South Asia Across the Disciplines. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. x, 313 pp. (Illustrations.) US$27.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-38506-8.
When I worked in Mumbai in 2000, my routine included an hour or so of birdwatching before the daily fieldwork rounds. The marshland around Kalina teemed with birds, but it was also being swallowed up at an astonishing pace by shopping malls, housing complexes, and business parks—the kind of buildings that Llerena Guiu Searle writes about in this book. Searle did fieldwork, mostly in Gurgaon (Delhi), for sixteen months from 2006 to 2008 and again briefly in 2014. It included participant observation with a European real-estate fund as well as interviews with developers, architects, advertising designers, and other people involved in the making of real estate. The result is a first-rate ethnography that has as its main object the encounter between international investors and their Indian intermediaries, as they attempt to produce an international market in land and buildings in India.
The watershed moment came in 1991, when Nehruvian protectionist economic policies were dismantled and legal and institutional changes made that ushered in new roles for the private sector, including real-estate development and its corollaries. It was in this way that land and buildings were transformed into tradable assets and large swathes of Indian cities into “landscapes of accumulation.” The profit margins are potentially high, in part because labour comes cheap and mostly in the form of people escaping grinding rural poverty. Developers use their clout to stave off the efforts of workers and activists towards better conditions, and they also have access to land made available through displacement of the urban poor. Thus one of the key contradictions of the Global South: cities are simultaneously the sites of spectacular accumulation and poverty. This contradiction is nowhere to be seen in the collective narrative that underwrites the speculative development. The protagonists in Gurgaon call it the “India Story,” and it tells of dramatic, perpetual, and inexorable growth and price appreciation. Circulated to the point of becoming accepted common sense, the story extends beyond real estate and intersects with similar discourses about a “rising Asia,” a global boom, and such. Markets emerge because they are made to do so, and they are “inaugurated in stories and realized by actions based on those stories” (64). Refreshingly, this book does not dismiss speculation as a collective madness. (Searle’s developers are nothing like the tulip-peddling monkeys of Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1640 satirical painting.) Rather, speculation is convincingly described as rooted in a set of knowledge practices and coherent narratives that tap into bigger discourses of development, growth, and globalization (“growth is a self-fulfilling prophesy, propelled by its own momentum” [91]).
Searle is at her best when unravelling the complex relations between Indian developers and international investors. Real-estate developers are located at the intersection of a number of interconnected markets for building-related goods and services. They play a highly entrepreneurial role buying land, massaging bureacrats, and roping in the people who do the actual building and financing. They also cultivate the elite buyers their projects are intended for; their associates in this venture include research institutes that perpetuate the image of an income ladder being climbed by everyone irrespective of regional, ethnic, religious, caste, and other affiliations. Crucially, developers have emerged as intermediaries, as foreign investors turn to them in the absence of social capital and local contacts of their own: “[b]y taking on the initial risks in the development process, navigating local politics, and assembling land parcels (often using intimidation, extortion, and violence), Indian developers transform Indian land into an internationally legible asset, a profitable route for foreign investment” (125). Clearly, the relations of brokerage between Indian developers and foreign investors have their own power dynamics. Discourses and performances of “quality,” “standards,” “expertise,” and “transparency” serve as a means for both sides to establish some sort of control and legibility in a context which is fraught and often unpredictable. The case of EuroFund, a European investment fund whose struggles with Indian developers are discussed in fine-grained and nuanced detail, shows that contrary to “popular narratives about the inevitable victory of global capital, aesthetics, and norms […], the authority needed to make markets is hard won, if won at all” (230).
It turns out that there is a twist to the India story. The global crisis of 2008 precipitated an exodus of capital and upset the timing of real estate and thus its profitability. Investments that had seemed shockproof turned out to be anything but, and the image of real estate as an inexhaustible source of profit took a big dent. In this way, the landscapes of accumulation at Gurgaon and elsewhere tell of the power of global finance to shape markets and city space—but they also tell of the limitations of that power.
This important and fairly sobering point finds a worthy voice in a book that is very well written and entirely free of jargon or padding. Searle constructs her argument systematically and convincingly, and she also has a useful habit of summing up at the end of each section. On many counts, Landscapes of Accumulation is a fine piece of work that will appeal to scholars—in particular, but not exclusively, anthropologists and sociologists—who are interested in cities, the politics and transformation of urban space, contemporary capitalism, globalization, and the relations between entrepreneurs, the state, and global finance.
Mark-Anthony Falzon
University of Malta, Msida, Malta