Property-work, work of property: figuring land and caste in an urbanizing frontier

Abstract

Property talk has gained a new amplitude amid soaring land prices in India’s agrarian-urban frontier. This article focuses on what is colloquially described as property ka kaam—property-work and ethnographically traces how property is continually made and remade on the ground. It heuristically identifies some of the key figures—the private developer, the religious leader, and the land broker—who, in their own specific ways, creatively improvise and draft the contours of an urbanizing frontier. It draws attention to everyday practices and discourses through which agropastoral land is turned into urban real estate and shows how the figures, working at different scales and capacities, navigate the complexly layered social-spatial dynamics of caste, class, community, and brotherhood to secure widespread consensus about urban transformation and coproduce an emergent agrarian-urban geography. This article opens a window into the opaque and dense world of property and highlights the contingent nature of property and place- and caste-based connections that undergird property-work.