Abstract
A growing literature on contested urban politics has revealed the political agency of seemingly marginal urban residents, including those experiencing the threat of eviction. Yet with much of this work highlighting single instances of successful resistance, the agency of informal urbanites can be overstated and much of what is understood as resistance may actually be confinement. This article addresses this issue by situating an ethnographic analysis of residential evictions in Delhi and Mumbai in historical perspective. Analyzing the character of insecurity since the 1950s, it demonstrates that historically rooted antagonisms and mobilized responses to insecurity have produced political stalemate. The comparative analysis reveals that while evictions in Delhi and Mumbai today occur in places with different histories and characters of insecurity, ongoing contestations between residents, activists, and local government in both cities have produced similar conditions of confinement.
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