Book Review: Awadhendra Sharan, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850–2000

Kishore, Raghav

doi:10.1177/0019464615573290

Cited by 3 publications

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“…As historians since then have turned to the question of housing, it has become evident that these omissions are not merely historiographical. Of course, it did not help that housing had entered governmentalized discourse from early on in the colonial period (Sengupta, 2010; Chhabria, 2020), and that slums were purely viewed through the lens of disease control (Kidambi, 2001; Datta, 2013; Sharan 2014). However, political movements, too, were unable to wrest housing rights out of this governmentalization.…”

Section: Housing Rights In India? a Short Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

DID INDIA EVER HAVE A RIGHT TO THE CITY MOVEMENT? Rethinking Housing Justice in Violent Times

Pati

2024

Int J Urban Regional Res

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In this article I look into the weakening state of housing justice in India, especially in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic and increased state violence. I ask how and why housing rights in India have mostly remained limited in their approach without being able to demand broader access to the city through right to the city discourse. In trying to find answers to this question, I examine housing rights activism in India historically. I show how, while some movements and campaigns organically began to make such broader claims without even invoking the term ‘right to the city’, these efforts were short‐lived and those spaces were taken up by policymakers and courts. In this article I trace how a relative absence of a political language and movements’ growing proximity to the policy world has shaped a very particular trajectory of housing rights in India. Within the context of this relative absence of a right to the city discourse even quiet encroachments of the poor have failed to claim their moral right to the city. In this moment, as the Indian state takes a more hostile turn towards the poor and to civil‐society organizations, I argue that it may be time to rethink ways of bringing back housing to the centre of political struggles in India.

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Section: Housing Rights In India? a Short Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

DID INDIA EVER HAVE A RIGHT TO THE CITY MOVEMENT? Rethinking Housing Justice in Violent Times

Pati

2024

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…This regime of dispossession is more akin to what Ananya Roy (2017) has recently described in the American context as the compounding of dispossession and racial banishment. Although in Hyderabad the racial ground of banishment is less explicit, there is no doubt that the urban poor in India hailing from marginalised caste and religious backgrounds are racialised in practice (Ranganathan 2022), and the politics of slum clearance pursued over decades has often espoused desires for banishment of the poor (Sharan 2014).…”

Section: Slum Redevelopment As a Regime Of Dispossessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Waiting for Dignity Housing

Jonnalagadda¹

2023

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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In this article, I track a housing scheme introduced in Hyderabad, India, to redevelop slums (in situ) into two-bedroom apartments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that existing forms of governance cyclically enact a suspension of poor people's lives and often dispossess the poor of one set of rights in the process of delivering another set. In their own descriptions of these schemes, displaced communities emphatically account for the forms of suffering they repeatedly incur, which are unaccounted for in the records of the state. In their experience, governance is not only arbitrary and labyrinthine, but it also entails necessary experiences of dispossession that ironically accompany schemes for their development. This regime of dispossession that chronically underlies schemes for poverty alleviation is what I call ‘cruel governance’. Over time, this mode of development accompanied by dispossession has resulted in cynical realignments of subaltern politics towards the state and its projects.

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“…They entrenched divisions between the urban and the rural (Philo, 1995). Unlike European metropolises, however, elements of the rural or agrarian remain immanent to Indian metropolitan formations, although expunging the rural from the urban has been a long‐standing theme in Delhi's urbanisation (Sharan, 2014), poignantly witnessed in the State's continued attempts to capture free‐ranging cattle and relocate dairies deemed ‘illegal’ to the city's outskirts. Provincialising lively capital, therefore, not only complicates unitary accounts of capitalist natures but draws attention to other trajectories of urbanisation.…”

Section: Conclusion: Provincialising Lively Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living waste, living on waste: A bioeconomy of urban cows in Delhi

Turnbull

Barua

2022

Trans Inst British Geog

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The economic implications of biopolitics – or the administration, regulation, and control of life – have received significant attention in recent geographical and cognate scholarship. An emerging theme of inquiry, largely focused on the Global North, makes contributions to specifying ‘lively capital’, defined here as bodily value in motion – predicated on accumulation from other‐than‐human life. In this paper, we argue that the biopolitical process of bringing life into the ambit of capital works in cultural, political, and economic registers and not just through singular logics of the economic, as extant accounts have implied. The rendition of life into capital through modes of biopower is not a universal process. It has diverging trajectories that, in postcolonial contexts, involve hybrids between biopolitical and vernacular practices. This argument is made through an account of bovine biopolitics in urban Delhi with specific reference to the city's ‘cattle problem’ involving ‘surplus’ animals. It unfolds in four distinct parts. First, drawing on archival work, we trace colonial histories of cattle improvement to reveal how the category of ‘surplus’ was invented. Second, we deploy more‐than‐human ethnographies of free‐ranging animals in Delhi to foreground how ‘surplus’ cattle – which we conceptualise as ‘living waste’ – are driven to feed on waste as a result of gentrification and the enclosure of erstwhile grazing grounds. Third, we turn to gaushalas (cow shelters) in Delhi to show how ‘surplus’ cattle from the city's streets are rehomed and managed. Fourth, we examine the uneven practices of care afforded to different bovines based on logics associated with right‐wing Hindutva nationalism. Our account provincialises lively capital by opening up more nuanced and situated understandings of the relations between biopolitics and capitalism, attentive to divergences from models situated in Western modernity.

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Book Review: Awadhendra Sharan, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850–2000

Abstract: Awadhendra Sharan, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850–2000, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 288.

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

DID INDIA EVER HAVE A RIGHT TO THE CITY MOVEMENT? Rethinking Housing Justice in Violent Times

DID INDIA EVER HAVE A RIGHT TO THE CITY MOVEMENT? Rethinking Housing Justice in Violent Times

Waiting for Dignity Housing

Living waste, living on waste: A bioeconomy of urban cows in Delhi

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