Berkeley, University of California Press, 2022. xv, 273 pp. (Table, map, B&W photos.) US$85.00, paper, ISBN 9780520383104.
Dilli door aast huzoor (an ancient and ironic response to the question “Is it far to Delhi?”; note the archaic Indo-Persian spelling—“Delhi is still far, sire” [trans.]).
A Gujerati woman from Mumbai, Namita Dharia, was surrounded by construction projects in her youth, growing up in a family of architects, including her mother. From the 1980s, Mumbai was transforming (again) and Dharia learned at home about the processes she would study in Gurgaon for her dissertation starting in 2011. Having lived in Mumbai in the 1960s, I can attest that even then the city indeed seemed to be transforming through construction. Big cities never sleep.
Once a small agricultural town with a military base, but made notorious by Indira Gandhi’s son’s small car (Maruti) factory in the late 1970s, Gurgaon could be within reach of Delhi offices if trains and highways were realigned. Dharia skillfully reconstructs the process by which ambitious famers assembled land in Gurgaon and made early deals with developers who in turn uncovered the capital for construction of huge housing complexes with luxurious villas nearby. During Dharia’s study, Gurgaon lost its old name and became Gurugram. Old farmers would be shaking their heads.
Why “ephemeral?” Don’t architecture, capital, and construction lead to tangible and permanent solidity? Dharia’s reply is that “[t]he ephemeral manifests in the shifting unstable states and locations of capital, and the constant brokering required to produce it … Tracing black money as it weaves through Gurgaon reveals the fluidity of many categories, including formal-informal, legal-illegal, public-private, educated-uneducated, and professional-agrarian worlds” (62).
She sought and accepted the guidance of a “marginalized caste” Bihari Muslim man who came late in life to construction, and who guided her during her field work. Though only slightly older than her, “MD-ji” was Dharia’s male lighthouse in dark corners. He could match specific buildings to specific developers and then to specific political parties engaged in Delhi politics. There is a very long tradition of such “priviledged informants” in anthropology, and this is a positive example. Some construction projects would not have allowed an outside woman on site, sites “where middle-class women rarely appear” (39), without a proper introduction. Dharia was given a lot of freedom, but had to observe male norms “lest I be identified as promiscuous and invite inappropriate conduct” (241).
Masons from Bengal, cement mixers from Bihar, Banjara women from nearby Rajasthan moving earth, all come together temporarily in a dance of work and stamina, braving the heat. Dharia chose for her dissertation to contrast a large building of apartments and a small, more personal mansion. She has uncovered the patterns of work, the stress of compulsory mobility, and the precarious condition of living in a jhuggi cluster of workers’ huts. Drought, deforestation, and steady decline of the water table will establish a permanent anxiety underlying Gurgaon’s ephemeral processes. Dharia learned about the workers’ diseases and illnesses, their accidents on the job, deaths in their families, and the grinding poverty to which this precarious kind of work seemed to be an answer.
Most Delhi taxi drivers could draw their model of how white money and black money flow together through the economy. But Dharia provides an astute model showing how black money in Gurgaon becomes white, through specific projects and specific persons. It is gripping, not simply to be told how it works “in general” by financial analysts, but in a grounded way by the participants themselves—the way that good ethnography can do.
An opportunity to test the game players in Gurgaon appeared suddenly in November 2016, during Dharia’s field work period, when the 500 and 1,000 rupee currency notes were de-monetized by the central bank. This sudden loss of value would have been a bright mirror for Dharia to hold up in front of those men financing big buildings, or construction materials, or the land itself, to see how they and their systems compensated for a blow to their cash economy from outside its predicable parameters. But she doesn’t appear to have seized it.
Her attention to the meaning of categories in Hindi, and their varying subtle uses, is most illuminating for a non-speaker. Although there is no glossary to quickly reference, the index has most of these terms carefully listed. Dharia’s love of language and double meaning shines through. She gets close enough to female workers to hear their earthy appraisal of their husbands and co-workers, and their talk about their wages and tough way of life.
Bless the existence of the small camera inside the mobile phone in the hand of an anthropologist. Dharia would have been told not to arrive at a construction site with a camera, but she could swiftly and inconspicuously snap essential and ephemeral scenes with a sweep of hand on a cell phone. Her images strengthen the story well, and her interpretations are thus less strained.
Namita Vijay Dharia has written a silver mine of suggestions and insights for a new generation of feminist (and possibly Indian) anthropologists about working in a male-dominated and macho world. It would be easy to generate debates using this book in a graduate methods class. She lays out all the cons and pros. But a Brazilian or Chinese anthropologist, whether male or female, who is seized with a suddenly growing city near them, twisting and smothering what was once there, will admire her personal honesty about the challenges in this kind of work. Though it helped to have her own family’s orientation to construction, there is much for everyone else to emulate here.
Robert Anderson
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby