In this book, Prasad Khanolkar offers a new way of thinking about ‘slums’ and southern cities based on a grounded engagement with the relationship between media, objects, spaces, and people in the everyday life of slum localities in Mumbai, India. Over the past few decades, Mumbai, like many cities in the global South, has experienced a series of overarching governmental missions to program it into an interoperable and profitable city. Its ‘slums’, which house a majority of its population don’t fit within the dominant registers and continue to be deemed as excess. Urban residents inhabiting Mumbai’s slum localities thus find themselves in the middle of missions, policies, and programs that are not of their making, just as often that they find themselves localized by lack of resources, caste system, communal conflicts, and territorial jurisdictions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in slum localities of Mumbai, this book explores how its residents engage in different forms of play in order to extend and expand their field of possibilities, despite the limitations and fixities. The book attends to some of these playacts: imparting stories with different thicknesses, rehearsing roles on and offscreen, engaging in deceptive performances, experimenting with repetitive everyday rhythms, and recycling matter and forms. Through these playacts, urban residents explore the virtual abilities of different mediums to put bodies, objects, and spaces into new forms of relationships and create passages to depart from programmed urban futures. By attending to these proliferating urban passages of different residents in slum localities, the book makes a case for rethinking southern cities as mediums for urban lives to converge and depart without an overarching framework. The book makes a significant contribution in the field of urban studies, urban anthropology, urban geography, and urban sociology. It will be of interest to scholars and students working on postcolonial cities, Southern urbanisms, infrastructure studies, and urban planning in the global South.

This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida, a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh, bordering national capital Delhi. The book demonstrates a flexible planning approach being central to the entrepreneurial turn in India’s post-liberalisation urbanisation, whereby a small-scale industrial township is transformed into a real-estate driven modern city. Its real point of departure, however, is in the argument that this turn can enable a form of illiberal community-making in new cities that are quite different from older metropolises. Exclusivist forms of solidarity and symbolic boundary construction - stemming from the differences across communities as well as their internal heterogeneities - form the crux of this process, which is examined in three distinct but often interspersed socio-spatial forms: planned middle-class residential quarters, ‘urban villages’ and migrant squatter colonies. The book combines radical geographical conceptualisations of social production of space and neoliberal urbanism with sociological and anthropological approaches to urban community-making. It will be of interest to researchers in development studies, sociology, urban studies, as well as readers interested in society and politics of contemporary India/South Asia.

This book analyses the question of the right to the city, informal economies and the non-western shape of neoliberal governance in India through a new analytic: the right to sell. The book examines why and how states attempt to curb, control, and eliminate markets of urban informal street vendors. Focusing on Kolkata, the author provides a theoretical explanation of this puzzle by distilling and analysing the inherent tensions among the constitutive elements of neoliberal governance, namely, growth imperative, market activism, and corporatization, and demonstrates its implications for the formal/informal boundaries of the economy. A useful addition to the existing literatures on the right to the city, informal economies, and the shapes that neoliberalism takes in the non-west, the book provides a non-western counter to accounts of neoliberalism and will be of interest to academics working in the fields of South Asian Studies, Urban Studies, and Political Economy.

The Iranian city experienced a major transformation when the Pahlavi Dynasty initiated a project of modernization in the 1920s. The Rite of Urban Passage investigates this process by focusing on the spatial dynamics of Muharram processions, a ritual that commemorates the tragic massacre of Hussein and his companions in 680 CE. In doing so, this volume offers not only an alternative approach to understanding the process of urban transformation, but also a spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals that provides a platform for developing a fresh spatial approach to ritual studies.

Papers presented at a seminar, held in 1996, organized by North East India Council for Social Science Research, Shillong.

Based on the author's thesis (Ph.D.--Rice University, 1987).

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Passage to America is very informative. It is about how and why legal immigrants come to this land, what they actually come for, what struggles they go through, how they blend in, and how they become productive citizens of United States and become part of the American melting pot. The book is nothing but a true story of a family and their struggles with their previous country’s traditionally and historically set system. The book does not intend to give any bad feelings about our previous friends, relatives, or government officials, but the actual feelings displayed in the day-to-day dairy. It is dedicated to children and grandchildren.

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