Morality, Legality, Enterprise: Infrastructures and Space in a Delhi Neighbourhood

Paper Abstract: Through a contemporary micro-history, this paper examines different power matrices to craft social and material infrastructures in Jangpura-Bhogal, Delhi, India. It revisits the history of resident, economic, and religious collectives to shape social and material infrastructures in the neighbourhood. This includes the production of religious space, economic life, educational institutions, and neighbourhood space. Local political networks, socio-economic capital, historic spatially proximate relations, varying administrative and legal regimes, and a persistent presence-absence dynamic mediate these processes.


The paper addresses Delhi’s long twentieth century through the neighbourhood to show that market relations and “people as infrastructure” (Simone 2004), apart from historical residence and spatial proximity, have been vital to producing neighbourhood socialities and infrastructures. This history of entanglements between the state, judiciary, and neighbourhood socialities translates to different infrastructural possibilities for Jangpura-Bhogal’s diverse populations. It also produces spatial and historical displacements to craft space in the neighbourhood.


In doing so, the paper charts a postcolonial history of a neoliberal disjuncture in urban politics in the Global South marked through propertied articulations, abject infrastructures, the fortification of space, and renewed appeals of the right to the city. In seeing the neighbourhood as what Simone (2021) calls “processual infrastructure”, the presentation examines the formal and informal collectives such as trader/market associations, religious associations, resident collectives, refugee organisations, and resident welfare associations that have produced social and material relations in the neighbourhood and the city.