Property-work, work of property: figuring land and caste in an urbanizing frontier

Abstract

Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird property-work.

Keywords:

• property
• property-making
• agrarian-urbanism
• caste
• class
• Gurgaon
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Names of all interlocutors have been changed to protect their identity.

2 According to a World Bank Report (2013), urbanization was expected to result in poverty reduction and progress toward meeting the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs). In this context, the Land Ceiling Act, Land Acquisition, and Rent Control Act are some of the land laws that were overhauled, leading to an unprecedented land rush.

3 There is a vast body of scholarship that has richly documented how the flows and forces of neoliberal urbanism have transformed the agrarian hinterlands and extended urbanization (See Balakrishnan 2019; Cowan 2021; Ghertner 2015; Goldman 2011; Gururani 2013; 2020; Kennedy and Sood 2016; Kennedy 2020; Searle 2016; Sud 2014; 2020; Upadhya 2020; 2021; Upadhya and Rathod 2021).

4 In 2016, Gurgaon was officially renamed Gurugram. Since Gurgaon was commonly used during my fieldwork, I continue to use Gurgaon in the article.

5 Much before the first Master Plan of 2021 was drafted, rumors began to fly, and private developers with ‘insider information’ started purchasing land from farmers in zones and sectors that later appeared in the Master Plan. In 2005 alone, there was a thirty-fold surge in the purchase of land.

6 There are close to five hundred real estate builders officially registered with Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority (HRERA), but the number keeps changing as builders go in and out of business.

7 Bhattacharya (1976) presents accounts of ‘hoarding’ and ‘speculation’ in nineteenth and early 20th century Punjab that bear a striking resemblance to what is happening a century later, alerting us to the historical continuities and connections that continue to reverberate as neoliberal India makes the real estate turn.

8 Figures are not new on the scholarly horizon. Anthropologists have been keenly aware of their role as mediators and translators among those with whom they often navigate the multiple social worlds in their fields (Geertz 1960; Sahlins 1963). They have drawn attention to the pivotal role these figures play in negotiating the opaque terrains of law, bureaucracy, land, property, and development (Gupta 2012; Hansen, Blom, and Verkaaik 2009; Sud 2014).

9 By foregrounding these human figures, I do not wish to discount the agency of hedges, rocks, soils, documents, chemicals, dogs, and cattle that secure the relations of property. Indeed, the arid geo-ecology of this region is deeply seeped in, as Gilmartin (2015) notes, ‘blood and water’, and ploughs, wells, soil, rain, canals, cattle, sheep, and goats have been central to how social-spatial relations came to be stabilized.

10 There are several impressive accounts of the private developers, builders, consultants, and planners (See Fainstein 2001; Searle 2016; Shatkin 2016; Rouanet and Halbert 2016).

11 Humphrey and Verdery (2004; 15).

12 See Guha (1982); Blomley (2008); De Neve (2014); De Neve and Donner (2015); Hann (1998); Humphrey and Verdery (2004); Rose (1995); Polanyi (1944); Nichols (2020); Bhattacharya (2018); Bhattacharyya (2015); Bhattacharyya (2018); Rao (2020); Verdery (2003).

13 There is a vast body of scholarship that focuses on the question of property and its reconfiguration in colonial India. Some of the classic studies of property come from the subaltern studies collective, namely Guha's Rule of Property (1982). The question of property in colonial times, especially its spatial and ecological variation in different parts of the province, has been addressed extensively. See Chakravarty-Kaul 1996; Gilmartin 2015; Bhattacharya 2018; to name just a very few.

14 Vanaik (2019) highlights the role of the property markets in Delhi in the first half of the 20th century.

15 In this ‘great agrarian conquest’, as Bhattacharya (2018) calls it, the space of the village was reconstituted essentially as a fiscal category, bounded and enumerated, over which revenue could be assessed.

16 The categories of uncultivated and uncultivable land were considered ‘waste’ and kept outside of state's revenue demands. The uncultivated area, or the wasteland, within the village boundary was designated as the ‘village common’ or the shamalat deh, while the wasteland outside the mauza (village) was called rakh (state property) (Gilmartin 2015, 70).

17 It was his Jat connections, he writes, that helped him resolve the labor strike in his American Universal factory in Faridabad and also saved him from the dacoits on the highway, who backed out when they heard the name of his village and his father—Mr. Mukhtiar Singh, lawyer from Khareda in Bulandshahr (2015, 98–99).

18 Names changed.

19 https://surajgarhgurgaon.com/about/.

20 The DSS Ashram in Sirsa, not far from Gurgaon, is seven hundred acres. According to Jodhka (2008), one temple complex in Gurdaspur district in Punjab covers four thousand acres of land, and the Radhasoami campus has its own land acquisition officer!

21 https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/quietly-baba-ramdev-s-patanjali-group-has-crept-into-aravalli-hills-119060500400_1.html; https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/haryana-discreetly-consolidates-acres-of-forest-land-in-kot-64615

22 The land has been sold to Herbo Ved Gram Limited, which will host yoga retreats, provide a yoga training center, promote Ayurveda, and instill humanitarian values and love for the nation.

23 https://www.jantakareporter.com/india/congress-raises-illegal-purchase-of-400-acres-of-land-in-aravallis-by-ramdevs-patanjali-ayurveda-demands-cancellation-of-land-deals/257087/.

24 See brokers (Björkman 2021), mafia (Weinstein 2008), touts (Benjamin 2005), dalals (Nelson 2018), political entrepreneurs (Jonnalagadda 2021), middlemen (Sud 2014), the Boss (Harms 2013), grassroots cadre (Deng, O’Brien, and Zhang 2020).

25 He was not the only person who made a claim about assisting the former president of the US secure his property deal in Gurgaon.

26 The story, however, was different among the Gujjar property dealers, who only recently entered property work. One of the Gujjar dealers, Rajesh Tanwar, in a rather animated conversation, said, ‘People here don’t want to do business with us. Our profession was to steal some sheep here, or cattle there. No one trusts us. Even people from our biradari don’t trust … I have gone mostly into the construction side’ (pers. comm. February, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 435-2022-0712].

Notes on contributors

Shubhra Gururani

Shubhra Gururani is at York University, Toronto, ON Canada. Email: [email protected]