Abstract
This book presents yet another important facet of the ongoing transformations in Delhi, a city that has drawn scholars and academic attention as much for its history as its contemporary role as India’s political capital. In her account, Ghazala Jamil adds a political economic aspect to its development that makes the metropolis an important site for social theory and research. In particular, she relates processes of capital accumulation with the growing segregation of the people along religious lines, especially with the emergence and persistence of segregated Muslim localities over the last several decades.
The book contains a range of analytical insights, but the most crucial amongst them is the idea summarised in the title of the book itself which is that the accumulation of capital in contemporary Delhi is directly linked to, and is even a cause of, segregation of Muslims into ghettos and dilapidated industrial zones where they remain marginal in the civic and social fabric of the city. This thesis that relates the economic benefit accruing to the city’s capitalist system and its impact on the life conditions of one of the city’s important religious group is innovative since it breaks down barriers one often finds among scholars of political economy and those focussing on cultural and religious practices.
The analysis begins with a review of existing theories that have sought to typologise the growing segregated nature of Indian cities, particularly the enclaves and ghettos that now house Muslims in major metropolitan cities of India. It is here that Jamil departs from efforts to shift the causal line from a focus on the intrinsic cultures of Muslims as if they were an exceptional people to the structural aspects of contemporary urbanisation that deepen and institutionalise segregation. In a series of chapters that deal with the materiality of cultures, political economic readings of media stereotyping and more broadly, the capitalist logic of urban development of Delhi, particularly since the 1990s, Jamil underscores just how accumulation of wealth in globalised urban spaces produces segregation over time. By turning the argument about exceptionalism, often used in ‘area studies’ and developmentalist literature, to justify further market-based interventions on its head, the book shows that, if anything, the lived experience and aspirations of Muslims in Delhi are like anyone else seeking to make a city into a place for dwelling and fulfilment.
The book has at its vortex the most significant site of Delhi’s Muslim history, Shahjahanabad, the imperial city of the Mughals, that remains home to communities that are increasingly becoming objectified alongside their neighbourhoods. In drawing out material dimensions of urban cultural commodification, she is able to tease out details of how structural inequality and the way it turns occasions for interactions into cultural and material exploitation. Using theories drawn from French scholarship on urban life, Jamil shows how the supposed ‘old Delhi’ has witnessed series of changes in the recent decades that go far beyond the orientalising perspectives which showcase this Mughal era district as an unchanging slice of history. In addition, the book also shows how the politics of urban redevelopment and governance consistently marginalise Muslims into segregated communities in other more contemporary parts of the city.
Here the focus of her analysis, drawn on the basis of intensive field research, is Seelampur which has emerged as a satellite locality for Shajahanabad’s Muslim communities. This part of Delhi is a vibrant production and manufacturing hub that feeds into the economy of the city state. However, the logic of profit-seeking capitalism in Delhi is such that it confines only particular forms of economic activity to be based in these neighbourhoods, where the possibility of short changing those trading beyond the barriers becomes a daily reality. In showing this material logic to the segregation of Muslims, Jamil contributes to the critical scholarship on labour and urban studies, most notably the work of American Marxist scholar David Harvey whose work is richly referenced and empirically grounded in this study. One hopes, that besides the detailed ethnographic perspectives there will be future research that includes more ‘big data’ perspectives which could also identify the precise flows of capital and juxtapose it with the restrictive labour mobility due to an unfair social system.
The economic and ideational logic of communal geographies of contemporary Delhi also becomes the backdrop for analysing what Jamil calls ‘variable but durable marginalities’ of middle class Muslims who have also become segregated in various parts of the city. In her analysis of sources behind middle class segregation, she identifies the role of politics and ‘governmentality’ that allows for the affluent to politically marginalise Muslims in the city’s vibrant civil society. By tracing the overlaps between coercive institutions of the state and latent technologies of governmentality, she shows how the arc of communal and contemporary globalisation cuts across the differences among Muslims and collapses them into a single identity. The detailed account of such overlapping failures in the course of the India Against Corruption movement shows how communal prejudice has its basis in politics and political economy.
Adding to the existing literature that deals with the violence and communal hate against Muslims in India, these insights place the social and spatial segregation of minorities within a broader framework which not only remains attentive to the material structural dimensions of marginality but also the discursive means that dispossess Muslims from becoming a rights bearing community. Her analysis of media stereotypes and representation highlights that besides insecurities from violence, which surely are central to the growing segregation of the community, there are what I would call the ‘discursive institutions’ of contemporary urbanisation which erode the discourse of citizenship for Muslims in India. Jamil argues that Muslims in Delhi have emerged as ‘normative non-citizens of the global urban’ and shows the crucial ways in which public institutions of education, mass media and even cinema are crucial to the process.
This, I would argue, is the single most creative and substantial aspect of this study. The attentiveness to the affective dimensions of popular culture and their linkages to formal and structural aspects of capitalism is significant and often missing in cultural accounts of Muslim life in India. In analysing the ‘avenues of hope and optimism’ that remain in Delhi’s social and cultural milieu, Jamil also emphasises that Marxist analysis must expand to include discursive and even affective aspects of social realities if they are to be truly emancipatory. Working with theories drawn from Foucault, Horkheimer and a range of other continental and contemporary interlocuters for Marxist ideas, Jamil is able to demonstrate that such theories matter if we are to understand varied social realities of not only Delhi’s human geography but also of our world today. Except for the use of Zizek’s conception of contemporary political economy, which takes away more than it adds to our understanding, these innovations are a valuable contribution to social theory and our understanding of Delhi’s segregation in particular.
With the value of ‘trust’ and solidarity as the basis for economic relations, particularly within Muslim communities, that face stigmatisation and even violence from outside, the book also shows pathways for reconciliation and mutual coexistence. More crucially, the book is also a valuable treatise to consider the question of secularism and current challenges faced by Muslims not only in Delhi, but to an extent across Hindustan (North and North Western India). Its final ‘coda’ serves as a leap of faith, offering means that could ameliorate the continuing suffering and anxieties of the community. In reframing debates in terms of citizens and their globalised marginality, Jamil has set aside the acrimonious and eventually self-serving discourse of modernity which has been debated endlessly in the context of the failures of the state to safeguard its minorities and ironically, also in the context of their own lack of engagement with the system. By taking us beyond the religious-modern divide, quite literally in her analysis of spaces such as Nizamuddin basti, Jamil shows that rather than arguing over their civilisational discontent, we can begin by considering the everyday concerns that contribute to the making of a more humane city.