Sushmita Pati’s Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (published by Cambridge University Press in 2022) seeks to interrogate and contribute to wider debates on the global flow of capital and spatial transformation by looking at the phenomena of rent in Delhi’s two urban villages. Pati packs it as an urban anthropological account that blends both political economic and sociological understandings to examine rent as a source of economic mobility, a mechanism of social control, a conscious strategy of building social cohesion and reinventing community amidst its fragmentation in the face of global capital, and a mechanism to dominate racial, ethnic and caste “others”, within neoliberal challenges. This work offers a context for interrogations of universalized theories of capitalist expansion, financialisation, urbanisation, and the relation between state and community mediated by the market.
It consists of seven chapters with an introduction and an epilogue. All the chapters are organized individually to interrogate the social history of rent and aim to find answers to the central question: how do Jat landlord-owned urban villages find a place in the political economy of a global city? The initial chapters narrate the story of land acquisition acts and notions of kabza, lal dora, bhaichara and analyses how land becomes property in these villages.
In the first chapter, she explores land acquisition and urbanisation in Delhi throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It traces land’s transformation into property, and how legal and illegal methods establish a range of property relationships. In 1954, Munirka was one of the first villages to be acquired just outside the then-city limits of Delhi. The agricultural terrain was eventually replaced by new urban designs, including ring roads and government quarters. In the case of Shahpur Jat, the land was acquired in 1958. Over time, garment workers and garment workshops became the economic backbone of Shahpur Jat village.
The second chapter focuses on the land acquisition between the 1960s and the 1990s that drove displaced people to invest their money in three key sectors: the purchase of additional rural land, construction and transport. To enter into these industries, Jat landlords made links with the fringes of rent-seeking networks established by the state’s license-permit system. The author tells us that the families that relocated to Haryana and Uttar Pradesh to maintain agriculture as a primary source of income missed out on the speculative chances that the urban centres began to provide. However, families that invested in rural land around Gurgaon, Najafgarh, and even Rohini saw huge financial rewards as this land was gradually transformed into commercial real estate. In the framework of the shifting urban political economy, she explores various accumulation methods that families and individuals were experimenting with. At various points in history, we witness landowners turning transporters, transporters to financiers, builders and contractors to educators, and local policemen or ex-army men becoming builders.
The author contends that individuals often actively and purposefully participated in the process by which agricultural land became private urban property. She uses life stories, in-depth narratives, court judgments, architectural and spatial forms, local political institutions, and urban rental market structure to provide a rich ethnographic description. Through the dynamics of rent (in its abstract and lived forms) in specific locations, Pati’s research demonstrates the necessity of paying attention to the ‘vernacularisation of capital’ in Indian contexts.
The author contests the linear theoretical narratives of the universal march of the capital across the globe. She draws on David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession but also challenges his ideas on the subsumption of rent into circuits capital by borrowing critical insights from Anna Tsing’s small political economy scheme. She delves into the urban rental structures of two villages: Munirka and Shahpur Jat. In her world of ‘small political economy’ of Delhi, you get to see the village landlords, builders, Jats, state, urban villages, bhaichara, kunba, lal dora lands, apartments, JNU, one-room sets, fragile masculinity, African Nationals, North-Easterners, Dalits, OBCs and the intricate macro social, and economic relationships among them.
She explores the tension between rapidly changing economic realities and the concurrent need to maintain kinship ties and traditional ideals of respect and honour. The village land separated by (red line) lal dora, from the revenue-generating agricultural land, becomes the source of its income and subsistence on the one hand, and the sense of pride and belonging on the other. Through this sociological conception of rent, she moves beyond the political-economic lens. She argues that rent can be understood as a form of control over social resources in two ways: control expressed through belongingness, honour, and community; and control in the form of extraction as an economic value. The author refutes the ‘phasist/transitional’ understanding of urban villages and asserts their deeper role in constituting real estate and framing a parallel governance model along with the neoliberal state.
The third chapter takes us to post-liberalisation Delhi and tells the story of how these villages acquire real estate value. By this time, Munirka becomes a space for lower-middle-class migrants employed in service who were looking for apartment-style accommodation. While Shahpur Jat grows as the economic market for garment factories and workers and gradually became a centre for fashion designers, boutiques and lifestyle stores.
The landlords also reimagine themselves in the context of capital. Accumulation of rent was presented as a ‘risk taking’, even though the risk, in this case, emerges from the threats of demolitions and not from the upheavals of the market. It also tells the story of the state finding it difficult to demolish these lal dora land rental structures and instead aims to tie them into the framework of property and revenue taxation by resorting to regularisation as the final option. She outlines this dilemma between the state and the landowners of urban villages as an alternative logic of governing by non-state actors who emerge through the fissures of governance and law.
Chapter four pays attention to the notion of community and how the community is transformed in light of the changing urban political economy. It reveals how community (land) relations expressed via bhaichara and kinship associations, including the panchayat, acquire a new role of vernacular companies, perform tasks of money lending, building credit networks, and new social relations within global metropolitan extraction processes to manage urban property and accumulate rent.
In chapter five, the author moves to incidences of racial and sexual assault to emphasise that this accumulation needs ‘outsiders’ that foster deep-seated insecurity among landlords, centred on a loss of culture, masculine self-worth, and authority over women. The racialized tension reflects a complex dynamic in which the landlords are both dependent on and disgusted by the rentiers. The presence of Northeasterners and African Nationals as rentiers imparts racial and ethnic connotations to the discourse of community, belongingness, insider and outsider. Pati presents the extremely intriguing notion of a ‘racial surcharge’ imposed by these renters as an additional component of rent accumulation over the tenants from North-East India and Africa.
In chapters six and seven, she asserts that inequality and violence build today’s emerging urban forms. Rent expresses these anxieties, aspirations, emotions, and contestations in the city. She demonstrates this anxiety among Jats, particularly with the rise of Dalit and OBC landlords in these villages. This tension unfolds along with wider concerns of risk, insecurity, demolitions, and changing demography as the playfield for electoral politics.
To conclude, this book offers a rich analysis of two Jat-dominated urban villages of Delhi to reflect on the unregulated economy of rental properties, the relationships of these villages with the state, and how this social, economic, and political relationship is managed by the strong networks of community. There are a few certain shortcomings of this endeavour as well. The book does not provide any relevant ethnographic account or theoretical insights of tenants except when she discusses ethnic and racial violence. A book dedicated to the study of properties of rent remains oblivious to how these urban economic realities and social transformations affect and shape tenants. Similarly, throughout her rich ethnographic accounts of Jat landlords, she is silent on the social and economic negotiations, experiences and journeys of Jat women in these urban villages. In the same vein, the book does not provide a sufficient exploration of the lives, struggles, anxieties, and aspirations of the children or the youth of these builders, and financiers’ families. Including these missing voices in the account of rent in the urban economy would have been particularly rewarding for the wider audiences.
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Dr Suraj Beri teaches Sociology at the Central University of Nagaland.