The Magicians’ Ghetto: Moving Slums and Everyday Life in a Postcolonial City

Introduction

Kailash Bhatt was born and raised in Kathputli Colony, a 60-year-old slum community comprised of street performers and folk artists in central New Delhi. Magicians, puppeteers, fire-breathers, jugglers, acrobats and myriad conjurers of everyday spectacle constitute the diverse groups that reside in what is one of the largest slum clusters in the city. When Kailash’s father Mohan first built his home in Shadipur, as the area surrounding Kathputli Colony was known in the 1950s, it was surrounded by dense jungle. The elder Bhatt had migrated to Delhi from neighboring Rajasthan, bringing along with him his knowledge of gypsy folk arts, and helped inaugurate a continuously evolving residential and occupational space for artists and performers, one that has managed to miraculously persist in the middle of a violent capital(ist) city.

Founded on the outskirts of the capital, today Shadipur is surrounded by postcolonial Delhi’s expansive commercial and residential developments for miles in every direction. ¹ And while the city grew around Shadipur, the slum itself grew manifold, as migrants from all over India moved into the slum in different waves over the past half-century, forming dense clusters and neighborhoods adjacent to and surrounding Kathputli Colony.

As Kailash told me about the history of his slum, we climbed to the roof of a tall, narrow, brick building in the middle of Shadipur. From three storeys above the surrounding slums, the expanse of the community was now visible; it was a bustling mini-city in the midst of a much larger and expanding metropolis. Just recently, Kailash informed me, the Delhi Government had sold all of Shadipur’s land to a private real estate developer. The slums in Kathputli Colony and its adjacent neighborhoods were now being targeted for demolition. ‘The government wants to get rid of us’, Kailash said. ‘They want to build a skyscraper right here in Shadipur, one that will be taller than the Eiffel Tower!’ ²

The reference to Paris was deliberate. Kailash and his troupe had been to that city several times. They had also been to Rome, Moscow, Dubai and Washington, DC, places that seemed a world away from their tight quarters in Shadipur. In Delhi they struggled to make ends meet month-to-month, increasingly finding it difficult to even perform in public spaces without getting harassed by the police and made to pay bribes. ³ Yet talented folk artists like Kailash and his family were regularly commissioned by the Ministry of Culture to showcase their talents at diplomatic events both in India and abroad. For the latter, the ministry would produce special visas to travel to specific foreign countries, so that at international meetings and gala receptions in foreign consulates, the artists of Kathputli Colony represented India’s rich cultural achievements, even as they were facing imminent eviction in their own city.

If the story of Kathputli Colony’s impending removal strangely resonates with a previously recorded incident of slum demolition involving magicians, jugglers and puppeteers in postcolonial Delhi, this is because an eerily similar event is famously chronicled in Salman Rushdie’s historical allegory of postcolonial nationalism in India, his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. But the resonance does not end there. In Rushdie’s magical realist treatment of postcolonial Delhi, towards the end of the novel, ‘the magicians’ ghetto’ is said to have originated in the shadow of the Red Mosque in Old Delhi. Amid the worst excesses of the Emergency in the 1970s the ghetto of the magicians is brutally targeted for demolition. ⁴ But instead of vanishing once and for all, the ghetto inexplicably turns into a magical ‘moving slum’ that manages to evade the authoritarian grasp of the Emergency state. The slum’s resistant movements only come to a stop once the Emergency ends, finally settling down in Shadipur, where the magicians’ ghetto remains today.

Sometimes a coincidence is more than a mere coincidence; it is an un-timely conjuncture. In this essay I revisit the brief but significant tale of the magicians’ ghetto in Midnight’s Children. In particular, I adapt the inter-temporal concept of ‘moving slums’ to theorize how postcolonial cities and communities are continually destroyed and re-constituted, often under the rubrics of urban ‘development’ or ‘renewal’, and how such cities and communities improvise in order to survive, and sometimes manage to even thrive in the midst of their precarious everyday lives. In postcolonial cities like New Delhi, as Rushdie’s novel poignantly reminds us, the state’s erratic yet violent attempts to order and discipline the city’s uneven development confronts the everyday spatial and discursive practices of slum dwellers who subsequently become the targets of an increasingly violent, unpredictable, and exclusionary regime of urban governmentality (Foucault, 2007; Chatterjee, 2004). I use the untimely conjuncture between a text and an event to theorize the livelihood possibilities of marginalized and ‘informal’ populations in postcolonial cities.

Magical Realism and the Postcolonial City

It is often argued that Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children works best at the level of national allegory, where magical realism as a literary method is used to creatively treat the mythological and secular aspects of the postcolonial nation as an imagined community. The mythology extravagantly describes the story of India’s transition from colonial rule to independence and the three bumpy decades after. The allegory is literalized in the life and times of one Saleem Sinai, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, whose (auto)biography closely mirrors that of the postcolonial nation.

I do not contest this basic interpretation of Midnight’s Children, which informs a range of critical engagements with the text in literary and cultural studies (Agarwalla, 2006; Ahmad, 1987; Aldea, 2010; Kortenaar, 1995; Shankar, 2004). But to this established interpretive framework we might productively pose the following questions: does the novel’s famous embrace of magical realism as a mode of narrative description merely give fabulous expression to what is an otherwise secular national history? Or, in contrast, is the idea more that the magical and the real, the mythic and the secular, are mutually entangled in postcolonial modernity, ⁵ so that their logical separation becomes impossible? Here, magic stops functioning merely as a literalized form of national allegory and becomes a much more direct practice of social narration and everyday practice. Yet how are we to understand this difference?

A relatively minor episode from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children can help us think through this distinction and outline some preliminary responses to the questions posed above. The episode comes towards the end of the novel. Saleem Sinai has completed his misadventures in Bombay, Pakistan and the newly-created Bangladesh in order to take up residence in New Delhi, where he plans on confronting none other than the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi. Before he can do this, however, Sinai befriends a group of magicians who reside in a slum ghetto in the Islamic heart of the old city and, having no money, Saleem comes to stay in their ghetto. The time period of this transition is also important: Saleem moves into the magician’s slum in the shadow of the Red Mosque just before Indira Gandhi declares a national state of emergency in 1975.

Significantly, although Saleem takes up residence with the magicians, he does not inform his hosts of his own unique magical powers that he has possessed since birth. He practices this sorcery along with all the other ‘midnight children’ who were born at the exact moment of India’s independence. In Saleem’s case, he was born with the talent to communicate telepathically with all of the other midnight children, as well as sniff out looming danger with his gigantic nose. Yet Saleem never reveals his occult powers with the magicians that house him towards the end of the novel, because he knows that ‘the ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic’ (Rushdie, 1991: 462). Because they produced illusions of magic every day through conjuring tricks and misdirection, spectacles that relied on sleight-of-hand and deception, the magicians themselves were cynical realists who ultimately knew that there were no authentic miracles to be found in real life. It is in this apparent paradox (cynical magicians who steadfastly disbelieve in magic within the otherwise magical literary universe of Midnight’s Children) that a key interpretive strategy is revealed in the novel, one that I argue comports with a critical re-interpretation of the postcolonial city.

At times in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie seems to make a distinction between two types of magic. First, as Kortenaar and others have argued, ‘much of the magic of Midnight’s Children arises from the literalization of metaphor’, and ‘in Rushdie’s postmodern allegory the literalization is self-consciously highlighted’ (1995: 43). For instance, there is the allegorical magic figured in a character like Saleem, his unexplained power to communicate telepathically with all the other midnight children. In the case of this telepathy, the magical power literally represents the equally miraculous and super-natural imagined community that is the postcolonial nation, described melodiously by the narrator as a ‘dream we all agreed to dream’ (Rushdie, 1991: 111). At this level, ‘Rushdie’s use of magical realism shows us in practice how the imagination offers us ways of making sense of the world’, often in grandiose and mythologized nationalist terms (Aldea, 2010: 57).

But a second type of magic, less metaphorical and more metaphysical, proliferates in the everyday spaces and times of the novel. There are many examples sprinkled throughout Midnight’s Children, including – quite fittingly – the episode in the magicians’ ghetto:

The plain, unadorned truth is that, in those days, the ghetto illusionists and other artistes began to hit new peaks of achievement – jugglers managed to keep one thousand and one balls in the air at a time, and a fakir’s as-yet-untrained protégée strayed on to a bed of hot coals, only to stroll across it unconcerned, as though she had acquired her mentor’s gifts by osmosis; I was told that the rope-trick had been successfully performed. Also, the police failed to make their monthly raid on the ghetto, which had not happened within living memory; and the camp received a constant stream of visitors, the servants of the rich, requesting the professional services of one or more of the colony at this or that gala evening’s entertainment. (Rushdie, 1991: 463)

This mode of social narration is aptly demonstrated in the immediate wake of the slum’s brutal demolition during the Emergency, when many, including Saleem, are captured by the Emergency state apparatus and are forcibly sterilized. But the magicians are able to escape confinement. The ghetto in the heart of Old Delhi is destroyed but is at once re-born as a magical ‘moving slum’ that obstinately escapes the repressive Emergency state’s grasp. As Saleem informs us, ‘Only after the end of the Emergency did the moving slum come to a standstill’ (Rushdie, 1991: 514).

Thinking through the two types of magic outlined above, the phenomenon of the ‘moving slum’ can be conceptualized in two distinct, and equally compelling, ways. First, as the literalization of historical metaphor, the moving slum manifests the limits of state power in postcolonial Delhi. During the Emergency, close to 15 percent of Delhi’s total population was coercively moved from slums to re-settlement camps at the periphery of the city, their erstwhile homes demolished by the state (Tarlo, 1995: 2921). Yet, as we will see in the next section, the state’s ongoing destruction of slum communities did not (and in fact could not) preclude the slum dwellers’ ongoing presence in the city. In effect, ‘moving slums’ became a part of the city’s spatial morphology during the Emergency period and beyond, enduring through various phases of demolition and reconstruction in postcolonial Delhi. As soon as one slum colony would get destroyed in a particular part of the city, another would seemingly materialize elsewhere, sometimes nearly simultaneously. ⁷ Moving slums thus embody what Abdoumaliq Simone calls ‘the cityness’ that ‘continues to haunt the City’ of postcolonial urban planners (2009: 8).

The second way we can understand the phenomenon of moving slums is less as a metaphor for the failure of the state’s governing strategies to house its urban population and has more to do with the actual experiences and narratives of displaced peoples themselves. As an interpretive concept, moving slums index a spatial morphology comprised of multiple urban rhythms and ways of being and becoming in postcolonial cities (Highmore, 2005; Lefebvre, 1991; Opondo, 2008). Whereas the first use of magic takes us to the abstract yet materialized terrain of state practice and urban planning and shows us the limits of what Henri Lefebvre called ‘representations of space’ in modern cities, this second reading of the magical moving slum brings us into the ethnographic realm of everyday life. These are what Lefebvre called the dynamic ‘spatial practices’ and ‘representational spaces’ of users and inhabitants of the city, with their incipient and often rebellious re-inscriptions of dominant urbanist idioms, forms and spaces (1991: 33). ⁸

A literalized reading of ‘moving slums’ as a metaphor for postcolonial urbanism will be pursued further in the following two sections, first in the context of recent literature on urban ‘informality’ in postcolonial Delhi and then in the context of the aforementioned slum re-settlement process ongoing in Shadipur. In the subsequent sections of the paper I will bring the second reading of the magical moving slum to bear on the first, juxtaposing postcolonial urbanist discourses of ‘renewal’ and ‘re-settlement’ with the narratives and experiences of those removed and displaced by these governing practices.

The Precarious Temporality of Delhi’s Moving Slums

Let us briefly return to Rushdie’s account of the origins of the moving slum in Midnight’s Children:

… the day after the bulldozing of the magicians’ ghetto, a new slum was reported in the heart of the city, hard by the New Delhi railway station. Bulldozers were rushed to the scene of the reported hovels; they found nothing. After that the existence of the moving slum of the escaped illusionists became a fact known to all the inhabitants of the city, but the wreckers never found it. (Rushdie, 1991: 526)

Ashis Nandy has described the urban slum in India as ‘a living critique of the political economy of the city. By virtue of its existence, it is a comment on the failure of a political economy to provide certain kinds of lifestyle to its people.’ ⁹ The proliferation of urban slums in postcolonial cities is often seen as evidence of ‘state failure’ in development literature (Chakrabarti, 2001; Mathur, 2008; Mohan and Dasgupta, 2004), namely a failure to provide safe and adequate housing to urban residents. But such interpretations assume that the state is in fact sincere in its intentions to provide equitable care and protection to its citizenry. Seen from a different perspective, the persistence of slums can be read more perversely as an ambiguous sign of governmental ‘success’ in the midst of historically unprecedented rates of urbanization and the intensification of capitalist relations all over the world. The very existence and growth of slums and non-legal squatter settlements in postcolonial cities already presupposes a range of ongoing political and economic negotiations among diverse urban institutions and populations that broadly defines what Partha Chatterjee calls ‘political society’ in postcolonial cities (Chatterjee, 2004). But the radically unequal relationships of dependency, access and mobility amongst these urban bodies greatly shapes how such negotiation proceeds. Thus, political parties often compete for influence and patronage in slums, while slum dwellers too strategically use their limited economic means and political agency to negotiate unstable legal environments. While many neighborhoods are suddenly and remorselessly removed without warning, many other slums manage to survive in a precarious urban temporality where demolition and displacement is not always actualized, but it is always potential. As Stephen Legg has shown, slums and other ‘informal’ urban settlements are thus intimately intertwined with ‘formal’ structures of governance, which ‘exclude subjects from the political order, only to include them more completely in politics by their outcast state’ (Legg, 2007: 3).

In the city of Delhi, with over 3000 officially recognized and non-recognized slums housing upwards of three million residents, ¹⁰ state practices of slum demolition go back to the colonial period of British rule, when colonial governments depicted slums as a threat to both public health and security (Legg, 2007: 190–207). The unorganized and precarious settlements of the ‘native population’ in the city were to be cleared out so that the state could discipline and re-order their ‘unhygienic’ and ‘chaotic’ environments. Such ‘representations of space’ were particularly prevalent in and around the Mughal citadel of Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi as it later became known, especially after the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. ¹¹ But slum demolitions continued even after independence. Under the 1956 Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act, the postcolonial state began categorizing unauthorized squatter settlements on ‘public’ land as ‘notified slums’, which ‘the Delhi government could use as an instrument for slum clearance as and when required’ (Kundu, 2004: 260). The ‘Jhuggi Jhonpri Removal Scheme’ of 1958 was devised by the Delhi government to ‘remove squatters from government land’, with the promise of re-settling them on the periphery of the city at a subsidized rate (Tarlo, 2000: 55). These promises were often left unfulfilled, leaving the evicted to fend for themselves and create new ‘informal’ settlements elsewhere within the city. Forced evictions of notified slums continued into the 1960s but their numbers rose dramatically during the Emergency period of autocratic rule between 1975 and 1977. Many settlements of the urban poor in Delhi particularly (notably, the magicians’ ghetto in Midnight’s Children) were demolished during this time.

Having become a major symbol of the violence of the Emergency regime, the practice of forcibly removing slums was noticeably curtailed, with ‘no major evictions taking place after 1977 until 1997–98’ (Kundu, 2004: 262). Meanwhile, in the 1980s and 1990s, due to consistent high levels of migration into the city, and the state’s experimental strategy of relatively ‘benign’ neglect towards the ‘unintended city’, a profusion of non-legal and so-called ‘informal’ settlements surrounded and penetrated the ‘intended’ or formally planned city (Sen, 1976; Sundaram, 2009). Today, 30 percent or more of Delhi’s urban population resides in slums, with little-to-no publicly serviced infrastructure, including potable water and public toilets (Panda and Agarwala, 2013). Residents rely instead on pirated infrastructure and improvised service networks in an era of increasingly privatized provision (Ahmed, 2011; Sundaram, 2009, 2011).

Most slum dwellers are daily wage earners, laborers, guards, domestic workers, small shopkeepers and petty traders. They constitute a key site of surplus extraction as ‘informal’ workers in Delhi’s large and expanding urban agglomeration (Datta, 2012), a seemingly never-ending supply of flexible, contingent, and unprotected workers. In a paradox that is increasingly characteristic of postcolonial urbanism’s violent economy, migrants get caught up in a process that is viciously circular: they are ready to move to the city because that is where there are jobs and chances for life-improvement or at least change, but by moving to the city en masse, migrants reduce the overall chances for life-improvement. It is the overabundance of labor that keeps wages down and postcolonial cities competitive. The exclusionary growth of the postcolonial economy manifests a city that is of necessity exclusionary. Thus, while slums are central to the functioning of the city’s spatial and political economy, they are left in existential and legal limbo by virtue of their ambivalent status as notified slums, ‘a term which gave the [Delhi Development Authority] the authority to destroy them even before the internal Emergency of the 1970s, although it was the Emergency conditions that enabled them to exercise that right’ in an expanded form (Tarlo, 2000: 61). Notified slums are now euphemistically referred to as ‘informal settlements’ in development literature. As Sundaram points out in the Delhi context:

‘Informality’ has emerged as one of the main designations of proliferation in recent years … [and] what has emerged right from the outset is informality’s ambivalence about the law, both in terms of housing settlements and production sites which worked through tenure rather than formal title. (2009: 4)

The literalized metaphor of the ‘moving slum’ thus helps us understand the precarious temporality of ‘informality’. Even when slums are not physically moving, the actuality of these informal spaces, their precarious everyday existence, is haunted by the potentiality of demolition. As a recent report on slum demolitions in Delhi explains:

Most squatters feel it is not worth investing their meager incomes in their immediate environment when their homes might be destroyed by the authorities at any moment. On the other hand, that moment might string out for several years, if not decades owing to the political games of local leaders and politicians who patronize squatter settlements. In the meantime, the inhabitants of such areas carry on living in what are often deplorable conditions. (Vidal et al., 2000: 20)

Moving Slums: Urban Renewal or Urban Removal?

In Rushdie’s novel, after the Emergency ends and Indira Gandhi is voted out of office, the slum of the magicians finally stops moving. It settles down in a discrete location, ‘hard by the New Delhi railway station’, as Saleem tells us: ‘Shadipur bus depot on the western outskirts of the city’ (Rushdie, 1991: 526).

Jumping from the novel’s present (the late-1970s) to our own, the magicians’ ghetto cum ‘moving slum’ continues to exist across the street from Shadipur bus depot in west Delhi. Today, it also goes by the name of the aforementioned Kathputli Colony. And like its predecessor in Rushdie’s novel, Kathputli Colony in Shadipur is being targeted today for demolition.

But talk of the slum’s demolition has persisted as a rumored possibility throughout Kathputli Colony’s unusually elongated existence. In the past, aligning with the right elected leaders sufficed to ensure that the bulldozers and wreckers stayed away from Shadipur. Kailash’s father Mohan told me the story of one particular trip his troupe made to Washington, DC, to perform, and had photographs to back it up. The year was 1985, and on the White House lawn, after performing in front of then-US President Ronald Reagan and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the latter assured Mohan that folk artists would always have a place in Delhi, that unlike other slum clusters in the city, their homes in Shadipur would always be protected from redevelopment and demolition by the state. Mohan showed me a picture of himself with his cohort of musicians and dancers in front of the White House. Then his mood suddenly turned somber as he finished the story: ‘Of course, then Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. After that, who could guarantee our place here?’ ¹²

More recently, slum survival has become directly linked to election cycles. As one resident of Kathputli Colony told a journalist in 2009, just as talk of the slum’s demolition was beginning once again: ‘We know our very existence here would become a problem if we do not vote. Just because we vote we are allowed to stay here, otherwise we would be thrown out from this place.’ ¹³ Here, we might surmise that the ‘magic’ of the moving slum has to do not merely with it miraculously ‘shifting’ from place to place in the city, but with its residents moving themselves to the ballot box in order to secure their temporary permanence.

Yet the current talk of impending demolition rings differently than before. It is being articulated as part of a novel and potentially lucrative urban renewal strategy whose rationale is outlined in the 2021 Master Plan for Delhi (2021 MPD). The idea is to both ‘re-habilitate’ old urban neighborhoods while self-financing the provision of housing for the urban poor by ‘using land as a resource for private sector participation’ (Puri, 2007: 1). The strategy is consistent with the overall approach of the 2021 MPD, which focuses particularly on ‘optimizing’ land use in the city and facilitating public-private partnerships as much as possible in order to transform Delhi into a ‘global metropolis’ and ‘world-class city’ by 2021. Among other things, the master plan seeks to put a ‘humanitarian face’ on the process of slum demolitions in the city. Rather than forcibly evicting current residents and moving them to the urban peripheries, which has long been the practice (indeed, Shadipur itself was once on the western periphery of the city), the new strategy includes ‘in-situ rehabilitation’, in which ‘in-site up-gradation of the land pockets of slum and JJ Clusters, which are not required for public priority use, is the first option for provision of affordable housing for rehabilitation of squatters’ (Puri, 2007: 16). Under this scheme those current slum dwellers able to furnish proof of tenure in a notified slum colony would be able to secure a future flat within the ‘re-habilitated’ site.

Shadipur was to be among the first of these so-called ‘in situ rehabilitations’. According to the DDA’s plan, the current residents of the slum would be temporarily relocated to a transit camp (in a site to be decided later) for the duration of the construction period. Through a public-private partnership, the DDA would work with Raheja Developers Ltd, an Indian firm, to provide 2800 flats for slum families free of charge. Reiterating the DDA’s goal of transforming Delhi into a ‘world-class city’, the developer’s website characterizes this project as ‘a move to provide better living conditions for urban poor; the development work at Kathputli Colony project would act as a pilot project in Delhi and also set a benchmark for many such projects to follow to make Delhi a slum-free State’. ¹⁴

But what makes this particular plan for ‘re-habilitating’ the Shadipur slum clusters different from past demolitions is not simply this ‘in-situ’ aspect. In addition to the free flats to re-settle the slum’s current residents within the redeveloped site, the scheme also contains a less altruistic but financially alluring aspect: the Raheja ‘Phoenix’ – Delhi’s first ‘official’ skyscraper. Raheja will partner with a multinational firm, Dubai-based Arabtec Construction LLC, which famously built the world’s tallest building, the half-a-mile-high Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The result of this transnational collaboration will be a spectacle of grand proportions in New Delhi: the Phoenix will feature a 54-floor tower with a ‘skyclub’ and helipad with 170 premium apartments at more than 1000 square feet each. The flats for the residents of Kathputli Colony would ostensibly lie adjacent to these high-end luxury dwellings (see Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

Yet for all the appeal of luxury skyscrapers coupled with free housing for the poor, the so-called ‘rehabilitation plans’ for Kathputli Colony have hit a severe impasse. As of early 2013, construction still had not started for Raheja’s Phoenix project, which is now more than three years behind schedule. The biggest problem seems to be that no one in Shadipur really wants to leave the place, not even if it might mean getting a new flat at a subsidized rate or even for free. Moreover, the project actually re-settles just a small fraction of the slum’s current population: only those able to furnish proof of tenure and ‘valid’ identification will be eligible for a new flat. Close to 10,000 families live in the area, many of whom have been there for decades but do not have valid identification and would thus be disqualified from being able to stay in the neighborhood. As one Kathputli resident stated in a recent media report on Kathputli Colony, ‘My ration card expired and I have been doing the rounds at the government office.… How will we get housing without valid identification?’ ¹⁵

Many residents who actually have valid identification are nonetheless wary of being moved into transition housing, only for this ‘temporary’ transition to turn into their permanent removal from Shadipur. Such skepticism was common amongst those with whom I interacted in Kathputli Colony. Many recited instances of trickery and misdirection on the part of the Delhi government in the past. ‘As soon as we leave’, Kailash’s brother Samir (a drummer and dancer) explained, ‘they will build their skyscraper and never let us come back.’

Perhaps giving added credibility to the skepticism of Samir and others, each of the sites proposed thus far for the so-called ‘temporary’ relocation of the evicted slum dwellers has faced stern resistance from locals who also question the temporary status of these sites. Many fear that hosting a relocation camp in their neighborhood would also attract others to squat on the land. As Navin Raheja, chairman of the redevelopment firm, stated rather bluntly: ‘No one wants poor people to be their neighbor.’ ¹⁶

Meanwhile, Raheja Developers, still eager to speculate on the land underneath the present-day magicians’ ghetto in Shadipur, is instead frustrated by what has become an increasingly familiar impasse in urban ‘renewal’ and ‘development’ projects across India. A hotly anticipated image of future spectacular and profitable real estate development promises to replace one kind of spectacle (the everyday practice of magicians) with another (the spectacle of ‘city-branding’ through showcase architecture). Yet the magicians, wary of past tricks and deceptions, refuse to leave without assurance that they will be able to return. Thus far, the Delhi government has refrained from using force to evict the slum dwellers of Kathputli Colony, perhaps fearing the repercussions of such a move against the famous community of performance artists. As a Wall Street Journal article recently reported:

Mr. Raheja says he can’t begin work until the residents have been moved into transit camps that he is supposed to build, and for which the DDA has yet to provide him sufficient land. Kathputli colony residents say they won’t move until the DDA provides them a list of all the families who are eligible for free flats and promises in writing to return all of them to this site once construction is completed … as many as 63 real estate projects around Delhi that were supposed to supply 40,000 units of housing are four years behind schedule for reasons that range from lack of capital to ‘socio-political’ reasons. ¹⁷

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Future site of Raheja Phoenix superimposed on existing Shadipur slums (taken from http://maps.google.com, accessed 8 February 2013).

In Figure 2, the image, discovered accidentally by the author while attempting to locate Kathputli Colony via Google Maps, ¹⁸ implicitly juxtaposes conflicting temporal dispositions towards the urban present. The software programmers for Google have superimposed the text ‘Phoenix’ upon the satellite image of the existing Shadipur slums, as if hastily conjuring the latter’s erasure in a sinister and urbanistic act of ‘dynamic nominalism’ (Hacking, 1986). At the time of writing (early 2013), the slums were still standing at the site, with no signs of an impending demolition. In juxtaposing Figures 1 and 2, the Google map’s time-image renders the slums in Shadipur ‘anachronistic’ with respect to the speculative present and future of Raheja Builder’s spatial projection. Yet the obstinate presence of Kathputli Colony endures underneath the name of the unbuilt development, leaving an undeniable trace on the urban palimpsest. What will this satellite image look like in five years? What will we make of the tragically utopian projection of the Raheja Phoenix in 2013?

Moving Slums as Spatial Morphology

If one is to take the Delhi government at its word, then its policy of squatter evictions and slum demolitions achieves two ostensibly laudable goals, ‘simultaneously decongesting the urban centre and providing better amenities to the poor’ (Leena and Chotani, 2007: 12). In the state’s urbanist discourse, moving squatters from slums to ‘re-settlement’ colonies ‘is a marker of progress in people’s lives’ (Leena and Chotani, 2007: 26). But in order to generate consent among the soon-to-be-evicted, the government must conjure an appealing image of the future: promising slum dwellers secure and comfortable lives in ‘formal’ housing, with ‘adequate access to electricity, water, health, education and other basic services’. As many recent studies of re-settlement colonies have shown in postcolonial Delhi, however, most of these projections turn out to be false promises (Baviskar, 2003; Bhan, 2009; Ghertner, 2008; Kundu, 2004; Menon-Sen, 2006).

For the artists of Kathputli Colony, re-location to the urban periphery (even if only temporary) is doubly threatening to their livelihood possibilities, as their central location in Shadipur has become a well-known place for potential patrons to find and book performers for entertainment, either in the city or abroad. These artists are understandably apprehensive about being removed from the vibrant social habitat that makes their livelihood possible.

At a small chai shop in Shadipur, Kailash told me in a voice that was both earnest and optimistic: ‘If we were able to collect 10,000 rupees from every family in the slum, we could easily come up with enough money to buy back the land from the developers.’ He had already done the math, and seemed quite confident that, with some effort, he could mobilize the residents and resources. But as soon as optimism made its fleeting appearance, his disposition turned desolate. ‘Of course, the government probably would still build the Phoenix because they want to remove the slums from Delhi anyway. The skyscraper is just another excuse.’

Such a fine balance of optimism and skepticism is perhaps engineered into the urban imaginary of postcolonial cities like Delhi, yet it appears particularly acute amongst slum-dwelling performers like Kailash, his friends and his family. As conjurers of everyday spectacle and illusion themselves, the puppeteers and magicians of Kathputli Colony seem fully aware of the government’s own callous methods of misdirection and deceit when it comes to its rhetoric and practices of slum clearance and ‘re-settlement’. The narratives of slum dwellers like Kailash and those all over postcolonial cities like Delhi are informed by the hard lessons learned in the art of urban survival.

In her ethnographic work on narratives of displacement and subsequent ‘resettlement’ in Delhi during the Emergency, Emma Tarlo writes that: ‘From the accounts of the resettled, it is possible to make an alternative reading of the distribution of space’ in postcolonial cities (Tarlo, 2000: 56). Re-settlement camps and colonies, often far away from urban centers, are spaces that are built upon acts of erasure, ‘each one recalling something which no longer exists’ (p. 58). Such a reading allows us to understand re-settlement camps in their inter-temporal and inter-spatial context, so that these sites on the periphery ‘cannot be seen independently of the re-development of different sites within the city’ (p. 58). As Tarlo’s temporally sensitive analysis reveals in the context of post-Emergency Delhi: ‘In the spaces left behind by these acts of erasure new parks, trees and public buildings sprouted all over the city whilst a ring of poverty accumulated and thickened around its edges’ (p. 61).

This process of spatio-temporal marginalization brings us closer to the second definition of the ‘moving slum’ elaborated earlier in this essay. Slums do not literally ‘move’ as an object might move continuously across physical space, but the dis-located lives of slum dwellers gives the effect of a continuous movement ‘not only through the memories of the displaced but also through the bricks and materials that arrived with them. Initially [the evicted slum dwellers] built their homes in the re-settlement camp out of the rubble of the previous slum’ (p. 57). In this second sense of magic, which works less at the level of urban governmentality and more at the level of everyday narratives and sensory perception, the magical spectacle of the ‘moving slum’ provides an interpretive lens or, better yet, a ‘time-image’ (Deleuze, 1989) of demolition and reconstruction in the postcolonial city. ¹⁹

Time-images of ‘moving slums’ are particularly effective for rendering the alterity of inter-temporal space, for tracking what we might call a spatial morphology. Recounting a passage from the autobiography of Jagmohan, the notorious vice-chairman of the DDA during the Emergency and mastermind of many of the most violent slum demolitions, Tarlo juxtaposes the state’s urbanist narrative of spatial transformation with the narratives of those who were themselves evicted. Jagmohan describes a particular slum demolition at the Jamuna Bridge with remarkable economy, emphasizing change, continuity and closure in a pithy sentence: ‘In about three days the clearance and simultaneous resettlement was completed’ (Tarlo, 2000: 58). In contrast, based on the narratives of those who actually experienced the clearance, Tarlo brings a radically divergent sense of time into focus: ‘For the people of Jamuna Bridge there had been no simple continuity between their experience of demolition and their experience of resettlement’ (p. 60). Instead, many had to wait months if not years to secure a new settlement with a semblance of stability and security. Such a juxtaposition not only demonstrates the radical divergence in experience between a high-level bureaucrat and victims who were displaced by state policies, it underlines the more profound insight that, in many ways, slum ‘re-settlement’ is never ‘completed’, it is never ‘final’. Rather, as Tarlo writes, ‘the development of squatter colonies is a never ending process’ (p. 56). In these narrative disjunctures, a time-image of the ‘moving slum’ crystallizes on an urban depth of field, bringing into the same frame the brutal co-existence of ‘past’ environments re-constructed on the margins of the city and new speculative environments in the urban center.

What also stands out in the narratives that Tarlo collects from the Emergency is the wisdom and practical knowledge gained through the experience of slum ‘re-settlement’. Such experiential wisdom emerges as a kind of tired cynicism, similar to the attitude of many of the current residents of the Shadipur slums. In Tarlo’s account, this cynicism is expressed in the sarcastic use of phrases such as ‘of course’ when narrating traumatic events like slum evictions. For instance, a tea stall owner who was displaced from Jamuna Bazaar in 1967 talks of one local slum leader ‘who assured us that he would force the government to give us land at Jamuna Bazaar itself. But of course that never happened’ (p. 57, emphasis added). This person goes on to describe the bulldozers coming in and forcing them to move to a re-settlement camp shortly after. Another resident of Jamuna Bazaar, a sweeper, refers to a meeting that was organized by the DDA to inform the residents that they would be moved to a new place: ‘Of course nobody believed them because this kind of talk had been going on for years. But a few days later the police came and told us to remove our belongings because the whole area was going to be cleared’ (p. 57, emphasis added). The sardonic tone used in these narratives exemplifies a kind of skeptical realism among the urban poor with respect to the discourse of urban ‘renewal’ by the state, a counter-narrative whose condition of possibility is the collective memory of spatial violence. In this dislocated and disjunctive context, the body of the slum dweller takes on a new role as ‘the developer of time, it shows time through its tiredness and waitings’ (Deleuze, 1989: xi).

Finally, these time-images complicate our understanding of displaced peoples as merely the victims of urban development. For victims are also positioned, albeit ambiguously, as agents who make decisions according to their experiential and practical knowledge and the narratives they employ in order to situate themselves in space and time. For her part, Tarlo looks into the active and often unwitting role ‘victims’ of the Emergency played in helping to actualize the state’s exploitative land and sterilization policies. In concluding this essay, I want to bring this insight on the ambiguous agency and experiential knowledge of slum dwellers into conversation with the present-day slum demolition and ‘re-settlement’ plans that are being proposed for the magician’s ghetto in Shadipur.

Magical Urbanism and Urban Metis

Urban metis is a term that Michael J. Shapiro develops to conceptualize the practical knowledge that ‘diverse social types employ to flourish or survive in the face of procedures and structures of surveillance and control’ (2010: 46). Urban metis is a kind of everyday pragmatics that in turn illuminates the city’s micropolitics: ‘the forces shaping its sensorium, its partitions, its social issues, tensions, and factions’ (p. 46). Writing about metis more generally, James Scott describes it as a form of socially-produced knowledge that ‘resists simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and non-repeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply’ (Scott, 1999: 313).

Many residents of Kathputli Colony, in voicing skepticism and resisting the in-situ rehabilitation scheme in Shadipur, display an urban metis based on their own embodied experience and subversive knowledge of urban ‘renewal’ in Delhi. Such knowledge, produced at the very margins of the postcolonial state, is radically heterogeneous with respect to that of urban governmentality. ²⁰ Observe Jagdish Bhatt, a 43-year-old puppeteer in the colony, voicing his doubts about the possibility of an inclusive version of urban ‘renewal’ miraculously unfolding in Shadipur:

They been showing us dreams for 25 years … The Delhi government promise us nice house here, but they are just promises. This land is all over expensive. I’m sure they don’t want to build us a proper house for nothing. They are going to break up the colony. ²¹

In Midnight’s Children, recall that Rushdie explicitly also underlines the cynical realism of the illusionists and performance artists in the magicians’ ghetto: ‘the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was’ (Rushdie, 1991: 476). I would argue that such skepticism is potentially illuminating in the narratives of those still living in Kathputli Colony.

In his insightful ethnographic and textual study of Shadipur’s magicians in the late-1980s (a study that in many ways inspires and edifies this one), Sanskrit scholar Lee Siegel asks Naseeb, a skilled illusionist, a direct question: ‘Is there real magic?’ Naseeb’s response comports with, and deeply enriches, Rushdie’s depiction of the cynical magicians above:

No, but I shouldn’t ever say it. I earn a living only if people believe these things, only if they believe in the possibility of miracles. But there are no real miracles, and all the holy men and god-men, Sai Baba and Jesus and other men like them, are just doing tricks, tricks that I can do, that I can teach you to do, tricks that all the street magicians can do. (Siegel, 1991: 43)

What makes ideologies of urban ‘renewal’ so seductive to postcolonial cities and modern societies is precisely their marginalizing effect. Yet the same misdirection and sleight-of-hand that gives ‘renewal’ an attractive appearance to elite urbanists looks much different from the perspective of those who must disappear in order for the urbanist time-image to crystallize. As Lee Siegel cannily observes: ‘It’s a primary principle of magic that an object becomes invisible when no one is looking at it.’ ²² The inter-temporal concept of moving slums helps to restore visibility to the invisibilizing practices of marginalization, demolition and reconstruction that make urbanist ideologies believable and desirable even in the face of their spectacular violence.