Social City

This book examines urban experience from the vantage point of the global
South. Drawing upon narratives coming from three key axes—communities,
neighbourhoods, and market places—it lays bare the specifcities of urban
experience in contemporary Surat. It discusses a host of issues, including
the ambiguity of urban experience, its uncomfortable ties with frames of
the capital, and the politics of urban belonging that operate at multiple
levels, shaping the contours of urban society. Musing on the subjectivities
pertaining to the social and the spatial in a milieu of a fast-transforming
urban landscape of Surat, Gujarat, the book is an exploration of how peo-
ple perceive and associate with their surroundings, how they aspire, how
they stigmatise others, the relation between the city and its migrants and
castes, and at a broader level, between the capital and the city.
An important contribution to the study of cities, the volume sheds light
on how urban experience can be approached as a socially and spatially
embedded concept. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers
of social history, urban sociology, urban studies, global South, and South
Asia.

Sadan Jha works on issues related to the social and everyday life of cities,
history of visuality, symbols (Indian National Flag, Spinning Wheel and
Bharat Mata), and history of colours. His publications include Reverence,
Resistance and the Politics of Seeing the Indian National Flag (2016);
Devanagari Jagat ki Drishya Sanskriti (2018); Half Set Chay Aur Kuchh
Youn Hi (2018); Neighbourhoods in Urban India: In Between Home and
the City (edited along with Dev Nath Pathak and Amiya Kumar Das, 2021);
Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration: Leaving and Living (edited
along with Pushpendra, 2021); Neighbourhoods and Neighbourliness in
Urban South Asia (edited along with Dev Nath Pathak, 2022), and a num-
ber of academic as well as non-academic articles. He is currently Associate
Professor at the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, India.
Social City
Urban Experience and Belonging
in Surat

Sadan Jha
First published 2023
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Names: Jha, Sadan, author.
Title: Social city : urban experience and belonging in Surat / Sadan Jha.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book examines urban
experience from the vantage point of the global South. Drawing upon narratives
coming from three key axes - communities, neighbourhoods, and market-places -
it lays bare the specificities of urban experience coming from a non-megacity
landscape of South Asia. It discusses a host of issues including ambiguity of urban
experience, its uncomfortable ties with frames of the capital, and the politics
of urban belonging that operate at multiple levels shaping the contours of urban
society. Musing on the subjectivities pertaining to the social and the spatial in a
milieu of a fast-transforming urban landscape of Surat, Gujarat, the book is an
exploration of how people perceive and associate with their surroundings, how
do they aspire, how do they stigmatise others, the relation between city and its
migrants, between city and its castes, and at a broader level between the capital
and the city from a location in the global South. An important contribution
to the study of cities, the volume sheds light on how urban experience can be
approached as a socially and spatially embedded concept. It will be of great
interest to scholars and researchers of social history, urban sociology, political
theory, Global South studies and South Asian studies”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022031237 (print) | LCCN 2022031238 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032158310 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032406459 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003354079 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Urbanization — India— Surat. | Cities and towns— South Asia.
Classification: LCC HT384.I4 J48 2023 (print) | LCC HT384.I4 (ebook) |
DDC 307.760954/75 — dc23/eng/20220919
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031237
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031238

ISBN: 978 -1- 032-15831- 0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978 -1- 032- 40645-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 -1- 003-35407-9 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354079
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Dedicated to late Prof. I.P. Desai
Contents

List of fgures ix
List of tables xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xxi

Introduction 1

1 Surat: An Overview 23

2 Caste in the Contemporary City 36

3 Dalit Desires and the City 75

4 A City of Migrants 97

5 Suratilala, Neighbourhoods, and the Socio-Spatial

Subjectivities 114

6 Dwelling in the Marketplace 151

Epilogue 197
Bibliography 209
Index 223
Figures

1 “Floreat Surat [Surat is en fete], Hindi Punch, March 31,

1907. Source: Author xviii
1.1 A handdrawn map of Surat City showing its expansion
and its municipal boundary between 1963 and 2006 along
with of neighbourhoods and market places discussed in the
book. Source: author 31
6.1 A map of Chauta-Bhagal hand drawn during the feld
work. Source: Nishpriha Thakur 156
6.2 Chauta Bazaar in a late afternoon. Source: author 158
6.3 A Publicity brochure of Bombay Market, late 1960s.
Source: Author 177
6.4 A Publicity brochure of Bombay Market, late 1960s.
Source: Author 178
6.5 A Publicity brochure of Bombay Market, late 1960s.
Source: Author 179
Tables

0.1 City Limit Extension and Population Distribution of Surat

(1961–2011). Surat Municipal Corporation 13
0.2 Scheduled Caste Population in Surat (1961–2011). Surat
Municipal Corporation 19
1.1 Status and Growth of Surat. District Census handbook
Surat 2001, pp. 560–561 30
5.1 The Census Data on Zone Wise Area, Population, Density
and Decadal Growth of Surat City for 2001 and 2011.
Surat Municipal Corporation 126
Preface

In dino garche Dakkan me hai bade qadr-e-sukhan

Kāun jāye Zauq par Dilli ki galiyan chhor kar
[Poetry is greatly valued in Dakkan these days,
But Zauq who would leave behind the alleys of Delhi; Md. Ibrahim Zauq
(1789–1854)]

Deboarding the train

It was a rainy morning, the frst day of September in 2007. They said the
monsoon was receding. Leaving Delhi was diffcult. Yet, turning a deaf
ear to Zauq, I left for Surat. Much before reaching Surat, soon after our
Mumbai bound Gareeb Rath had left Bharuch, a commotion began in
our compartment. Now, the passageway was getting populated and bags
of all sizes and shapes were queued at the gates, jamming the pathways.
Standing awkwardly, we too joined this spree, waiting anxiously for the
Surat Railway Station. With 13 big and small luggage, one and half-year-
old son, my mother, and my wife we quickly realised the pragmatics of
jamming the door early.
It was drizzling when we de-boarded the train. Compared to Delhi,
hiring a taxi was hassle-free and the roads were wide and clean. The down-
pour in the night and ongoing drizzles had added an extra glaze on the
tar surface. This was my third visit. I had earlier come for two short but
eventful trips. However, for new visitors (my wife and mother), the city
produced a sense of awe flled with anxieties. Anxiety was about entering
into a new unknown urban terrain. They were probably bewitched. They
had expected a cityscape less spectacular than what they had left behind in
Delhi. The wide roads, long fyovers, and multi-storied apartments in the
City light were beyond their comprehension for an image of Surat.
The gaze outside the Maruti van taxi window also met women sweepers
neatly dressed in sidha pallu glittering synthetic silk saris. This was an
impressive sight. The city was charming, clean, and inviting to its visitors.
Soon, I came to know that this was about the transformation that this city
witnessed in recent decades. The researcher’s desire was sprouting within.
xiv Preface

Surat Way
When I moved here, as a site of study, Surat became an obvious choice for
me to continue my long-term research pursuit on the city. My readings on
Surat convinced me about its economy-centric discourse, particularly in
history. Yet, the need to focus upon the social was only a gradual reali-
sation. What was clear, though, was my conviction to move away from
a disciplinary engagement with history. I wanted to make sense of the
contemporary city, it’s here and now.
The reason certainly did not rest in the history of this city. If we leave
aside the pre-medieval phase that has attracted less number of professional
historians, three key shifts can be easily delineated in the city’s rich and
vibrant history. These are (a) the demise of Rander (an adjacent settlement;
now a part of the city) and the rise of Surat between 1520 and 1530; (b)
the decline of Surat from the mid-eighteenth century; (c) the emergence of
contemporary city from the 1960s (owing to diamond policing, synthetic
textile, and large-scale infux of migrant groups; hitherto, an ignored ter-
rain as far as the contemporary history of this city is concerned). In this dis-
course, while we have three monumental interventions (Das Gupta 1979;
Gokhale 1979; Haynes 1991, 2012) and a few brilliant yet stray forays
into non-economic arenas of city’s history (Das Gupta 1988; Haynes 1991;
Subhramanyam 2000), the overarching historiographical contours revolve
around city’s status as a key mercantile location in the Indian Ocean trade
network and in terms of its role in the credit market (Varadarajan 1976;
Subramanian 1985, 1987; Michelguglielmo 1987, 1991, 1998). When it
comes to the twentieth century, we have three major book-length studies
(Haynes 1991; Shah 1997; Haynes 2012). While Haynes stops in 1960,
Shah focused on the governance of public health in context of the outbreak
of Plague in the city, the social city remained merely a backdrop in these
studies. The domain of the social acquires enhanced focus in reports and
essays discussing the contemporary Surat, particularly its economic life and
in studies on the communal violence the city had to witness in the after-
math of Babri Mosque demolition in December 1992 (Breman 1993; Shah
et al. 1993; Chandra 1996; Desai and De 2003). There are a few essays on
religious institutions and traditions (Van Der Veer 1992) too. Therefore,
while it cannot be said that the social arenas are left unattended (Parmar
1978; Engelshoven 2002; Das 1994; Punalekar 1983 and 1988; Punalekar
1993), social relationships, processes and institutions in this city have not
been adequately studied. In this context, I strongly felt an urge to revisit the
terrain of the social with fresh questions and perspectives. The question of
belonging and the experiential dynamics of living in a city became two core
axis in my approach to this social city.
While gleaning the literature on Surat, I also came across a thin yet unique
report and its formulation of a somewhat enigmatic phrase called ‘Surat
way’ (Desai 1972: 4–5). In this thin booklet Glimpses of Surat, published
 Preface xv

as a part of Census of India 1971 (Paper no.1 of 1972), sociologist I.P.

Desai wrote a brief introduction providing insights into a city located at
the cusp of a historical juncture (Desai 1972: 1–27). The city of Surat wit-
nessed changes at a massive scale in decades that preceded and followed
this publication. The astute eyes of this unorthodox Marxist sociologist
wanted to capture this transformation. He wrote that the

material and ideological factors have contributed to the material, social

and psychological developments of the city. The world forces and All
India and All Gujarat forces affect all the places. But each place receives
and reacts to them in its own way. This ‘own way’ is largely a resultant
of the reactions and interactions of various forces in the past.
(Desai 1972:4)

I.P. Desai went on to delineate the basic contours of this specifcity by

terming it as ‘the Surat way’ and noted its characteristics primarily in terms
of the city’s response to modern technology and organisation of produc-
tion. He wrote,

Surat’s reaction to modern technology is an illustration of the ‘own

way’…Surat is an instance in which modern technology is adopted but
not the large scale of production. Yet, it leads in production. What con-
sequences this open-mindedness to the technological skill have for the
character of the people and the city is the question for study.
(Desai 1972:4)

He pointed towards ‘new economic elites’ of the city (namely Kanbis:

Diamond and Jari; Khatris: Art Silk; Bana or Gola: Jari and Art Silk; and
Modhs or Ghanchis: Grain and other industries) who largely controlled the
business and industry of the city but ‘they did not have the Brahmin and
vaisya tradition’. He further elaborated,

it would be interesting to know what Hinduism means to them or what

religion means to them. As a sect, Swaminarayan was the most favourite
among some of them. But tradition did not prohibit non-vegetarianism
and liquor to them.
(Desai 1972:13)

I was particularly struck with Desai’s emphasis on ‘the Surat way’ and
the fgure of ‘a self-contained or self-dependent’ people of Surat that he
borrowed from an earlier commentary on Surat, Surat Sonani Murat by
I.I. Desai (1958/2004). Beginning with these insights, at one level, I ask
a question contemporary to my own location: what has happened to such
xvi Preface

fgures and such specifcities in the course of the last fve-six decades, since
the 1960s?
At another level, Surat’s ‘own way’ led me to ask a broader question,
How to understand the specifcities of the urban experience in a given sit-
uation? At another level, if urbanism is a way of life as Louis Wirth’s cele-
brated concept (1938) has seeped so deep in our approach, what this ‘own
way’ of a fast-growing city in south Asia can offer to us? How do particu-
larities of this ‘own way’ puncture the universal language of urbanism as a
way of life, as propounded by Wirth? We will return to this question later.
Here, it may be worth to note that I.P. Desai is not alone in pointing
towards the unique qualities that Surat embodies. There is no dearth of ref-
erences when this affection for the city has acquired aesthetic articulations
too. Writing on the Surat of the seventeenth century, B.G. Gokhale too asks
a similar question: What was unique about the urban experience in Surat?
In response, he writes,

that the city had developed ‘a genuine community’. Gokhale identifed

two kinds of linkages which provided the city ‘a degree of social cohe-
sion and economic versatility. He explained these linkages as ‘vertical’
and ‘horizontal’. Vertical linkage found the top occupied by govern-
mental authorities having mercantile classes and sections of the society
engaged in commodity production. Common mercantile and pecuni-
ary interests helped preserve this vertical linkage, gave it a form and
created ‘a sense of community’. The ‘horizontal linkages’ on the other
hand, were on the foundation of the activities of several organisations,
both informal and institutionalized in nature. Mahajans, caste or guild
organization were institutionalised ones ‘whose authority over their
members were often pervasive and vital... These organizations created
a sense of belonging among the members and, for the economy of the
city within which they operated, a sense of interdependence among the
various functional groups’.
(Gokhale 1979:47–49)

Desai’s and subsequently Gokhale’s model of interdependence of communi-

ties for economic reasons has provided an overarching and dominant frame
for scholars in subsequent decades to understand the economy and soci-
ety of the city. Thus, historians, as well as political scientists, have taken
recourse in this theory of interdependence while analysing varied themes,
i.e. specifc constellation of capitalist development or even communal riots
which are conceived as exceptional moments, an isolated event or crisis in
the society’s life when this interdependence broke down. Such riots came as
disarming leaving scholars bewildered, owed with anger, frustration, and
loss of speech. Shocked with disbelief, someone cried—‘This cannot be my
beloved city, Sir’, to borrow the title of one such response (Khare 1993).
 Preface xvii

In this framework, affection for the city, social harmony, and interde-
pendence are socially and historically inbuilt, hence all-pervasive but con-
fict is temporal. The belongingness with the city that comes from such
treatment appears devoid of conficts, tensions, and the politics that shape
the everyday life of a city. It is like representing a city as a beautiful smiling
lady, a trope not unfamiliar to the cartoonist of Hindi Punch in the initial
years of the twentieth century (see Figure 1).
This beautiful, young, smiling, and welcoming lady has many paral-
lels in other representational registers. Khoobsurat, a weekly column by
Ashleshaa Khurana in the local edition of a leading English newspaper,
The Times of India, is one such example separated from ‘Floreat Surat’
by nearly a century. The imaginative twist in the title Khoobsurat (liter-
ally meaning beautiful) nonchalantly sets the mood for a glittering land-
scape, emphasising the feelings of a pleasant, and vibrant city. The broader
framework of the column tries to portray Surat in the same spirit, inform-
ing readers and citizens about the richness of Surat’s heritage, boasting its
contributions, commenting on the aesthetic taste and lifestyle of affuence,
and also occasionally chiding about unpleasant and unwarranted contem-
porary practices. There is also a YouTube channel, ‘Surat Khoobsurat’
by heritage enthusiast and local documentarian-historian, Sanjay Choksi.
The city is affectionately and aesthetically represented as an infectious and
invigorating one for a recent newcomer to the city, like myself.
The social science discourse, particularly in South Asian milieu, is
often oblivious to this affectionate and beloved city. She is often left in
the company of poets, storytellers, painters, and flmmakers. What seems
a normalised erasure in social science scholarship on Surat, in fact, rep-
resents a ubiquitous malaise. One cannot agree more with Nigel Thrift
when he points towards the ‘neglect of affect in the current urban liter-
ature, even with issues such as identity and belonging, which quiver with
affective energy’. He explains this negligence in terms of ‘residual cultural
Cartesianism’ where ‘affect is a kind of frivolous or distracting background’
(Thrift 2004:157–158). If affectionate and beloved city had no space in the
language of causality and science, the recent affective turn in social sciences
equips us to engage with such feelings and experiences of affections and
belonging.
At another level, we fnd that a dispassionate treatment in the name
of scientifc knowledge reduces this beautiful city to an ailing body that
requires surgical operations in the discourse of urban planning. It is there-
fore not surprising that urban planning and governance for a very long
time were articulated in a language of public health in India (see particu-
larly Draft Master Plan prepared for The First Master Plan of Delhi (Delhi
Development Authority 1961 and 1962; Priya 1993, Sharan 2006)).
Away from this planning discourse and looking for resources to attend
the neglected domain of the affective city, my approach is informed by the
xviii Preface

Figure 1 ‘Floreat Surat [Surat is en fete]’: The city as invigorating and welcom-
ing female has been a dominant trope of public imaginations across
genre and representational registers. The occasion for this specific
sketch was ‘a carnival of Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition and the
Provincial, Industrial and Social Conference in the city, and for the
first time after years of supineness, the former Mistress of Gujerat
shows signs of political and social activity’, Hindi Punch, March 31,
1907. Source: Author.
 Preface xix

following four: feminist and gender studies (Haraway 1988), Dalit Studies
(Guru and Sarukkai 2012), emphasis upon subjectivity which has acquired
sharp focus in the last fve-six decades, and the question of belonging that
I fnd insightful both for narrowing down my focus and as a vantage point
for analysing the affective in the city. These approaches are mobilised here
to access and analyse a coming together of the experiential and the trans-
formative urban in the Contemporary Surat.
It may be prudent to mention at the outset that although these four have
their distinct trajectories and lineages, there are many common grounds
they share with each other too. Subjectivities and experiential dimensions
are two such aspects about which I freely borrow from them by drawing
insights from phenomenology and its emphasis upon the affective. These
epistemic borrowings and this centrality of the affective are crucially linked
to the affectionate lady Surat, about whom we talked earlier. The coinage
of ‘Surat way’, references of belonging and interdependence, fgure of a
smiling lady in the Hindi Punch, and the emotive energy behind heritage
projects and columns mentioned above are entry points and provocations
for me into a realm of attachment, belonging and ultimately into affective
city and its ties with the social-spatial dimensions. The trope of affection-
ate city demands that we move from the quantifed city of statistics to the
experiential terrain of the affective.
The scholarship having allegiance to the affective turn in social sciences
has foregrounded the question of corporeality and sensuality. Issues like
touch, smell, and body acquire centrality in such a discourse. Unlike these
valued interventions, my attempt differs on at least two counts. First, I try
to engage with feelings which, to me, are at the core of affection. As we
shall see later in the Introduction, it is this feeling that is also a connecting
thread between the affectionate city and the affective frames of sociality.
To me, the question of feeling is the ground for exploring various layers
of spatial subjectivities, a key to engage with the urban experience. In this
study, the spheres of feelings or emotions are approached primarily in terms
of how one feels about others. How does one member of a caste perceive
someone from another caste or community? At spatial level, how does one
feel and articulate emotions for his neighbourhood? It is at this level, these
feelings get translated as perceptions and stereotypes. Essentially, these are
relational and constitute a feld of the social. Second, this feeling, together
with spatial subjectivities, is linked with the issue of belonging. Belonging
in such a framework ought to be about subjectivities that shape feelings and
dynamics of relatedness and attachment. Once again, these are feelings of
being connected, rooted, embodied, or a denial of these. In the backdrop of
massive changes witnessed by Surat in the last six seven decades, this book
is about such subjective dimensions of relatedness that constitute an urban
society.
Acknowledgements

This book is an outcome of a teamwork undertaken for two studies titled

Experiences of City Life: Contemporary Surat and the Question of
Belonging, and The Social Fabric of Surat (the second one was a component
of a collaborative research programme titled Capital, Labour and City:
Unorganised Sector and the Social Fabric of Surat). Both these studies were
conducted under the aegis of Centre for Social Studies, Surat with fnancial
support from the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi. I
wish to express my gratitude to Centre for Social Studies and to the Indian
Council of Social Science Research without whose support, institutional
backing, and fnancial resource, these two studies and eventually the book
in hand would not have been possible.
As collective endeavours of a group of researchers and their conversations
with citizens of this lovely city of Surat, the book belongs to respondents
who consented for such conversations and shared their experiences with
us, and to these researchers who painstakingly documented these voices.
I would like to place my sincere obligation to all those who kindly agreed
to spend time and shared their personal life, viewpoints, and perceptions
about the city. For gathering these responses and for all those innumerable
feld notes which function as the foundation for this book, I wish to thank
members of my research team Anand Kapadia and Shayar Kamaljagruti for
the frst study, and Divyeshkumar N. Halpati, Nishpriha Thakur, Meghna
Bohidar, Dharmesh Patel, Bharath bhai Kantharia, Samiullah Ghanchi, and
Rishika Mukhopadhyay for the second research project. In many ways, you
all are co-authors of this study, though all the errors remain mine. I would
fail in my duty if I forget to acknowledge my colleagues, both academic and
non-academic staff members of the Centre for Social Studies, Surat.
The book beneftted from comments, discussions, and conversational
energy from a number of friends and colleagues over the decade: Ravi
Sundaram for your continued support, Biswaroop Das for all those long
conversations in person and on phone, Dev Nath Pathak for keeping alive
the spirit of ‘let’s don’t give a damn!’, Pushpendra Kumar for a sustained
conversation on migration and migrants, Suresh for your Georges Bataille
xxii Acknowledgements

under the shade of CSS’s old banyan tree, Sonal, Gauri, and Rutul for great
conversations and camaraderie over coffee at CEPT, and Amiya for your
care and faith in me. While it took time for this book to appear in print,
detours in this journey were pleasant. Shared experience of editing volumes
on neighbourhoods, migration, and streets not merely helped to break the
monotony but interaction with fellow editors and contributors clarifed and
enriched my understanding on the urban in so many ways. Thank you all
my fellow travellers for allowing me to walk with you.
Some sections of chapters on marketplaces (component on Chauta), Dalit
aspirations, and migration appeared in Journal of History and Sociology
of South Asia, Economic and Political Weekly, and in Home, Memory and
Belonging in Migration: Leaving and Living (Routledge). I am thankful to
editors and reviewers. Comments and feedback on these essays helped me
while revising these sections for this book.
Shukriya to Dilip Menon for your continued support and for connecting
me to my publisher Aakash Chakrabarty of Routledge. Finally, I would like
to thank anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions,
to Aakash and my publisher, Routledge.
Introduction

Cities are often viewed as sites producing anonymity, alienation, uproot-

edness, detachment, and disembodied persona. From cinematic screens to
fction, from social science discourse to artist’s canvas, the urban landscape
is thickly populated by faceless fgures with their gaze lost in the maze of a
crowd and their sense of belonging oscillating nowhere. Contrast this dom-
inant trope of the urban with the couplet of Zauq (mentioned in the begin-
ning of the Preface) having a sharp streak of attachment to Delhi. Similarly,
an exuberance for Lahore is epitomized in the phrase, jine Lahore nai
vekhya wo te janamiya hi nahin (one who has not seen Lahore has not even
born). The couplet from Zauq comes from a historical context in which
Delhi was in decline. Yet, it sits oddly in the genre of poetry called Shahr
Ashob (lit. city’s misfortune) where the characteristic impulse is about loss
and desertion. Unlike his fellow poets, composing Shahr Ashob poetry, in
this couplet, Zauq insists on staying. There is a reluctance to move. How
to engage with these emotional linkages that appeal to stay connected with
the city? Are these mere poetic effervescences or do they point towards
some specifcities of urban experience? The question is how to make sense
of this attachment to the city coming from south Asian milieu?
Focused on the dynamics of contemporary Surat (Gujarat), a city in
western India, various facets of this question of attachment are studied
here in a backdrop of massive transformation that Surat has witnessed
since 1960. This account of the transformation (as perceived and narrated
by people) explores the category of everyday urban experiences as a con-
stellation of narratives of neighbourhoods and neighbourliness, events,
public spaces, and social relationships, particularly highlighting the ques-
tion of belonging in the changing milieu of Surat. Documenting this trans-
formation at socio-spatial levels, this book attempts to grapple with how
these changes get translated at experiential levels. Therefore, instead of
looking at processes, structures or institutions, the idea is to foreground
practices, perceptions and subjectivities of people who have lived through
this changing city.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003354079-1
2 Introduction

The category called experience in general and urban experience in

particular constitutes a vast, open, and ambiguous feld. The urban expe-
rience is a frequently used and familiar, yet little explored term. In the
most elementary sense, this is about how people live and relate with the
city, not objectively and dispassionately but as an account of their life and
surroundings as perceived by them. In contrast to objective knowledge of
a city’s social life, this book explores subjectivities with which people con-
nect with the city, and make sense of spaces they inhabit, communities they
interact with, and markets they visit.
This shift in approach from an objective knowledge to subjective accounts
is crucial as in the social science discourse, cities in south Asia are largely
bereft of people and their experiences. From history to urban design and
planning, from sociology to urban geography, the scholarship is largely
silent on the subjectivities of city dwellers, their perceptions, and how they
relate to the space they live and breathe in. We have neighbourhoods with-
out neighbours and their attachments, marketplaces empty of shopkeepers
and customers, migrants without aspirations, and an urban society pre-
tending to be ignorant of its caste. Therefore, in this scholarship, the idea
of urban society lacks any engagement with ‘sociation’, the relation which
brings together individual and the collective, to borrow the term from
Georg Simmel (1950:4–15). In the absence of such an engagement with the
relation, the scholarship prefgures people as victims of exploitative pro-
cesses, of unequal distribution of infrastructures and recipients in adverse
situations for their access to resources and spaces. While these accounts are
essential as they keep alive the ethical characteristics of knowledge build-
ing exercises, these studies do not take us beyond the well-recognised and
institutionalised forms of violence and discriminations. They tell us little
about the manners in which members of one community relate to members
of other communities, how they associate with spaces which they inhabit,
and how subtle forms of power dynamics shape their social practices, their
subjectivities, and sensibilities. This study aims to place these subjectivities,
the experiential, and the relational at the heart of the idea of the urban
society in a south Asian milieu.

Scholarship on the Urban in South Asia

South Asia is home to 23% of the total population of the world and at least
14% of its urban population. About 130 million people live in informal
urban settlements, giving South Asian Urbanisation its ‘messy and hidden’
characteristics (Ellis and Roberts 2016:2). Six out of 29 megacities are in
this region (Bangalore, Delhi, Dhaka, Karachi, Mumbai, and Kolkata). In
this scenario, it is quite expected that social science scholarship cannot
ignore such a large part of society and their experiences. Refecting upon a
‘noticeable surge in the attention paid by the scholars and activists to city
 Introduction 3

life in India’ at the turn of the century, Gyan Prakash termed it as ‘urban
turn’ (Prakash 2002:2). This was about the newly gained ‘sharpened focus
on the city as society’ in the scholarship on cities in India.
The urban turn for him ‘offers an opportunity to revise the history of
Indian modernity, to bring into view spaces of power and difference sup-
pressed by the historicist discourse of the nation’ (Ibid:6).
Critiquing the discourse on the city in terms of themes of development,
of modernization, of transition from tradition to modernity or as a stage in
historical evolution, Gyan Prakash points towards the lack of engagement
with the experience of the city (Prakash 2002:5). He offers a perspective
to look at city spaces as made up of a network of power that codifes such
spatialities. It is this intertwined lives of space, linkages, and dynamics of
power that has motivated this study to look at the feld of urban experi-
ence, albeit differently. Instead of linkages and dynamics of power, I have
harped upon subjectivities and perceptions in and through which spaces are
experienced. This social experience has been the location for different sets
of conclusions to comprehend the social reality, for theories to spring up,
and grounds for the production of knowledge. Yet, a part of the ambiguity
of experience, by its very nature, it eludes the roundedness of such compre-
hensions. I argue that these narratives of the experiential constitute a social
city that has been neglected by social scientists. The unattended, ignored,
or neglected landscape of the social city potentially also reveals deeper ties
between the capital and the city, and we will return to this equation, pro-
vocatively if not substantively, in the Epilogue. Here, in the beginning, the
left-out dimensions can be better identifed by paying attention to some of
the broad contours of the existing scholarship on the city.
Perhaps the most dominant frame of accessing the urban has been
through the binary of rural and urban, city and the village, backward and
the forward, and the organic as opposed to the artifcial. These opposites
have deep roots, going into colonial scholarships which were infuenced by
experiences of industrialisation in Western Europe on the one hand and the
ideas of isolated ahistorical and self-sustained village republics of India on
the other hand. Much of this binary not only continued in the twentieth
century, but these also got re-inscribed and re-articulated in newer moulds
and newer arenas. Gandhian nationalism was one such forum when the
mythic and utopian notions of the rural came into circulation, demonising
everything associated with the city. With Mahatma’s advocacy for a sim-
ple harmonious and organic social life, the village emerged as the locus of
civilizational values India stood for as opposed to the inorganic, imposed,
and complex city. For later scholars, searching for an effective critique of
modernity, this binary allowed them an easy entry, a route to more complex
ideas about the social reality in a non-Western, non-modern landscape like
India. Similarly, for those who were seeking an answer to the question of
backwardness, lack of development, failure of Indian society to transform
4 Introduction

itself into a capitalist society, or why a proletariat class could not emerge
in India in the manner in which it took shape in Europe, this binary ena-
bled a wide range of scholarship to concentrate on the intermeshing of
tradition and modernity into each other. In this set of studies, the urban
is confgured as an extension of the rural, as some kind of continuance of
the conservative, of tradition, of past in the contemporary, in terms of the
nature of social institutions and the shape of urban spaces. Therefore, peas-
ants and their native social entanglements came in handy in understanding
the specifcities of the working-class consciousness, constellations of basti
confgured the vocabulary of slums and lower caste settlements, and the
institution of caste in Madras (now Chennai) was conceptualised as the
modernity of traditions.
With a growing assertion of the post-colonial frames of critique, the
distinctiveness of the history of both modernity and capital in Indian
society gained acceptance (Chatterjee 2006; Sanyal 2007). Along with a
realisation of this distinct history, the scholarship on urban life and its
different institutions acquired a new axis, a new set of invisible binaries.
These were formal as opposed to informal, illegal as a contrast to legal
and pirate in lieu of the owner (for example, on informality see Roy 2004).
A great deal of emphasis was placed upon emphasising the practices and
acts of transgressions to critique the normative and the institutional. Slums
and illegal squatters came to be studied as sites of such transgressions,
which can allow researchers to challenge not merely the dominant univer-
sals but also to show how inequalities and injustices circulate in the name
of planning, law, governance, and civic morality. The city was monopo-
lised as the sole anthropological site for such claims. It was obvious then to
stay focused on megacities and lower class/slums as ‘the feld’. Therefore,
while you can live and work in the frst world city, you feel burdened to
theorise slums of Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. Like the anthropologists of
olden days, you travel, make it a point to mention jet lag in conversations,
and gather narratives from the feld. Or you can live in upper-middle-class
neighbourhoods of megacities and visit illegal settlements on the verge of
demolition. Ethically, it was conscientious to represent the maimed voices,
and it was conceptually a fertile ground to challenge the conventional, the
dominant, and the universal. The idea of the urban in these studies was
already prefgured along the axis of the political and the ethical. As a fall
out, various conventional social categories like caste and class did not fnd
enough takers and were either ignored or at best selectively explored. The
multi-headed hydra called the caste question was reconfgured towards
achieving the sharpness of the Dalit question. It seemed the social division
has only two-axis, Brahmins and Dalits. Without scuttling the signifcance
of studying Dalit experience in the city, the study undertaken here engages
with the caste dynamics in its everydayness and in relation to its spatial
entanglements in urban social life.
 Introduction 5

The third and fnal trajectory, I wish to delineate here, would be about
a cluster of studies which centrally frame the urban question in relation to
globalisation. In this trajectory, cities emerge as interlinked nodes of global
capital through fnance, goods, and cultural processes that provide the con-
temporary its specifc urban form. This scholarship goes back to the dec-
ade of 1970s when at the global level, scholars like Manuel Castells, David
Harvey, and Saskia Sassen among others forcefully argued for a closely
woven concept between space and the capital to reveal constellations of hier-
archies, inequalities, exclusion, and transnational linkages. In recent dec-
ades, these linkages and the fow of the capital have attracted scholars for
their homogenising potential in terms of decisively shaping the urban form
and their divisive role in deepening social inequality. For example, as an
intervention in this trajectory, Roy and Ong have analysed the aspirational
urbanisation through the idiom of ‘worlding’ (Roy and Ong 2011) where cit-
ies of the global South become a site of ‘experimentation’ in relation to capi-
tal and technologies, along the axis of capital and technology. This discourse
is deeply concerned about the binary of global North and global South.
Irrespective of such a binary, the global South in this recent discourse
does not remain merely a follower, a site of gathering empirical data, but
has also forcefully emerged as a site producing new theories (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2012; Simone 2020). Abdou Maliq Simone, for example,
has argued for the creative potential in specifc urban features of the global
South, what he identifes in his coinage of ‘people as infrastructure’ (Simone
2019). These writings have enabled us new insights into dynamics of urban
space and society both. It is true that, space is no longer seen as a nested
hierarchy moving from ‘global’ to ‘local’. Yet, in this discourse, space is
reduced to ‘a tiny set of narrow, standardised connections’ out of many
others (Latour 2002:124; Thrift 2004:159). This scholarship, however,
underplays the ever-shifting social contours of urban spaces as affective
spaces and as one that generates different forms of sociability. It is impor-
tant then to shift our attention away from economic frames, categories,
and linkages to social processes, practices, and experiences. It is here on
this point, as Merrifeld forcefully calls for ‘a thorough reframing of the
urban question’ when we are invited to get rid of ‘old chestnuts between
global North and global South, and between developed and underdevel-
oped worlds’. Merrifeld argues,

…the frontier lines don’t pass between any North-South or urban-ru-

ral divide, but reside ‘within the phenomenon of the urban itself’-as
Lefebvre says in The Urban Revolution.
(Merrifeld 2014:4)

A thorough reframing, as advocated by Merrifeld, would obviously lead us

into many directions. The affective and the question of belonging may be
6 Introduction

one such route The issue of attachment, relationships and linkages, which
constitute the domain of belongingness, becomes relevant.

Affectionate City and the Question of Belonging

Affectionate city, commonsensically speaking, is the realm of the sensorium.
However, scholars proposing affective turn in social sciences have made a
strong plea for an inclusive and comprehensive framework in which body
and mind, reason and compassion, and cognition and intellect are not sep-
arate from each other (Clough 2007; Hardt 2007). As Clough argues, the
affective turn ‘expresses a new confguration of bodies, technologies and
matter instigating a shift in thought in critical theory’ (Clough 2007:2).
As mentioned by Massumi, affect in its broad sense is often treated as a
synonym for emotion (2002:27). Massumi goes back to the philosophy of
Spinoza to argue that affect is basically about the affection and at the same
time the idea of the affection (Massumi 2002:31). It is in this sense that
Massumi also emphasizes upon feelings as having a way of folding-in mind
and body, sensation and action, into each other ‘mutually intensifying, all
in unquantifable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably’
(Massumi 2001:1).
Deploying this perspective at the level of society, Clough builds upon
Massumi, when the latter claims that the affective is not presocial—it
includes social elements but mixes them with elements belonging to other
levels of functioning and combines them according to different logic’
(Massumi 2002:30; Clough 2007:1–33). In this ‘different logic’, Massumi
questions the apriori location of the society vis-à-vis individuals. Instead,
Massumi harps upon the in-between by realigning the logic of relation
between the individual and the social (Massumi 2002:68–88). Thinking
in this manner, Massumi opens up a way to conceptualise social change,
the stylisation of power, belonging, and capitalism where ‘Capitalism is the
global usurpation of belonging’ (Massumi 2002:88). In a new planetary
mode, this is neither a lament nor a celebration, but ‘the inescapable obser-
vation that belonging per se has emerged as a problem of global proportion.
Perhaps the planetary problem…a challenge to rethink and re-experience
the individual and the collective’ (Massumi 2002:88).
The emphasis on relations or what Massumi has called as the logic of
relation is important in both these genealogies and for our study on belong-
ing in so many ways. Thrift points out that in Spinoza’s (who along with
Deleuze and Guattari are routinely invoked by scholars working on the
affective) conception of bodies and minds, there is a prior category of ‘alli-
ance’ or ‘relationship’ (Thrift 2004:62).
On this logic of relation, much before the affective turn, Simmel had pro-
posed that besides relations and interactions, crystallised as defnable, i.e.
‘state and the family, guilds and the church, social classes, and organisations
 Introduction 7

based on common interests ..., there exists an immeasurable number of less

conspicuous forms of relationship and kinds of interaction’ (Simmel 1950:9).
He further stressed, ‘one should properly speak, not of society, but of socia-
tion…it is because of their interaction that they are a unit’ (Simmel 1950:10).
Thinking this way, it became imperative to focus on the relation, the
way elements are attached to produce a sense of belonging, un-belonging
or shades of belongingness in the city. It is this relation, this attachment
of individuals and specifc castes with each other and with the collective
called the city that is germane with analytical possibilities opened up by
the phrase ‘Surat way’ (discussed in the Preface), and makes the question of
relationship, attachments, belonging as a key conceptual axis for our study.
The question of belonging further gains a multi-pronged location of the
‘in-between’ when we ask how different castes, in the case of Surat, relate
to the space of the city in terms of their everyday orientations and practices.
Here, I agree with Diane P. Mines and Sarah Lamb when they write that
‘to focus on every day is to focus on the ways people live their ordinary,
day-to-day lives rather on generalities or averages or abstract theories about
those lives’ (Mines and Lamb 2002). This is about an attachment between
the social fabric of the city and the space that is emphasized at the level of
practices. It is at this level that belonging also reveals its dynamic and shift-
ing characters as new elements (i.e. migrants) enter into this complex of the
social and the spatial.
The infux of migrants into Surat, which began recognizably in the 1960s,
also points towards severe limitations or exclusionary dimensions of the
Surat way. Migrants have no space in this coinage, making it insular and
sociologically narrow. We also fnd that with its emphasis on horizontal
linkages among specifed castes (identifed as Suratis) and on harmony, the
concept excludes not only migrants but also others like Scheduled Castes
(as mentioned earlier) and Scheduled Tribes. In this exclusion, the Surat
way obfuscates vertical relationships among castes and elements of confict,
discrimination, social inequality, and violence. Yet, despite all these limi-
tations, it may be safely argued that we cannot undermine the signifcance
of the Surat way as an entry point for a study on Surat. Second, and more
crucially, treating Surat way as only a point of entry and not as a coherent
concept to pass a judgement on the nature of Surat’s society then differen-
tiates it from being a cultural constellation and puts an onus on us to chart
a trajectory that can address belonging at social level and not just at psy-
chological or cultural level. This approach has to be different from Louis
Wirth’s frame of looking at urban as a way of life (Wirth 1938).

A Move Away From the Cultural Essentialism

A good deal of our engagement on affect, its emphasis upon the social
and its spatial linkages with the urban build upon the genealogy of the
8 Introduction

urban going back to Simmel (his famous lecture The Metropolis and the
Mental Life delivered in 1903; Simmel 1950:409–424). Simmel has drawn
our attention to the de-humanised psychological profle of individuals in
a metropolis. What emerges forcefully is the fgure of an alienated, regi-
mented, and objectifed self that is devoid of irrational, spontaneous, and
subjective selfhood in the environment of a city. Simmel has emphasised
that the ‘modern mind has become more and more calculating one’ (Simmel
1950:412). Along with the money economy’s gift of reducing life into math-
ematical formulas, pocket watch ushered a frmly fxed framework of time
transcending all subjective elements in metropolitan life. Thus, punctual-
ity, calculability and exactness three requirements of the metropolitan life
also led to the ‘exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human
traits and impulses which originally seek to determine the form of life from
within instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of
life from without’ (Simmel 1950:413).
Building upon Simmel, Louis Wirth, among others, has identifed the
urban as synonymous with the modern (Wirth 1938). The question, as
Wirth himself poses, is how potent cities are in moulding the character of
social life. In many ways, this has been the defning concern among schol-
ars looking at cities and urban life for nearly 100 years. To engage with
the question, at a very fundamental level, we can safely begin with Wirth’s
schema when he identifes urbanism at three levels: (a) physical structure
comprising a population base, a technology, and an ecological order; (b) as
a system of social organisation involving a characteristic social structure,
a series of social institutions, and a typical pattern of social relationships;
and (c) as a set of attitudes and ideas, and a set of a constellation of person-
alities (Wirth 1938:18–19).
In Indian milieu, the scholarship on the urban society, pre-dating as well
as cohabiting the urban turn has remained centred upon either the frst set
of the above concerns of Wirth (i.e. about physical structure) or to the third
rubric (which is related to a set of attitudes and ideas; broadly speaking
cultural dimensions of the urban) largely ignoring the question of the social
(institutions, structures, and relationships; particularly the third) . Harping
upon this relationship in the equation between the urban and the social, I
wish to go back to previously mentioned aspects in Simmel: relation and
‘sociation’. This is partly to avoid the primacy of the urban in determining
the social in Wirth’s scheme, which makes urban distinctive and modular
in Wirth. Although Wirth duly acknowledges the variations (to serve a clas-
sifcatory purpose), his defnition is universalistic where cities act as civili-
zational forces and the stress is upon the process of urbanism in imparting
‘distinctive traits’ to the social life.
Unlike Wirth, I.P. Desai’s coinage of Surat’s ‘own way’ (as mentioned
previously in the Preface) emphasises the language of the particular and,
by doing so, challenges the modular. Second, Wirth places the urban
 Introduction 9

in a culture-essentialist way, taking the city out of the confnes of the

economy-centric discourse. Desai, on the contrary, places his analysis of
the urban in the social relations of production. Therefore, following Desai’s
formulation implies that one should reorient the question of the urban
away from the physical and the cultural to the social domain. This makes
the question of belonging even more pertinent as we need to ask not merely
who all belong to this idea of the Surat’s own way, but perhaps more vigor-
ously who gets excluded. In such a formulation, the affective ties remain no
more isolated to social and spatial dynamics.

The Question of Belonging

Belonging is essentially about relation, attachment, and linkages. At
a deeper level, this emphasis upon relation takes us to the dynamics of
rootedness, situatedness, and embeddings or a lack of such features, i.e.
uprooted self, non-belonging, detachment, or alienation (Ahmed 2000;
Valentine et al 2009; Lähdesmäki 2016).
Scholars have increasingly privileged belonging in the last three to four
decades to move beyond the causal frames of analysing social realities and
also to address multiplicity and fragmentation of identity (Lähdesmäki
2016:233–247). While the question of identity presumes that an individual
is already framed as a member of a collective, belongingness enables us to
look at an individual as relational. The strength of the concept lies in its
openness and fuidity. ‘People may feel that they belong to something with-
out necessarily describing this feeling as identifcation or identity’; therefore,
allowing us new ways of addressing sociality, social and cultural practices.
The concept ‘enables the inclusion of subjective, social, and societal dimen-
sions in the study’ (Lähdesmäki 2016:241).
The academic discourse of belonging has a strong genealogy going back
to Heidegger where we fnd that the idea of ‘being in’ as a spatial relation in
a primordial sense (Heidegger 1953/2010:54). This is about the spatiality
of Dasein or being (Heidegger 1953/2010:66). This Heideggerian pedigree
serves twin purposes for the book in hand. First, it allows us to engage with
the affective as spatially embedded and as a co-constituent in the idea of
the social.
Second, it also simultaneously makes the social dependent upon the
affective. I argue that through the body, the corporeal, and the subjective
in a non-Cartesian manner, one can approach the social in its located-ness.
Bennett, for example, talks about belonging in terms of people’s inalienable
connections to material places, where to belong is pervasive, intangible, and
unseen. It is a way of being in relation to a place (Bennett, 11). In the words
of Heidegger, ‘the closest world of everyday Dasein (being) is the surround-
ing world [Umwelt]’ (Heidegger 1953/2010:66). Conceptualising belonging
in this manner also implies that it is always about belonging to something
10 Introduction

else, to others, to space. As Heidegger reminds through Ereignis (appro-

priation, belonging together; Translator’s Preface, Heidegger 1953:XIV),
‘we belong to others, we are others too’ (Translator’s Preface, Heidegger
1953:XV). Standing in a south Asian landscape, particularly in an Indian
terrain, the question is how to approach this relation at the levels of castes
and communities, and between people and the space. In this regard, percep-
tions and subjectivities are keys for me.
Behind these quests for subjectivities of urban dwellers, issues pertaining
to their belonging to city-spaces shaping the contours of social relationship,
and the challenge of making sense of particularities of living in this city,
I had a broader anxiety: what does it mean to live in a city? Why living
in a city is such a familiar yet analytically least explored issue? One way
of addressing these questions of experience was by taking recourse to the
personal and its ethnography. Another way was to approach the question
of urban experience through the lives of people who constitute the social in
and through their relation with spaces.

Approach
For pragmatic purposes of narrowing down the scope of this study on urban
experiences, the social dynamics of this city is studied here by selecting
three thrust areas. These are few selected caste groups, neighbourhoods,
and marketplaces.
The discussion that follows in the book is based on two research projects
carried out over a decade and a half of my stay in Surat. Based on about
245 conversations, collected during the feldwork conducted in phases by a
team comprising researchers from different social backgrounds, the largest
share of these conversations has been with people coming from modest
economic backgrounds or subaltern segments of the society. To safeguard
their identity, they are kept in anonymity by using different names. Yet,
their locations and caste markers are mentioned to give readers a sense of
social-spatial moorings to these conversations. It is diffcult to club them
together into one sociological category but these can be termed as informal
workers, retired workers, retired government servants (mostly those who
served at the lowest rank of government offce), small shopkeepers, sales-
men, housewives, hawkers, and people whose job is not to sell commodities
in a shop but only to persuade customers to step inside the shop. Adding to
these subaltern lives, the team also interviewed power loom and Jari unit
owners and those who can be safely termed as members of the middle class
and rich sections of the society. Intending to capture the life spent in Surat,
these conversations were normally one and a half to two hours and tried to
capture personal detail, life in Surat (including arrival in the city in case of
migrants), occupations, religious practices, beliefs, change in occupation,
shift of residence, and perceptions of other communities.
 Introduction 11

In my research design, I do not claim to use any statistical sampling

method. In a study that relies heavily upon perceptions, stereotypes, and
open-ended ambiguous category called experience, I have primarily relied
upon the amorphous and ambiguous characteristics of conversations
(whichever directions they came from) that make the tapestry called the
experiential.
Does that mean one can afford to write social science with utter contempt
for the language and method of science? If so, then what kind of knowledge
production it would be? A fip side of this same question would be that
if one was already settled with the language and methods of a science of
knowledge production, then the human experience was already framed as
the passive location for generating knowledge and thus had already lost its
autonomous say, its ambiguities, and its openness.
To explore the in-betweenness of these two settled positions, there was a
challenge worth pursuing. To keep the openness yet keeping alive the link-
ages with the method, the research began by selecting castes/jnati {Gujarati
word frequently used instead of jati, commonly used Hindi term for the
caste; also see notes 2, chapter 1 on page 36}. As the study was anchored
upon questions of belonging, initially, I focused on identifying castes and
communities which are identifed as Surati.
The respondents selected for the study include castes that are often con-
sidered as having close and deep roots in the city of Surat. These are Kanbi,
Khatri, Gola, and Ghanchi. Owing to their initials, which are identical to
the frst four letters of Gujarati alphabets (‘k’, ‘Kh’, ‘G’, and ‘Gh’), these
have conventionally been often acknowledged as constituting the fguration
of Surati or the core of the social fabric of the city. However, this privileged
position should not be confused with their higher status in the caste hierar-
chy, as all four come from non-Brahmin Vaishya lineage.
In the second phase of research, the number of castes was extended to ten
(including a continued engagement with these initially selected four castes).
The researchers carried a minimal brief to approach their respondents. The
researchers, in certain cases themselves, belonged to these communities and
they were free to select members of their families, friend’s families, and
neighbourhoods. The basic idea was to document their individual lives in
the city. These researchers were given certain broad talking points to collect
information about the respondent’s life but researchers were also advised to
follow the fow of the conversation, remain attentive to the unanticipated
trajectories of the conversations, and register their observations as best
as they can. They were particularly encouraged to follow leads given by
respondents, track and cross-verify (to the extent possible) factual details,
and expand conversations in manners they would feel appropriate in the
situation.
Ten castes or communities which this book focuses upon were selected
in terms of their entry into the city at specifc historical junctures. Thus,
12 Introduction

Marathi communities having deep-rooted past and also having proximity

to their native regions (Surat is in the geo-cultural region in the neigh-
bourhood of Maharashtra) became an obvious choice. Similarly, commu-
nities of Patidars from Saurashtra began migrating to Surat in the 1960s
in the diamond polishing units and soon came to dominate the sector
(Engelshoven 1999 and 2002) and Marwari from Rajasthan which form
the core of textile trade (second most important sector after diamond pol-
ishing) were selected for the study. Another crucial factor determining
the selection of communities was the time frame chosen for this study.
This is a study of contemporary Surat having its lineages going back to
the decade of the 1960s when the city grew manifold both in size and in
terms of social complexities (see Table 0.1). In the second research pro-
ject, along with earlier mentioned four castes, we expanded our ambit
and included Mahyavanshi, a scheduled caste having a long history of
suffering and caste exploitation. The members of the Scheduled Caste are
part of the Dalit community. However, it must be clarifed to readers that
the two terms are not necessarily interchangeable and therefore, all those
who belong to Dalit communities may not be part of the Scheduled Caste
category, as these two terms come from overlapping yet distinct trajec-
tories. Along with Mahyavanshi, we also widened our engagement with
Dalits by engaging with this heterogeneous group. This group comprised
Dalits, who identifed themselves as migrants from Maharashtra, mem-
bers of the Vankar community as well as Pasi and Mallah migrants. Other
social communities that were focused during the study identifed them-
selves as Bohra, Marwari, Muslim, Khandeshi (Marathi), and Halpati.
Some stray case studies were also conducted among members of Jain
Vania (Sthanakvasi), Leuva Patel, Kadva Patel, Dhaduk Patel, and Hindu
Rathod.
Surat is in the South Gujarat region, which has a strong tribal population.
To explore this linkage further, the community of Halpatis was selected.
A community of landless agricultural labourers from the vicinity of this
city, Halpatis along with Mahyavanshis and Marathi migrants have formed
a substantial portion of Surat’s working-class population which constitute
the bottom of the city’s social order. I must also mention that while the study
gathered voices from all these mentioned caste and communities, only a
tiny part of these conversations are referred in this book. The inclusion and
omissions are largely guided by the questions raised and issues discussed.
Therefore, the narratives discussed in this book, primarily, revolve around
four ‘Surati’ castes, caste of the Mahyavanshi, and stereotypes pertaining
to migrant communities.
Similar to the selection of castes and communities, care and due back-
ground preparations were made before selecting neighbourhoods and
marketplaces. For the neighbourhoods, we selected Golwad, Begampura,
Kharwarnagar, Bhatar, Piperdi Sheri of Salabatpura, Rander, Parvat
Table 0.1 City Limit Extension and Population Distribution of Surat (1961–2011)

Year Area Name of Area Total Area (sq. km) Population E xtension of City Limit Reso.
(sq. km) No./Notif ication No./Date

Area Area Total S.C . S.T.

(sq. km) (sq. km)

1961 8.18 8.18 288,026 13,232 17,664 (1–12) Wards & TPS —1&2
Borough Municipality;
Census Year
1963 T.P.S. 3 to 9 13.77 21.95 Vide Govt. Reso. No.
MBR /1262/1541/L ,
Dt.21- 03- 63
1966 21.95 Vide Govt. Notification No.
KP/771/SMC/1066/5618/p.
Dt.05-ept., 1966. Surat
Borough Municipality
Converted into S.M.C. from
01-10 - 66
1970 Rander, Adajan 11.85 33.8 Vide Govt. Notification No.
KP/1807/SMC/1267/8/85.
Dt.16 - 01-70
1971 33.8 33.8 471,656 21,541 32,444 Census Year
1975 Tunki, Singanpore, Dabholi, Ved, 21.76 55.56 Vide Govt. Notification No.
and Katargam KP/7570/SMC/1273/1704/P.

Introduction
Dt.28 - 03-75
1981 55.56 55.56 776,583 38,909 48,411 Census Year

13
 14
1986 Nana Varachha, Karanj, Piplod, 55.6 111.16 Vide Govt. Notification No.
Umra, Althan, Bhatar, Majura KV/87/86/S.M.C./669/4424/P

Introduction
(P), Bamroli (P), Pandesara, Dt.15- 03- 86
Udhna, Bhedvad, Bhestan,
Dindoli (P), Limbayat, Anjana
(P), Umarwada, Dumbhal,
Magob (P), Jahangirabad, and
Jahangirpura
1991 111.16 111.16 1,498,817 65,118 70,955 Census Year
1994 112.28 Vadod (P) [0.696 sq km] Pisad 1.12 112.28 1,499,560 65,118 70,960 Vide Govt. Notification No.
[0.428 sq km] KV/562/94//SMC/8090/825/P
Dt.15-11-94
2001 112.28 112.28 2,433,835 86,575 86,400 Census Year
2006 148.67 Amroli, Chhaprabhatha, 34.176 2,729,482 93,687 97,138 Vide Govt. Notification
Godadara, Parvat, Bamroli, No.KV/26/2006/
Puna, Una, and Kosad SMN902006/410/P
Dt.14 - 02-2006
2006 326.515 Rundh, Magdalla, Vesu, 180.059 2,877,241 100,272 113,365 Vide Govt. Notification
Bharthana—Vesu, Vadod, No. KV/212/2006/
Dindoli, Magob, Simada, SMN902006/410/P
Sarthana, Mota Varachha, Utran, Dt.21- 07-2006
Variav, Pal, Palanpur, Gaviyar,
Vanta, Dumas, Sultanabad,
Bhimpor, Abhava, Khajod,
Sarsana, Bhimrad, Sonari, Jiyav,
Gabheni, and Budiya
2011 326.515 4,466,826

Source: Surat Municipal Corporation, https://www.suratmunicipal.gov.in/TheCity/City/Stml1.

 Introduction 15

Patia, Ghanchi Sheri, Varachha, and Rampura. Many of these neighbour-

hoods share fuzzy and messy linkages with marketplaces. An underlined
common feature in many if not all of these neighbourhoods is that these
are primarily identifed with a single caste or community. For example,
Golwad is identifed with the Golas, and Kharwarnagar is a settlement
singularly dominated by Khatris. It may be worth mentioning here that
while selecting areas for the study of neighbourhoods, this was nowhere in
our consideration. We were interested in selecting areas that can represent
different geographical parts of the city as well as areas that can potentially
refect upon the expansion of the city both spatially and in terms of social
complexities and plurality. While we initially felt that such assumptions
about areas would help us understand the linkages between the social and
spatial in better ways, pragmatics of the study, the way feldwork pro-
gressed, and how people responded to our requests for interviews and
conversations ultimately guided us. The obvious reason for placing such
a disclaimer upfront is to convey to the reader that the list of neighbour-
hoods selected for this study was not predetermined but one that evolved
during the study. By and large, this is also true about the communities and
marketplaces covered in the study. However, in the case of the market-
places, we wanted to have a composition that can also refect both spatial
dynamics of the city’s growth and some kind of rudimentary chronology
of the city’s history. We also wanted to study marketplaces that evolved
historically, organically, and over a period of time, as well as those which
were planned to meet the specifc purpose and to cater to customer culture
of particular types. Hence, in this list, we have Chauta Bazaar which in
the public memory claims to have about 400 years of continuous history
along with markets like Bombay Market and Textile Markets which came
into existence as planned efforts to meet the demands of a growing textile
sector in the late 1960s and later decades. On this imaginary temporal
axis, while we have on the one hand Chauta Bazaar, on the other hand, we
have shopping malls like Iscon Mall and Rahul Raj Mall which came up
barely a decade ago. In between these two extremes, we selected Sargam
Shopping Centre, Turning Point Complex, Shaniwari Market, and Rangila
Park.

Search for a Framework to Engage With Urban

Experience
In the Preface, I have mentioned four epistemic trajectories that this study
mobilises to engage with the terrain of urban experience. One among this
is the intervention made by scholars working with the feminist frameworks
and epistemic investment in gender and geography. They place corpore-
ality of the body in the centre of their engagement with space (Duncan
1996/2005; Massey 1994:175–248; Ranade 2007; Phadke 2013; Phadke
16 Introduction

et al. 2011; Spain 2014). In this oeuvre, the terms of reference shift from
objective universal knowledge to a critique of dualism between reason
and non-reason (Massey 1996/2005:109–126), personal experience, situ-
ated knowledge (Haraway 1988), and subjectivity. For scholars working
under the overarching frame of gender studies, the claims are articulated
along with the logic of ‘limited locations’ and ‘embodied objectivity’, and
‘not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object’ (Haraway
1988:579–581).
With its lineage in personal is political, feminist discourse and, subse-
quently, gender perspectives have opened up new vistas for looking at the
city in terms of subjective experiences and practices. Dualities and binaries
of home and outside, streets and backyards, body and city, internal and
external all confated with each other in that subjective realm of experience.
Cityscapes become bodyscape, an extension of the self.
In this privileging of the experience, we also fnd ourselves standing
together with the epistemic interventions made by Dalit studies (Guru and
Sarukkai 2012). This is another signifcant feld where subjectivities acquire
the centre stage, and objective, singular, and universal frames of knowledge
are questioned.
The critique of universal objectivity and the argument for the situated
knowledge also open up ways to look at the question of experience in
the specifc context of India in markedly different terms than what we
have observed so far in Eurocentric traditions of knowledge production.
One of the fundamental ways in which this difference gets articulated
is around the question of caste, an aspect we shall discuss later in two
chapters.
Both these interventions (feminism and gender studies on the one hand,
and Dalit studies on the other hand) with their emphasis on subjectivi-
ties and the experiential also leave us with certain unsettling questions
in our engagement with Surat’s way. Do lived experiences of Scheduled
Castes and women go into the idea of Surat’s way? My response would
be an emphatic and unambiguous no, neither at an empirical level nor
at conceptual terrains! We do not fnd these segments as integral in the
making of this phrase. Therefore, while in the context of Surat, we will
see the limitations of the claim pertaining to the harmonious co-existence
of different segments of society, gendered understanding, and Dalit per-
spectives allow us to see the power dynamics and fractured nature of the
affective at broader conceptual levels too, something we fnd neglected in
the sociological discourse related to the affective turn in social sciences.
Insights coming from Dalit Studies, in particular, allow us to have a more
situated understanding of the affective turn with a nuanced and grounded
approach to it by taking into consideration the socio-historical complexi-
ties of the global South.
 Introduction 17

Chapter Plan
This book begins when in the Preface, the personal journey of the author
initiates the reader into this city and an attempt is made to engage with a
key formulation related to specifcities of Surat’s social fabric which is artic-
ulated in a coinage Surat’s ‘own way’. Through this coinage, scholars have
emphasized the harmonious interdependence of castes and communities in
Surat. A critical appraisal of the phrase allows us to focus on belonging
and subjectivities, two core aspects of urban experiences that this book
aims to engage with in some detail. Introduction offers a brief explication
of the core threads i.e., urban experience, affective frames of sociality and
the question of belonging which have broadly shaped this study. Further an
attempt has been made to locate this study and its approach in the discourse
on the urban both at global level and in connection with the existing schol-
arship on the city in India.
Subsequently, at analytical level, Introduction briefy emphasises upon
the signifcance of looking at relationship, attachments, or belonging for
the study of urban society. For this purpose, the chapter discusses the sig-
nifcance of mobilising insights coming from the affective turn on the one
hand and on the other hand the resources made available by interventions
in Gender and Dalit Studies. At the core, the Introduction frames the ques-
tion of urban experience as socio-spatial in nature with the challenge of
analysing the dynamics of belonging.
The frst chapter offers a brief profle of the city and an overview of the
transformation this city has witnessed since 1960 (Table 0.1). The chap-
ter identifes key phases in the history of this city before landing on the
contemporary one, the theme of this book. These are emergence of Surat
as a medieval port city, the period between the latter half of the sixteenth
century and mid-eighteenth century when the city was perhaps the most
important and busy port and dominated the Indian Ocean trade in many
ways, and fnally the contemporary phase beginning from the decade of
1960s onwards. The chapter argues that the fast-changing profle of Surat,
the scholarly assumption about the existence of organically bound com-
munities and its decay in recent decades, loss of multi-cultural ethos which
this city boasts in its celebrated past, the physical expansion of the city in
the last six decades, and last, but certainly not least, a massive infux of
migrants into the city cumulatively.
Chapters are thematically arranged and after having introduced the city
to readers, the second chapter discusses an often ignored yet central theme
of social reality, i.e. caste and its linkages with the urban social life. This
chapter argues that in India, caste is crucially tied with the idea of belong-
ing and shapes the urban sensibilities in a way that is both ignored and
revelatory about its uncanny presence in the realm of the contemporary
18 Introduction

urban social experience. Therefore, the chapter has twin objectives. While,
at one level, this chapter claims that engagement with the caste allows us
a nuanced understanding of the urban social, at another level questions of
belonging and the feld of the urban experience offer us a foray into the
contemporaneity of the caste. With a focus on castes traditionally identifed
as ‘Surati’, the core question raised in this context is, how does the caste
function in a contemporary urban milieu? A focus on the caste also helps
us to look at the ‘Surat way’ as socially differentiated, inherently contested,
and a fragmentary epitaph.
The scholarship on caste, a thin corpus of sociological and anthropo-
logical literature, revolves around the anxiety: how does caste function
differently in an urban milieu? By emphasising difference, the discourse
essentially relies upon and remains tied to the foundational myth that
the caste is primarily a rural phenomenon and its presence in the city,
therefore, either does not warrant scholarly attention or whenever it
attracted academicians, they resolved it as an extension of the rural in
the urban society, in terms of the incomplete task of urban transforma-
tion, through a much-celebrated phrase of continuity and change and due
to the presence of ‘peasants in the city’ (Chandavarkar 2009). For a very
long time, the shadow of the rural hovered over the understanding of the
urban-social.
Trying to break free from this conventional mould, this chapter aims
to look at the question of caste in an urban context without putting the
idea of this ‘difference’ (from the rural) in the centre. Staying clear of this
rural, analytical hangover serves two objectives: frst, to take away the idea
of the urban in South Asia out of the historicist confnes where the urban
remained umbilically tied to the rural. Second, removal of the rural also
allows us to respond to the spatial dynamics from within the cityscapes
and, in turn, can lead to a richer knowledge of the spatial embodiments of
the social, a core concern of the book. At another level, the discourse on
caste in recent decades has been around a binary of Dalits and non-Dalits.
Therefore, even when David Mosse conceives caste as an effect in terms of
inequality, exclusion, discrimination, or opportunity hoarding, he remains
focused on Dalits and others (Mosse 2020). Framing the caste question as a
Dalit question has helped foreground extreme forms of exclusion, inequal-
ity, and exploitation. However, it has also thrown a multi-headed hydra
into a vortex of identity politics. In my approach to caste dynamics in the
landscape of a city, as a point of departure, I have tried to move away
on both counts—from framing the caste question as essentially a Dalit
question or from perceiving it through the lens of identity politics. This
chapter aims to comprehend how people from one caste perceive members
of other castes, how boundary making among them takes place and how
stereotypes circulate. As a part of a larger issue of belonging, that this book
focuses upon, here in this chapter, I argue that in Indian milieu, the idea of
 Introduction 19

belonging has to be subjected to the dynamics of caste. I point towards a

fundamentally different dimension of belonging where it is inscribed and
reproduced in and through an idea of difference that is socially rooted,
that is inheritance, and that cannot be explained merely in the universal
language of inequality (i.e. access to resources, rights, and spaces).
As I mentioned above, a focus on non-Dalit aspects of caste dynamics in
one chapter must not mean an ignorance to Dalit question itself. Therefore,
it is quite obvious that a discussion on caste should proceed to the com-
plexities of Dalit experiences in the contemporary city. Chapter 3, discusses
the question of Dalits in the city by focussing upon the community of
Mahyavanshis in Surat. According to the Census of India 2011, Surat has
a total population of around 45 lakhs. A total of 2.36% of urban Surat are
Scheduled Castes (SC) (Table 0.2).1
It may be relevant for our discussion that till quite recently, the city
was (and in many ways the city continues to be) not merely spatially
segregated along caste lines but Dalit neighbourhoods were particularly
marked on this landscape forcing us to look at the spatial nature of Dalit
experiences in a city closely. Writing on Mahyavanshi, Yohan Parmar
notes the presence of two walls encircling the city. These were the Nana
Kot or Shaharpanah forming the inner circle and the Mota Kot or the
Allampanah as the outer one. A Khadi surrounded the city behind these
walls. He further adds that ‘The areas enclosed by the line of the inner
wall had fourteen divisions called Chaklas or wards, like Chowk bazaar
chaklo, Mulla chaklo, A’surbed chaklo, Bhagatlav chaklo, and Ranitalav
chaklo.’ The neaighbourhoods falling in between these two walls were
referred to as ‘Paras’ i.e. Nanpura, Sagrampura, Salabatpura etc. He writes
that Mahyavanshi areas were located in predominantly muslim neighbour-
hoods, near their graveyards, between these two walls of Nana and Mota
Kots, and on the bank of the ‘Khadi’. Their areas were physically seper-
ate from the rest of the savarna areas. Parmar informs us that historical
evidences from an unpublished manuscripts on ‘Suratno Prachin Itihas’

Table 0.2 Scheduled Caste Population in Surat (1961–2011)

SC Population
Census Year SC Population Total Population as % of Total

1961 13,232 288,096 4.59%

1971 21,690 471,760 4.60%
1981 38,909 776,619 5.01%
1991 65,118 1,499,560 4.34%
2001 83,687 2,433,835 3.44%
2011 105,572 4,466,826 2.36%

Source: Surat Municipal Corporation. https://www.suratmunicipal.gov.in/TheCity/City/

Stml8
20 Introduction

written during the period 1934–35 by Dhansing Thakorsing Jamadar indi-

cates, that the various areas inhabited by the Mahyavanshis were known as
‘Dhedwadas’. Besides this, there were also Khalpawadas and Bhangiwadas
in the city. Khalpas who were staying adjoining to their localities used to
carry out their traditional occupations of tanneries’ (Parmar 1978:42–43).
In this chapter, I argue that a Dalit does not merely suffer in silence.
She also desires and strives for her aspirations. With this rather banal
proposition, the article draws its question from the intersection of urban
studies and recent debates on Dalit experience. Based on voices coming
from the community of Mahyavanshi of Surat, the chapter then proceeds
with complexities of how to look into aspirations and their incongruence.
Here, narratives of desire do not take shape as bereft of suffering and dis-
crimination. Yet, in their articulation, they allow us to engage with ignored
dimensions of Dalit personhood and reveal facets of city life that are less
attended. In both these chapters, we fnd subtle yet deep politics of othering
at different levels. This process of othering acquires further complexities in
the chapter on migrant experiences.
With the diamond polishing and synthetic textile industries, in the 1960s,
Surat began receiving a large infux of migrant population. Over the dec-
ades, some of these groups acquired a dominant position in terms of their
hold on the capital. Communities of Patidar from Saurashtra and Marwari
from Rajasthan are two such groups.
Apart from social and spatial factors where the city and its outside or the
social differentiation and othering have been discussed so far, we also need
to think about how historically this duality plays out. We are so far accus-
tomed to thinking outside as others. Often this translates into external or
something/someone which/who does not belong to the city. An outsider in
this frame is a fgure who, when enters the city, is branded as a migrant. But
then the obvious question is how to differentiate between who is a migrant
and who belongs to the city. In the common language, how to differentiate
between who is and who is not a Surati? The discourse informs us that the
fgure of migrant is not merely labelled as other but is inked with a tattoo of
a perpetrator of violence too. The chapter is about this politics of otherness
where criminality is inscribed on the fgure of a migrant in the city.
The fgure of a Surati also has spatial connotations to it. At this level,
old neighbourhoods come before as playing a key role. Mobilising a var-
iant of Surati, the fgure of ‘Suratilala’, in the next chapter, we enter into
the complexities of neighbourhoods with a broad objective of exploring
the intertwined dynamics of space and society. I ask, how to approach
neighbourhoods of the old walled city (Kot Vistaar) and (be) longing with
that space in the moment of the contemporary? With the expansion of
the city, people moved out of caste clusters of the old walled city and we
expand this thread in detail in the chapter on neighbourhoods. We will
fnd out that this shift to newer areas did not mean the transformation of
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