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n 2014 while launching the government’s flagship ‘100 Smart Cities’ programme, the Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley commented that “a neo middle class is emerging which has the aspiration of better living standards. Unless new cities are developed to accommodate the burgeoning number of people, the existing cities will soon become unliveable.” The minister’s urban apocalypticism aside, the reference to the aspirations of the “neo-middle class” recalls the central animating figure of development in post-liberalization India. Look to any government press release or policy pronouncement, to the topics of the literary bestsellers and evening talk shows in contemporary India and you will come across this emergent middle-class aspiration. It is this middle-class aspiration, the unrelenting desire for order, pride, efficiency and community amidst the collapse of the post-colonial modernist settlement that acts as the central conceit of contemporary Indian political economy, a key pillar in the Hindutva project, and the central condition for all manner of violent, dispossessive and exploitative state project. And if meeting the aspirations of this new aspirational, yet resentful national subject, whom Snighda Poonam (2018) refers to as India’s “angry young men”, is a central organising logic of the contemporary political settlement in India, then the selective distribution of property rights to these groups (and the violent withdrawal from other groups) tied with the expansion of the capitalist urban fabric are its core spatial expression. In this respect, the mythic ‘neo middle-class’ act as a vanguard for what we might think of, to borrow from Du Bois ([1935] 1992) as India’s “counterrevolution of property” in the present conjuncture; wherein the invitation into new forms of propertied citizenship for the middle-class act as key makeweight for the dispossession and exploitation of others.

In the urban peripheries, our counterrevolutionaries – landowning caste pastoralists and farmers – are popularly understood as desperate to break from the shackles of post-colonial civic nationalism, eager to engage entrepreneurially in the world free from government intervention, and eager to push beyond their own agrarian caste-communitarianism, itself upended by years of neoliberal economic policy (Kumar 2021), and over-zealous positive discrimination policies that have extended political and economic opportunities to their historically underprivileged neighbours. If these aspirations sound alarmingly in tune with the interests of the country’s industrial elites, that’s because they are. And yet there is more to India’s careful cultivation of a new petty bourgeois subject than mere capitalist spirit. Staring down dramatic social and economic upheaval, as the agricultural sector struggles to compete and its economic and cultural bonds begin to disintegrate, it is the allure of community in the propertied nation, of communal membership in property-owning caste-citizenship and rentier forms of accumulation, increasingly tied to a masculinised and resentful Hindu Rashtra, that offer much needed succour (see Valluvan 2020). This kind of propertied subjectification, saturated in chauvinistic caste- and gender- based values, all the while quietly facilitates the traffic of huge volumes of capital into city-building and rebuilding projects across the country.

Contemporary urbanisation in India, in this context, is no doubt a political-economic project that aims to subject land to the all-powerful whims of global capital, and yet it is also at its core a project of subjectification and myth-making, of constructing a new national subject, aspiration and common-sense that neatly align with the voracious interests of domestic capitalists to churn land into surplus value. This is what I am beginning to think of, prompted by Ghertner's intervention in this forum, as a passive urban revolution. Of course this process is not straightforward, as scholars of urban India have shown, not only are there various fractures in this counterrevolutionary coalition, but these projects of propertied subjectification often require our counterrevolutionaries to cede to their own expulsion and abjection (Ghertner 2015), and frequently subject them to the speculative whims of rentier capital, processes that produce their own novel political and spatial contortions (Cowan 2018). In Subaltern Frontiers, I attempt to trace the project to build a neo-middle class on Delhi’s southern frontier, one willing to participate and buy-in to the mass enclosure and assetization of their lands, but also take centrally how these propertied class settlements are themselves unwieldy and unpredictable; not only compounding processes of class fracture but also requiring the surrender of power and territory to rural communities and working-class groups who may contort and upend the project altogether.

Writing subaltern frontiers

Ideas for the book emerged first in 2011, while I was studying for a Masters degree at the LSE. I had been engaged with the workers’ politics exploding across Gurgaon that year, when my advisor (Asher) handed me a draft copy of an exciting paper on the city, telling me I had better give it a read. This paper, Shubhra Gururani’s Flexible planning: the making of India’s millennium city, Gurgaon (2013) was the first critical treatment of planning politics on Delhi’s fringe that I had come across and to this day the paper remains a key intellectual touchstone in my understanding of agrarian-urban geographies. My initial interest was in the seemingly stark contradiction between the city I knew fairly well, characterised by mass organised labour politics, factory occupations and road blockades, and the one Shubhra highlighted, an emerging landscape of global real estate capital and flexible state planning. Asher Ghertner, who also proposed this book forum for EPD, provided intellectual guidance over the past years of putting together the book. Asher’s writings on dispossession, the politics of property and aesthetic rule are foundational texts to a heterodox urban theory that has influenced my work inordinately. The influence of Vinay’s work on my writing will be evident to anyone who picks up the book. Almost every chapter has reference to Vinay’s landmark Capital, Interrupted (2008). Vinay’s theorization of capital’s “anxious whole” and critical attention to the dialectical tension immanent to capitalist geographies has shaped my understanding of urbanisation inordinately, and it’s an absolute privilege to have his commentary here. Finally Tim Bunnell’s (2004) work on the geographies of ruralization and critical work on urban-rural transformations and global urbanisms in Southeast Asia (Gillen et al 2022), have been incredibly instructive for me as I have been taking ideas of the book into new geographies, and have pressed me to consider the ever more dynamic and more determinate role of rurality and rural geographies in the present conjuncture.

The three commentaries on the book here provide rich, critical interventions that have given me much to think with and ponder in my current work. Such is the richness of the commentaries I have grouped my response into three sections that correspond to what I see as the central provocations made across the commentaries: first, the book’s theorization of subalternity as a “troubling relation of difference” that articulates uneven geographies of urbanisation in Gurgaon; second, the book’s theorization of the geographies of agrarian-urban transformation on the frontier, and finally the book’s critique of ‘subaltern urbanism’ and elaboration of a non-territorial ‘right to the city’.    

Subalternity and passive urban revolution

From the outset of conducting research for this book I have been engaged with the broad body of scholarship on the subaltern. While I might have taken a classic economic geography approach to studying Gurgaon’s urbanisation, examining the institutional geographies of capitalist investment, financing and state planning driving the mass expansion of urban capital across the Haryana countryside, I had long been suspicious that such an approach might elide the dynamic geographies of land, property and labour that I saw as defining the agrarian-urban frontier. I was wary to reproduce the breathless celebration of Gurgaon as metonymic of triumphant free market capitalism often provided by domestic and foreign (even critical) commentary on the city. Any time spent on Delhi’s rapidly transforming urban peripheries reveal something quite different: luxury real estate adjoined to enclaved villages and pastoral common lands; shopping mall complexes owned and financed by peasant coparceners; highways dug out, blocked off and rerouted by agrarian territories; and of course fermenting proletarian struggle. Most strikingly the protagonists of urbanisation on this frontier not only appeared to be drawn from seemingly oppositional social formations of agrarian capitalism, but the complicity of the agrarian, exposed the capitalist urban fabric to disruption and disfigurement. This is the Faustian bargain urban capital makes with the agrarian world. One which requires forms of conjunctural analyses ready to contend with the non-expressive articulation of contingent histories of uneven agrarian capitalism with contemporary tendencies toward capitalist urban totalization (Cowan, 2024). The complicity of non-urban, non-bourgeois social formations within projects of capitalist urbanisation drew me toward re-examining both urban theory and urban capitalism; to ask how we conceptualise the role of the dominated, here the rural and agrarian, within the domain of the dominant, here the capitalist urban? How does capital access, aggregate and ready non-urban land for assetization? How is the non-urban world brought in line with their own dispossession and marginalisation? How do extant geographies of power shape the urban on the frontier?

To this I found the writings of both Antonio Gramsci and the Subaltern Studies Collective incredibly useful. While I was repeatedly discouraged from using a concept so weighed down by decades of fractious disagreement (Chaturvedi 2012), subalternity provided me with a vocabulary to interrogate not only the active role of seemingly defeated and despondent social formations in the terrain of the dominant (here for example, the active role agrarian pastoralists and farmers play in readying their own displacement from the land), but also importantly, the capacity for those defeated social formations to act otherwise to defeat – to act out; push back and contort hegemonic geographies. Subalternity, read not as a fixed sociological position or space, but rather – pace Gramsci – a relation of provisional subsumption into bourgeois capitalism, enable an understanding of both the ideological, political and economic interment of popular classes within capitalist geographies, and the complete inability of capital to fully subsume these lively geographies under its domain. Here I take central instruction from Gidwani’s subalternist readings of the Grundrisse in which he attributes the subaltern to “living, creative potential in labor for becoming otherwise” (2008, 879) to its capture by capital. For Gidwani (2008, 879), the subaltern represents both “the immanent potential that is both the effaced predicate of capital and, as the possibility of use value-for-itself, capital's differentiated “other”, which persistently exceeds its imperial mediations and objectification”. It is, to borrow from Gidwani, this subaltern double-aimed insurgency that is apparent in the uneven and truncated urbanisation of the agrarian-urban frontier. As I will return to later in this commentary, this relational conceptualization of subalternity I would suggest allows us to interrogate the political-economic grounds upon which  urban-nonurban transformations take place, without reifying the dominant geographies of capitalist urbanisation.

In his commentary, Ghertner generatively pushes back on my approach by asking how my theorization of subalternity differs from Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’. And on reflection, passive revolution is an essential partner-concept to subalternity. Passive revolution was used by Gramsci in order to understand the Italian Risorgimento and later rise of Italian fascism at the nervous juncture of modernity and specifically refers to bourgeois strategies – amidst crises of state hegemony– to absorb and constrain working-class and oppositional social forces into bourgeois structures of power. Gramsci’s much-quoted assertion that, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Gramsci, 1996, 33), speaks to a conjuncture defined by a crisis of capitalism paired with a failure of anti-capitalist revolution, a blocked revolution wherein capital is reliant upon renovating proto-fascist, bourgeois social formations. As I have already alluded, such a blocked revolution, in India’s post-liberalization moment, gave way to a ‘counterrevolution of property’ with a chauvinistic, propertied national subject as it’s vanguard.

In the book, I use subalternity to describe those troubling relations of subordinated difference that animate and disfigure projects of capitalist urban expansion, and yet this must be viewed within a historical conjuncture in which the post-liberalization state, itself under a period of transition, is committed to both incorporating elements of the agrarian world into bourgeois projects of capitalist urbanisation all while stilling and constraining all other potential social formations. This forms part of the book’s critique of dispossession-centred analyses of urbanisation in which the capitalist state stands only in violent opposition to social forces in land. Chapter 3 of the book describes as such not only how agrarian landowners play an active role in clearing and readying rural land for assetization through strategies of speculation, occupancy, and capture, but also how the state planning department, elicit such speculative practices by incorporating landowners into a post-agrarian modernity tightly bound to caste-based private property ownership and rentierism. So too in Chapter 4 of the book we see how the bureaucratic mechanisms required to legally convert rural land into fungible real estate operate not through the sledgehammer of enclosure but rather through the indeterminacies and imaginaries of the agrarian bureaucracy who bend and shake the existing agrarian social structure and institutional apparatus to translate rural lands’ heterogeneity into singular, exchangeable private property.

Passive revolution, as Ghertner (this Forum) notes following Gramsci, does not proceed through the extension of the new, of bourgeois revolutionary social forces, but rather through the renovation of existing power structures, constraining political alternatives by absorbing oppositional movements into the institutions and structure of the bourgeois state. The relation of not only the proletariat, but a whole host of popular and oppositional actors vis-à-vis this strategy of passive revolution is one plainly of subalternity. While under passive revolution the capitalist state aims to renovate existing social forces by incorporating subaltern groups into the fold so to speak, Gramsci insisted upon the anxiety and fragility of such a revolution, open to tendential rearticulation and resettlement by the organic generation of new collective understandings and collective action. There is in other words a deep subalternity to those interred under forces of passive revolution.

Throughout the book I touch on many of the morbidities of what we might call India's passive urban revolution: casteist land dispossessions (Chapters 2 and 3), the violence of landlords and factory managers (Chapter 5 and 6) and the rise of fascism and Hindu nationalism (Conclusion). If subalternity in the book provides a way to explore the “double-aimed insurgent” at the heart of capitalist urbanisation in contemporary India, passive revolution, as Ghertner notes (this forum), provides a way to understand not only the strategies to absorb oppositional social formations subalternly in the domain of capitalist urban, but also highlights the fragility of this settlement, and its potential to re-articulate and re-settle under distinct historical conditions to produce quite distinct, often morbid, geographies.

Understanding contemporary urban expansion in India through the lens of passive revolution requires attention to the fragilities of India’ss post-agrarian political economy, to the uneven, global circuits of capitalist urbanisation, caste-politics, Hindu nationalism and their saturation of processes of land enclosure, dispossession, and exploitation (Balakrishnan and Gururani 2021). As Gillian Hart (2014) has argued, passive revolution is an “inherently comparative concept” able to articulate historically contingent geographies of capitalist development within multi-scalar and hierarchically organised national and global political economy.

Geographies of agrarian city-making

As Gidwani notes in this Forum my use of subaternity in the book strongly resonates with Coronil’s own Gramsci-inflected reading in the Magical State. Here Coronil argues that a relational theorization of subalternity breaks down “homogenizing categories into their relational historical forms, a subaltern perspective provides a basis for a general critique of power in its multiple fetishized forms” (1997, 17).  Coronil’s relational conceptualisation of the subaltern also forces a profoundly conjunctural reading of capitalist development that I attempt to develop in the book in conversation with a broader scholarly initiative studying ‘agrarian urbanisation’ (Gururani 2020).  This approach is constantly open to the possibility of the dialectical tension and subalternity of the capitalist urban, to elaborate entirely different geographies under distinct historical conditions. This is, I believe a useful rejoinder to current urban theory-making that has a tendency to take our current conjuncture, and its bombastic narration by urban capitalists in good faith: that there really is no slippage, no excess nor disturbing contradiction within the planetary urban death drive we are currently witnessing.

No doubt, ‘planetary’ and ‘extended urbanisation’ scholarship provide an incredibly useful analytical lens to interrogate emergent forms of capitalist agglomeration that transgress conventional spatial categories (see below), nevertheless as Bunnell’s comments in this forum suggest, there is an unfortunate eagerness within this scholarship to establish an “everywhere urbanization” (Bunnell, this forum) which unhelpfully elides the distinct and uneven circulations of global political economy that may hold their roots in quite other social and political-economic formations. Taking on Bunnell’s provocation, we might ask how serious we really are about counter-hegemonic, oppositional, not least conjunctural geography, when the rural is so cursorily inspected, its histories so easily flattened, its demise so convincingly assured, that we conceive of it only as prefigurative of a coming capitalist urban. In the book I attempt to hold analyses of processes of extended urbanisation in Gurgaon utterly unfaithfully, entirely open to the disorderly conditions of what Ghertner (this forum) prompts as a passive revolution on the frontier, to re-articulate and congeal social formations into quite distinct geographical forms and relations.

In his review of the book Bunnell asks, in reference to Irawati’s illuminating work on desakota transformation in Jakarta,  whether emergent forms of agrarian- or ruralization might too be taking place on India’s urban fringes? This is, I would suggest, an empirical question that the book does not directly engage with but is being explored by scholars elsewhere (see Bathla 2023; Upadhya 2021). And yet it is an empirical question we are only likely to uncover if we adopt a methodological approach open to the subaltern tensions immanent within capitalist geographies, that under contingent articulation with multi-scalar relations of global capital, can turn and spin surplus value reproduction in inordinate ways.  

The right to the agrarian city

In Chapter 5 and 6 of the book I trace what I see as a non-territorial, working-class cosmopolitanism shaping proletarian struggles across Gurgaon. Pushing back on the overtly territorialised epistemology of urban politics within subaltern urbanist literature, the book explores how women’s ‘extroverted sense of place’ (Massey 1994) across rural-urban spaces produces ‘extroverted’ claims to the city. These are engagements in a politics of solidarity that extend beyond the ‘here and now’ of a particular workplace struggle, and extend out to the tenement lines, labour hiring points and public spaces of the city. The book examines how the political struggles of migrant, predominately women workers in the city make appeals to working life across stretched rural and urban geographies. To this both Gidwani and Bunnell ask whether the book’s focus on the spatial politics of working-class women in the city elide an interrogation of scheduled caste, non-migrant, and non-Hindu forms of exploitation and appropriation that might enrich an analysis of agrarian city-making in Gurgaon. While Ghertner asks whether “instead of dispensing with an interrogation of territorial politics, we might rethink the scale at which urban rights are framed?”, rethinking the ‘territorial’ in light of the ‘extended urbanisation’ hypothesis which rescales the ‘city’ to the extended geographies of capitalist urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid 2014).  

This kind of gendered, rescaled right to the city is aligned with Lefebvre’s infamous call for a “renewed right to urban life”, one which is reflective of the stretched, circulatory systems through which urban life persists. These circulatory geographies, in which the ‘city’ provides but momentary fixture, are precisely what the book attempts to tease out in discussions of labour organising in Chapter 6,  arguing that women’s political organising and associative power are deeply informed by a highly gendered experience of translocal circulations, mobilities, rentier appropriation, and spatially uneven incorporation into the wage that come to constitute urban life albeit not solely limited to Gurgaon. These geographical-political circulations have been discussed by urban scholars elsewhere (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003; Yeoh 2004) work I would suggest that is instructive for taking this question further. In Chapter 6 of the book, the struggles and strategies of Subia, Sonia and others, as Ghertner instructively suggests, elaborate not solely a gendered ‘right to the city’ but perhaps more importantly an altogether distinct and extroverted “sense of place” inhabited by migrant working-classes, one that stretches across multiple temporalities of “life’s work” (Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004) and vast geographies of exploitation, appropriation and conviviality. This sense of place, I concede might be conceived as territorial in some sense and yet– formed of translocal households, labours and familial and loving relations, and circulatory and uneven spatial experiences exploitation and joy – it is a sense of place and a territorial form which bears little resemblance to the kinds of spatial categories commonly found subaltern urbanist literature. The book attempts, in tentative ways to bring those kinds of circulatory urban politics to bear on agrarian city-making.

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Thomas Cowan is an Associate Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, and author of Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon. He researches capitalist urbanisation in South Asia, with a focus on dynamics of land, labour, governance on the agrarian-urban frontier. He is the Principal Investigator of the British Academy Wolfson-funded project, Digital enclosures: automating property in India, a study of the contested politics of property technology programmes in contemporary peri-urban India. His writings have appeared in Antipode, City, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, Gender, Place and Culture and Economic and Political Weekly.