Quintessence of Urban India: Musings about Social Change from the Perspectives of the Slum Dweller and the Displaced

Abstract

Urbanisation is a ‘constant’ process and cities will account for all future world population growth. What does it mean for people who find these spatio-temporal existences entrapping and limiting? This article reflects upon the urban condition of India from the imaginative geographic perspectives (to use Edward Said’s concept) of working people, labour, informal proletariat, the slum-dweller. In order to do so, this article explores the ‘urban’ or the ‘city’ as a concept and therefore, its connection with its ‘other’. Since the quintessence of life is the flowing hermaphroditic existence of the slum-dweller and the displaced flowing through space, social change would mean comprehensive re-haul of geographic imaginations that understand how city and country are connected and how they are impacted by neoliberal policy shift. This article concludes that oppression of the urban poor is universal in most urban conditions, hence reversing this universality constitutes the quintessence of social change.