Delhi has a unique place among the three big metropolises of India. Compared to Mumbai and Kolkata, Delhi’s history is much older: stretching back to the 12th century. Its growth in size, however, is much more recent. From a population of a little over a million in 1951, Delhi and its satellites—the National Capital Region (NCR)—had a population of over eighteen million in the 2011 census. In fact, Delhi’s urban history can be divided neatly at independence. Before that time, Delhi’s urban form reflected its repeated (but not continuous) status as a setting of political power. For the period of explosive urban growth after independence, scholarship about planning initiatives and their discontents abounds. There are excellent accounts of the movement from high-modernist planning to the more recent invocations of making Delhi a world-class city. Inadequate housing and repeated displacements of the poor are keynotes in this scholarship. Social movements, particularly those of the urban poor, have been an important theme from the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. Alongside spatial conflicts over planning, there is a rich vein of empirical work, and some theorization, of the ways in which political mobilizations around religion have shaped the city. Scholars have also dwelt on the complicated structure of urban governance in Delhi—as national capital and burgeoning metropolis, as an urban region that spans four separate provinces, as a megacity engulfing rural pockets, and as an administrative and commercial center ringed by an industrial periphery. Urban interventions aimed at improving Delhi’s environment have also been a topic of scholarly study. Thus, the expulsion of so-called polluting industries in Delhi, on the one hand, has gone together with the emergence of industrial zones in the peripheries of the NCR. Broadly speaking, the scholarship on historical urbanisms in Delhi points to the ways in which shifting structures of power generated urban forms in the Delhi landscape. Unsurprisingly, one manifestation of this long history has been in the active presence of heritage discourses. There is a particularly rich literature on the ways in which the present and the past coexist in modern Delhi, and the multiple possibilities for place-making opened up thereby. The author would like to thank Deepasri Baul and the anonymous reviewer for their suggestions.

This book is a social history of the property market in late-colonial Delhi; a period of much turbulence and transformation. It argues that historians of South Asian cities must connect transformations in urban space and Delhi’s economy. Utilizing a novel archive, it outlines the place of private property development in Delhi’s economy from 1911 to 1947. Rather than large-scale state initiatives, like the Delhi Improvement Trust, it was profit-oriented, decentralized, and market-based initiatives of urban construction that created the Delhi cityscape. A second thematic concern of Possessing the City is to carefully specify the emerging relationship between the state and urban space during this period. Rather than a narrow focus on urban planning ideas, it argues that the relationship be thought of in triangular fashion: the intermediation of the property market was crucial to emerging statecraft and urban form during this period. Finally, the book examines struggles and conflicts over the commodification of land. Rents and prices of urban property were directly at issue in the tussles over housing that are examined here. The question of commodification can, however, also be discerned in struggles that were not ostensibly about economic issues: clashes over religious sites in the city. Through careful attention to the historical interrelationships between state, space, and the economy, this book offers a novel intervention in the history of late-colonial Delhi.

Chapter 1 traces the transformations of Delhi after the Rebellion of 1857. It draws attention to four crucial phenomena between 1857 and 1911: the demolition and reconstruction of the city after the rebellion, the process of building the railways, administering garden lands around Delhi, and the economic activity that developed around these transformations. These phenomena constituted an extended form of primitive accumulation in Delhi over the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite important differences, It incorporated the classic features of such a process: displacement of people, the creation of funds of wealth for future investment, and the employment of force to achieve this. On the eve of the shift of the capital to Delhi in 1911, the railways, commerce, finance, and the actions of the colonial state had between them generated a cityscape in which properties were bought and sold and suburban land was being built over.

Chapter 5 outlines the convergence between the state and the property market in Delhi during this period. This convergence can be understood in terms of four registers of intimacy between the state and the market. For one, the state internalized market valuations into its own everyday practice—a kind of ingestion of the property market. A second register might be thought of as affinity—an attraction towards the property market as an opportunity and means to make profits and boost income. A third register resembles something more like symbiosis—a coming together of state and urban property to the point where it becomes impossible to think about the latter except inasmuch as it was mediated by the state. The fourth register is that of the property market as nightmare, thwarting efforts of the state to serve the ‘common good’.

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