Abstract
An anthropological inquiry into the symbolic dimensions of the Indian real estate industry is long overdue and this book is a welcome addition to social science literature that explores the newness of ‘New India’. It is the new market-place for land and what goes on it—marked by culturally and historically potent processes and symbols of desire, anxieties and aspirations—that Llerena Guiu Searle seeks to explore. ‘To understand contemporary capitalism’, as she says, ‘…we need to understand these acts of mediation: exchanges in which the things being traded and the people doing the trading are transformed in the process’ (p. 238).
The book utilises the real-estate sector—involving a host of national and global financiers, developers, owners, promoters, architects, politicians, bureaucrats and accountants, among them—as a site of multi-sited ethnography that explores a variety of ideas about New India. These include ideas of Indian ‘backwardness’ and how to overcome it (usually through meeting ‘global’ standards of various kinds); relationships between national and global capital; consumer cultures; the ‘new’ middle-classes; making Indian cities ‘global’; consumer-citizenship; and the ‘belief in modernization, in progress, in improvability….[that has been] given a new lease in the era of liberalization as a sign of profit’ (p. 239). Real-estate activity, as the author points out, is about ‘moral projects’ and ‘value projects’ that involve money but also moves beyond it through registers of unquantifiable social aspirations and strategies.
The book, broadly speaking, explores the ‘India story’. This story—with broad overlaps with the ‘India Shining’ narrative—refers to the combination of private and state-led discourse regarding the rapid and far-reaching economic transformation that will (soon) transform India from third-world misery to first-world prosperity. In Landscapes of Accumulation, the ‘India story’ is interrogated through the hectic residential and commercial real estate activity that has characterised many Indian cities in the decades since the1990s. The ‘story’, as it relates to the business of making buildings and selling them, is concerned with transforming land into a saleable commodity in order that India achieves the aims of becoming a ‘global economy’. The idea of becoming ‘global’ has, of course, a vigorous recent history in India, stretching across residential patterns, food habits, relationships, bodily etiquette, education, leisure, transport and financial activity. The manner in which becoming (and being) global is articulated through real-estate activity overlaps with these contexts, as the book fruitfully shows us, though not being reducible to it.
Guiu Searle’s ethnography explores the cultural and social dimensions of this process through field-work that ranges across offices of Indian and foreign real estate companies and chambers of commerce; fund managers, land ‘brokers’, developers, ‘consultants’ and ‘analysts’; media discourses; and advertising executives. In all these contexts, she explores the vigorous work of imagining futures that are always growing and expanding. Preparing the grounds for ‘accumulation’ requires a great deal of symbolic work. Indians must convince each other and non-Indians about the truth of the narrative of a prosperous future and the latter converse with each other and their Indian counterparts regarding transforming immoveable assets into liquid commodities. While ‘triumphant globalist narratives’ (p. 239) significantly drive national ones—‘how should Indians measure up to ‘global’ standards?’—they also face ‘local’ hurdles. These include bureaucratic practices and the extraordinarily complex histories of land ownership and the capacities of their Indian partners to hew a path through these. Given these complexities, Guiu Searle points that plans for the future have not always turned out as imagined.
The material that Guiu Searle covers is both fascinating, but also familiar. This is not a drawback in itself, though there is a reason for this. The fieldwork for the material on which the book is based, was mostly done around 2005–2006, with what appears to be a very brief visit in 2014. During that period, a great deal of scholarship has appeared that covers many of the themes—including gated communities, new spaces of leisure and commerce and their publicity material—that the author takes up for discussion. However, in this study, the larger body of this material is conspicuous by its absence. Given the pace of urban change in India—and the fact that so much has been written on aspects associated with it—some of the descriptions in the book (as well as photographs of buildings under construction in 2005–2006) have an unsatisfactory feel about them. Even the quoted bribe-amounts offered and accepted for different real-estate linked activities seem jarringly paltry by contemporary standards.
It is worth also considering some of the key arguments of the book. One of these relates to the fact that the manner in which future growth is narrativised ‘diverts attention from India’s current poverty’ (p. 101) and ‘enables businesses to target the richest class of Indians’ (p. 102). As the author also notes, ‘Developers rarely mention that what’s needed is housing for the poor’ (p. 87). Given that the state itself has been unable to meet its own publicly stated objectives of public housing, this would not seem a very surprising insight about the nature of private capital. That ‘Indian governments are clearing slums and displacing their own citizens to provide land for developers…[and] enable large multinational corporations, foreign investors and Indian elites to accumulate capital’ (p. 92) is entirely true. However, given that the post-colonial state has been the largest agent of displacement of the most vulnerable (see, for example, Chakravorty 2013) and that multinational corporations are not in the business of public welfare, it is sometimes difficult to fully understand the import of such observations.
Another important argument the book advances concerns relationships between foreign investors keen to cash-in on the ‘India story’ and their Indian intermediaries. Among the factors that make for difficulties for the former, include ‘Regulations in these firms’ home countries [that] prevent them from bribing foreign officials’ (p. 124). If contemporary media reports on gargantuan bribing scandals involving multi-nationals are anything to go by, this, at best seems to be a very charitable view of what foreign firms do in practice. Real estate firms in India have regional specificity (Sud 2016) and this aspect might have nuanced the book’s discussion regarding relations between Indian and global capital.
The binary between the ‘helpless’ farmer whose ‘Indian’ land has been alienated in the service of global capital and those doing the alienating also bears closer scrutiny. Farmers’ own narratives—not really explored in the book—suggest that different motives characterised different phases of land sales and that this has led to a new class of rentier-capitalists in places such as Gurgaon. Many who have sold their lands to real estate companies do not necessarily think in terms of the alienation of ‘Indian’ land. Rather, as many other parts of the book point out, such land is the complex—and usually unsentimental—site of transactions between the state, local and global capital and landholders with an increasing awareness of the benefits of such transactions. The importance of the book lies precisely in pointing us to the multiple sites, processes, aspirations and motives that must constitute a new ethnography of the present.