Book review: <i>The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement</i>

Abstract

Ayona Datta’s book works at the interstices of at least three significant bodies of literature in the social sciences. The first is a wealth of recent writing that has sought to theorize citizenship, class and exclusion in the informal city through ethnographic accounts of occupancies, insurgencies, stealthy advances, collective action and the politics of the urban poor (e.g., Bayat, 1997; Simone, 2004; Benjamin, 2008; Tarlo, 2003; Roy, 2003). The second is a body of literature on urban violence, focused largely on political, religious or communal mobilizations and their gendered dimensions (e.g., Hansen, 2001; Das, 2007). Third, a body of anthropological work has explored how law, development and the state operate to shape the subjectivities of everyday life in subaltern communities (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Li, 2007; Appadurai, 2001). Despite its rich referentiality, this book uncovers and illuminates a productive terrain of questions and relations that have remained underexplored in these bodies of literature. The book yields a plausible mapping of the ways that the structural violence embedded in the rule of law converges with the machineries of urban development to produce effects of insidious, intimate violence within the neighborhoods and homes of a squatter settlement. The material for this analysis is drawn from Datta’s ethnographic work in an illegal “camp” of squatters established in 1976 on the edges of a resettlement colony that she pseudo-names “Lakshmipur” in southern New Delhi. The book is framed around the “founding violence” of the right to property guaranteed as a fundamental right by the Indian Constitution, not matched by a similar guarantee for the right to shelter. Backed by the “maintaining violence” of interpretation, administration and enforcement by various arms of the state – police, judiciary and bureaucracy – this legal structure positions squatters permanently on the wrong side of the law. Thus, the category of the “illegal settlement” is produced by a complicity between the fetishism of property rights in law and the state’s upholding of property-based social relations under the rubric of a “rule of law”. The first part of the book sketches this backdrop, deploying a textured analysis of the violence of law, urban development and planning. It explores their structures, affiliations, categories and gaps in shaping the terrain of shelter rights in Indian cities. It outlines the disjuncture within law, between the Constitution and the state, and within the Constitution, between its enshrinement of property rights on the one hand and its channeling of entitlements to development resources via cultural identities of caste, tribe and religion on the other. Urban working-class squatters, rendered illegal by one part of the law, stake claims to justice via constitutional categories as lower caste or minority subjects. The book situates itself in a problematic of an emerging “culture of legality” in Indian cities, inaugurated by a moment of rupture in 2000, when the Almitra Patel judgement reflected a new convergence of law and judicial pronouncement, building up into what Derrida calls the “force of law”. This conjunctural moment reversed the precedent that had previously established shelter as a basic human right connected to the right to life. It served to criminalize squatting as trespassing and dismantled the state’s obligation to resettle evicted squatters. Datta’s central argument is that illegal urban settlements are also caught up in this culture of legalism. The shifts in the judicial and urban social ethos represented by the Almitra Patel judgement made legality, as distinct from formality or security, a central idiom in the way that settlements of the urban poor define themselves and are perceived by the state.