Abstract
The Illegal City is a detailed exploration of the relationship between space, law and the gendered body in a squatter settlement in Delhi. Following the lives of the residents of the Lakshmipuri camp over a period of several years, Datta uses a multi-scalar approach to explore the complex relationship between the residents of the camp and the law, and how interpretations of the law are entwined with the gendered body politic of everyday life within the camp. The book is divided into two sections: part one, spanning Chapters 1–4, discusses the ways in which law and illegality are negotiated and acquire meaning within squatter settlements, and traces the ways in which legal frameworks and rhetoric have altered throughout India’s recent history. Part two, from Chapter 5 onwards, shifts the focus of the book to consider the ways in which squatters’ encounters with the law affect everyday relationships within the camp, specifically in relation to gendered power relations, both within the home and within the public spaces of the camp.
The first half of The Illegal City focuses on the dual relationship between squatters and the law in relation to the temporality and uncertainty of the squatter settlement. Datta engages with Agamben’s (2005) theory of the state of exception to focus on the ways in which legal/illegal dichotomies are manipulated to the disadvantage of squatters. Their status is exceptionalized through law: squatters are rendered illegal citizens, situated within a permanent state of exception and uncertainty, and thus in need of control and containment through a force of law. At the same time, The Illegal City highlights how the law is recontextualized by squatters themselves: their internalization of their positioning within a state of exception forms a way in which to legitimize their need for resettlement, via an emphasis on the positive discrimination present within the Indian Constitution. Squatters, therefore, emphasize their lower-caste, low-income or tribal status to articulate their vulnerabilities, thus legitimizing their need to be resettled in legal camps.
Datta continues to unpack the complex relationship with squatters and the law through a socio-historical contextual approach, tracing the shifting rhetoric of law relating to squatter settlements from the mid to late-twentieth century onwards. In particular, Datta focuses on the ways in which rhetoric shifted from the rationale of the Emergency period from 1975–77 that sought to create an ‘orderly city’ by demolishing India’s slums, towards a refashioned culture of slum upgrading during the 1980s and the 1990s, built on the idea that the only way to secure those in illegal settlements was to legalize their tenure (DeSoto, 1989; Turner, 1967).
Introducing the gendered performative element to The Illegal City, Datta suggests that such a focus on upgrading, rather than demolition, was further enabled through the emergence of the ‘feminization of poverty’, which placed poverty and slums as a ‘women’s issue’ in the eyes of the United Nations (UN), governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). However, the legal and social frameworks surrounding squatters and squatter settlements were again radically altered via the emergence of public interest litigations, spearheaded by the 2000 legal case, Almira Patel vs Union of India, which reinterpreted slums as a blight on the middle classes. Such cases encouraged a sense of public affectation whereby the existence of squatter settlements was seen as a violation of the middle-class urban environment, rather than as the right to shelter of the urban poor. This socio-historical timeline enables Datta to insightfully detail the continually shifting negotiations and relationships between squatters and the law in Delhi from the mid-twentieth century until the present day.
Part two of The Illegal City examines squatters’ relationships with the law on a more private, familial scale, using detailed ethnography conducted over several years to delve into the intimacies of everyday life in the Lakshmipuri camp. Here, Datta focuses, in particular, on the ways in which the gendered body and the intimate spaces of the home highlight the complexities of the relationships between squatters and the law. Datta focuses particularly on the female body politic, and the ways in which ‘legitimate’ social organization within the camp has been formed via a rhetoric of a ‘feminization of poverty’ and the formation, during the 1980s, of a women’s collective—Mahila Mandal—politicizing the home lives of women and the female body. Through its positioning by NGOs as a legitimate organization, Datta traces how the Mahila Mandal facilitated gendered transformations within the camp through increased gendered access to spaces usually denied to women, in particular a newly found negotiating power in the public realm.
However, The Illegal City refrains from relying on a one-dimensional activist-orientated approach to gendered performance within the camp, instead highlighting the complex and multifaceted nature of the gendered relationships of everyday life and politics among the squatters. In this second, more intimately focused section of the book, Datta returns to squatter settlements as sites of exception, focusing on the ways in which such exceptionalization affects the gendered everyday lives of the residents of Lakshmipuri camp through the politics of contested infrastructures. The Illegal City traces such contestations through examples of gendered exceptionalization in the everyday lives of the squatters. For example, Datta notes the ways in which a Rajasthani woman had little choice when collecting water other than to adapt her traditional gendered performance of wearing a sari at all times in public; the necessity of water collection versus the impracticality of the sari altering her everyday gendered corporeal performance. Through such examples, Datta highlights that the power of the state is at its highest when it ‘reduces everyday life to a collection of bodily functions’ (p. 143). State power is contested least when it holds control of everyday intimacies and corporeal performances.
In the book’s penultimate chapter, Datta intersects another detailed analysis of the complex relationship between the gendered body and the law in relation to the intimacies of the home space. Here, Datta insightfully analyzes the ways in which normative ideologies of home and the family supercede the rule of law. For example, when a woman is the victim of rape or incest within the home, state law is silenced by gendered values of home and family within the camp, and she is expected to remain within the private sphere of the familial home space so as to avoid bringing shame upon her family. Throughout this chapter, Datta highlights that ‘violence is present not just in the founding or maintaining moment of law but also in the very absence of law from the intimate spaces of home and family’ (p. 148). Thus, the less visible, intimate spaces of the squatters’ everyday lives are essential in understanding the legal and cultural constructions of the settlement.
Datta’s intersectional and multi-scalar ethnographic approach enables The Illegal City to make important contributions to both the fields of legal and gendered geographies, highlighting the ways in which the violence of law that renders squatters in a state of continuing temporariness and uncertainty is inseparable from the unseen politics of the gendered body, and how it is lived and constructed in the everyday spaces of squatter settlements. The Illegal City is thus an essential interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding of how the legal/illegal is manifested in the everyday intimate prac-tices of home in squatter settlements and how the issue of illegal settlements remains a highly contested and incomplete task, both for the state and for the squatters themselves.