Fragmented marginalities: dispossessed peasantry and migrant labour communities in urban North India

Abstract

Analogous to the Euro-American context, Indian cities are usuallyconceptualised as socio-spatial forms where communities at theperipheries of ‘development’ constitute ‘urban margins’. However,such conceptualisations rarely interrogate the varied aspects ofmarginality within those spaces. Drawing from an ethnographywith dispossessed peasantry (in ‘urban villages’) and migrantlabour (in slums/jhuggis) in Noida, a north-Indian city, we unpackthree aspects of marginality. First, the process of marginalisation;second, two communities negotiating their marginalitydifferently; third, evolving social relations within each. Wepropose a relational framework: supra-sub levels of structural-spatial and economic-cultural marginalisation to betterunderstand the fragmentations within urban margins.