Neo Delhi and the Politics of Postcolonial Urbanism

Rohan Kalyan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351846639
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is augmented by an interactive website (neodelhi.net). During research trips to Delhi and Gurgaon between 2008 and 2015 the author produced a multi-media urban archive that includes full color photos, an essay film, ethnographic videos, field notes and more pertaining to the arguments and ideas presented in this book. The reader is encouraged to actively engage with the website alongside this text.

This book challenges the prevailing metro-centric view of globalization. Rather than privileging the experiences of cities and urban regions in the industrialized world, it argues that cities in the so-called "developing" world present opportunities for scholars to re-think entrenched ideas of globalization, urban development and political community. Kalyan presents a trans-disciplinary exploration of the manifold possibilities and challenges that confront a "globalizing" megacity like New Delhi.

Combining theoretical scholarship, ethnographic exploration, media archival research and textual and visual analysis, the book foregrounds complex urban dynamics in and around the region and raises critical questions about changing urban life for postcolonial cities across the Global South. Kalyan employs methodological approaches from political economy, urban studies and visual culture to render a vivid portrait of changing urban life in India's largest conurbation.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, postcolonial studies and inter-disciplinary studies.

Part II: Aura and trace in Gurgaon

Before beginning Part II: Aura and trace in Gurgaon, the reader is encouraged to watch the musical video Delhi in Movement (8 min). Produced by Rohan Kalyan and screened in 2010, the video juxtaposes different modes of transportation with disparate parts of Delhi, ending up in the new elite suburb of Gurgaon. To view the video, visit: www.neodelhi.net/videos/.

Arrival

I landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport on September 12, 2008 to begin research on the town of Gurgaon. Gurgaon was most prominently known then as a high-tech satellite city comprising private residential, commercial and industrial spaces developed through real estate speculation and multi-national investment. The old town of Gurgaon was about thirty kilometers from Connaught Place in New Delhi, but postcolonial urbanization had effectively connected the two spaces, bringing Gurgaon into Delhi’s ever-expanding urban fabric. In fact Gurgaon had been considered part of the greater Delhi metropolitan region since at least the 1962 Master Plan of Delhi. By 2008 Gurgaon had become increasingly synchronous with the giant megacity to the north through investment in the built environment and industry that was tied to Gurgaon’s proximity to Delhi, as well as through automotive connectivity on the Delhi–Gurgaon Expressway and later through the Delhi Metro rail system, which only served to bring Gurgaon and Delhi closer together, at least for some. Gurgaon was also close to Delhi’s international airport, so that not only was the national far order (New Delhi) accessible form the near order of Gurgaon, but so too was the global far order of the international. In the mediations between multiple far orders and (as we will see) an unevenly developed, fragmented and fractured near order, Gurgaon became known as India’s Millennium City. Part II of this book is about the troubled transformation of Neo Delhi’s premier suburb.

Sometime in the 1990s Gurgaon began to distinguish itself from Delhi’s other peripheral satellite towns, in some ways even from the sprawling megacity itself. By 2008 Gurgaon was fast becoming one of India’s “global” economic and cultural landmarks, attracting foreign investment and providing high-paying jobs for India’s well educated and expanding middle classes. As one prominent writer described it, Gurgaon was “famous for its sleek office towers, shopping malls, multiplexes with state-of-the-art projection systems, upscale homes and condominiums, and even a world-class golf course.”¹ In popular media discourses Gurgaon’s ostensible “globality” was often metonymically described as embodying the economic dynamism and emerging potential of the “new urban India”: cosmopolitan and urbane, globally recognized and confident, a city/nation “on arrival” and “on the move,” poised to grow.

Such amplified, if not exuberant, descriptions arose in part because of the relatively recent and rapid transformation Gurgaon had undergone over the past decade or so before 2008. Prior to this transformation Gurgaon consisted of a small municipal township surrounded by many miles of barren fields, punctuated with occasional rural villages and isolated agricultural settlements. But by the time of my first research trip to Gurgaon the place had morphed into a futuristic metropolis that betrayed many of the visual trappings of the twenty-first-century “global city.”

Commonly referred to as India’s “Millennium City,” Gurgaon’s rapid visual and spatial transformation seemingly served a distinct ideological function: it was a metonymic part (the urban) which stood for the whole (the nation), heralding a broader historical transition from the “old” India to the “new.” But as I gradually discovered over subsequent years of research, in reality the ideological role of the postcolonial city was something more complex. Global recognition was never quite secure, even if the trappings of a certain kind of globality were materializing in cities like Gurgaon. Such recognition was complicated by countervailing intelligibilities of the city that frequently interrupted and confounded new ideological projections, resulting in something far from expected.

Figure II.1 Unrealized Mall of India project in Gurgaon.

Source: Photo by author.

Synchrony and diachrony

Imagery of the so-called “new urban India” abounds in popular media and culture. Bollywood films, for instance, armed with ballooning production budgets, sell a sleek, glamorous and increasingly commodified “India” to audiences around the world.² It is of course easier to project this new “cosmopolitan” identity on celluloid than it is on the actual urban street. In such films the renewed nation becomes intelligible after deftly framing or editing out any uncomfortable visual signs of a “developing” country in which over half the population survives on less than two dollars a day, and less than 5 percent of the country live something comparable to a “global” middle-class lifestyle of ten dollars a day.³

Similarly, best-selling books on the so-called “new India” celebrate the neoliberal economic reforms that make cities like Gurgaon possible. Distributed in corporate “non-places” across the world, like airports and Barnes & Nobles, these books render a “common sense” discourse that understands the reforms as “awakening” India from its economic slumber, shaking it from the dreaded “Hindu rate of growth” that dogged the country during the Nehruvian era, when other Asian economies experienced “miraculous” growth.⁴ Now India was poised to finally “catch up.” It was turning to its largest and most dynamic cities to attract private investment and spark competition among different regions, hoping to generate positive feedback loops through self-organizing market mechanisms. These discourses generally celebrated the reasoning behind such reforms, if not necessarily the results. Yet they usually did not bother to connect the two, relating the process of economic liberalization and “market” reform in the city to the intensification of urban-rural and intra-urban inequality. They strategically hid from view the fact that markets always benefited first of all those that were already in advantageous positions to begin with, and perhaps a few lucky and hard-working exceptions. These discourses made invisible the profound and multi-fold effects of market exclusion.⁵ In the discourse of magical economics, those that were excluded could gain an alternative intelligibility, now simply as people “below the poverty line” (BPL). Within the magical discourse of neoclassical economics and the increasingly popular neoliberal policies it informed, the lives of the poor, their social relations and complex modes of survival, were reduced to a number, namely the percentage of the total population that fell under an arbitrary poverty line.⁶ As if the groups positioned just above this line were thriving in neoliberal India.

Figure II.2 Unrealized Mall of India project in Gurgaon.

Source: Photo by author.

As Nandy writes, “these are not easy facts to live with; one has to spend enormous psychological resources to ensure that they do not interfere with our ‘normal’ life by burdening us with a crippling sense of guilt.”⁷ An...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Neo Delhi and the Politics of Postcolonial Urbanism
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Maps
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Distance and proximity in Delhi
• Aura and trace in Gurgaon