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

Introduction

Mid-morning on the 29th of October 2017, as I sat at the desk of a junior engineer (JE) of the M East ward office, attempting to understand the everyday functioning of the Building and Factory (B&F) department of the Brihanmumbai (Greater Mumbai) Municipal Corporation or BMC, I received a distraught phone call. A Bhai, one of my key informants within the informal settlement of Bhim Nagar, anxiously whispered over the phone, ‘log bol rahen hain ki aaj poori basti ko tod denge (people are saying that the entire basti [settlement] is going to be demolished today).’ He didn’t seem to know who was conducting the demolition, to what extent this settlement of 1500 households would be demolished, or even when the bulldozers would arrive.

Realizing the urgency of the situation in Bhim Nagar and guessing that I would encounter the officials of the M East ward office there, I abandoned my post, grabbed my bag, jumped into an autorickshaw, and headed over to Bhim Nagar. On reaching the settlement, as I made my way to A Bhai’s house, a man and a woman appeared with clipboards in their hand on the dirt road abutting the settlement. Surrounded by a group of men that A Bhai referred to as dalals (brokers), the two were ostensibly conducting a survey. Soon after, the residents’ fears materialized when three vans full of police officers arrived dressed in their riot ensemble and started cordoning off the western edges of Bhim Nagar. The bulldozers arrived shortly after the police vans. Behind them came the vans full of bureaucrats from the M East ward office, responsible for implementing the statutory land uses as prescribed in the Development Plan (DP) of Mumbai, and the Suburban Collectorate, responsible for managing the land where this settlement exists.

Meanwhile, residents assiduously retrieved the documentary proofs that their local dalals (brokers) and karyakartas (political party workers) had made for them, realizing that getting on the surveyors’ list (even though they didn’t know what it was for) created the best way to legitimatize their claim to this land. As the arm of the bulldozer came crashing down on one side of Bhim Nagar, the surveyor penned down details of residents in their list on the other side of the settlement. Mr. S, an assistant engineer (AE) in the building and factory department of the M East ward office, flashed an irritated smile as I approached him in an attempt to understand what was going on. Pointing to the empty field adjoining the settlement, he said, ‘aaj poori basti todne ka plan hai, yeh basti No Development Zone par hai aur yehan metro depot banne wala hai (The plan is to demolish the whole settlement today. This land inhabited by the settlement is demarcated as a No Development Zone [NDZ in the Development Plan], and the metro depot will be built here).’

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This cacophonous scene set within one of the most populous megacities, Mumbai, evokes a sense of disorder, haphazardness, and the inevitable failure of modern urban planning practices in the post-colony. The present-day conditions of Mumbai, characterized by a multitude of informal settlements without adequate infrastructure provision, squished together with highly capitalized real estate projects and massive, under-construction, world-class city infrastructure projects governed by multiple bureaucratic institutions, necessitate the question: how are these incongruent conditions of living—for example, the assiduous retrieval of documentary proof by residents amid the demolition of their homes, for a survey whose implication was unclear but known to be somehow significant—produced?

In 2018, the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) approved the construction of a 43-km metro line in a bid to create world-class infrastructure. These infrastructure projects, originally not a part of the development trajectory of Mumbai as envisioned by the Development Plan (DP), a statutory instrument of urban planning, required a significant reformulation of its planning directives. The construction of this metro line is estimated to displace 6000 people across the city. For instance, in the case of Bhim Nagar, the plot of land that was earlier marked as a No Development Zone (NDZ) has been slated by the bureaucracy for the construction of the largest metro car shed in Asia. Volumes have been written about the complications with the process of enumerating those displaced in previous iterations of transport infrastructure projects in Mumbai (Anand and Rademacher 2011; Doshi 2018; Patel 2005). While this work has done much to challenge the skewed logic of the implementation of mega-infrastructure projects and delineate the variety of community responses to the displacement caused by them, less scholarly attention has been given to role in such processes of informal channels of mediation and negotiation, operating within the domains of the para-legal (Ghertner 2017; Björkman 2020; P. Chatterjee 2004). These channels of mediation, which operate in the ‘gray spaces’ (Yiftachel 2009) where the state seeks to create informalized spatial configurations by either whitening or blackening, i.e. by either preserving or destroying, are animated by actors who A Bhai called the ‘dalals’ and the ‘karyakartas’ and who I am calling fixers.

This article examines the quotidian practices of fixers and their role in producing the city. The concept of jugad (Jeffrey and Young 2014) has done much to illustrate the moral ambivalence of the flexible strategies deployed by young men from different social classes in the context of urban inequality in the Hindi heartland of India. In a related but distinct line of inquiry, this article brings attention to the role of fixing within informal settlements operating ‘neither [as] habitus nor territory, neither [as] politically subversive nor culturally pragmatic’ (Roy 2011) in producing the metonymic spaces of the megacity. Using fieldwork spanning sixteen months between 2017 and 2018 in the informal settlement of Bhim Nagar, this article illustrates the strategies employed by local fixers within informal channels of negotiation to challenge the impending enclosure of ­non-privatized land tenures.

While on the one hand, the strategies of the fixers were able to delay the displacement of residents, on the other, they created hierarchies in the distribution of resettlement benefits. Based along caste, regional and religious lines, these distinctions, which form the foundation of the informal determination of recipients of resettlement, have rarely been interrogated in the literature on urban displacement. Unlike the literature focusing on ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ a dominant lens to conceptualize urban displacement as dictated by capitalism’s inherent desire to find a spatial fix (Harvey 2001), this article illustrates vital incongruities of resisting infrastructure-led displacement in the megacity. Following Roy (2011), this article provides a new metonym for subaltern urbanism by interrogating the arena of political struggles inhabited by the fixers, at the limits of archival and ethnographic recognition. In the following sections, I situate Bhim Nagar, and M East ward more generally, in the peripheries of Mumbai. I then introduce the role of fixers, especially in surveys and enumerations, and examine their entanglement with party politics, urban bureaucracy, and everyday practices of space-making.

A new metonym for subaltern urbanism

The municipal authority governing Mumbai, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), divides the city into three districts comprising twenty-four administrative wards. The three districts are the Western Suburbs, the Eastern Suburbs, and the Island City. The Island City, a historical city center with iconic textile mills and various governmental offices, has seen tremendous transformation in the decades since the new millennium (Adarkar and Phatak 2005; Chandavarkar 1999). The Western Suburbs, on the other hand, with their planned neighborhoods, historically home to the salaried or middle classes in the period before the liberalization of the Indian economy, have come to be inhabited by the creative classes, working in the marketing, film, and entertainment industry. This prosperous district has also historically been home to large informal settlements like Dharavi, Behrampada, and Golibar. It is these slums that animate the imagination of films like the Slumdog Millionaire, an Oscar winning film that Roy (2011) argues has led to the worlding of the megacity or led to the creation of an apocalyptic imagery of the megacity as populated by the impoverished slums. The poverty pornography within this film, drawing from life within the space of the slums in Mumbai, brought much attention to the lived experiences of the poor. However, there was considerable resistance to the depiction of slum life in Mumbai by civil society organizations and public intellectuals working within the slums who proclaimed that these spaces are entrepreneurial hubs and not the hearts of darkness as presented in the film. Ananya Roy (2011) celebrates this ‘native refusal’ as a metonym of subaltern urbanism and writes that through it ‘against the apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the megacity,’ the space of the slum is resurrected as vibrant one.

Compared to the other two districts, the Eastern Suburbs, in the imagination of urban planners, have served in the past as a ‘terra nullius’ or ‘nobody’s land,’ with vast swathes of industrial land and land owned by the Indian Navy. The eastern suburbs were also home to native fishing villages or goathans and other large informal settlements established by the municipality itself (Björkman 2014). The new millennium saw the increasing growth of resettlement colonies in the supposed ‘nobody’s land’ of the Eastern suburbs, necessitated by the introduction of large infrastructure projects in Mumbai, such as the MUIP (Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Project) and MUTP (Mumbai Urban Transport Project). As expansive highways and Metrorail and monorail infrastructure came into existence on land previously inhabited by large informal settlements in the central and western districts of the city, so did massive rehabilitation and resettlement colonies in the Eastern Suburbs, especially in its M Ward (Bhide 2017).

As the city of Mumbai has grown, the M Ward has increasingly become a space for storing the undesirables—not only resettled populations, but also polluting industries, solid waste dumping grounds, nuclear reactors, and abattoirs (see Bhide 2014; Jha 2023). The first Development Plan (DP) of Mumbai, published in 1967, demarcated the M ward as a low-density zone with various hazardous industries (Geoplan 2014). However, due to the growing slum populations and resettlement colonies, the BMC further divided the M ward into the M East and M West wards for administrative purposes in 1997. The population of this ward has nearly doubled since the new resettlement policy of the regional development authority came into being (TISS 2015). The M East ward is recorded to have some of the lowest socio-economic indicators in India. The census of India published in 2011 recorded a population of nearly 632,000 for this ward with more than 77% of them living within informal settlements. According to the Human Development Index for Mumbai calculated in 2009, M East ward ranked lowest at 0.05 (TISS 2015).

The uneven development in the M East ward has further been exacerbated due to the real-estate boom in Mumbai brought about by the planning policies of the BMC. With the introduction of the market-based Transferable Development Rights (TDR) tool, the BMC incentivized the construction industry to build bad-quality public housing and slum rehabilitation projects in the Eastern Suburbs (see Jha 2023; Nainan 2012). Due to the availability of large numbers of vacant resettlement units, state agencies relocated people from different sites of the city impacted by the construction of the world-class infrastructures to the transit camps and thirteen resettlement colonies of M East Ward. Due to this predicament of neglected populations, solid waste dumping grounds, oil refineries, and chemical industries, this administrative ward and particularly the neighborhood of Deonar within it has gained the title of the ‘Gas Chamber of Mumbai’ (S. Chatterjee 2019), where the poor were sent to die.

This contradictory and peripheralized ‘gray space’ (Yiftachel 2009), a spatial and communal configuration created by the state where populations live a bare life, is, I argue, the site for the emergence of a new metonym of subaltern urbanism. Due to its peripheralized condition, this space has given rise to a thriving, heterogenous and contradictory political realm, with fixers often acting as key conduits and operating within the domain of the ‘para-legal’ (P. Chatterjee 2004). The politics witnessed within the informal settlements of the M East ward is a contradictory one emblematic of the times in which we live. It deploys a new frame that is focused on creating channels of negotiation and mediation relatively unexplored in urban studies, making it the new metonym of subaltern urbanism. Scholars of southern urbanism have explicated the politics within these greys spaces by developing concepts such as ‘occupancy urbanisms’ (Benjamin 2008), which discusses the political strategy used by the poor to engage with the dictats of global capital in reformulating land tenure regimes inside slums. Gidwani’s (2006) notion of ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’ is also particularly helpful in thinking about the possible solidarities between the disenfranchized in the mega-city. As I demonstrate below, however, neither of these formulas fully capture the complexity of the politics of the M East Ward, which can be conceptualized as a new metonym of subaltern politics in the megacity.

Fixers

At the heart of the politics of spaces like the M Ward, I argue, are actors that I refer to as ‘fixers.’ I use the term ‘fixer,’ rather than other common terms like ‘broker’ and ‘middleman,’ to bring together the rich anthropological literature on brokerage within communities of the urban poor and the geographical literature on the impacts of global capitalism in megacities. Regarding the latter, I seek to extend Harvey’s (2001) wordplay concerning the spatial ‘fix’ of capital, which has come to signify the reconfiguration of space, particularly urban space, to satiate capitalism's desire for expansion and reproduction. Harvey writes that though there are multiple meanings of the word fix—being pinned down or secured, resolving a difficulty, and that of a drug addict's fix—he prefers to use the last meaning to illustrate the spatial attributes of the inner crisis tendencies of capitalism. However, though this is a compelling and convincing argument about the transformations of urban space, the abstract nature of much of the work deploying this concept often has meant overlooking the contradictions that can emerge within the realm of the quotidian.

Literature on brokerage and middlemen helps to illustrate this quotidian world. The figure of the broker or fixer has been variously described as a ‘synapse’ (Wolf 1956), a ‘cultural translator’ (Geertz 1960), one who navigates inequality (Scott 1976), a morally bankrupt individual who preys on the disadvantaged (Hausse 1992), or as someone merely responding to the political or economic configurations of the times in such a way as to further their benefit (Koster 2014). Hiring an agent from the ranks of the fixers becomes the default way to negotiate the bureaucracy, a pattern widespread in post-colonial societies more generally (Agbiboa 2022; Lund 2006; Tuckett 2018). They also serve the crucial functions of providing documentary evidence, sometimes forged, to those most in need, as was the case in Bhim Nagar. Relatedly, brokers or fixers have been a source of interest in literature on immigration (Lindquist 2012; Piot and Batema 2019) as necessary conduits required to pass through the boundaries of nation-states. However, their moral ambiguity and cunning manipulation of the structures that they operate within have restricted scholarly discussions on brokerage to seeing these agents as tricksters not to be trusted.

There are some exceptions to this, especially in works connecting brokerage to the politics of land, capital and the state. The social anthropologist Deborah James (2011) in exploring the complexity of brokerage in the land markets of South Africa, notes how brokers are both the ‘products and producers of a new kind of society’ (335). Scholars of agrarian studies and land transactions in rural India have additionally shown the longstanding traditions of the ‘pyravekar,’ a broker mobilizing the varying conditions to get a file passed (Reddy and Haragopal 1985). While there is emerging literature on the role of these middlemen in brokering rural land deals (Levien 2018; Sud 2014), it rarely connects brokerage with quotidian practices of the state. More recently, some urban scholarship has introduced brokers such as the ‘chavi-walla’ (N Anand 2017), the social worker (Björkman 2014), the ‘dalal’ (Das 2007, 164), or the pradhan (chief) (Srivastava 2012), all serving as intermediaries between the poor and the bureaucracy.¹

I hope to extend these arguments, focusing attention on the quotidian practices of the fixers in relation to manipulating the rules governing the land use codes of the Development Plan of Mumbai. Through non-singular practices of fixing, including bridging divisions in the context of structural discontinuity, securing objects in place, and cultivating and performing a spatio-temporal awareness of tweaking the bureaucratic code, fixers can proffer insight into the seemingly incongruent conditions of living in the megacity.

Finding the fixers

In 2017–2018, the settlement of Bhim Nagar was going to be displaced to make way for a metro car shed and an intermediary proposed road in the Development Plan of 2034. On the day of the demolition, however, as the bulldozer proceeded to demolish the homes of Bhim Nagar residents, multiple ranks of the B&F department—the Assistant Engineer (AE), the Junior Engineer (JE), and the muqaddam—were being ‘handled’ by the people that A Bhai on previous occasions had called dalals. The dalals seemed familiar with the BMC and the Suburban Collectorate officials and shared a jocular relationship with police officials protecting bureaucrats conducting the demolition. Skillfully, these agents convinced the bureaucrats to let the residents disassemble construction materials with the expectation that the settlement would eventually return to its normal form in the coming weeks. These agents had easy access to the local elected representatives and subsequently requested them to come down to Bhim Nagar and stop the demolition. They seemed to have provided all the documentary proof required by residents to become eligible recipients of resettlement from the World Bank-sponsored infrastructure project being initiated in their vicinity and were guiding the survey for this resettlement process.

Most fixers that I encountered in the initial months of my fieldwork were slippery figures impossible to pin down and introduce myself to, let alone talk to about the work they did. Inside the spaces of the bureaucracy, however, despite being omnipresent, they were elusive. Here, no one used the term dalal; instead, every officer, inside their cubicles, was graced by the presence of someone identified as a karyakarta or a social worker. Despite their ubiquitous presence, securing an introduction to them from officials proved impossible. In Bhim Nagar, however, the karyakartas and the dalals had a more visible quality, in that they would actively approach people to come to participate in political rallies, inform them of the status of the demolition, get papers made, etc.

In this article, I have improvised on Hull’s method of ‘following paper’ to ‘following the fixer.’ Much like the survey, the file or paper, which has been the focus of significant scholarship on the post-colonial bureaucracy (Hetherington 2011; 2018; Hull 2008; Mathur 2017; Raman 2012) does not move on its own, even though it may have a life of its own. I focus here on the movement of the survey within the settlement as facilitated by the fixers to understand the dynamics of land management in millennial Mumbai. In doing so, I hope to extend Björkman’s (2020) intriguing account of the conflicts over resettlement policies for the residents of Pratiksha Nagar, a neighborhood in the vicinity of Bhim Nagar.

Based on my fieldwork within the MMRDA, BMC and Bhim Nagar, spanning over sixteen months between 2017 and 2018, I can attest to the various roles that the fixers served inside and outside the bureaucracy. In Bhim Nagar, they served the crucial function of helping people stay fixed on the land that they inhabited by mobilizing kinship relations and political ties, albeit to further their own monetary incentives (Banerji 2021). They thus operate within the para-legal to acts as conduits between those who govern and those who are governed (P. Chatterjee 2004). In Bhim Nagar, the fixers were instrumental in bringing the bulldozers of the BMC to a halt after three devastating days of demolition. While nearly a third of the settlement lay ruined, I observed that by fluidly moving through the spaces of the various state entities present at the demolition, fixers could manipulate the directive of the surveys and maps commissioned by the MMRDA. In the weeks following the demolition, I would increasingly run into these fixers at the ward office, outside the cubicle of Mr. V, the resettlement and rehabilitation officer of the MMRDA, at the maintenance chowkis on visits there with the JEs and sometimes even at the head office of the DP department, where the third revised DP was displayed at the time to solicit public participation before publication. Realizing the importance of the survey in determining the future of this settlement, its fixers were mobilizing for changes in its new form.

The survey

Over the course of three days, bulldozers demolished approximately 400 homes in Bhim Nagar before the local MLA decided to make a phone call to the collector and order him to stop. However, no one in the settlement or even the local ward office seemed to know why this ‘routine demolition’ had been initiated by the collector’s office. The presence of the BMC staff from the building and factory department of the M East ward office indicated that the demolition was somehow linked to the non-adherence of this settlement with the prescription in the Development Plan (DP). The DP as a statutory and modernist instrument of spatial planning governs land in the city of Mumbai. Spatial planning directives contained in the DP are where differentiated access to the city is produced.² Within the BMC, the DP is implemented via a three-tiered institutional structure: the centralized DP Department, the zonal Building Proposals (BP) department, and the Building and Factory (B&F) Department at the ward level. The B&F department has the role of demolishing aberrant structures, such as informal settlements like Bhim Nagar that do not adhere to the prescribed land uses of the DP and any other hazardous constructions.

Within the uneven geography of the M East ward in the Eastern Suburbs of Mumbai, Bhim Nagar is a slum within another larger slum. It is a relatively new settlement that came into existence as recently as 2010 and remains tucked in between the massive Maharashtra Nagar, Cheetah Camp and Pratiksha Nagar. The land Bhim Nagar sits on today was a marsh bordering the National Armament Depot (NAD) for the Indian Navy, as seen in Figure 1. In the last decade, Bhim Nagar has been subjected to multiple demolition drives by the office of the Suburban Collectorate of Mumbai facilitated by the local ward office of the BMC. People in Bhim Nagar have now become accustomed to losing their homes to the bulldozers of the bureaucracy every three years. Basic infrastructure such as toilets, water pipelines, and electric lines stop at the line where Bhim Nagar begins. It is located squarely in the NDZ of the DP as seen in Figure 2. Opposed to the prescribed land uses in the DP, such as residential, commercial, and industrial, the NDZ is a land use zone that prohibits any development in the designated area. Bhim Nagar, as seen in Figures 1 and 2, is situated near a vast tract of land adjoining the mangroves demarcated as ‘vacant’ and supposedly serviced by a thirty-six-meter-wide road marked in light brown in the DP of 1992 seen in Figure 3. Suffice it to say, the thirty-six-meter road did not exist when I was doing my fieldwork.³ Presumably with the permissions of the BMC, the vast tract of vacant land had been slotted for the development of the metro shed by the development authority. This decision was made in clear opposition of the Coastal Regulatory policy and the prescribed land use regulations of the DP as the vacant land lay adjacent to the protected mangroves. It could be surmised that both the Depot and the settlement of Bhim Nagar were non-adhering land uses; however, it was the informal settlement that the BMC was demolishing while promoting the metro depot.

Figure 1: Satellite image of Bhim Nagar and surrounding area, Mumbai.

Figure 2: Bhim Nagar as seen in existing land use survey, DP 2014 (Source: mcgm.gov.in).

Figure 3: Bhim Nagar as seen in Sanctioned Revised Development Plan 1992 (Source: mcgm.gov.in).

These facts still did not explain the presence of surveyors in the settlement on the day of the demolition, as the BMC is not mandated to survey the inside of a slum settlement for land use planning purposes.⁴ My attempts to understand the events leading up to the demolition of Bhim Nagar took me to Mr. D's office. Mr. D, operating from a second-floor room of a small informal settlement lodged between two walls, was involved in facilitating surveys for various infrastructure development projects in Mumbai. From him, I learned that the MMRDA had awarded him the contract to survey the settlement of Bhim Nagar as a part of the social impact assessment for the metro line 2B running between Mandala (in the vicinity of Bhim Nagar) and DN Nagar (in the vicinity of prosperous neighborhoods of the Western Suburbs). Mr. D had a small staff of about five surveyors and two managers who reported to him and operated as enumerators as guided by the people within the settlements.

Perplexed by the size of his team, I asked him, ‘How can you accurately conduct enumeration surveys in these large informal settlements with just five people?’ Slum surveys for infrastructure development projects have played a significant role in determining urban policy in Mumbai. Famously, surveys were conducted as a part of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) initiated at the turn of the millennium, which displaced about 300,000 people. These enumeration surveys have been the sites of contestation over space in Mumbai. The competing and repeating claims produced by this enumeration technology have created populations in the city which have found permanent shelter in transit tenements (Björkman 2020). Yet Mr. D calmly replied, ‘No one looks at these surveys. None of these infrastructure projects would be proposed by the authorities if they did. Besides, we never do a detailed door-by-door survey; it's impossible to do and too contentious.’ He also claimed that for Bhim Nagar, two people had helped them survey the settlement. The surveyors employed by Mr. D knew that without the help of two people that Mr. D had made contact with, they would not be able to enter, let alone survey the settlement.⁵

I posit, drawing on the theoretical framework outlined above, that the two people introduced to me by Mr. D are fixers enabling the spatial fix (Harvey 2001) of capitalism by operating within the domain of the para-legal (P. Chatterjee 2004). This survey and the upcoming construction of the metro depot, owing to the extended timelines for infrastructure provisioning in Mumbai, still did not explain why the demolition had taken place. In the past, the ward office of the BMC had taken upon itself to demolish this settlement on behalf of the Suburban Collectorate (the landowner). The underlying reason for the demolition in Bhim Nagar this time, however, was rumored to be a conflict between two politicians in this area—the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), the Member of Parliament (MP) and the many karyakartas that serve them.⁶ Both politicians were members of the nativist, right-wing Shiv Sena party. Yet, citing the rapid rate at which ‘encroachments’ were growing in Bhim Nagar, the MP who was currently in office, had directed the collector to demolish this settlement due to the security threats to the NAD. In many ways, the MP has much more power than the MLA. However, in the case of Bhim Nagar, this social and political hierarchy was more complex.

The MLA had worked his way up through the neighborhood-level cadre of the Shiv Sena and commanded a great deal of respect from workers within the party. The MP, on the other hand, was a suave, young, relatively well-educated upcoming leader of the party who did not work his way up through the local cadre but had sufficient community influence to gain a higher-ranking position. Additionally, the MLA belonged to the Maratha community, which is the largest voting block for Shiv Sena and the MP is from the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu (CKP) community that is historically considered the intelligentsia of the party and has a brahminical status in Marathi politics. Each of these leaders have developed their careers by investing substantial resources in the construction of the para-legal (P. Chatterjee 2004)—their private networks of fixers, commonly referred to as karyakartas, serving the purpose of relaying information to and from the community for these politicians. While the MP had jurisdiction of the much larger district within the Eastern Suburbs, the MLA had a stronger hold within M East ward.

The rumor held that the sitting MLA, who had primary control in this settlement of Bhim Nagar, had ‘lost control of his dalals.’ These dalals, the MP’s office estimated, had been busily extending the borders of the MLA’s territory, eating into their own. What was not so evident was that even the MP’s dalals were operating in much the same way to consolidate their territory. The view from within the settlement primarily indicated that the demolition was a result of the rivalry between these two political actors and not the forces of global capital trying to displace the urban poor. Reinforcing the contradictory nature of the subaltern politics of the M East ward, the abstract ideations of the circulation of capital in relation the spatial fix (Harvey 2001) in Mumbai was being manipulated by the concrete practices of these fixers. Below, I illustrate how the fixers of two informal sovereigns (Hansen and Stepputat 2001) were instrumental in negating the grand visions enshrined in the modernist DP and the neoliberal infrastructure development project of the metro line, illustrating the role of these agents in fixing space and creating diverse land tenures in Mumbai. The two figures that I portray here are composite characters (Willis 2019)—that is, they are amalgamations of observations that I gathered from the activities of more than one fixer.

Getting on the list

The first fixer worked for the MLA and represented the interests of the nativistic right-wing majority around Bhim Nagar. Kharat displayed his right-wing (Shiv Sena) allegiance by dressing in crisp white and putting a saffron tika on his forehead. Having grown up in this area, he had a longstanding relationship with the elected representative and other bureaucrats. Through persistent efforts, he had been able to secure the construction of a community hall, a set of public toilets, and a temple with funds acquired from both the elected representatives and bureaucratic agencies. Over the years, perhaps due to the deep linkages he had within the settlement, he specialized in creating documents for residents needing to establish their identity in the city. These documents, over time, would be used to demonstrate the residents’ legitimacy and swell the number of votes Kharat could manipulate. The handsome profit that he made as the fee for these services had allowed him to invest in the property market of Bhim Nagar. He ‘owned’ more than a dozen tenements within the settlement when I first met him. Due to a reasonably visible position of Kharat within the settlement, politicians and bureaucrats alike would consult him before planning any infrastructure in the settlement. Additionally, Kharat and his men were this politician's ‘eyes and ears’ within the settlement. So, it was only natural that when the MMRDA announced this massive project in their backyard, they jumped at the opportunity.

During the early weeks of my fieldwork in Bhim Nagar my very first interaction with Kharat and the other operatives of Shiv Sena gave me much insight into their politics. Our first meeting took place in a public hall which was also the Shiv Sena Shakha (office) of the area. On reaching the hall there were few others who did not invite me in; instead they just pulled up a chair at the doorway and asked me to sit on it as though they were beginning an interrogation. The other two karyakartas, Datta and Gaikwad, were ostensibly Kharat’s seniors. As the conversation about the demolition proceeded, they suddenly inquired—‘madam, aapka caste kya hai (madam, what is your caste).’ Disoriented and with some hesitation I proceeded to answer, ‘I am Bengali.’ Datta in particular was quick to dismiss this answer, as my outward appearance and disposition indicated that I was not the kind of Bengali who was a problem for them and continued to press further—‘nahi, who toh pata hai—lekin apka caste kya hai (no, we know that—but what is your caste)?’ Now I had no escape, I could mock them, refuse to answer and endanger my access to this settlement or tell them the truth. With some trepidation I conceded—‘Brahmin’. Immediately, they all relaxed, even called for water and tea for me. Then the interrogation continued a bit further—why aren’t you wearing a bindi? Where are your parents? Where do you live now? Do you live abroad alone? You should wear a saree and come stand with us on the podium as we promote this project for our MLA. From this experience, I can safely surmise that my caste and class position were crucial in gaining an entry and gathering insight into this world of the Shiv Sena Karyakartas. However, the people of Bhim Nagar and the other Bengalis in the area were not as fortunate to be welcomed into the circles of decision making and conversations concerning the allotment of resettlement units.

Initially, the MMRDA constructing the metro depot planned to acquire all the land designated as NDZ on the Development Plan for this project. Realizing how MMRDA’s plans would substantially change their vote bank, the elected representatives negotiated only a partial relocation of residents, perhaps explaining why the demolition stopped short of the primarily Hindu parts of the settlement. In fact, Kharat was the first to show me the blueprint for constructing the metro shed (seen in Figure 4) by the MMRDA. After much negotiation with the involved officials, Kharat informed me that the plan was to resettle only the residents whose homes were within six meters of the wall separating the settlement and the open field and not the entirety of the plot designated as NDZ. Kharat being at the helm of these negotiations meant that he had almost exclusive access to the enumeration of the resettlement recipients. When the surveyors came around, led by Kharat, he had already orchestrated the presentation of documents that would allow him to become eligible for procuring approximately fifteen resettlement units that he had built in Bhim Nagar. This skillful maneuvering of the surveyors for personal gain had irked the MP’s dalals, who wanted to participate in capturing the resettlement list on their own terms. In facilitating the movement of Mr. D’s surveyors, Kharat had ensured that he had complete control over who would or would not be included in the list for compensation and resettlement. Thus, he was fixing the lists by which displaced residents were likely to get resettlement. When I asked him how they would account for the residents of the demolished part of the settlement, he said, ‘wahan sab Bihari, Musalman ya Bengali hai, abhi aakar hadap liya hai zameen. Unko toh kuch nahi milna chahiye (all of them are either Bihari, Muslim, or Bengali [read Bangladeshi] there, they recently came and captured the land, they shouldn’t get anything).’ This nativist and bigoted rhetoric was not uncommon in Bhim Nagar.

Figure 4: Blue print for the metro card shed for metro rail line 2B to be constructed by the MMRDA.

Unlike the other neighborhoods in the area which had Marathi-speaking middle caste Hindu populations from rural areas of Maharashtra, Bhim Nagar was populated predominantly by lower caste Muslims from Northern India. A Bhais’ family for instance were landless sharecroppers from Eastern Uttar Pradesh, close to the state of Bihar, spoke chaste Urdu and were practicing Muslims. The dominant Muslim population in this area also fed the rumors of these families being illegal Bangladeshi migrants. The cultural differences between the Marathis, the Biharis and the Bengalis were further weaponized by actors such as Kharat and the MLA to justify the othering of the community in Bhim Nagar. They believed that the creation of a homogenous community consisting of ‘their’ people, the Maratha community, would perpetuate the power of their representative in this area. Bhim Nagar, populated in part by the ‘Biharis’ and ‘Bangladeshis,’ had become a sore spot for the MLA. Perhaps this was why he did not put in the call to the collector in time to halt the demolition. During the three days in which the BMC demolished approximately 400 houses in Bhim Nagar, Mr. D’s team continued with the enumeration survey for the infrastructure project within the rest of the settlements of the area. However, the lack of enumeration in Bhim Nagar wasn’t the best outcome for Kharat either because he had recently built more tenements there. Yet in the larger interest of the nativistic rhetoric he seemed to be letting go of the matter.

Fixers working with Kharat had made sure that each resident being surveyed that day had their very own Aadhar cards, slips from the slum survey of Mumbai in 2001, and voter cards linked to the address of the unit in which they resided. According to the World Bank policy that became the general guideline for infrastructure-induced displacement in Mumbai in the past decade, any claimants found at the location of the units being displaced are eligible for compensation and rehabilitation. Most people living in these tenements could not provide proof of ownership because they were predominantly Kharat’s tenants (and resided in an unregularized informal settlement on the collector’s land). While the MMRDA never requires evidence of ownership for these surveys, Kharat convinced residents to provide documentation with property transactions on stamped paper proving that either he or his relatives were the valid recipients of resettlement. Kharat and other karyakartas had additionally identified an empty plot of land in the vicinity of the settlement, which could be acquired and used for constructing the resettlement buildings. Their negotiations with bureaucrats yielded the construction of ten buildings of fifteen floors each to project affected residents, fixing the political terrain ‘of their people’ in place.

My caste status had earned me privileged access into the actions of Kharat and his associates and the sustained interactions in the duration of my fieldwork led to an astonishing offer from them. During one of our last meetings Kharat asked me, ‘madam, yehaan ghar chaihey kya? Mein karwa ke deta hun. Hum sab mil jhul ke reh lenge yehaan (Madam, do you want a house here? I can get it done and we can all stay together).’ Perplexed I asked how this was possible because I obviously didn’t live here—to which he answered with great ease, ‘document toh ban jaat hai, bas aap photo bhej dijeye, hum baki sab dekh lenge (documents can get made, just send a photo and we will take care of everything else).’ Though I never was informed about how, I learned that under the aegis of the MLA, if one had the right caste background and the right connections, one could acquire all the documentary evidence required to prove residency in this settlement.

From patra to pakka

The second fixer, Guddu, worked for the MP. He had grown up in the nearby Phule Nagar neighborhood, with his family of two older sisters. In the aftermath of the communal (Hindu-Muslim) violence in 1992, his family had temporarily migrated to Howrah in West Bengal. On their return to Mumbai after the violence had receded, he started doing odd jobs as an office boy in the various small enterprises in the Island city area. He worked first as the office boy of the Saifi Bohri Upliftment Trust (SBUT), where he picked up the basics of how the real estate business works. Then he worked in a shipping company and worked as a labor contractor. Due to his varied work experience, he could now fluently speak Hindi, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, and Bengali; he was also proficient in English. After about half an hour had passed during one of our first meetings, having assessed my Hindi laced with Bengali, he declared, in Bengali, ‘madam, amar naam Abdul Qadir (madam, my name is Abdul Qadir).’ He had assumed Guddu, to disguise himself as the local Marathi man and the Bengali identity his clients despised. In the last two years of working within the settlement as a mobile shop owner, he had become acquainted with a contractor who usually worked in the neighboring areas. This contractor specialized in the construction of pakka (concrete) houses from those of patra (tin or aluminum sheets). Since most of the tenements in this settlement were made of patra, the settlement of Bhim Nagar was a new frontier for market expansion for Guddu's contact.

In this informal construction business, Guddu was also responsible for the ‘handling’ of the local officials because of his language skills and familiarity with bureaucratic procedures. His negotiations often involved either paying them off or reminding them that they had already been paid for the ongoing informal conversion constructions, appeasing the patrolling policemen by giving free mobile recharges, and keeping track of the activities of the competing contractors in the area. Guddu would appease officials with tea or beverages when they came for rounds, never seeming too aggressive. In Bhim Nagar, the lower-level bureaucrats that often-needed handling were the policemen, patrolling the settlement continuously because of its ‘law and order’ problem. Guddu additionally informed me that the rumor behind the demolition story was indeed true. Seeing how the workers of the MLA had been building rampantly within the Bhim Nagar, the MP also wanted to stake a claim in that area now that the extensive infrastructure development project was on the cards.

Thus, as the MP’s karyakarta, Guddu had placed a tip with the officials of the collector office. Here Guddu and his men claimed to have seen two unidentified men with duffle bags jump into the NAD from inside Bhim Nagar. He went on to inform me that while other political parties operating in Bhim Nagar engaged in performative claims-making processes organized by their respective karyakartas, the MP’ karyakartas which included Guddu, had bought out many of the MLA’s tenants with a combination of intimidation and economic imperatives. However, the MP’s influence in this settlement remained only partial at the time of my fieldwork. Representing the variegated politics of the Shiv Sena, Guddu told me, ‘Okhane bodo nongra politics khele. Oi jaat paat aar dhorom niye jhagda lagaye. MP sir ekdom eei sob koren na, uni khali developmenter kothai bolen (the politics of the people [from the MLA’s team] is very dirty. They start fights based on caste and religion. The MP is not like that, he speaks only of development).’ To Guddu, the MP was infallible, and his faith in this political representative was validated when during his first term, the ward saw the most infrastructure development it had seen in decades. The MP had nurtured Guddu as a worker despite being fully aware of his Bengali Muslim identity.

Now that the ground of Bhim Nagar had literally been leveled and was again open for capture, Guddu had taken it upon himself to capture territory for the MP. I had learned about this land capture from different sources within Bhim Nagar, but hearing it from the horse's mouth was exciting for me, and I pressed on—‘toh MLA lok jon ghor banate debe aapnader ke? Jhogda Hobe na? (Will the MLA’s people let you build houses there? Is there any violence amongst you for that)?’ Amused, he said, ‘eeijonne toh shakha pramukher saathe bhalo relations maintain kore rakhi. Relations maintain korar jonnie toh survey korei diyeche. Talwar niye eschilo, aami handle kore niyechi (therefore I must maintain good relations with the [Shiv Sena] shakha pramukh [branch leader]. To maintain these relations, I helped in getting the survey done. People [from the settlement being surveyed] had come out with swords but I handled everything).’ The Shakha Pramukh of the political party must solve local disputes, and ultimately, it was all about business. The Shakha, like the municipal chowki of the BMC, is the most localized unit of the political machinery of the Shiv Sena (Hansen 2001; Shaikh 2005). It is here that these localized disputes over capture of land and other financial resources are adjudicated, in the greater interests of the party.

Guddu’s actions were certainly driven by self-interest and in the interest of capital accumulation for his patron, yet, they were also rooted in the conditions that Muslim and Bengali people from within his community in Bhim Nagar experienced. Realizing that the politics of the nativist and bigoted MLA would not serve the interests of the marginalized in the community, he had chosen to operate under the patronage of the MP. However, it was also the actions of Guddu and his associates that had caused the demolition of the slum. They had placed the tip about the ‘unidentified people’ entering the NAD from Bhim Nagar that led to the sudden and exaggerated response from the office of the Suburban collectorate. In the aftermath of the demolition Guddu and his associates had rushed to consolidate territory for the MP, in the name of developing the area for the poor through a politics that would be free of the bigotry previously experienced. These dynamics of political patronage within slums rarely ever make it to the mainstream rhetoric of large political parties. Ironically, both these fixes ultimately represented and consolidated the interests of the same political entity, the Shiv Sena within the informal settlement. Even though Guddu and Kharat had deeply contradictory politics and strategies of operation, the Shiv Sena Shakha became symbolic of the contradictory subaltern urbanism espoused within Bhim Nagar, one that seeks to creatively destroy the vibrant and entrepreneurial space of the slum to accumulate real estate surpluses by any means possible.

Conclusion

This article opened with the very confusing and disheartening scenes of the informal settlement of Bhim Nagar being demolished by the BMC in Mumbai. Despite the presence of multiple governmental authorities at the site, it was initially unclear why this demolition was taking place and what the predicament of the residents would be. Before describing the origins of this demolition, I asked the question: how such incongruent conditions of living were produced in the megacity of Mumbai? While the answer to this question proves very complicated, this article finds that the quotidian practices of fixers managing the aftermath of the demolition illustrate the emergence of a new subaltern urbanism. Ananya Roy’s (2011) influential formulation of subaltern urbanism, predicated on the native refusal of portrayals of slums as the heart of darkness, and enacted by experimental civil society organizations like PUKAR, has done much to advance the theoretical value of slums as entrepreneurial and as having political agency. Other scholars’s concepts, such as Benjamin’s (2008) ‘occupancy urbanism’ and Gidwani’s (2006) ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism,’ have also significantly reframed the politics of the Southern megacity. Bringing a different frame of reference, this article proposes the emergence of a new subaltern urbanism, in which we shift the gaze from to the quotidian practices of the fixers in places like the M East ward of Mumbai.

Presenting a disaggregated view of everyday life within informal settlements of Mumbai, this article ethnographically presents the persistence and prevalence of what Partha Chatterjee (2004) has called the ‘para-legal,’ a domain of action between the legal and the illegal, a space where moral claims on the state can be made by members of political society. It is here that fixers, through a variety of morally and ethically ambiguous strategies, complicate the project of global capital as it seeks to fix itself in the city space of millennial Mumbai. This article shows that the interactions between the bureaucracy and the fixers, made it possible for the dwellers of Bhim Nagar to remain fixed in the city and also remain invisible for an extended period. The fixers were ultimately instrumental in delaying or rather manipulating the development of land in the city. These fixers perform the critical function of making visible or obscuring the post-colonial state to the native populations—in this case, the people of Bhim Nagar. At the same time, even international capital must respond to the fancies of the fixers, like Guddu and Kharat, to be able to fix itself within the resettlement colonies. It is only through fixers that the world-class city infrastructure imagined by global capital can be realized. In a context of an intensely complicated institutional landscape and structural discontinuity, with their savvy knowledge fixers can ensure that the gaps are bridged. The local fixers ultimately determine who and what remains fixed to the landscape and finally, it is through their understanding of the planning codes and bureaucratic dispositions that various enumeration and technical processes are actualized.

Gayatri Spivak (2005) writes that ‘subalternity is a position without identity,’ and that ‘subalternity is where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognizable basis of action.’ Fixers, I argue, operate in these ever-shifting points to constitute a new subaltern urbanism. They are both absent and present in the ethnographic setting—omnipresent in the informal settlement and the bureaucratic offices yet impossible to follow and pin down in everyday life. Yet, it is also the quotidian practices of these slippery ambiguous figures determine the survival of the most marginalized in the megacity. The allegiance of the fixers can never be pinned down, as we saw in the cases of Guddu and Kharat above; they sometimes serve the community and at other times the interests of capital. It is the contradictory and inscrutable politics of the fixers, within the domains of the para-legal, that this article argues to be the new subaltern urbanism, one that is more suited to the times in which we live, attentive to the complexity of community within the metonymic slum.

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.

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]

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.