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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Subaltern counter-urbanism dynamics of urban and industrial change in Gurgaon, India’s millennium city Cowan, Thomas Grant Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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Oct. 2021 1 Subaltern counter-urbanism: dynamics of urban and industrial change in Gurgaon, India’s millennium city Thomas Cowan PhD, Geography (Arts) Department of Geography Words: 96771 2 Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ 5 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................ 6 List of figures ................................................................................................................................... 8 List of tables ..................................................................................................................................... 8 Glossary of terms ............................................................................................................................. 9 Chapter 1. Between two cities ........................................................................................................ 10 1.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 10 1.2 Urban villages and abstract space ................................................................................................................. 12 1.3 Research Questions ........................................................................................................................................ 14 1.4 Gurgaon and the urban question ................................................................................................................. 15 1.5 Gurgaon the industrial city ............................................................................................................................ 20 1.5.1 Labour informalisation in India. ............................................................................................................. 23 1.6 State space in Gurgaon .................................................................................................................................. 28 1.7 Between two cities .......................................................................................................................................... 32 1.8 Thesis outline ................................................................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 2. Towards a disorderly relational dialectics .................................................................. 36 2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 36 2.2 From the abstract to the concrete ................................................................................................................ 38 2.2.1 Abstraction ............................................................................................................................................... 39 2.2.2 Abstraction and the political ................................................................................................................. 42 2.2.3 The Subalterns and the difference ........................................................................................................ 45 2.2.4 Gramsci’s “person”. ................................................................................................................................ 47 2.3 Difference and Possibility .............................................................................................................................. 49 2.3.1 The two-fold character of place. ........................................................................................................... 50 2.3.2 Provincialising Space .............................................................................................................................. 54 2.4 Analytical points of entry ............................................................................................................................... 55 2.4.1 Gender ...................................................................................................................................................... 55 2.4.2 Social reproduction ................................................................................................................................. 58 2.4.3 The urban and urban politics ................................................................................................................ 61 2.5 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................... 64 Chapter 3. Research Methodology .............................................................................................. 65 3.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 65 3.2 Sites of research............................................................................................................................................... 66 3.3 Initial moves .................................................................................................................................................... 68 3.4 Research Methodologies ................................................................................................................................ 70 3.4.1 Ethnography and Interview ................................................................................................................... 70 3 3.4.2 Survey ........................................................................................................................................................ 71 3.5 Data analysis .................................................................................................................................................... 72 3.6 Entry points ..................................................................................................................................................... 73 3.7 Interpreters....................................................................................................................................................... 75 3.8 Reflections ........................................................................................................................................................ 76 3.9 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter 4. Urban villages, agrarian transition and rentier capitalism ......................................... 79 4.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 79 4.2 The internal frontiers of dis/possession ..................................................................................................... 83 4.3 Beyond “bypass urbanisation” ...................................................................................................................... 86 4.3.1 Accumulation by containment .............................................................................................................. 89 4.4 The urban village and “accumulation by containment” ........................................................................... 90 4.4.1 The ‘thrifty Yadavs’ ................................................................................................................................. 94 4.4.2 Uneven agrarian development .............................................................................................................. 96 4.5 Land transformation and the creation of rentier capitalists ....................................................................