How Delhi's Rural 'Past' Shapes its Present: Rent, Property and the Making of an Urban Economy | Humanities & Social Sciences

How Delhi's Rural 'Past' Shapes its Present: Rent, Property and the Making of an Urban Economy

Tuesday Seminar
Speaker: 
Sushmita Pati
Date and Time: 
Tue, 15/11/2022 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Venue: 
HuSS Committee Room

Abstract: This talk based on the book Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi (Cambridge University Press, 2022) looks at Delhi's southward expansion in post 1950s period to make sense of how Delhi's villages were oddly absorbed into the growing city space and what that means for the city. The talk would trace how Jats- an agrarian pastoral community transforms along with the city and how this interaction has shaped the political economy of the city through rent. These older kinship networks were deployed diversely in order to create their own dominance. These kinship networks are used for speculating collectively on land, for seeking credits, business partnerships, but most importantly to create a market for property that is based on the logic of monopoly ownership. This talk would foreground rent as an important political-economic category that begins to define this form of accumulation- very different from that of capital which is integral to the shaping of the city's economy as well as politics.