The principal aim of this thesis is to rethink Southern urbanism by studying the everyday politics of middle-class neighborhoods and their vital role in shaping the grammar of politics in urban India. I undertake a comparative analysis of two Art Deco architectural middle-class precincts in Mumbai, India, that underwent divergent spatial evolution over a century, owing to different cultural histories. I study the spatial evolutions to unearth multifarious cultural histories and how they shape contemporary politics and spatial practices in fragmented ways. The two precincts, constituting several neighborhoods (four neighborhoods in the Dadar Matunga region in western Mumbai and two neighborhoods in South Mumbai), were the first planned precincts in colonial Bombay, built in response to the catastrophic plague of 1896. Predominantly protected by the archaic Rent Control Act, over the next century, the Dadar Matunga neighborhoods gave into gentrification and redevelopment while the South Mumbai neighborhoods became part of a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, both owing to residents’ activism and litigations. In Dadar and Matunga, residents petitioned to repeal the heritage status of the precinct, while in Southern Mumbai, residents litigated against flouting of building and heritage laws in the region. Through an ethnographic and historical inquiry of the seemingly similar precincts, my research explicates the middle-class’ tactical and improvisational jugaad politics, and how they negotiate with the state and capital through redevelopment and heritage preservation.

The three main domains of analysis are collective memory, civil religion, and state-society contestations. The thesis situates Mumbai in the larger discourse of global transformations and neoliberal development and maps the historical genesis of the two neighborhoods - the Dadar Matunga precinct as communitarian, ethnic clusters of migrants, and South Mumbai as adopting the secular Christian austere ethics of the British regime. It then elucidates how different socio-religious practices have shaped the politics of the residents and in turn, the destinies of the two neighborhoods. I argue that the theologically grounded philosophies of Hindu niskama-karma and Christian sincerity shape the collective conscience and political sensibilities of these neighborhoods. Consequently, each neighborhood engages with the administratively inept, politically fractured, and ideologically strong state differently, resulting in divergent spatial outcomes. The Dadar Matunga residents forge a congenial partnership with state officials, while the South Mumbai activists have a combative relationship. Middle-class civil society emerges as an agent of urban governance and plays a critical role in not only challenging the state over spatial politics but also in negotiating with neoliberalism. Subsequently, my analysis moves beyond the backyards of the neighborhoods. I argue that the spirit of jugaad spills into the physical and conceptual spaces beyond the neighborhoods to form spaces of hope, where jugaad becomes the dominant mode of urban politics, relational, tactical, and improvisational.

In synthesizing Marxist urbanism and the cultural analysis of postcolonial studies, this dissertation proposes a model of jugaad urbanism which disrupts the politics of cooperation between the state and civil society and shifts the focus of improvisational political tactic from the subaltern to the middle class. As the middle class serves as a significant bastion of democracy and dissent in India, especially in the face of radical Hindu extremism, jugaad politics becomes emancipatory and provides a useful analytical framework in three ways. First, I center the postcolonial neighborhood as the frontier for urban theory as not only a case study but as active historical-political agents that shape urbanism and its epistemological practices. Second, while religion has been studied as an overarching reality in postcolonial societies, the secular predominantly remains absent in this discourse, as a liberal Western way of life that does not percolate into the vernacular rungs of deeply fractured Indian society. My comparative study shows how the inheritance of secular discourse from imperial colonizers plays an important role in configuring certain spaces. Third I contribute to the anthropology of state and politics by outlining a portrait of a fragmented and uncaring state. In response, the middle class encroaches on the topological state space to marshal urban governance, in emergent and incremental ways, by using the tools of activism, critique, and litigations. I contend that jugaad is central to constituting space in Indian cities, and as jugaad is historically informed and culturally specific, the urban landscape comes to be constituted by heterogenous, checkered political spaces of postcolonial neighborhoods.