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Neutral Accent
How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global
By A. Aneesh Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7571-5
CHAPTER 1
Glimpsing an Urban Future: Divergent Tracks of Gurgaon
As late as the 1980s Gurgaon was a sunstruck expanse of fertile earth at the empty edges of New Delhi. A small town with a smaller bazaar crowded with tea shops selling samosas and jalebis, small clothing stores, tailors, paan stalls, and old-style jewelers — a place full of bustle but, oddly, in no particular hurry. It was a noisy place, by western standards, but a whisper away from the bazaar lay quiet fields of green in seasonal incarnations of wheat, paddy, and pulses. Being next to a major metropolis, Gurgaon struggled to define itself, often leaning toward the character of Haryana, the agrarian state of sun-hardened folks whose straight talk aroused suspicions of rudeness, and whose culture was labeled "agri-culture" by the cultured populace of Delhi. Before Biharis started arriving in large numbers, migrants from Haryana were the people considered responsible for destroying Delhi's possible urbanity and refinement. Gurgaon, on the other hand, remained untouched by Delhi. Indeed, if a place worth any mention must have a past that connects to a seat of empire, religion, or trade, Gurgaon — a place of ordinary hard-working peasantry — was a nonplace on the cultural map of India. Just a couple of decades ago!
Gurgaon is still a nonplace but for reasons of a different kind. The problem is no longer about the past of no particular consequence, no major monuments of the Sultanate or Mughal times, or pilgrimages leading to Gurgaon, reconstructing the past through a collective renewal of memory. The city has, in fact, outgrown the need of a past for self-definition. It is defined by its future. As the future can never fully exist in the present but can only be imagined or glimpsed as a not-yet present, Gurgaon gains its full meaning only as a virtual city, as a place that exceeds its appearances.
It is not surprising that Gurgaon is a city of glass, crowded with buildings reflecting more than they contain, referring not to the past but to prospects briefly glimpsed in their flashy façade. Borrowed from colder climates of the West, its glassy architecture alone does not mark Gurgaon as a nonplace.
It gains the character of a nonplace through its evasion of memory and roots. Despite good agriculture, its life is no longer rooted in its fertile soil or its local bazaars; it is a global city of an export variety whose capacity for capital generation is increasingly dependent on the flows from across the seas. Its economy is intertwined with other economies in real time, and hence susceptible to global vicissitudes. It has become global before it could become a regional city. Gurgaon no longer looks up to Delhi for inspiration.
Many of Gurgaon's townships are named not after Delhi's plush localities; they have names that signify that the city has arrived on the global map: "Beverly Park," "Malibu Town," or "Sun City." Since the late 1990s, the city itself has been called the Millennium City, situating itself not in the history soiled by farmlands but on the horizon of a new millennium.
Gurgaon takes the logic of a modern city so far that it stops bearing resemblance to it. Let us first recognize how it remains well within Max Weber's definition of a city, medieval or modern, that is, primarily a market settlement where "the local population satisfies an economically significant part of its everyday requirements in the local market," and where "a significant part of the products bought there were acquired or produced specifically for sale on the market by local population or that of the immediate hinterland" (Weber 1921, 1213). What makes the city modern in Weber's sense is the fact that authority rests on a rational rather than on a traditional basis; the law is enforced on a universalistic basis rather than on a personal basis; and major divisions are based on class rather than family and clan. Gurgaon also remains faithful to Georg Simmel's diagnosis of the metropolis where life is coordinated less by interpersonal relationships always blemished by "irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits"; rather, its meaning and style, its color and content, its blasé attitude, owe more to the functional mechanisms of the money economy and rationalities of "punctuality, calculability and exactness" (Simmel 1903).
Beyond these understandings, however, Gurgaon takes functional mechanisms to a new level where it appears to lose the unity of a city. It starts to reveal diverse itineraries of multiple functional worlds that give it a look of cities within a city, some local, others global. If global processes mean a certain unhinging of social, economic, and political relations from their local-territorial preconditions, this unraveling does not suggest that the place has turned into a void. Just as cities located on the shores of oceans and rivers and other waterways developed a particular port- city form, we can explore Gurgaon as a city located at the nexus of global information highways, signaling a set of connections different from the ones that defined a regular city. To substantiate how global interactions reterritorialize contemporary cities and states (Brenner 2004; Harvey 1982; Sassen 1991), let me highlight Gurgaon as a variation on global cities.
I detect three essential features of Gurgaon, which may not cover all its aspects but they may help us decide if the city is part of a new urban variation that is emerging in fast-growing economies like India and China. While Gurgaon may have a lot in common with conventional cities, these three interrelated features seem to differentiate it from others. First, the shape and trim of Gurgaon is not that of a single city but a collection of mini cities. Second, the character of Gurgaon appears defined more by other places than the surrounding region. Third, the city is gradually emerging as a set of transnational enclaves, or more formally, of special economic zones (SEZS).
An Archipelago of Mini Cities
Shuchi Nayak, a human resource manager at an international call center, rented an apartment in one of the posh residential complexes of Gurgaon. As I started all my interviews with informants' personal stories, I came to know that she lived there with her husband and a three-year-old daughter. She mentioned that there was even a room for an aayaa (i.e., maid) in her apartment but she did not want a live-in maid, leading to an interesting conversation about her apartment complex. Shuchi was a bit unusual for her social class in Gurgaon where upper middle class often shows a callous disregard for the city's poor. Born in Orissa, an eastern state of India, she received her MBA from Calcutta where she worked for four or five years before moving to Gurgaon. Raised by a progressive father who worked for the central government, Shuchi had worked as a human resource coordinator for a U.S. subsidiary, a software company, for seven years before joining the call center. Despite a high household salary, she was acutely aware of her humble background, and began to complain against the inequality that surrounded her building; just half a kilometer away from her building was a local slum that supplied aayaas and other servants to her gated complex, which was almost a self-contained mini city, with a private school, gymnasium, private club, tennis courts, swimming pool, and more important, its own infrastructural facilities, including back-up electric generator, and water tanks. Such mini cities had begun mushrooming all around India's metropolitan cities. Another mini city built by DLF corporation boasted its own hospital, water recycling system, and — ahem — fire brigade.
Shuchi explained how the world looked so different outside her vast complex. There were better and safer walking paths built inside these mini cities than there were outside, and she regularly took walks that wove around a beautifully designed swimming pool and various gardens, one for every block in her mini city. If there was a power outage, an everyday event in Gurgaon, her tall housing complex did not show obvious signs: its lights stayed on, its Internet and air conditioners continued running, and its elevators kept quietly ascending and descending.
Such mini cities have proliferated all over in India since the 1990s. They are paragons of what an ideal and aesthetically pleasing small city — with no class divide, educated inhabitants, and functioning infrastructure — must look like but has become a futile hope in much of India. It was, however, not too difficult to see that the rise of these plum cities was intricately linked to the proliferation of its opposite: slum cities. Slums lacked everything that plum cities enjoyed: electricity, water, and basic sanitation. But they were essential to Gurgaon's plum cities, for the slum dwellers had been building the city with their cheap labor since the late 1980s, raising towers by hand, literally, brick by brick, building it so that there would be no place left for them to live there.
Once the township was finished, their presence in the complex changed its character. Now their movements were watched with suspicion. They must get their identity checked at the gate when they entered or exited the township. The security guards at the gate, most of whom lived in slum cities, made sure the workers left carrying nothing more than what they had entered with. In the period between entering and leaving, they cooked family meals, bathed the family's children, entertained them at the playground, mopped the floors, and watered immaculate gardens of the premises. In the evening they came back to their shacks, a different world, where there was no water to bathe their babies, and barely enough, courtesy of some public faucet or biweekly supply through a water tanker, to cook a meal. As the dusking sky quietly slipped into their shacks during long and persistent daily power outages, their slum city fought the blinding spray of darkness with the hesitant glow of kerosene lamps.
Class divides are nothing new in capitalism. Emile Zola's description of a factory settlement of the 1880s has a ring of familiarity: "The inmates lived there, elbow to elbow, from one end to the other; and no fact of family life remained hidden, even from the youngsters. In spite of the keen cold outside, there was a living heat in the heavy air, that hot stuffiness ... the smell of human cattle" (Zola 1942, 13). Gurgaon's slum cities may not be too far from European factory settlements of the 1880s. Yet Gurgaon is quite different from those settlements. Unlike early modern European cities, Gurgaon stands at the ruins of modern hopes of integration. Modernist discourses of linear, universal development offered the hope that the fruits of growth would come to all, slowly but surely. And they often did: a universal grid of public education that sought to cover the rich and the poor, raising high school education in the United States from less than 14 percent in 1900 to 83 percent in 1999 (Chao 2001); a continuous electrical grid that ran through rich and poor areas alike; and water pipelines that did not skip the poor to hydrate the rich.
But the promise of modernity in many cases, as James Ferguson noticed in the case of Zambia, has turned out to be a broken promise: "A new generation of Zambians ... has come of age in a world where the modernist certainties their parents grew up with have been turned upside down, a world where life expectancies and incomes shrink instead of grow, where children become less educated than their parents instead of more, where migrants move from urban centers to remote villages instead of vice versa" (Ferguson, 1999, 137).
True, Gurgaon was not located on the Zambian Copperbelt. To the contrary, it was experiencing explosive growth. But Gurgaon's growth still defied the presumed logic of modernization: Instead of continuous electricity, water supply, and sewage systems that carried the fruits of growth everywhere, it witnesses an archipelago of growth pockets where the hopes of universal urban services were replaced with private realizations of mini utopias, the specialized zones of living. Gurgaon had evolved into many cities within a city, an archipelago of cities. Neat packages of life, consumption, and work — gated townships, malls, and call centers — ensured a continuous supply of amenities to its special inhabitants. Decades ago Richard Sennett (1970) had warned us that any community purged or "purified" of the diverse and conflicting interests and personalities would be lifeless. As a bundle of different functional domains, the city appeared too specialized to be inclusive of all, poor and rich, leaving migrant labor from poorer parts of India out of the urban dream that Gurgaon had become. Harassed by the police as potential criminals, they were building cities not designed for them.
Priced out of Gurgaon's real estate boom where property prices in a mini city like Shuchi's doubled and tripled every five years, the poor inhabited the fringes of Gurgaon's growth islands, but they found themselves frequently at the center of its troubles, often blamed for illegally siphoning off power from the main electric lines that were supposed to skip their slum dwellings, a common middle-class complaint in many cities of India.
Large enclaves of affluence have emerged not only in Gurgaon but around all fast- growing, overstrained Indian cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. It is a larger urban formation where islands of affluence, secured against the encroachments of the slums, come equipped with amenities not available even to their Western counterparts: a regiment of maids and drivers supplied by slum cities.
My contention that Gurgaon represented an urban formation with an appearance of a city containing mini cities is well supported by large-scale real estate developers who regularly use city and township in their self-descriptions, distinguishing cities and townships from other kinds of developments: "Suncity Projects Pvt Ltd, is a pioneer in conceiving and executing a profusion of urbane real estate projects, arraying from Townships to Group housing to luxury Apartments to shopping Malls to Office Complexes" (emphasis added). They also describe the meaning of mini city better than this author:
The Suncity Gurgaon is spread over 140 acres of lush green environs in Gurgaon, promising the best of international quality residential and commercial possessions. The magnificently planned township offers plots, built up floors, apartments, penthouses, shops, etc. offering all the best facilities that any township can boast of. It plans to provide exceptional amenities like — clubhouse, schools, hospital, shopping center and dispensary. It facilitates drip irrigation and water harvesting systems, parks and jogging trails, wide roads, 100% Power backup, for group housing & commercial, ample parking space and round-the-clock security. (Suncity 2012)
Here is another description from DLF'S plan of their Gardencity in Gurgaon:
The pioneers of plotted developments proudly bring to you a community where you can live luxuriously in the lap of greens. Enhanced by about 1000 acres of planned open spaces, a panorama that's the size of DLF Phase I and II put together, DLF Gardencity gives you a chance to capture the grandeur of nature in your neighbourhood. The buildings are grouped to form blocks that have internal courtyards. Each block would have a unique character distinguished by gardens, recreational facilities, etc. Parking for each block is provided in two levels below the interior court gardens: Gated Community; Over 3100 apartments by DLF nearing delivery in adjoining areas; 4 acres of Retail complex planned on the lines of Galleria abutting Gardencity; Adjoining 100 acres greenbelt with in the vicinity; Host of Community facilities such as School, Playground etc.; Minutes drive to airport via Dwarka Expressway; Includes park; Water bodies; Lakes; Sports ground; Stadium. (DLF 2012)
Despite the unavoidable hyperbole of advertisement, the privatized development of city-like structures has its basis in persistent failures of central and state governments in matters of infrastructure, failures known and experienced by all and sundry, differentiating India even within the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group.
In addition to private islands of habitation, there have also emerged many islands of consumption, developed by some of the same real estate players. Indeed, Gurgaon is often called the mall capital of India. On the heels of an information technology- enabled BPO boom, Gurgaon has led India in an organized retail boom, which is also its largest industry after IT services.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Neutral Accent by A. Aneesh. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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