I am delighted to convene this review forum on Tom Cowan’s new book Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-making in Gurgaon. As a fellow traveller who has been charting the contours of agrarian urbanization for almost two decades, it is a real pleasure to read this richly textured and sophisticated analysis of the massive social-spatial transformation currently underway in India. In a short period, from a relatively unremarkable stretch of dusty agro-pastoral land, Gurgaon has emerged as one of the desired destinations for global capital investment, private land development, enclaved housing, Special Economic Zones, and shopping malls. While urbanization beyond the cities was embraced in the nineties as one of India’s key neoliberal strategies for ‘urban awakening,’ in which peripheries of almost all metropolitan cities were opened up for land acquisition, Gurgaon was the first to jump into the intense land frenzy. Given its proximity to the national capital and the international airport, Gurgaon led the way and provided a template, the so-called ‘Gurgaon model,’ for privatized urban development.
Reading Subaltern Frontiers, I was reminded of my fieldwork in the heydays of speculation in 2007-08, during which every conversation was replete with stories of peasant proprietors narrating accounts of how land changed hands, who were the key actors, who gained and who lost. Cowan evocatively captures this complexly layered and rapidly changing world of agrarian relations and offers an analysis that departs from standard narratives of urbanization. In conversation with recent debates on agrarian urbanism (Balakrishnan 2019, Gururani, 2020, Balakrishnan and Gururani 2021, Upadhya and Rathod 2021), Cowan traces the social-spatial unevenness that undergirds agrarian urban frontiers like Gurgaon and presents an analysis that emanates not from the summits of the city but from the villages that punctuate this urbanizing terrain. In doing so, as Cowan notes, the book complicates and counters the narrative of India’s triumphalist arrival on the global stage and critically intervenes in the dominant frameworks of urban theory. By drawing attention to the situated ways in which agrarian spaces, institutions, and actors are recruited to draft the contours of India’s Millennial City, Subaltern Frontiers beautifully illustrates the tensions that inhere and shows how “Gurgaon’s spectacular ascent as the supposed vanguard of new urban India is deeply dependent upon the very actors and spaces it seeks to disavow: the agrarian and the working classes” (33). As Bunnell writes, Subaltern Frontiers presents an account that is, “not only about agrarian histories or pasts, but also about the ongoing salience of the agrarian in Gurgaon” (this issue). Cowan convincingly forges a much-needed conversation between agrarian and urban studies, situates it in regional histories, and makes a highly valuable contribution to the scholarship on southern urbanisms, extended urbanization, urban land, rent, and labour.
Through a generative theoretical engagement that maps the political economic conjunctures of economic liberalization, financialization of land, shifting politics of caste and class, labour migration, and the rise of Hindu majoritarianism, Cowan insightfully shows the inherently fragile, tentative, and incomplete nature of capitalist urbanization. As the title suggests, the book deploys the core concepts of subalternity and frontier to unpack what Cowan calls the ‘subalternity of the frontier’ and highlight the contradictions, contingencies, and confusions that ensnare the politics of land, labour, and property. For Cowan, subalternity is not a sociological or spatial position; instead, it indexes a relationality, an incorporated contestation, that permeates and threatens to upend or unsettle the hegemonic alliances that propel capitalist urbanization. Ghertner and Gidwani have engaged with the concept of subalternity, and I want to turn briefly to the equally evocative framework of the frontier. Frontier has been widely used to invoke a sense of place or process that is in motion, saturated with anticipations, aspirations, hope but also doubt, fear, and resentment (Tsing 2005, Gururani and Dasgupta 2019 Frontier). As Anna Tsing (2005) points out, is ‘a zone of not yet,’ it signifies a particular kind of edge or edginess that sutures unexpected and unintended alliances. Tsing writes, frontiers “confuse boundaries of law and theft, governance and violence, use and destruction. These confusions change the rules and thus, enable extravagant new economies of profit—as well as loss” (pp 27–28).
Through the analytic of the frontier, Cowan ethnographically parses out the granular process through which the political elites, dominant agrarian castes, namely the Jats and Yadav, and private developers mobilize their caste-based brotherhood and authority to navigate the dense and fuzzy world of land and property. Here, the book’s core argument resonates with my research on flexible planning, where I argue that the making of Gurgaon relies on regulated improvisations of urban land laws that pave the way for political/caste elites to productively navigate the ambiguities in the plan, reconcile multiple contradictions, and enlist a range of material and symbolic techniques to produce an uneven geography of urbanization. Subaltern Frontiers enriches this further by demonstrating how landowners and state authorities not only repurpose agrarian property regimes but they also, as Cowan writes, “discipline the army of migrant workers that produce value in the city’s economy” (10). Through a carefully crafted ethnographic narrative, Cowan deftly juxtaposes the overlapping geographies of land, caste, property, rent, labour, discipline, and struggles to illustrate the highly fraught and contested social-political terrain that is constitutive of India’s agrarian-urbanization. In doing so, Subaltern Frontiers highlights how entrenched agrarian relations of land and property endure and how they continue to configure social geographies of unevenness and difference.
In the 2023 AAG in Denver, Tim Bunnell, Asher Gherner, and Vinay Gidwani joined in a lively conversation with Tom Cowan on the book and it is a pleasure to have their rich commentaries presented in this forum.
References
Balakrishnan, Sai. 2019. Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Balakrishnan, Sai and Shubhra Gururani. 2021. “New Terrains of Agrarian–Urban Studies: Limits and Possibilities”. Urbanisation. 6(1), 7–15.
Gururani, Shubhra. 2013. “Flexible Planning: The Making of India’s ‘Millennium City,’ Gurgaon”. Ecologies of Urbanism in India: Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability, 119–42.
Gururani, Shubhra. 2020. “Cities in a world of villages: Agrarian urbanism and the making of India’s urbanizing frontiers." Urban Geography 41, no. 7: 971-989.
Gururani, Shubhra and Rajarshi Dasgupta. 2018. “Frontier Urbanism: Urbanisation beyond Cities in South Asia.” Economic & Political Weekly, 53(12), p.41.
Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Upadhya, C., & Rathod, S. (2021). “Caste at the city’s edge: Land struggles in peri-urban Bengaluru.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, Special Issue on Urban Peripheries.
Shubhra Gururani is the Director of York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Canada. Her research lies at the intersection of urban anthropology and political ecology and focuses on peripheral urbanization, agrarian-urban transformation, property-making, and caste politics. She is the Principal Investigator of SSHRC-funded project, Life and Death of Urban Nature, an anthropological study of disappearing water bodies and flooding amid real-estate led urbanization in India. Her essays have appeared in Urban Geography, Gender, Place, and Culture, Urbanisation, SAMAJ – South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal and Economic and Political Weekly.
