A place in the city: Narratives of ‘emplacement’ in a Delhi resettlement neighbourhood

Narration and place

Gardner defines narratives as ‘conscious and structured accounts of events across time’ (2002: 31), but ‘first and foremost [as] stories’ (2002: 2). Narrations are processes of ‘re-membering’ and ‘re-collecting’, bringing fragments of memories and stories together as narratives (Stewart, 1996: 20). So events are not simply objects, but discussed on the front steps of people’s houses, ‘re-present[ed] in order to re-member and provoke’ (Stewart, 1996: 20; 2007: 15). Re-presented remembrances induce reactions from family and neighbours present, who add to, contradict, position and reposition themselves in stories, entwining people present and absent into the space and the act of telling. In this way, agency is redistributed through accounts of resettlement as actions are explained as impelled by the threat of violence, new opportunities, or the need for food and shelter.

So narrative is not so much about veracity as what the presentation and depiction of these events tell the researcher about the experiences of the teller. Mattingly extends this to argue that ‘narratives shape action just as actions shape stories told about them, and that stories suggest the course of future actions as well as giving form to past experience’ (Mattingly and Garro, 2000: 17). Drawing on Austin’s concept of a perlocutionary act in language, she shows that it is ‘the rhetorical power of words to persuade and influence the listener’, in which ‘the audience plays an active role in the creation of meaning’ (Mattingly and Garro, 2000: 11). Hence, Mattingly argues, narrative may also attempt to ‘emplot’ or enfold the speaker and listener into a particular set of events or dispositions through the account (Mattingly, 1998: 20). This may be with the desire to produce certain outcomes, as the occupational therapists in Mattingly’s study attempt to positively reframe the illness and healing experiences of their patients. Yet emplotment produces far from complete or certain outcomes, narratives may appear more as negotiations with the interlocutor, or even just assertions. Consequently, it is important to emphasize, as Gardener (2002) does, the multiple, shifting nature of accounts, particularly their location within a place and its prevailing power relations.

People speak from particular places. ‘What gives place its specificity’, Doreen Massey argues, ‘is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ (1994: 154). Particular interrelations of region, caste, religion or occupation may affect the stories people tell amongst others, the narratives they emphasize, downplay or even choose to ‘hear’ (Gardner, 2002: 33). Massey’s point that ‘places are processes, too’ (1994: 154) can also be drawn together with Mattingly’s concept of ‘emplotment’. Together, I suggest, that the work of some of these narratives might be better described as a kind of ‘emplacement’. That is, a form of spatial practice mediating between formal ‘representations of space’ as a space for development (Lefebvre, 1991), and its affectual consequences, space as people live and experience it. In a neighbourhood where a right to residence is based on eligibility for resettlement, rightful residents must have been through the experience of ‘slum’ demolition and resettlement. Consequently, narratives that situate the narrator within this experience also serve to ‘emplace’ them with a form of legitimacy into the history of the locale. ² Yet emplacing people as residents of a resettlement colony also locates them within wider discourses circulating in the city that question the eligibility/suitability of ‘slum dwellers’ for urban residence in terms of ‘encroachment’, illegality and implicit criminality. Consequently, care and tacit negotiation is required in the emplotment of narratives to come out on the right side. ‘Even the most apparently innocuous story is loaded with political meaning; for stories do not simply entertain or convey experience, they also comment upon it, and hence help to change it’ (Gardner, 2002: 2). Narratives of emplacement open up to residents a minor means of negotiating a place within the city and colony itself.

A place of stories

The demolition and resettlement of ‘slum’ dwellings had been taking place in Delhi since the 1960s and continues today. But the declaration of the state of Emergency (1975) greatly intensified the rate of demolitions with a programme of aggressive ‘beautification’, an informal labour crackdown and widespread slum ‘removal’ and resettlement.

Punarvaspur’s first four residential blocks (A, B, C, D) were settled in January 1976 from a site known as ‘Power House’ on the banks of the Yamuna River in central Delhi. Blocks E and F were resettled from ‘Yamuna Bazaar’ near Old Delhi in the monsoon of 1976. In the 2001 census, some 23,700 people were officially living in 3778 houses in Punarvaspur, although this is almost certainly underreporting due to the subletting of rooms. A, B, C, D blocks are predominantly Hindu, from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, with a large proportion of Scheduled Caste (‘Dalit’) residents (in three blocks around 50%) identifying themselves as members of the ‘Valmiki’ caste. Many work as sweepers for the Municipality, while numerous older men had worked for the Delhi Electricity Board (DESU) before its privatization in 2002. The remainder, especially younger men, work for private businesses in East Delhi’s industrial areas, in workshops, retail, as autorickshaw drivers, etc. Contrastingly, E and F block residents, as ‘Bengali’ Muslims without access to Scheduled Caste based quotas (‘reservations’) for government jobs, often work in home-based industries (e.g. waste-sorting, garment work, handcart vending). There is a higher proportion of casual labourers and correspondingly lower incomes.

Punarvaspur is a place woven through with narratives, both the subject and more often the setting for their telling. Galis, narrow (3 m wide) semi-domestic, neighbourly and relationship-‘thick’ lanes, link Punarvaspur’s wider commercial streets. Stewart describes the texture and traffic of social life in rural West Virginia as composed of ‘thickets of storied sociability’ (Stewart, 1996: 6), often told, ‘just settin’ (1996: 17). Similarly in Punarvaspur stories flow through galis and are valued in themselves as time passes; pleasurable to tell, but also how information, news and comment passes up, down and between lanes and acquaintances renewed.

These exchanges often have moral and associational value – interacting with neighbours is an investment in the sociability of these relationships, reaffirming and cementing them. Families who avoid all such interactions in the lane are viewed as aloof, giving themselves ‘airs’. Doing fieldwork, conversations could be held privately, inside houses or on rooftops, but this was unusual. Usually they were multi-voiced and polyphonous, with contradictory additions thrown in, making them more collaborative than singly authored accounts. Often they were punctuated by comment, a scramble to collect water, or distracted by a good bargain from a handcart vendor.

The resettlement shocked new residents’ livelihoods, challenging their ability to sustain a toehold in the city. Without a secure job in Punarvaspur it was very difficult to survive on Delhi’s borders so far from sources of casual work in the city centre. This produced a violent stratification along lines of relative wealth as the poorest residents abandoned their plots and left the neighbourhood. Beyond the city’s limits the new colony abounded with the hair-raising tales of a frontier town. Yet the ‘pioneer narratives’ one might imagine are blunted in the present by the steady movement of residents in and out of the colony. Those with greater resources move up and out, while new migrants to the city, in search of affordable accommodation with security of tenure in a ‘legal’ colony, ³ move in.

Consequently, tales of the resettlement are not necessarily personal accounts. For some residents origin stories of the settlement assert the legitimacy of the colony and their residence, rather than directly retell their experience. In the accounts below, I suggest these narratives are forms of spatial practice that seek to influence and shape relations with others and their experience of place too.

Narratives of fear, the ‘jungle’ and the possibility of transformation

Veena Karki's family, originally from Nepal, were amongst the first arrivals from Power House. Their telling of their experience of the resettlement and early days of the colony was similar to many others I heard.

We are sitting in the lane outside her house with her sister-in-law and several neighbours, under a dingily dark but dry, late monsoon sky. ‘We came from Power House in Indira Gandhi’s time’, Veena explained. ‘When we shifted [to here], it was jungle all around. It was completely empty.’ ‘There was nothing but grass’, adds her sister-in-law, gesturing up to the level of her neck. Each family was given a plot but it took Veena’s family more than six months before they could build a solid room to live in, and with no sewerage residents were supposed to use the community toilet blocks. These however were filthy, with a reputation for ‘peeping toms’ and where women were molested, so that women preferred to ‘go outside’ into the ‘jungle’ scrubland then surrounding Punarvaspur. ‘It’s not a private colony’, her sister-in-law continues, ‘the government can pick us up and move us anytime.’ Unlike the houses and plots purchased by people in ‘private colonies’, residents in Punarvaspur had been allotted their plot by the state and asserted that they could just as easily be dispossessed again by the state. ⁴

People often said that Punarvaspur was built on a former cremation ground. Veena recalls that cremations continued after the resettlement. Catching the early bus to school, back in central Delhi, she remembered seeing pyres. ‘The smell; it was impossible to sit outside like this.’ ‘It was a kabristan [Muslim graveyard]’, a neighbour from several doors down chips in on her way from the market. ‘When people dug the foundations for their houses, they found human bones. They just used to appear out of the soil. Word would go round and people would come from all over to see.’ The cremation ground was eventually moved, although Veena doesn’t remember when this was or how it was done, ‘perhaps people went to see HKL Bhagat? – He was MP [for East Delhi at the time]’.

Given the unsettling descriptions, I tentatively asked what people had felt about the resettlement and was surprised by the replies. ‘People here came from places that were worse; at Power House the kitchen and living area was not separate either, so they did not miss anything’, says another neighbour. ‘People were pleased, she [Indira Gandhi] picked us up off the road and gave us somewhere to live.’ An older woman who joins us disagrees. She and her husband, originally from the Punjab, had lived in a ‘private’ colony until seven years ago. ‘In that place you could sit comfortably with good people’, she says wistfully. Now they rent a room on the first floor but she will not be drawn on why they moved. Reetu, another neighbour, joins on the steps, adding that Punarvaspur seemed very strange when she arrived from Nepal after her marriage. In her village she said, ‘people were all the same, here people are all mixed up; there are SC and ST people. ⁵ We have to live with other castes’, and she complains of their swearing and abusive language. Veena’s sister-in-law, who married in from a more prosperous neighbourhood in the early 1980s, continues: ‘I asked my parents, why are you getting me married here, when you’ve lived in a house with toilets and a kitchen?’ She was anxious about living in a resettlement colony, saying they had a bad reputation: ‘they are rowdy, and the atmosphere and feel of the place was not good’. But her parents had told her that her husband was a good match, and although Punarvaspur was as she had feared, she has adapted. Veena tries to steer the conversation: ‘The atmosphere of the place is changing, good families also live here. Water and electricity is less [regular in supply], so some people leave, but other families also buy houses here because it is cheaper.’ ‘There are good people living here, but given the choice, why would people want to live here?’, the Punjabi neighbour replies.

Veena’s mother returns home. In her 70s, she is outgoing and forthright. Neighbours depart back to their houses or to the market, as she settles herself on the steps and launches into her story. She had lived all over the North Indian ‘hills’ with her army husband, in Shimla, Kashmir, before arriving to live in Delhi. Their first place proved too expensive, so they rented a jhuggi (shack) at Power House when her husband joined the fire brigade. At demolition, ‘They brought us here in trucks, and put us down in this place’, adding dismissively that, of course, she had moved many times before.

From her location in Punarvaspur, by speaking of ‘Indira Gandhi’s time’, Veena is referring to the political context of the period of Emergency Rule (1975–1977), when vast numbers of forced evictions and demolitions of informal housing were carried out with no formal means of appeal. To say that ‘it was the Emergency’ in these accounts works to ‘emplot’ the speaker’s agency (or the lack of it) in that context, and functions here as a sort of explanation for compliance. It serves as a way for people to explain how they found themselves in Punarvaspur, in spite of their anger or fear at events, even as a reply to a question about what people felt and thought about their experience of resettlement. An allusion to forcible eviction, the destruction of homes and an atmosphere of insecurity, replies may be reinforced by the rhetorical question, ‘What else could we do?’ Several people refer to the demolitions and early days of the colony as a time of aatank, of acute fear, apprehension, even terror. Yet participants in this conversation are also positioning themselves in relation to the time: where they have come from, their perceptions of improvement and what they would accept now. In effect they are also negotiating to ‘emplace’ themselves in their present social relations, their ‘proper’ behaviour, and senses of status.

‘They threw us out of Delhi’

Bhram Lal, in his late 60s, is clad in a grey kurta tunic with bicycle grease blackened hands when he lurches up early one evening. It turns out he is fairly drunk, and wants to know why I’m talking to his son. He is not much mollified when I say I am interested in what it was like when people arrived in Punarvaspur.

When we arrived it was barren land; we were thrown out of Delhi! The poor, government doesn’t try to solve their problems, they removed [the poor]. Indira Gandhi said, ‘Remove poverty’ – but they removed the poor! This was the government. They pushed us into the jungle – ‘wherever [the poor] are – throw them away!’

In these accounts residents narrate themselves, ambivalently and uncertainly, into the present and future, as well as into the past of the colony. Present-day demolitions uncomfortably reminded residents that Punarvaspur was perhaps not really Delhi, and the opportunities the city had presented could suddenly seem remote. The stories told here serve to ‘emplace’ residents in a constellation of social and structural locations on the periphery of Delhi. The repeated references to Punarvaspur’s jangal and border location in the late 1970s underpin the sense of uncertainty and fear of social disintegration felt by the newly resettled residents. This is evident in tales of bodies found dumped in the scrub by women venturing out at dawn to defecate in the relative privacy of the scrubland, or of men robbed of their wages at the end of the bus route. The description of land surrounding the new resettlement colonies as jungle is common (also Tarlo, 2003: 131), the Hindi etymology of jangal carrying shades of uncultivated, uninhabited and particularly wild land (Zimmermann, 1987: 16). Punarvaspur was not the city, but in its location in the barren, grass and thorn of the ‘jungle’, it was not the ‘village’ or former home-space either. Deployed in tandem with assertions of being ‘thrown out of Delhi’ into a wild (‘jangali’) and ‘barren’ future beyond the edge of the city, fear and uncertainty come to be embodied in these tales of marginality and lack of agency, addressed both to the past and to the fear of a jobless or resettled future.

‘Indira settled this place’

Against this backdrop it can be hard to understand why anyone stayed in Punarvaspur, or any other resettlement colony. Many residents objected to this interpretation: ‘But here we had land, why would you leave?’ This is an important point, for disturbing as the early settlement was, households who had sustainable jobs then are relatively well placed today. So it is worth paying attention to the sometimes contradictory and ambivalent ways in which residents locate themselves in these accounts, and in relation to the colony itself.

Despite the negative reputation of the resettlement, as Veena’s neighbour says, ‘People were pleased, [Indira Gandhi] picked us up off the road and gave us somewhere to be [live].' A number of people argued that it was because Indira Gandhi was ‘with the poor’ or ‘felt for the poor’ that she had settled people. Others claimed that she had bought the land with her own money and the difficulties that people had faced during the resettlement were government chamchas (‘yes-men’) thwarting her efforts. Some even described her in divine terms as Bharat Mata [Mother India], attributing the lowering of the Yamuna floods that inundated the new resettlement colonies in North and East Delhi in 1978 to her, explaining how she had performed a puja from the main Yamuna bridge, throwing gold into the river.

Divine attributes aside, it is noticeable that even amidst the struggles of the resettlement and brutalities of the Emergency, Indira Gandhi generally remains beyond reproach. The appearance of Indira Gandhi and East Delhi’s MP (HKL Bhagat) in these narratives highlights the critical role of political patronage in negotiating access to services. With land and property at their centre they perhaps offer some explanation of Indira Gandhi’s enduring status. Land is the medium that people struggled to control, both at Power House and on arrival at Punarvaspur. It is the medium in which residents invest both money and meaning to access the possibilities of the city; it is a space in which to live and work, but it is also the ground from which relationships are forged with others, within and beyond the neighbourhood. As resident Sukhdev, baby daughter on his knee, explained frustratedly of his parents, ‘They have eaten the Congress Party’s salt’, explaining the debt his father has felt all his life to the Congress Party for his plot. ‘They will not vote for another party.’ The narrative depiction of party figures granting boons is almost a performance of allegiance in itself (Appadurai, 1990). These glowing accounts are assertions that make these relationships visible, even if in Sukhdev’s contemporary view it is an unreciprocated exchange, one that sits uncomfortably with the struggle to survive and remake life in the neighbourhood. Yet the high stakes at which people were playing and potential costs to themselves in this struggle for land and space become disturbingly clear in the next section.

The cost of a plot: Forced bargains, constraints and possibilities

Whether people stayed or left Punarvaspur after the resettlement depended on their calculation of the best use of their resources. Should they sell, extracting what value there was from the plot that they had just been allotted, and move back to a jhuggi nearer their workplace? This was risky at the time of Emergency. Some residents, with accommodation tied to their employment, put up a jhuggi at Punarvaspur, renting it out, others oscillating between their work quarters and the resettlement colony. But for the majority who could sustain living at Punarvaspur, their prime reason to stay, as they explained with hindsight from a relatively prosperous present, was that they had just been allotted land. They had, grudgingly, in effect just been given leave to stay in the city. ‘There was land here, so why leave?’, Veena’s neighbour argued. Others pointed out, ‘how could people know then that this land would become worth so much?’, or more acutely, ‘there is nothing in the village – where else would we go?’ Residents’ positioning of themselves in these accounts, as both ‘thrown out of the city’ but also allotted land, reflects their physically ambiguous location on the margins of the city whose subsequent exponential growth has engulfed the colony. More significantly these ambiguities reflect residents’ attempts to shore up their position as legitimate allottees and modern city dwellers, rather than erstwhile squatters and villagers, out of place in Delhi.

Nonetheless, the cost of remaining in the city was high for some. Socio-economic and religious differences aside, the origin site and date of the two waves of demolition produced radically different experiences of resettlement, as well as spaces in the colony today. Far fewer residents who had been part of the resettlement in E and F blocks remained. But most who did arrive in the second resettlement mentioned sterilization (nasbandi). This sharply contrasts with A, B, C and D blocks of the first phase, where cases of sterilization were rarely mentioned and then in pejorative terms. I was surprised how easily the topic was broached by E and F residents who had undergone it, as well as how often they assumed it had happened to everyone on Punarvaspur – this despite general social and religious disapproval at the unnaturalness of the procedure and the stigma with which infertility and nasbandi is viewed. The difference reflects the increasing pace of Emergency decrees; on 15 May 1976, after the first round of resettlement to Punarvaspur, the ‘Provisions for the General Public’ order was issued. This declared that eligibility for a plot (and many other public services) would now be subject to the production of a sterilization certificate. ⁶

For Dilruba in E block, sterilization was clearly a ‘forced bargain’. Her husband’s work as a rickshaw puller in Old Delhi made him vulnerable to being picked up by the police. Under the Emergency there was a crackdown on informal trades including hawkers, handcart vendors and rickshaw pullers, clearing them from the streets to beautify the city. Fearing the consequences of arrest meant that despite rickshaw-pulling being their only source of income, her husband thought it wiser to stay off the streets for several days. ‘It was the Emergency, there was no work.’ But after several days of sitting at home, their three children were hungry, and fearful or not, he had to go out to work. When her husband didn’t come home Dilruba went to look for him, eventually finding him at the much feared Tihar Jail. Begging his release she was to see two women, Ruksana and Fatima.

‘I remember their names very clearly’, she says angrily. ‘They said ‘‘Get nasbandi done, [and] your man [husband] will be released’’.’ They took her to Lady Irwin Hospital, where the operation was performed; she got the papers and her husband was released. He was very angry with her, but as she says, what else could she have done? With the papers it was possible for them to claim a plot in Punarvaspur and they arrived at the height of the monsoon with nothing more than some bamboo matting, a rope bed and a few pots. Gradually they earned money to build up their plot, bit by bit. ‘But today’, she says, fixing me with angry, glitteringly bright, and I realize tear-filled eyes, ‘my husband, son and daughter are dead, only my last son is with me. If he dies – what will I do?’ Her neighbour puts her head through the ragged curtain over the door to collect Dilruba for Thursday evening prayers at Firoz Shah Kotla’s dargarh (tomb) in central Delhi. Catching the end of the conversation, she directs a torrent of abuse and innuendo about Sanjay Gandhi, ⁷ Indira Gandhi’s son, at me. Again I am struck how even in this situation Indira Gandhi remains unassailable in the fallout of resettlement and the darker side of the Emergency.

In D block, Sultani explained that she and her husband had initially been resettled in West Delhi. A government clerk told them they could transfer to Punarvaspur, so long as one of them got ‘the operation’ (i.e. sterilization) done. So her husband did. Arriving in Punarvaspur in December 1976, nearly a year after the first settlements, they found a plot they thought they could live on, and they ‘sat on it’. Sultani describes how by the end of 1976 there was a lively trade in empty and abandoned plots, as people from within Punarvaspur, elsewhere in Delhi, and across the state border in Uttar Pradesh bought and ‘captured’ (squatted) plots.

Peripheral, subject to little formal supervision, Punarvaspur was simultaneously the site of much bureaucratic activity, with a small government ‘office’ where a patwari (clerk) kept (and varied) accounts of allocations. ⁸ In this moment of flux and uncertainty at the height of the Emergency, the fixity of documents, gained in some cases through indelible physical changes, allowed people to bargain and move, as they would not otherwise have been able to. In this way people reordered themselves into plots they liked, or away from neighbours of a different caste or religion they did not want to associate with. While some people felt confident enough to do this, others feared dealing with government officers, passing up the opportunity of gaining an extra plot or more valuable location.

For Lakshmi and her daughter Anita who narrated the story, without sterilization they could not have found a place to live. Originally from South India, Lakshmi’s husband had abandoned her after she gave birth to their fourth daughter, but no son. She worked at the LNJP Government Hospital, but there was nowhere she and her four young girls could live while earning Rs2 a day. Lakshmi was quite clear that she would have no more children, so when the possibility of obtaining a plot by sterilization came up, she took it. As Anita says, what else could her mother have done? She was sleeping on pavements, fearing for her safety and that of her four young girls. So, Anita says, her mother did what she could – she had the operation and they moved to their plot in Punarvaspur.

The emplotment of the narrative in these last two stories attempts to reverse, or at least counteract, the dominant interpretation of the highly stigmatized act of sterilization, but also that of the Emergency and the experience of the resettlement. By introducing the language of value and land as a kind of post hoc calculation, they work to shift the narrative slant. In this new emplotment, the narrator’s decision is reappraised in the contemporary light of relative wealth, so that the contemporary appreciation in plot value makes sterilization appear as a choice. This move effectively reclaims the ability to act and perhaps even to make an active exchange in an otherwise very difficult situation. In doing so, these stories work to emplot and return some kind of agency to what are often predominantly passive accounts or depictions of residents as victims of the Emergency. By disaggregating the ‘massified’ accounts of resettlement, emphasizing the individual circumstances of decisions taken, they represent the opportunities and possibilities that people extracted from the situation as decisions taken. In this way an element of agency is retained, even if the stakes are high and choices stark.

For both Dilruba and Sultani, undergoing ‘the operation’ is presented and rationalized as a ‘forced deal’ (zabardasti sauda), where lost fertility for the gain of a plot appears as a total exchange with the state, a complete payment. In this ‘emplotment’ there were no outstanding dues on their part. Consequently, in the present day, for both women there is also a strong sense of injustice – of default or reneging by the state over the current state of affairs in the face of increasing costs of living (especially utilities) and uncertainty. For these women especially, their right to their plot and subsidized utilities was grounded in the totality and completeness of the exchange and high cost at which it had been obtained. Their narrative presentation is strikingly similar to Lawrence Cohen’s analysis of sterilization and ‘operability’, ⁹ defined as ‘the degree to which one's belonging to and legitimate demands of the state are mediated through invasive medical commitment’ (2004: 169). In his analysis, the sterilized body of the subject is offered as a ‘countergift’ to the developmental state in exchange for the physical adherence to the norms of modern citizenship. In this deal, while forced, fertility is the medium through which people normally represented by the state as ‘the masses’ take on the appearance of ‘modern’ citizens through population control in exchange for city residence and individual right to a plot.

These narratives bring ‘the idea of the state’ (Fuller and Harriss, 2001: 4) back into the picture, not simply through the weighty application of force or mediations of local leaders and ‘big men’ (pradhans), as it often appears in Punarvaspur. Instead, residents engage the state itself by ‘emplotting’ it into their narratives. By investing in this site, living in its spaces-made-places and jhuggies-made-dwellings, Punarvaspur residents re-emphasize what they have made of the neighbourhood since its settlement. While once ‘it was all jungle’, in their next sentence residents point out ‘but look, today, there are three storeys and every house has at least a bicycle’. Time is marked not just by a politician’s rule (‘Indira’s time’), but with the arrival of water and electricity, transforming the locale into somewhere liveable. Houses are built incrementally with scrimped money or a son’s first salary, appropriating and remaking their alienating surroundings from the state's minimal provisions into some kind of home (see Miller, 1988: 354). In this way, residents are linked through their shared accounts of the experience of demolition, but also through their investment into the colony and social relations there, having made the best of a forced bargain with the state.

This relationship of the state with resettlers has implicitly been confirmed through historically lower rates in resettlement colonies for services (from bus passes to water bills). But with increasing wealth in the city, political and commercial pressure from newly privatized utilities companies means efforts are now being made to incorporate all Delhi residents into their revenue streams, some for the first time. In addition to increased charges, post-privatization electricity meters have been extensively installed and are widely thought to run much faster than the old ones. Although now on equal terms with other city dwellers, spiralling costs highlight the wealth gap between the city's richest and poorest, leaving resettlement colony residents feeling increasingly excluded and disenfranchised. More and more residents wonder aloud if they won't be displaced again from a city that ‘wants to remove the poor’, in Bhram Lal's words.

If the majority of residents in Punarvaspur had put their fears and fortunes into the bricks and mortar of the place, for Dilruba, Sultani and others, the degree and meaning of their investment is much greater. In Dilruba’s account, her anger brings her abruptly to the present.

We built this [house] – and now – listen – they are asking for tax; electricity tax, water tax! Why are they asking?! – The operation was done – nasbandi [sterilization] was done – and a plot was given. Now why are they asking for tax?!

Emplacement: Narrating social relations in space

The prevailing representation of resettlement and the Emergency, in press and popular accounts, is of facilities lacking and lists compiled of the dehumanizing effects of demolition and relocation (Dayal and Bose, 1977: 119). These are often depictions of passivity, of things done to the resettled and frustrations of the authors, unable to prevent them. Yet in the accounts above, the Emergency itself emerges as a period of not just upheaval and brutality, but of ambivalence and uncertainty, and even in some accounts a perverse kind of opportunity too.

Cheryl Mattingly describes ‘emplotment’ as the enfolding and negotiation of speaker and listener into a particular set of events or dispositions through narrative (1998). In this article I have drawn on this understanding of narrative to try to understand what people do with narratives about place. Unlike the clearly directed outcomes of Mattingly’s encounters with occupational therapists, the endpoint of people’s narratives in Punarvaspur is less clear. Veena and her neighbours can be seen emplotting themselves within contemporary social relations, through narratives set in the past – the resettlement. By positioning themselves as respectable wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law, they are making the best of a bad situation (Veena’s mother), foregrounding what status they have. These accounts are meaningful for their relationship to a place, Punarvaspur.

Punarvaspur's status as a resettlement colony is central to understanding these narratives and significant as the site of their telling. Massey’s dynamic, processual understanding of place (1994: 154) opens up a perspective on Punarvaspur as the site of the spatial practice of narrativizing the resettlement into a particular set of relationships. Residents emplot difficult social relations in Punarvaspur through narratives of ‘emplacement’, creating spaces to live in and speak from in the maelstrom of city life. Framed and reframed, residents narrate their experiences in the past, ‘thrown out of the city’, as active if ambivalent participants in what was at best a forced deal. Appearing in the present, they are respectable neighbours, with an eye to the future with the uncertainties about jobs and livelihoods. So, present-day anxieties continue to animate both the articulation and performance of residents’ narratives of emplacement, locating and negotiating their own ‘place’ in the city.