Negotiating Urban Space: Development, Exclusion and Exchange

This paper focuses on a property title routinely granted to poor and marginalized slum-dwelling households in Indian cities. This property title known as a “D-Form Patta” is non-transferable and non-alienable accepts as inheritance, hence the author calls it a “conditional title”. The conditional title introduced in colonial India, became a legal instrument to manage economic advancement among specific groups defined in terms of caste identity, income, or location even in a post-colonial context. It relies on ethnographic fieldnotes from the city of Hyderabad which has witnessed at least six rounds of conditional titling to analyze and describe how this conditional legal instrument impacts the political and economic prospects of beneficiary households and neighborhoods. It finds that although state-recognition is greatly desired, people who have received this title experience it as “useless” and “restrictive”. Contrary to offering a path to formal citizenship, or operating as an incentive for enterprise, my paper demonstrates how this dispirited legal instrument constructs a sphere of subaltern citizenship. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two large slum-clusters in Hyderabad, this paper describes subaltern citizenship as a process by which certain groups negotiate and construct legal relationships with the state starting from positions of subordination and marginalization. By analyzing ten life histories across these two sites, it further examines how subaltern citizenship circumscribes the aspirations and actual trajectories for slum-dwelling households. By specifically unpacking the discourse around issues of titling, this paper explores the tensions between state-agents who expect gratitude for the self-perceived largesse of title distribution, and the contempt of beneficiaries who feel entitled to clear and unconditional titles to land in the city. Thus, arguing that understanding subaltern citizenship, which is starkly brought into relief through the politics of land, is fundamental to unpacking political and economic inequality in India and other comparable post-colonial democracies.