New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. xliv, 317 pp. (Figures.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-809914-7.
In the field of urban studies, single-city profiles tend to come in two varieties: a first offers arguments about a city as a whole, and thus invites comparative analysis with other, “similar” cities. A second takes an opposite tack, homing in on particularities—specific localities, identities, and meanings within a single city—then making arguments about these particular places and people. Sanjay Srivastava’s Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon, begins instead with the evocative claim that the city itself is “like an argument” (xviii). That is, rather than approach India’s National Capital Region as either a “totality” or as a collection of splintered spaces, Srivastava focuses on what he calls the “intimate entanglements” (27) by means of which seemingly separate places, people, and ideas (slums and gated communities; shopping malls and nationalist sentiment; temples and theme parks) are co-constituted in the city. The fruits of this approach are borne out in a richly ethnographic, deeply insightful, and at times wonderfully surprising portrait of urban contestation, transformation, and self-making in contemporary Delhi and Gurgaon.
The book is divided into three parts. The first takes place on the bank of the Yamuna River in the basti settlement of Nangla Matchi, where the ethnography narrates the lead-up to the neighbourhood’s demolition (as part of an urban “beautification” drive). Srivastava probes the processes and contestations that link the “formal city” to the “exertions and activities of the occupants of its putatively ‘informal’ spaces” (xli). Focusing on Nangla Matchi residents’ efforts to shore up individual claims to compensation in the event of demolition, the chapter follows the “life-stories” (6) of three characters: first we meet Chamkili, a neighbourhood leader who enlists the technical skills she acquired during an earlier career working for a power company to now (informally) supply electricity to neighbourhood residents at a tidy profit; next we meet Balkees, who puts “faux symbols of authority” (22) to work in producing passable versions of official government documents needed to claim post-demolition compensation; lastly we meet Rakesh, an auto-rickshaw-driver-turned-real-estate-broker, whose information-gathering skills honed over two decades spent chatting with passengers underpin a lucrative (if legally dubious) career buying and selling plots of land in a slum resettlement colony. This fascinating chapter demonstrates how the elusive power to access and deploy the authority of “the state” stems from the precarious world-making practices of urban marginality itself.
Chapter 2 introduces the assorted techniques of “mutually agreed upon fraud and deception” (32) by means of which Nangla Matchi residents seek to prove eligibility for a compensatory allotment in a resettlement colony. At the heart of this chapter are the vagaries of documentary “proof”: the sociomaterial array of paper slips, signatures, and socialities that are assembled in a “great chain of documents” to make a case for eligibility. Thus we see how “entitlement” inheres not in the extent to which any particular chain of documents reflects or narrates any “true” history, but rather in the tricks, mimicries, and ruses through which “genuineness is established through fakeness” (39). “Faking,” Srivastava argues, is not only “crucial to the making of community life” (53) in Nangla Matchi, but relations between the urban poor and the state are produced and instantiated by means of these relations of deception and trickery. The bulldozers finally roll into Nangla Matchi, but not before the narrative has led us through a series of tortuous paper trails, gone-awry appeals to patronage, rumour-infused misinformation, and frantic efforts to establish “rights” to compensation—dynamics that unfold in sometimes triumphant and other times heartbreaking ways.
Part 1 concludes with a discussion of the state’s “arbitrariness”: “the state has no norms,” (50) Srivastava writes, and in the context of this inscrutability, Nangla residents approach the state as they might a fickle lover: seeking to decipher its “moods” (68) and to match moods with correspondingly capricious tactics. A good ethnography might be said to be one in which the accounts not only impel readers to question received histories and taken-for-granted categories, but one in which the material can sometimes exceed the author’s own categories of explanation and analysis. Undoubtedly, “the state” that Nangla Matchi’s residents encounter is not of the Weberian variety. But words like “moody,” “erratic,” and “arbitrary” do not quite do justice to Srivastava’s ethnography, which reveals not an arbitrary or unknowable state, but rather one that perhaps Nangla’s residents know entirely too well: one that is run through with power-infused, asymmetrical social relations of caste, class, and exclusionary ethno-religious nationalism. In this context, the ethnographies in part 1 raise pressing questions: What enables some people to take advantage of the porosities inhering in the social and semeiotic complexity of contemporary “urban entanglements,” and not others? What new forms of knowledge (social, spatial, technical) are re-valued in this context?
Part 2 leaves the rubble-strewn lanes of Nangla Matchi and the dusty offices of the lower-level bureaucracy, to turn towards the (air-conditioned) localities where “emerging cultures of market-citizenship” (110) animating “post-nationalist” Delhi come into view. The protagonist of part 2 is Delhi’s multifarious and elusive “middle class.” Chapter 5 outlines how a new form of nationalist citizen-consumerism has been spatialized through a combination of “consanguineal capitalism,” “corporatist ambition and state patronage” (130), fuelling a construction boom in gated residential complexes. Yet notwithstanding elite fantasies that gated “enclaves” like DLF City in Gurgaon might enable residents to secede from the surrounding city (and region and nation), the ethnographies show instead how “decrepitude” and “unruliness” (149) leak through the gates in pesky ways. When a “stream of sewage” (145) appears as an “unexpected water feature” in a swish Gurgaon colony (whose residents thus discover their colony has not been connected to the municipal sewage system), we learn that affluence does not enable a “clean break” from the materiality of the city and its infrastructures. And when caste-based agitations for expanded educational quotas elicit a frantic response among DLF City’s largely high-caste parents (who fear rising numbers of lower-caste students in their children’s classrooms), we see how this would-be “island of plentitude” (149) is decisively implanted in the region’s “larger restless geography” (147). Enclave residents respond to these sorts of looming “threats” with mismatched efforts to wall off their world with amped-up security—to sometimes unintended effect.
The unintended outcomes of the “urban entanglements” that Srivastava’s book presents militate against any easy vilification (or celebration) of “post-nationalist” consumer capitalism or market (neo)liberalism. The ethnographies show instead how particular versions of “history, heritage and contemporary and ancient religiosity” are bound up with the “theme-ing” (216) of Indian modernity in ways that enable a multitude of experiences and appropriations. For the upwardly mobile “service class,” we see how shopping malls are a stage for “personality development” (246), for the cultivation of middle-class comportments, and for achieving and performing “self improvement.” While cultures of consumer citizenship play out along gendered lines in uneven ways across the socioeconomic spectrum, malls are also where asymmetrical relations of power and hierarchy are reproduced (“you don’t want to be seen at the wrong mall!” [243]). Spaces of consumption emerge as sites where “multiple dramas of distinction” play out simultaneously.
Entangled Urbanism leaves us with the conclusion that the city is “no whole entity, but a series of connected realms, each of distinct character, linking varied lives and processes into an urban entanglement” (261). While it may indeed be true that the complexity of Delhi’s “entanglements” defies any tidy interpretation, Srivastava’s beautifully textured account suggests a more pointed proposition: that perhaps the socio-material complexity of contemporary urbanism invariably surpasses any singular effort to know the city, thereby exceeding the designs of those who would control the city and seek to circumscribe its possibilities.
Lisa Björkman
University of Louisville, Louisville, USA
pp. 383-386