CAN we think of the term ‘informal’ as a ‘flexible’ space where indeterminacy and opacity opens up possibility? This perspective contrasts the way most planners, policy makers, many academicians and activists feel the need to ‘fix the chaos’ of the city by making transparent. The key assumption by ‘experts’, is essentially to provide or show ‘ordinary’ people ways to access a ‘rights’ based development of ‘livelihoods, adequate housing, infrastructure for basic needs, while competitively provide high end services to attract global investments towards ‘economic growth’.

The physical form that reflects in such vision is clean (and usually barren) streets, new cities such as Chandigarh, or Brazil’s Brasilia, and to govern them via neat bureaucratic offices now endowed with computer managed systems housing complete citizen databases with adequate privacy safeguards. Instead, and metaphorically, our research time and again suggests the contrary: it is the clustering of the ‘messy’ bazaar – of pavement shops of seemingly chaotic electrical power lines, and neighborhoods that have houses incorporating shops, and shops being extension of workshops and factories, that actually form the lifeline.

Importantly, we could then think of this ‘chaotic’ city as spaces of ‘perpetual becoming’ – a concept by Shetty, Gupte, and Khanolkar.¹ For them, this is where people learn to ‘work the system’ – to get services, to find new ways of making or fabricating things, to locate social and political connections to stabilize the economy, and places for day to day domestics; importantly, they see ‘settling’ that remains as an active space: it is where such practices done again and again, and by numerous people learning, copying and modifying from earlier ways, to consolidate these into commonplace social conventions. The ‘informal’ is here, thinking the city as spaces of practice – what Simone and Uzair Fauzan usefully build around the idea of ‘surfacing via majority time.’²

 

To explore this analytical shift, let us consider three commonly held ‘fixing agendas’ mentioned above as three interrelated realms, all foudationalized in how we think about land:

* ‘Fixing land’ is to ‘rationalize’: often framed as a ladder from customary to informal to complex tenancies to clarity of public and private uses, the mission towards ‘clear’ land titles over the last decade or so as a well funded central government program involving private foundation and corporate houses.³ Aimed to control unplanned development, it’s also a way for ‘economic development’ via territory made available for infrastructure corridors, SEZs, malls, and gated housing complexes. The brute corporate power that drives such agendas may explain why despite overwhelming evidence about the disastrous impacts of land titling for poorer groups, academics and research institutes explore resettlement and rehabilitation of ‘slums’ as a possibility of ‘social justice’.⁴ Arguably, this would enter a quagmire in attempting to inscribe land a singular value and meaning when in reality these are spaces moving across owners and tenants and into a mythology that shapes its future real estate. Anything that muddies such clarity to reveal land’s co-existent meanings: housing incorporating fabricating units; expressways encountering sacred sites; importantly, ‘messy’ tenurial complexity that dilute real estate surpluses into tenants claiming occupancy rights, are all to fix, the last particularly when such surpluses are central to landing the deal with Global Capital.

* ‘Fixing public administration’ via ‘reforms’ represent two interconnected realms, the second connected to land as territory: The first, more visible, is for local governments to dutifully implement ‘new age development’ that combines ‘public private partnerships’ with social welfare of re-habituating poorer groups posed as ‘PAPs’ (project affected people); Second, as its engagement with territorial politics, where ‘patron clientalism’ is seen to facilitate ‘land encroachment’ via ‘vote bank’ politics to erode ‘development’: i.e., funds designated for ‘smart cities’ get reworked by municipal procedures to service non-conforming settlements, and worse, when bureaucratic procedures substantiates ‘messy’ tenurial claims referred above.

* ‘Fixing economy’, is also usefully viewed as a territorial politics. This opens up two interconnected realms: First, posed as modernity and its remnants. This mission oscillates between efficient ways to land global capital posed concurrently with loftier intents of social justice by indulging dormant seeds of entrepreneurialism via state enforced ‘clean’ and bankable land titles, NGO managed micro credits, and more recently, ideas of guaranteed urban public works. The second, less positivist, targets economies corroding large capital, small firm non-branded products, whose social contacts into middle level bureaucracies fund patron clientalism through which encroached land disallows large contiguous territories that policy has designated for SEZs, now embroiled into a legal quagmire. Policy as a high ground aims to secure such ground to back up statements proclaiming global competitiveness.

‘Fixing’ remains a set of contested and conflictual spaces and central to city politics as life spaces practiced by the ‘majority’. When co-joined with ideas of indeterminate and opaque as operative tags to the informal, an economy of this majority lies deeply embedded enmeshed with social connections into local government.⁵ When posed together with land, this space is substantive in urban territory across metro and small towns, across institutional spaces and practices and economic value addition and employment that open massive skilling for youths with few other opportunities.⁶

Note that this has happened without any livelihood scheme by government or by donor heavy NGOs, and ‘planning interventions’ have proved almost always counterproductive, just as financial support remains largely irrelevant with less than 2% of even dedicated SSI finance reaching these spaces. Nor are there significant effects of export promotion policies that explain its huge trans-national connect, which incidentally have spurred border conflict normalization.⁷ If so, to even imagine and some understanding, calls first to develop a sensibility before one can pose meaningful questions.⁸

 

Meanderings are central. It allow for an exploration of complexity that is usually missed out in the desire control set in the guise of resolving contradictions that underpins an approach of ‘reform and fix’. Instead, we explore land as spaces of embedding in multiple logics and meanings.⁹ This allows an exploration of state spaces of political mediation, to engage with economy in non-teleological frames of things, and to reject modernity’s privileging time over space. Exploring such ‘settling of life’, we enter three streetscapes of land that interconnect to a complexity of institutional politics and economy.

 

Land’s streets are much wider as a ‘settling’ ground for state spaces and economy: One can find spore like life forms of ‘mixed land use’: what seem like ‘shacks’ extend into rooms and floors. It is the invisible that is more complex: complex leases allow sub-tenants to undertake sub-contracted work in close physical proximity, but importantly, their occupancy claims allow them to claim real estate surpluses and re-invest into production.

 

However, such sites can find their visibility in master planning. Here, the streets can become an expressway – under global investment zones to connect with SEZs. Here too, financial logic also includes real estate surpluses, but made possible as a state subsidy, land acquired on grounds of ‘public purpose’. Which street forms a front street for corporate brands and which are bazaar like, remain indeterminate spheres where tentativeness implies possibility in the occupancy claims to land across varied societal groups including big business, varied institutional realms from local bodies to high end policy circuits, and the way these are politicized from councilors and MLAs to national and international lobbies.

Across these spaces, to be transparent or then opaque is a political issue, and thus, also an impossibility of being ascribed a singular and indeed, an ‘understandable’ narrative. Such street spaces confound expert knowledge, especially those who when confronting their lesser endowed, comfortably assume that the latter’s crises are to be rescued by an identifiable project, and where rough edges can be ‘refined and resolved’ with further research, rationality, or then a dose of activism empowered with missionary zeal.

 

Three sites help us explore the complexity of meanings shaping contemporary practices. The first is an account by Aditya Unnikrishnan, whose 2015 MA thesis at IIT Madras’s Humanities and Social Science Department is set around the practices of ‘title deed writers’ (TDW) (or ‘Aadhaaram Ezhuthukaar’ in Malayalam):

‘Take the case of a father who divided his estate between his two sons. One of the brothers wants to sell his half to the other. At the same time, he would like to impose a condition before selling it – his half of the land contains a ‘mullathara’ where their father would teach them as kids (a place with some sentimental significance). The revenue department would, however, completely reject such conditions in a title deed to be registered, given incompatibility with the categories of transactions specified by their regulations. In the same breath, he was telling me how this is not even their jurisdiction – all they can and should do is to make sure the duty is collected appropriately.’

Three points from the above resonate through this essay: First ‘sacredness’ is not just nostalgia of a distinct religiosity with a significant hereditary remnant of a past era; rather it is an acquired contemporary built around practices in living memory that shapes a value in land; Second, the TDW, as part of state spaces, reflects its porosity and Unnikrishnan rightly describes these as ‘state-licensed operators playing a critical role in transactions, drafting and preparing title deeds as a cornerstone of the land registration bureaucracy.’

Importantly, the TDW framing of land as a continually settled history as an extended life space poses it beyond the binary of individual buyer and seller; Finally, the TDW is not just a passive ‘street bureaucrat’ framed by the American political scientist Lipsky, or located at the ‘margins’ connected to ‘slum life’; or then as is common in academia across ideological lines reflecting its elitist underpinnings: touts, mafia, liaison agents of low-end circuit wheeler-dealers constituting ‘patron clientalism’, or even, new age brokers populating coffee lounges of five star visiting global capital and financiers materializing ‘neo-liberal’ urbans.

Figures like the TDW are central to interpreting the complex values of land that emerge out of its situated histories and practices. His ‘power’ or societal space lies in a judicious listener of stories of families, their conflict over that defines what is whose in property, the claims of past lives that will shape future ones, and with all these, decide which of those stories and in what useful framing, to place these within one of the most fundamental of state spaces – connected and constituting its land.

 

Complex histories and meanings of land as memory are central to a vibrant bazar economy visually territorialized in central city areas, but also dense coastal areas thriving with fishing economy. Territory as ‘informal’ is to highlight its spaciality and view unhindered by the anxiety of posing rationalities or law or then the zeal of developmentalism. Instead, to freely explore how stories around land that embeds real estate shaped markets into society. Memory poses complex logics and meanings as seen Shetty’s semi-fictional account of a Mumbai chawl. Such ideas of territorial memory explored by Nidheesh in his doctoral work in ‘rural’ Kerala’s Allapad where, ‘property of coastal communities is co-produced across land and sea’.¹⁰ His ‘the urban’ forms a transformational site locating logics of sacred ground intermeshed with the changing fishing industry confronting Thorium mining.

 

Such multilayered complexity with varied vantage points comes alive in Keerthi Purushothaman spatiality-framed history of Chennai’s Vadapalani.¹¹ As home to ‘major and minor’ temples, and the Tamil film industry Kollywood, film extras adopt some of these sacred spaces to ensure their fortunes, and their ‘addas’ adjoin those of film financers adjoining local party offices. Such layered over land claims, whose stories of genealogy remain entangled with histories of temple land, as much of Tamil Nadu is. ‘Informal’ as spatiality, is different from debates on modernity or being secular, and as an analytical, explores the complexity and entanglements with land. Territorial lives via its presumptive titles characterized in Indian law, and allows us to complicate how we understand the market as embedded in such histories that move across cartographic geographies.

Perhaps, such entanglements pose fear for those implicated in ‘new age developmentalism’, via programmes to digitize land titles inspired by the Australian Torrens system of titling. After all, it was this ultimate form of law fixing time and space that played arguably a central role in wiping out Australia’s aboriginal groups. And as our next section reveals, perhaps we need to recognize life in law.

 

Central Bangalore’s Palace Guttahalli forms our second site. Here we find Pushkal Shivam’s meanderings in around the idea of ‘Land’s After Life.’¹² His explorations of its multiple epistemological enters this landscape ubiquitous as an everyday to almost all of Bangalore. A narrower read of law, set against such a life space, was to have ‘killed’ any future action as implied by an order for land acquisition. This legal curtain, aiming to freeze territory into a limbo till the CITB (city improvement trust board) was to lay out ‘lower palace orchard’ as a new ‘planned’ development.

Seeking such bloodlines in this after life, Shivam’s exploration enters the dark dingy Mysore City archives whose archeology of five kilos of legal-administrative paperwork leads him to ride on a rickety Vespa scooter. Driven from the front seat, is his political informant called ‘BJP-K’. Together they court cases and political gatherings. Contested life histories of family politics that like everywhere, line Gutahalli’s streets showing that it is the stories that build a city, not autonomous individuals. Ironically, the 1894 land acquisition rather than a ‘curtain of closure’ is a life space of ‘stays’ and the memory of the horse stables of the Mysore Maharaja revealed as trace in the middle of a bustling road, has spurred around its small plot urbanization characteristics of most Bangalore.

 

If its stories, myths can open up space. From Thrissur to Bangalore, our perusal of land populated into territory takes us westward to our third site: South Canara. Fronting the Arabian Sea and the highlands of Karnataka’s western ghats, we follow in 2012 a still being built eight-lane expressway connecting Mangalore up the coast to Udupi and onto Kundapura. At Yermal the expressway makes a detour, abruptly diverted due to a sacred territory of ‘bhoota’ shrine. This is ironic as such infrastructures, representing a leading edge of Karnataka’s high growth, now confront other rationalities.

Meeting late into the evening, M. Shetty, Udupi district’s largest real estate developer, for whom this region remains a ‘disturbed territory’ from its land as sprits were uprooted. Shetty’s metaphor is an electrical power plant whose high voltage lines expand into a wider region. With all this development, the sprits reveal themselves to developers like him, to the project engineers, officials, contractors and workmen. Incidentally, east of Yermal sites a massive thermal power plant made visible at a distance by a series of hyperbolic cooling towers. Their foundations dug into bhoota territory: After an Odia worker slipped into the pit and lost consciousness temporarily, he awoke to be sprit possessed, swaying in a trance, speaking an ancient Tulu, to recount to terrified fellow workers and the startled contractor of what evils befall them.

 

Such revelations were enough to have the part of expressway abutting Yermal diverted from a shrine. It also has Korean expat technicians joining their local engineer counterparts calling for the Bhoota’s forgiveness, disturbed by their SEZ located project.¹³ Beliefs are not binaries set in a modernist frame in opposition to ‘global’ capital, and capital is premised and seen in our operative frame, very much constituted around an ‘informal’ space.

Logics of the sacred are quite fundamental to territorial transformation of this high growth region: Udupi and Mangalore’s fishing and related industries such as fishing nets built on long-standing 16th century trading routes with the gulf and more recently further east to Korea and Japan, while nets marketed even further to Brazil and Chile. These infrastructures, as M. Shetty explained, are premised on territorial logics of identifying the nuances and powers of deities and sprits marked invisible spaces beyond cartographic logics. And interestingly, these are shared, he emphasizes, across ‘communal groups’ and emphasizes the Ali Bhoota worshipped by Muslim traders and business communities. Such spaces underpin varied relationships between ethnic groups, governing norms around financial arrangements, and form mediated spaces to address conflicts and transgressions.¹⁴

 

These ideas have long histories. Further north up the coast towards Basur, I was drawn to seek out the marking of five Chinese Bhoota as documented by an IAS officer writing the history of that ancient kingdom town. The Chinese had lost out in a power contest with local deities to be then enshrined for their brave efforts. Another 17th century Chinese connect was evident in the palatial chieftain home of Ashok Raja at Yermal: Two four feet high stoneware caskets relief-textured with dragons centering other symbols.

It was this complex of sacred logics opaque to ‘outsiders’, that Ashok Raja’s grandfather mobilized to tell off the British Commissioner seeking to extend his political control, archived in sheaf of blue fountain pen ink on yellowed paper. Raja, overseeing the Yermal Bhoota’s several key ‘energy nodes and transmission lines’ (as M. Shetty described this area) would have the locals in revolt if colonials imagined they could move north. Paradoxically, it was this same mythical space that also trapped Raja: while we sat looking at the blue-inked papers, his former tenants stood on the porch seeking funds. They entangled him in earlier ‘Mulugeni and Chalugeni’ tenurial obligations, now supposedly reformed by the land to tiller acts, to initiate as a chieftain and of course, fund the next Bhoota Kola.

The kola remains a site to decide on local conflicts: over produce, territorial-land boundaries, and these resolutions are driven by a sensibility that also called into question caste hierarchies. My point of this traverse into ‘mythical’ as ‘informal space’ remains fluid to sense (and not explain or resolve) contemporary power dynamics that shape practiced space. And as reflected in M. Shetty’s own practice of contemporary real estate entangles sacred territories to negotiate continuing and earlier occupancies.

 

Let us now enter another contemporary ‘situated’ history that overlays these negotiations: the Aliyasantana, an ‘ancient matrilineal’ system. A functionalist view would remain in a narrow frame about maintaining a ‘false’ integrality of land. Here, ‘informal’ moves territory as constituted into a range of inter-connected temporally dynamic spaces. By the mid-eighties, the impacts of the land tenancy act rippled unevenly with the Aliyasantana as a space being reworked to accommodation to incorporate other practices and logics of the court, of the municipal councilor as mediator, and arguably, rarely a replacement.

These accounts came from a close friendship with my colleague, the late Harish Hedge. As a Congress-I politician in the ’90s at the zilla parishad, he had evolved a constituency in both the coastal wards fishing community working the Cong-I political space to enforce fishing grounds sought out by globalized Norwegians companies, and his other claim, compensation from the Konkan Railway Corporation. But maintaining his constituency was a day-to-day engagement, and being a chieftain and a certified land valuer, involved him to mediate land shaped conflicts. Like M. Shetty, Hegde narrated states of possession as judiciated spaces located property conflict where subtlety and nuance were not just to ensure justice but also shaped by norms laid down around the Aliyasantana ‘possessed’ site that remained entangled deep into family histories.

Often, mediations bridged public and private, a road upgraded from a well used path. And as a politician dealing with the courts, the police, and the administration, as these too were entangled spaces with the bhoota.¹⁵ It took some time to realize that there were subtle realms of statecraft to maintain political autonomy: South Canara is recognized for its political consciousness to run counter to both party politics at the state but also weaving their way through at the central level. And thus, to disregard the complexity of the informal was to, in effect, loose out on a political space. Very much like Unnikrishnan’s TDW that opened this essay, I could witness Hedge deeply engaged within this ‘informal’ to define the constructs of territory and its value beyond money.

 

As we drove long distances, interspaced by his fondness for local cuisine, his own thoughts on fishing sites, as property remained interspaced with the Bhoota Kola’s trance, his family accounts of Aliyasantana that allowed me to construct a genealogy of how South Canara had been urbanized.¹⁶ Land was multilayered, similar to the Chinese idea of land ownership that interlinks ancestor worship to an ‘underworld’ bureaucracy and whose ‘informal’ was constructed in multiple realms and temporalities. Reflecting on these sites contests the view that see these uses and practices as a vestige of the past or then, that modernity would ‘settle or fix’ land.

 

Exploring and framing the ‘informal’ alludes to spaces that refuse capture in the zeal for rationality, to fix meaning and thus value. Just because land is intensely real and cartographic with aspects to be measured, the impossibility of a completeness of value from a host of other and fluid meanings also implies the disruption, displacement and incompleteness of developmentalism. Varun Patil’s research on transformation of land shaped property relations in North Bangalore’s highly contested territories emphasizes it’s multiple logics and meanings of land, while my East Delhi industrial site connects the complexity of land tenures to a sophisticated industrial system.¹⁷

Patil’s story is spurred by parastatal promoted Arkavathi Layout (Asia’s largest housing project) and newer configurations of elite capture shape the 83 acre Manyata Park whose developers and the BMRCL metro company realign one of Bangalore’s many flyovers. For armchair research devoid of nuanced theorization, this would spur tags of ‘Speculative/Frontier Urbanism’. Instead, Patil’s story reveals disruptive logics to such assumptions. This is also Thigla territory whose real estate practices exemplify an everyday Bangalore. Their property claims are complex.

One realm remains embedded in sacred territories with the ritual worship of Draupadi highlights the procession in a 11-day cross gender Karaga Jatre. This compliments their main Dharmaraya Temple in central Bangalore where the Jatre is initiated via a nearby Dargah-e-Shariff. Patil exploring the further north Sriramapura, reveals this as a connected and autonomous space. Its shrine housed in cement and brick, extends a political constituency via real estate and brokerage within Bangalore’s elected municipal and lower level administration. His informant is the chief patron to the local panchayat school; a politician and political worker to higher ups, landlord and small plot consolidator for lower and middle incomes seeking cheap housing near work. Here we see the ‘peasant caste gowda’ landowners (and via their local MLA) infiltrate as touts and brokers to appropriated-notified lands.

 

Such entangled occupancies allows a glimpse, a politics of power hallmarked by opacity and fluidity driving and appropriating real estate value; just as Bangalore’s largest real estate players behind mega projects also seek the high policy ground to ensure their capture of space and value. Thus, Patil’s ethnography of multiple state spaces playing real estate markets, sought out by large developers is disruptive of armchair academics across ideological positions: they remain fossilized in their narratives framed around corruption, encroachments, unplanned, comfortably cocooned in their ‘liberation’ burdened epistemology protean.

What Patil also reveals is the impossibility of a single narrative (or then perhaps at all) to ‘represent’ and thus rescue a majority space. And when we think that such majority space pertain to vast areas of city territories, much of institutional realm to be embedded in an extensive economy, we can then sense the power in opacity, indeterminate fluidity as empowerment. It points to the politics of contemporary policy – not just pro-corporate but of large capital’s hauntings. This is not just by access to land to convert into its territory by capturing higher realms of state power as partner to facilitate it, but rather by the majority’s stories and myths that build territory out of such meanings, and importantly, underline the fallacy of the smooth flow of capital.

 

Not surprisingly, these three interconnected realms of land, institutions, and the embedding of economy remain viewed with disdain and often fear. Witness the terms used by NGOs, well meaning academics, large real estate developers, and vision documents of bi- and multilateral donor agencies and advisors like KPMG, PWC and the McKinseys: ‘unplanned growth, slums, encroachers, land mafia, touts and agents, patron clientalism’ as these pertain to practices and everyday lives that are our own. So commonplace are these acts, that we hardly ever see them to be ‘political’. Paradoxically, it is this cityscape as an everyday politics, that most of us are part of, and one that arguably has significant impacts.

Perhaps this may be far bigger and lasting than what authoritarian regimes feel fearful of university spaces, of streets turned into protest grounds for months, and in an economic reform forced via factory closure. The ‘radical’ in such a read of ‘informal’ is ubiquitous. This is a politics where we are both worker and capitalist, home and factory, an agent of the state where the centre becomes the margin. For most of us, this is a politics of our own lives: our often guarded and less talked conversations about entry into institutional spaces when we seek to build an extra roof protecting an extended terrace, upgrade an electrical connection to commercial metering to rent out to a small fabrication workshop, to get a long expired drivers license renewed.

 

Footnotes:

1. Gurgaon Glossary 2017 https://bardstudio. in/gurgaon-glossaries/

2. Simone AbdouMaliq and Uzair Fauzan Achmad, ‘Majority Time: Operations in the Midst of Jakarta’, The Sociological Review 61(S1), 2013, pp. 109-123.

3. Jonathan Zasloff in his 2011 article ‘India’s Land Title Crisis: The Unanswered Questions’ (Jindal Global Law Review 3, September 2011) shows how attention to land titles surfaced by 2008, spurred a USD one billion investment by the Government of India to fund the ‘Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme’. By 2017, a specific urban component was framed to be piloted by the BJP government in Rajasthan led by the NGO Jannagraha under their ‘Project Platinum’. More recently this has expanded with eBay linked Omyamdar Trust, big business houses, think tanks, to mobilize drones to GIS and GPS land in Odisha, Behind the rhetoric of providing land rights, lies the Torren based conclusive land titling – a curtain of all prior claims – as explained in Karuna Maharaj, ‘Legal Loopholes That Plague Land Titling in India’, The Wire, 20 December 2017, accessible at https://thewire.in/government/legal-loopholes-plague-land-titling-india.

4. See Timothy Mitchell, ‘How Neoliberalism Makes its World: The Urban Property Rights Projetct in Peru’, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road From Mount Pelegrin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009. Our research showed such interventions to seriously damage poor groups in accessing shelter and jobs. See Benjamin Solomon, Bhuvaneswari Raman, ‘Illegible Claims, Legal Titles, and the Worlding of Bangalore’, Revue Tiers Monde, 2011/2 (no. 206), pp. 37-54. Accessible at https://www.cairn-int.info/revue-tiers-monde-2011-2-page-37.htm Interestingly, academic institutes and ‘progressive’ academics on ‘housing rights’ openly align with such moves. See: (i) ‘Odisha Launches Largest Slum Land Title Transfer Project’, Business Standard, Bhubaneswar edition, 7 May 2018 accessible at https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/odisha-launches-major-largest-slum-land-title-transfer-project-118050700789_1.html; (ii) a discussion at Land Portal: ‘Land Rights for Slum Dwellers in the East Indian State of Odisha: Making Technology Work for the Urban Poor’, accessible at https://landportal.org/event/2019/01/land-rights-slum-dwellers-east-indian-state-odisha-making-technology-work-urban-poor

5. Abdou Maliq Simone, ‘The Surfacing of Urban Life’, City 15(3-4), 2011, pp. 355-364.

6. Our recent research on cell phone in Chennai’s Richie Street (its main electronic cluster) and earlier in 2015-16 in Mumbai’s Lamington Road and Manish Market, and Delhi’s Gaffar Market and Seelampur reveal the complex of refurbishment as a massive space for youths unable to enter technical institutes on ground of language and social economic power structures. Industry insider and academic, G. Venkatesh, a Professor of Practice at IIT-Madras, visualized (in 2019 pre-corona) that smartphones in use in India would rise to 750 million over the following 3-4 years, from the present 150 million then sold annually. Assuming that 4-5% of the 150 million phones presently in use need some kind of repair job each year. This implies 20-30 million annual work orders among youth most of whom have few alternative economic and social opportunities. Set within economic value addition is direct return from ‘labour’ – between a significant 25-30% spurring greater incentive to acquire skills. Part of the Shenzhen connect is small-scale but sophisticated capital machine assisted repair of increasingly miniaturized circuits – but also possibility of graded substitution.

To fathom the regional effect, our 2018 research in suggested that in the 20,000 daily footfalls at least Ù if not more, were service engineers visiting from smaller TN cities and towns, but also South Indian locations. Unlike the ‘jugaad’ image, a significant number of senior technicians are sponsored to visit Shenzhen every three months to discuss new reconfigurations with Chinese manufacturers. We estimate similar numbers in the ‘china bazzars’ in Mumbai, Delhi, and slightly lesser volumes in Bangalore SJP Road and other sites in metro cities. The more conventional ‘macro’ framings of this space as an ‘informal sector’ that dilutes its complexity and substance, never the less acknowledges that it contributes 95% jobs at least 50% of economic value addition (Neelkanth Mishra, Prateek Singh and Ravi Shankar, India Market Strategy. Credit Suisse: Asia Pacific/India Equity Research Investment Strategy, 9 July 2013). My Ph.D. on Delhi’s ‘small and tiny’ manufacturers spurred by forms of land development that dominate metro, smaller cities and towns suggested, in 1995 only 5.2% of the 220,000 firms in both commerce and manufacturing located in master plan areas. This came out of detailed investigations by the then ‘pre-privatized’ electricity authority DESU that sought to ‘regularize’ these connections (forced into illegality by the DDA’s unthinking and ill-advised norms) to ensure both safety and also raise its revenues manifold. S. Benjamin, Neighborhood as Factory: The Influence of Land Development and Civic Politics on an Industrial Cluster in Delhi, India. PhD dissertation DUSP, MIT, 1996. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11045.

7. India’s ambassador to China, S. Ranganathan told the author in 2013 that it was the masses of small traders visiting Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and towns like Yiwu, that helped to ‘normalize’ relationships between the two countries, but these issues remained ‘off the radar’.

8. Note the irony in academic and policy-oriented scholarship remains disconnected from ground realities and logics. The vast bulk of research into the economy is driven by ‘understandable’ categories pre-fitted into development narratives to remain fixated on SEZs, and in turn pose the vast bulk of economy ‘as an other’ via the ‘informal sector’. There is almost no understanding of the formative land linked institutional, finance, organization of production and its embedding, when in metro areas, but also regions such Bombay’s Thane, and in smaller cities and towns, all fall outside designated zones. The minor exception is some initial inroads into industrial clusters but these remain a narrow techno-managerial frame of how to incorporate them into mainstream policy, and thus, arguably again missing the conceptual bus.

9. Drawing on Visvanathan’s critique of knowledge production, his emphasis on ‘the story’ is to explore spaces of diverse possibilities, rather than the fixity usually seen in epistemologists. See Shiv Visvanathan, ‘For a New Epistemology of the South’, Seminar 630, February 2012, pp. 66-70.

10. See for instance Prasad Shetty, ‘Ganga Building Chronicles’, The Caravan, 1 May 2012; Suresh Nidheesh, Politicizing the Coastal Commons: Redefining Conceptual Boundaries via Alappad’s Fishers in Kerala, India. Paper presented at People and Sea Conference, organized by the Centre for Maritime Research (MARE), 24-28 June 2019 at Amsterdam.

11. Purushothaman Keerthi, ‘Religiosity in the Neighborhood: Territorial Imaginaries of Temple Land in Chennai’, (ch 11), in Caroline Carter and Wing Shing Tang, (eds.), Post Gentrification or Urban Re-Development. Basil Blackwell (forthcoming).

12. Pushkal Shivam and S. Benjamin, ‘Life After Law in Bangalore’ (ch 2), in Caroline Carter and Wing Shing Tang (eds.), ibid.

13. Khairudin Aljunied tells of a similar diversions witnessed in Master Planned overdosed Singapore (see Syed Khairudin Aljunied, ‘Sufi Cosmopolitanism and the Subversion of Colonial and Postcolonial Enclosures: The Life and Afterlife of Habib Noh’, paper in ‘Wild Spaces And Islamic Cosmopolitanism in Asia’, ARI, NUS, 14-15 January 2015, Singapore. Also see Miho Ishii, ‘Caring for Divine Infrastructures: Nature and Spirits in a Special Economic Zone in India’, Ethnos 82(4), 2017, pp. 690-710.

14. See Marine Carrin and Harald Tambs-Lyche, ‘You Don’t Joke with These Fellows’: Power and Ritual in South Canara, India’, Social Anthropology 11(1), 2003, pp. 23-42.

15. Consider an extract discussing the position of an MLA in such a space: ‘Clearly, the jajman’s answer was inappropriate, not because it was untrue but because it was irrelevant. This was not what the people, nor the medium, wanted to know. This the politician understood. He knew that in the context of the ritual, the jajman does not answer a bhuta’s criticism, he simply asks forgiveness. But he also knew that the essence of the bhuta’s criticism was political oi from Marine Carrin and Harald Tambs-Lyche, ibid., p. 32.

16. Benjamin Solomon, ‘Multilayered Urbanization of the South Canara Territory’ (ch.8), in Eric Denis and Marie-Helene Zerah (eds.), Subaltern Urbanization in India: An Introduction to the Dynamics of Ordinary Towns. Springer India, 2017.

17. V. Patil and S. Benjamin, Situating Land Histories as Practices of State, 2021 (forthcoming) in Part III – State rationalities, complexity and the ability to govern cities, in Claire Benoit Gaffou (ed.), Practices of the State in Urban Governance. Routledge, Oxfordshire.