BODIES AGAINST MODERNITY: Politics of Slum Rehabilitations in India

Abstract

India continues to modernize, and the legacy of political modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment continues to reify itself in India through the performative practices of the body politic. The body politic is a totalized conceptualization of a society imagined in the form of a body, with real exclusionary effects on those without citizenship rights. This body politic is made real through performances of popular sovereignty, bureaucratic state practices and liberal democratic electoral procedures performed during urban development processes. Ethnographic accounts of politics of slum rehabilitations in Pune show that the modern body politic is indeed performatively practised, and reshaped, by the very bodies that are expected to be alienated for the making of the body politic. Bodies meet one another in different spaces and times and generate the possibility of reshaping the liberal body politic into relational and affective bodily politics. Together, bodies become both the site and the means through which political modernity is reshaped in India.