhar’ (Progressive Grocer January 2010: 14). Tier II and III cities (sometimes also called ‘category B’ and ‘category C’ cities respectively) are increasingly within sight of mall planners and developers. This, as the executive editor with a leading trade magazine relating to shopping trends told me, has to do both with economics as well as the ‘culture’ of these cities: Right now, there is a great deal of interest in tier II and III cities, because land is cheap and so the costs are lower. However, in these cities, the mix needs to be different [compared to tier I cities], you will need different kinds of retailers. In many of these places, there is nothing to do—I don’t know what young people do in these cities!—so, the malls provide more choices as well as leisure and entertainment. Also, in these towns it may not be so much about ‘demand’, as about aspirations. The ‘cultural’ aspect is also played up in other contexts. The magazine Shopping Centre News inaugurated a discussion of the ‘retail revolution process’ underway in the cities of Dhanbad, Bokaro, and Ranchi in the (p.220) state of Jharkhand (2000) in Eastern India, through pointing out that despite the presence of a large number of ‘discerning customers’, retail and entertainment options are almost ‘non-existent’ (Sinha 2010: 69). There are several projects in the offing in Jharkhand that seek to address the ‘experience of a mall that is missing’ (Sinha 2010: 69), and ‘[W]ith almost 5 to 6 new shopping centres covering almost 10,000,000 sq. ft modern retail space coming up in the area, it is the retail real estate hotspot of Eastern India’ (Sinha 2010: 69). The ‘hotspot’ nature of the region does not, however, only relate to the economic opportunities (apparently) on offer in a region famous for its mineral resources and steel manufacturing industry. Jharkhand has also witnessed a sustained and violent Maoist movement with substantial areas under the control of Maoist groups contesting the writ of the state. It is perhaps this context that encourages the developer of Dhanbad’s Ozone mall to point out that ‘We will have CCTV surveillance system and 24-hour armed security in the mall’ (Sinha 2010: 72). There are also other ways in which the apparently global modernity Dhanbad’s Ozone mall brings to Eastern India is unmistakably a part of regional circuits of consumption and aspiration. Hence, The mall has done strategic zoning to facilitate easy navigation for shoppers. While the first floor has been dedicated to national and international brands, the second floor has a majority of regional brands from Kolkata and [other parts of] Eastern India. The third floor houses

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots major local retailers from Towns like Ranchi, Bokaro and Asansol [the last in West Bengal]. (Sinha 2010: 70). The modern taste for ‘regional’ goods is not, of course, new and emerges out of a history of state-sponsored handicrafts production and government-owned emporia in major cities that sell regionally sourced goods from different states of India (Wilkinson-Weber 1999). The Indian incarnation of transnational consumerism builds upon the state’s active promotion of ‘local’ cultures, itself part of the post-colonial agendas of ‘national integration’ and cultural pride. Bokaro, it will be remembered from the discussion of Chapter five, was one of the ‘steel towns’ constructed by the Indian state as a ‘model’ post-colonial residential and industrial site. Bokaro’s nature as the spatial expression of deferred consumption—in favour of consolidating industrial capacity—translated into the state’s monopoly of land use and ownership. If (p.221) ‘zoning’ in the Ozone mall illuminates the incorporation of nationalist cultural agendas within privatized systems of consumption, then current negotiations between the state and mall builders in Bokaro offer an additional glimpse of other ways in which the state’s monopoly powers are being eroded: Although one of the major reasons for the lack of retail infrastructural development in the city [of Bokaro] is that the majority of the land belongs to SAIL [the state-owned Steel Authority of India Limited]. However, Amit Reality has now entered into a strategic lease arrangement with SAIL to develop the city’s first state-of-the-art modern retail infrastructure. [The] … Bokaro Mall is projected to be Bokaro’s first shopping mall. (Sinha 2010: 70). The conversion of Nehruvian spaces of production into consumerist ones is commonly imagined within contexts that link Indian consumer culture to ‘global’ standards, experiences, expectations, and styles. Here, the Indian ‘High Street’ is a significant notion within writings about malls. The ‘High Street’ is a national lifestyle highway that is also an affective domain. So, the High Street Ishanya mall in the west Indian city of Pune—which was earlier known as just Ishanya— has been transformed: … from its earlier enclosed, only home & improvement profile … [to] a lifestyle centre—with arcades around open spaces, landscaping, and water bodies. The idea [is] to recreate a busy high street shopping experience with cafes, kiosks, awnings, florists, landscaping, an ambience of fun/ relaxation, discos, etc. (Chakraborty 2009: 44).

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots The affective dimension of Indian high street lies in the fact that it re-introduces shoppers to the culture of the ‘Indian street’ through a transnational aesthetic that will, putatively, capture the essence of the street, while simultaneously keeping out its smells, crowds and other discomforts. The High Street Ishanya mall has: A vibrant ‘street character’, complete with flea markets, florists, bustlers (sic), magicians, street performer … a Ferris wheel, carousel rides and lots of dining options to suit all budgets …. (Chakraborty 2009: 44). The trope of the transnational Indian high street is also the context for careful evaluation of the ‘bazaar mentality’ of the B-town which, if not (p.222) accounted for, might threaten the cultural and economic significance of the High Street: To cater to these markets in the right way, one needs to evaluate the buying trends and capacities carefully. While developers need to understand the local culture and flavor, the retailers also need to understand what worked in metro cities may not work in B-towns. Both the developer and retailers need to create a space which connects with the people. (Sinha 2010: 74). The idea of ‘backward’ provincial mentalities as obstacles to achieving modernity constitutes, as Nita Kumar (2003) notes, a well-established theme within Indian cultural discourses. Gandhian championing of the village as the site of ‘true’ Indian-ness (Nandy 2001) existed alongside an equally elaborate discourse on the backwardness of the province. The nationalist leader, Bipinchandra Pal (1858–1932), was to describe the student ‘messes’ of Calcutta as ‘small republics’ (Pal 1973: 157) that taught the lessons of democracy and egalitarianism to their (male) members otherwise steeped in the ‘orthodox’ ways of the provinces from where they came; booklets published under the Bombay Citizenship Series (Bulsara 1948) were specially focused on ridding the city of ‘the primitive mental condition … [brought to it] from our numerous villages’ (Bulsara 1948: 20); and, more recently, mass-appeal fictional and nonfictional works, such as those by Shobha De, explicitly position the metropolis— in clear distinction to the province—as the site of a consumerism-led Indian renaissance (Dwyer 2000). It is within this context that malls—and consumerist lifestyles—are imagined as enabling mechanisms, and as potential grounds for overcoming a variety of provincial handicaps. South Delhi’s ‘luxury’ mall Emporio—built and owned by DLF—is one of several in the city that has provided display and retail space to well-known art galleries. In a recent newspaper report, the owner of Delhi Art Gallery located within the mall noted Page 9 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots that ‘From our art gallery at Emporio we have sold high-end art to people from tier-two cities who have never bought art or even visited an art gallery before’ (Sharma 2010: 2). A visit to a high-end consumer mall—Emporio houses only luxury international brands, such as Cartier and Tag Heuer—is, in fact, envisaged as an encounter with the democratic potential of consumerism simultaneously as it fulfills the drive towards acquiring social status (Zukin and Smith Maguire 2004: 177). (p.223) The economic stimulus for mall development in India relates to the fact that ‘it was found that retail developments gave the highest rate of returns as compared to any other form of real estate development’ (Agarwal 2009: 177). In this, the Indian experience echoes a global one. So, as a Chinese real estate consultant points out, ‘[I]n any asset class across the globe—USA, Singapore, or Dubai—the shopping centre produces the highest gross operating profit for a real estate developer’ (Chakraborty 2009: 42). Notwithstanding this, the first Indian mall—Crossroads in Mumbai—began operations only in 1999, almost fifty years after its European and North American counterparts (Goss 1999; Söllner 2008). According to an industry source, in 2010, ‘modern retail’ comprised slightly over 10 per cent of total retail business in India (Mallsnext Preface 2009: 12). This figure hovered around 6 per cent in 2008 (Taneja 2009: 6). These relatively small figures (but significant growth) may have received a massive fillip had the impressive plans for mall construction that were around only a few years ago not been stymied by the global economic downturn; as recently as 2007, there were plans for ‘700-plus malls … to come up by 2010’ (IMAGES F & R Research 2009: 135). This would have been a four-fold increase at an all-India level from the current (2009) figure of 172 operational malls. As of September 2009, 174 new malls were due to open by the first quarter of 2011, a figure that ‘reveals some amount of caution in mall development … but not a general pessimism about the future of modern retail in India’ (IMAGES F & R Research 2009: 135). There are, as other industry based research suggests, considerable grounds for optimism with respect to the future of the ‘modern retail’ sector. A 2005 study by the Delhi-based National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER)—whose members of governing body are drawn primarily from the upper reaches of the corporate sector—provides interesting insights into the possible reasons for the lack of ‘pessimism’ in the ‘organized’ retailing business to which malls belong. The study, entitled ‘The Great Indian Market’, was carried out in collaboration with the Business Standard news magazine, and provided a snapshot of existing and projected consumer demand across a number of categories—of goods, cities, and the rural-urban divide—at the time of its publication. The study points out that between 1995 and 2010, the demand for cars would increase over ten times (from 276,000 to 3,466,000), whereas the demand for colour television sets (p.224) and refrigerators would go up by Page 10 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots multiples of nine and six respectively (NCAER’s Market Information Survey of Households 2005: 3). The upward trend is confirmed through another set of data that deals with ‘Penetration of Consumer Durables’. The study predicted that between 1995 and 2010, the number of households owning cars, refrigerators, and white goods per thousand households was set to increase from 16.1 to 91.4, 86.1 to 224.9, and 149.4 to 451.7 respectively (NCAER’s Market Information Survey of Households 2005: 7). Another, more recent, NCAER report addresses the spatial dimension of consumer demand in a more direct manner. In keeping with the re-orientation of vision towards the putatively aspiring hinterland, it provides a classification that marketers might use to re-think their strategies of selling. Here, tier II cities are renamed ‘Boomtowns’ and tier-III as ‘Niche cities’: Sectors heavily geared towards demographics—consumer durables, financial services, FMCG, and apparel—may follow typical patterns where the boomtowns will be the next big pockets, and we see some early evidence of this in the household data. At the same time, more specialized consumer markets, such as luxury goods, big ticket durables, entertainment services and housing may find further inroads in niche cities. (Shukla et al. 2008: 3). Notwithstanding the promise of Boomtowns and Niche Cities, it is, unsurprisingly, the ‘Megacities’ that are home to the largest number of malls. Of the seventy-nine operating malls in North India, forty-four were in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR)—which includes the satellite towns of NOIDA and Gurgaon)—whereas of the fifty-six malls in Western India, Mumbai had thirtyseven. North India—and within it the Delhi region in particular—exhibits the most intense consumerist activity.1 The India City Competitiveness Report for 2009 ranks Delhi the highest in terms of ‘demand conditions’ (Kapoor 2009: 28), ahead of Mumbai. And, all five cities grouped under the ‘Niche’ heading— characterized by high demand for ‘luxury goods and big-ticket durables’—are located in North India.2 In 2009, the total area as shopping mall space in North India was 24.7 million sq. ft (expected to increase to 49 million sq. ft by 2011), whereas the figures for Western, Eastern, and Southern India stood at 16.36 (22), 4 (6.4), and 7.2 (18.43) respectively (Mallsnext Preface 2009: 12). Though folk sociology characterizes South India as consumerist backwater, these figures indicate a more than two-fold increase in mall space in the region.

(p.225) Crucibles of a New Era Western modernity, Jon Goss says, ‘narrates the loss of genuine public interaction, transaction, and festivity under the progressive privatization, commercialization, and rationalization of urban life’, and, ‘The Mall (of America) attempts to recover their possibilities in associated, ideal urban forms’ (Goss 1999: 52). Further, ‘The narrative of lost authenticity and its redemption takes Page 11 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots place in spatial settings (of) Public Space, Marketplace, and Festival…, and in temporal settings (such as) … Nature, Primitiveness, Childhood, and Heritage’ (Goss 1999: 50). Spatial myths of identity, as Morris (1993: 298) puts it, are significant aspects of the ways in which a mall engenders a ‘localized affective relationship’ (Morris 1998: 67, emphasis in the original). Market places have, of course, historically always been much more than sites of pure economic transactions (if at all it is possible to identify such dealings), serving as sites of sociality in a number of different ways (Yang 1998). The ‘problem’, as some mallindustry theorists see it, is precisely this: privatized public spaces that the malls are, there is only so much sociality investment capital can countenance. The problem for the mall owner is to calibrate sociality so that it issues an exchange value. Here, the notion of ‘lifestyle’—combining spatial, temporal, behavioural, and stylistic aspects—is key to striking parity between sociality and spending. As the next chapter will explore, a wide cross-section of the urban population now visits malls that are both in its immediate environment as well as those in other cities; shopping malls, at least for now, are something of a tourist attraction, particularly for residents of small towns on their visits to large cities. This echoes the situation in other non-western contexts such as Egypt (Abaza 2001) and Turkey (Erkip 2003). Young people form a considerable section of the mall-visiting population. However, it is not only the well-off youth who frequent malls. Along with these, there are large numbers of those of modest means. And, just as significantly, couples form a healthy proportion of the population of the not-so-well-off visitors to malls. Delhi’s public culture can be particularly harsh on courting couples, and malls are new spaces that provide shelter for those who do not have parental approval or access to private spaces for taking part in the courting rituals of adolescence and young adulthood. Malls are also greatly favoured by young women of all backgrounds. Here, women wander around singly (p.226) or in groups, wear clothing of their choice, and hold hands with their male friends without running the risk of being subjected to the sanctions and harassments of an overtly masculine public culture. Then, there are older women for whom—in addition to shopping—malls have become social spaces where one may ‘hang around’ outside the ‘normal’ hours that are allowed to women in a city such as Delhi. Malls are also places where, in a highly stratified society, the relatively poor act out fantasy of passing as another: as ‘global Indians’ connected to transnational worlds and participants in the great drama of cultural and economic change. Industry data indicates a relatively low ‘conversion’ rate with respect to ‘foot falls’ and purchases. One industry source held it to be roughly thirty per cent.3 The following news report aptly summarizes an often repeated lament by mall operators regarding their inability to convert pleasure into hard cash: In cities like Delhi, with extreme weather conditions, malls have become a runaway success. Even at the height of summer season, when temperature soars up to 42 degree celsius, shopping is no more an unpleasant exercise. Page 12 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots Instead, these malls in various part of the city have made it a pleasurable exercise—in fact, it has become a way to relax and chill out in an airconditioned environment! (Sinha 2008). As I will discuss below, the manner in which Delhi’s shopping malls produce a sense of place does not rely on narratives of a lost ‘authentic’ past and a denuded present (made so through the eviscerating processes of modernity), as suggested of many western malls. Rather, their spatial strategies borrow from a complex mix of discourses regarding the strictures of the Five-Year Plan state and the promise of its post-liberalization successor, new forms of democracy and its sub-national and transnational spaces, and the ideal relationship between consumerism, globalization, and Indian identity. The crucial issue through all this, from the perspective of mall operators, remains one of engendering a matrix where sociality and consumption become linked characteristics. Once again, the vital issue of ‘lifestyle’ as the grounds for this congruence. Mall theoreticians from the industry address this aspect through thinking through the peculiarities of the Indian consumer culture in general, and mall culture in particular. ‘Indian consumers’, as the editor of an industry magazine told me: (p.227) … don’t buy their groceries for the entire month as in the U.S., say. You can simply order from your kirana [corner] store on a regular basis and he will deliver to your door. He will also give you credit. Also, not everyone has a car, and there is no ‘volume’ shopping. So malls in India have to take account for these factors. Our infrastructure is very poor, so it is a real effort to drive to a mall. There has to be a compelling reason for people to visit malls. This, simply put, relates to the issue of habitus, the ‘open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 133). Older (‘backward’) manners of consuming that relate to the kirana store culture—haggling, price consciousness, and putting little value on shop-aesthetics—act as barriers to the success of ‘modern retail’ and require modification. However, the situation is only compounded by the ‘backward’ and unregulated nature of the mall construction business itself. The editor quoted above offered the following perspective on the several malls in Gurgaon: All the malls have the same mix. Some investors had land, so they built malls. Then it became a race to build: ‘If he is building so should I’. Then, there is the ludicrous rent situation, many retailers also stay away [from malls] because of this.4 Now take the case of [names one of the largest malls in Gurgaon] … it is run in a typical landlord fashion: the owner had Page 13 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots land so he built a mall. Normally, it works like this: a mall owner goes from potential anchor store to anchor store, saying such and such store is here, you also need to be here. Some stores are signed up with promises that such and such store will be next to yours. However, eventually only 60 per cent of the mall is full, and the word gets around. So the other 40 per cent never come. This mall is huge, so it has to get all kinds of stores. That is why it has an identity problem. The ‘identity problem’—located within an outdated habitus—gets to the heart of the project of promoting mall shopping as an affect of contemporary modernity. The project seeks to re-engineer a modern Indian subjectivity that moves beyond treating commerce as commerce, as both Indian consumers and ‘typical’ mall landlords are inclined to do. What is required, as one mall manager told me, is an education in ‘etiquettes of modern shopping’. She was convinced that this was possible. After all, she went to note, travelers on Delhi’s new Metro rail network had learnt (p.228) to ‘behave differently’. In the Metro, as Rashmi Sadana (2010) points out, ‘People mostly sit quietly; they do not eat or drink or spit. Most noticeable is what is missing: heat, sweat, food, smell, trash. The elements have been reordered, enabling a different view of this city of 14 million’ (Sadana 2010: 78). Perhaps the mall manager quoted above had seen the film clip of visiting novelist V.S. Naipaul riding the Metro, in which ‘he speculates that the experience of riding the metro will, over time, “make them [the passengers] more civil”’ (Sadana 2010: 78). The key to the success of the malls, as industry representatives see it, lies in inculcating a new set of affects located within an altered habitus. Encouraging the ‘dispositions’ that meet the requirements of new consumerism requires seamless cohabitation between commerce, sociality, and culture. Indian culture, as one industry representative saw it, may, in fact, be particularly suitable for the purposes of making a consumer culture: StarCentres [a mall management and design company] is convinced about the viability of a culturally-inclined leisure and retail centre. Referring to The Alamo in Texas, [the CEO of StarCentres] says, ‘This major tourist attraction in USA is a memorial for a 12-day battle between Mexican and Texan solders in 1836 …. More than 2.5 million people a year visit the … complex, which is anchored in just one event in American history. Imagine the possibilities for a 2,000-year-old civilization like ours!’ (Chakraborty 2009: 47). The putatively inherent Indian proclivity for cultural diversity is also the grounds upon which advanced capitalism might flourish. ‘We have a fantastic mix of cultures’, as one mall designer told me, ‘and we need to use it for mall design’. Indeed, Indian culture might itself be best imagined as a ‘tourist culture’ and Indians as permanent tourists within it. So, the mall designer continued, ‘we Page 14 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots should give [mall visitors] coffee and chhach [buttermilk, particularly imagined as a ‘rural’ beverage] … ethnic experience’, and that ‘hundreds of such elements’ could become part of mall design. The state’s role in marketing Indian culture as a global ‘brand’ has a relatively long history (as in the various International Festivals of India, for example). However, it is the more recent shift towards localized promotion—say, the cultural confidence in Indianness indexed by Shobha De—that links it to the spatial imagination of malls. My designer acquaintance went on to note the parallel processes of the state and the market that delineate culture as market and marketable: (p.229) So, for example, [the recently built] Terminal III at Delhi Airport will have a Dilli (Delhi) Bazaar where you can buy bangles and eat different kinds of foods available in Delhi. The tourist experience begins right there, at the airport …. It is also the Indian culture-as-tourism-sensibility that, for her, holds the potential for another avenue in mall design: ‘there is a Venice-themed mall being designed in NOIDA’, she pointed out, ‘and I think that will work’.

Making Meanings: Democracy, Culture, and Malls While mall operators seek ideal consumers and mall visitors have divergent reasons for visits, there is another group that is keenly interested in the relationships between commerce and commingling. Mall designers provide another gloss on this relationship. Rakesh Gupta is in his mid-40s. He completed a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Delhi’s prestigious School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) in 1990, and then a master’s degree in the subject from the United Kingdom. He came back to India in 1996 and started his practice ‘in a garage’. It was, he says, ‘a very bad time’, as there was very little private development activity where architects could be involved. The chief employer of architects for large-scale construction projects was the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the state-owned land monopolist (see Introduction). Moving from the ‘garage’, Gupta opened his first office in NOIDA, Delhi’s satellite city in the state of Uttar Pradesh. One day, the office was visited by a businessman who eventually commissioned Gupta’s firm to design the Metropolitan Mall in Gurgaon. It was after this that his practice flourished. At present, the business occupies a massive building in an ultra-expensive locality in South Delhi. The ground floor is a massive and ultra-modern work area: there are rows of computer terminals, and various other tools that go to make a modern architectural practice. The office buzzes with the conversations of young women and men poring over colourful computer screens and busy in conversations with clients and each other. It is an impressive set-up and looks every bit like a prosperous practice. The very large house in which the practice is located—itself in one of the most expensive residential localities in Delhi—has been entirely converted into an office.

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots (p.230) The walls of the meeting room where I waited to meet Gupta were adorned with news clippings about the firm, interviews with Gupta, newspaper articles about him and his fellow colleagues, and articles authored by him for various publications. There were also glass-framed plans of the various offices, shopping malls, and other projects the firm has designed. Gupta told me that there is almost no ‘social architecture’ in India anymore, as the government had handed over almost all construction activity to private companies. Hence, architects by and large now work for private developers. So, he said, construction and design of the capital of Chhattisgarh state, Raipur, had been ‘pretty much handed over to private parties’, who, in turn, employed architects. He was despairing of the ‘intellectual’ state of the Indian architectural profession and told me that ‘for the past thirty years or so, we have produced no distinct discourse on architecture in India’. He suggested that part of the reason is the prohibition on ‘private practice’ at Delhi’s SPA, his alma mater, ‘and so the best people’ do not teach. In addition to malls, Gupta’s firm is also involved in designing large-scale gated communities in small towns and I was keen to know his thoughts on the design aspects of Gurgaon’s residential enclaves. I asked him about Victoria Park. ‘Oh’, he said, ‘it’s just pastiche’. He says that he watched a ‘presentation’ by the architect of the complex, where a basic design of building-interior was modified through a set of props: ‘If you wanted a “Spanish” design, he would add on one set of props, if “Italian”, another set’. The implicit critique of ‘pastiche’ in the age of the hybrid—where mall visitors might be offered both coffee and chhach—sits oddly with the tenor of the times; it does, however (as I have also noted in Chapter seven), say something of the lingering nostalgia for authenticity and ‘depth’ (Jameson 1984) that accompanies spatial transformations. Gupta is not alone in this. Another very prominent architect, Amit Mehrotra, had once told me that he would like to design shopping areas such as Dilli Haat, a government run open-air space that ‘provides the ambience of a … village market’ in Central Delhi. However, he added, ‘I can’t design those kinds of places, so there’s no point dreaming’. There is an echo of Frederic Jameson’s critique of ‘aesthetic populism’ (Jameson 1984: 54) in both Gupta’s and Mehrotra’s lament for a solid centre, both in terms of style or a social context (the ‘village market’). Perhaps it is the relentless interweaving of transnational and Indian (p.231) processes of consumerism, and the dizzying proliferation of choices and styles that marks it, that is also the stimulus for the search for a stable ground: the idea of social benefit and utilitarian consequence within the mêlée. I once asked Rakesh Gupta about his opinion on the differences between Indian and American malls. ‘I think’, he said, … shopping malls are one of the very few truly democratic spaces … where the corporate executive as well as his driver can wander around without being barred …. The Indian malls I have designed are different from the Page 16 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots American ones in that our malls are nor hermetically sealed. I always try to make it a public place, where there is a connection between the outer and the inner space. So, it is a mixture of the kind of ‘open’ shopping areas of Old Delhi, and a modern shopping mall. The other difference [between Indian and American malls] is that malls in general are designed to make exiting as difficult as possible, so that you wander past as many shops as possible. This is not true of the malls we design. I am really interested in creating public spaces under the constraints I work in, which is that the bottom line for the client is to make money. However, despite the architect’s attempts at salvaging and incorporating Indian culture (‘the shopping areas of Old Delhi’) within and against the powerful processes of transnationalism, there is a significant sense that the Indian consumer is not particularly mindful—or caring—of this aspect. ‘As long as they have a clean, air-conditioned environment’, Gupta mentioned, ‘that’s really what they want’. Malls, he continued, ‘are novel things in India—so they [the visitors] do not really care. A critical attitude will come later’. In the absence of a ‘critical attitude’, the makers of new spaces of urban consumption must manufacture their own. Once again, the problem of affect. Amit Mehrotra has been engaged in designing a ‘super luxury’ mall. I asked him how he was going to ensure that a mall of this kind was visited by the ‘right’ kind of person. Well, he said, a hotel lobby makes you feel at home because ‘there’s a buzz’. The new mall ‘will work on the same principle … piano playing in the lobby, women having coffee … very classy and classic atmosphere. People will feel intimidated to come in (sic)’. However, in other circumstances, the ‘buzz’ is an affect that will serve to draw crowds to those malls where an undifferentiated clientele is sought to be attracted; noise is an affect and marker of class. Speaking of other projects that he is involved in, Amit noted that he had ‘decided that all the malls I design will have a “town square” that is busy (p. 232) all the time. I want to formalize the buzz’. New urban spaces are also being re-imagined through the politics of acoustics.

Premier City Arcade: Karva Chauth Cosmopolitanism and Zones of Confluence There is one particular mall in Delhi that appears to have carved a reputation for itself that lies somewhere between the populist acoustics of the ‘buzz’ and the tactic of intimidatory silence that constitute strategies of designing mall spaces in the city. The Premier City Arcade (PCA) mall in South Delhi is striking for the admiring comments it attracts from a wide cross-section of mall managers, designers, architects, and visitors. So, Gurgaon-based Anita Kapoor who had earlier lived in different parts of the world (see Chapter seven) mentioned that PCA was ‘different’; Amit Mehrotra had talked about the ‘careful thinking’ that Page 17 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots had gone into its planning; and industry observers referred to it as an ‘iconic mixed-use development [that is] recognized as one of India’s most successful projects’ (Goswami 2009: 33). Further, during 2008–9, PCA had won industry awards such as the ‘Most Admired Shopping Centre’ and the ‘Best Secured Shopping Centre’. Occupying a total area of 1.4 million sq. ft, including a ‘landscaped plaza’, PCA is sandwiched between two other malls. It is ‘one of Asia’s first fully turnover-rent based shopping centres’ (Goswami 2009: 33).5 One industry publication describes it as ‘giving Delhi a rich and soulful urban space, comparable to any Leidseplien or Leicester Square’ (Mallsnext Preface 2009: 104). It is, by no means, the largest mall in the NCR. Rather, the adulation that surrounds it marks its significance as a space that articulates meanings regarding relationships between commerce and aesthetics, the local and the global, tradition and modernity, and profit and social good. As visitors drive into the underground car park at PCA, a bevy of crisply attired private security guards check under the bonnet, the boot, as well underneath the car. The boom gate is the next stop, where an attendant presses the button for the machine that dispenses the parking ticket and raises the barrier. There are smartly dressed attendants—male and female—everywhere. Each carries a walkie-talkie, directing cars into bays. The parking here is more expensive than other malls, and a four hour stay costs Rs 50, as compared to the flat charge of Rs 30 or less (p.233) at other malls. A longer stay incurs an even higher charge. After parking, visitors proceed to the mall entry point and are physically frisked. There is a small cubicle where women are frisked by a female guard. The mall is L-shaped and the car-park lift opens out into a circular lobby. One of my visits was a few days before Valentine’s Day (14 February). The centre-piece of the lobby was a circular stage with oversized and miniature stuffed bears of different sizes holding cushion-hearts. There were several other small stalls selling V-Day items, including one with a long pink couch with a curtain draped around it. Many young women could be seen making inquiries at these stalls. Unlike other malls (in India and other parts of the world), PCA does not present itself as a spectacle of shopping, seeking to impress with grandness of sale, or profusion of sensory experiences. In fact, given its L-shape, there is no seamless vista of grandeur that is a common part of the design of other malls such as Ambience Mall in Gurgaon (Figure 9.1). Rather, the effect of space at PCA unfolds through incremental engagements with the visions and senses of the present and future lives that visitors and mall designers bring to the precinct. The shopping space at PCA consists of three storeys including the ground floor. Walking from one end to the other on the ground floor, there is a mixture of shops that sell Indian and foreign brands. So, the Indian-owned ready-to-wear Page 18 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots chains Pantaloons and Wills Lifestyle are located here, along with international chains specializing in other goods, such as Llardo, Guess, Estēe Lauder, and Lancôme. Other global brands on the ground floor include Ed Hardy, Esprit, Mango, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger. Sections of the first floor are given over to ‘casual’ wear, with outlets such as Levi’s, Pepe Jeans, Punk (a ‘grunge’ clothing and accessories shop), Giordano, Adidas, and Reebok in close vicinity of each other. The casual feel is enhanced by other stores such as Planet M (music), Lush (‘handmade’ cosmetics), and the Body Shop. However, as one moves away from this clutch of shops, it is not all casualness. For there is also Zardozi (‘The Ethnic Ensemble Shop’), and the well-known Delhi sari outlet, Kalpana, that sells a variety of traditional Indian weaves such as Kota, Chanderi, Tangail, and Maheshwari (‘We recreate the past. You rejoice in it’, a sign at the entrance says). The second floor has a ‘gourmet’ food court called Food Talk, where prices are Rs 40–50 higher than other malls. Purchases at Food Talk outlets can only be done through a debit card with a value of Rs 100 (p.234) or more that must be obtained at the entrance. Whatever is left over is refunded during the validity period of the card, which is twelve months. Leading to the food court are stand-alone restaurants including Spaghetti Kitchen, Satvik (‘Voted as Best Pure Vegetarian Restaurant 2009’), and the Punjab Grill (marketed by the celebrity cook, Jiggs Kalra). There are also shops that sell Manchester (Maspar); soaps, lotions, bath salts, and Thai artifacts (The Nature Company); and children’s clothing (Lilliput). The largest section on the top Figure 9.1 Ambience Mall Gurgaon’s floor is reserved for children’s Interior play area that charges an admission fee. The mall also Source: Author includes a ‘Gold Class’ PVR multiplex cinema complex (a collaborative venture between an Indian company and an Australian company), and a five-star hotel. An external balcony runs around the first and second floors, which houses several open-air cafes. Inside, on the first floor, (p.235) there is a ‘Barista Premium’ (part of an Indian coffee shop chain), where well-dressed men and women in single as well as mixed groups sit around drinking, eating, and engrossed in casual conversation.

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots Outside the mall, there is a large forecourt area which has several fountains, (including a musical fountain), palm trees (that are draped with decorative lights), water bodies, including one with a small wooden bridge where family groups can be seen taking photos, and a miniaturized reproduction of the eighteenth century Jantar Mantar astronomical observatory in Central Delhi’s Connaught Place shopping precinct. Meera Puri is a senior executive of the company that has designed and manages PCA. She told me that the real estate business is really a ‘downmarket’ one that she was trying to change that image. She had studied at a Delhi architecture school and then in the United States. She said that she and her business partner ‘wanted to create an urban space that reflects the city’, and that’s why ‘we created the forecourt called Sanskriti (civilization/culture)’. Contemporary urban culture—at least of the kind PCA seeks to embody—is (and here, we might remember the discussion on Shobha De in Chapter five) a confident confluence: We observe our clients carefully: the woman [shopper] comes with her mother-in-law when she wants to purchase Indian clothes, but buy herself when she wants to buy western clothing. We analyzed the South Delhi woman: comfortable in a sari and doing her Karva Chauth [the Hindu festival performed by women for the well-being of their husbands], but also very cosmopolitan and international. So, that is what we wanted to do here: bring the two polarities together. Puri is originally from a small village in the prosperous western region of Uttar Pradesh that borders Delhi, where her father was a sugarcane farmer. The farmers of Western Uttar Pradesh (the region that was also home to DLF’s founder as well as current head), along with those in Punjab and Haryana, were the key beneficiaries of the ‘green revolution’ agricultural technology of the 1960s and 1970s (Nath and Agarwal 2007: 110). ‘Being a first generation citydweller’, she told me, ‘I was much more connected to my village roots than many others’. The place of ‘tradition’ (and ‘village India’) is, as we have also seen in other parts of the book, a significant narrative thread in contemporary discourses on consumerism in India. The making of PCA as a place in the urban imagination also draws upon this aspect. Small kiosks have been (p.236) built on the first floor balcony that runs outside the building. These, Puri told me, ‘will eventually be given over to artisans and handicrafts people, and also have stalls for Indian foods’: It will be like a street bazaar, a bit like Dilli Haat. We find that the Indian consumer still likes his/her ‘tradition’. So, we will have a street bazaar … but the difference is that whereas on the street you don’t really get any respite, here, if you don’t like the street, you can always come inside (Figure 9.2).

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots Reflecting upon the ‘shopping habits’ of residents of the South Delhi area (where PCA is located), Puri noted that while it was a ‘prosperous shopping zone’, there are also other well-off areas in Delhi. However, she went on to say—pointing to different cultural characteristics of spaces—that she didn’t think that ‘Premier would have worked in, (p.237) say, East Delhi’, a locality whose middle-class residential enclaves are of more recent origin, having been established from the late 1970s onwards (see Chapter eight). ‘Here’ (in South Delhi), she noted, ‘the women are both Indian and cosmopolitan’. Market research by PCA management found that while around the country, women account for around 20 per cent of sales of Nike products, ‘at Premier City Arcade, it is more like 40 per cent’.

However, simultaneously, while the food court has a variety of … cuisine, the highest sale is that of pani-

Figure 9.2 Premier City Arcade ‘Arts and

puri [a ‘traditional’ Indian snack]. That’s what the

Source: Author

Crafts’ Market

Indian consumer is like …. Meera Puri’s ideas about the kind of ‘urban space’ PCA ought to be follow from her understanding of the ‘Indian consumer’, who has ‘always differentiated between different kinds of shopping experiences’; consumers have always known that ‘the [bazaar like] Lajpat Nagar shopping experience is different from the [upmarket] South Extension one … even though they are only a stone’s throw from each other. It is only the real estate developer who thought that all malls were the same’. In Puri’s vision, the mall as a new urban space is the site of production of new consumers who are made into socially and culturally engaged citizens through the effect of consumption. It is also a site of differentiation between new and ‘old’ consumers, and planners of malls (whose ideas conjure such affect) and ‘real estate developers’. So, Sanskriti, the open forecourt, was initially intended to be a parking lot, but it was decided to build an underground parking area which significantly added to the cost of construction. However, Puri noted that ‘the owners have made their money in the travel trade and are open to new ideas … not the traditional lala (moneylender) sitting across the table’: Page 21 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots So when we said that we should plan for an open space, even though it may not return a profit in the near future … because parking is also where you make money … they nevertheless agreed … they are not your traditional real estate developers. PCA also builds upon the trend—noted in Chapters five and seven in the context of gated communities—of private sponsorship of ‘public good’. Puri mentioned that PCA management was ‘very interested in combining NGO activity with the shopping experience here’. In her opinion, ‘A place such as this can leverage its position … and become a new kind of urban space’. So, in 2008, PCA organized an event with (p.238) a non-government organization (NGO) that works with ragpickers. And, another NGO had participated in a different event held on the 26 January (Republic Day), ‘where people wrote down on pieces of paper how they would make India a ‘Sone Ki Chidiya’ [A Bird of Gold/A Remarkable Place], and they also donated money to Chintan [an NGO that also works with the urban poor, particularly those in waste recycling]’. The 26 January celebrations were extremely popular, with some 30,000 visitors coming to the mall. The mall’s popularity is reflected in the ‘very positive feedback’ it has received since its opening. Puri was particularly proud of comments by visitors such as ‘When I sit in Barista [café], I feel as if I am in Europe’; she went on to note that ‘many NRIs [Non Resident Indians], when they come here, feel very proud … we also have Page 3 celebs who shop here and they feel very comfortable’. For mall planners, an understanding of the spatial sensibility appropriate to new consumerism requires a complex interweaving of cultural material to produce spaces that speak to the tenor of the times. In this lies the significance of ‘zoning’, where profits are calibrated through the landscape of social mores. Zoning, Puri noted, was an extremely important aspect of the organization of space at PCA. Zoning entails a close observation of consumer habits, preferences, and aspirations. It did not, she was at pains to point out, simply mean ‘that all the shoe shops will be together’. Zoning is the anthropological work of producing worlds. Select City Walk, she explained, is divided into three zones: (i) Staple Tradition: This is the zone for families, so it is a little bit of South Extension [an up-market shopping and residential area], and has stores such as Wills Lifestyle, as well as other stores you would find in traditional shopping areas. (ii) High Voltage: Here on the first floor there are stores that are kind of MTV [including ‘Punk’ that sells ‘grunge’ accessories] … such as Nike, Swatch etc. …. Then on the ground floor, it is more FTV … with fashion stores …. (iii) Celebration: This zone is where the Indian and the international come together. So along with shops such as FabIndia, here you will also find Forest Essentials, The Body Shop, Kimaya, Lancome … this is the space Page 22 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots where the truly international Indian consumer is at home … simultaneously Indian and international …. (p.239) *** The meanings that surround malls as new urban spaces in North India, I have suggested, relate to the confluence of discourses regarding the strictures of the Five-Year Plan state and the promise of its post-liberalization successor, new forms of democracy and its sub-national and transnational spaces, and the ideal relationship between consumerism, globalization, and Indian identity. While the malls under discussion offer spaces that are physically discontinuous from the outside—air-conditioned, clean, functioning infrastructure—the ‘magic’ of the mall, I have suggested, should be analysed primarily in terms of the intensification rather than the diminution of the reality principle. That is to say, malls do not proffer their aura through the mise en scène of a pre-modern utopia or in the manner of a ‘total institution’ (Goffman 1976). Rather, they concentrate on affect and desire through presenting a metaphysical ‘inside’ which is always already a part of the external world. The aura of the mall lies in its alignment with the gathering—and greatly admired—discourses of privatization of public spaces, technological advancement, the making of ‘clean’ urban spaces (through, say, slum-clearance), requirements of new consumerist affects, perceptions of an easy fit between ‘Indian traditions’ and global culture, and the superior ‘developmental’ capacities of private enterprise over the state. Mall owners and designers seek to manage affects and produce ideal consumers in the context of the extraordinary fluidity and multiplicity of processes and events that constitute the experience of contemporary Indian modernity. However, on the other hand, mall visitors experience such spaces through divergent personal biographies. The mall that is most admired is one that is perceived to have routinized cultural complexity, producing a template for the affective relationship between such spaces and their clientele. Premier City Arcade is seen to have combined local traditions, global sensibilities, managerial professionalism, corporate social conscience, and an understanding of gendered behaviour, in turn conjuring a sense of what it is to be an Indian consumer in a globalizing world. Finally, it is worth considering that the perspective outlined here may not apply in the same way to other parts of India that are also witnessing intense consumerist activity. So, for example, the greater traffic between Kerala and the Gulf region—and the varied relationships to (p.240) the Gulf that different religious groups might have (Osella and Osella 2009)—might introduce another set of cultural and social dynamics than that outlined here. Do, for example, visiting or returning migrants from the Gulf bring other habits and relationships to the mall that must be accounted for? Similar caveats might apply to other Page 23 of 24

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High Streets, Low Places, and Indian Roots parts of India: do the urban and semi-rural areas of Punjab that send large numbers of migrants to the U.S. and Canada also have different mall cultures? It is quite possible, then, that this analysis might only apply to Delhi and its surrounding areas, a relatively ‘inward looking’ space with quite specific relationships to local and global processes. And that, the foregoing discussion might, in fact, suggest the need for region-specific analyses of consumerism, taking account of the different histories of the circulation of peoples and goods.6 The meanings that mall industry theoreticians and designers seek to create are not, of course, the only ones that add value—as it were—to them. As urban spaces, they are, in equal part, sites of desire and identity of the shopping and visiting public. The next chapter is about the several ‘publics’ that frequent malls, and the different meanings they both bring to malls and take away from there. Notes:

(1) . The folklore around North Indian consumerist tendencies is legion. One mall designer commented that the Emporio luxury mall had not been a success, since ‘why would someone, particularly someone from Delhi, spend, say, Rs. 5 Lakhs (500,000) on a watch and have to admit that they bought in Vasant Kunj (in Delhi)? They would much rather be able to say, “I bought it in Paris”.’ (2) . These are Faridabad, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Chandigarh, and Jalandhar. (3) . Personal Communication, Dr Joydeep Goswami, Project Manager, IRIS and the IMAGES Group. (4) . According to Jaideep Wahi, Director, Agency Retail Services, Cushman and Wakefield, there was a sharp decline in ‘rental value’ across India during 2008–9 as the economic conditions made it difficult for retailers to bear the high rentals that were being charged (Wahi 2009: 60). The sharpest drop was in the South Delhi locality of ‘Basant Lok, which saw a rental correction of 29 per cent’ (Wahi 2009: 60). In Mumbai, some areas ‘corrected by 24 per cent’ (Wahi 2009: 60). (5) . That is, it does not charge a fixed rent. (6) . I owe this important point—and the idea of ‘inward looking’ regions—to Caroline Osella (personal communication).

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Shop Talk

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

Shop Talk Shopping Mall Publics Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords Indian malls are sites of multiple dramas of identity, meeting points of the promises of urban culture and the aspirations of its hinterlands, and emblems of social and cultural changes that relate to the emergence of the middle-class female consumer. The appeal of the malls lies in being open to differing personal and social trajectories that make up the contemporary tumult that, in turn, is a relay between changing ideas of class, gender, ‘personality’, trust, ‘branding’, consumption, and saving. This chapter investigates the different kinds of publics that visit malls and the meanings that emerge from their individual histories of class and other forms of social identity. Among other aspects, the chapter discusses the very specific meanings that attach to relationship between malls and non-elite women visitors. Keywords:   Indian malls, consumption, branding, social identity

Shopping centers show why you can’t usefully treat a public at a cultural event as directly expressive of social groups and classes, or their supposed sensibility. Publics are not stable, homogenous entities … M. Morris, 1993, ‘Things to Do with Shopping Centres’, p. 304.

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Shop Talk When Everyone is Shopping, ‘You Don’t Want to be Seen at the Wrong Mall!’ I once asked Anita Kapoor, resident of the Kingston Park condominium in DLF City, about the malls she frequents and ones she liked best. Anita and her husband, as we will recall from Chapter five, lived overseas for several years (where the latter worked for an American bank and oversaw its outsourcing activities) before settling down in DLF City. They live in a ground floor flat in Kingston Park, a gated community on a road with the highest concentration of malls in Gurgaon (eleven at last count in 2011). In fact, Kingston Park is wedged between two large malls. In the sitting room of Anita’s flat, there were several wall-size oil paintings. In one, there was a clown slumped on a chair, and in another, Ravi Varma-influenced piece, featuring two women and a young girl. She said that they didn’t know much about art, but luckily their ‘investment has appreciated greatly over time’. Anita volunteered the information that apart from malls, she was also an avid internet shopper and would often buy clothes for her children during ‘sale’ seasons in the U.S., spending as much as $700–800. (p.242) Since her husband now heads the credit card department of a major American bank, she said she was not worried about credit card fraud. Anita has two small children, a boy and a girl. She said that Indian-made children’s clothes are still not ‘good enough’. She didn’t appear to be bragging about her ‘international experience’, and stated this in a matter-of-fact manner. However, she had moved some distance from her early life-experience, as her parents ran a school in the Western Uttar Pradesh town of Meerut. But every holiday, she said, ‘my parents sent me to Delhi’. Later, she studied at Delhi University’s prestigious Lady Shri Ram College. Recently, her father passed away, and her mother spends a lot of time with her, and when she is in Gurgaon, she too frequents the malls ‘since it’s all walking distance … she gets her hair done, something she didn’t do very frequently earlier.’ Anita and her husband were renting in Kingston Park and had ‘booked’ their own flat in the nearby ‘super-luxury’ gated enclave. At 5,000 sq. ft, their new home will be large, as flats go. However, construction was behind schedule by some eighteen months, so they continued to rent. When the Kapoors decided to move to India, they first rented in the gated enclave of Laburnum, paying a rent of Rs 100,000 per month. Perhaps it is her experience of living in the West that made Anita remarkably open with me about her personal life. She told me about her miscarriages and wondered aloud that her first miscarriage might have been due to the frequent power failures in the South Delhi locality where she began married life. In one of our earlier conversations about her ‘favourite’ malls, Anita had suggested that I visit Premier City Arcade (discussed in the previous chapter), praising it profusely and describing it as the one she liked best. Anita also liked Page 2 of 18

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Shop Talk the newly opened Ambience Mall (with an area of 1.8 million sq. ft), which sits at the entrance of the Ambience Island gated community in Gurgaon; in effect, the gated community has its own mall. The mall has seven floors, each a kilometre long and its promotional material describes it as ‘7 kilometres of shopping!’ The store she most frequently visits is the British retailer Debenhams. However, Anita was very disappointed that one of the ‘anchor stores’ at the mall was the Big Bazaar, an extremely popular discount chain that sells everything from plastic buckets to cooking oil. At the nearby Sahara Mall, the Big Bazaar store is the scene of hectic and crowded shopping by shoppers who are particularly attracted to its ‘buy-one-get one-free’ strategy. ‘At Sahara Mall’, Anita said, ‘the crowd is very different. It’s (p.243) really like Lajpat Nagar or Sarojini Nagar (popular shopping precincts known for “bargains”) … pushing and shoving’. Ambience Mall, she continued, ‘is confused … it will become like a bazaar’. She liked malls where she could have a ‘pleasant experience’, and that’s why she liked Premier City Arcade. ‘There are no stores there like Big Bazaar, so you get a very different crowd’, she told me, adding that ‘we were invited to its launch party, and you could tell it was a different crowd … people who could spend.’ She had another story to tell, by way of driving home her point: ‘We went the other day to the movie hall in Sahara (Mall)—as there were no tickets available elsewhere for the film we wanted to see. It was a horrible experience; there were paan stains [from betel nut juice)]!’ ‘We are not targeting any one group’, a senior manager at Ambience Mall had told me, ‘but everyone [sic]. Our mall is particularly popular’, he had added, ‘because of its mix: it has very high end shops as well as shops for every day shopping such as Big Bazaar. It has the biggest Big Bazaar in Delhi NCR’. The front of the mall is occupied by the luxury Leela Kempinski Hotel, and there is also a BMW dealership on the premises. I had been told by several industry professionals that, given its size, the mall’s key aim was to maximize tenancy and that it was not particularly choosy about the ‘mix’. As Anita described her discomfort with Ambience Mall and its seeming lack of attention to identity politics, I was reminded of a comment made to me by the architect Amit Mehrotra (Chapter nine) that Premier City Arcade exemplified ‘careful thinking’ since ‘you don’t want to be seen at the wrong mall!’ Forty-two year old Sangeeta Mehta, who lives in an independent house in DLF City, is also someone who is careful in her choice of malls. Sangeeta worked for seventeen years with a prominent American bank and her husband heads a large outsourcing firm located in Gurgaon. She quit her job a few years ago. ‘Ideally’, she said, ‘I would like to shop at someplace like Galleria’, speaking of an openair market built by the DLF company, which is designed to look like a European city square, and includes a fountain at its centre. ‘However’, she added, ‘places like that get dirty very quickly, and maintenance is always a problem’. Further, she added, a mall worth visiting must have a place for having coffee, shops for children, and clean toilets. Comparing malls to other kinds of shopping areas, Page 3 of 18

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Shop Talk she felt that they are a ‘great improvement. You don’t have to put up with the dirt’. (p.244) Sangeeta is originally from a South Indian city, and her father worked as a manager in a factory in one of the steel cities discussed in Chapter five. She came, as she put it, from an ‘older middle class’. It was a milieu where there was familiarity with the world of consumption, though certainly not in the intense manner that characterizes the present. Sangeeta’s father’s professional background, the relatively frequent interactions with visiting Western ‘experts’ and NRI relatives during her growing-up years were all sources of information about, as well as access to, goods that have only recently become part of a more wider sphere of consumption. This aspect—Sangeeta’s own longer-term familiarity with consumerism—was a significant aspect to her attitude towards contemporary trends where many from vastly different backgrounds had, in a manner of speaking, become like her. Consumption, for her, was simultaneously the task of being a ‘different’ kind of consumer. She moved in social circles, Sangeeta once told me, where ‘brand consciousness is very high’. Many of her acquaintances liked brands with ‘big logos’, so that from a distance ‘you can tell it’s a Louis Vuitton’. As for her, this was not very important: she could spend a very large amount ‘on a solitaire, but it can be a small one’. She was emphatic that while she may buy branded products, but ‘never something that has a large logo … people actually have to peer to work out what the logo is’. By way of an example, she narrated how she had recently bought a Korea-made four-wheel drive vehicle that cost around Rs 700,000. She could, instead, she said, ‘have bought a Mercedes’ for much more. However, ‘my husband and I had a long discussion about this, and I said, “No, let’s downplay it, and not buy a Merc”’. A significant aspect of being a consumer with the capacity to ‘downplay it’ relates to having been part of a ‘savings mentality’, as Sangeeta characterized her own upbringing. Of course, she added, it is a good thing to have ‘grown out of it’. However, to have had the experience of control over money is a significant differentiating factor from ‘new’ consumers whose relation to the world of goods is in the nature of control it exercises over them.1 Further, the experience of locality in a time of globalism is significantly tempered through the habit of careful evaluation that comes from the sustained experience of the culture of savings. Echoing a remark that Anita had once made to me (see Chapter five), Sangeeta noted that: (p.245) We are all internationally traveled people so we know the prices at the same store in Gurgaon, as in London. Earlier Marks and Spencer used to be very expensive, and my husband [who] travels overseas every month … would buy exactly the same clothes at cheaper prices in London or New York. Price is important for me…. I like the international brands, Page 4 of 18

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Shop Talk because you get a sense that India is moving ahead. Being internationally travelled, we also know the significance of brands, we know which foreign brands are actually ‘luxury’, and which run-of-the-mill.

Shopping in the Time of Personality Development Sahara Mall—with its popular Big Bazaar store that stocks the kind of ‘run-ofthe-mill’ goods that Sangeeta referred to—is a great favourite with Ravi (25), Amit (23), and Rishi (21). All three men live in villages surrounding DLF City that are being absorbed into the urban limits as farmers find it more profitable to sell and move further inland. I met them through Ram Singh, who worked as a driver for a family in Victoria Park. Rishi and Ravi live in the village of Ghata, whereas Amit lives with Ram Singh (his maternal uncle) in nearby Ulwasnagar. Both villages—dominated by the cattle-owning Gujjar caste—are within half an hour’s motorcycle ride from DLF City. The families of Ravi, Amit, and Rishi have each sold some or all their land to developers such as DLF and Sun City (another active player in local real estate market). Ravi told me that villagers strike a deal for ‘collaboration’ with real estate companies where the latter hand over 30 per cent of what has been built on villagers’ lands to them, and sell the remaining part on the open market. From the money they made through sale of their land, Amit and Rishi established their own real estate businesses. Ravi is also an ‘agent’ for the Indian arm of the American Max Life Insurance Company. All three had wives, with Rishi having been married at the age of nine. Child marriage, Ravi told me, was not an uncommon practice among the Gujjar community to which they belong, though one that was slowly changing. As we talked, I could see the skyscrapers of DLF City in the distance, where the cafes are full of single young women and men, some on ‘dates’, and others just ‘hanging around’. I expressed surprise that Ravi had clients for his insurance business in villages. ‘The majority of my customers’, he told me, ‘are from the surrounding villages … they are the ones who have sold their land and become crorepatis (p.246) [millionaires] … whereas in the city, the “service class” person is going to think twice about paying a premium of Rs 25,000 per year’. Ravi told me that on 14 February he decided to have a night out with his ‘girlfriend’, and that they had to go to several venues before they could find somewhere to eat at one of the malls. ‘We always do this on Valentine’s Day’, he said. I asked what would happen if he ran into someone from his village. He said that people from his village do not hang around the places he frequents with his girlfriend. All three men go to malls and clearly prefer Sahara Mall. ‘This mall is for the aam aadmi [common man], whereas we occasionally go to DT Mall and MGF Mall to watch films’, he said. Amit chimed in to say that soon after marriage, he took his wife to a mall, ‘but when the elders in my house found out, I was severely reprimanded. They “‘abhi se mall ja raha hai to baad mein kya hoga” (if he starts taking her to the malls from now on, what will they get up to later?)’. Even now, he said. there is a lot of ‘respect’ for elders. There is really no

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Shop Talk such thing as ‘love marriage’: ‘either you become an outcast, or they shoot you!’ So, love happens at the malls. But not just love; for these young men, there is another significant aspect to do with malls. Amit told me that in his house, ‘everyone wears jeans …, even the girls’. And, At least once a month I take the youngsters in my family out to Sahara [mall], it’s a question of ‘personality development’. The government school in my village is up to the eighth standard, but it only has forty students. These are mainly the children of the mazdoors [labourers] who are working on construction sites. Most of the villagers send their children to private schools. The spatial aura of malls, gated communities, and glass-fronted offices (that house the offices of key transnational corporations) is the palpable stuff of ‘personality development’, and the older populations of Gurgaon now take part in a barter of dispositions. The exchange is made possible through the new economies of land and older arrangements of labouring. There are many like ‘us’, Ravi told me, who have sold their land. Many, he said, have bought in the interiors of Rajasthan (that borders Haryana) at about ‘20 per cent’ of what they sold their land for. However, they no longer farm themselves and have given it over to sharecroppers. Many others, he added, have bought houses in DLF city, ‘mainly for the sake of their children, because they want them (p.247) to grow up in a different environment’. Going out with the girlfriend to a mall on Valentine’s Day—while the wife stays at home—caters to the requirements of this ‘different environment’; for Ravi and his friends, young men at the cusp where the city meets the village, the malls are both processes of this environment, as well as the sites of acting out the new times. Amit: When I was ten and saw women smoking and driving, it was very ajeeb [peculiar] …. Now in my village women from many of the better off families drive around in cars … we have grown up in that environment, so it’s not unusual any more.

‘There are only two ways of improving yourself (in our villages)’, Ravi once told me, ‘‘graduation”, or money’. There is very little ‘graduation’ here, so it’s mostly money’. Malls allow for improvement, if you have the money.

‘We Prefer Going with the Family’ ‘Improvement’ is also a term that came frequently into use in a series of conversations with a group of four women who work in clerical positions in a government organization in Delhi. All four were aged between forty-five and fifty-five, had grown up children, and lived in West Delhi in self-owned flats within Cooperative Group Housing Scheme (CGHS) complexes. The CGHS has Page 6 of 18

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Shop Talk its origins in the state’s Social Housing Scheme that came into existence in 1952 (Madan 2007: 337). Housing societies formed under the Scheme were ‘meant primarily for persons of small means’ (Madan 2007: 342), with the state providing both land and financial assistance at subsidized rates. The CGHS aimed to assist both ‘low’ and ‘middle’ income groups. Unlike Ravi and his friends above, the women, when asked about the company in which they most often went to the malls, responded, ‘we prefer going with the family’. The group also expressed preference for shopping at Big Bazaar, and malls that hosted the store were frequently visited. While there are a number of malls in West Delhi, there is one particular stretch of land in the locality of Rajouri Garden—now bisected by the Delhi Metro light rail—that has the greatest concentration. There are five malls in close proximity to the metro station, each a few minutes walking distance apart. I was directed to this area by the women in this group who were frequent visitors to these malls. The City Square (p.248) mall is the nearest to the Metro station. Like most Delhi malls, it is air-conditioned. It has four floors built around a central courtyard, which is the most common design in Delhi (an aspect mentioned by those in the group who had visited Premier City Arcade and who were able to point to this difference in design). The top floor—called Café Terrace—has cafés and various eating outlets and there is also a coffee shop on the ground floor. There are also sit-down restaurants that offer, among others, Thai, Chinese, and North Indian cuisine (the last two include the upmarket Yo! China and Punjabi by Nature respectively). Visitors face strict security checks followed by physical frisking at the entry. Around the mall, there are flyovers, the metro line, and the incessant hum of traffic on the major roads that criss-cross the area. Shoppers Stop is another nearby mall. Part of a relatively upmarket chain, it has four floors of shopping. On the first floor, there are plush leather chairs for shoppers and a newspaper stand. Nearby, there are two mock mandaps (small pavilions where marriage ritual are performed) with life size mannequins dressed in Bollywood style wedding finery. The first mandap has a sign, ‘Varnmala: Shadi Ka Bandhan’ (The Garland: Marriage Ties), whereas the second is called ‘Mehendi Ki Raat’ (The Henna-Ritual Night). On the same floor, there is a section called ‘Men’s Ethnic Wear’, and another for ‘Women’s Ethnic Wear’. Many young couples wander around, mostly unmindful of the goods on display. They appear lost in themselves, holding hands. One stops to admire the wedding tableaus. The relatively shabby Paragon mall and only slightly better TDI mall (both owned by the same company) are also in the vicinity. The former is scantily tenanted whereas the latter appears to be thinly visited. The fifth mall is Westside, which is reached after crossing a large area of vacant, rubble strewn land. Around the malls, there are half-made roads and the frequent danger of being hit by cars that come down the wrong side. Inside, however, it is another world.

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Shop Talk Adventure

To return to the group of women with whom this section began, malls are, firstly, a world of new adventures: escapades and experiences that have specific gendered dimensions and fold across the registers of time, commerce, kin networks, and the restrictions of ‘purpose’. Unlike Anita Kapoor and Sangeeta Mehta, however, the manner in which the group relates to malls is not through a system of ranking of spaces that are (p.249) more or less desirable, depending on kinds of stores and their (imagined or real) clientele. Rather, the women are open to visiting all kinds of malls, accumulating new experiences that distinguish the current phase of their lives from earlier ones, rather than seek to differentiate one mall from another as a way of positioning themselves as different (or ‘superior’) kinds of shoppers; shopping itself is the act of distinction. At one of our meetings, I asked the women what they thought the differences were, if any, between different kinds of malls in Delhi. Their recounting of difference was exclusively in terms of the different kinds of goods a mall might specialize in—‘women things’, for example—and that some may have a multiplex cinema and others not. No one outlined a hierarchy of malls, where some may be more ‘common’ than others. A mall, by its very nature, is an uncommon place: it facilitates particular kinds of urban experience—market-sociality—that have been open to men, but out of bounds for most women; the places might be too far and the distance considered ‘unsuitable’ for a woman to traverse, or the transport, erratic. Rekhaji (around fifty-five years of age): Sometimes there are shops [in a mall] that sell things that are only sold in places that you might never have been, or don’t go … so sometimes we ‘explore’ these goods … things that we have never seen before … we can find those things [at a mall].

Sanjay Srivastava: Like what?

Rekhaji: Like Kalpana [saree store] … I will never be able go to the Kalpana shop in Connaught Place [in Central Delhi], but I will go to the one in the mall in Pritampura [West Delhi].

The mall is also the context of a significant change in the relationship between gender and ‘purposeful activity’ through the consolidation of a new imagination of ‘loitering’ (Phadke et al. 2011). This relates to the popular perception that there are specific conditions under which men and women may access public spaces. Hence, while it is generally understood that men’s access to public spaces need not be tied to a ‘purpose’ (that is, carrying out specific tasks), the idea of women loitering in such spaces is treated as both incomprehensible and Page 8 of 18

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Shop Talk condemnable. A study carried out in Mumbai that asked respondents to indicate how men and women use space summarizes its findings as follows: … it is always men who are found occupying public space at rest …. Women, on the other hand, are rarely found standing or waiting in public (p.250) spaces—they move across space from one point to another in a purposeful movement …. Women occupy public space essentially as a transit between one private space and another. (Ranade 2007: 1521). The idea of the necessity of purposeful activity by women is one that emanates from many sites of which the domestic is one of the most powerful. It is, perhaps, also the most stringent in its enforcement of the rule of purpose. As another study carried out in Kolkata points out, ‘Restrictions over time are completely absent in case of upper-caste men. The only condition for men is that they should inform a family member in case of delay’ (SWSJU 2010: 30). In the context of this discussion, malls provide an alternative logic of purposelessness. The group’s discussion of malls was usually expressed through fracturing the discourse of purpose and narrating instances of diversions from the immediate task at hand: Sanjay Srivastava: So, if you go to NOIDA, say to visit a relative, will you also visit a mall there?

Kusumji (around forty-five years of age): Yes, definitely. But it’s not that I have gone specifically to visit a mall, it’s because I have gone there for some other reason … If we are in that area for some other reason, then we go and see the mall, we don’t go there just for the purpose of seeing the mall.

Consider, on the other hand, the imperative of purpose in Kusumji’s reflections on an earlier phase in her life: When I first got married and wanted to go out) we [she and her women friends] used to have to make the excuse that are going to the Gurudwara … now we don’t care, as long as they [referring to her son and daughter in law] are happy [‘unki bani rahe’]! It is, of course, true that age confers certain freedoms upon women. However, that is not the only factor. For, as a gender ‘safety audit’ for Delhi points out, older women also feel unsafe in Delhi (Viswanath and Tandon Mehrotra 2007). Malls have created an environment that combines the legitimacy and desirability of consumerism, as suggested in other parts of the book and elsewhere

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Shop Talk (Srivastava 2007), with a discourse of public safety, where ‘publicness’ is of a very specific kind: Sanjay Srivastava: Many women I have spoken to say that they feel very comfortable inside malls …

(p.251) Kusumji: Yes, there is a greater sense of security, there is no eve-teasing … my daughter’s purse was stolen twice [in a bazaar] … also it’s about neatness and the ‘gentry’…

Sanjay Srivastava: What do you mean by that?

Kusumji: The kind of people who go there … so there is far less probability of meeting the kinds of people who do ‘chain snatching’.

Lataji (around fifty years of age): The Great India Place [mall] is worth seeing … I had gone to NOIDA specially to visit it … of course I won’t now specially go to see it, however, whenever in future I go to NOIDA, I’ll make it a point to make some time to visit it.’

The mall space is the site of a new relationship between purpose and its antithesis, through the logic of commerce, and without any assistance from the traditional guardian of public safety, the state: Lataji: I also like malls because you hang around as long as you like … there are no shopkeepers to hassle you … as to how much time you are spending there … wasting his time. Also, at the open shopping areas, you always have to be careful, whereas at a mall you can be ‘free’ [carefree].

The ethnographic vignettes above refer to a context of shopping that has moved beyond the ‘provisioning’ aspect of shopping that women are required to do (Miller 1998). No doubt this continues to be a significant part of the lives of nonelite women in India; however, there is also a lessening of strictures against ‘non-essential’ shopping. This aspect is linked to perceptions of malls as both ‘safe’ and spaces that provide opportunities for interacting with ‘people like us’. ‘Hanging around’ converts, in this context, to a different act of purpose: it reinforces one’s place as a classed subject of the city. It is the logic of commerce that is the context for another kind of adventure, that which relates to the minutiae of transactions themselves. It concerns the idea of ‘credit’, which is utilized to repudiate prevalent notions regarding the ‘worthiness’ of women, particularly those who have lived most of their adult lives within traditional family structures, under the restraining hands of fathers, Page 10 of 18

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Shop Talk brothers, husbands, and in-laws. It is, ironically, the ‘corporate-state nexus’ that has constituted an ‘idealized nuclear family’ (Patel 2012: 532), which also produces a narrative of freedom for women through promoting altered modes of making purchases. One of our discussions concerned how this group made purchases. All the women possessed credit cards, either in their own right, or as a ‘spouse’. Since credit cards are relatively easy to obtain, (p.252) particularly for salaried men and women, this was not a surprising fact. Nirupmaji pointed out that apart from the ‘convenience’ factor, an additional incentive lay in the fact that her card ‘is also a loyalty card, and every time I buy my points increase!’ Nirupmaji (around forty-five years of age): The bill comes a month later … and when the bill comes I think ‘surely this is not right!’ Then we verify against the receipt [everyone laughs] … you think ‘just buy it and worry about it later’!

Notwithstanding the concerns expressed by the group regarding the possibility of ‘overspending’ when a credit card was involved, the dominant sentiment was one of pleasure, one that incorporated the complaints against the long history of ‘purpose’ as a rule of gender such that places to be visited and resources to be expended were strictly aligned with properness and propriety. Nirupmaji: Yes, but also we buy other things, just waste our money! [Laughs and is joined by the others] … in my house we always have a surplus of things … if I like this, I buy it, if I like something else, I buy that … that’s why our ‘frequency’ [of visiting malls] is far less, compared to teenagers … for them it’s a meeting place, if they want to eat something, they go there.

It is a mark of the adventure that the mall—and its modus operandi—offers that middle-aged women, otherwise subject to the rules of female adulthood, articulate a new sensibility of space through comparisons with teenagers. ‘It’s a good change, all good’, one of the women said when I asked them whether they thought there was anything ‘bad’ about malls. ‘Loyalty’—as that embedded in credit cards issued by specific stores—could now be split as a concept, no longer exclusively signifying devotion to the household, and the capacity to purchase ‘faltu cheezein’ (goods not needed) also signifies a reformulation of the strictures of gendered expenditure and consumption patterns. So, while increasingly many women may visit a mall to buy routine provisions because ‘you get everything at the same place’ in a mall, the latter also generate a sense of impulsiveness that has historically been the preserve of men: Sanjay Srivastava: Do you go to malls after planning or just on the spur of the moment? Page 11 of 18

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Shop Talk Lataji: Well, the other day I was watching TV and a friend rang to ask what I was doing, and then she said, ‘Let’s go to a mall’. So I said ‘OK!’ (p.253) [ ] … when our children were small and we used to go to [the] India Gate [monument] to show them these things … we used to go for a picnic, packed our food and went to India gate. Nowadays the ‘service class’ [with which the women self-identified] mostly goes to the malls… []

Kusumji: aadat bhi pad jaati hai … [it becomes a habit]. New Relationships

The new ‘habits’ of the women of the ‘service class’—practices that militate against habituation, feminine norms, and those of ‘service’—are also the site of new kinds of relationships formed in the crucible of the mall-space. The first of these relates to the family and broader kin networks. Reflecting upon their lives as adults, the women divided their experience of sociality into three distinct phases. First, there was a time when as young married women with small children—say, twenty–twenty-five years ago—they experienced a great deal of organized familial interaction. This was a time when weeks of planning preceded all-day family picnics to one of the four or five regularly visited leisure sites: the shopping precinct of Connaught Place, the India Gate monument, Children’s Park in Central Delhi, the Qutub Minar historical complex, and the sprawling Lodhi Gardens in South Delhi. In the second phase, the children were older, but both the lack of suitable public transport and ‘security’ fears made it difficult for large family groups to meet for public leisure as often as they would have liked. Perceptions of harm in public spaces were linked both to the rise of substantial labouring populations in Delhi—mainly from surrounding economically backward states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—and ‘terrorist’ threats that were also magnified through active ‘awareness’ campaigns by the state (such as those that asked passengers in buses to look under their seats to see if there was a bomb placed there). The third phase, this group of women reported, relates to a reinvigoration of family ties. Nirupmaji: Yes, that’s true [that families spend more time together because of malls] … I often call up my sister and ask her to come with me … ‘otherwise’, I say, ‘you’ll just be stuck in the kitchen; we’ll go out and eat something’ … so this is how we have our get-togethers … sometimes my husband comes home early and we decide to go out … the basic thing is that you can do everything at once, shopping and dinner, a movie.

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Shop Talk (p.254) Noting that the ‘safety’ offered by the mall—from a multitude of threats—has led to a ‘great change’ in the ways that families are able to meet and socialize, Nirupmaji suggested that this included ‘a shift towards outside dining … so now it’s “let’s go and eat there today, let’s go to a mall, etc”’. There was spontaneous laughter when I asked the group if they could remember when they last visited, say, the Qutub Minar: Kusumji: If someone comes from outside [Delhi], then we take them out [to show the tourist sites] … I think about ‘six years back’ I went Qutub Minar …. In any case, we have seen these places earlier, how will Red Fort and Raj Ghat [Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial] change in the intervening years? We have been here [in Delhi] for so many years….

Further, malls are also preferred sites of interaction with out-of-town kin, a renewing of relationships around new spaces: Kusumji: Earlier, when we had relatives visiting from Punjab, they had a ‘set plan’ and they would want to go to such and such gurudwara [Sikh temple] and to Lal Qila [Red Fort] and to the Qutub Minar … but now when they come to Delhi, they don’t want to go to these places; they say ‘take us to a mall’, or they want to go for a ‘joyride’ on the metro.…

Whether accompanying relatives from out of town, or going with family members from within the city, the mall is a favoured site of new kin sociality. For, while the food court might be more expensive than similar independent outlets, ‘at the food court, everyone can order according to their choice … it offers great choice: there is Chinese, South Indian, North Indian, everything is available’; family ties are (re)constituted through the instrument of ‘choice’. If malls are the site of a putative return to a period before fear and discomfort led to a decline of family interactions upon public spaces, then the new cultures of commerce also offer a different relational model of civility and equality with the market. Kusumji noted that she felt that in a mall, ‘they (the shopkeepers) “attend” to you better’ and that ‘there isn’t the kind of rush you see [in bazaars]’. However, and perhaps more significantly, customers negotiate the new sites of commerce through entirely different matrices of equality that, in turn, make the experience an empowering one: ‘Kusumji: Shoppers Stop has an excellent ‘returns’ policy: you can return goods purchased from them to any of their stores, anywhere in Delhi. (p.255) You just have to go to their ‘customer care’ section and they will give you a ‘voucher’ and willingly

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Shop Talk exchange your goods … at any shop. They just have to look at the ‘invoice’, and they will exchange it ….

Sanjay Srivastava: But many say that the earlier forms of shopping when you went to a shop, you developed a relationship with the shopkeeper … you got to know him.

Kusumji: Well, that’s true … however, if you keep going to the same branded shop, you can build the same ‘rapport’. And, nowadays the sales people in the small [independent] shops also keep changing ….

The minutest of mechanisms of capital are translated into the language of social life. So, Lataji explained that some of the new practices—particularly prevalent at malls—had also been effective in improving the relationship between consumers and the salespersons who attended to them. ‘Competition’ is the grounds of a new environment of welfare and sociality. Lataji explained the process—deus ex machina—as follows: … when you have bought [at a shop in a mall], there is a code on the bill [identifying] the person who has been attending to you …. I remember once a man was showing me something then he had to go somewhere, and another came. However, the earlier salesperson came back and when I was purchasing he said ‘put this in my name’, so there is competition. [] It’s quite clear to see that the benefit goes to the consumer, she gets the best rates … if there is competition then they attend to you better.’

Genuine Brands, Genuine Spaces An important reason for visiting malls is related to the growing clamour for brands by younger members of the family. This has also rubbed off on the parents in the ways in which they have begun to reformulate consumerist desire. ‘Branded’ products also serve to announce a transition in family circumstance, both economic as well as cultural. (Rekhaji:) … our children are now earning in lakhs [hundreds of thousand] … and they like to spend … in my ‘life time’ we would go from one shop to another to see what is cheap, what is expensive … now they want to buy ‘brands’… and within brands, particular styles … so within Levis they want particular styles (emphasis added).

As brands become intimate part of household purchases, their presence—and necessity—comes to be expressed through the logic of antique custom: (p.256) Kusumji: Page 14 of 18

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Shop Talk The difference between branded and non-branded goods is … ‘quality’, definitely, there is no guarantee with the other clothes … so if you buy a brand like ‘Monte Carlo’ [an Indian clothing brand and a great favourite within this group] … you also feel good that you are wearing ‘branded’ clothing … there’s the quality and the comfort, reliability … there is that old saying ‘mehnga roye ek baar, sasta roye baar-baar’ [If you buy something expensive you cry once, if you buy something cheap, you’ll cry many times].

Brands are also, of course, on display in other shops that are not in malls. However, the ‘open’ market, unlike the mall, is full of ‘defects’. Malls have an aura of certainty, whereas the bazaar is a milieu of doubtful transactions: … at a mall … the brands are genuine … so if they say it’s ‘Monte Carlo’, then it will be a Monte Carlo brand … if you buy an Adidas in a mall or in Kamla Nagar a shopping area in North Delhi … it will be better in a mall. The branded material that you get in a mall will not have a defect … it will be the best quality … the company will send their best quality (to a shop in the mall) … whereas at other places, it may have defects, they will sell it anyway … halka sa bhi defect ho to chal sakta hai [they will sell goods that have minor defects] …. Other experiences also carry the insignia of certitude, genuineness, and transparency, particularly those that personal memory can juxtapose to a time before the appearance of malls. One of these concerns the significant activity of watching films at theatres: Kusumji: The other thing is that when you go to a mall to watch a movie, you are likely to get the tickets, whereas earlier, you went to a hall and there were no tickets available and you had to buy in ‘black’ or come back home … there must be ‘independent’ cinemas in my locality … but [now] I think I will have to think hard to be able to name them. Earlier we would have to look around to see which film was running in which hall, now you can go [to a multiplex] and you can choose from a several films … it’s all about choice. The older halls had broken chairs, but we had to sit on them, whether they were comfortable or not.

At one of our meetings, I asked the women what they thought about the suggestion—frequently made in the media—that malls would lead to the eventual decline of the kirana store (the corner shop). Lataji appeared to speak for everyone when she stated that ‘It is all positive … I think it [the ‘new’ shopping environment] is an improvement … (p.257) there has been an economic impact upon the small shop-keepers, but it is an improvement’.

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Shop Talk Between Consuming and Saving The advent of shopping malls and their reputation as ‘safe’ spaces for women, a youth cohort that has launched upon highly successful careers within the new economies of the post-liberalization period, and the rapidly growing reputation of consumerism as a respectable activity have combined to conjure certain freedoms that, otherwise, mainly resulted through ageing (Lamb 2000). However, the aura of the mall—its promises of sociality and adventure, and assurances of authenticity—sits alongside memories and practices of another era. Positioned at the juncture of traditional family structures and emerging market forms—that is, between performing Karva Chauth and visits to multiplex cinemas—the women, unlike their children, articulate more complex senses of being than might at first be apparent. It is a sense that comes from imbrications with the savings economies of the past and the consuming imperatives of the present, forming a joint narrative of gendered ‘responsibility’ and the excitement of ‘irresponsible’ behaviour. One day, Kusumji was talking about her last visit to watch a film in a multiplex located in a mall. ‘Of course’, she said, only one ‘level’ of person can afford to go to a multiplex.2 ‘In a [multiplex] picture hall’, she noted, ‘a cup of coffee costs Rs 75’. She meant to say that she now considered herself part of the groups that could, if only occasionally, watch a film at a multiplex screen. During her last visit, she ordered a cup of coffee. But then, she added: I felt very scared. I thought that for that money I can buy a kilo of tea for the whole family … but my kids say ‘This is nothing [not very expensive]’. But of course the kids, if they don’t like something, they will use it for a short while and throw it away. Whereas me, if I have paid Rs 75, I will drink all of it … if I can’t finish, I take it home! Everyone laughed at this anecdote, as if recognizing themselves in it as women situated within an uneasy transition from being the sacrificing mother and wife to a carefree consumer devoted to self-satisfaction. I have noted above that malls provide an altered temporality, one where women might take part in activities at times—late evenings, (p.258) night-time—that are otherwise out of bounds. However, the sense of a new freedom is frequently tempered with discourses of responsibility and duty of care to the household. I asked the group how long, on an average, they spent at the malls: Lataji: Hmmm … two to three hours is normal. [But] sales are … very attractive, even though I may not have thought of buying at a [particular] shop, if there is a sale on, I will say, ‘Let me go and have a look!’ If in winter you are getting cheap summer clothing, then you say, ‘Let’s buy it, it will come in use later’.

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Shop Talk Kusumji: But I want to emphasize that we tend to go to malls much more often during sales, thinking that we will get goods at a cheaper rate … we’ll see an ‘ad’ in the paper about a sale in mall where branded goods are being sold. So, I’ll certainly think that I need to make at least one round….

But—as if the responsible housewife is pursued by the seductions of the market —she added, ‘Then [having bought at a sale] … we sometimes come home and repent … because it might not be of the latest variety’. Balancing is a hard act. The malls that are most liked are those that allow for the articulation of the cultures of consuming and saving, where one can move between desire and constraint. To have ‘everything’ does not just relate to material goods: Lataji: I like Shoppers Stop, it’s very spacious and everything is there … and there is a lot of space to move, and it has both local and global brands, so if you don’t want to spend too much money, you can go for the local brands ….

In fact, there is folklore—narrated with some amount of admiration—about those whose consumption activity is reminder of another time. ‘I know a family’, Lataji told me, ‘that buys the entire year’s spices at the [India International] trade fair [at Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds, where bulk purchases can be made]. And, she added, ‘When we go to watch a film at a mall, we prefer morning shows, where the tickets are much cheaper!’ *** Indian malls are, as I have suggested, sites of multiple dramas of distinctions (Bourdieu 1982), meeting points of the promises of urban culture and the aspirations of its hinterlands, and emblematic of social (p.259) and cultural changes that relate to the emergence of the middle-class female consumer. The appeal of the malls lies in being open to differing personal and social trajectories that make up the contemporary tumult that, in turn, is a relay between changing ideas of class, gender, ‘personality’, trust, ‘branding’, consumption, and saving. It was, perhaps, the recognition of their increasing cultural and social role in her own life that led Kusumji to relate with increasing incredulity an anecdote about a visiting friend. ‘A friend of mine came from the U.S.’, she told me, ‘and I said to her, a new mall has opened, let’s go and see it”.’ But, the friend responded that ‘She didn’t want to go! She said she was fed up with malls!’ For the women and men discussed in this chapter, malls are significant places in the new urban imagination that is aligned to consumerism. However, as scholars working in different regions of the non-Western world have shown, consumerism is no longer the exclusive preserve of the middle-classes (Miller 1994; Posel Page 17 of 18

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Shop Talk 2010; Sun 2008). The urban poor also take part in its imaginative economies. Rather than provide a ‘conclusion’—what could it meaningfully be?—the final chapter explores the ways in which the city is the site as well as the product of consumerist processes for the residents of Nangla Matchi. The concluding chapter is intended to return the focus of the discussion to urban entanglements that, in effect, are the grounds for the sense of the city. The city is that place where the state and private enterprise, cultures of contract and kinship, the desire to both transcend locality but also to be part of it come together in uneven ways. Chapter eleven explores these junctures. Notes:

(1) . With respect to a point made in Chapter eight, whereas a new section of consumers seek to differentiate themselves as ‘moral consumers’, an older middle-class practices its own form of differentiation by pointing to its more ‘mature’ attitude to the world of goods. In both cases, however, acts of consumption themselves are not being questioned (cf. van Wessel 2004). (2) . Ticket prices vary from Rs 150 to Rs 250. At older, single cinemas, Rs 50 is the average ticket price.

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‘Revolution Forever’

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

‘Revolution Forever’ Consumerism and Object Lessons for the Urban Poor Sanjay Srivastava

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.003.0011

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores the ways in which the urban life for the poor unfolds as an engagement with consumerism. The discussion looks at the manner in which the transformative potential of the city–in contrast to the putative constraints of the village–is experienced as a relationship with its consumer cultures. If the shopping mall is a particular place utilized (mostly, but by no means exclusively) by the well-off, then, what can we say about other processes through which the city itself is imagined as a shopping mall by the poor? These issues are explored through an ethnography of activities related to Revolution Forever, a ‘multilevel marketing’ scheme that is popular among large sections of Delhi’s poorer populations. The chapter re-emphasizes the nature of entangled urbanism– between disparate elements–that the book seeks to highlight. Keywords:   pyramid selling, urban poor and consumerism, city and consumerism, slums and consumerism

The ITC network [that has installed ‘internet connected computers’ in villages in Madhya Pradesh] … is one example of how access to information can increase productivity and raise incomes. It also shows what happens when large businesses stop regarding the world’s 4 billion poor people as victims and start eyeing them as consumers. A.L. Hammond and C.K. Prahlad. 2004. ‘Selling to the Poor’, Foreign Policy, 142, p. 30.

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‘Revolution Forever’ This chapter explores the ways in which life for the urban poor unfolds as an engagement with consumerism. That is, the discussion looks at the manner in which the transformative potential of the city—in contrast to the putative constraints of the village (Inden 1990; Madan 2002; Nandy 2001)—is experienced as a relationship with its consumer cultures. If the shopping mall is a particular place utilized (mostly, but by no means exclusively) by the well-off (Brosius 2010), then what can we say about other processes through which the city itself is imagined as a shopping mall by the poor? I will explore these issues through an ethnography of activities related to Revolution Forever (RF), a ‘multilevel marketing’ scheme that is popular among large sections of Delhi’s poorer populations. This chapter, though it concludes the book, is not a conclusion in the traditional sense of an ending. For I am unable to provide a panoptic view of the city through providing a summary of the discussion so far. I am unable to summarize ‘Delhi’, and this discussion on consumerism, urban cultures, and (p.261) the poor seeks to point to the fragments out of which ‘modern times’ (and spaces) are experienced. I do not, however, strive to join the fragments in order to present a ‘whole’ picture of contemporary life; rather, the chapter seeks to highlight the significance of ‘fragmentary analysis’ (Chatterjee 1993a) for understanding life-ways that play out in the crucible of thresholds, and fleeting processes that constitute the experience of the city for the urban poor. The city is no whole entity, but a series of connected realms, each of distinct character, linking varied lives and processes into an urban entanglement. That is the key conclusion I have to offer. For spaces, we know, are both sites of self-making as well as produced out of imbrications with other spaces (Deshpande 2000; Feldman 1991; Foucault 1980; Lefebvre 1994; Massey 1994). As earlier chapters have discussed, and the burgeoning body of scholarship on consumption practices indicates (Appadurai 1998; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Fernandes 2006; Kopytoff 1997, Leichty 2003; Mazzarella 2003; Rajagopal 1999), contemporary consumerism forms a significant site for self-making. One of the clearest formulations on this is provided by Daniel Miller in his ethnographic approach to modernity in Trinidad. ‘If we reject the romantic notion’, he says, ‘that: the increasing importance of commodities is necessarily a diminution in the humanity of the people who use them, this has the advantage that, while we sometimes become disturbed by the inconsistencies and partial commitments of people, it is less problematic to find contradiction and ambivalence signified in objects. (Miller 1994: 298).

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‘Revolution Forever’ A recurring aspect of studies of consumerism is the conflation with affluence and the notion that consumerism requires a degree of disposable income that is beyond the capacities of the poor. Hence, the vast majority of studies tend to focus on the relatively well-off, with very little attention to the meanings created by consumption in those contexts where participation requires much greater effort and sacrifice. However, even though the urban poor face the reality that ‘Behind the glamour and spectacle of consumption lies the banality of its opposite—the act of not consuming’ (Sun 2008: 476), consumption is frequently imagined by economically marginal populations as ‘the only domain in which [they] are free to pursue their urban dreams’ (Sun 2008: 476). In this chapter, I explore the urban worlds created by poor consumers through their engagement with consumerist activity that—sometimes—promises a way out of the basti and into an exotic (p.262) holiday location, or at least a more permanent foothold in the city. For, though much effort is expended in consigning the basti to the edges of the official city, it is an inextricable part of the city’s material processes of consumption and production. Its residents fire the factories of urban production systems, make it possible—through domestic labour, for example—for others to consume, and themselves seek to take part in consumption to the limits of their capacities. These limits, and the attempts to extend them, tell us something about an urban experience that is formed out of the combination of economic marginality and the promise of the commodity to—magically— transform this condition into a state of plenitude. They are also indications of the nature of entanglements of peoples and spaces. Notwithstanding architect Rakesh Gupta’s assertion (Chapter nine) that shopping mall might be ‘one of the very few truly democratic spaces’, mall managers have well-developed, though informal, policies that seek to encourage certain types of consumers, while keeping away ‘visitors’ who might be ‘offputting’ for their clientele. So, as the manger of one of Delhi’s most successful malls located in South Delhi told me, Initially when it opened in late 2007, we had a lot of riff-raff from [the ‘urban’] village just across the road … well, not really riff-raff [she corrected herself]…. Anyway, they soon realized that this was not the place for them … now we don’t have them here…. As the above statement suggests, the relationship between the urban poor and malls is a tenuous, if not a tense, one. There are, however, other sites of subaltern consumerism in the city that provide a more productive entry into to the topic of consumerism, self-making, and the city. This discussion of the relationship between the Revolution Forever (MLM) company and the urban poor (including many from Nangla Matchi) is also a story of what observers of ‘emerging markets’ (Lahiri Chavan et al. 2009: 26) refer to as ‘designing for the other 90 per cent’ (Lahiri Chavan et al. 2009: 27).

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‘Revolution Forever’ Shampoo, Car Polish, Goa, Shimla, Nangla Matchi Multilevel marketing organizations (or Direct Selling Organizations—DSOs) have been explored in detail in a number of fascinating studies for contexts other than India (Biggart 1989; Butterfield 1985; Koehn 2001; Lan 2002) and this chapter is not intended as a detailed study of (p.263) either their mechanisms, effects, or cultural variations. What I attempt here, rather, is a modest ethnography of the particular nature of the relationship between the lives of the urban poor and the promises of redemption held out by forms of consumerism that directly address them as consumers. As a specific development within capitalism, MLMs came into being during early twentieth century in the United States. There are, as Lan (2002) points out, three key differences between MLMs and other forms of business organizations. Firstly, goods distributors are not employed by a company but work independently. Secondly, selling is based entirely on the basis of personal relations between distributors and customers. And, finally, ‘distributors recruit each other and form multilevel sponsorship networks that are concurrently financial ties under the governance of a hierarchical system of distributing royalties based on seniority’ (Lan 2002: 166). The American multinationals, Amway and Tupperware, are perhaps two of the best known global MLM organizations. ‘Many network DSOs’, Biggart (1989) points out, ‘are founded on organizational ideologies, holistic belief systems in which products and the act of selling are merely manifestations of a superior way of life’ (Biggart 1989: 98–9; original emphasis). Further, These ideologies, and the products that are often their expression, are claimed to have the power to transform lives in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways. (Biggart 1989: 99). The idea of ‘networking’ is crucial to the business model of MLM, for there are no retail outlets, or large scale advertising campaigns through which customers are induced to purchase. ‘The process of networking for business ends’, Lan points out, ‘involves an articulation of making money and making friends’ (Lan 2002: 167). Indeed, the face-to-face nature of the MLM business relies upon the capacity of distributors to both secure customers as well as other distributors. Financial rewards accrue through the sale of products as well as a system of royalties that depends upon one distributor’s ability to recruit other distributors ‘down the line’. Sales made by the ‘downline’ distributors (Lan 2002) also contribute to the income of those who have recruited them. Hence, the greater the ability of a distributor to convince others to become distributors, the greater his or her potential income. Building upon Weberian analysis, Biggart suggests (p.264) that a significant aspect of ‘network DSOs’ concerns their mooring in Page 4 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ ‘value rationality’: ‘a belief not in efficiency or profitability … but in a substantive ideal or goal’ (Biggart 1989: 101). These might include ‘honour’, ‘loyalty’, or beliefs of a religious nature. So, Biggart says (speaking of the American context), ‘Network DSOs are unusual, maybe unique, in today’s economy because they are large capitalist enterprises founded on value rationality’ (Biggart 1989: 102). Such organizations are based on ‘one or both of two substantive values: a belief in entrepreneurialism and a belief in the transformative powers of products’ (Biggart 1989: 102). For Americans, the belief in ‘entrepreneurialism’ is a key aspect of the ideological framework that relates to membership in MLM schemes. ‘Distributors’, Biggart points out, ‘see themselves as superior to employed fellow Americans. Being an “entrepreneur” to them, is a morally superior way of being in the economy’ (Biggart 1989: 134). And, based on her research on Taiwanese MLMs, Lan suggests that a great deal of ‘emotional labour’ is required to ensure that the distributors ‘below’ both continue to sell as well as recruit others in order for incomes to increase. Slackness below could translate into a substantial fall in income or, in some cases, the income may dry up completely. An important strategy among DSO distributors in Taiwan, Lan says, is the ‘familiarization’ of networks through ‘reproducing quasi-family bonds and hierarchies within a DSO genealogy (recruitment line)’ (Lan 2002: 177). However, business with family and friends—or at least those who come to be constructed as ‘family’ and ‘friends’—has its own pitfalls, not least the feeling that such relationships are being utilized for personal benefit. So, Lan says, ‘distributors transform economic transactions into nurturing activities such as “sharing,” “helping,” or “teaching” to solve their emotional anxieties (“feel guilty,” “feel embarrassed”)’ ( Lan 2002: 174). In the studies I have quoted above, there is no particular emphasis on the urban poor as ‘distributors’ in MLM schemes. Indeed, Lan (2002) points out that in Taiwan, it is the more highly educated and the well-off that form the bulk of MLM participants. And, though companies such as Amway and Tupperware appear to attract growing middle-class and ‘professional’ participation in India (Srivastava 2007; Chapter seven), my own encounter with this form of consumerism happened in Nangla Matchi. (p.265) I had once asked Dilip, a fourteen-year old year from Nangla, if his mother did door-to-door selling as I frequently saw her wandering around the locality with a bag full of products of different kinds. Dilip responded that she recruited ‘members for a company which she has recently joined’. Some days later, I went to meet his mother at their house. Mrs Kumar was in her midthirties and told me that she joined the RF ‘about five months ago’. There are, she said, two ways of ‘joining’: either by paying Rs 9,000 or Rs 11,000. Under the former ‘scheme’, a member receives a package of goods that can be sold, whereas the latter is linked to a life insurance policy, but there are no goods to Page 5 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ sell. The insurance is worth around Rs 100,000. Lan (2002) suggests that MLM ‘offers a significant case for the commercialization of emotions’ (Lan 2002: 168) since ‘distributors’ business relations with customers are simultaneously personal networks with friends’ (Lan 2002: 175). And, indeed, Mrs Kumar’s strategy of converting the sentiments of locality into quantifiable monetary benefit unfolds precisely through such means. However, in the particular case of the poor and the milieu of direct selling, there is something also to be said about the experience of spaces as they align with participation in the consumerist economy. Revolution Forever (RF) was founded in 2001 and has its head office in the West Delhi locality of Janakpuri, with branch offices in other parts of the city, as well as in towns in Punjab, West Bengal, Odisha, and Bihar. It is one of several—one source lists thirty-seven1—MLM organizations in India. The better known ones include Amway, Modicare, Tupperware, and Quantum. RF markets a variety of goods including ‘Health Care’ (mainly herbal remedies), ‘Home Care’ (soaps and detergents), ‘Personal Care’ (creams and lotions), and ‘Ready Made Garments’. In 2006, the company’s website mentioned an association with the Kotak Mahindra group, which is a major player in the Indian financial industry. However, at the time of writing (2010), this information was no longer there. The company’s website offers the following advice and encouragement to potential recruits: After becoming a distributor, the right approach is to create curosity [sic] among your friends for this business. Once he/she is curious to know about it, becomes more and ready to see it [sic]. Bring him/her to the Revolution Forever office [sic] and seniors will take care of the rest. It seems easy. But let us tell you, this is not as easy as seems to be. Initially you need to educate yourself with the help of this kit and follow the (p.266) guidelines given by your upline. Try to share the experiences of your seniors with you. (www.revolutionforever.com/html_new/keytosuccess.html) As one enthusiast of the MLM business plan suggests, ‘It is common knowledge that MLM works on the concept of time leverage. A work to be done by you in 100 days can be completed in one day if you have 100 people under you (in a chain) doing one day’s work’ (Sreekumar 2007: 1). Notwithstanding its growing popularity in cities such as Delhi, RF’s most significant business is concentrated in smaller towns and cities. For example, in March 2010, the RF website carried an announcement congratulating members for attaining different levels of enhanced membership, achieved through sales and other performance measures. ‘Emerald’, ‘Diamond’, ‘Platinum’, and ‘Gold’ Distributor titles were awarded to members from the following towns in Bihar and Jharkhand: Darbhanga, Saharsa, Muzzafarpur, Sitamarhi, Ranchi, Khagaria, Motihari, and Munger. The company deals in three kinds of ‘products’ that its distributors are Page 6 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ required to sell, namely, Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCGs), an ‘Insurance Plan’, and an ‘Endowment Plan’. In sum, each distributor must begin as a ‘consumer’, having to purchase a package of products that, hopefully, can be sold on. The distributor’s income stream will further depend on others she is able to recruit as distributors. Some distributors move on to become ‘trainers’, providing instructions to potential distributors.

Risking Nothing Located amidst endless rounds of pronouncements and rumours about demolition and eviction from Nangla Matchi, Mrs Kumar’s relationship with RF narrates another, though perhaps just as unstable, story of space. Lakshmi Nagar, where the company office is located, is in East Delhi across the Yamuna river. Mrs Kumar had initially accompanied a friend (who had recruited her) to the office in order to join. For Mrs Kumar, Lakshmi Nagar was a familiar locality, since it is a place where many from surrounding bastis such as Nangla Matchi found employment, mostly as casual workers in shops, light industries, and a variety of service jobs. From Nangla to Lakshmi Nagar, it used to be a short but brutish bus ride on one of the privately owned and erratically driven buses that —before they were banned—were also known as ‘killer Blue Lines’. On the way (p.267) to the RF office, one passes the accoutrements of urban life that would be well-known to basti residents: pot-holed and congested roads, tiny mechanical workshops from where grime-blackened men and boys peer out to inhale the exhaust and dust of the streets, cycle-repair businesses and small goods shops that clog the footpaths, a variety of ‘street doctors’ (especially ‘bone setters’, perhaps it is the dangerous traffic), tea and food stalls with wares open to the skies, and, when the skies open up, streets flooded with knee-deep water unable to escape due the clogged storm-water drains. Mrs Kumar knows it all well. However, when she returned home from her visits to the RF office, along the same route, she would be laden with maps of other territories. Mrs Kumar joined the Rs 9,000 scheme and was given a box containing a watch, face lotion, dishwashing liquid, car polish, window cleaners, a herbal face cream, soaps, shampoo, a bottle of perfume, and a voucher that enables a family of four (‘including two children under eight years of age’) to have a holiday in resorts in Shimla, Goa, and various other locations in India. I asked her if she planned to go on a holiday to one of these places, and she said her husband wanted to go to the hills of Shimla, but that she hoped to sell the holiday voucher to someone else before it expired in a few months. She showed me the box and its contents while sitting on the floor of her tiny two bedroom house in the middle of Nangla Matchi. Clearly, her’s is one of the better off families in the locality. The house is painted blue on the inside, there is a small television in one of the rooms and a hand-pump in the tiny courtyard like area that leads to the two rooms. But, Mrs Kumar said, she hadn’t been able to sell any of the products that came with her Rs 9,000 payment. Instead, her Page 7 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ family had used some of it, especially the soaps, the shampoo, and the glass cleaner. Her elder son, she told me, wore one of the two watches that also came as part of the deal. ‘All the bottles were Rs 175 upwards. This [she lifts a liquid filled bottle to show me] is for putting into your bathtub, but who has a bathtub here [laughs]! I should try and sell them to some rich people. And, as for the car polish, this is completely useless here in Nangla Matchi! Who has a car!’ The RF ‘system’ works—like any other MLM scheme—such that the person who gets others to join receives an ‘income’ as long as others below her are also able to recruit more members. For every two (p.268) people who join, Mrs Kumar got Rs 400, and if she was able to get a person to visit the RF office in Lakshmi Nagar (where the visitor is cajoled to join the company), she got Rs 150. Notwithstanding the fact that Mrs Kumar had not been able to sell most of the products, she was convinced that this was an easy way to make money and gave me the example of her neighbour Meenu. Meenu, she said, is apahij (disabled), and ‘she has just received a cheque for Rs 7000’ from the RF company. Then there is the case of someone who is now ‘very senior in the organization, but who used to earlier go around on a bicycle. Now, thanks to RF, he owns two Maruti cars and has built a double storey house in Lakshmi Nagar’. However, she said, ‘he still drops into our house, just to see how I am; he isn’t too proud for that’. The ‘senior person’ who visits her often probably does so to make sure that she continues to recruit others, so that his own income stream is maintained. In a similar manner, Mrs Kumar has become a persistent visitor to households within Nangla. She started off by visiting relatives and neighbours, but slowly pushed out the boundaries of her network through asking those she already knew to introduce her to their acquaintances. However, unlike the Taiwanese middle-class subjects interviewed by Lan (2002), Mrs Kumar never expressed any degree of anxiety over the fact of having to treat long-standing friendships as opportunities for commerce. For Mrs Kumar’s relations with others in the locality are located in a context of enduring fragility: there is hardly a month without rumours of ‘slum-demolition’ and relocation to some farflung locality. So, when demolitions occur (as happened in the case of Nangla), it is just as likely that former long-term neighbours may expect to not meet again, or at least not meet for extended periods of time. Under such conditions of spatial uncertainty, anxieties over ‘using’ one’s personal ties for business purposes are less salient than might otherwise be. In addition to the city that lies between Nangla Matchi and Lakshmi Nagar, there are two others that Mrs Kumar now inhabits. First, there is the city that presents as a site of remarkable possibilities, miracles, and ‘escape, excitement, and fun’ (Sun 2008: 478). Here, the disabled are able to rise above their handicap to earn incomes that seem beyond reach, and the once humble are able to cast off their cycles for cars and their shanties for double-storey concrete Page 8 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ houses. It is, as if, traveling between Nangla Matchi and Lakshmi Nagar, some managed to (p.269) jump off the Blue Line bus and sneak into an airconditioned car, to be dropped off at a well-appointed mansion. Simultaneously, however, another city beckons, but does not allow entry. Here, there are nuclear families that go on holidays to Shimla and Goa, faces that require face lotion and herbal cream, bodies that require soap, hair that asks for shampoo, dishes that must be cleaned with the appropriate chemicals, cars that must be polished with the right polish, windows that must be sprayed with cleaners, and bathtubs that can be filled with soothing foam. Mrs Kumar converts intimate spaces—where friends become customers—into unfamiliar ones; unfamiliar since even though they appear to be right alongside— appropriated for Rs 9,000—they are forever out of reach. These spaces—of herbal creams and bath foams—disappointingly disappear in the pores of familial bodies, rather than transport the family somewhere else; not many are buying the dream either they or Mrs Kumar want. This is one experience of urban space: a rapid movement through a number of worlds, palms outstretched in a gesture of grasping what comes to hand—very little—and bodies brushing against seemingly solid waves of commodity-promise, but each more evanescent than the last. But the investment in the promise of spatial transformation (well, if not Goa, at least Lakshmi Nagar, and one Maruti car) is, compared to one’s resources, very substantial, so the effort to gain whatever little benefit is unceasing. In one of my later visits to Mrs Kumar’s house, I discovered that she had now bought a ‘Rs 11,000 policy’, as she referred to the RF package that comes with an insurance policy, and that she was saving up to buy another policy package. When I asked her the reason for the second planned purchase, she said it’s because ‘if I need to borrow money for my daughters’ wedding, I can borrow from the company against the insurance policy’, and that the loan ‘can be paid back with the commission I earn as part of the scheme’. She also planned to take out additional policies in her sons’ names. If she works hard, she said, she can become an ‘RSD’, then a ‘GRD’, and ‘something else I can’t remember’. She has just bought a fridge, she said, and the ‘senior person’ for RF had come to see it two days ago. I asked her what RSD and GRD stand for, but she was unable to say. The social construction of ‘risk’, theorizations on the topic suggest, is characterized by ‘an increasingly pervasive logic (p.270) of manufactured uncertainty’ (Adam and van Loon 2000: 5). However, the physical environment in which Mrs Kumar lives is one of such extraordinary risks that it is unlikely that any system of risk-assurance, such as an insurance policy, would cover the gamut of hazards: children and adults die from a variety of diseases, and from crossing a busy highway because an ‘unauthorized colony’ cannot have a pedestrian bridge; pools of water discharged from a nearby power generation plant shine a bright green with unknown chemicals; residents mysteriously Page 9 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ disappear if the police is not paid off for real and imagined crimes; and, of course, one day the basti itself might disappear. Given this, Mrs Kumar’s purchase of an insurance policy has little to do with a fact of life—risk—that is so interwoven into quotidian existence that it has been normalized; risk is a way of life. Rather, the insurance policy—an offshoot of Indian consumer culture—is a bridgehead to the deepening of family ties. Some months after my first meeting with Mrs Kumar, I learnt that the family had arranged the marriage of their elder daughter, Meenakshi. An important aspect of the preparations concerned buying appropriate gifts for the groom. One day, I accompanied Dilip and his father to a nearby locality where they had arranged to meet Meenakshi’s future husband in order to fit him out for a suit. The three of us caught an auto-rickshaw from Nangla, which wove its way through a backroad that led to a pontoon bridge across the Yamuna. As we crossed the river, the irregular—untarred and largely potholed—road suddenly met with a bustling commercial area and we found ourselves in the midst of a traffic jam for which— as is normal in Delhi—there appeared to be no particular reason. We were on our way to Raghubir Nagar, where Dilip’s father worked as a tailor in a stitching factory. Arriving at a pre-arranged meeting point at 1 p.m., the appointed time, we looked around for the groom, but he was nowhere to be seen. As we walked through the lanes of Raghubir Nagar, there were hand-carts piled up high with jeans that were being ferried around like mounds of vegetables. Frequently, cart-pushers stopped at houses and housewives haggled over the price of a particular pair, as one would for vegetables. Jeans were being sold, as if, by the kilo. This area contains a number of small-scale stitching workshops that supply to many parts of the country. We stood below the factory where Dilip’s father worked, but even after an hour and half of waiting, there was no sign (p.271) of the groom. We then went upstairs into the factory, brushing against exposed wires and protruding metal pipes. There were boxes of marked ‘Perry Cardin Shirts’, ‘International Shirts’, and ‘Kanwood Shirts’. A man was making up the boxes from flat cardboard with extraordinary speed. He didn’t even look at the cardboard; instead, his hands moved rapidly around familiar contours and a ‘Perry Cardin’ carton was formed in no more than twenty seconds. There was constant whirring of cutting and sewing machines around us. On the walls were posters for ready-to-wear clothing from brands such as Cairo, Monopoly, and Regalia. Fashionably dressed men and women, and couples, stared out at us from the walls of the packing room where we sat. That morning, Dilip told me, his mother had gone for her fortnightly RF ‘class’, where she was to be told about the latest selling techniques. After about two hours of waiting, the groom arrived on a scooter along with an older man. Dilip didn’t recognize the groom, Manoj, who was employed as a driver with a white goods manufacturing company. We were introduced to each other and the older man, who turned out to be the groom’s brother-in-law, Page 10 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ enquired about me. Dilip’s father called up a friend on his mobile to ask about a shop where he could get a good deal on the suit. The friend arrived to meet us and we again walked past sundry carts piled high with jeans and, after traversing the maze of lanes which is the locality, finally arrived at the preferred outlet. It was closed. The shop-owner next door directed us to another store further down the road where, we were told, we would find the owner of the shop we intended to visit. After some delay, the owner was located and he opened the shop just for us. Manoj chose a three-piece suit. It consisted of a jacket, a pair of trousers, and a waistcoat. On the front of the jacket, as well as the waistcoat, there was gold and silver thread-work of an elaborate nature. There was also golden thread-work on the jacket shoulder. Dilip also wanted one of the same to dress up for his sister’s marriage, and he chose an off-white number. The suits were neither Indian nor western, but rather, acted as a kind of bridge: between the tradition required in a wedding (‘Indian kadhai’ or fine needlework, as the shop-owner referred to the embroidered jacket), and the consumerist modernity dictated by popular culture, including films (a three-piece suit). The handsome Perry Cardin male model looking out from the poster on the grimy factory wall in Raghubir Nagar was, perhaps, the (p.272) man who might (with his nuclear family) go to Goa for a holiday. The group I was with was headed back to Nangla Matchi in an auto-rickshaw whose driver was muttering loudly about the fare he had been beaten down to, dodging more jeans-laden push-carts. Mrs Kumar had borrowed some money from the ‘company’ for her daughter’s marriage, giving up on the hope of going to Shimla and Goa, and settling for the possibilities that Raghubir Nagar had to offer. Nevertheless, the intensity of engagement with the global world of holiday resorts, herbal face lotions, and car polish is in keeping with the making of a ‘global’ city. A year later, when I drove past the spot where Nangla Matchi used to be, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) was constructing a Commonwealth Games-related building. However, the relationship with RF and its world of promises does not, unlike in, say, the United States, play out as ‘a belief in entrepreneurialism and a belief in the transformative powers of products’ (Biggart 1989: 102). For, no one (apart from those who directly worked for the RF company as office managers) ever expressed the sentiment that entrepreneurialism was better than getting a government job. Indeed, most would have preferred a job in the government if they could have managed it, since it offers far more secure prospects for future prosperity than the market. Rather, the relationship translates into one between spaces. Simultaneously as RF’s products speak of other worlds beyond the basti (apparently accessible by everyone), they also articulate justifications for how the basti might be transformed into the city; the beginning of this task is the erasure of one kind of locality in order to institute other kinds of spaces. The commodity speaks to the urban poor through the logic of the double bind: their inclusion in the commodity-world is part of the process of their physical displacement. Page 11 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ However, it is not all one way, this traffic between new commodity cultures and the urban poor. For, if the logic of the space that the commodity-in-the-city offers is one of erasure of old spaces in order to attain new—more desirable—ones, it also paves the way for a more intense engagement with familiar spaces. Mrs Kumar’s family converts the transnational promises of a consumer revolution into a fulfillment of localized kinship obligations in a locality—Raghubir Nagar— where the dreams of consumerist modernity are tempered with the realities of subaltern life and work—one that buys a three-piece suit with Indian embroidery.

(p.273) Shifting Spaces: Shashi and Raj Kumar While there are several women who work for RF, they are easily outnumbered by men, particularly young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty. For one thing, it is far easier for men to cover larger areas of the city in search of customers and recruits. Unlike the women, they need not rely so heavily on relatives and friends as potential business targets. Their business is also built through a system of referrals—friend of a friend of a friend of a relative—that establishes wide circuits of circulation across urban spaces. In a city where the percentage of those under the poverty line (calculated according to a calorie norm) between 1993–4 and 2004–5 has increased from 35 to 57 per cent (Patnaik 2010: 49), the attractiveness of quick material gains is undeniable. And, as Patnaik also points out, the increase has coincided with the period of ‘economic reforms’. Hence, both the increase in urban poverty rates and the promises of a ‘revolution’ through consumerism are part of an overlapping set of economic and cultural processes. Twenty-four year old Shashi lives in the Sanjay Camp basti, located behind ‘Mega Technical Training Institute’ and the ‘Sehgal Bistar Ghar’ (that hires out beds for weddings) near Dakshinpuri Resettlement Colony in South Delhi (Chapter three). He told me that the land used to be a shamshan ghat (cremation ground) for children. His father, who came to Delhi in 1984, earlier worked as a labourer in a Mumbai factory, having migrated from his village near Ludhiana in Punjab. After a prolonged strike, the factory was shut down, and Shashi’s father came to Delhi, staying with a brother who already lived in the city. Shashi’s mother was pregnant with him at that time and he was born in Delhi. At first, she got a job in a kothi (large house) working as a maid. However, as the family could not afford to feed all mouths, the eldest son (Shashi’s elder brother) was sent to work as a domestic servant in a house in Jaipur. The boy—ten or eleven at the time—was distraught at being separated from his family and was brought back to Delhi. ‘The madam gave my mother Rs 5000 when we were leaving Jaipur. She loved my brother more than she loved her own son’, Shashi said. At the age of twelve, Shashi managed to get a job in the ‘field’ in a private security firm. That is, he would visit the various establishments where the company’s guards were posted, deliver their pay, and also make sure that they were on duty, ‘because they would often go to sleep, (p.274) or just run away’. Page 12 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ By the age of fifteen, Shashi was driving one of the company vehicles. However, soon after, the company went bankrupt as the ‘owner was in a relationship with some girl, and she ruined him’. For several years, Shashi did odd jobs—including washing dishes at restaurants, cleaning offices, and selling pens and handkerchiefs—that usually did not last beyond a few months. He would usually be recruited by a thekedar (contractor) and let go if the contractor found someone else who was willing to charge less, or if the business folded. When I first met him in 2006, he was working as an on-call kitchen-hand at the student hostel of a prominent private school in Central Delhi. On the days he was needed, he would leave home at five in the morning and only return late at night. Working days were important since the meagre pay was supplemented with kitchen leftovers that were brought home in polythene bags. In early 2007, Shashi managed to get a permanent job at a private hospital as a ward boy. It had been secured for him, after many years of effort, by an uncle who also worked at the hospital as a cleaner. Shashi was overjoyed when he heard the news and told me that in addition to the Rs 3,800 monthly salary, he was also part of a provident fund. ‘This is a permanent job, “for life”’, he told me. ‘There is no tension of a thekedar now. Some of my shifts are at night and I get five days off a week’. He was also happy because he could get concessional medical treatment. A few months before getting the hospital job, Shashi had gotten married to a young woman, Pooja, from the neighbourhood. They had been wanting to get married much earlier, but had faced a great deal of opposition from his wife’s family who did not consider him ‘suitable’ as he had an uncertain job as a kitchen hand. I went to meet him at his home in Sanjay Camp soon after the wedding. He had engaged a photographer to take the wedding photos, but a month and a half after the wedding, the photos were still not ready. The wedding had taken place in a rush as it was a ‘love marriage’. In his one-room house, there was a large mounted photo of a Tata Safari ‘Special Utility Vehicle’. He and his cousin discussed the video that was also shot at his wedding. ‘You get married here (in Sanjay Camp)’, the cousin said, ‘but they can insert Nainital or foreign places. It gives a good “looking”.’ ‘Looking’ is very important, Shashi said. Since I last met him, there were new photos on his walls, all done at studios. However, it does not appear, as (p.275) Pinney (1997) says of smalltown studio clients, that there is no ‘inner self’ to be depicted in photos. ‘Looking’ is both a concern with the surface as well as a manifestation of an inner self. Both surface and depth exist together, forming part of the same discursive universe. Hence, the self is neither hostage to the fleeting present (thus merely fashionable), nor the result of deep-seated historical processes (and hence, primarily a ‘deep’ unchanging structure of accruals from the past). The self is a thing of the threshold, forever poised to move across a number of registers (Srivastava 2007).

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‘Revolution Forever’ Shashi told me that for a month and a half after the wedding, it was ‘customary’ that the bride cannot leave the locality. Now that this period was over, he wanted to take his wife Pooja to a cinema or some other place. He decided that we should all go to the shopping arcade of the nearby up-market Saket locality. We were accompanied by a friend of Shashi’s—Ravi. When we got there, Pooja and Ravi mentioned that they had never been here before. They both wanted to eat a ‘Paneer Dosa’, so we went to a restaurant. All through the way, in the autorickshaw, Pooja had her face covered with a corner of sari, which she slowly discarded as we got further and further away from Sanjay Camp. Finally, as we sat down to eat, she completely uncovered her face. She had earlier worked in a ‘beauty parlour’ in the posh Safdarjang Enclave locality, and now wanted to open one of her own. Shashi said it would cost around Rs 25,000, but Pooja shot back with ‘50,000’! It requires a lot of ‘decoration’, she said, ‘that’s what people look for in a beauty parlour’. If she had her way, she said, she would open one tomorrow. She really liked being at the Saket shopping centre, she said. Some months later, we met again at Shashi’s house. He had put up some new posters in his room: there were several for the ERA construction group that showed steel and glass fronted office blocks like the ones DLF makes. ‘They are all on your side’, he said, meaning Gurgaon. There was also a photo of him with a friend where both stood with bared torsos, flexing their muscles. ‘One day we were passing this studio and my friend said, let’s get our photos taken, so that I can see what my body looks like’. Other recent photos included one with Pooja, where she was wearing her wedding sari, and he was wearing a body hugging tshirt of the ‘Delhi half-marathon’. He said he liked this one because his body looks good, ‘My body and hair has a “looking”’, he said. His hair was arranged over his forehead. There were three other photos in (p.276) the same frame: one in the middle with Pooja, and two on the side with him wearing a black nylon shirt. There was a large board in the room on which there were photos with friends and with Pooja. The ones with Pooja were from before their marriage. I asked if their parents didn’t object to these photos. ‘We got them taken but never told anyone, it’s only now they’ve been put up’, he said. These photos were taken when Pooja still worked at a beauty parlour in Safdarjang Enclave. There was a lot of fond and gentle banter between them and she referred to him as tum (you), rather than the more respectful aap. Of all the posters, the Tata Safari one was Shashi’s favourite. He said that he will soon buy a motorbike, perhaps one that costs Rs 60,000. He also wanted to take up another job as an auto-rickshaw driver, in addition to his hospital job, which he did in shifts. He thought that he will also look for a place, maybe to rent, for Pooja and himself. His family was hoping to sell their present house in Sanjay Camp and had been ‘looking at some places in Faridabad’, just across the border from Delhi, where property prices are lower than Delhi.

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‘Revolution Forever’ Shashi’s world of enforced mobility, uncertain employment, and the search for more permanent sources of making a living, consumer desires, and the imagined possibilities of material improvement through taking part in expanded sensitivities of the body—beauty parlours and body-building businesses—is also the world of RF. It is a world where there are no fixed hours of work, no permanent employees, and no guarantee of an income or a sale. Indeed, by its modes of operation and consequence, it reproduces the milieu of informality that young men such as Shashi are part of; it operates according to the principles of informalism, while simultaneously promising access to, and membership of, the formal world of material and non-material possessions. It was not surprising that it was Shashi who introduced me to another RF member—his friend, twenty-year old Raj Kumar from Nangla Matchi. Raj Kumar was both an ‘agent’ and a ‘trainer’ (as he puts it) for the company. Raj Kumar had been with RF for about six months when I first met him in late 2006. He told me that he now only went to ‘office’ and signed on for the day, and conducted ‘classes’ for newcomers in order to inform them about the company. All classes are held in Lakshmi Nagar. As we talked, we were standing next to an open drain; there was a pile of rubbish that had just been cleaned out from the drain, and (p.277) naked children and chickens ran around us. I was curious to know more about different aspects of the company’s functioning: Sanjay Srivastava: So, how does one become a member?

Raj Kumar: You have to buy the ‘products’; unless you buy the products you can’t join. Once you pay, you get the products and you can ‘join’, and then you have a ‘licence’. You get a ‘distributorship’. You have to sell and if you introduce someone then your ‘salary’ [sic] will be separate. There is a lot of advertising, and you also visit many homes. The company holds ‘classes’ and explains the whole ‘system’. The company has three offices in Delhi, and thirty-two offices all over India. It’s all over India.

Sanjay Srivastava: And, does your work take you all over Delhi …?

Raj Kumar: No, not really, I just have to go to the office and do haziri [give attendance].

Sanjay Srivastava: Do you know if it is an Indian company?

Raj Kumar:

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‘Revolution Forever’ Yes, it’s an Indian company … there are several schemes: life insurance, buying products … that’s how you join, you pay and get the products … many people think that you pay the money and get a ‘job’, it’s not like that, that money has been paid for the ‘products’ … if you sell the products, your ‘salary’ starts, and if you take someone [for the induction classes] you also get money for that, and you also get a ‘commission’ for getting people to join. If you want to join you have to tell me and then come with me …. We have our ‘branch’ in Lakshmi Nagar, the ‘head-office’ is in Janakpuri [in West Delhi]. If you ever want to go, come here [to Nangla Matchi] and I’ll take you there. Call me on my mobile.

Sanjay Srivastava: Are the classes held daily?

Raj Kumar: Yes.

Sanjay Srivastava: How do people get there?

Raj Kumar: They are introduced by other ‘distributors’ … at the classes, they explain everything, the entire ‘system’, then if they want they can join …

Sanjay Srivastava: And, how many have joined from Nangla Matchi?

Raj Kumar: There are about thirteen members here in Nangla Matchi. They all get ‘cards’ [shows me his ID card], everyone gets this card, along with the products.

Sanjay Srivastava: What kinds of products?

Raj Kumar: One’s that are used on a ‘daily basis’; cream … you also get a watch … if you want to come and see, you’re welcome…. Both men and women, boys and girls have joined…

Sanjay Srivastava: How many members do you think there are in Delhi?

Raj Kumar: In Delhi? I don’t know, but ‘all India’, there are 45,000 members ….

(p.278) Sanjay Srivastava: But not everyone can be like you, since you provide information to others, you’re a trainer…?

Raj Kumar:

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‘Revolution Forever’ One has to take ‘training’ for three months, and there we learn everything. The training itself costs around Rs 4,000 … done at the branch itself. Everyone has the opportunity to train.

Sanjay Srivastava: But not everyone can become a trainer like you, how were you chosen?

Raj Kumar: It depends. If you are able to finish your training in a competent manner, and manage to understand all that has been explained.

For a poor, young person such as Raj Kumar, his work with RF offered a significant way of renegotiating his own location within the city. It offered the possibility of a symbolic cosmopolitanism that is not easily—if ever—available to others of his background. The conversation reproduced above presents in compressed form Raj’s various attempts to present himself to me as an urban sophisticate—perhaps like the Perry Cardin model in Raghubir Nagar—rather than a basti dweller constrained by both material and cultural circumstances. So, ‘training’, ‘head office’, ‘branch office’, ‘license’, ‘distributorship’, and ‘salary’ formed common conversational material when Raj described his everyday life to me. And though he had been with the company for only around six months at our first meeting, he had immersed himself into its culture so deeply, that it appeared as if he had been working for RF for a much longer period. He knew about the structure of the company, the training schemes, the officials, the products that were sold, how many branches there were in the country as well as in Delhi, and how many members, as well as the various ‘schemes’ the company offered. Hence, while on the one hand, ‘personalization’ is a significant aspect of the line of work offered by RF, on the other, for men such as Raj Kumar, it also forms the background to an imagined ‘contractual’ relationship with the city: the use of personal contacts for business activity is the stepping stone to a refashioning of the self as an inhabitant of the world of training, head offices, branch offices, and ‘distributorship’. As he travelled between Nangla Matchi and Lakshmi Nagar on the same route as Mrs Kumar, the city—of head offices and branch offices—that he relocated himself to is one that is more familiar to residents of the gated communities of Guragon. What would be less familiar to the latter, however, is the uncertainty and volatility of the Perry Cardin world Raj Kumar imagined himself to be part of. For, rapid movements (p.279) up and down the ‘ladder of success’ are, as Lan (2002: 170) observes, a common part of this line of work. Indeed, Mrs Kumar told me that despite having recruited many women, her own income was not as high as it should be as many of the recruits dropped out after discovering that the ‘starter kit’ they had paid for contained goods that were very difficult to sell, or required an investment in time and energy that was not commensurate with returns. They simply wrote off their—not inconsiderable—investment in the promises of consumerism. However, ironically, for someone like Raj Kumar, the Page 17 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ experience of the city as a volatile and uncertain space is precisely what emboldened him to be an enthusiastic participant in the ‘revolutionary’ world of RF. This is because ‘despite the existence of labour laws like the Contract Labour Act, contractualization and casualization of labour has occurred significantly, as far as the Indian labour market is concerned’ (Guha 2009: 47).2

Finding Revolution Mrs Kumar had told me that the RF office in Lakshmi Nagar was ‘just beyond the turning for Radhu Palace’, an old (and now closed) cinema hall. I wandered around Lakshmi Nagar looking for the premises, but without any success. I rang a number for the company and was told that it was in Guru Nanak Pura, a locality within Lakshmi Nagar, opposite the DDA District Centre, a complex for commercial offices. After a great deal of searching, I was still unable to locate the RF office. Guru Nanak Pura is a locality of small lanes, with balconies almost touching each other. Many houses have shops and workshops operating from the ground floor. Guru Nanak Pura lies along a road that comes off the ITO bridge that crosses the Yamuna from West Delhi to the East. The ITO complex is also the site of the offices of the Slum Wing of the MCD. So the ITO bridge is, we might say, the thoroughfare along which Nangla’s residents shuttle between the promises of the state and the market. After a great deal of inquiring from several shopkeepers, a cigarette-stall owner finally pointed me in the direction of the RF office. He told me that it was in the basement of one of the buildings on the ‘main Nanak Pura Road’ (which is off the ITO Bridge Road). I had, in fact, walked past it several times, unable to identify it as a corporate office (Figure 11.1). I approached the entrance and tried to enter. A security guard stopped me. I asked if I could meet an RF official and he called (p.280) out for ‘Govinda’. A man in his late twenties, wearing a tie, formal white shirt, black trousers, and black leather shoes came out to meet me.

I explained to Govinda that I was interested in finding out more about the company. He was unconvinced about the genuineness of my interest. Perhaps he thought I was a journalist who was going to add to the bad press regarding ‘pyramid selling’. In 2006, police in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh had raided Page 18 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ several offices of the Amway

Figure 11.1 Revolution Forever Office corporation,3 and ‘genuine’ Source: Author MLM corporations (such as Amway) had been complaining for some time that their reputations were being sullied by unscrupulous operators (Sukumar 2004). And, in September 2009, there were media reports about concerns expressed by the Reserve Bank of India ‘at the operations of shady MLM companies’.4 (p.281) After some discussion that included the possibility of my joining RF, Govinda passed me on to ‘Gaurav’, who in turn asked me to fill up a form in order to ‘join’. The form asked for details such as place of residence, age, income, and profession. Then, I was given a white token with a stamped logo and asked to wait for the ‘seminar session’. The RF office is a large basement area that is crammed with potential ‘joiners’, mostly men and a few women. There are two kinds of people: those already part of RF (all the men were wearing ties), and those they have brought along to introduce to the system, for which they will get Rs 150 each. There was loud conversation. Most of the men seemed from relatively poor backgrounds. I was an oddity in my relatively clean and ironed clothes. All around the basement area—a mid-size hall—there were glass cases with ‘products’ that the distributors can sell. These included shampoos, soap, and car polish. Also on the walls were various photos that said ‘RSD of the Month’. People hang about in groups, sometimes with the RF contact who had brought them there. Soon, we were asked to queue up behind a door that was opened after some waiting and we slowly made our way into an air-conditioned seminar room with a stage and sound system. It was a very hot Delhi day and the airconditioned room was like a world apart; the gathering exuded a palpable sense of relief at the temporary respite from the sweat infused air of the entry-hall and the oppressive heat of the street. People talked in whispers and looked around at the well-appointed chairs, even though due to the relatively large numbers, many of us were left standing. The ‘seminar’—none of us quite knew what to expect—was preceded by a warm up session by a young man. He said the session will be opened by Gaurav (whom I met earlier) and asked us to applaud. Another man opened a side door to the stage with a flourish and Gaurav bound up on to the stage in the manner of a pop star. ‘Imagine’, Gaurav begins, ‘that there is a man X, and that his son asks for a bicycle, but X responds, “on your next birthday”.’ Today, Gaurav continued, he was going to introduce us to men who had never had to wait for anything till the next birthday. The side door opened once again and a group of seven young men rushed on to the stage, much like Gaurav’s own dramatic entrance. Each was formally attired, including ties. They stood in a straight line and, one by one, told us their stories of ‘success’ after having joined RF. (p.282) At the conclusion of this event, we were introduced to Navin who took the stage for about two hours. His ‘story’ and performance moved between personal Page 19 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ narratives, those of the different economies of the city, and the newer discourses of personal effort and corporate sensibility: My father is a head constable in the Delhi Police and when I first told him that I wanted to join a company called Revolution Forever, he threw me out of the house … but now that he is witness to my success, he is very proud of me. In this business … there are two kinds of income streams…. I will now explain this … [he spotted someone for whom the cool comfort of the room had proved too alluring and who had fallen asleep] … you there! Get up and leave this room at once! [He turned to another member of the audience who had been looking distractedly at the ceiling] … I want you to repeat all that I have just said! […] Let me now explain something of the company and how it operates: […] There are different categories of staff… There is the RSD [Revolution Silver Distributor], this is someone who has achieved ten pairs in one month, makes Rs 7,000–10,000 per month, plus 100 bonus. RMD: Management Distributor, with 25 pairs in one month, makes Rs 15,000–20,000, plus 200 bonus. RGD: Gold Distributor, with 50 pairs in one month, makes Rs 30,000– 40,000, plus 300 bonus. RPD: Platinum Distributor, with 100 pairs in one month, makes Rs 60,000– 70,000, plus 400 bonus. RDD: Diamond Distributor, with 150 pairs in one month, makes Rs 1 lakh and above, plus 500 bonus. And finally, RED: Executive Distributor, with 300 pairs in one month, makes Rs 2–3 lakhs, plus 600 bonus. [We were one hour into Navin’s lecture and the crowd showed signs of restlessness, but there was no break in Navin’s flow]. There are different kinds of incomes you can earn, not just one type as in a government job … there is direct income: You, X, recruit two members, they recruit two, they recruit two, and every time each pair pays up and joins RF, you get an income, Rs 490, plus a monthly retainer. Then there is ‘network income’: money that comes to you after those you have recruited Page 20 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ the right leg and the left leg—each of these legs goes on to recruit a pair each … and there is ‘spillover income’: this is when even if (p.283) none of your ‘legs’ are paying off, you can still benefit through being part of the system. Navin pointed out that many people said that this is all membership-wala kaam [work that involves having to recruit members], but he went on to ask, ‘What’s wrong with that? What is wrong with having other people work for you?’ Then he explained the ideas of ‘Linear Income’ and ‘Leverage Income’. The first is where ‘the more you work, that is the more time you can give, the more you earn. So, if you double your time, you double your income, and so on’. But, ‘it is only possible to work twenty-four hours a day. The second [Leverage Income] is when you have others working for you’. It was time for a break in the presentation. During the break, we milled around chest-high tables, each of us allotted our own ‘advisor’ who further explained the complexities of the system and encouraged us to ask questions. The most common theme concerned the idea of time: that we have the ability to transform ‘linear’ time into a more flexible commodity, and that we can ‘leverage time’. For the vast majority of people there—daily labourers, shop-workers, resettlement colony dwellers—the idea that time can be stretched and moulded seemed extraordinary and they repeatedly asked for further explanation. The rigid constraints of their own lives, where they are completely at the mercy of their work environment, makes it hard to think of such a ‘revolution’ in time; but, the spatial revolution—the air-conditioned room, men dressed in neat corporatewear, a water-cooler, the commodity trophies that line the glass cases—promised a great deal. As the afternoon traffic and heat built up outside, Navin was winding up his act. The room remained comfortably cool, but Navin was sweating from his exertions. His voice at a high pitch and in a tone of serious warning, Navin called out: Don’t be one of those people who just keeps thinking; you must act, or this opportunity will be gone forever! Middle-class people like us think too much and the chance is gone! As the seminar ended (it lasted from 10.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m.), all of us rushed outside. The footpaths were bustling with shops full of electronic goods and bright signs, and the streets were crammed with flashy cars. People rubbed their eyes to adjust the harsh light of the sun. Someone asked which bus to catch to cross the river to reach home to Nangla. Many buses drove past us, almost all full to bursting. Very few (p.284) from among the crowd that emerged from the seminar were able to get on. We were soon sweating profusely. Notwithstanding the recent incursions of the market into the imagination of the poor, it is, as Osella and Osella (2000: 157) suggest, ‘the quotidian intimacy of Page 21 of 23

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‘Revolution Forever’ the state’ that is the most significant aspect of their lives. Or, as Kaviraj puts it, ‘From an agency which was spectacular, mysterious and distant, the state has become something vast, overextended, extremely familiar at least in its sordid everyday structures’ (Kaviraj 1997: 243). As the provider of cheap food and other domestic goods, erratic legal succour, education, medical aid, residential spaces, and arbitrary regulatory force, the state looms large in the life of the poor. In this context, what are we to make of the latter’s engagements with market discourses of individual enterprise and the soi disant figure of the gogetter as the new urban ideal? The constant to and fro movement between the rights to resources on the one hand, and enterprise as a road to prosperity on the other, is a condition of the threshold existence the city both makes possible and requires. So, it is not so much an emotional commitment to the spirit of free enterprise that moves Mrs Kumar, Raj Kumar, and Navin to hitch their wagons to RF. Rather, it is the strategic search for a livelihood—and a life—that propels them with equal force to the portals of the Slum Department and the aspirational venues of RF. In this sense, then, the city itself is like a gigantic shopping mall—full of goods one hopes to possess, but requiring constant calibration of desire in order that it aligns with the actual capacity to consume. The experience of the city is produced through occupation of thresholds that make for possible movements in several directions, rather than a firm (ideological) commitment to a home—the state, the market, whatever—that, in any case, is not really an option afforded by material circumstance.

Epilogue: Crime and Revolution Some months after my attendance at the RF seminar, I had gone to visit Harish Singh who works for the NGO, All India Crime Prevention Society (AICPS, see Chapter six). As we talked, Singh received a phone call and was soon immersed in a lengthy conversation about meeting someone at a particular place. Thinking that he was talking about (p.285) recruiting more people for AICPS, I asked if he had to do a lot of running around on membership drives. Actually, he said, he had recently become a member of ‘Eazyway’ and was talking to a friend about it on the phone. For a sum of Rs 620, he was given goods worth 300 and then had to get others to join the company as well. He was introduced to the company by a friend. He explained in detail how his own income stream would be enhanced by the new members, and he could also buy goods from the company at cheaper rates, either for personal use, or for selling to others at a profit. Singh had joined three months ago and had already enrolled around thirty people in the first instance, generating a commission of Rs 100 per person for himself. I expressed surprise and asked him how he had managed to enroll so many in such a short time. He said that these were, in fact, all members of the AICPS whom he had persuaded to join Eazyway. In an urban world of thresholds, one kind of network shades into another, and those dedicated to ‘crime-prevention’—

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‘Revolution Forever’ a statist discourse—also become partners in the new consumerism. Such is the nature of entangled urbanism and its spaces. Notes:

(1) . For complete list, refer to ‘MLM Companies in India’. Available at www.gmmlm.com/mlm-companies-in-india.htm. (2) . Guha also points out that since the greater labour market ‘flexibility’ has been accompanied by the adoption of capital intensive technologies, there is a particular relationship between it and employment growth (Guha 2009). (3) . For complete story, refer to ‘Amway Offices Raided in India’. Available at www.pyramidschemealert.org/PSAMain/news/AmwayinIndia.html. (4) . For complete story, refer to ‘RBI flashes red signal at MLM companies’. Available at www.financialexpress.com/news/rbi-flashes-red-signal-at-mlmcompanies/518020/.

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Bibliography

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

(p.286) Bibliography Bibliography references: Abaza, M. 2001. ‘Shopping Malls, Consumer Culture and the Reshaping of Public Spaces in Egypt’, Theory, Culture, & Society, 18(5): 97–122. Abrams, P. 1988. ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(1): 58–89. Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 2004. ‘Cairo: Too Many People, not Enough Land: Too Few Resources’, in Josef Gugler (ed.) World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, Development and Inequality, pp. 119–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adam, B. and J. van Loon. 2000. ‘Repositioning Risk: The Challenge for Social Theory’, in B. Adam, U. Beck, and J. van Loon (eds), The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory, pp. 1–33. London: Sage Publications. Adiga, A. 2004. ‘India’s Mania for Malls’. Available online: www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/; accessed 22 August 2007. Agarwal, Amar K. 2009. ‘Are We in the Right Direction?’, in Amitabh Taneja (ed.), Operational Shopping Centres and Malls Next, pp. 176–79. New Delhi: IMAGES Group. Ahuja, S.K. 2010. ‘Powerless Residents Find Light Solution’, The Hindustan Times, 10 July: 2. Alley, D.K. 1997. ‘Gandhiji on the Central Vista: A Postcolonial Refiguring’, Modern Asian Studies, 31(4): 967–94.

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Bibliography Goldman, M. 2011. ‘Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(3): 555–81. Goffman, Erving. 1976. Asylums. Chicago: Alldine Publishing Company. Gopalakrishnan, A. 2003. ‘A House in Disorder’, Frontline, 2(10), www.frontlineonnet.com. Goss, J. 1999. ‘Once-upon-a-time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89(1): 45– 75. Goswami, Dr. J. 2009. ‘India’s Rich Diversity’, in A. Taneja (ed.), Operational Shopping Centres and Mallsnext, pp. 30–57. New Delhi: IMAGES Group. Gottdiener, M. 2003. ‘Recapturing the Centre: A Semiotic Analysis of Shopping Malls’, in A.R. Cuthbert (ed.), Designing Cities: Critical Readings in Urban Design, pp. 128–38. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Greenough, P. 1995. ‘Nation, Economy, and Tradition Displayed: The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi’, in C. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, pp. 216–48. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guha, A. 2009. ‘Labour Market Flexibility: An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberal Propositions’, Economic and Political Weekly, 44(19): 45–52. Gupta, A. 1995. ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22(2): 375–402. ———. 1998. Postcolonial Development: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gupta, I. and A. Mitra. 2002. ‘Rural Migrants and Labour Segmentation: MicroLevel Evidence from Delhi Slums’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(2): 163–68. (p.293) Gupta, D. 2000. Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Gupta, R.K. and S. Nangia. 2005. ‘Population Explosion and Land Use Changes in Gurgaon City Region—A Satellite of Delhi Metropolis’, paper presented at the XXV International Population Conference Tours, International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, France, 18–23 July 2005: 1–11. Hammond, A.L. and C.K. Prahlad. 2004. ‘Selling to the Poor’, Foreign Policy 142 (May–June): 30–37.

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Bibliography Hansen, T. B. and F. Stepputat (eds). 2001. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham: Duke University Press. Harris, J. 2007. ‘Antinomies of Empowerment: Observations on Civil Society, Politics and Urban Governance in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42(26): 2716–24. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Hawley, J.S. and Shrivatsa Goswami. 1981. At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Brindavan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hoffenberg, P.H. 2001. An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hosagrahar, J. 2007. ‘Negotiated Modernity: Symbolic Terrains of Housing in New Delhi’, in P. Scriver and V. Prakash (eds), Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling, and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, pp. 219–40. London and New York: Routledge. Hume Report. 1936. Report on the Relief of Congestion in Delhi, Volume I. Simla: Government of India Press. Inden, R. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jaffrelot, C. 2003. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in North Indian Politics. Delhi: Permanent Black. ———. 2008. ‘“Why should We Vote?” The Indian Middle Class and the Functioning of the World’s Largest Democracy’, in P. van der Veer and C. Jaffrelot (eds), Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China, pp. 35– 54. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Jain, A. 2009. ‘75 lakh litre rainwater harvesting project in city’, Metronow, 22 August 2009: 5. Jameson, F. 1984. ‘Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 1/146: 53–92. Jain, M. 2002. ‘Tyrannies at Work’, Seminar, ‘First City? A Symposium on Remembering Delhi’ 515 (July): 38–41. Jain, Kajri 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian ‘Calendar Art’. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Index

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

(p.305) Index Academy of Fine Arts and Literature xl Advani, L.K. 203 Aga Khan Hall xl Agarwal, S. N. 73 Ahshan Colony RWA Bhagidars 104–8 All India Crime Prevention Society (AICPS) 155, 285 crimes against women solved through intervention of 158–9 governing structure of 157 objectives of 156 organizes variety of annual events 157 Amar Ujala 73 Ambience Mall Gurgaon 234, 244 Amby Valley township, Maharashtra 112 American bhakts (devotees) 164 American multinationals 263 American style coffee shops xxii Amway 263–5, 280 ancient modernity 202–4 anthropologist xx anti-corruption agitation by Hazare 92 anxiety xxxiv, 12, 32, 38, 143, 165, 209, 214, 216, 269 Appadurai, Arjun 93, 139, 214, 261 Akshardham Temple (AT) complex, Delhi 58, 212, 216 (see also Bhagwan Swaminarayan; Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS)) ancient modernity reflected of 202–4 appeal of 206 configuration of urban spaces 206 constructed by BAPS 192 consumption part of 207 Garden of Values 208 Page 1 of 16

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Index processes of consumption 204 Ramesh Swami in charge of 197–8, 201 spirit of things 193–7 women and the spiritual-commodity space 210 Asian Centre for Organization Research and Development (ACORD), NGO 99, 101, 104 (p.306) Asian Games (1984) 4, 108 Askew, Marc 5, 79 Babri Masjid mosque demolition in 1992 17 backwardness, notion of 146–7 backward provincial mentalities 222 backward villager 151 Balmikis 11 Bangladeshis 53 immigrants 67 banks 134, 136n12 basti 42, 48, 57, 262 (see also Nangla Matchi basti) dwellers engagements 61 evictions 60 fragile certainty of life 16 imagination of residents 27 Jagmohan drive for basti-demolition-and-urban beautification 22 market for people of 16–17 meaning of 5 pradhans 7, 9 pre-demolition survey before demolition of 12–13 relationship between state and people of 54 resident mercy of unpredictable pastoralism of state 17 residents lives entangled with middle-class ones 85 Basti Harphool Singh redevelopment, North Delhi xxiv Baviskar, Amita xxi, xxix, xxxviii, 59, 128 Bawana Resettlement Colony, North Delhi 72, 78 bedrooms in national imagination 116–29 Beechwood Estate 172, 175, 182, 184, 187 Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards 31, 37, 39–40, 46 Benjamin, Walter 216 Bhagidari scheme of Delhi government 34–5, 56n3, 87, 89, 98–102, 115, 192 Bhagidari Utsav (Bhagidari Festival) at Pragati Maidan 108–9 model bhagidars Ahshan Colony RWA 104–8 Sangam RWA 102–4 Bhagwan Swaminarayan 192, 198, 201, 208 bhajan (prayer-song) 164, 203 Bhangra dance 102, 109 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 12, 14, 17, 19, 75, 111, 158, 171, 194, 203 Bharat Sevak Samaj 58 Bharat Upvan (Garden of India) 201 bhashan (lecture) 40 Bhilai (Madhya Pradesh) townships 119 Big Bazaar 218, 242–3, 245, 247 Page 2 of 16

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Index Bilkees Begum 18–22, 27–8, 42, 44–5, 72 Birla Committee xiv, 59 Birla Report (BR) xxix, 59 Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) 192–4, 198 (see also Akshardham Temple (AT) complex, Delhi) Bokaro (Bihar) townships 119 Bombay Citizenship Series 222 boomtowns 224 Bose, Ashish 59 Bramhaswarup Yogiji Maharaj (the fourth guru, 1892–1971) 193, 203 bridal magazines, Indian 120 Bride and Home magazine 120–1 (p.307) British Hinduism 193 bundhs (embankments) 7, 13 Bureau of Police Research and Development 152 Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system 102 Call Centres xxiii Campaign Against Power Tariff Hike (CAPTH) 91, 111n1 caste in gated communities 182–8 caring state, notion of 110 category B and C cities 219 CCTV surveillance system 220 Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) 20 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) 74–5 Chakrabarti, Poulomi 92 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 215 Chamkili Pradhan (Shiny Head-Man) 6–18, 69, 75–6 (see also Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); Khurana, Madan Lal) erratic passages 13–18 Chandra, Suraj 13, 21, 27, 41–2, 44–5, 47, 52–3, 68, 71 charpais (hessian or woven bed) 76, 130, 170 Chatterjee, Partha xxiv, xxx, 97 Citizen’s Security Committee 155 citizen-worker 120 city(ies) xviii–xix, xx–xxii, xxiv–xxvi, xxxi–xxxv, xxxix–xli, 4, 124 city girls 150–1 civil disobedience 91, 93 civil society xiii, 87, 97 class xix, 4 (see also middle classes) cleanliness of open-plan house 143 in Gurgaon, debate on 145 Coca-Cola Company 140 colonial ambience 93 colonial government xxiii colonial police reports 31 commodity cultures 163–6 Commonwealth Games (2010) xxxviii, 4, 70, 102 village 2010 195 Page 3 of 16

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Index Communist Party 79 communitarianism 17 community(ies) 27–9, 45–54, 163–7 complex idea 169 sharing common identity and public culture xxi condominium spaces 161, 174–5, 188 Congress party xxvii Congress rule 55, 91 Connell, R.W. 4 consanguineal capitalism 129–34 consumer cultures 87, 95, 111, 116, 120, 122, 128, 205, 217, 221, 226, 228, 260, 270 consumerism 4, 6, 21, 88, 93, 110, 121–2, 124, 127, 206–7, 210, 226, 228, 236, 238–40, 245, 251, 258, 260 capitalist 214 transnational 220–1 consumerist activity 224 consumerist space 214, 216 consumption 214, 262 Communitarian criticisms of 215–16 contemporary communitarianism 215 contemporary gated communities of NCR 117, 119 contemporary urbanism 45–6 Cooperative Group Housing Scheme (CGHS) complexes 248 cosmopolitanism xix, xxxi, 113, 122, 125, 143, 166 (p.308) counterfeiting 31 courts 75–80 criminals 149–59 classes xxxiii spaces, demarcation of 3 cross-border migration 33 Crossroads mall, Mumbai 223 crowds 158 (see also urban villages) culinary cosmopolitanism 139 cultural diversity 228 cultural guides 217 cultural imperialism 165 culturally differentiated consumer 217 cultural pride 221 cultural role of West 124 culture, Indian 95, 125, 164–5, 214, 228–9, 231 cultures of diasporic Hinduism 209 cultures of piracy 31 dalals (broker) 43, 81 Dandiya Night dancing 176 Das, Veena 33 debased villagers 96 decrepitude 143–9 Deed of Relinquishment 63 Delhi Ajmeri Gate Slum Clearance Scheme xxiv, 59 Page 4 of 16

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Index Delhi Art Gallery 222 Delhi city xxiii, 30 heterogeneity of xxi improving through Public Private Partnership xxii–xxxi modern spatial history of xxxi Delhi Colonisers Association xxvi Delhi Crown lands xxiii Delhi Development Authority (DDA) xxi, xxix, xxx, 3–4, 10, 13–14, 23, 59, 63, 74, 99, 102–3, 128, 176, 280 LIG flats occupied by middle-income families 60 Slum Wing 8 survey of houses in 2005 43 Delhi Development Provisional Authority xxix Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking (DESU) 11–12 Delhi government xxxviii, 56n3 Bhagidari scheme of (see Bhagidari scheme of Delhi government) plans to erect Signature Bridge 14 Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT) xxi, xxiii–xxvi, xxviii–xxxi, xxxiii–xxxv, xxxvii, 3, 58–9, 128 Delhi Jal (Water) Board 100 Delhi Land Finance company (DLF) xxi–xxii Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) 121 Delhi monkeyman (2002) 38 Delhi Municipal Council xxiii Delhi-Noida-Delhi (DND) toll 195 Delhi (Control of Building Operations) Ordinance of 1955 xxix Delhi Police 155 Delhi Students’ Compulsory Manual Labour Bill, The xxxvi–xxxvii Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation (DTDC) 57 Delhi Tourism Development Corporation (DTDC) xxxviii Delhi Urban Arts Commission (DUAC) xxxix, 194 Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) 91, 100 democratic sentiment 97 demolitions 57–60 Department of Education, Health and Lands xxxi (p.309) deprived villagers xxxv Desai, Morarji 14 De, Shobha 123–6 development xxxvi developmentalism xviii developmentalist relationship 115 Dikshit, Sheila 90–1, 99 Dilli Haat 236 Direct Selling Organizations (DSOs) 213, 262–4 dirt 145 distributors 266 DLF City (New Gurgaon) xxii–xxiii, xxxi, 125–9, 131–3, 137–9, 142–3, 148, 154, 160, 167, 170, 177, 246 (see also Gurgaon district (Haryana); plenitude) Dr Mehta vision of 140 Page 5 of 16

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Index garbage collection in localities of 144 lines of demarcation 144 DLF Corporation 114, 140, 144, 170 domestic sphere 121 emergence of 120 drawing rooms in national imagination 116–29 DT Mall 246 Dubai dream 143 Dubai skyscrapers 215 Dubaizaton 143 duplicity 33, 45–54 Durga Puja festival 95 Durgapur (West Bengal) townships 119 Dwyer, Rachel 123–6, 193, 222 educated classes 88 e-governance 32 Emergency demolitions during period of xxxi, 14, 23, 61–2, 67 employing 29n1 English-language cookbooks 139 entrepreneurialism 130, 264, 272 Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums (EIUS) 57–8 export processing zones 112 fake-object 31 fake state of affairs 41–5 faking 32–3 fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) 224, 266 feint 45 female Bihari pradhan 18 (see also Bilkees Begum) festival 163–4 filth 23, 145 financial rewards 263 First Information Reports (FIR) 69, 158 Following the Equator (Mark Twain) 137–8 foreign bodies 52–4 foreigners 30, 53 forgeries 32 forger mounts 31–2 fortified enclaves 114, 116, 149 Fraser, Nancy 68 Gandhi, Indira 18, 23, 61–2 Gandhi, Sanjay 23 Garba 164 garbage 145 gated community(ies) xx–xxi, xxxii, xxxiv–xxxvii 89, 104, 111, 116–17, 119–21, 124–6, 128, 135, 166 gated enclaves xx, 5, 95, 114, 116, 120, 124, 135, 139–40, 146, 148 gates to residential localities in Delhi 114 gateways to heaven 191–2 gating localities, trend of 114 Page 6 of 16

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Index (p.310) gawahi (evidence) 70 gendering of public spaces 174 genuineness 39 Gidda 164 glancing, notion of 209 global city xxi–xxii, xxxi, xxxvi, 29n1, 86–7 global consumerism 135n3 globalization 162, 226, 239 global spaces xxxv, 218 Goa 262–6 Goss, Jon 216, 225 Gounders agricultural caste 184–5 Great Mall of America 216 green maps xxxix–xli Grihalakshmi magazine 210 Grihashobha magazine 210 Gujar agitations 147 Gujar community of Rajasthan 147 Guongzhou city, China 143 Gupta, Akhil 44 gupt (secret) system of codes of government 48–9 Gurgaon district (Haryana) ii, 6, 117, 124–5, 127–9 clash between different civilizational values, perception of 151 construction boom in 134 gated communities of 104 increase in urban area 147 malls in 227 migrants to (see migrants to Gurgaon district) as Millennium City 7, 130, 138, 144, 151 public spaces 141 sewerage problem in 146 threats against property and life 150 unruly villagers of 150 Hampstead Park 172, 182 Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) 132, 145, 152 Hazare, Anna 92 Hazrat Nizamuddin Bridge 195 heavy industry, investment in 96 heritage maps xxxix–xli High Street Ishanya mall 221–2 High Street (Indian), notion of 221 hijra (eunuch) 7–8 Hindu fundamentalists 17 Hindu spirituality 209 Hindustan Colonisers xxviii Hindustan Times 145–6, 150 Hindutva leanings of NDA 194 History of Railway Thieves: With Illustrations and Hints on Detection, The (Pauparao Naidu) 31 Page 7 of 16

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Index Homeowners’ Associations 85 householder in Hindu life, centrality of 214 Hume, A.P. xxiii, xxiv, xxix ICICI 134 ID cards 30 ideal basti 22–3 idea of networking 263 identity, tasks of proving 30 identity cards (pehchan patra) 37–9, 46, 52, 82 identity problem 227–8 illegal settlements xx, xxxvii immigrant Delhi 4 Imperial Delhi Municipal Committee xxxi improvement 248 improvement schemes in Delhi, modern history of 3 India City Competitiveness Report for 2009 224 India Habitat Centre xxxix, xl, 22–3 (p.311) India International Centre xl India International Trade Fair (IITF) 34, 108 Indian Express 32, 56n2, 145, 207 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) 202 individual lives, cultural contexts of 4 industrial activity, delineated areas for 119 informal Delhi spaces 4 infusions 52–4 in-situ upgradation 57 International food chains 218 International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) 164, 179 International Toilet Museum, North-West Delhi xli International Trade Fair grounds 4 (see also Pragati Maidan (‘The Field of Progress’) exhibition grounds) Inter-State Bus Terminus (ISBT) 105 intimacy 45–54 Jagmohan xxxvii, 22–3, 195 Jago Grahak Jago (‘Wake up, Consumer!’) programme 207 Jain, Vijendra 73 Janata Dal (JD) 19 Janmashtami festival 163, 179 Jats caste xxiii, 147 jharokha (tableau depicting Krishna as a child) 164 jhuggi jhopri (slum colonies) 205 growth in Delhi 60 jhuggis (hutment) 4, 9, 17 Kalam, Abdul 203 Kanpur 139–40 Karol Bagh area xxxiii, 176 Karva Chauth ritual 175, 178–9, 185, 232–9 katchi parchis (temporary documents indicating entitlement) 25 Kaviraj, Sudipta 55 Page 8 of 16

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Index Khanna, Tejender xxxiii kharanja (brick-paved laneway) 16 Khurana, Madan Lal 12 kirana stores 218, 227, 256 kitchens in national imagination 116–29 Kuber Finance Corporation 24 (see also Kumar, Rakesh) Kumar, Nita 222 Kumar, Nitish 18–19 Kumar, Rakesh 22–7 labour market dynamism 162–3 Lakshmi Nagar (East Delhi) 267, 269–70, 277–80 Land Acquisition Act of 1894 xxiv Land Owning Authority (LOA) 67 Land Using Authority (LUA) 67 Large Group Interactive Event (LGIE) 99 lawyers 75–80 liberalization 87 licence-permit Raj 183 life-history 4 lifestyle 218, 225 lost authenticity, narrative of 225 Mahajan, Gurpreet 96 mahaul (atmosphere) 17 manufactured uncertainty 270 market 16, 54–5 Market Traders Associations (MTAs) 87, 99–100, 110 Master Plan for Delhi (1962), first 59 megamall 216 Mega Technical Training Institute 273 Mehrauli-Gurgaon (M.G.) Road 131–2 (p.312) Member of Parliament (MP) 9, 69 Members of Legislative Assembly (MLA) 69, 78, 92 Metro malls 121–2 MGF Mall 246 middle classes 38, 110–11, 134–5, 154 (see also Singh, Raghubir) activism in public affairs xxii, 85–8 aspirations 136n5 consumer-citizen 94 idealization of rural 96 making of moral 209 post-national movement of activism 94–5 sympathies for slum dwellers xxx woman emerged as public figure xxxvii migrants to Gurgaon district 151 millennium geographies 129–34 Miller, Daniel 79, 262 Ministry of Rehabilitation xxxi MLM company(ies) 263–8, 280 mobile kiosks 218 Page 9 of 16

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Index Model Basti in North Delhi 114–15 model villages xxxiv–xxxv modern city person 151 Modern Delhi Corporation (MDC) xxviii modernity xxix modern retail 220–1, 223 mohalla (traditional neighbourhood) 141, 159–63 mood swings of state 68–70 multilevel marketing organizations, Indian 213, 260, 262–3 Multi-National Corporations (MNCs) xxiii, 147, 160–1 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) xxxi, 10, 25–6, 41, 46, 54, 78, 99–100, 272 to make Delhi as transparent as Chicago 32–4 Slum Wing of 41, 51, 62, 65, 81 Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG) 144 Municipal Corporation of Mexico City 99 mystic India 197–202 Nagarik Suraksha Samiti (NSS) 155–6, 158–9 Naicker, E.V. Ramaswamy (Periyar) 184 Naipaul, V.S. 228 Nangla Matchi basti 7–8, 11, 14, 16, 22, 25, 27, 65, 68–9, 73, 86, 108, 205, 262–6 (see also Chamkili Pradhan (Shiny Head-Man)) Bilkees status in 19 masterji appointed on behalf of Chamkili 12 multiple histories of 4–6 population of 36–7 public spaces 39 rumours of impending demolition circulating in 70, 73–4, 266 trouble due to 75–80 semi-demolished 80 stay on demolition by Supreme Court 80 workshop in 2006 by an NGO 72 Nangli Razapur village, Central-South Delhi xxxiv–xxxv nation 4 National Cadet Corps (NCC) 208 National Capital Region (NCR) xviii, xix, 117, 138, 224 National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) 223 national crime statistics 152 (p.313) National Democratic Alliance (NDA) 194 National Gallery of Modern Art xl national integration 220 Nazul (crown) lands xxiii, xxvi, 15 Nazul schemes xxvi Neelkanth Darshan in AT complex 199–200 Nehruvian spaces of production 221 Nehruvian state, decline of 87 neighbourhoods 5, 16, 27, 31, 35, 46, 92–3, 96, 110, 114, 141, 146, 154, 156, 159–60 neighbours 149–59 with kindest cuts 49–52 New Delhi Municipal Committee (NDMC) xxxi Page 10 of 16

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Index New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) 73–4, 100 New Industrial Policy (1980) xxvii new middle-classness 205 New Okhla Industrial Development Area (Noida), Uttar Pradesh 138, 150, 195, 201 new-style Cairo coffee shops xxii niche cities 224 Nigam, Sanjay xxxiii non-bourgeois subaltern citizen 145 non-government organizations (NGOs) 22, 48, 86, 88, 93, 100, 140, 284 Non Resident Indians (NRIs) 169, 238 non-state social networks 42 non-Western city xix Notified Area Committee of the Civil Linea area xxxii obsession with physical security systems 149 Office of the Chief Commissioner of Delhi xxxi old Wazirabad bridge 13 Omaxe group 112 Omaxe Heights, Lucknow 113 Omaxe Park Woods township 112–13 open-plan house 141–3 organizational ideologies 263 Other Backward Classes (OBCs) 146–7 overcrowding xliin9 Pal, Bipinchandra 222 panchayat (assembly/village committee) xxxv, 7, 70 Parry, Jonathan 55 Parsvnath Castle 116–17, 121–2 Parsvnath Metro Malls 121 people 169–70 (see also spaces) people power 91 People’s Action, NGO 85–6, 91, 111n1 personality 61 plenitude 137–43 political society 97 politics of exclusion 85 politics of reservations 146–7 Population Council 22 post-colonial state 59 post-Marxist disaffection with commercial society 215 post-nationalism 93–8 post-Nehruvian economic liberalization 93 post-partition refugees xxxv power sector, reform in 91, 94 pradhan/pradhanji 7, 9–11, 29n1, 34 Pragati Maidan (‘The Field of Progress’) exhibition grounds 4–5, 8, 36, 258 Bhagidari Utsav (Bhagidari Festival) at 108–10 strike in mid-1970s 15 (p.314) Pragati Power company 43 Pramukh Swami Maharaj 192, 194, 198 Page 11 of 16

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Index Premier City Arcade (PCA) mall 232–9 Premises Eviction Act 1950 xxv private enterprise xxviii, xxx, 104, 145, 239, 260 private entities in real estate business xxiii private property 114, 127 private spaces 115, 127, 225, 250 private urban development process xxviii–xxix privatization of public thoroughfares in residential localities 113 privatized production of spaces of residence and leisure 88 Progressive Grocer magazine 217–18 Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) 14–15 public culture of Delhi 225 Public Health Department of Minneapolis, Beijing and Ford 99 public spaces 39, 115, 127, 141, 214 characteristics in DLF city 161 feminist writings in India on 166 gendering of (see gendering of public space) restructuring in liberalizing India 148 women access to 166 public sphere, idea of 68 Public Works Department (PWD) 145 Punjab industrial township of Rajpura 117 Punjab Suppression of Indecent Advertisements Act 1941 xxxii pushta (embankment) 16, 155 putative sociality 128 Quick Response Team (QRT) 127, 144 quotidian intimacy of the state 44 Rabindra Bhavan xl Radio Mirchi (Delhi FM station) 203 Rajan Swami 197, 202, 209 Rajasthan township of Bhiwadi 112 Ramesh Swami (RS) 197 Ram, K. 57 Rapid Action Force (RAF) 75 Rapid Metrorail Gurgaon 140–1 rationality of transparency 33 ration cards 30–1, 43, 54 real community (the samaj) 27 real estate developments in India xxi, xxiii, xxv–xxvii regional goods, modern taste for 220 republican tradition of citizenship 215 Reserve Bank of India 281–2 resettlement colony(ies) xx, 4, 12 of Dakshinpuri in South Delhi 62–3, 274 Resettlement of Displaced Persons Act of 1948 xxxv residents of reclamations colonies xxxiii residents welfare association (RWA) xxi, 58, 85, 87–92, 110, 192 (see also Bhagidari scheme of Delhi government) active in installing and maintaining gates in Delhi 113 Page 12 of 16

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Index activism partakes in redefining civil society 97 crucial to process of consolidating urban consensus 86 protest movement by 86 of Victoria Park complex 140 (p.315) Residents Welfare Association Joint Front (RWAJF), Delhi 90–1, 93, 111n1 retail revolution process 219–20 revolution 93, 120 Revolution Forever (RF) 213, 262, 266–9, 272–4, 280–2 Revolution Silver Distributor (RSD) 269, 281–2 Robinson, Jennifer xviii, xix, xxxv Rourkela (Orissa) townships 119 rural ambience 95 rural migrant, fear of 150 Sadana, Rashmi 228 safety 143, 150, 154, 177 Sahara Mall 242, 245 Sajha Prayas programme of Delhi government 35–6 sakhi (girl-friend) 6–9 sales 263 Sangam Phase II Housing Society (Sangam-II) Bhagidars 102–4 Sanjay Camp basti 273–4 Sansi criminal tribe xxxiii Santhal (tribal) dance 109 sarkari naukari (government job) 14 Satyagraha 91, 93 Savda-Ghevda (Savda) village resettlement colony 12, 34, 205 Scheduled Caste (SC) 146–7 Scheduled Tribe (ST) 32, 146 Schielke, Samuli 136n5 security 154 Select City Walk 238 self-pleasure 210 Self-Respect movement 184–5 senses of real 31–4 sewerage 105–6, 144–6 shampoo 261–6 shanties 59, 79 Shivaji University, Maharashtra xix–xx shopping centres 217, 242–6 in time of personality development 245–7 Shopping Centre News magazine 219 shopping malls xx, 206, 211–12, 215, 225, 231 (see also Premier City Arcade (PCA) mall) in Delhi 226 development of 217 economic stimulus for development in India 223 favoured by young women 225 genuine brands and spaces 255–7 Page 13 of 16

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Index key to success of 228 prefer going with family 245–55 relationship between consuming and saving 257–8 theoreticians 226 Shree Swaminarayan Gadi Sansthan 192 Signature Bridge in Wazirabad 14, 29n4 Ssilver Woods (Pune) 122–6 Simla 262–6 Singh, Kushal Pal 129, 171 Singh, Raghubir 170–1 Singh, V.P. 75, 78 slum-dweller-turned-criminal, fear of 150 slums xx–xxii, xxiv, 3, 5 (see also basti) bureaucracies 10, 62–8 as a city-wide public nuisance 58 clearance xxiv, 3, 57–8, 128 (see also Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT)) clusters 61 in Delhi 4 (p.316) demolitions 57–8 in Delhi 59 during Emergency period of 1975 xxx dwellers xxx, xxxiv, xxxvi, 96 socialist state, decline of 87 Socialite Evenings 1988 123 social life 45 social life of urban settlements xxxviii Sociologist Slum and Urban Rehabilitation (SUR) 66 soi-disant dreams of alternative spatial modernity xxix Sonia Vihar 12–14, 76–7 spaces 169–70 intimate 119–20, 269 mammoth transformations of 117 mould human characteristics 119 national 117 new performances of 159–63 public (see public spaces) seduction across 216–25 shifting 273–9 sites for enfolding current and future occupants 117 transforming xxxv–xxxviii spatial myths of identity 225 special economic zones (SEZs) 112, 148–9 Spouse: The Truth About Marriage (Shobha De) 123 stamp-paper 39 Starry Nights 1988 123 state 4, 27–9, 32, 54 construction of industrial townships 118 nation-building activities 4 site for dramas 17 Page 14 of 16

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Index statism 17 steel towns 117, 119–20, 220 Strange Obsession 1994 123 street xxxii, xxxix, 3, 5, 8, 23–4, 76 struggle 33–4 Sub Divisional Magistrate (SDM) 52 suburban activism 88–92 suffusion of local space 165 Sulabh Shauchalaya, NGO xli Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable (Shobha De) 123 surplus consumption process 206–7, 209–11 Surviving Men. The Smart Woman’s Guide to Staying on Top (Shobha De) 123 Swaminarayan Gurukul 192 Swaminarayan Satsang 192 talk circuits xxxix–xli Taneja, Amitabh 216 tariqa (protocol, method, or protocol) 46–9 Tarlo, Emma 4–5, 16, 18, 38, 62, 64–5, 67 Tata Energy Research Institute 22 terrorists 149–59 Thapar, Romila 214 thekedar (contractor) 15 tier II and III cities 218–19, 224 Times of India, The 95 toilet maps xxxix–xli traditional house 142 traditional lala (moneylender) 237 transnational commodity-broom 218 transnational consumerism, Indian incarnation of 220 transnational consumerist modernity 108, 120 Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Foundation of India (TRIFED) 32 tribal identity 32 trickery 45, 55 (p.317) Trivedi, Virendra 194–5 Triveni Kala Sangam xl ‘true’ Indian-ness 205, 222 trust 57 Tupperware 263–5 Turkman gate, Old Delhi 15 twentieth century Delhi, history of 3 Uberoi, Patricia 120–1 Unani medicine 14 union-bazi (trade-unionism) 23 United Residents Joint Action (URJA) group 111n1 urban beautification 128 urban confinement xxxiii urban consumption 231 urban cultures xix, 150, 235, 258, 260 urban design 118 Page 15 of 16

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Index urban developments xxiv, xxviii, xxx, xxxv, 35, 114, 127–8, 144, 170 urban fear xxxii, 149 urban fortification trend 96–7 urban governance 35, 87, 90, 92, 114, 146 urban improvement scheme xxiii, xxiv urbanism xxvii, 88–92 urbanized spaces of Gurgaon 146 urban life xix, xx, xxxiv–xxxv, xxxix, 33, 87, 107, 110, 225 of poor 261 role of RWAs in 96 urban living 32, 119 urban political economy, pradhan position in 9 urban poor 38 necessity of poor of identity 30 urban redevelopment 191 urban residential patterns xxii urban restructuring 149 urban spaces xviii, xxi, xxviii, xxix, xxx–xxxi, xxxiii, xl, 3, 22, 60, 87–8, 93–4, 110, 128, 159, 204–6, 210–11, 213, 232, 235, 237, 239–40 urban transformation xxiii, xxxvi, 128 urban villages xxi, 158, 262 urban working classes 96 urban worlds created by poor-consumers 261–2 Uttar Pradesh State Employees Confederation 194 Victoria Park enclave, DLF City 126, 140, 149, 152–3, 159–60, 162–6 Bhargavs and Vermas, exchange of culture 172–82 video compact discs (VCDs) 69 villages India xxxv, 7, 12, 27, 95, 124, 146 V-Mart 219 voter ID cards 31, 39, 43–4, 46, 66 wealthy cities xix Western metropolis xviii Western modernity 225 Western urban theory xviii–xix world class city 135n3, 139, 219 Yamuna river xxxvii–xxxviii, 4, 7, 13, 155 zoning 220–1, 238

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About the Author

Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community, and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon Sanjay Srivastava

Print publication date: 2014 Print ISBN-13: 9780198099147 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198099147.001.0001

(p.318) About the Author Sanjay Srivastava is Professor of Sociology at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also associated with the sociology unit of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. His key research interests centre around ethnographies of urban life, cultures of sexualities and masculinities and consumer cultures. His publications include Constructing Postcolonial India: National Character and the Doon School (1998), Cultural Politics in the Global Age (2001, co-author), Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia (2004, contributing editor), Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India (2007), and Sexuality Studies (2013, contributing editor). He is the co-editor of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology.

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