Fixing Bhim Nagar: a new metonym for subaltern urbanism

Abstract

This article investigates the processes and politics of slum demolitions in the megacity of Mumbai. Scholars of subaltern urbanism have celebrated the political agency and entrepreneurial ability of the metonymic slums in Mumbai. This article argues instead that paying close attention to the dynamics of the lived realities within informal settlements directs us to the limits of ethnographic and archival imagination where fixers operating within the ‘para-legal’ are practicing a new subaltern urbanism, one that is attentive to the complexity of community within the metonymic slum. Through a detailed analysis of the practices of two fixers, this article shows how, by placing themselves at crucial nodes in the demolition and rehabilitation process, the fixers, on the one hand, were able to delay the displacement of residents; on the other, they created hierarchies in the distribution of resettlement benefits. Focusing on the quotidian practices of fixers operating within the demolished informal settlement brings forth a complicated and contradictory politics that ensure the existence of diverse non-privatized land tenures in the city.

Keywords:

• slum demolition
• brokerage
• subaltern urbanism

Acknowledgements

Though they go unnamed here, I am deeply grateful to the people of Bhim Nagar and A Bhai in particular who gave me a peek into their complicated and contradictory everyday lives. I am also grateful to the guest editors of this Special Feature, Indivar Jonnalagadda and Thomas Cowan, for the intellectual encouragement they gave in the process of writing this paper and Thomas Crowley for the ever patient editorial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Some might suggest echoes with earlier an shift in urban anthropology toward everyday acts of resistance (Ghannam 2011; Scott 2014); however, what I am showing here is a politics engendered by these fixers that works to further marginalize the impoverished.

2 The DP, however, is not merely a symbolic or semiotic device of statecraft. This technocratic and modernist experiment in social engineering is a relic of India’s socialist past, which demarcates plots to be acquired by the BMC for meeting amenity requirements, such as housing, health, education, and livelihood, of the populations under its jurisdiction and is revised every twenty years.

3 The three iterations of the Development Plan in Mumbai have seen incredibly low implementation rates (of 12–14%) since their first inception in 1967. The very high prices of land and lack of clear property titles, and also a lack of political intent is thought to be behind these dismal rates of implementation.

4 In fact, during the revision of the DP in 2014 the informal settlements and other vast tracts of land were demarcated as Special Planning Areas (SPAs) that would be to be planned by other parastatal agencies such as the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), MMRDA, etc.

5 Though the focus of this article is primarily on the quotidian practices of the fixers, further study needs to be conducted to understand better the perception of the surveyors themselves, as well as of lower-level bureaucrats of residents themselves.

6 In the Indian legislative system, the main difference between a Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) and a Member of Parliament (MP) is their level of representation. An MLA is a representative of the people at the federated state level, while an MP is a representative of the people at the national level.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received financial support from the Wenner Gren dissertation fieldwork grant [grant number 9517] and the Excellence fellowship from the Graduate School New Brunswick of the Rutgers University.

Notes on contributors

Sangeeta Banerji

Sangeeta Banerji is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at New York University Shanghai. Email: [email protected]