Ursula Rao

Making the Global City: Urban Citizenship at the Margins of Delhi

There is a growing scholarly interest in the spatialisation of class relations in post-industrial cities. Gentrified suburbs exclude the poor and re-work notions of public property and urban citizenship to the advantage of the rich. My study moves beyond the sanitised places of the inner city and shows how the cleaning mission affects life in the new spaces of deprivation. I analyse home making in a resettlement colony of Delhi. After being removed from the hubs of the labour market and with little state support, resettled slum dwellers struggle under harsh conditions for survival. Those who can afford this expensive venture embrace home ownership at high personal risks und by exploiting the channels of the informal economy, hoping that possessing a legal dwelling will root them more firmly in the city. In practice, the new status is an often uneasy fusion of a formal and informal status and thus remains essentially precarious in an environment that criminalises informality.

Caste and the Desire for Belonging

Abstract Questions of power and competition have figured prominently in the expanding debate about Dalit assertion. This article moves beyond the rhetoric of caste wars to engage with the affective and emotional dimension of caste. The focus is on the urban environment, where caste unity is challenged by the centrifugal forces of urban living. The article demonstrates how Khatiks in Bhopal are reunited through a festival culture that straddles class differentiation, factional politics and generational gaps. The emerging formation signifies the continuing strength of caste sentiments in the city and demonstrates how Dalits create arenas for publicly declaring pride in their heritage both within and beyond the political arena.

Biometric Bodies, Or How to Make Electronic Fingerprinting Work in India:

The rapid spread of electronic fingerprinting not only creates new regimes of surveillance but compels users to adopt novel ways of performing their bodies to suit the new technology. This ethnography uses two Indian case studies – of a welfare office and a workplace – to unpack the processes by which biometric devices become effective tools for determining identity. While in the popular imaginary biometric technology is often associated with providing disinterested and thus objective evaluation of identity, in practice ‘failures to enrol’ and ‘false rejects’ frequently cause crises of representation. People address these by tinkering with their bodies and changing the rules, and in the process craft biometric bodies. These are assembled bodies that link people and objects in ways considered advantageous for specific identity regimes. By using assemblage theory, the article proposes an alternative interpretation of new surveillance regimes as fluid practices that solidify through the agency of multiple actors who naturalize particular power/knowledge arrangements.

Renu Desai and Romola Sanyal (eds), Urbanizing Citizenship. Contested Spaces in Indian Cities: (New Delhi: Sage, 2012), ISBN 9788132107309, 320 pp., £39.99, hdbk

placed means above ends, Gandhi saw voluntary nonviolent suffering as eventually assuring success. In other words, the saving of life in the present was not his primary concern. Dying fearlessly was more precious than life. Instead of arguing that Gandhi’s sentiments were idealistic and unrealistic, or worse, as many do, Devji engages with the Mahatma’s ideas seriously. What was Gandhi thinking when he asked the British to ‘Quit India’ when the country did not seem ready for independence, and would possibly plunge into anarchy? He believed that a British withdrawal would force the main groups to come together and engage in direct negotiations based on honour and trust, resulting in a realistic settlement; this would never be achieved as long as the parties did not have to ‘look to one another but to an outsider for support and sustenance’. Any resultant chaos was preferable to an unending armed peace. Devji makes a considered attempt to understand Gandhi in Gandhi’s own terms, to critically examine some of Gandhi’s ideas that most would consider as excessive rhetoric. This may give us a sincere and more consistent Gandhi than the one often presented, but at the same time a Gandhi that can leave us uncomfortable given the consequences that can, and perhaps did, flow from his directions. But then this is what can be expected when someone is more concerned with converting violence into nonviolence by engaging with it rather than merely wanting to avoid it.

Christiane Brosius, India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity

findings and theories agree or disagree with existing scholarship on why Jain women renounce and/or why they renounce in larger numbers than men. Two of the first scholars to address the central questions Sethi is interested in were N. Shanta (1985) and Josephine Reynell (1985), who came to the same conclusions as Sethi has about women’s renunciation. Numerous scholars since then have addressed these questions and/or posited their theories, including Savitri Holmstrom (1988), Anne Vallely (2001, 2002), M. Whitney Kelting (2001, 2009), Peter Flügel (2006, 2009), Sherry Fohr (2001, 2005, 2006), Nalini Balbir (1994, 2002), John Cort (2001), Lawrence Babb (1996, 1999), Michael Carrithers (1990, 1991), Padmanabh S. Jaini (1991) and James Laidlaw (1995). These omissions should be corrected in future editions.

From the Edge of Power: The Cultural Politics of Disadvantage in South Asia

India’s cultural ‘‘soft power’’ overshadowed its much-touted economic credentials in 2008. The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize for fiction, and Slumdog Millionaire, a rags-to-riches fable, won an Oscar. What can these portrayals tell us of India and its oppressed classes? The first, written by Arvind Adiga, tells the story of a poor man from Bihar, who becomes a domestic servant in an upper-class household in the affluent suburb of Gurgaon near Delhi. The poor man achieves his ultimate release from the shackles of servitude by ruthlessly murdering his employer and stealing his money, then forging a new life as an entrepreneur in the burgeoning city of Bangalore. The second successfully employs the Bollywood style and formula, seducing us with a fairytale story of a Mumbai slum-dweller whose life story and everyday struggles provide a resourceful foundation for him to answer the questions levelled at him in the Indian version of the TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire have stimulated passionate debate and attracted both criticism and praise from Western and Indian audiences alike. It is not our intention to evaluate the merit of the commentary, largely polarised around the issue of whether or not such depictions of subaltern worlds are accurate and authentic; we want to highlight the common thread that runs through these two controversial renditions. The White Tiger and Slumdog both employ the voice of the underdog to narrate their stories and in both the underdog triumphs, achieving upward social mobility. Nevertheless, this is a thin notion of upward mobility acquired through improbable means – a gameshow and murder.