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Abstract
This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, electricity, and building permission, the article proposes two topological figures that move beyond narrower spatial metaphors that read that state either as a fixed, hierarchically scaled entity or as a flat, wholly malleable assemblage without consequential spatial order or historicity. These are the topological state and the state outside itself. The analysis of the topological state centers on how real-time connections are forged between residents and key nodes in the bureaucracy, producing momentary reconfigurations of state form that allow low-level state actors to capture authority even as bureaucratic hierarchy is maintained. The analysis of the state outside itself focuses on how the routine actions of water engineers and municipal officers challenge the common conceptual mapping of the state as a surface with an inside and outside. Taken together, these figures reveal a temporally adept mode of political agency open to conjunctural possibilities and proximate connections but often dismissed as a near-sighted political disposition symptomatic of the poor and marginal classes' submission to clientalist politics.
本文企图在国家的地理学分析核心植入时间性的探问。本文藉由运用在印度德里的贫民窟与所谓未经许可的聚居地从事的大量田野工作来进行上述探问, 并描绘生活在国家边缘的人们, 如何採用拓朴学的敏感性, 评估、影响并为国家 “测时”。本文透过关注这些居民每日努力确保水电与建筑许可的时间律动, 提出两个超越狭义国家空间隐喻的拓朴形态, 而狭义的国家空间隐喻, 不是将国家视为固定且阶层性的尺度化之实体, 便是完全具可塑性且不具任何空间秩序或历史质后果的凑组关係之平面。它们是拓朴的国家以及国家之外的国家。对于拓朴国家的分析, 聚焦居民和官僚中的主要节点之间如何形成即时连结, 生产瞬间的国家再组构形式, 该形式让低阶的国家行动者能够取得权力, 即便官僚的阶层性仍然继续维持。对国家外的国家进行之分析, 聚焦水利工程师与市政层级官员的日常行动, 如何挑战将国家视为存在于内部与外部之间的平面之普遍性概念製图。总体而言, 这些特徵揭露了政治行动者对局势的可能性与即将发生的连结开放的瞬间熟练模式, 但该模式却经常被贬抑为短视的政治处置, 且为穷人与边缘阶级从属于侍从政治的特徵。
Este artículo busca insertar cuestiones de temporalidad en el núcleo del análisis geográfico del estado. Se hace esto con el apoyo de amplio trabajo de campo en los tugurios de las así llamadas colonias no autorizadas en Delhi, India, para describir cómo aquellos que viven en las márgenes del estado emplean una sensibilidad topológica para acceder, influir y “programar” al estado. Atendiendo a los ritmos temporales de los esfuerzos cotidianos de estos residentes para conseguir agua, electricidad y permisos de construcción, el artículo propone dos figuras topológicas que se movilizan más allá de las metáforas espaciales más estrechas que interpretan al estado, bien como una entidad fija, escalada históricamente, o como un ensamblaje plano y enteramente dúctil sin un orden espacial consecuente, o sin historicidad. Estas figuras son el estado topológico y el estado fuera de sí mismo. El análisis del estado topológico está centrado en cómo se forjan conexiones en tiempo real entre los residentes y los nodos claves en la burocracia, produciendo reconfiguraciones momentáneas de forma del estado que permiten a actores de bajo nivel del estado capturar autoridad aún si se mantiene la jerarquía burocrática. El análisis del estado fuera de sí mismo se enfoca sobre el modo como las acciones rutinarias de los ingenieros hidráulicos y oficiales municipales retan al mapeo conceptual corriente del estado como una superficie con un dentro y un afuera. Tomadas en conjunto, estas figuras revelan un modo temporalmente erudito de agencia política abierto a posibilidades coyunturales y conexiones aproximadas, pero a menudo desechado como disposición política miope sintomática de la sumisión de las clases pobres y marginales a la política clientelista.
Acknowledgments
I thank four anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and suggestions. I also thank Austin Zeiderman, Akhil Gupta, Anjali Nerlekar, and Meheli Sen for reading and commenting generously on preliminary formulations of the arguments presented here. This article benefited tremendously from a long-standing conversation with Jayaraj Sundaresan about the structure of the Indian bureaucracy. An early version of the first half of this article was presented at The City in South Asia and its Transnational Connections Conference hosted by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Oregon. I thank that conference's participants, especially organizer Arafaat Valiani and discussant Dan Buck, as well as Matthew Hull and Jon Anjaria, for useful feedback at the time. I am also incredibly grateful to Preetha Mani for her careful editorial scrutiny of early drafts. Finally, I owe thanks to Richard Wright and Nik Heynen for shepherding this article through the review process.
Notes
1. In 2002 electricity distribution was privatized in Delhi when three private companies acquired the assets and personnel from the Delhi Vidyut Board, the previous public utility. “Unserviceable liabilities,” however, remained with the government, which included delivery to unmetered areas, such as low-income settlements, until the private distribution companies extended infrastructure and supplied meters there, a process that began in haste in the mid-2000s and was rolled out in Shiv Camp in 2010. Although more than 3.5 million new meters have been installed across the city by the three distribution companies, along with high-voltage distribution systems that make it difficult to “hook” into and draw electricity from distribution lines, Delhi remains among the top four states in terms of reported cases of electricity theft nationally (Criqui and Zerah Citation2015).
2. This was a pattern established prior to the 2002 privatization of electricity distribution in Delhi and maintained even after privatization, given that the same personnel occupied the same posts before 2002 and through the time of my fieldwork. I therefore refer to the hierarchical system of posts that manage electricity distribution as a “bureaucracy,” even though that system in West Delhi became part of the private company, BSES Rajdhani Power Limited, in 2002. This makes further sense given that Shiv Camp residents maintained the same relationship with this structure during my main fieldwork carried out between 2006 and 2008, referring to its staff as part of “sarkār (government).” As Weber (Citation1978) noted, “It does not matter for the character of bureaucracy whether its authority is called ‘private’ or ‘public’” (956).
3. The role of the pradhān varies greatly across northern Indian cities, with some slum-based leaders deriving their authority principally from their role as senior ethnic heads while others wield influence based on their ability to ensure service delivery (Jha, Rao, and Woolcock Citation2007). Shiv Camp had two pradhāns, each representing one of the two dominant communities—Rajasthani and Bundelkhandi—in the settlement. The younger Rajasthani pradhān was far more active in mediating service delivery and was the one involved in the electricity matter described here and throughout this article.
4. Modi won the election, in part, by offering himself up as a symbol of strong, masculine rulership committed to straightening out the stubborn bureaucratic regime he was to inherit (D. Gupta and Misra Citation2014).
5. Nigam (Citation2012) argued that Chatterjee worked with “a static notion [of the everyday] where negotiations take place only within a given configuration of power and provides [sic] no scope for thinking of mass actions and uprisings as moments of negotiating the terms of power and the content of the everyday” (4). The temporally adept approach to state space advanced in this article works with a different notion of the everyday, one attentive to how spatial practices dialectically compose the larger political structures of which they are a part (Lefebvre Citation1991).
6. A. Gupta (Citation1995) presented strong evidence that “members of the subaltern classes have practical knowledge of the multiple levels of state authority,” even though in his case they were “defeated in the end by the procedures of a bureaucracy whose rules” (382–83) they could not comprehend.
7. There are multiple genealogies of topology within human geography (Lata and Minca Citation2016), which build on topology as a qualitative field of mathematics that began in the seventeenth century as the geometry of place and more generally examines the properties of space (called homeomorphism) that are preserved as it is stretched and bent. The approach I follow builds on Allen and Cochrane's (Citation2010; also see Allen Citation2011) work, which builds on their collaborative research with Massey examining how institutions influence political decisions in ways not explainable through measures of proximity, distance, and scale (Allen, Cochrane, and Massey Citation1998). This brand of political topology extends directly from Massey's relational analysis of power and occupies an analytical space somewhere between assemblage theory and political economy approaches to the state. Like assemblage thinking, topology provides insight into emergent properties but because it does not follow the flat ontology of assemblage theory and stems from a tradition of studying spatial divisions of labor and regional economic restructuring, it is not dismissive of topography and it thus retains analytical attention on the structural order of the state (and economy) through which actors exert pressures, even if they break from defined jurisdictional constraints.
8. In citing Weber, I do not mean to equate the topographic state with an idealized rational bureaucracy. Rather, I take Weber's account of the hierarchical structure of the bureaucracy to provide a simple shorthand for the dominant geographical imaginary of the state, what Prime Minister Modi (cited earlier) called the “chain of responsibility and accountability” or what Ferguson and Gupta (Citation2002) called the principles of verticality and encompassment. The idea of nested scales of political authority operating through a functionally interdependent office system is indeed one of Weber's foundational observations of the bureaucracy, one that political geography carries forward in topographic analyses that seek to define scales of governance, locate centers of command (place), delineate limits of jurisdictional authority (territory), and chart the presence or absence of hierarchical command or horizontal linkages (networks; see, e.g., Brenner Citation2004; Swyngedouw Citation2005; Jessop, Brenner, and Jones Citation2008; Ghertner Citation2011). Topology contrasts (but does not contradict) topography through its focus on intensive relations and non-Euclidean geometry (Allen Citation2011).
9. I spent twelve months in Shiv Camp between 2006 and 2008 as part of a long-term ethnographic project on the politics of slum demolition in millennial Delhi (see Ghertner Citation2015). I made return visits in 2011, 2012, and 2013 to track further developments in its legal disputes. Shiv Camp is a pseudonym, as is Krishna Garden, which is what I call the neighborhood within which Shiv Camp is located.
10. The legal details of this case were established through a review of the interim orders and final judgments issued in the Shiv Camp legal dispute, interviews with the most active Krishna Garden residents and their lawyer, and periodic attendance at hearings in the High Court in 2007 and 2008.
11. This echoes Hull's (Citation2012) observation that “files [and file managing clerks] can virtually reconstitute the roles of functionaries in decisions, remaking formal relations of hierarchy in unpredictable ways” (114).
12. Despite the fact that the Delhi government's resettlement policy mandated that displaced jhuggī dwellers who could prove residence prior to 1998 be given resettlement plots, none of those displaced from Shiv Camp were offered resettlement, an outcome enabled by a legal loophole that excludes those occupying roads from resettlement compensation.
13. Actor–network theory would call this a process of applying increasingly general rules to build stronger coordination into a network or what Callon (Citation1990) called a higher degree of convergence.
14. The special-purpose vehicle was created by the Delhi Geo-Spatial Data Infrastructure (Management Control, Administration, Security and Safety) Act, 2011. For Modi's quote, see “Good Governance Day” (Citation2014).
15. It should be noted that despite their low salaries and prestige, low-level posts are highly coveted for the economic security and influence they offer. In the state of Chhattisgarh, for example, the Hindustan Times reported that 75,000 people—including many applicants with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in fields including law and engineering—applied for thirty openings for the position of “peon,” the lowest of government jobs (a type of orderly or attendant), with a monthly salary of 14,000 rupees (∼$210; Kaiser Citation2015). The story is accompanied by a cartoon depicting a uniformed peon exclaiming, “I left lot of top jobs to be a peon!”
16. In justifying his opposition to a separate electorate for “untouchables,” Gandhi, remembered as a champion of the rights of former untouchables, affirmed that “there is very little political consciousness among them, and they are so horribly treated that I want to save them against themselves” (cited in Roy Citation2014, 120). The history of interpretations of slum residents' inherent fatalism is long, but for one influential report in the history of Delhi slum policy, see Bharat Sewa Samaj (Citation1958, 217).
17. Although accounts of economic redundancy in South Asia do not go so far as to assign surplus populations political irrelevance, the dispossessed and economically marginal are often seen as highly prone to the structural manipulations of political parties (Chandra Citation2004) or, as in Sanyal's (Citation2007) influential framing, as governmentally managed through poverty programs that partially rehabilitate them via “the need economy.” The political effect of this state-subsidized need economy is to subvert deeper structural critiques of capitalist dispossession among the dispossessed, thereby becoming, for Sanyal (and Chatterjee Citation2008, who followed him), the politico-ideological condition for capital's reproduction in postcolonial societies. Although I am in no way arguing that Delhi's urban marginal classes are advancing a foundational critique of the capitalist state, I find Sanyal's notion of a split in the Indian state (corresponding to the economic split between between capital and noncapital) inattentive to how these same classes' everyday claims might performatively reconfigure state form. Struggles in political society cannot be reduced to material “needs” alone, in other words (Menon Citation2010). They must also be seen to profoundly affect what the state is and how it operates.
18. See Bhide (Citation2015) and Ranganathan (Citation2014) for examples of such settlements in Maharashtra (where they are known as gunthewari) and Karnataka (where they are known as revenue layouts), respectively.
19. According to the Central Ground Water Board, Delhi's water table is dropping by about three meters per year, driven largely by the operation of as many as 500,000 illegal borewells (see http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/borewells-suck-delhi-future-dry/1/370283.html). For a picture of the poor state of piped water delivery in Delhi's unplanned colonies and the strict legal requirements for new bore and tube well drilling, see Sheikh, Sharma, and Banda (Citation2015). As they stated, the “complicated [borewell application] process seems designed to ensure that no one attempts it, effectively rendering the majority of tubewells illegal” (11). For the 2010 order, see Government of NCT of Delhi, Department of Environment. Order: Direction under Section 5 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. F8(348)/EA/Env/09/1041–1061, dated 18 May 2010.
20. As Sheikh, Sharma, and Banda (Citation2015) reported, “All private individual tubewells are supposed to be registered with the DJB [Delhi Jal Board], yet the Board's 2014 data records only 960 privately sunk, approved, and registered tubewells, out of several hundred thousand reported to be in operation.” My conversations with security guards and a Jal Board junior engineer confirm that new borewells were being drilled regularly in UCs in 2013.
21. I conducted two months of research in the summer of 2013 and winter of 2014 in UCs in the Chattarpur area of South Delhi, a district that has some of the most elite, so-called farmhouses in Delhi, as well as more than a dozen middle- and upper middle-class UCs characterized by a mix of stand-alone bungalows, vacant lots, and multistory “builder flats.” My analysis here focuses on the latter type of UC.
22. Although there is no standard configuration for such wells, this was a common arrangement in the UC in which I spent the most time. Some wells there service more than fifty buildings, where water is supplied at set times to designated lanes, whereas others that service as few as ten households are switched on according to a set schedule and require no regular oversight.
23. In addition to paying for the cost of digging and installing borewells, the MLA in the UC where I carried out most of my research paid the monthly electricity charges for operating the wells, usually through prepaid monthly meter payments. There were no individual household water meters. The only operating costs that households had to cover for water were the additional payments they make to the security guard who manages each pump—a task not part of normal duties.
24. “In the mathematical field of topology, a homeomorphism … is a continuous function between two topological spaces that has a continuous inverse function” (Parisi Citation2013, 296). Nigam's (Citation2012, 2) critique of Chatterjee's (Citation2004) narrow use of the spatial metaphor of the “domain” in characterizing political society is resonant with the topological approach I follow here. As he put it, political society should be seen “not as an identifiable domain but as perhaps the dark shadow of civil society that changes shape and form at different times of the day.”
25. These task forces are composed of the assistant commissioner of the Municipal Corporation, the subdivisional magistrate, the assistant commissioner of the police, a senior engineer from the Public Works Department, and the deputy director of the Delhi Development Authority for each district. For the order constituting the special task forces, see Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, Order No. F-27/SDM/KJ/2010/96, 30 March 2011 (http://delhi.gov.in/wps/wcm/connect/e9b5290047d5252b93d8df0fed934187/stf+order.pdf?MOD = AJPERES&lmod =-1825763891).
26. Although RWAs in UCs were not officially included in Bhagidari because of UCs' “unplanned” status, Bhagidari broadly authorized all RWAs to engage more directly with local state offices. It also led officials in those offices to rely increasingly on RWAs for community input and consensus building, especially pertaining to land use and construction oversight (Kundu Citation2011).
27. Gidwani and Reddy (Citation2011) characterized this in India as a “post-development social formation,” within which even the “nominal ethical relationship” between the state and the poor is frayed.
28. This is what Mitchell (Citation1999) called the “state effect,” a metaphysical effect produced by more routine practices that give the appearance of a macrostructural essence that we call the state but that does not exist independently of those practices.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
D. Asher Ghertner
D. ASHER GHERTNER is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045. E-mail: [email protected]. His research focuses on informal urbanization and land and environmental politics in India.