What Kind of Urban? A Case Study of Kullu,A Small Indian Town

This article examines the kind of urbanisation that is emerging in Kullu, a small but quickly growing North Indian mountain town. It does this both within the context of the town itself, but also by studying its relationship to nearby villages that are increasingly a part of the town’s remit as it emerges as a new metropolitan region.

What the article seeks to highlight is that despite rising incomes, urban and spatial expansion and in-migration, many of the markers of new urban growth commonly found in other metropolitan Indian cities are absent in Kullu. These include increasing corporate real estate development, middle class and public consumptive cultures, neoliberal experiments with governance and rising urban inequality. The article locates the area’s tepid response to the templated ‘new’ Indian urban in a continuing orientation and attunement of Kullu residents to the high alpine Himalayan landscape within which the town is located and by which it is hemmed wherein belonging and dwelling are predicated on a continuing attentiveness to the unfolding landscape, and on rurality, in which many urban residents continue to have a stake. This, even as relatively widespread land distribution among those considered ‘local’ ensures a relatively well-distributed and languid prosperity in the area as a whole.

In this context, the article argues for the rethinking of singular definitions of urbanisation and of the relationship between urban and rural areas, particularly in light of dominant metropolitan experiences, and to consider the alternative forms of urban life that Kullu presents. Simultaneously, however, it discusses new and emerging fault lines that threaten Kullu’s existing rural–urban compact in the concluding section, namely new youth cultures and the building practices of locals themselves.