I had the privilege of teaching Tom Cowan’s Subaltern Frontiers in my fall 2022 graduate seminar shortly after the book was published. Student commentaries bubbled with enthusiasm about Tom’s impressive wielding of ethnographic and archival research and his ability to tack back and forth across historical periods. In the first two chapters of the book, we come to see historical figures such as Malcolm Darling – the assistant commissioner of colonial Punjab, whose racializing language helped establish caste hierarchies – alongside present-day characters such as Vikram Yadav, an elite landowner in Gurgaon who, echoing Darling more than a hundred years later, ridiculed those still residing in the region’s villages for their lack of industriousness. I concur with my students and find in this book a dexterous and confident technician at work, mobilizing tools of heterodox political economy and subaltern historiography into concrete-historical syntheses of the contradictions of contemporary urbanization.  

We had a funny moment in seminar: ten of the twenty students were from South Asia, and 6 were Delhi wallahs. Adding myself, a third of us shared in an insider conversation about our respective experiences travelling through, living in, or generally despising the city of Gurgaon— that neoliberal nightmare and dialectical image of accumulation and crisis lying just south of India’s capital. I’ve taught about Gurgaon for many years, and more recently written about the city through the familiar contrast it offers between luxury enclaves and abandoned labor camps (Waldman and Ghertner 2023). The group of us in the seminar found Tom’s journey through the city refreshingly original. He begins by taking us on a trip not south from Delhi to the glimmering malls and fertilized golf greens, as most commentators on the Millennium City (as Gurgaon self-brands itself) do, but from the southern border, moving northward from the hinterland in a shared jeep for migrant laborers to an urban tenement. In a city that perhaps best exemplifies the geography of extended urbanization, Tom reverses things, moving from outward in. The reversals – both analytical and geographical – continue across this multi-layered book.

Tom tells us he’s drawing from the Subaltern Studies collective, but then rejects any notion of the subaltern as either a fixed identity or subordinate social position. Landed agrarian castes who gained power precisely through their control over more classically subaltern castes here become the chief protagonists of subalternity. He goes inside the most speculative, financialized urban space in India and shows that it is governed by deeply material struggles over labor. Tom locates the rural–urban frontier not on the periphery, but in urban villages smack dab in the middle of the city, calling these localities “frontiering devices,” not obstacles to or externalities from the urban process. The book is brimming with surprises.

These geographical and sociological twists are not just of interest to the area specialist. They lead to profound reframings of urban theory that should be of widespread interest to students of the city and its hinterlands. I would like to highlight just two such theoretical revisions here, neither of which are centrally stated in the book, but that bubble up across the empirically dense yet highly readable chapters.

First, Subaltern Frontiers re-orients our understanding of occupancy urbanism. This builds on and revises Solomon Benjamin’s (2008) foundational description of how the urban poor quietly occupy complex land tenures to appropriate real estate surpluses. Whereas Benjamin showed how such occupancies worked in informal settlements through a “porous bureaucracy” that embedded local land economies in popular democracy, often producing pro-poor ends, Tom shows a different bureaucratic porosity and land economy at work under the conditions of agrarian urbanization he explores. Territorial claims in Gurgaon, he finds, are led not by the landless or outcaste, as the term occupancy urbanism might indicate, but by aspiring landlords, local property brokers, and even corporate developers, who deploy many of the same practices that urban squatters historically used, not to democratize the surplus, but to “repurpose village common lands and opaque customary tenures… as private property” (143). DLF and Unitech, India’s largest developers, here emerge as occupancy urbanists. Tom’s close documentation of how the indeterminacy of the agrarian bureaucracy becomes a resource undergirding the processes of speculative urbanism now proliferating across India speaks to the work of calculative devices and the “government of paper” (Hull 2012). As importantly, though, it shows how these technologies of abstraction—the very tools for making property severable and bankable on the terms of capital—rest on vernacular knowledges and local, sticky, social institutions. You can’t have luxury enclaves without urban villages in Gurgaon; you can’t have DLF without Yadav caste property committees. And, as the conclusion provocatively suggests, you can’t use caste-based territorial assertion as a mode of city-making without the attendant risks of ethno-religious nationalism.

Subaltern Frontiers’s broader demonstration of how all property is the concrete enactment of some form of occupancy urbanism is important for two reasons. First, it disabuses us of the simple equation of non-privatized land tenures with democratic village life or a pre-capitalist mutuality. Thinking on the terms that Kalyan Sanyal (2007) provides, the sphere of non-Capital here is as prone to “becoming Capital” as it is to serving something like a sphere of subsistence. Second, Tom indirectly pushes debates on political society. Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) dualist framing of civil society – the politics of the propertied – and political society – the politics of the governed – has been much critiqued, with the common line being that property owners also use the tools of brokerage characteristic of political society. Tom’s account of occupancy powerfully shows that these mechanisms undergird the very making of formal property; property, in other words, is a provisional settlement ensconced in the machinations of caste power and vernacular governance Chatterjee assigns exclusively to the subaltern sphere.  

A second theoretical shift is Tom’s framing of the subaltern as a process. This leads him to emphasize the key role that “actors and practices effaced from the scripts of neoliberal modernity” (12) play in enacting neoliberal urbanization, but it also marks the subaltern less as a structural position and more, as he puts it, as a “relation of subordinated difference,” including within its ambit “those actors, institutions, and logics under the command of urban capital but [which] are never fully subsumed” (19). This differs from both the Subaltern Studies position, where the subaltern stands for buried histories (Guha 1986), and from Kalyan Sanyal’s (2006) framing of “non-Capital” in his capital–non-capital complex. This is a generative move, aligned with Gramscian analyses of populism elsewhere under conditions of blocked social transformation (see Hart 2014). But it also raises a set of questions.

First, Subaltern Frontiers asks how to locate the right to the city when its primary protagonist has seemingly abandoned the question of territorial belonging so central to Lefebvre’s framing of urban rights. If capital’s march toward increasingly concentrated forms of accumulation is a march toward the city, then the “cry and demand” that Lefebvre (1996) highlighted was a territorial claim for the right to habitat. In the second half of the book, Tom takes us into tenement rental units that aren’t even shared by cohesive households. Instead, we find factory shift workers who rotate beds on 12-hour-on,12-hour-off work–sleep shifts, with a seemingly low degree of spatial solidarity. They experience intense forms of discipline in the tenements, but focus their action on the factory. In chapter 6, “The Camp,” Tom elegantly tracks women’s “interventions into the everyday subjugations of migrant domestic workers” and “their willingness to fight back against gender-based violence in the neighbourhood,” but observes how their politics “refuse the bounded and contested territorialities of the city” (276). It is on this basis that he problematizes the notion of urban rights.

But, I wonder if instead of dispensing with an interrogation of territorial politics, we might rethink the scale at which urban rights are framed. If we take the extended urbanization hypothesis at its word, might territorial claims – like the feminist attempt to rescale the site of working-class politics from the factory floor to the household – similarly be undergoing a shift from the neighborhood or household to the body? What if the right we’re talking about concerns the body’s emplacement in a circulatory regime that socially metabolizes rural subjects, turning them into urbanized subjects? Might the right to the city stand not for the right to habitat and permanence, but a right to appropriation as territorial emplacement, to a serviceable life for whoever is in the city, even if it isn’t you but a future generation, a trailing rural comrade, or a niece or nephew?

We might turn here for guidance to the palpable shift in how a denied right to the city operated during India’s COVID lockdown. In that bleak moment of halted construction projects and closed factories, the cry for improved urban life operated not via a critique of deficient shelter, and not only via a demand for employment, but specifically against the denied capacity to return to the village—to continue to participate in the “translocal household” through which social reproduction flows back and forth between rural families and urban workers (Gidwani and Ramamurthy 2018). The images of workers downing tools, abandoning tenements, and marching to villages hundreds of kilometers away by foot offered a firm indictment against the uninhabitability of the neoliberal city.

As Tom puts it in Chapter 6 in his discussion of migrant women, we found in the COVID-19 moment an urban critique framed as a demand not for the material form of the house, basic services, and the means of social reproduction (not that these didn’t continue to matter), but rather for a presence within the “movement across rural–urban landscapes” (276). In other words, if the working-class women of Gurgaon are responding to what that chapter characterizes as migrants’ “structural out-of-placeness” (277), might the fight for territoriality be precisely about this sense of place? If so, what does this tell us about the right to the city in working-class neighborhoods where the forms of land-based occupation are, as the early chapters convincingly argue, less a means of place-making? What, in other words, does gendered emplacement mean in the absence of durable working-class socialities? This is the question so poignantly posed by Gurgaon, and by this book, and it bears on the lives of the working class in all cities experiencing the effects of speculative urbanism (Goldman 2011) globally.

I want to dwell on this question of structural out-of-placeness in relation to the book’s use of subalternity. Returning to the framing of subalternity as what the book calls “the contaminating internal underpinnings” (26) of capitalist urbanization, I want to ask how this concept of the subaltern differs from Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution. In chapter 3, Tom notes that the unknowability of whether an investor’s land purchase will ultimately be confirmed as severable property is an instance of subalternity (135). It strikes me that the unknowability of whether value will be realized (as the urban sublates the rural) is quite different from the matter of “structural out-of-placeness,” although I’m certainly open to thinking the value relation on these terms.  

For Gramsci, “passive revolution” was a heuristic formula that emerged as a way for thinking about what he called “the revolution in permanence” in contexts of political defeat. In elaborating this argument, Gramsci turns to a schematic treatment of complex histories, writing about the foreclosure of the French Revolution meant that the spirit of Jacobinism was sublated in a new form of political power that, by the end of the nineteenth century, restored hegemony by reviving older political and economic forms. This was also the fate of Italian unification and its restoration of mercantile and landed power. Gramsci is careful about the spatial differentiation of passive revolution in various historical geographies. Throughout, though, “passive revolution” conserves the old and hijacks the language of revolution. Consider Tom’s argument in chapter 3 about how agrarian landowners are brought into the project of speculative urbanization, even as their very presence threatens to undermine it:

“The binding of identities and cultures to agricultural land, codified by colonial rule and mobilised by post-colonial government, is hard to shake off amid the slow post-agrarian transition… the peculiar non-alienable spaces at the heart of Gurgaon are both enabling and disabling, constitutive of the bizarrely composite socio-spatial relations of the city” (126).

This is what Tom identifies as the subaltern relation, but would thinking of this as passive revolution instead of subalternity help foreground the preservation of the old in the new and the incomplete sublation of difference? Might it also help analytically point to the ever-present potential for revolutions otherwise, such as the Hindutva revolution where the book ends? This most recent political shift, and the stark rise in anti-Muslim violence even more recently, is certainly revolutionary, but appears far from the working-class revolution Gramsci certainly had in mind when invoking the subaltern classes.

References

Benjamin S (2008) Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 719-729.

Chatterjee P (2004) The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press.

Goldman M (2011) Speculative urbanism and the making of the next world city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35(3): 555-581.

Guha R (1988) On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India. In: Guha R and Spivak GC (eds) Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 35-44.

Hart G (2014) Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Lefebvre H (1996) Writing on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sanyal K (2007) Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality, and Post-Colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge.

Waldman D and Ghertner DA (2023) The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating.  Progress in Human Geography 47(2): 280-297.

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D. Asher Ghertner is an associate professor of geography at Rutgers University, the author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi, and an editor of Society and Space.