Rural, urban, and regional: Re-spatializing capital and politics in India

Abstract

The debate over India’s economic liberalization has dwarfed significant social transformations and political changes since the late 1970s/early 1980s, with non-Brahmin upper castes and other backward class castes rising to power in several Indian states, irrevocably altering the political landscape of symbols, language, styles of mobilization, and alignments. These changes have, in turn, created new urban-rural networks and connections or reinforced older ones. This chapter attempts to understand rural-urban transitions and connections in light of these political trends with a special focus on the three states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra. These states have been at the center of new urban dynamics caused, in part, by global linkages fostered by economic and spatial switches in their urban centers. While rising political and economic aspirations of ‘regional’ or rural elites have been recognized to have played a role in the regionally differentiated growth patterns of the post-liberalization period, the spatial implications in terms of domestic capital flows, their specific iterations in space, and redrawing of the relationship between rural and urban areas and their diverse populations have not been adequately researched. The interconnections between agrarian capital and global finance and their geographical effects are also not well understood. This chapter offers some insights into the different ways in which both politics and capital are being re-spatialized in India. It also discusses the implications of this process for methodological and conceptual approaches that help us to understand and redefine notions of the urban, the rural, and the regional in India.