Introduction

Summary

… the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things.

—Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3

Balbir Singh, a resident of Shahpur Jat, then a village in the outskirts of Delhi, remembers the time when land acquisition began taking place in the year 1958. The news had first come to them wafting in as a rumour, but it grew limbs and fangs to become reality soon enough. He remembers having accompanied a group of villagers headed by Dalip Singh Panwar, a local Congress leader, to appeal to Jawaharlal Nehru, the then prime minister, to not acquire the land. Nehru had merely thrown up his hands in despair, expressing his helplessness in the matter and said, ‘Badhte hue bachhe aur badhte hue shahar ko main nahi rok sakta.’

There probably could be no better analogy than the one Nehru had used. In the life of a newly independent nation, in the heyday of Nehruvian socialism, cities were indeed like children. They needed to be nurtured, nourished and sacrificed for. It is entirely another matter that cities as we know them today are less like growing children and more like insatiable monsters, which demand blood sacrifices on a regular basis. Their appetite for resources has only grown exponentially. So much so that these monstrous cities devour almost everything that falls in their way. And while cities devour and keep growing bigger, they end up changing the entire morphology of the spaces that they consume. Quite like how Nehru saw the fate of these villages in Delhi's hinterlands, the question of rural dispossession has been treated akin to ‘collateral damage’. For the monstrous city, the periphery is the space waiting, like a sacrificial goat, for its turn to be consumed. But zooming closer, the city appears more like a bored and slow sloth, which creates a trail of half-eaten, half-chewed out debris. In the process, urbanisation does not look like a sharp, linear transition, but rather a curious mosaic made of such semi-devoured landscapes.