TheDaak review

Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalizing Delhi by Sushmita Pati, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 320 pages, 15.88 x 2.54 x 23.5 cm, 978-1316517277, Price: 989 INR.

by Ishan Sahi

Properties of Rent studies two urban villages in South Delhi-Munirka and Shahpur Jaat. Urban villages of Delhi are a product of its southward expansion, when the Delhi Development Authority Passed an order to acquire 34,070 acres of land under section 4 of the Land Acquisition Act,1894, it distinguished the village settlement area from the agricultural land of the villages based on a land settlement report of 1908-1909 which separated the two areas by a line drawn with red ink. This red line which once demarcated the taxable from non-taxable land became the legal demarcation of the rural from the urban, and resulting in the nomenclature lal dora villages (p.3).  It goes beyond considering rent simply as a form of accumulation and considers the emergence of specific housing properties under the impetus of rent maximization. The two villages became a part of the expanding city of Delhi in the 1950s and 60s, and their agricultural land was taken over by the DDA. The red line also signified that the building bye-laws of the DDA did not apply to these villages which led to the evolution of creative housing configuration in the two villages. 

The book focuses on the role of community organizations and cooperatives as informal sources of credit for developing rental properties. The book traces the broad occupational trajectory of the landholding communities, especially the majority Jat landholders. The Jat landholders expressed the sentiment of feeling shortchanged by the compensation they received for their land in the 1950s and 60s. The book then shows how the Jats of the two villages accumulated capital across generations through jobs in the lower bureaucracy, the sale of construction goods and the transport business. Community cooperatives were one of the significant sources of credit, which allowed the landholders to develop their properties for rent. This trajectory was not shared across all the communities, especially Dalits who borrowed money for developing their properties under relatively unfavourable terms and their current living conditions are marked by precarity despite being landlords(p.174-198). 

The two villages follow distinct trajectories of development determined not just by the absence of the DDA bye-laws but also by distinct connections to the globalized production chains that reached Delhi after the economic reforms of 1991. Munirka witnessed the proliferation of the one-room set, which allows maximum units in a single building. This caters to a large number of migrants from the north-eastern states, of whom 85% are Manipuris (p.152). They have been working in Delhi’s burgeoning service sector economy, from jobs in the BPOs (Business Processing Outsourcing) to restaurants that have sprawled across the city. This community has also faced xenophobic attacks from their landlords, an issue that we shall touch upon later. 

Properties in Shahpur Jaat were rented out to two categories of tenants—artisans working in garment factories and high-end stores of designer clothing. In the 1980s, Shahpur Jat emerged as a garment manufacturing hub and began housing many artisans, mostly Bengali Muslims from the North and South 24 Parganas (p.95). With the economic reforms, elite entrepreneurs sought to develop areas like Shahpur Jat which were away from the city’s arterial roads, into markets for niche consumption (p.91). The village of Shahpur Jat became a favourable location because of the availability of cheap labour, low rents and their ‘rustic rurality could be curated, packaged and sold’(p.91). This trajectory of property development has led to sky-high valuations and pushed the landowning community to further gentrify the area.

Expectedly, the relationship of the landholding communities and their tenants reflects their economic and social location. The north-eastern migrants renting properties in Munirka have been subjected to racist abuse and even sexual harassment. After the incident of the rape of a minor manipuri girl in 2014 by the son of her landlord. The Youth Brigade Munirka an organisation devoted to fostering a sense of Jat solidarity issued emotive appeals to the resident community. The Jat centric nature of the organisation did not sit well with residents of the Jatav and Nai communities. The ambition to remain politically relevant and led YBM to expand its membership base expanding its membership base. It is now led by a Jatav and a tenant and has enlisted as an organisation by the Delhi Police which supported North-Eastern students. The YBM also campaigned for the inclusion of women in the voting process of the RWA, a demand which was begrudgingly accepted (p.189).  

This shows the paradoxical position of landowning communities in urban villages with rent as the primary source of income which ensures that the landowners have to include and address the concerns of the tenants however this does not eliminate the racism and xenophobia which even takes violent forms. They feel threatened from the cultural erasure which is a consequence of being absorbed into a large city like Delhi and being surrounded by the radically different cultural norms of their tenants who outnumber them significantly. 

However, rental markets also force the Jat landlords to form a common front with other communities like Jatavs and Nais in Munirka  as well as address the concerns of their tenants. In the case of Shahpur Jat which has seen property values sky-rocket, presenting the area as a safe, secure, and a well-curated space is in the best interest of the landlords. The book chronicles the modernizing influence of rental markets on the landlords in great detail. The differences in the kind and speed of the changes are a function of the demands of the rental markets and the social location of the tenants.

Shahpur Jat shows a different aspect of this dynamic. While landlords compete amongst themselves to attract high net-worth commercial tenants, they also make sure that the tenants cannot form a collective front or become members of the Resident Welfare Association. Though occasionally volatile, the landlord-tenant tensions in Shahpur Jat pale in comparison to the situation in Munirka. This is helped by the extremely high rents that landlords here can extract from their tenants. The aesthetic changes catering to the tenants raise both the rent and value of the properties in the village. This has led both individual landlords and extended families organised through the kinship group of the Kunbas which are spatially organised act like joint stock companies to improve whole portions of their village which cannot be done by a single family (p.124). 

Properties of Rent is an important contribution to the literature on cities in the Global South as it highlights the relationship between rent and built structure. The book studies the networks through which the value and rental spaces are produced in globalizing Delhi. It complimentsthe literature on world-class spaces and cities focus on the politics and networks of finance and expert bodies which world-class built form of cities in the global south (Ghertner 2015a; Roy and Ong 2011). While the one-room set is a defining character of Munirka, its emergence is also a consequence of the burgeoning service sector economy. The adda and the commercial properties of Shahpur Jat are parts of another circuit of Delhi’s economy which produces distinct spaces and very high valuation. In this way, the book contributes to the literature on the production of spaces through informal practices (Palat Narayanan and Véron 2018). The simultaneous examination of the circuits producing spaces and value makes Properties of Rent a necessary work for those interested in the relationship of rental accumulation and built structure in the India where the planning regime is an informalised entity(Roy 2009).

Like all important works, Properties of Rent also suffers from some limitations. It describes the movement of values across landscapes as mysterious (p.91). But then it demonstrates how migrant flows into the city and their position in the global circuits of production either as BPO workers or as craftsmen working in emerging boutique fashion stores shows how value moves across space and time dispelling any notion of mystery, especially when read with the literature of spatial transformation that accompanies financialized economic growth(Harvey 1991; Ghertner 2015; Roy and Ong 2011; Palat Narayanan and Véron 2018) . Without this hesitation in drawing conclusions from its empirical material, the insights of the book would have come forth with greater clarity.

The book also characterizes the improvements made to their properties and the area by the landlords of Shahpur Jat as ‘gentrification’. But if we are to define gentrification not just as improvement to properties seeking higher rents but also as the displacement of poorer existing residents then we have to ask some questions about this characterization (Ghertner 2015b). The presence of garment factory workers in the Shahpur Jat attracts the high-end commercial tenants who would lose out if the factory workers were to be removed. It is also interesting to ponder why it is that the gentrification of Shahpur Jat is happening only to the benefit of the landowners and not at their cost. After all, the tenants are significantly richer than them and should have been able to buy these lands and displace the original landowners, had the land not been in the confines of lal dora villages. This shows the limitation of the lens of gentrification, understood as market induced displacement associated with rising rent accompanied by aesthetic improvements in built structure in the context of the different forms of property regimes and informality that characterizes the land market in the global south (Ghertner 2015b). 

Despite the occasional misses, Properties of Rent is an important and ambitious monograph. Empirically rich, it is a fertile ground for further theoretical exploration of the relationship between circuits of accumulation and built form of cities. Across its breadth we can trace how agricultural villages whose lands were acquired by the government evolved as they were surrounded by a globalizing city. This allows us to see how a natural product like land gets commodified and transformed to cater to the needs of migrant workers and rich elites of Delhi through specific housing innovations like the one-room set and the adda.

References:

Ghertner, D Asher. 2015a. Rule By Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. Rule By Aesthetics. Oxford University Press. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199385560.001.0001/acprof-9780199385560.

Ghertner, D. Asher. 2015b. “Why Gentrification Theory Fails in ‘Much of the World.’” City 19 (4): 552–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1051745.

Harvey, David. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. 1st edition. Oxford England ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Palat Narayanan, Nipesh, and René Véron. 2018. “Informal Production of the City: Momos, Migrants, and an Urban Village in Delhi.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (6): 1026–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818771695.

Pati, Sushmita. 2022. Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi. Metamorphoses of the Political: Multidisciplinary Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009043694.
Roy, Ananya, and Aihwa Ong. 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10484883