Session 47: The New Politics of Urban Space in India

Organizer: Geert R. De Neve, University of Sussex

Chair: Sylvia Vatuk, University of Illinois, Chicago

Discussant: Mattison Mines, University of California, Santa Barbara

Keywords: politics, urban, space, locality, neighborhood, community, India.

The transformations which cities and towns in India have undergone since the process of economic liberalization took off in the 1990s have been widely discussed among social scientists. While it is generally acknowledged that a new politics of urban space is emerging in the global city (Hansen 2001), changing notions of urban localities have rarely been discussed in much detail. This panel will therefore address four main questions: (1) What happens to narratives of social change and modernity in urban places that are not at the heart of India’s new metropolitanism? (2) How are local social and economic relations transformed through processes of globalization? (3) What kind of urbanism is produced in smaller towns, and in both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ neighborhoods of India’s cities? (4) If locality remains a key category to understand social relations in urban areas, in which ways do new urban spatial practices produce distinctive locations, create new kinds of social interaction, and challenge assumptions about bounded communities?

This panel will provide a critical anthropological perspective on urban localities, and by charting recent transformations in urban areas across India, will address issues of wider interest such as the politics of group and communal identities, changing gender relations, and the new politics of production and consumption. Through detailed ethnographic accounts of urban localities and their meaning in different settings, we explore how provincial modernities, national imagination and global images manifest themselves and are mediated in localities inhabited by ever larger sections of India’s population.

The Parlour and the Para: Class and Gender in a Neighborhood of Central Calcutta

Henrike Donner, London School of Economics and Political Science

This paper explores the way in which gendered subjects are constituted in relation to a particular socio-spatial configuration, namely the urban neighborhood. It focuses on the structural constraints and experiences guiding middle-class women’s relations with their neighborhood in Central Calcutta, and the way gendered subjects are constructed in relation to local class and community configurations. Rather than looking at the neighborhood as the backdrop of meaningful social relations, the paper explores how spatial concepts and practices are used to (re)produce gendered norms and are appropriated by individual women in different ways.

Neighborhoods are crucial for the production of relationships of power: architecturally, in terms of social boundaries related to caste and class, and the spatial regulation of gendered behavior. In the urban setting they are often somewhat diffuse places, because they may not be congruent with administrative units and comprise of kin and non-kin, households belonging to different castes and ethnic communities, and classes. In Calcutta, as elsewhere, neighborhoods are constituted in relation to other places through conceptual links, practical relationships, and by means of comparison. Some of these concepts are contained within the locality, and others clearly point beyond the immediate surroundings and the actual setting; all have specific implications for the lives of women in the locality.

"Our Locality, Our Law": Ethnic Neighborhoods and Women "Gangsters" in Bombay Slums

Atreyee Sen, University of Sussex

In this paper I analyze the power of ‘marginalized’ urban spaces in the creation and dissemination of a culture of female militancy. I describe how lower-class women in the Bombay slums, by affiliating themselves with an aggressive ethno-nationalist movement, came to violently control a range of physical, material and social spaces, in the process moving away from positions of subordination, to occupy roles which allow them to affect male exercise of authority and power.

I explore the narratives of older slum women and trace the birth of female militancy in the slum areas. These older women, now marginalized from the movement’s youth-oriented action-based programmes, physically ‘created’ the slums (by reclaiming swamps and wasteland), formed meaningful relationships with their environment and invested these locales with a backdrop of resistance.

The urban slum became a complex space which redefined and reconceptualized social groupings, and the migration and relocation of peoples created new social and kinship networks. While sustaining a façade of being structurally muted within such an environment of constant transition, my ethnographic illustrations reveal how women tacitly and explicitly resisted naturalizing discourses on femininity and ‘the home’. I argue that slum women strategically chose to infuse their physical environments (the street, the party office, the neighborhood) with the threat of conflict, as women’s presence in (and patrolling of) these contested urban spaces has become a source of real and symbolic power.

What Makes a Neighborhood? Notes on Representations of an Urban Working-Class Neighborhood in Tamilnadu, South India

Geert R. De Neve, University of Sussex

This paper explores the varying ways that different social groups represent an urban working-class neighborhood in a small town of Tamilnadu. The paper focuses in particular on an urban neighborhood, called Sengadu Thottam, which is inhabited by low caste, yet socially mobile Vanniyars. It looks at how such a locality is constructed through multiple, oppositional and contesting representations of space and community, and explores how such spatial representations draw on discourses of violence and morality, kinship and reciprocity, and work and the body.

It is argued that representations of locality are often highly oppositional and contested. In this case, outsiders perceive of the locality of Sengadu Thottam and the Vanniyars who live there as characterized by violence, poverty and immorality. Vanniyars themselves defy this public representation by a counter-discourse that emphasizes kin mutuality, moral support and economic co-operation. Moreover, representations both overlap and interact with material realities of economic, familial and moral relationships that make up the everyday life of a locality. Indeed, discourses about Sengadu Thottam intersect with hierarchies of caste, class, and power. Finally, the paper shows how neighborhoods are reproduced as important spaces in urban life. Caste and class identities as well as community boundaries are continually shaped through spatial concepts, and evidence is presented of a remarkable inclination to consolidate affinities of neighborhood, caste and community at a time that modernity and globalization are assumed to bring about much more fluid and hybrid urban spaces.

Muslims, Cosmopolitanism, and the Communalization of Space in Calicut, Kerala

Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, SOAS and the University of Sussex

Kozhikode (Calicut) in coastal northern Kerala has always had cosmopolitan orientations through trade, colonialism and migration. Calicut Muslims speak of pre-colonial prosperity, followed by colonial decline from the Portuguese arrival (1492) onwards. Contemporary globalization offers beneficial strengthening of contacts with Muslims elsewhere, but also negative Western cultural hegemony. While wealthy entrepreneurs embrace globalization, the middle and working classes are more wary.

Old Muslim families with links to Arabs are losing prominence to ‘new’ Malappuram (rural hinterland) Muslims with Gulf monies. The former lament the death of Calicut’s bazaar as its regional centre, with large traders shifting from Calicut into the new peripheral hinterland bazaars. Old ‘cosmopolitan’ groups (Jains, Gujerati Muslims) are deserting their traditional trades and their children are studying professions. Large Muslim corporate groups, developed through gulf money, are emerging, while gulf-based corporate groups exert strong influence on the new local economy (real estate and private service provision).

Contemporary Calicut urbanism is thus influenced by: (a) Gujeratis’ Bombay connections; (b) the growth of children working/studying in Bangalore; (c) Gulf migrants; (d) colonialism; (e) TV/internet access. We see the rise of a new bourgeois lifestyle, heavily involving women as ‘housewifes’ and an associated boom in feminine arts/crafts with some women inching into small businesses. The paper will explore how community boundaries are now marked in new ways (e.g. private education, pardah).

Calicut simultaneously demonstrates the increased communalisation of space and the emergence of ‘cosmopolitan’ areas. Kuttichira is now a prototypical Calicut Muslim neighborhood, which other communities do not visit. Middle-class Muslims are moving out into former high-class Hindu areas. A discourse on ‘Calicut heritage’ is emerging, with Kuttichira both ghettoized and romanticized.