Fragmented marginalities: dispossessed peasantry and migrant labour communities in urban North India

Abstract

ABSTRACT Analogous to the Euro-American context, Indian cities are usually conceptualised as socio-spatial forms where communities at the peripheries of ‘development’ constitute ‘urban margins’. However, such conceptualisations rarely interrogate the varied aspects of marginality within those spaces. Drawing from an ethnography with dispossessed peasantry (in ‘urban villages’) and migrant labour (in slums/jhuggis) in Noida, a north-Indian city, we unpack three aspects of marginality. First, the process of marginalisation; second, two communities negotiating their marginality differently; third, evolving social relations within each. We propose a relational framework: supra-sub levels of structural-spatial and economic-cultural marginalisation to better understand the fragmentations within urban margins.