The urban village, agrarian transformation, and rentier capitalism in Gurgaon, India

24 Pages·2017·2.7 MB·English

Thomas Cowan
The urban village, agrarian transformation,
and rentier capitalism in Gurgaon, India

Article (Published version)
(Refereed)

Original citation:
Cowan, Thomas (2018) The urban village, agrarian transformation, and rentier capitalism in

Gurgaon, India. Antipode. ISSN 0066-4812 (In Press)
DOI: 10.1111/anti.12404

© 2018 The Author
CC BY 4.0

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A Radical Journal
of Geography
The Urban Village, Agrarian
Transformation, and Rentier
Capitalism in Gurgaon, India
Thomas Cowan
Department of Geography andEnvironment, London School ofEconomics andPolitical Science,
London,UK;
[email protected]
Abstract: Gurgaon, India’s “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India’s
embrace of global real estate capital and private sector-led urban development. This
paper asserts that Gurgaon’s spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally under-
pinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transforma-
tion. Shifting away from dispossession-centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in
India, this paper explores Gurgaon’s “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration
of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of
differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon’s
landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrar-
ian transformation whichmakepossiblelandscapes of globalaccumulation.
Keywords: India, accumulation by dispossession, urban studies, agrarian transitions,
urbanvillages, articulation
Inlate2015,IsatwithMukeshYadavinBadshahpururbanvillageinGurgaoninthe
north Indian state of Haryana. Badshahpur had been incorporated into the city in
theGurgaon-ManesarUrbanDevelopmentplan2021,bringingexpansesofthevil-
lage’s agricultural land into the urban real estate market. In 2010, agricultural land
salesinBadshahpurspikedafteragroupofdeveloperslobbiedtheHaryanagovern-
ment to expand the urbanisable area to include a further 2000 acres of land in
neighbouringSohna(TimesofIndia2015).Mukeshsoldhisfouracresofagricultural
landin2008toUnitech,oneofthelargestrealestatedevelopersinthecountry,for
30 lakh rupees per acre, earning himself 1.2 crore from the land sale.1 Haryana’s
urban planning legislation exempts all residential [abadi] village land from urban
landacquisitionandplanninganddevelopmentregulations,leavingpocketsofrural
“urban village” land, like that of Badshahpur, peppered across cities like Gurgaon.
SeekingtocapitaliseonrumoursofSohna’spendingurbanisation,Mukeshusedthe
cashfromhisagriculturallandsaletobuyeightacresoflandinnorthernSohna.He
remarked: “I built myself a pukka house and bought some land over in Sohna, let’s
seeifwecansellit...landistheonlywaywecanmakemoneythesedays”.
Along with his investment in peri-urban agricultural land, Mukesh had joined a
group of fellow villagers to invest in a new shopping mall development in central
Gurgaon. The developer leading the project had drawn in 160 crore rupees of
investment from around 350 small landholders like Mukesh across south Gurgaon.
AntipodeVol.0No.02018ISSN0066-4812,pp.1–23 doi:10.1111/anti.12404
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distributionandreproductioninanymedium,providedtheoriginalworkisproperlycited.
2 Antipode
Unbeknown to Mukesh, the developer had not received a license for the develop-
ment. Three years after their initial investment the shopping mall was nowhere to
be seen. Mukesh remarked: “We were scammed, looted. All of us here invested,
each of us gave five lakh, ten lakh, twenty lakh ... the developer’s in jail now”.
Mukesh and his friends who I sat and discussed real estate business with that
afternoon were eager to impress that, despite their active participation in real
estate markets across the city, Gurgaon’s rapid urbanisation was no success story
for the landowners who remain in the exempt urban villages. Mukesh insisted:
“Listen son, we are peasants, we are in a situation without future nor past. We
should never have sold our land”.
Gurgaon, India’s “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India’s embrace
of global real estate capital and privatised modes of urban development (Gururani
2013; Searle 2016). This paper argues that, the “Gurgaon model” of urbanisation,
which has transformed 35,000 acres of agricultural land into urban property since
the 1980s (Gururani 2013), has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven
process of agrarian transformation, involving the exemption of residential abadi
land from urbanisation, the designation of “urban villages” as rural, and the dif-
ferentiated integration of landowning communities into emerging networks of
urban rentier accumulation (see Figure 1).2
As my encounter with Mukesh suggests, Gurgaon’s story is not one of wholesale
agrarian transition, led by a unitary “carrier class” of landowning capitalists (Byres
1991), nor one of dispossession and the violent expropriation of land by the state
andglobalcapital(Levien2013).RatherurbanandindustrialdevelopmentinIndia’s
“millennium city” has been facilitated by an uneven process of land acquisition,
exemption and agrarian transformation. This highly differentiated process of agrar-
iantransformation intheregionhasmediateddominantlandowningcommunities’
Figure 1: New residential developments on Kherki Duala village land in Gurgaon
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.
The Urban Village: Gurgaon, India 3
opposition to rapid agrarian change, unevenly integrated well-placed villagers into
urban land markets, while constraining others like Mukesh to petty rentiership and
speculativeinvestmentsinlandandpropertyacrossthecity.3
Nowhere is this process of differentiation more evident than in the peculiar
space of the urban village. In this paper I conceptualise the “urban villages”, areas
of land deep within the city designated “rural”, as social and spatial articulations
of Gurgaon’s uneven capitalist development (Hall 1980). In doing so, this paper
explores how Gurgaon’s contemporary urbanisation is underpinned by both
specific histories of agrarian reform which paved the way for the emergence of
urban villages in the early 1980s, and differentiated experiences of agrarian
change among Gurgaon’s landowning communities. As Mukesh’s statement sug-
gests, processes of “global” urbanisation, characterised by some as “planetary” in
nature (Brenner and Schmid 2014), are not defined wholly by logics of an eternal
“urban” capital, but are rather constituted through the uneven articulation of
multiple, unequal logics of land, territory and value.
In this paper I draw on Hall’s (1980) influential work on capitalist development
in South Africa, alongside the Marxist agrarian transition debates (Byres 1991;
Chari 2004; Hart 1998), to disrupt analyses which understand India’s “remarkable
urban moment” as either coherently “urban” or dispossessive in nature, empha-
sising the differentiated and subversive internal relations (Hart 2006) that under-
score Gurgaon’s spectacular production as a site of “global” capital accumulation.
The production of differentiated landscapes of accumulation in Gurgaon, in this
respect, are not simply a consequence of the uniform development of a global
capital, but rather hold to an uneven “molecular existence” (Gidwani 2008), a
dominating structure that articulates with a variety of contingent social relation-
ships, modes of (re)production, and forms of value to produce uneven and differ-
entiated landscapes of accumulation.
In order to explore this differentiated and spatially uneven process of agrarian
change, I will first examine the agrarian transition debates which have long chal-
lenged Eurocentric dispossession-centred understandings of capitalist urban devel-
opment and examine the multiple, nonlinear and locally mediated ways in which
capitals develop in different contexts. Building from this, the first half of the paper
will explore how Haryana’s urban planning legislation, alongside the state’s
uneven agrarian transition throughout the post-Independence period came to
produce “urban villages” across Gurgaon, a phenomenon which would shape the
agrarian social structure in ways crucial for urbanisation from the early 1980s. The
second half of the paper will then explore how the Gurgaon’s spatially uneven
process of urbanisation is expressed in both uneven articulations of “urban” and
“rural”, and differentiated processes of rentier accumulation engaged in by the
city’s former landowning classes.
Beyond Dispossession
Dispossession is something of a master narrative within contemporary urban stud-
ies.FromMarx’sformulationof“primitiveaccumulation”inhisstudyoftheEnglish
enclosures, to the “new enclosures”literatures (DeAngelis2001;Sanyal2007) and
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.
4 Antipode
Harvey’s (2003) influential expansion in “accumulation by dispossession”; dispos-
sessionshavebeenunderstoodasfoundationaltoprocessesofurbanandindustrial
development the world over (Sassen 2014). Within the Indian context, this schol-
arlytraditionhasbeenmobilisedtounderstandtheIndianstate’sattemptstofacili-
tate capital’s access to large swathes of rural land through eminent domain in the
post-liberalisation period (Banerjee-Guha 2013; Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011).
Sanyal (2007), for example, mobilises Marx’s primitive accumulation to conceptu-
alise “postcolonial capital” in India as a dual process of violent capitalist expulsion
and state-led developmental rehabilitation, productive of the hyper-exclusionary
and unequal landscapes of new urban India (Bhattacharya and Sanyal 2011). For
Sanyal, “postcolonial capital” is as such constituted as a “complex” of a stable, dis-
possession-centredcapitalandadistorting andmarginalisednon-capital.
Yet what sets Gurgaon apart from these narratives of dispossessive urbanisation
is the leading role the private real estate sector has played in land acquisitions. In
Gurgaon there are few outright “dispossessions”, 85% of urban land in the city
was bought by developers on the real estate market. Indeed an examination of
the manner in which land was acquired by the real estate sector over the past 30
years (see Table 1) reveals a process of urbanisation mediated by the complex
articulation of emerging real estate actors, agrarian land reforms, urban planning
regulations and existing inequalities in the agrarian social structure.
In this paper, against analyses which foreground dispossession as a universal
attribute of a stable capitalist urban, I seek to develop an understanding of the
dialectical and uneven internal relations which constitute landscapes of capital in
specific historical and geographical milieus. In doing so, I seek to draw from the
Marxist agrarian tradition which has long sought to break from conceptions of
capitalist development which centre on the unfolding of a stable European form
within multiple, different contexts (Chari 2004; Gidwani 2008; Hart 1998).
Articulation and Agrarian Transitions
The classical “agrarian question” as discussed by Lenin (1964) and Kautsky (1988)
was concerned with how, in different historical contexts, predatory landed prop-
erty, the peasantry and feudal agrarian relations are overcome and capitalist social
relations established. Central to the agrarian tradition as such has been the quest
to break from the canonical English model of primitive accumulation and map
out the multiple ways in which capitalism has developed in differing contexts. In
this regard, Byres’ (1991, 1996) influential development of the agrarian question
was concerned with the particular, differential conditions which lead to “success-
ful” agrarian transition; the conditions within agriculture which contribute to pri-
mary accumulation for the purposes of industrialisation (Byres 1991:11–12). This,
according to Byres, does not always require the development of capitalism within
the countryside, rather for Byres the agrarian question can be effectively “re-
solved” when the agrarian social structure no longer presents significant obstacles
to capitalist development (Byres 1991:11–12). Crucially, this may be achieved
through any number of means not limited to the English model of enclosures.
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.
The Urban Village: Gurgaon, India 5
More recently, in an influential essay, Bernstein (2006) challenges the enduring
relevance of the “agrarian question of capital” in the wake of post-colonial agrar-
ian reform and the advent of globalisation. For Bernstein, both colonial interven-
tion and post-colonial agrarian land reforms enacted throughout through the
19th and 20th centuries had resolved the question of non-capitalist agrarian rela-
tions globally. As such, for Bernstein non-capitalist social relations in the coun-
tryside no longer pose an obstacle to processes of proletarianisation nor
agricultural capitalist development. Further, Bernstein (2006) following Byres
(1996) argues that the “developmental” agrarian question, that of how to gener-
ate agricultural-industrial linkages to spur capitalist development, a preoccupation
of many post-colonial governments throughout the 20th century, is today largely
bypassed by the wide availability of global capital. Upon the opening up of global
markets in the late 20th century, the imperative to develop national agricultural
linkages to spur industrial development have weakened; the agrarian question of
capital, according to Bernstein, resolved by global capital.
Indeed it has been argued that such a “resolution” can be seen in dynamics of
economic transformation in contemporary India. Since formal liberalisation of the
Indian economy in the early 1990s, there has been a dramatic growth in Finance,
Services and Real Estate (FSRE) sectors and collapse in agriculture. In 1951 the ser-
vices sector contributed a 30% share of total GDP, a figure that rose to 38% in
1981 and 60% in 2014. Within that same period, agriculture declined from 52%
to 14%, while industry increased modestly from 16% to 26%.4 It is in this sense
that scholars argue India has experienced industry-less growth (Maurya and
Vaishampayan 2012). While organised manufacturing accounted for 14% of GDP
and 13% of the workforce in 2012, the FSRE sector accounted for 20% and 2%
respectively (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh 2014). Such phenomena, Lerche (2013)
argues, indicates that by the 1990s the Indian economy had little need for agri-
cultural capital transfers nor rural primary markets.
Yet such capital-centric understandings of agrarian change which purport a
“resolution” to the agrarian question and successful “completion” of agrarian
transition ignore the enduring internal contradictions which riddle the uneven
development of capital, and underestimate the crucial ways in which historically
and geographically specific agrarian determinates continue to be deeply impli-
cated into contemporary capitalist development (Watts and Goodman 1997).
Byres’ contributions to debates on the agrarian question are so useful precisely
because they allow us to think about “transitions” not as unilinear, nor as unfold-
ing from a stable economic logic, but rather as the multiple, heterogeneous social
and spatial articulations of capitalist development within particular historical and
geographical milieus. As Watts and Goodman (1997:13) argue, the intersectoral
surplus flows of agrarian transitions are not only “surplus value via terms of trade
... but in social, cultural and institutional terms as well ... [their] origins are prefig-
ured in agrarian settings”. In this regard, postcolonial Marxist agrarian scholarship
(Chari 2004; Gidwani 2008; Hart 1998) draws attention to the central role in
which “difference” plays in constituting capitalist social relations, and the impor-
tance of locally specific histories and social dynamics in obstructing or facilitating
urban and industrial development.
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6 Antipode
The postcolonial Marxist agrarian literature (Chari 2017; Hart 2006) produc-
tively speaks to and at times explicitly draws from Hall’s (1980) influential work
on capitalist development in Apartheid South Africa. Here Hall explores the ways
in which race is put to work within a specific historical conjuncture to actively
structure uneven development of capital in South Africa. Against analyses which
understand economic and social relations as distinct, coherent phenomena, Hall
calls for an understanding of capitalist hegemony as articulated through multiple,
historically specific practices of race, class and capital. Crucially, Hall expands an
Althusserian reading of “articulation” by focusing on the articulation of materiality
with historically specific meanings, experiences and practices (Chari 2017). For
Hall, the racialization of modes of production in South Africa is not “eternal”, but
under constant renewal through discourses, lived experiences and practices.
In the remainder of this paper I seek to show the ways in which Gurgaon’s “ur-
ban villages” materially and discursively articulate the city’s uneven and differen-
tial urbanisation; deeply entangled and augmented by regionally specific agrarian
histories. As Roy (2016) notes, the agrarian question in India today is deeply
entangled in the urban land question; that of translating complex histories of
agrarian settlement into urban property relations legible to global and domestic
capital. While sectoral linkages from the agricultural sector may have been “by-
passed” in the advent of liberalisation in India, Gurgaon’s agrarian transition con-
tinues to have enduring material and discursive relevance to the particular
development of urban and industrial accumulation in the city.
In the following section, I will explore the particular social forces which aug-
mented real estate capital’s access to rural land on market prices. Gurgaon’s pecu-
liar agrarian change has magnified fractures within the dominant landowning
caste, between those fully incorporated into urban land markets and those who
tentatively participate in petty rentiership and land and property speculation.
Such fragmentation draws attention to the ways in which agrarian transitions
implicated in Gurgaon’s urban and industrial development are highly differenti-
ated, laminated by existing agrarian inequalities, meanings and practices. In order
to understand these articulations we must first explore the particular conditions
which gave rise to Gurgaon’s urban villages.
The Urban Village
Planning the Urban Villages
The presence of urban villages in Gurgaon can be traced to agrarian land reforms
and urban planning regulations in Haryana from the 1960s. In 1963, while Har-
yana remained a region of the state of Punjab, the influential Chief Minister Par-
tap Singh Kairon passed the Punjab Scheduled Roads and Controlled Areas
Restriction of Unregulated Development Act (PSRCA). The PSRCA sought to con-
trol and regulate urban development in the state by identifying urbanisable areas
within which the transferral of agricultural to urban land would be managed by a
parastatal urban development authority. In the Haryana region, this was dele-
gated to the Haryana Urban Development Authority, hereafter HUDA.
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.
The Urban Village: Gurgaon, India 7
Crucially, the PSRCA excluded all village residential abadi land from urbanisa-
tion. Abadi lands, what are today termed urban villages, are demarcated from
urbanisable land by the lal dora, a boundary line between agricultural and village
residential land invented by colonial governors to distinguish residential from
agricultural taxable areas. As a consequence, as rapid urbanisation began in earn-
est in Gurgaon in the early 1980s, the state and private sector were only able to
purchase agricultural land, leaving pockets of urban village land deep within
urban areas excluded from land acquisition and HUDA’s development and plan-
ning regulations. In Gururani’s (2013) exposition of the “flexible” planning tech-
nologies which ensconced the development trajectory of Gurgaon, the author
notes that amidst the fervent political jockeying between Haryana politicians and
real-estate developers in the early 1980s, the boundary lines of PSRCA-designated
urban areas were routinely redrawn and improvised to accommodate the inter-
ests of various political pacts. As of 2011, there were 94 urban villages within
the Gurgaon-Manesar Urban Complex (see Figure 2).
The PSRCA is characteristic of Nehruvian developmentalism that sought to pro-
tect landowners from state land acquisition, and regulate urbanisation through
modernist planning and development technologies (Roy 2007). This protection is
especially pertinent in Haryana, where dominant landowning caste communities,
the Jats and Yadavs, are both politically and socially dominant.
In 1975 the Haryana Chief Minister, Bansi Lal, passed the Haryana Development
and Regulation of Urban Areas Act (HDRUA) that allowed landowners to acquire
development licenses from the State government for the purchase and develop-
ment of land within controlled areas. While under the short stewardship of
Bansi Lal licenses were reserved for HUDA projects, after the 1979 election of
pro-business Bhajan Lal, licenses were opened up to the private sector, initiating a
process of private sector-led urban development which would later come to be
known as the “Gurgaon model”.
HDRUA allowed developers to directly negotiate and purchase land from
landowners within controlled areas. During this period Gurgaon had no municipal
level government; instead the city was governed directly by municipal council
through the Chief Minister’s office. As Gururani (2013) notes, this centralisation of
jurisdiction provided the Chief Minister significant power in negotiating with real-
estate developers, improvising urban planning codes, and issuing development
licenses. In this manner, while the HDRUA’s initial purpose was to introduce a for-
mal system of land development to be managed and regulated by HUDA, from
the 1980s onwards successive Haryana Chief Ministers, who had sole discretionary
power to authorise development licenses, utilised the legislation to authorise the
sale of vast tracts of agricultural land5 in the region (Hiro 2015). Bhajan Lal, for
example, allocated 6000 acres in development licenses to the private sector
between 1979 and 1996.
The HDRUA is significant to the contemporary landscape of Gurgaon for at least
two reasons. First, while the PSRCA gave the state government “powers of relax-
ation” in land use change, the HDRUA bypassed the requirements for land use
change approvals within the urbanisable area altogether. The urbanisable areas of
Gurgaon—at the time agricultural land—were at once prefigured as urban,
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.
8 Antipode
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Figure 2: The Gurgaon-Manesar Urban Complex 2031 marks out the city’s urban
villages in bordered white areas across the city (reproduced with permission of
Town and Country Planning Department, Haryana)
thereby bypassing deeply politicised and bureaucratic procedures that had sty-
mied urbanisation processes in other states (Balakrishnan 2013).
Second, the HDRUA together with the PSRCA set urbanisation apart from
those in many neighbouring states where large urbanisation projects were pri-
marily undertaken by parastatals that utilised the highly controversial and liti-
gious Land Acquisition Act 1894 to acquire land (Levien 2013). Through the
exemption of the urban villages and the introduction of a license system it was
the private sector and not the state that acquired and developed 85% (35,000
acres) of urbanisable land in Gurgaon between 1981 and 2014. In enacting the
PSCRA and HDRUA, the state government both passed on acquisition responsi-
bilities to the private sector, and mediated political tensions with landowners by
cordoning off urban village land, nominally “non-urban”, from corporate capi-
tal. As a result, opposition to land acquisition, while not completely absent
(Kennedy 2014), has been much more muted than in other parts of the coun-
try. This is in part facilitated by the creation of a differentiated landscape of
agrarian change, articulated through the urban villages, wherein certain factions
of the dominant landowning communities have been able to instrumentalise
inequalities in the agrarian social structure, temporalities of the urbanisation
processes and the “flexible” local state (Gururani 2013) to disproportionately
benefit from land acquisitions.6
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.
The Urban Village: Gurgaon, India 9
Land Tenure and the Green Revolution
Finally, both historic land tenure systems and the uneven impacts of the Green
Revolution across Haryana from the 1950s fundamentally shaped Gurgaon’s
uneven urbanisation. Land ownership in Gurgaon has historically been dominated
by two communities, the Yaduvanshi Ahirs, or Yadavs, and Jats. While Jats are a
much more powerful political force within Haryana as a whole, Yadavs are numer-
ically and politically dominant in the Gurgaon district, returning Yadav politicians
to both national and state assemblies in every election since the state was inaugu-
rated.
In 2015, I carried out a household survey of 198 households across Gur-
gaon’s urban villages (see Table 1). The survey recorded data on land sales,
compensation, investments of landowning households over the past 30 years.
According to the survey, Yadavs own the largest plots of land in the city, with
average individual landholdings of 11 acres compared with Jats’ nine acres, Guj-
jars’ six and a half acres and Scheduled Castes’ three acres. Historically, Jats in
Gurgaon have held their land on bhayacharya tenures where land is formally
subdivided non-ancestrally across the village, leading to highly fragmented,
small landholdings. In contrast, Yadavs have historically held their land through
pattidari tenures where land is held through ancestral lineage and family mem-
bers own large, discontiguous plots of land, and cultivate land or supervise
farm workers in common. Successive colonial land settlement reports from
1872 note that the commonly owned, large landholdings of the Yadavs pro-
duced high yields and with it high tax revenues (Channing and Wilson 1882).
This system of land tenure, which favoured revenue extraction, played into
colonial governors’ construction of the Yadavs as an “industrious, thrifty and
prudent” landowning caste (Channing and Wilson 1882). The priming of the
Yadav community as a dominant landowning force, evocative of Chari’s (2004)
work on Tiruppur’s Gounder caste, is perhaps explained by the high levels of
participation of Yadav men in the colonial military and, unlike Meo and Gujjar
castes who were much derided by colonial officials, low levels of participation
in the 1857 mutiny in the region (Channing and Wilson 1882).
Formal land consolidation was carried out across Haryana under the East Punjab
Holdings (Consolidation and Prevention of Fragmentation) Act 1948. The act
intended to reduce land fragmentation and produce more productive, gridded
and legible agricultural farmland, yet was itself a highly uneven and politicised
process, tending to provide dominant landowning communities with larger, more
productive plots and significantly reducing the availability of village common land
which landless communities relied upon (Bonner 1987; Narain and Vij 2016;
Oldenburg 1987).
Equally important, as Gururani (2013) notes, was the highly uneven impact of
the Green Revolution across Haryana. The Indian state’s attempts to induce “suc-
cessful” agrarian transition in north-west India through the introduction of new
technologies and high-yield seed varieties produced an uneven development of
agrarian capitalism across the state. As such, the land consolidation and increases
in farm work that the Green Revolution brought to other parts of the state largely
bypassed Gurgaon, which was considered to have unproductive and barren soil
ª2018TheAuthors.AntipodepublishedbyJohnWiley&SonsLtdonbehalfofAntipodeFoundationLtd.