In the last few decades, migration and globalisation have become the foci of extensive investigation across disciplines, including in urban studies. Indeed, with the onset of structural reforms in an increasingly neoliberal world economy, studying transnational migratory flows to the global city—their patterns and processes—became key to unpacking the dynamics of a new, interconnected world. However, literature on international migration systems usually pays disproportionate attention to dyadic South–to–North or North–to–North flows and academic focus on South–South flows has remained scanty. African Clusters in India by Koyal Verma, published by Routledge in 2023, attempts to break this discursive hegemony by centring postcolonial (stylised as Post-Colonial in the text) South–South flows and looking at the diasporic experience through a spatial lens. Koyal Verma’s African Clusters in India is unique for another reason: it further extends the usage of the spatial idiom to comment on the social construction of the African identity in urban India.  Why are there African migrants in India? Why is there a clustering of African migrants in Delhi’s urban neighbourhood of Khirki Extension? Is this spatial concentration out of choice or a result of the urban process? How is race, more specifically, racial exclusion, manifested in the city? In this context, can we/ how do we reimagine our cities to be more inclusive? These are some of the questions that Verma poses to the reader throughout the monograph.

Verma locates the African cluster as a form of spatial exclusion and historicises Indo-African migratory flows in the context of its political-economic ties both—historic and post-liberalisation—and details the histories of migration India and Africa share, emphasising the role of Islam in the formation of historic transnational networks and highlighting how South-South partnerships have emerged in the contemporary neoliberal moment and have provided pathways for contemporary migrations while also explaining the various push and pull reasons that cause migration including civil war and political crisis like in the case for Somalia.

In Delhi, Verma shifts her focus more specifically to the spatial exclusion African migrants experience in India and dives into the ways such exclusion manifests in determining access to housing. Since racism, in particular, is not one of the many ‘-isms’ that find themselves in the middle of Indian academic inquiry, Verma is forced to rely on theories of race, housing and exclusion that have emerged out of the global North; but she tactfully circumvents any expected high-handedness and successfully glocalises her analysis by expanding upon the contemporary urban realities of ghettoisation, gentrification, the formation of gated communities, politics of housing associations and uses these insights to locate the conditions that lead to the emergence of African clusters in urban India. Verma uses intersectionality as a theoretical tool to make it clear that the racial and then spatial injustice that African migrants experience in India is not only a result of larger (yet less discussed) race-based politics that envelop Indian systems and institutions like the state and the police but also a result of the racially-motivated exclusionary attitudes and practices perpetuated and professed by local communities, thus highlighting our broader failure to recognise racism as an Indian issue.

What makes African Clusters in India novel is also how it transports the reader, albeit not very seamlessly, from discussing spatial injustice to thinking about how the violence perpetrated by the state and the community—most prominently through language that reflects stereotypes, prejudices, and biases—is significant in the social construction of an African identity wherein language plays an important role as a signifier of race. In this context, Verma explores the nuances of representational politics and the symbolic and discursive role language plays in perpetuating racist violence. But with that, it becomes necessary to explore means and modalities of resistance and solidarity which Verma deals with towards the end of the text (perhaps as an academic ray of hope) where she discusses safe spaces, solidarity networks and the emergence of a ‘pan-African identity’ in India

Dotted with ethnographic vignettes to reflect on race, urban space, migration, globalisation and identity, African Clusters in India tries to theorise race and racism in India but falls short of that impossible task because the different kinds of analyses presented in the text often seem like disjunct essays rather than a single monograph on the African migrant’s identity in urban India. But by using the cluster as a unit of analysis, Verma is able to inaugurate several unique tangents of inquiry which have been conspicuously missing from Indian academia; however, to what extent the monograph successfully answers those questions remains a contention.

***

Sara Bardhan is a Master’s student of Urban Policy and Governance at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.