Introduction

Over the last decade, a surge in scholarship on the displacement of the urban poor in Indian cities has highlighted the need for post-colonial engagement with theories of gentrification. While urban projects and en masse displacement warrant the kind of political concern that a globally minded gentrification studies offers (see Smith, 2002), this chapter follows others (see Lees, 2012) in arguing for the need to push the boundaries of theories derived from political-economic processes in Euro-American cities. Although some studies demonstrate the existence of rent gaps (Whitehead and More, 2007) and post-industrial gentrification processes that resemble Northern urban processes (Harris, 2008), most elite usurpations of land in Indian cities have unfolded through a set of market and extra-economic processes and conditions that require distinct if complementary framings. Indeed, the term ‘gentrification’ is rarely used in vernacular speech and academic writing, which refer instead to slum demolition and resettlement, peri-urban land grabs, and state-led development. Factors influencing urban change in India include informal practices of land settlement and governance, legal and extra-legal modes of land and resource enclosure, and developmentalist interventions of the Indian state, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and transnational agencies. Some scholars have used the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003; Banerjee-Guha, 2010) or the notion of ‘enclosure’ of various kinds of ‘urban commons’ (Gidwani and Baviskar, 2011) as an alternative way to conceptualise the extra-economic mechanisms of displacement and dispossession. Another similar perspective posits the Lefebvrian notion of ‘urban revolution’ as a more appropriate framework than gentrification, because the latter presumes the transformation of already capitalised spaces whereas most newly developing areas of Indian cities are undergoing first-time spatial privatisation (Ghertner, 2014). I stress the need to think of such concepts as complementary to (rather than interchangeable with) gentrification as there is a danger of subsuming process to outcome when deploying any singular framework.

Processual analysis is also especially necessary for understanding the political opportunities and limits circumscribed by complex and uneven forms of displacement and dispossession in Indian cities. Elite-biased urban development is often enacted and negotiated through illegible, illiberal and flexible means (Hansen and Stepputat, 2006; Roy, 2009).