TITLING AS A CONTESTED PROCESS: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India

Abstract

Carol Upadhya, the two anonymous IJURR reviewers and the handling editor for generous and generative comments on drafts of the article. All errors remain our own.

Dispossession without displacement: Producing property through slum redevelopment in Bengaluru, India

“…By exchanging their ‘poor huts’ for modern flats, slum residents may have expected to become proper urban citizens, yet the move has reproduced their status as ‘unauthorized’ residents of the city who are entitled only to ‘subaltern’ forms of property (Jonnalagadda et al, 2021). Their expressed preference for redevelopment schemes that provide independent houses and clear property rights to land reflects their recognition that this form of redevelopment represents a kind of dispossession – not through eviction or physical relocation but by replacing their tenurial rights with inflexible, small dwelling units carrying conditional titles.…”

“…This capacity reflects what Benjamin (2008) terms ‘occupancy urbanism’ – an understanding of southern cities as ‘multiple, contested territories inscribed by complex local histories’ (2008: 720). Variegated and often long histories of settlement incorporating diverse communities and forms of land tenure and use have created ‘layered histories of claims’ (Benjamin and Raman, 2011: 49) that can be invoked to resist eviction or press for other entitlements (Jonnalagadda et al, 2021). In India, the state has been a central actor in the creation of these complex urban landscapes by conferring tenurial rights or other forms of recognition on residents of colonies otherwise deemed ‘illegal’ or ‘unauthorized’.…”

“…In India, the state has been a central actor in the creation of these complex urban landscapes by conferring tenurial rights or other forms of recognition on residents of colonies otherwise deemed ‘illegal’ or ‘unauthorized’. The ‘messiness’ of land tenure, property rights and documentation often allows slum residents to assert ‘a politics of emplacement’ (Jonnalagadda et al, 2021: 14). Yet, the story of slum redevelopment presented in this paper suggests that the space to sustain such claims may be shrinking, as the logic of neoliberal urbanization takes hold across different social classes and urban spaces.…”

“…Ghertner, 2020). Nonetheless, scholars recognize the significance of a subaltern politics of titling because it engenders negotiations between state and citizen on the terrain of law and rights, possibly enhancing recognition (Jonnalagadda, et al, 2021; Roy, 2017). But as the case described below shows, slum residents may lack the political or social power to negotiate successfully with powerful others with strong interests in ‘developing’ the land on which they reside (Mahadevia et al, 2018).…”

Recasting Land: Agrarian Urbanism in Amaravati

“…In these and other ways, assigned land stands in opposition to patta land, which carries full property rights and is mainly possessed by non-Dalit castes. Through the category of 'assigned land', land distribution programmes create a 'subaltern category of property' (Jonnalagadda et al, 2021). The inscription of caste in land governance categories and procedures in turn shapes processes of land acquisition and resultant struggles, as I show below in the case of Amaravati.…”