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Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two neighbourhoods of the global city of Bangalore - one at the heart of the city and one on the periphery – this paper explores how the city is constructed as a palimpsest of 'villages' encompassing local histories, myths, and stories.

Paper Abstract:

Bangalore, the third most populous city of India, has predominantly been a case study for understanding globalization, unchecked rapid development, and the consequent exacerbation of urban problems. Erstwhile known as a pensioner’s paradise, it exploded into an urban agglomeration after the Information Technology boom at the turn of the millennium. This has surfaced deep infrastructure related problems and social tensions caused by increasing migration to the city. However, these rapid changes have not obliterated the ‘villages’ of the city. Indeed, they have blurred the boundaries between the city, the sub-urban and the rural. Drawing on two case studies of neighbourhoods – one at the heart of the city and one on the periphery – this paper explores how the city is constructed as a palimpsest of villages encompassing local histories, myths, and stories from origin villages of immigrant communities. This paper draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, since January 2023, in the two neighbourhoods. The local myths and memories of inhabitants highlight the nature of the city as ‘always-in-flux’, amidst the terrains of expansion, movement, change and erasure. The two neighbourhoods have come to typify different aspects of the city, and stake claim to a slice of the city, despite political assertions of belonging based on biographical history, or linguistic identities. At the crux of this exploration, the study of neighbourhoods enables conversations with anthropological scholarship on intimate relations between the human and the non-human, presented in the forms of local gods, stone spirits, and nature.