Cities in a world of villages: agrarian urbanism and the making of India’s urbanizing frontiers

Abstract

Amidst extensive peripheral urbanization in India, this paper focuses on the city of Gurgaon and describes how the forms and processes of sub/urbanism not only exceed the confines of the city but also of the urban. It argues that even though the questions of land and peasantry have changed, the agrarian question remains at the heart of contemporary urban transformation. It forges a conversation between urban and agrarian studies and outlines the contours of an urbanism it identifies as agrarian urbanism, an urbanism that can explain how changing relations of caste and land endure and produce an uneven geography of spatial value. Such an urbanism does not erase or assimilate the rural but shows how agrarian and urban dynamics sustain and produce each other. Agrarian urbanism, it suggests can help stretch the comparative register of urban studies that tends to be largely city-centric or even urban-centric.