Indian cities have long served as spaces for violent outbreaks. While the exponential rise in violence has been attributed to the rule and presence of right-wing, Hindu fundamentalist parties at the centre as well as in the states (Chatterjee, 2014; Jamil, 2023), scholarship produced on the same has deemed the nature of this violence as contingent on the lineage of ‘otherisation’ along the lines of caste, class and religion during the colonial regime, that has only modified itself to fit into newer logics of accumulation (Baviskar, 2003). The formation of subjectivities through hegemonic discourse lies at the root of such practices of otherisation (Das & Kumar, 2023), resistance to which is meted out through identity assertion by the ones at the receiving end of it.

The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth Century India (2001) by Nandini Gooptu and Accumulation by Segregation (2017) by Ghazala Jamil explore the spatial segregation and the processes of identity constructions and assertions of the urban poor in colonial India and the Muslims in post-colonial India. Both Gooptu and Jamil show how attempts at mobilisation and identity assertion are not alienated from the political sphere of the state and might work in collaboration to reproduce the hegemonic constructions of subaltern identities.

Gooptu directs her attention to what she refers to as ‘bazar industrialisation’, encompassing the informal mandis and the cottage industries, in four towns of the United Province (UP), namely, Kanpur, Allahabad, Benares and Lucknow, during the interwar period, which also marked the last few decades of the colonial rule in India. The book provides a detailed archival survey of how various sections of the urban poor were organised in the nationalist struggle and how their politics was mainly a response to the negative perception of them that was manifested spatially. Jamil resorts to studying spaces as texts, which also helps challenge the ‘epistemological injustice’ and the dominant perception concerning certain spatial zones. She explains that the category of Muslim is not a monolith, and is instead a web of complexities determined by various forces and waves of capital accumulation. The monograph, as Jamil claims, is an agent in challenging the hegemonic discourses through the provision of what she proclaims as ‘thick descriptions’ of localities that consist of ‘five small and big clusters of Muslim population in Delhi’ with varied socio-economic compositions.

In this review essay, I argue that the political articulation of the subaltern groups, shaped as identity assertions, in the works of both Gooptu and Jamil reflects the unanimity of the civil and political society, which has mostly been (mis)interpreted as antithetical to one another in prominent scholarship (Anderson, 2017[1976]). By engaging with two monographs, exceptional for their scholarly intervention, written and published decades apart, I specifically focus on symbolic dispossession that initiates the devaluation of certain communities to produce values spatially.

Segregation, subjectivation and symbolic dispossession

Jamil brilliantly portrays the connection between segregation and capital accumulation, whereby to produce a built environment that holds value and to minimise the chances of depreciation, contractors in exclusively Hindu neighbourhoods and spaces completely curtail or limit the influx of Muslim people. The Muslim contractors in the areas exclusively populated by Muslims bank on the limited choice the community has concerning access to land resources and sell the properties at profit-maximising prices. The book sheds light on how rampant heritage tourism post-economic liberalisation has been contingent on the experience of Muslimness, as ‘wild’, especially for outsiders who use the ‘daring’ opportunity to immerse in the food, smell and architecture of neighbourhoods in the vicinity of Jama Masjid and Nizamuddin.

The youth from the community most often make use of their status as insiders, playing the role of tour guides and accruing some monetary benefits, besides the Muslim shopkeepers, who tend to benefit most from the influx of tourists. Muslimness precisely has been turned into a style where the devalued spaces are only valued through the symbolic dispossession (Wacquant, 1993; Fitchett et al., 2021) of their inhabitants, who are turned into outcasts – Muslimness is delegitimised and denormalised, for further commodification. Another instance of such dispossession that Jamil noted is the ‘self-segregation’ of the educated, middle-class Muslim population from well-off mixed localities to Jamia Nagar, with the establishment of a university, predominantly for the Muslim youth, and the mushrooming entrepreneurial hubs around the region that would need skilled labourers produced by the university. Such forms of dispossession are dispersed over time and space (Vorbrugg, 2019) instead of being delimited to spatial restructuring in neoliberal India, and Gooptu’s work brilliantly portrays that.

Gooptu emphasises how the politics of the urban poor in colonial India was a response to the negative connotation associated with them. The nationalist struggle, too, which had so far viewed the rural poor as embodiments of the true essence of India emplaced within Gandhian philosophy, developed a strong disdain for the urban poor, who were regarded as loose and immoral. Reform and measures driven towards the upliftment of the ‘lower classes’ and ‘lower castes’, specifically through education and hygiene, to integrate them into the rungs of the middle classes, lay at the roots of the nationalist movement. The urban middle classes and the British colonisers both carried out a civilising mission directed at the urban poor. The ‘lower caste’ and the Muslims, who consisted of the urban poor, were encouraged to adopt ‘purer’ and more moral ways of life. 

Added to this, the coming of British architect Patrick Geddes, whose idea of urban development sprang from a critique of colonial urban redevelopment projects and an endorsement of the local or dominant Hindu ways of life, paved the way for civic nationalism. The aspirations for a slumless city served as a primary path towards nationalism. The war against slums proved to be a war against the poor, who were now to be shifted to the peripheries. Spatial zoning-induced segregation of the poor emerged as pivotal to urban planning. Large-scale demolition of the housing of the poor was carried out. In displacing them to the peripheries, they were also distanced from their economic activities and source of livelihood, that is, from the local bazars and mandis, which were subjected to similar demolitions bearing the stigma of being spaces of immorality. The usual activities of the bazar were disrupted under the pretext of encroachment. The spatial stigmatisation of the urban poor in colonial India provides a historical and unchanging context to the similar treatment meted out to the Muslims in independent India, aided by the logic of symbolic dispossession.

Civil Society, for and against the state

What is striking is that both Gooptu and Jamil, without being explicit about it, do not present civil society articulations as solely an antinomy to the state but as both against and for it and inherently a part of it. The perception of civil and political society as different or antithetical is an erroneous interpretation of Gramsci, who had warned that the distinction ‘that is presented as an organic one’ is, in fact, ‘merely methodological’ (Gramsci, 1999, p. 371). Gramsci defined the state as embodying both the political society and the civil society (Gramsci, 1999). The rich empirical data surveyed by Gooptu attest to the fact that the political society, strictly adhering to the activities of the state, is in tune with the civil society – the image of the urban poor as outcasts was not only a discursive construction of the colonial state but also of the elite bourgeoisie and the early nationalists.

The attempts of the Congress party to organise people in the nationalist struggle often led to their conflation with the colonialists in taming the unruly poor and moralising and purifying them to be integrated into the elite society. The civil society articulations of various groups of marginalised caste Hindus were also directed at gaining legitimacy through political power, often leading to secessionist tendencies and alliance with the British colonialists. A similar articulation was observed among the poorer Muslims, whose struggles were vulnerable to co-optation by the Islamists. In a way, their intentionally produced civil society articulations led to unintentional articulations at the level of political society (Levenson, 2022).

Jamil, too, refers to the role of corporate-backed civil society organisations (CSO), funded by the World Bank, whose entry had been facilitated through the opening up of the economy, as banking upon the spatial segregation of Muslims, often intervening to fill up the void left by the state and, in a way, acting on behalf of the latter. CSOs like Resident Welfare Associations also augment the segregation by lobbying for benefits exclusive to their Hindu inhabitants, in partnership with political persona and intellectuals. The CSOs and the neoliberal Indian state are in holy unison here. On the other hand, Jamil also identifies practices and efforts by the Muslims themselves in asserting their identity, taking up the (missing) developmental role of the state. There are also instances of socio-economically privileged Muslims distancing themselves from their poorer counterparts to the extent of justifying the latter’s ‘deficit of citizenship’.

Conclusion

The displacement of the urban poor into the peripheries, relying on Geddes’s imagination of a city that would bolster the discursive formation of civic nationalism to produce a slumless, clean city and the later acquisition of the lands in the peripheries by the mercantile classes as fixed assets leading to increase in rent hardly affordable by the peripheralised poor in colonial India hints at the kind of speculative urbanisation (Fields, 2023) that characterises the speculative imagination of a global city that displaces the Muslim inhabitants settled around the heritage sites as Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, to make space for the international tourists who might abhor the idea of Muslimness (Jamil, 2017). Muslimness is permitted within a demarcated zone if it can be commodified into tourism walks, as a static spectacle that is forbidden from being assimilated into the global formations of a city. While Gooptu’s work deems the capitalist relations of production as giving rise to segregated spaces, Jamil’s work shows how these segregations and stigmatisations further aid the processes of accumulation. The symbolic dispossession through the denormalisation of the urban poor and the Muslims and their civil and political society articulations can serve as prominent grounds to examine the various instances of urban dispossession and displacement that have become routinised, with new forms and articulations of nationalism.

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Sukanya Maity is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University.