Imagining the Rural: Longing and Labor in India’s Construction Industry

• In Event: Modernizing Villages in Asia: Navigating between Urban and Rural

Abstract

Gurgaon, a city-suburb of New Delhi National Capital Region, grew rapidly over the past two decades to expand from fields and forests into a hi-tech, multinational city with glass towers and gated apartment communities. The recently constructed city, originally occupied by a majority of farming or cattle herding communities, encloses several urban villages that act as service, industrial, or dormitory hubs for the offices, homes, and industries that have been built on their farmlands. This city on the edge of the desert expresses a great divide between its local population and the middle class communities who moved there. The villagers are considered backward, patriarchal, violent, and the villages—small, badly maintained housing settlements—are considered dangerous and dirty.

This paper takes seriously the category of the village or the rural within the politics and practices of urban development. What is the role of a local rural population in a rapidly urbanizing area? What are the histories of the activation of these roles? What form and sentiments of village integration into urbanization does real estate reveal? Taking examples from the life of select “village locals” working in Gurgaon’s real estate industry, I explore the modalities through which village economies and social and spatial ecologies are transformed through a real estate industry. I explore the role and perception of locals within these dynamics. In an era where scholars promote and predict the domination of urbanization, I argue for attention to the rural imagination as a key driver and component of these processes.

Author

• Namita Vijay Dharia, Harvard University