Caste at the City’s Edge: Land Struggles in Peri-urban Bengaluru

Upadhya, Carol; Rathod, Sachinkumar

doi:10.4000/samaj.7134

Cited by 18 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Driving share exemplifies the ways in which the “social and symbolic values” (Upadhya and Rathod 2021, 19) of agrarian land and life are kept alive albeit in new ways after the financialization of agrarian lands. Share‐driving is built on affective ties to the landscape and is a practice that incorporates moral sentiments of trust and generosity.…”

Section: Driving “Share” and Place‐based Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent scholarship on Bengaluru has drawn attention to the central role of the IT sector in shaping laboring subjects and creating new iterations of professionalisms and professionals. With Bengaluru's IT boom, the earlier generation of professionals, public sector worker‐subjects shaped by the ideology of modern industry and the developmental state, are making way for laboring subjects produced through the process of work in combination with their “social coordinates within, or on the edge of, the middle class” (Upadhya 2016, 15). In this sector, discursive operations and disciplinary mechanisms such as surveillance and rigorous training are used by management to shape the worker.…”

Section: Conclusion: Co‐opting the Urban Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this sector, discursive operations and disciplinary mechanisms such as surveillance and rigorous training are used by management to shape the worker. Being a laboring subject in this regime requires the “reordering of the self, cultural identity, and sociality” (Upadhya 2016, 340). In Bengaluru's call centers, the disjunctive temporalities and forms of embodiment accompanying affective labor produce specific kinds of laboring subjects (Mankekar and Gupta 2019).…”

Section: Conclusion: Co‐opting the Urban Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 3 3 Upadhya and Rathod (2021) discuss the conversion of agricultural land to commercial real estate in peri‐urban Bengaluru, asserting that it has respatialized and reconfigured caste. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Un‐Fare: “Local” Share‐Auto Rickshaw Drivers and the Work of Belonging in the Midst of Urban Change in India's “IT Capital”

Kalyanaraman

2022

City & Society

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In Bengaluru, India's “IT capital,” global capital and processes of world city‐making valorize specific kinds of work and workers as “formal” while categorizing others as “informal,” “chaotic” and “unregulated.” This article draws attention to the work of share‐auto rickshaw driving among local men from formerly farmland‐owning households in a rapidly urbanizing pocket in peripheral Bengaluru. Why do these drivers, whose work is situated outside of visions of world‐classness, engage in the practices that they do? How do processes of urbanization shape how they see and situate themselves and their work in the city? This article argues that the drivers construct themselves as urban laboring subjects through their deep ties with place. Their identity as “local” refers to new manifestations of their ties to agrarian land and life, their place‐based knowledge in providing transport services, their selfhood, and their logic of operation. Local is also a discursive strategy that differentiates their work from that of non‐locals (or “outsiders”), and situates their work as neither formal nor informal. In illuminating the experiences of urban transformation among members of this driving community, this article asserts that local is the drivers’ way of co‐opting the urban present.

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Section: Driving “Share” and Place‐based Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Co‐opting the Urban Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Co‐opting the Urban Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Un‐Fare: “Local” Share‐Auto Rickshaw Drivers and the Work of Belonging in the Midst of Urban Change in India's “IT Capital”

Kalyanaraman

2022

City & Society

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“…He spent his time primarily with a Dalit rights activist and worked with him on tracing cases of land sales to understand how caste shapes land markets. Local residents shared knowledge about historical migration out of the area, and spent their evenings talking with him about politics and the meaning of land disputes that had torn apart several large families (Upadhya and Rathod 2021).…”

Section: The Onward March Of Speculative Capitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist multimodality: A retrospective account of an exhibition on speculative urbanism

Gupta

2021

Multimodality & Society

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This essay offers a retrospective account of a multimodal public exhibit at the end of a multi-year research project on speculative urbanism. While the registers of speculation are invariably forward-looking, our research presented us with the central place of memory as a frame through which urban residents in Bengaluru, India, negotiate their present and imagine the possibilities of the future. This essay examines four ways in which we created space for memory in our exhibit, understanding our approach as situating an archive-optic, drawing on approaches of critical fabulation, object perception, and submerged perspectives. I suggest that these forms of engagement are multimodal and that they offer feminist and decolonial ways to unmaster linear narratives and situate our research affectively.

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(Im)mobile ageing: risks of exclusion in later life in liminal urban peripheries

Nagesh

Bailey²,

George³

et al. 2023

Ageing and Society

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Despite the recent policy impetus for age-friendly cities, there is still scope for more geographical insights into ageing in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Cities in LMICs, such as Bengaluru (India), are witnessing an increase in the size of the older population in their peripheral urban regions, but there is relatively little understanding of the risks of exclusion in later age in these liminal zones. This study, set in a peripheral ward of Bengaluru, focuses on the experiences of exclusion/inclusion of socio-economically marginalised older adults and their access to work, health care and leisure. The research uses a multidimensional old-age exclusion framework to highlight how the domains of neighbourhood, material resources, mobility infrastructure and social relations influence the risks for social exclusion. We use a qualitative approach by combining behavioural mapping and in-depth interviews. Our findings highlight some ways in which institutionalised exclusion from civic infrastructure accentuates the precariousness of ageing. The rigidity of traditional hierarchies in peri-urban regions has meant that older adults who were poor, women and belonged to marginalised castes experience constrained mobilities to access labour markets, health care and social life, compounding their place-based exclusion. Despite social networks and solidarities, older adults on the periphery faced individualisation of risks while trying to access the basic amenities, thereby falling between the gap of the urban–rural milieu and governance. Age-friendly cities need to accommodate such hybrid transitionary urban processes, in the absence of which, active ageing in these rising peripheries can be impeded.

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Caste at the City’s Edge: Land Struggles in Peri-urban Bengaluru

Abstract: We are grateful to the organizers and participants of those conferences for their valuable feedback, as well as to the anonymous referees for their constructive comments. All photos are by Pierre Hauser, who we sincerely thank for allowing us to use his work.

Cited by 18 publications

References 59 publications

Un‐Fare: “Local” Share‐Auto Rickshaw Drivers and the Work of Belonging in the Midst of Urban Change in India's “IT Capital”

Un‐Fare: “Local” Share‐Auto Rickshaw Drivers and the Work of Belonging in the Midst of Urban Change in India's “IT Capital”

Feminist multimodality: A retrospective account of an exhibition on speculative urbanism

(Im)mobile ageing: risks of exclusion in later life in liminal urban peripheries

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