Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic research carried out in the city of Tiruppur in South India, this paper describes the processes of land acquisition and the politics of housing that mark contemporary urban class relations.

Paper long abstract:

Post-liberalisation India has been marked by a considerable degree of 'accumulation by dispossession', in which the enrichment of some closely relates to the impoverishment of others. Land and property have long been central to such processes of dispossession, and disputes over low-caste lands appropriated by members of higher caste communities have attracted the attention of media and research alike. More recently, however, headlines have been made by the larger 'land grabbing' projects that led to the displacement of thousands of rural and urban poor for the benefit of big capital, as is the case of SEZs and similar neo-liberal enterprises. While such large displacement projects reveal a darker side of post-liberalisation India, this paper by contrast focuses on the less visible and smaller processes of property acquisition that have nevertheless led to a large-scale dispossession of the urban poor - many of whom are temporary migrants and recent settlers - by an urban class of capitalists. Based on ethnographic research carried out in the city of Tiruppur in South India, this paper describes the processes of land acquisition and the politics of housing that mark contemporary urban class relations. It is argued that urban class formation is increasingly shaped and intensified by processes of what I call 'predatory property', in which increasingly wealthy industrial families come to 'grab' and monopolise the urban property market at the expense of the urban labouring classes.