Vishan was walking me through his neighbourhood in Nathupur village, Gurgaon. The village sits on prime real estate in the city, enclosed on three sides by DLF Cyber City commercial hub and DLF Phase-3 residential complex, and encircled by the elevated Rapid Metro system that overshadows the neighbourhood. Nathupur sits on some of the most high-value real estate in India. Vishan was from an agriculturalist Gujjar family, his grandfather owned agricultural land long sold to DLF in the 1970s and 1980s and his father spent time in the Indian army. Today Vishan and his two brothers work ‘in property’. From the balcony of his three-storey whitewashed villa on Nathupur's eastern flank, Vishan pointed towards the various buildings he owned along with his two brothers. The family business owned five buildings in Nathupur, two tall tenement buildings in the centre of the village that are rented out to ‘labouring classes’ and two ‘apartment-style’ tenement buildings that house middle-class call-centre and office workers. In a city with a dearth of public or low-rent housing, Vishan's village property business extracts rents from and facilitates the daily reproduction of Gurgaon's army of incoming workers. Vishan explained how he and his brothers, after coming into some cash from a property sale, had upgraded a tenement building into one- and two-bedroom set apartments for ‘professionals’ arriving from Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. Vishan's family had diversified their rental revenues across Gurgaon, investing in private schools, commercial and residential plots and a car lease business in the city. Standing on the balcony of Vishan's villa, overseeing the family's empire of densely packed tenements and apartment buildings surrounded by the glistening monuments of global real estate, the subaltern relationships between global real estate capital and agrarian institutions, political actors and territories come to the fore. How were Vishan's family able to develop a mini-property empire amid some of the highest value real estate in India? Vishan, like all members of Nathupur's proprietary body, holds non-alienable, non-transferable property rights to land within Nathupur's lal dora boundaries. The liberalisation of Gurgaon's land market was facilitated by colonial-era property relations that vested monopoly property rights to agriculturalist caste communities within the village abadi deh.

To get to Gurgaon from the villages that flank the National Highway 48 (NH48) in southeastern Haryana, you have to either take a crowded intercity bus or pile into a shared jeep. As a young researcher, I tended to travel by shared jeep. Accounts of Gurgaon's landscape usually move from New Delhi, southward on the Delhi Metro to HUDA City Centre station at the heart of New Gurgaon, narrating a landscape that transitions from a historic urban centre to its boisterous, nouveau riche neighbour, from urban capital's (post-)colonial being to its unwieldy neoliberal becoming. And yet, I have spent most of the past ten years in Gurgaon moving in a different direction. The jeeps are stacked with twelve other passengers, all of us clutching our small lunchboxes, in Tetris-style formation, silently grimacing as the worn-out suspension ploughs through an assault course of BMWs, SUVs and freight trucks. The NH48 that runs through the centre of Gurgaon forms part of the 1,700 miles of highway that runs from Chennai to New Delhi and is incorporated into the 1 lakh crore rupees Delhi–Mumbai economic corridor. These economic corridors that tear through rural spaces are viewed by politicians as key engines of post-agrarian economic growth vital to the transformation of Delhi's agrarian hinterland into productive, capitalised urban space. They are what Grappi and Dey have termed a ‘neoliberal institution’, one that instructs and joins up the extractive and financialised operations of post-colonial capitalist development.

Riding on the NH48 from Gurgaon's southern periphery, we tear through an expanse of partially irrigated, gridded fields interspersed by clusters of small, whitewashed bungalows and roadside garages. At this point the road becomes increasingly populated by a deluge of billboards hyping the land on our flanks with land brokerage services selling ‘hot land’ and ‘investment opportunities’ in real estate projects yet to materialise. In the winter this part of rural Haryana is masked by a dense, low fog and the warmth of human proximity the jeep affords provides welcome respite from the cold. In 2018 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Gurgaon the most polluted city in the world and the winter is when the smog is at its worst.

THE ROOTS OF THE GURGAON MODEL

This chapter explores the prehistory to Gurgaon's contemporary agrarian urbanisation, highlighting how neoliberalism on India's urban frontier is realised as an outcome of attempts to graft market-driven governance onto extant class, territorial and institutional settings. Studying a forebearer to neoliberal urban India reveals neoliberalism's earthbound mediations, an incoherent ideological project compromised by the territorial and institutional alliances brokered to make space for capital on the edge of the national capital. Agrarian city-making in the twenty-first century has relied upon class projects that include the landowning peasantry into property and labour markets. But how were such class projects forged? How did certain rural populations become dominant? And why were they so easily conscripted to sell themselves and their lands into urban economy from the 1980s? In this chapter I explore how the articulation of capitalist uneven development, liberalism and caste came to structure social formations favourable to the Gurgaon model.

Gurgaon's urbanisation holds many of the characteristics of neoliberalism: financialised real-estate-led urbanisation; elite propertied citizenship; secessionary, privatised governance and infrastructural development; and a celebration of entrepreneurialism and liberal capitalism form the backbone of Gurgaon's story. And yet underwriting this façade is not only mass state-facilitated investment but also the yoking of land and labour markets to agrarian institutions and class compositions configured under colonial and post-colonial agrarian modernisation. The Gurgaon model, this chapter argues, is characteristic of what Brenner, Peck and Theodore call ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, the coming together of neoliberal actors and logics with local institutions and processes in ways that enable market-driven growth while giving space to quite other political-economic and spatial logics.

In this chapter I will move across three key moments that were foundational to the making of Gurgaon as a frontier for urban real estate capital. The chapter begins by outlining the infrastructure of the ‘Gurgaon model’ and discusses the model's early roots in pre-liberalisation Haryana. It was the repurposing of Nehruvian-era planning controls by pro-liberalisation politicians that gave the model its form and presages many of the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1990s and 2000s. I argue that the model's relative success has been dependent upon pre-existing social and economic conditions forged through colonial and post-colonial agrarian development.

I moved into a tenement room on Kapashera in late 2014. My building formed part of a dense gridded matrix of four-storey tenement blocks that houses thousands of migrant workers – predominately migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – who come to work on the garment export lines in Gurgaon's Udyog Vihar industrial estate on temporary contracts. My tenement awakes at 6 a.m., as Ashmita, the building pradhan, unlocks the front gates and switches on the whirring water pump, and a chorus of hissing pressure cookers and tinny radios call in the new day. At around 7:30 a.m. dreary, red-eyed young men amble through the front gate, exhausted from a long night shift in the industrial estate and collapse into their rooms, swapping out bed-space with roommates already taking their morning bucket shower at the rear side of the building. Soon the alleyways of Kapashera become choked with an army of workers, lunch boxes in hand, making the march toward the industrial estate. Labour contractors flank the main arteries flowing out of the tenements negotiating day rates and hours with workers before shoving them onto auto-rickshaws and into the sea of marching workers. This wave of workers that completely consumes the main road from Kapashera marches past the swanky farmhouses that occupy the Delhi–Gurgaon border, past the whisky shops where exhausted elderly workers lay drunk like roadside premonitions of industrial decay, and all the way up Peer Baba Road to the towering export houses in Gurgaon's Udyog Vihar (Figure 5.1).

Mornings in Kapashera are buzzing with activity. Freshly arrived workers – bundles of blankets and clothing in hand – alight at Kapashera bus stand and wander the alleyways in search of tenement rooms made available by workers who circulated away in the dead of the night.

A Tale ofTwo Cities

On the hot evening of 18 July 2012, the Maruti Suzuki automobile plant on the borders of Gurgaon, Haryana, was on fire. Earlier that day a supervisor had verbally abused an assembly-line worker, fights broke out with security guards, and 2,000 workers stopped production and set the factory alight. The Maruti Suzuki plant in Gurgaon's Industrial Model Township (IMT), Manesar industrial estate, is the largest car factory in India; producing two-thirds of all the cars in the country, the factory was the centrepiece of India's modern manufacturing prowess. By the morning of 19 July 2012, the factory was partially burnt out, hundreds of workers and management officials were in hospital and a supervisor was dead.

Maruti began life in the 1970s as a government-owned car manufacturer based in central Gurgaon, then a small agricultural town on Delhi's southern border. In 1983, with backing from Japan's Suzuki, Maruti produced India's first mass-consumer car (the Maruti 800 ‘people's car’) – a moment that anticipated imminent market liberalisation in the 1990s and the coming decades of mass urbanisation. Suzuki took control of the company in 1992 following India's economic liberalisation and by 2002 the Japanese conglomerate had a majority share. During that period Suzuki aggressively expanded production and iteratively reoriented the company towards flexibilised, lean manufacturing systems characteristic of contemporary globalised production regimes. By the late 2000s, Maruti Suzuki shifted production to a state-of-the-art industrial township – IMT Manesar – on the edge of Gurgaon, setting up shop in the largest factory in the country; boosting production output and restructuring the workforce, the factory became the country's engine of the future, a showpiece of globalised production and high-tech industrial prowess feeding the state's insatiable desire for rapid urban and infrastructural development. The fire marks a denouement in India's embrace of globalised flexible production.

The fire of course did not come out of nowhere. The factory had been embroiled in near-constant workplace struggles for over a decade. A year before the fire, in June 2011 both temporary and permanent workers at the IMT Manesar plant carried out strikes, tool-downs and occupied the factory on two occasions, costing the company over 200 million US dollars, dipping the company's market share while suffocating the complex supply chain that extends across the region.

DRAFTING THE CITY

‘That’s the problem with these maps: this one was in such bad condition we couldn't read it.’ Squinting to read the scrawled handwriting of the field book, Ajay sifted through photographs, hand-drawn plot sketches, land record copies and a cloth cadastral map depicting the parcel of land our jeep was parked on in the western periphery of Gurgaon. With a laptop precariously balanced on his knees, we were attempting to draft the contours of property in the land on the AutoCAD software in preparation for the day's boundary demarcation. Pushing his fingers across his temples, Ajay lamented the poor condition of the records that Virinder, the kanungo (a senior field-bureaucrat within the Haryana Revenue Department), had brought along: ‘These records are unclear, this road could be anywhere … they had a new one made, of course we have the mussavi [original cadastral map] and the GPS survey image but we have to be certain with these things.’ Ajay explained that our attempts to survey and correct a disputed boundary between the two parties’ property was likely to be difficult. Not only are there frequent inconsistencies and points of ambivalence within the documents we were sifting through, but also the land had already been subjected to two cadastral surveys over the previous twelve months. With each survey, each conducted using different technologies and methods, new certified maps came into circulation that would come to obscure the veracity of the boundary. As we attempted to map out a copy of the record onto the software, Ajay pointed out some of these inconsistencies from the jeep window: ‘Look here on the ground the [grid] is not accurate, this here road is not straight like this, it is coming at an angle, see? These plots are not square – there will always be difference between the maps, the survey [image] and the land itself.’ On top of all of this, not all land claims are recorded in the map. Post-colonial land gridding and consolidation screened out messy non-geometric property from the revenue maps, leaving thousands of property shares hidden from state view. To find these unmapped shares we search through the textual data of the jamabandi (landholding register) and field book (original settlement notes) and a series of smaller hand-drawn sketches of land parcels that are yet to make it into the cadastral map.

MALL DREAMS

I met Mukesh Yadav sitting on the side of the Gurgaon–Sohna road in Badshahpur village in late 2015. Mukesh and two other elderly men were playing cards under the late afternoon shade while two others shared a hookah pipe. Badshahpur village was incorporated into the Gurgaon–Manesar Urban Complex in 2007, precipitating a rush on the village land by a host of domestic and international real estate firms emboldened by the liberalisation of the real estate sector two years ago. The historic territory of eighteenth-century Mughal military ruler Begum Samru, today the village is split into two by the road that connects central Gurgaon to its southern neighbour Sohna, a much quieter town that had recently been brought under its own urban development plan. Between 2008 and 2014, 560 acres of land in Badshahpur was purchased by developers and licenced by the planning department for the construction of a series of gated residential towers and colonies at the intersection of the highly sought-after DLF Golf Course Road. The village, akin to so many in Gurgaon, is composed of low-rise, fading and densely constructed tenement buildings linked by a maze of narrow paved streets, hemmed in on all sides by the porous boundary walls of posh residential colonies. The roadside is alive with dusty activity throughout the late afternoon and into the evening, with lorries, jeeps and cars shooting down the main thoroughfare passing small grocery shops and dhabas rubbing shoulders with small brokerage and dealership offices.

Mukesh's family had owned 4 acres of land across Badshahpur and like all landowners his family's landholdings were split into smaller shares scattered across different plots in the village. In addition, Mukesh's family had a non-alienable claim to both abadi property and the village shamilat (common) lands. As the eldest son, he had spent much of his life overseeing the family's land and was the final authority when it came to selling up in the mid-2000s. Like many of the small to medium landowners in Gurgaon, Mukesh's family did not greatly benefit from access to Green Revolution technologies in the 1960s. ‘Land was never profitable,’ he explained. ‘We grew some wheat and mustard but it's difficult to make a living from this land and now with the builders coming here, there's no future in farming for people here.’

This book has sought to explore processes of agrarian city-making on India's urban frontier. Gurgaon, like many peri-urban developments that have sprung up since the end of the twentieth century, has been developed through imaginative, calculative and political technologies that have been deployed to reorganise the countryside for real estate and industrial accumulation. As the narrative goes, Gurgaon's rapid ascendance as the figurehead for a ‘new urban India’, where private urban development and governance models cleanly capture mobile capital, has produced space for a hegemonic urban upper and middle class, signalling India's arrival at a global (capitalist) stage. This book has sought to complicate this well-run narrative. Since the early 1980s, Gurgaon's urbanisation has relied upon a terse remediation of agrarian spaces, institutions, actors and histories. As I have argued across this book, this project has depended upon the reproduction of a territorialised class alliance between capitalists, state institutions and so-called ‘dominant’ agrarian caste communities. It is this alliance that not only willingly opens and converts rural land into urban real estate but also manages the distribution and circulation of rents, wages and capital that underpin industrial accumulation.

This class composition was irrevocably shaped by uneven agrarian development in the colonial and post-colonial periods and are a result of hegemonic struggles engaged in by capital to forge the social and political conditions for its expansion into the countryside. This of course comes at a cost. Across this book I have sought to explore the subalternity of the frontier: the repurposing of state development agendas, the blockages in the ‘open field’ of capital circulation, the quiet delay and subversion of bureaucratic property-making and the disorderly class politics threatening the stability of the city's agrarian–urban alliances. Subalternity here describes unstable hegemonic alliances, not sociological or spatial identities. In this sense, many enrolled at the frontier are not ‘the subaltern’ classically defined. The first half of this book traces attempts led by landowner-cum-landlords and speculators to form part of a neo-middle class embedded in the urban economy, attempts not only marked by a structural subordination to global capitalist actors but also ones which are terse, incomplete and for some will inevitably fail.

WORKERSTRUGGLES IN THE AGRARIANCITY

The chapters thus far have examined the deep entanglements of the agrarian world and global capital that have shaped Gurgaon's spectacular development from agricultural hinterland to global city. In this chapter I want to think with and from the everyday struggles of migrant workers in Gurgaon, questioning what kinds of solidarities and struggles emerge from conditions of marginality and flexibility described in previous chapters, and what these solidarities reveal about subaltern urban politics in the contemporary moment. Where the previous chapter examined tenement-labour regimes, how everyday relations of the worker tenement patterned the mobility and working conditions of Gurgaon's migrant working classes, this chapter is interested in how these conditions shape attendant demands and claims for a place in the city. As I will show, the everyday struggles traced across this chapter are not made to housing, belonging or urban services – the typical registers of subaltern urban politics detailed in urban scholarship – but rather reflective of lives dominated by flux, mobility and precarity, the struggles coalesce around tentative demands for a dignified life. If contemporary scholarship on subaltern urban politics has centred on the territorial warfare waged between global capital and subaltern actors over access and use of urban land, the political struggles traced in the chapter align with the more expansive urban political agenda set out by Henri Lefebvre, as faltering calls for a transformed and renewed right to urban life. Borrowing from work elsewhere on subaltern cosmopolitanism, the chapter understands these disparate political struggles as informed by conditions of labour exploitation both in the home and workplace, migrations between the city and countryside, and ad hoc support networks that characterise the everyday lives of migrant workers in urban India. Attention to the workers’ subaltern cosmopolitanisms provides a way of getting at not only the gendered conditions that inform the workers’ willingness to engage in political action but also the strikingly tentative and speculative character of the demands being made. How have conditions in Gurgaon's tenements and workplaces, described in the previous chapter, shaped particular kinds of politics and agency among migrant workers that exceed claims to freedom?