Paper short abstract:

This paper sheds light on private-sector efforts to develop an international real estate market in India. It analyzes of industry-internal conflicts to theorize foreign investment in real estate as a cultural project and to illuminate the hierarchies of labor upon which this project depends.

Paper long abstract:

Newly constructed high-rise housing and malls, soaring land prices, and violent confrontations over land testify to the massive urban transformations underway in India today. The private sector, having gained an expanded role in urban development vis-à-vis the state, helps shape urban restructuring; however, few scholars have studied private real estate development in India or revealed the factions that underlie an analytically unitary "private sector." This paper sheds light on private-sector efforts to develop an internationally familiar real estate market in India. I draw on ethnographic accounts of industry-internal conflicts to theorize foreign investment as a cultural process of constructing authority and control. Examining interview data, industry reports, and observations, I show how foreign investors wield discourses of "transparency" and "quality" to transform business practices in India. Using these discourses, foreign investors attempt to establish a normative basis for insisting upon changes in Indian companies' accounting and valuation methods, firm organization, and construction practices and thus to transform Indian real estate into a globally legible set of practices and an international route of capital accumulation. Their attempts do not go unchallenged, however. I argue that the conflicts that emerge between foreign financiers and Indian developers illuminate not only the differences between them but the hierarchies of labor upon which this standardizing, market-making project depends.