Properties of Rent : Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi

This book brings rent to the forefront of an urban discourse using ethnography. It studies how vernacular forms of capitalism and its various affects shape up in opposition to both state, finance capital and the city in contemporary urban Delhi.

We live in cities whose borders have always been subject to expansion. What does such transformation of rural spaces mean for cities and vice-versa? This book looks at the spatial transformation of villages brought into the Delhi''s urban fray in the 1950s. As these villages transform physically; their residents, an agrarian-pastoralist community - the Jats - also transform into dabblers in real estate. A study of two villages - Munirka and Shahpur Jat - both in the heart of bustling urban economies of Delhi, reveal that it is ''rent'' that could define this suburbanisation. ''Bhaichara'', once a form of land ownership in colonial times, transforms into an affective claim of belonging, and managing urban property in the face of a steady onslaught from the ''city''. Properties of Rent is a study of how vernacular form of capitalism and its various affects shape up in opposition to both state, finance capital and the city in contemporary urban Delhi.