Abstract
A ‘squatter’ in the global South is another word for a seemingly incomprehensible heap of legal ambiguities, messy politics and abject poverty. Squatter dwellers are typically immigrants from the countryside, who squat on seized land and are caught in complex mazes of citizenship, labor and property laws. They are suspended in what I call ‘juridical limbo’—a situation in which overlapping legal identities and contradictory laws render individuals or entire communities into a state of semi-legal existence. Many squatters have fallen through the cracks of the legal arena and are vulnerable to being evicted without proper rehabilitation, but some of them have indeed learnt to use the law’s complications to their extralegal advantage. Using the case of two extraordinary land conflicts in India’s most populous city—Calcutta—this paper contrasts the claim-making strategies of two squatter settlements, providing a rich ethnographic account of their differential success in protecting their territory against eviction and of navigating their semi-legal status. Alongside establishing this variation, this paper also interrogates the proximate causes of this variation and puts forth a theoretical framework that focuses on the legal relationship between the state and the urban poor.
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