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arly in his book, Thomas Cowan remarks how Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s now canonical intervention within the discipline of history, was “incredibly instructive in thinking about the duplicitous role of the dominated within the social terrain of the dominant” (2022: 23). Briefly, Chakrabarty there formalizes the familiar concerns of the subaltern studies collective through a contrapuntal strategy that stages History 1 – the dominant, universalizing rendition of historical change narrativized as the developmentalist ascendance of Modernity, Nation, and Capital – in a differential relation to History 2s – the multiple pasts and possibilities that exist in domination and proximity to the teleological aspirations of History 1, but without belonging to its “life process” (Chakrabarty, 2000: 50). This curious formulation can be iteratively read (given Chakrabarty’s debts to Marx, Gramsci, and Derrida) as the assertion that History 1, notwithstanding its desires, is never fully able to subsume other ways of being in time; that the task of enrolling the dominated within the ambit of hegemony remains ongoing and asymptotic; that the “trace structure” of History 2s continues to haunt the text and life process of History 1. Against the potted history of capitalist modernity’s deliverance of society from backwardness – in the Gurgaon context of Cowan’s book, the celebratory fables of a Gurcharan Das or a K.P. Singh – Chakrabarty assigns History 2s the role of double-aimed insurgent: on the epistemological front, to function as a strategy of writing that constantly interrupts ‘‘the totalizing thrusts of History 1’’ and on the ontological front, to reveal those pasts and presents that show ‘‘the human bearer of labor power [as having the capacity] to enact other ways of being in the world” (Chakrabarty, 2000: 66).

Subaltern Frontiers performs the task of insurgent admirably, gleefully puncturing the giddy narratives of Gurgaon as the poster-child of post-liberalization India, and pulling back the curtain to expose the work of variegated human actors – landowners, landlords, land aggregators, land brokers, land consultants, local power brokers, petty bureaucrats, pradhans, liaisoners, surveyors, fixers, and working-class populations – who underwrite accumulation, speculation, and habitation in Gurgaon, forming the urban conurbation’s continuing condition of possibility.

Since few of these actors are persistently subordinated – least of all, members of the landed Ahir and Jat castes who figure prominently in his book – Cowan is quick to clarify that subaltern is not a “fixed, sociological identity position” (Cowan, 2022: 21) for him. Instead, subalternity – his preferred term – is a “dynamic relationship of domination and dependence” (Cowan, 2022: 21) that makes capitalist development possible. Cowan’s usage here is aligned with Fernando Coronil in The Magical State, where the latter astutely defines subalternity not as “the being of a subject, but as a subjected state of being,” leaving open the possibility of “times and places where subjects appear on history's stage as subaltern actors, just as there are times or places in which they play dominant roles” (Coronil 1997: 16). “Moreover,” as Coronil continues, “at any given time or place, an actor may be subaltern in relation to another, yet dominant in relation to a third” (Coronil, 1997: 16).

Such a relational conception, which Cowan embraces, allows him to evoke the ebbs and flows of power – and territorial compromises – that inform “agrarian city-making”; where the bearers of finance, real-estate, and industrial capital are powerful but not always in charge of outcomes, often dominant yet also frequently dependent on a coterie of actors whose lives are anchored in alternative forms of sociality, rationality, and values. In urbanizing the countryside, Cowan proposes, capital must contend with not just temporalities that are otherwise (as Chakrabarty asserts) but also geographies that are otherwise. As “subaltern frontiers” – marked by the contingencies and opacities of land, property, and labor – these spaces constantly threaten to disrupt capital’s march. While the figure of the “frontier” carries connotations, among others, of a civilizational border, a political limit condition, an undomesticated tract, an investment opportunity, and a space of speculative potential, Cowan himself leverages at least four different understandings of the frontier in the book: from Jason Moore (p. 19; “uncommodified natures” or “cheap work/energy” bundles), Christian Lund (p. 126; “influx and presence of non-native private actors in pursuit of…newly discovered resources”), Katherine McNeilly (p. 135; the “untimely”), and Eyal Weizman (p. 301; “fragmented and elastic territories”).

In Chapters 1 and 2, which dwell on the ‘agrarian (or land) frontier’, Cowan shows with great insight how forms of illegibility – inherited from colonial land settlements and compromises, post-colonial land consolidation schemes, and compounded by technologies of state simplification (such as digitization of land records) – together inject a generative indeterminacy into the process of land acquisition for real estate development. As in other regions of India, efforts by British colonial administrators in the Punjab to promote an entrepreneurial cultivating class that would provide fiscal and political stability solidified the land claims of certain, ostensibly industrious, agrarian castes – Ahirs and Jats – at the expense of others – Gujjars, Jatavs, and Balmikis. This historical curation of a landed elite enabled their later reinvention, in the liberalizing conjuncture of the 1980s and 1990s, as a rentier class that was able to siphon surpluses from sales of agricultural plots to private real-estate developers (under the so-called “Gurgaon model of development”) into the construction of rental tenements on abadi deh (village residential) and shamlat deh (common) lands. The non-alienability of these lands and exemption from the welter of municipal regulations that prevail in planned urban areas, combined with growing demand for cheap housing from the waves of working-class migrants, who were flocking to Gurgaon in search of jobs, aided the ambitions of Gurgaon’s agrarian rentiers.

Carol Upadhya and I witnessed something similar in peri-urban Bengaluru with the landowning Reddy caste (Gidwani and Upadhya, 2023), and Michael Levien (2018), Nikita Sud (2021), and M. Vijaybaskar (2020) have recorded similar phenomena in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu, respectively. Of course, the historical geographies of rentierism are different in each instance.

Chapters 3 and 4, centered on the ‘property frontier’, take a deep ethnographic dive into the labyrinthine operations by which land, at first encumbered by layers of (often obscure) claims, is laundered – or “cleaned” as one of Cowan’s interlocutors vividly puts it – into the monadic private property form that real estate capital seeks. This transformation, which is simultaneously a translation from the heterogeneity of use values to the homogeneity of exchange value, is tedious and time-consuming work that requires physical and imaginative labor. The illegibility of agrarian land, which derives from a host of factors – the coparcenary rights within Jat and Ahir communities; the exceptions and expediencies of colonial rule; the imperfections of ‘rectangularization’ in post-colonial land consolidation programs (thanks to, among other factors, the region’s undulating terrain); and the slippages between the cadastral map, the jamabandi (record of rights), and the intkal (mutation register) – creates, both, opportunities and obstructions for actors anxious to profit from the business of land. Cowan insightfully unpacks the “property market” as a concrete abstraction which is viscous and leaky, immersed in a thick porridge of customs and social relations, where extracting real estate from the khewat (landholder account) and the khasra (cadastral survey number) is a process of translation-transportation that pivots on patience, persistence, the virtuosity of knowledgeable patwaris (local revenue officials) and, sometimes, sheer luck. Cowan’s account here adds in consequential ways to recent scholarship on land enclosures and transactions in India.

Chapters 5 and 6, on the ‘working frontier’, bring us full circle from Cowan’s Introduction, which begins with a poignant account of the 2012 strike action at the Maruti Suzuki automobile factory in Gurgaon’s Industrial Model Township. In a direct rebuttal of accounts which contend that Indian cities are morphing from sites for the production of surplus value to sites for the management of surplus value in the retail, rent-seeking, and FIRE sectors – with employment ostensibly shifting from material to immaterial forms of labor – Subaltern Frontiers underscores how material labor in construction, housing, garment production, and auto ancillary plants remains an integral if invisible part of Gurgaon’s city-making. Indeed, the material geographies of labor that Cowan discusses, most vividly in his description of the “tenement fix” (Chapter 5), mirrors a wider phenomenon in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), where landowning communities – Jats in Gurgaon, Gujjars in NOIDA – have built lines of rent-grabbing tenements with windowless rooms to warehouse the migrant workers who cycle through nearby factories and sweatshops. The tenements are heavily surveilled by a pradhan, who operates as rent collector and enforcer of social norms. Tenants are subject to multiple forms of extraction, including the obligation to buy overpriced groceries from the tenement shop, loans at usurious rates, and so on. In NOIDA, as in Gurgaon, workers are predominantly men and, as Cowan documents, there is a certain bravado they display in the azaadi (freedom) to abandon a job, find a new one, move to another location.  

But this kind of footloose existence is by no means the only norm. In industrial sectors of NOIDA, for instance, many workers have been residing in adjoining villages for years. Those with families to support in their rural homes tend to be risk-averse; more unusually, they may form tight bonds with roommates (often 5-7 to a room, who work different shifts). It is possible to witness touching instances of homosociality, where migrant men – pit into intimate forms of sociality, depleted daily by a pushing system that constantly demands more, living in an urbanized setting they consider “foreign” (pardes) – perform the physical and emotional work of repair and care for roommates that ordinarily might be the burden of women. I wondered whether Cowan witnessed something similar in the urban villages he frequented, where the business-as-usual of heteropatriarchy was queered by the fraught circumstances of working men’s daily existence. In Subaltern Frontiers, it was women, when present, who almost always appeared to carry the double (or triple) burden of social reproduction.

Other questions also arose about the social-cultural worlds of Gurgaon’s laboring classes. Given its mention in the book’s conclusion, I wondered how caste and faith in the time of Hindutva were manifested in the tenement lives of Kapashera’s working-class men and women? Was Hindu identity becoming an interpellative instrument of divide-and-rule by employers and landlords, a way to purchase a “labor peace” by pitting workers of one faith against those of another? And how were non-migrant workers from the Jatav, Balmiki, and other Dalit subcastes faring in the frenzy of migration and agrarian city-making? Finally, since Cowan’s book has abundant stories of men from Gurgaon’s Jat and Ahir castes, I was curious how women and girls from these landed castes might have experienced their communities’ turbulent fortunes, amidst the heteropatriarchal summons of social reproduction? These subaltern geographies were an absent presence in Cowan’s otherwise exemplary account of the ‘working frontier’.

This is not to say that Subaltern Frontiers ignores women’s stories. Far from it. The working women – Subiya, Nadiya, Sonu, Dipu, and others – who feature in Chapter 6 of the book are extraordinary, reminiscent of the striking women who inhabit another recent book, Madhumita Dutta’s Mobile Girls Koottam (2021). What is memorable in both Dutta’s and Cowan’s telling isn’t just the wiggle room or “minor liberations” that working women are able to find within regimes of caste patriarchy, often upending the lines of orientation that they are summoned to, but also their sheer resourcefulness and gumption. While Dutta makes a forceful case for understanding the factory shop floor itself as a site of subaltern ‘meaning-making’, where a mangle of social relations – friendships, solidarities, love, mutuality, and shared discovery – can emerge among women workers amidst the dull, daily rhythms of repetitive, quota-driven tasks to alter workplace dynamics, Cowan shows in addition how collective action against dismal, gender-biased working conditions can incite a political subjectivity among working women that is neither articulated as a citizenship right nor simply as the right to a fairer wage. Instead, he finds a more radical, unexpected demand for a future where working women will be accorded the dignity and rights to be “more-beings” who can step out of their prescribed social trajectories – “go to better places,” as Subia says, in Cowan’s final visit to her one-room dwelling (Cowan, 2022: 276).

There is so much more to be said about Cowan’s book – about private commons and forms of commoning that upend how we conventionally think about these; about the vernacular calculus of speculation and the modalities that subtend it; about the confounding agency of non-human forces such as cadastral maps, shifting terrains, zoning plans, legal imbroglios, and highways. In Cowan’s frontier spaces, the agrarian is never fully effaced. Its “trace structure” continues to haunt the liberal urban fabrications of private property, rendering land-based accumulation and development in cities like Gurgaon an always provisional undertaking.  

Subaltern Frontiers is a bracing read: intellectually radiant and beautifully plotted. A benchmark for agrarian and urban studies of South Asia and the Global South.

References

Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Coronil F (1997) The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cowan, T (2022) Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon. Delhi: Cambridge University Press.

Dutta M (2021) Mobile Girls Koottam: Working Women Speak. New Delhi: Zubaan Publishers.

Gidwani V and C Upadhya (2023) Articulation work: Value chains of land assembly and real estate development on a peri-urban frontier. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(2), pp.407-427.

Levien M (2018) Development Without Dispossession: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sud, N (2021) The Making of Land and the Making of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Vijayabaskar, M (2020) Land Questions in the 21^st century postcolony. Journal of Agrarian Change, 20(4), pp. 682-689.

Vinay Gidwani is a Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He researches capitalist transformations in South Asia, focusing on the changing dynamics of land, labor, and nature in agrarian and urban settings. His earlier research was on the spatial organization of informal waste economies in Indian cities, and the pivotal contributions of waste workers to urban economies and ecologies. Vinay is the author of Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).