Grave Investments

Chapter 7 studies the connection between modes of community formation, the general commodification of urban space, and the specific effects of this on religious places. In a city where profit and loss from urban space was moulding the urban fabric, religious structures were no exception. Effective management of temples and mosques came to require that wealth be generated and accounts be maintained. At the same time, sacral sites were also seen in precisely the opposite manner, as outside of the process of commodification. Indeed, there were numerous efforts, especially at the local level, to prevent illegitimate commodification of religious structures by local managers or owners. Through the 1930s, a resolution was offered by religious collectives that defined themselves against local managers and claimed to operate in the interests of the community as a whole. Abstract space, then, called forth more abstract conceptions of community.

Representing Commodified Space

Chapter 4 examines ways of representing space as a commodity that played key roles in colonial Delhi: maps, lease deeds, advertisements, and auctions. These representations were related to the buying and selling of real estate in distinct ways. At the same time, they also referred to and relied on each other to give effect to their pronouncements. Two elements ran through these disparate representations: connections between space and time, and the imbrication of state and property market. This chapter argues that the ability to utilize these representations of space to develop narratives about urban space was a critical constituent of state power.

Landlords, Tenants, and Real Estate Firms

Chapter 3 studies the changing nature of ownership and tenancy in Delhi. It examines the property market at a number of different levels: the poor, the suburban ex-farmer, women, and the wide variety of intermediate groups, from petty traders to the emerging professional middle classes. Patterns of ownership and speculation in the property market were transformed by depression of credit in the 1920s. New actors in the property market emerged from the mid-1930s onwards. Large firms specializing in real estate and cooperative housing societies were two new kinds of entity that made their initial beginnings in this period. While often unsuccessful, these entities reflected a larger structural dilemma: the need to solve the problem of access to easy credit.

Introduction

The Introduction points to the absence of a full-fledged treatment of property in South Asian urban centres. In studying three different literatures—on property in South Asia, South Asian economic histories, and urban history—it points to the reasons why each of these bodies of work has ignored urban property. Histories of property have tended to concentrate on the countryside or forests. Economic history has downplayed economic trajectories—such as real estate speculation—that did not culminate in industrialization. Within South Asian urban history, the state (especially through planning), culture, and labour have been the most important foci. Finally, the Introduction locates the theoretical tools for studying property in the Marxist critical geography developed by geographers David Harvey and Neil Smith and the urban theorist Henri Lefebvre.

Conclusion

We have no desire to raise the controversy of public versus private enterprise. We feel that the housing problem in Delhi is so vast and so diverse that there is scope for state enterprise as well as for private enterprise. … A house itself is a commodity…...

A Malleable Cityscape

Chapter 2 presents the pattern of boom and bust in the property market and connects this to Delhi’s economy as a whole. With a depression of property construction in the 1920s and a boom in the mid-1930s, the Delhi property market was turbulent during this period. Carefully tracking the locations and timing of this pattern of rise and fall reveals the extent to which it was private property development rather than state-directed plans for urban expansion that generated Delhi’s cityscape. Over this period of bust and boom, however, the property market was constituted by new connections between industry, finance, and real estate. Using a database of permission to build created from the the Building Sub-Committee of the Delhi Municipal Committee, this chapter lays out a periodization of the property market. In turn, this had implications for urban space, from the individual house to the neighbourhood and indeed the city as a whole.

Background

Chapter 1 traces the transformations of Delhi after the Rebellion of 1857. It draws attention to four crucial phenomena between 1857 and 1911: the demolition and reconstruction of the city after the rebellion, the process of building the railways, administering garden lands around Delhi, and the economic activity that developed around these transformations. These phenomena constituted an extended form of primitive accumulation in Delhi over the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite important differences, It incorporated the classic features of such a process: displacement of people, the creation of funds of wealth for future investment, and the employment of force to achieve this. On the eve of the shift of the capital to Delhi in 1911, the railways, commerce, finance, and the actions of the colonial state had between them generated a cityscape in which properties were bought and sold and suburban land was being built over.

Lineages of the Housing Question

Chapter 6 studies politics over housing provision which linked the issues of commodification, urban housing, and demography. The issue of housing was raised in a large variety of forms. This chapter tracks these ‘lineages’ of the housing question, from above (directed by various state agencies) and from below (taken up by various agitations). Delhi’s symbolic centrality as capital city and sanitation discourses were two approaches to housing that were rooted in the authoritarian impulses of the colonial state. More broad-based articulations of the housing question can be seen in the struggles of government clerks, the nationalist movement, organizations taking up the caste question, and in battles over rent control. From this formidably diverse set of forces only a fractured politics of housing provision could emerge in Delhi.

Intimacy in Four Registers

Chapter 5 outlines the convergence between the state and the property market in Delhi during this period. This convergence can be understood in terms of four registers of intimacy between the state and the market. For one, the state internalized market valuations into its own everyday practice—a kind of ingestion of the property market. A second register might be thought of as affinity—an attraction towards the property market as an opportunity and means to make profits and boost income. A third register resembles something more like symbiosis—a coming together of state and urban property to the point where it becomes impossible to think about the latter except inasmuch as it was mediated by the state. The fourth register is that of the property market as nightmare, thwarting efforts of the state to serve the ‘common good’.