Subaltern Frontiers
Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon

The book examines how globalised urban labour and property markets are produced by agrarian actors, institutions, spaces and territories.

Thomas Cowan (Author)

9781009100472, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 January 2023

220 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.4 cm, 0.58 kg

'Subaltern Frontiers is a superb, sometimes surprising, and often moving analysis of agrarian transformations in Gurgaon, an iconic peri-urban frontier of Delhi. Eschewing tired developmentalist scripts of urban modernity and its impediments, Cowan instead underscores how agrarian and working-class actors and spaces subtend the material and imaginative possibilities of this new urban India. He shows how heterogenous agrarian worlds, encompassing land, property, and working frontiers, enable as well as thwart the designs and desires of state and capital, unsettling hegemonic trajectories of city-making and accumulation. Theoretically luminous, ethnographically plush, and vividly narrated, Subaltern Frontiers provides singular insights into the under-noticed geographies and cultural politics of agrarian urbanization. It is a surpassing contribution to the fields of agrarian and urban studies.' Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota

In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment, and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier. At the forefront of these processes in India, is Gurgaon, a privately developed metropolis on the south-western hinterlands of New Delhi, that has long been touted as India's flagship neoliberal city. Subaltern Frontiers tells a story of India's remarkable urban transformation by examining the politics of land and labour that have shaped the city of Gurgaon. The book examines how the country's flagship post-liberalisation urban project has been shaped and filtered through agrarian and subaltern histories, logics, and subjects. In doing so, the book explores how the production of globalised property and labour in contemporary urban India is filtered through colonial instruments of land governance, living histories of uneven agrarian development, material geographies of labour migration, and the worldly aspirations of peasant-agriculturalists.

Dedication
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Translations
Foreword
List of Figures
Introduction: Antinomies of an agrarian city
1. The experiment
2. The village in the city
3. The plot
4. The bureaucrat and the survey
5. The tenement
6. The camp
Conclusion: Urban limits
Index.

Subject Areas: Urban & municipal planning [RPC], Urban economics [KCU], Political economy [KCP], Labour economics [KCF], Politics & government [JP], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL]