Brokerage from the Margins: Mumbai's Vital Infrastructures of Urbanism

• In Event: AIIS Showcase on New Research: Urban Charisma and the Margins of Democracy in Urban India - Sponsored by the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS)

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Indian urbanism has drawn important attention to the role of mediation and brokerage in producing and facilitating urban processes - of urban development, investment, exchange, accumulation, and material/spatial urban transformation. The complexity, opacity and “constitutive unknowability” (Hansen and Verkaaik: 2009) of the urban (not only, but perhaps especially in the rapidly-growing cities of the global South) translates into new kinds of financial, material, social risk and vulnerability. How are the very real dangers of living and doing business in Mumbai mitigated and hedged in the dramatically-reconfigured context of liberalization and globalization? What role do things like kinship networks, religious associations, geographic proximity, or imaginaries of ‘community’ play in animating or
inhibiting the city’s extraordinarily-dynamic economies and urban processes?

This paper takes the city of Mumbai, with its highly-complex, institutionally-opaque,
extraordinarily- heterogeneous and socio-economically-stratified character, as site in which to probe the relationships between trust, kinship, danger/risk, and entrepreneurial ethics. Scholars across the socio-political spectrum have emphasized ‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘enterprise citizenship’ as a valorized ethic of self-making thought to characterize the contemporary global era (e.g., Giddens 1991, Tilly 1999, Fukuyama 1995). One idea that sits at the core of the concept concerns the question of ‘social trust,’ and the apportion/ management of risk in the institutionally-reconfigured context of late modernity. Mumbai presents an important site to probe the possibilities and tensions in this idea of social trust and entrepreneurial self-making: notwithstanding the city's social heterogeneity, famously-incendiary ethnonationalist political life (which results not-infrequently in bouts of inter-community violence), and dramatic scenes of socio-economic inequality the city’s entrepreneurial vitality is palpable.

This paper focuses on the shadowy, marginal, and little-understood figure of the urban broker, drawing on research conducted over six years with a Mumbai middleman named Rakesh.
The accounts demonstrate that, surprisingly, it is neither structural endowments like capital or material resources, nor socio-political attributes like caste or community that enable Rakesh’s work as a ‘trustworthy’ broker. Rather, it is his very marginality - as a migrant and as an outsider - that enable Rakesh to operate as an invisible but vital ‘infrastructure’ of contemporary global urbanism.

Author

• Lisa Bjorkman, University of Louisville