Paper short abstract:

This paper shows as to how 'political society' in postcolonial cities of the Global South moves beyond the rubric of patronage politics (Piliavsky 2014) and operates as a 'rhizome' (Deleuze and Guattari 1998) of brokerage in shaping the contours of subaltern aspirations.

Paper long abstract:

Attempts to theorize the urban in recent years have seen a sharp divide between the proponents of 'planetary urbanization' (Brenner and Schmid 2015) and that of 'global urbanism' (Robinson and Roy 2016). However, such an argument runs the risk of either reifying 'capital' or fetishizing 'identity'. For instance, in case of the Global South, the rise of a caste-class consociation (Heller and Fernandes 2006) has ruptured the presumed impermeability between capital and culture. Therefore, there has been a tendency to conceptualize the tussles between State-sponsored 'governmentality' and the localized communitarian interventions as one between the 'civil' and 'political' society (Chatterjee 2004). In this paper, I look at such contests through a 'multi-case' ethnography of Resident Welfare Associations (RWA) among the Valmikis (i.e., a lower caste community) in Delhi. It shows (a) as to how has the rise of a RWA mode of governance influenced the clientele predilections of traditional community leaders (viz., the pradhans) and (b) the ways in which such a transition has changed both the tactics and vocabulary of identity politics among Dalits in an urban set up like that of Delhi. In other words, it explores as to how do processes like urban gentrification engender the emergence of urban subcultures among the Dalits. In so doing, the paper shows as to how 'political society' in such contexts moves beyond the rubric of patronage politics (Piliavsky 2014) and operates as a 'rhizome' (Deleuze and Guattari 1998) of brokerage in shaping the contours of subaltern aspirations.