NEO DELHI: URBAN MEDIATIONS IN AN ERA OF NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT M!NOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE MAY 2012 By Rohan Kumar Kalyan Committee: Sankaran Krishna, Chairperson Kazi Ashraf S. Charusheela Jon Goldberg-Hiller Michael J. Shapiro Keywords: India, Politics, Urbanization, Globalization, New Delhi ! ! ""! ! ! ! ! Copyright © 2012 by Rohan Kalyan ! """! ! ! ! ! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to first thank the J. Watumull Foundation for generously funding parts of this research, namely my journey to and stay in Delhi from September 2008 to April 2009. This book would have been impossible without such support. I would also like to thank my professors who have been guides, colleagues and friends. Professor Sankaran Krishna has been a wonderful advisor and gave constant intellectual and emotional support and feedback when I needed it. He also helped me find research affiliation in Delhi, with the new urban/media research group Sarai at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, which proved to be immensely helpful resource and base for my research. Professor Michael Shapiro is an inspiration both as a critical political thinker as well as a model of academic productivity. His ideas and insights have shaped this book in immeasurable ways. The various seminars I took with Jon Goldberg-Hiller, S. Charusheela, Kazi Ashraf, S. Shankar, and Nevzat Soguk over the past half decade helped me develop many of the arguments on the pages that follow. In India I had the good fortune of meeting Ravi Sundaram (thanks to Krishna’s connection) at Sarai. Ravi put me on a trajectory of research from which I never looked back. I also made many friends in Delhi, too many to name, who were intellectual and political comrades. My family in India, particularly my cousin Rubal, provided me unwavering hospitality during my nine-month long stay. Through these friends and family in Delhi and elsewhere, I made a home for myself in what I consider to be one of the most interesting and dynamic places in the world. ! "#! ! ! ! ! In Hawaii my fellow graduate students have been collaborators, instigators, and inspirations for my own work. They are too numerous to name here but they know who they are. Finally, I would be nowhere without my family. This book is dedicated to my parents, Narender and Sulekha Kalyan, and my brother, Gorav Kalyan. They provide me unflinching support and are my biggest inspirations. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! #! ! ! ! ! ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of the role ideologies play in constructing new urban spaces. In an era of intensified global interaction, cities are increasingly positioned as sites for managing and mediating processes of economic production and exchange. For recently "liberalized" economies like India, cities carry the additional burden of showcasing the desirability of "emerging markets" for global capitalist incorporation, so that urban mediation becomes a means for re- articulating the image and identity of the postcolonial city and nation. My dissertation studies the complex and ambiguous ways in which urban space and postcolonial identity are mutually transformed in practices of urban mediation, where new lines of social inclusion/exclusion and spatial division pose critical political and ethical challenges to postcolonial democratic life. I use India’s National Capital Region of Delhi, and in particular the satellite city of Gurgaon, as a case-study. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! #"! ! ! ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE…………………………………………………………………… ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.0 Mapping [Old—New—Neo] Delhi …………………………………… 1 1.1 Arrival ………………………………………………………………… 5 1.2 Crisis…………………………………………………………………… 7 1.3 Arrested Development in Gurgaon …………………………………… 12 1.4 Plan for the Dissertation ………………………………………………. 15 1.5 Lines of Flight …………………………………………………………. 19 1.6 On Method ……………………………………………………………. 23 CHAPTER 2 POSTCOLONIAL CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN NEOLIBERAL INDIA 2.0 Neoliberalism in Crisis ……………………………………………….. 27 2.1 Virtual Consensus and Liberal Democracy …………………………… 31 2.2 The Narrative Discourse of Postcolonial Capitalism …………………. 37 2.3 The Discursive Space of Postcolonial Identity in India ……………….. 42 2.4 The Partiality of Economic Reform …………………………………… 48 2.5 Neoliberal Urbanism …………………………………………………... 53 CHAPTER 3: VIRTUAL URBANIZATION IN GURGAON 3.0 The Global qua Urban Turn in Postcolonial India ……………………. 56 3.1 Imaging Delhi …………………………………………………………. 63 3.2 Old Gurgaon and New Gurgaon ………………………………………. 68 3.3 The Peri-Urban Expansion of Delhi …………………………………... 72 3.4 DLF and the Privatized Urbanization of Gurgaon ……………………. 76 3.5 Dual Modes of Land Acquisition in Gurgaon …………………………. 82 3.6 Temporal Politics on the Frontiers of the Global Economy …………... 85 CHAPTER 4: NEOLIBERAL URBANISM AND THE POSTCOLONIAL MIDDLE CLASS 4.0 Introduction …………………………………………………………… 93 4.1 Gurgaon Collapsing …………………………………………………… 96 4.2 Mediating Modernity ………………………………………………….. 103 4.3 I Am Gurgaon …………………………………………………………. 108 ! #""! ! ! ! ! 4.4 “I am Gurgaon” ……………………………………………………….. 116 4.5 Conclusion: the Hauntology of a Hatred ……………………………… 121 CHAPTER 5 FRAGMENTATION BY DESIGN: ARCHITECTURE, FINANCE, IDENTITY IN GURGAON 5.0 Introduction ……………………………………………………………. 128 5.1 Time-Images of Neoliberal Urbanism ………………………………… 130 5.2 The Temporality of Neoliberal Finance ……………………………….. 137 5.3 Hafeez Contractor: Neoliberal Architect for Hire …………………….. 141 5.4 Postcolonial Modernism ………………………………………………. 154 5.5 De-territorializing the National through the Urban …………………… 158 5.6 Conclusion …………………………………………………………….. 162 CHAPTER 6 MOVEMENT AS MEDIUM: AUTOMOBILITY AND SUBJECTIVITY IN NEO DELHI 6.0 Introduction …………………………………………………………… 164 6.1 The White Tiger ……………………………………………………….. 165 6.2 Automobility as an Urban Ontology ………………………………….. 178 6.3 Automobility in Neoliberal India ……………………………………... 182 6.4 The Debacle of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Delhi……………………. 184 6.5 The Tata Nano: the (Partitioned) People’s Car ………………………... 197 CHAPTER 7 GLOBAL SIMULACRA, VIRTUAL POLITICS, AND CINEMATIC CRITIQUE 7.0 Introduction …………………………………………………………… 207 7.1 Global Simulacra ……………………………………………………... 207 7.2 Ghostly Images and Early Film ……………………………………….. 210 7.3 The “Phantom” Discourse of Neoliberal Globalization ………………..212 7.4 Trafficking in the Virtual ……………………………………………… 216 7.5 Animated Photography, Film, and Documentary ……………………... 218 7.6 Cinematic Images in John and Jane …………………………………... 220 7.7 The Virtuality of the Global …………………………………………… 230 7.8 The (Art)ifice of Documentary Film ………………………………….. 236 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION ……………………………..…………………... 241 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………. 246 !#"""! ! ! ! ! PREFACE This dissertation explores an uncommon sense of the present in contemporary urban India. It does this not by retreating from those places, discourses and signs most commonly associated with the emergence of a "new" and "globalized" India. Rather, it pursues a political ethnography that takes place in the very heart of this India, inhabiting its novel spaces and times, interpreting its narratives of "newness" and postcolonial arrival. The ethnography is based on ten months of research in the neoliberal boomtown of Gurgaon, a recently developed satellite city located on the southern border of India's sprawling capital of New Delhi. Gurgaon has been celebrated both nationally and internationally in recent years for attracting scores of multinational companies and being home to private consumerist townships catering to India's economic elite and its "new middle classes.” Above all, Gurgaon symbolizes India’s new global intelligibility: its represents a safe site for private investment and a suitable environment for global business. If there were a condensed space in India that could be said to signify the so-called “new India,” then Gurgaon would certainly make a common sense choice. And yet, for all the exuberance and celebration that surrounds Gurgaon’s supposed “newness,” the dominant narrative of the city in mainstream discourse is continually split in two trajectories: one of future potential, and one of unmet expectations. As the so-called “Millenium City” of the “new India,” Gurgaon is heavily invested with desires for “first-world” affiliation and global recognition. Yet simultaneously, Gurgaon is constantly under threat of “slipping backwards” into the “third-world,” as crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime, and persistent political protest and poverty threaten its intelligibility as an urban metonym for the “new India,” and a safe climate for global business. This dissertation develops the concept of urban mediation to explore the contentious terrain of politics that opens up through contemporary re-configurations of space, image and identity in ! neoliberal cities like Gurgaon. Specifically, I focus on how narratives of “newness” and postcolonial becoming are challenged in contestations over land acquisition at the rural fringes of Delhi, novel discourses of urban “renewal” within the city, residential welfare politics in elite urban enclaves, speculative practices of neoliberal architecture and urban design, and urban media—including print and tele-visual news, cinema and literature. My findings address a persistent puzzle in the narrative of India’s recent economic liberalization, namely, the curiously uneven pace of reform over the past quarter