This article traces the way the intersection between gender, class and family values is reorganised in relation to state policies that enable propertied citizenship through home-ownership. Focusing on ethnographic data from Kolkata, India, it discusses how women realise propertied citizenship in exchange for care work rather than through employment as developmentalist and liberal feminist discourses suggest. Here the way women’s lives are envisaged and represented through investment in high levels of educational attainment is in contrast to low levels of employment, symptomatic of what I call ‘liminal states’ – a gendered state of immaturity and dependence on kin. Home-ownership as a means of ‘empowerment’ configures the home as the economic and affective focus of gendered care work, which reproduces Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’, whereby the desire to own a home and the practices of homemaking hamper autonomy and restrict the efficacy of agency.

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The Politics of Urban Property RegimesOver the last three decades, processes of economic transformation and market liberalization have had far-reaching consequences for property regimes across the world. 1 These transformations are felt particularly strongly in urban areas, where land and housing have been turned into real estate. Discourses on private property are also part of emerging subjectivities and urban policies, 2 which are redefining citizenship in terms of property ownership. In many contexts, including urban India, property has enhanced both monetary gains and social status for those individuals and communities benefiting from post-liberalization ownership regimes. Thus, what Shatkin argued for Southeast Asia in the late 1980s holds true in India today, that 'real estate development and speculation in real estate products have become a major means for wealth accumulation by propertied people in many cities ' (2010, p. 272). While wealth accumulation per se is neither new nor necessarily problematic, the accumulation of capital through real estate enabled by liberalization policies has certainly not benefitted all social groups in equal measure. Even though marginalized groups are equally exposed to glowing media representations of urban renewal and homeownership, many continue to be subjected to evictions and exclusions, struggle to claim basic rights as citizens and can only dream of participating in the emerging consumer culture (Baviskar, 2010;Dey, Samaddar & Sen, 2013;Rao, 2010).Transformations of urban areas under regimes of millennial capitalism have renewed scholarly interest in questions of urban politics, urbane culture and urban power dynamics in the post-liberalization era (Shatkin, 2010;. Many transformations affect the appropriation of land beyond the city, as the burgeoning literature on land grabbing and the commodification of agricultural land across and beyond the subcontinent shows (Adnan, 2013;Feldman & Geisler, 2012;Levien, 2011). However, a key question about urban property markets concerns the role

This book presents the latest offering in a line of recent studies of the jute industry exploring questions of class, consciousness and politics during its most prosperous period. Thus, while the author announces 'a history of the Calcutta Jute Millhands', it needs to be read as part of 'the' history of the Calcutta jute millhands, which has come to dominate historical perspectives on Indian industrial labour. The book engages with the theoretical approaches of fellow jute-wallahs, most prominently Dipesh Chakrabarty. Based on the much discussed argument about the development of a working class under conditions of colonialism, Ghosh rejects any proposition that the identification workers maintained along caste and religious