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Dialect Anthropol
DOI 10.1007/s10624-014-9341-6

Development through paper deals: space and politics


of value in peri-urban India
Sarasij Majumder

! Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract The article looks at contestations over space in peri-urban India. It


studies the acrimonious responses in defense of a local marketplace that occupied
public land against the sovereign project of highway expansion in peri-urban West
Bengal. It posits an opposition between two aspects of state governancerational
legal and magicalthat shape the contentions. In the rationallegal mode, the
expansion of the highways represents the official development goals of progress.
The magical aspects of the state engender the circulation of officially approved
illegal chits that give occupying migrant villagers claim to the space around the
highway. The ethnography looks at the affective economy of illegal chits that
political parties and local bureaucracies use to bring migrating villagers within their
ambit. It explores how illegal chits embody the states legible presence in the
villagers everyday lives, their kinnetworks, communities and transform individual
affective orientations toward space. In these new modes of simultaneous space
and place making, public land is understood less as commons, but more as a
stretch that could be divided among individuals and households aspiring to be
developed or upwardly mobile by excluding others. The essay contends that
emergence of the right to the city as a collective right requires a double-edged
critique. A simple celebration of the subversive potential of the magical aspect of
the state vis-a`-vis its rationallegal mode may not be helpful for a politics of value
that seeks to challenge the idea of value (or what makes life worth living) embedded
in the wider neoliberal development discourse.
Keywords Value ! Hegemony ! Critical spaces ! Politics of space
and place ! Peri-urban ! Territorial politics ! Highways ! India

S. Majumder (&)
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA
e-mail: sarasijm@gmail.com

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This article looks at how differential access to space stratifies individuals and groups
in peri-urban India. I track the intertwining of non-legal claims to space and local
discourses of ascertaining worthiness of individuals and groups. Such discourses of
worthiness, hierarchies and claims to space, I contend, are conduits through which
global hegemonic discourses of progress and state making find acceptance in periurban India. Peri-urban partypolitics that I analyze engendered a network of illegal
chits to give certain groups access to a marketplace for setting up shops over others.
Preferentialism of these kinds, based on party affiliation, landownership and caste, is
at the heart of local territorial politics of political parties. Political parties distributed
illegal chits among aspirants, who claimed spots in the local marketplace, to expand
and maintain their influence among villagers seeking urban footing. Unintended
consequences of such territorial politics and party-based preferentialism were the
emergence of categories such as developed and undeveloped to distinguish
between individuals and groups with and without claims to space in the marketplace
and related social standing. The same illegal chits were also used collectively to
challenge the sovereign plans of the state when bureaucrats sought to displace the
shops in the marketplace for highway expansion. These illegal and informal
economies pertaining to space and place are important sites or critical spaces for
studying emerging politics of value (Graeber 2001: 88) and related discourses of
worthiness in peri-urban Bengal.
I use value as a concept to identify the local markers that distinguish between
people and practices in terms of their potentials and qualities drawing on Anagnosts
(2004) re-reading of Marxs notion of value as concept metaphor rather than as
substance metaphor (also see Spivak 1985; Castree 1996). Value, Anagnost
suggests, drawing on Spivak (1985), has no proper body of its own or substantial
expression, but can only be expressed in terms of a differential. Therefore,
according to Anagnost: To track the circuit of value and its accumulation, we must
attend to the influence of certain markers of distinction and quality as ideological
formations that enables the transfer of economic value from one body to another
(2004:191). The body that is recognized as valued is thereby a body to which
value has been added through political work rather than one from which surplus
value has been extracted. Local markers not only code that difference but also
channel it toward capital accumulation. Anagnost (2004) studies discourses of
quality, worthiness and value in China, which simultaneously inflict structural/
epistemological violence and incite desire for mobility, inclusion and progress.
Likewise, the local ideas of unnati (improvement), swadhin (independence),
develop1 (developed), dokani (shop owner) and the illegal chits are expressions of
value that assign positive worth to certain bodies, individuals and groups (primarily
from landowning middle castes) over others (primarily from landless lower castes).
Such ascription of positive worth conceals processes of marginalization and
exclusion that stigmatizes certain groups and bodies as undeveloped or not worthy
1

The English words develop, developed and underdeveloped are part of the colloquial Bengali in my
field site. These words are used alongside Bengali words, such as unnati, which means improvement or
social mobility and unnayon, which means development in the social and economic sense. The poor
landless lowercaste villagers are mostly described by political leaders, middle caste villagers and officials
as underdeveloped.

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of development. Access to spots in the marketplace may resist highway expansion,


but it is also a form of accumulation of symbolic and material capital. Thus, local
discourses of development and improvement, which often run into cross-purposes
with sovereign and global discourses of development, also embody their own share
of structural violence by hiding the condition of possibilities that sustain its
narratives and aspirations for development. Understanding collusion or collision
between layers of structural violence at various scales is crucial to comprehend how
state and party-politics shapes values or peoples orientation toward each other and
space. Also, such collusion and collision enable us to understand barriers to the
formation of a collective right to the city (Harvey 2008), a key concern for
countering dispossession in the developing world.
Too often collision is romanticized in terms of an opposition between the state
and the community or space and place (see Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003).
The collusion is explained in terms of a coercive or persuasive elitist regime and/or
state apparatus that bring pre-capitalist margins or subaltern communities within an
unstable and fragmentary edifice of domination. Such a phenomenon, which is
called the passive revolution in contrast to a classical bourgeois revolution,
defines the post-colonial moment in South Asia (Chatterjee 1993: 212; Samaddar
2013). The passive revolution establishes the dominance of the state, law and
discourses of development among the subaltern through force or persuasion; they do
not have hegemonic presence or significance in the subaltern lives.
Such reigning explanations loose sight of how the state and discourses of
development in their many guises are implicated in both the situationsformation
or production of place, i.e., market place, and production of space, i.e., expansion of
highway or siting of factories on agricultural land. In much reported case of protests
in Singur in West Bengal, ethnographies show that resistances to corporate
globalization, taken to be unambiguously anti-industrial or anti-capitalist, reflect
complex intentions. Protesting villagers, in Singur, were ambivalent toward
corporate capital, but their support for industries and protests against corporations
were grounded in local moral worlds that see both non-farm work and landownership as markers of critical social distinction and mobility (Majumder 2012).
Moreover, Partha Chatterjee recognizes such desires and aspiration among rural
youth in West Bengal and elsewhere in his much recent work. He (2008: 54) writes:
with the spread of school education and widespread exposure to modern
communications media such as the cinema, television and advertising, there is
a strong and widespread desire among younger members, both male and
female, of peasant families not to live the life of a peasant in the village and
instead to move to the town or the city, with all its hardships and uncertainties,
because of its lure of anonymity and upward mobility.
A vast majority of South Asians, thus, do not simply experience the state and its
discourses of development in the coercive or persuasive bio-political interventions
of the bureaucrats and the political parties, as Chatterjee (2004) portrays. State and
development discourses are lodged at the very core of how people think about,
aspire, evaluate and refashion themselves vis-a`-vis others to be socially mobile.
Such deep entrenchment of the state and development discourse in the lives of vast

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majority of population renders a historicist distinction between pre-capitalism and


capitalism and consequently a theory of passive revolution completely untenable
(Sanyal 2007). This essay, therefore, examines how individuals and communities
recreate the discourses of development, progress and entrepreneurialism and use
connections with the political parties to be socially mobile and worthy even when
they are apparently contesting the state and law. Such recreation of discourses with
local accents coupled with mobility aspirations certainly does not reiterate the state
and its discourses, but local reincarnations do not necessarily foreshadow radical
possibilities for social justice.
I introduce the site and controversy in some more detail next. Following that I lay
out the historical juncture of the ethnography and indicate its import for the
Anagnosts framework. Then, I go on to consider the voices of the dokanis, local
politicians and local discourses and practices to further elaborate on the emergence
politics of value and its political ramifications for democratization at the margins.
I collected data in rural West Bengal sporadically over nine years, with the
longest fieldwork period lasting fourteen months in 20062007. I base my
arguments on interviews and close participant observation of the daily lives of forty
small businessmen among approximately eighty along the disputed highway rightof-way. My interviews took place at multiple sites in Birajpur and the adjoining
villages. Most participants were interviewed in their shops during the hours after
lunch, when they were comparatively less busy. The shops were mostly concrete
structures with wooden or metal shelving. According to long-time residents of
Birajpur, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the marketplace had consisted of only a
few bamboo or tin-shed shops and temporary outfits. That over time had gradually
grown into a major market area with permanent shops constructed of concrete
block. Also, demographic composition of Birajpur had also changed because many
middleclass families from Howrah, Kolkata and other adjoining towns had moved to
Birajpur because land and property prices were cheaper in the peri-urban margins.
Such changes in composition of residents also provided a necessary market for
goods that were sold in the shops.
My entry point into the this site was at the height of tension and dispute between
local branches of national political parties and shop owners on one side and the
National Highway Authority of India on the other. The protests that ensued accused
the municipality, an elected body as a thief. This municipality is a thief, it has
taken our money; they cannot evict us, shouted the protestors surrounding the
municipal government office in Birajpur,2 a small town in the southern part of West
Bengal, India. Their numbers had gradually swelled from a motley gathering of
twenty in August 2009 to hundreds by October of that year. These protestors owned
small illegal shops dotting a two-lane highway that passed through Birajpur town.
Each one of them, who were locally called dokani or dokandar (shop owners) held
an identical chit bearing the stamp of the Birajpur municipal authority, representing
an informal claim to a spot along the highway. The shops sold grocery items,
agricultural machinery, household electronic goods and garments, generating
revenue for the local municipal government. The chits were issued to the
2

I use pseudonyms to refer to places and persons to protect the identity of my respondents.

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shopkeepers at the behest of political parties. They bore the stamp of the
municipalitys approval. Legally, the municipality did not have any authority to
distribute the chits as an elected body that operated under the government of West
Bengal and they did not own the land. The land was under the jurisdiction of
National Highway Authority of India.
The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), a body under the direct
authority of the Indian central government, was seeking to expand the Birajpur
highway to four lanes. NHAIs appropriation of the land bordering the highway,
which it had earmarked and acquired 20 years earlier, entailed removal of a thriving
marketplace where the protestors had owned shops for at least a decade. The
protestors, who came from small landholding households in adjoining villages, saw
those shops as their gateway to urban futures for seeking economic opportunities
outside agriculture.
Protests such as these, which pose significant challenges to the states exercise of
its sovereign authority, are very common in India. Provincial and central
government authorities repeatedly encounter protests when they either claim land
under eminent domain laws or seek to develop land previously acquired but left
undeveloped for a long time. These protests entail a politics of value (Appadurai
1986) that seeks to subvert the sovereign plans and divert the use of space, reserved
for fulfilling national economic goals, to more ordinary, singular and affective ends.
The diversion of the space earmarked for the highway expansion also gave rise to an
economy based on circulation of chits distributed by the municipality at the behest
of political parties. The economy connected the peri-urban with the rural. The chits
were passports to urban futures, hopes and aspirations and indexed social, emotional
and political labor invested to acquire them from the local state.
The chits also represented the states presence in governing non-farm livelihoods
in ways that depart from its strict rationallegal mode. Das (2004) calls this
magical (226) because of the vulnerabilities, obscurities and real material effects
that this kind of state presence brings to the everyday. Chits bring law into the
framework of everyday life by representation and performance in the modes of
mockery and mimesis of the official stamp of the state. Issuing of the chits precisely
exploited the paradox of the written sign, i.e., in this case, the so-called official
stamp. The official stamp, no matter how apocryphal it was, came with an
inherent potential of being appropriated and used in different contexts stitching
together multiple desires and intentions. The economy of chits shaped subjectivities
and socialities around space; it had real material effects. However, this potential to
be appropriated by multiple actors in multiple contexts was not automatically
radical and had deeper politicaleconomic implication in terms of producing
structural violence.
Space, that the chits represented, was seen less as commons, but more as spots
that can be owned or accessed individually to be socially mobile or to gain an urban
footing. Thus, the magical presence of the state represents the space in certain ways
(i.e., as spots that can be accessed to cultivate a developed personhood) that
inducted the villagers in the wider state projects. This is key to the suturing of
hegemonic development discourses in peri-urban margins because, as Das (2004)
points out, it is in the realm of illegibility, infelicity and excuses that one sees how

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the state is reincarnated in new forms (227). These are also realms where hegemonic
ideas of progress and development are reincarnated with local meanings and
signifiers. Therefore, ethnographies of these realms or critical spaces are crucial to
relate local experience, signification, means of exploitation and appropriation to an
ongoing debate on the key drivers of the history of the capitalist world system
(Steur 2013: 6).
The state in both its sovereign rational-legal mode and in its everyday magical
mode enhances the representational aspect of space; representations come to
dominate, shape and conjure social relations and socialities related to space. In the
rational-legal mode, the highways and space earmarked for highway expansion is
what Lefebvre (1991) calls spaces of representation, which represent the
sovereignty and the reach of the state. In the words of Indias former Prime
Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at the opening of a new expressway, This road is
like the countrys line of fortune, it represents the countrys unity, and it shows the
countrys integrity (Vajpayee inaugurates 2003).
In the magical everyday mode, the chits represent the same space or access to it
in terms of a rhetorical path toward urban developed futures. The chits create a field
of social and political associations or publics and possibilities because certain ideas
about mobility and social differences are articulated through the occupation of space
or spots in the market as a dokani. Thus, the fetishized space here gives material
expression to something that is abstract, virtual or spectral. It distinguishes between
people in terms of access: People securing spots are perceived to possess
potentialities to develop and its lack in the people without the access. Thus, in
ways similar to what Anagnost shows with respect to discourses on quality (suzhi)
in China, the chits along with status of dokani work ideologically as a regime of
representation through which subjects recognize their positions within the larger
social order and thereby set up the conditions for socio-economic striving
(Anagnost 2004: 193). In this striving, the unity, that ex-Prime Minister Vajpayee
referred to in his speech, is subverted but its civilizational undertones reemerges and
is resignified in the discourses of worthiness.

The setting
My interviews and observations took place at multiple sites in Birajpur and the
adjoining villages. The shops were mostly concrete structures with wooden or metal
shelving. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the marketplace had consisted of only a
few bamboo or tin-shed shops and temporary outfits. That over time had gradually
grown into a major market area with permanent shops, older residents recollected.
The historical context of the present study is marked by an agrarian transition and
peri-urbanization of rural India. Sociologists and economists have documented a
drift of rural populations from agricultural to non-farm occupations (Gupta 2005;
Shah and Harriss-White 2011). This drift is as much caused by demographic
pressure as by neglect of the agricultural sector by the post-liberalization regimes at
the national level and the provinces (Aiyer 2007). Villagers, leaving agricultural
sector, look toward to an uncertain future because they are not being absorbed into

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the so-called formal economy. Broader spatial implications of this change are an
increase in the number of towns, bazaars, marketplaces and peri-urban areas.
According to 2011, Indian census data, the number of towns and municipalities in
West Bengal, increased from 378 to 909 during the decade from 2001 to 2011. The
local regime of spatial governance, in terms of the chits, is a situated solution to this
demographic and occupational shift, which gives rise to informal spatial claims.
Thus, access to a spot in the marketplace is the sign of inclusion in an economy
stretching from local to the global. For the excluded, therefore, exploitation does not
always take place in form of appropriation of labor, but in terms of their
superfluousness and lack of access to resources for socio-economic mobility.
I turn next to the details of impasse between the National Highway Authority of
India and the local traders.
After a few days of interviewing the protesters, I was surprised to find that
municipality was taxing the shop owners on the basis of the chits. The fact that these
businesses were technically illegal did not prevent the municipality generating
revenue from them. A local regime of governance controlled usage, distribution and
ordering of the space adjoining the highway. The actors in this local regime were the
municipality; local chapters of provincial and national political parties; and middlecaste, upwardly mobile small landholders from villages near Birajpur. They had
collaboratively established an informal economy with paper documents that
assigned particular spots to specific individuals. By local custom, such informal
leases were transferable. Thus, when highway authorities arrived to take stock of the
local situation, they encountered on the highway a veritable maze of spatial
orderings, arrangements and informal entitlements that were generating substantial
revenue for the municipality. Whereas in theory, highway construction is supposed
to increase the welfare of the population and the state, and in this case, the
authorities were faced with a dilemma of removing a thriving local marketplace.
Intricate negotiations among NHAI officials, local politicians, bureaucrats and
shop owners followed the initial impasse. The eventual resolution was to alter the
highway plans by constructing arcades under the roadway to provide space for the
shops. The change was a significant challenge to the sovereign power of the central
state for whom the shops officially did not exist.
The most important element in local management of space is a semi-formal
category called dokholi (occupied). Because most local businesses were extralegal,
the municipality faced a challenge of how to generate revenue. The local
government resolved the dilemma by granting the businesses on NHAI land semilegal status by issuing them trade licenses in order to tax them. Businesses with
such licenses were known as dokholi. The trade licenses were notarized by a public
notary in the local government, or sometimes by district magistrates and judicial
magistrates, yet they have no legal validity because the local government did not
have any authority over the land adjoining the highway. For example, possession of
a license does not entitle a shop owner to claim compensation in the event of
eviction by the National Highway Authority of India. This is precisely where law
entered the everyday life taking advantage of the obscurities and creating illusions
of rights in the mode of mockery and mimesis as Das (2004) explicates through her
concept of magical aspect of the state.

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However, the access was regulated through local politics and negotiations with
local chapters of the two major political parties in the stateTrinamul and the
Communist Party of India [Marxist] (henceforth CPM). Both these parties extended
their political influence by providing local merchants with premises close to the
highway. Doing so enabled them to win the support of a segment of small
landholders who had considerable social and political influence in their home
villages. These small landholders were mostly heads of middle-caste households
who collectively gained power and influence in rural West Bengal following land
reforms that took land from large landlords and redistributed it among tenant
farmers or small landholders. Subsequently, the desire to earn more and a regular
cash income pushed many male members of these small landholding households to
diversify their livelihood through other occupations, such as government or factory
jobs. Because such jobs were in short supply, a significant proportion of villagers
took to operating small businesses.
Regional political parties took advantage of this desire for geographic, social
upward mobility to extend their influence among petty merchants. At the same time,
the merchants also expected the political parties to provide them with economic
benefits in exchange for their votes or support during elections. This mutual
dependence engendered a spatial practice represented by illegal leases that were not
simply claims to space, and they also represented the desired separation between
the resourceful middle castes and the lowest castes. Thus, the illegal leases, chits
and discourses, like suzhi in Anagnosts (2004) case conjoins relationships of power
with that of desire and value.
My interviews revealed that the petty merchants relate to the space they occupy
in terms of two separate but related discourses: The first is a discourse of claims to
the disputed space based on the license documents. The licenses indexed the
relationship shopkeepers had developed with the municipality through paying taxes
and gaining influence with local politicians. The documents also represented the toil
and hardships that the shopkeepers believed they had to undergo in order to
establish their businesses. The right to occupy a particular premise was an outcome
of certain events that shaped the life trajectories of small landholders and that they
used strategically to gain access to the world of trade and business. As I detail later,
this point of view manifested in narratives around being swadhin (independent) or,
in Agambens (1998) terminology laying claim to a proper life.
The second discourse around the chit and informal entitlement was never clearly
articulated, but was indirectly alluded to in the narratives of toil. Even though local
landowners sought the aid of politicians to gain a foothold in the peri-urban
marketplace, they viewed the world of trade and business as offering them freedom
from the intervention and control of either a factory boss or village big man. Thus,
dominant rhetoric of neoliberal developmentalism becomes internalized as a fable
of self-making, what Anagnost (2004: 197) drawing on Gordon (1991: 44) calls the
entrepreneurialization of the self, in the production of the marketplace.
Following, I present brief life histories as they were narrated to me by five shop
owners I call Haren, Shibotosh, Kalyan, Somenath and Asim. Whereas the first four
men came from small landholding and middle-caste backgrounds, Asim came from
a family of low-caste landless laborers.

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Trajectories of occupying extralegal space


Haren, who ran a small shop selling groceries and garments, had a poignant
narrative of toil. He was raised in a nearby village in a family of small landholders
and cattle herders. After he was orphaned at a young age, Harens uncles watched
out for him. He was determined not to be dependent on them, so he dropped out of
school and began selling the milk that his family herd produced, then gradually
began buying milk from other villagers to resell in Birajpur. He would wake up
early to take the first train into Birajpur, where his customers often tried to bully or
cheat him out of his milk. He described his youth as years of struggle, in comparison
with other young men of his generation, whom he described as either lazy or busy
with school and studies. He did not regret his decision to start a business so early in
his life, because he did not wish to work under anyones supervision nor to beg for a
job with a regular monthly salary; he wanted to be self-made/swadhin, whereas his
uncles were mostly agriculturists, Haren chose the life of a middleman as he
expanded his business to supply milk to big confectionary shops in Birajpur and
Calcutta.
However, Haren always wanted to make it big in life and be more than a
milkman. Therefore, as most of his brothers migrated to Indian cities to work as
jewelers, Haren started venturing into other kinds of businesses. By the time, he was
twenty-five he had secured a premises in the Birajpur marketplace. He started by
setting up a confectionary shop and then gradually diversified into garments and
groceries. He obtained his shop by making a small donation to the election fund of
the local chapter of the CPM. He also paid a lump sum to the municipality to get
electricity and water connections. Initially, his sales were insufficient to recoup all
the money he spent setting up the business and he had to work very hard to establish
his shop. He was extremely concerned when he heard the news of the highway
expansion and his possible eviction.
Shibotoshs family owned a small plot of land, but had to sell part of it to pay off
the debts that his alcoholic father had incurred. As the eldest of four brothers,
Shibotosh had to look for jobs in Birajpur town to support the family of five. He
started working as an apprentice in a vehicle repair shop, where he used to repair
cars belonging to local leaders of the Congress and Trinamul. From them, he finally
learned how to get access to a spot in the marketplace. Using the small plot that
remained in his family as collateral, he borrowed money from the owner of the
repair shop to set up his own car repair establishment in the marketplace. He also
made donations to the Congress and Trinamul in exchange for informal rights to a
spot in the marketplace. Eventually, he passed the responsibility of running the
repair business to his brother and used his contacts with CPM leaders in the village
to get another spot within the portion of the marketplace that they controlled, where
he established a grocery.
Kalyan used to work making jewelry in Mumbai and returned home to his village
only twice a year. He agreed to return permanently and get married after his
prospective father-in-law, a local political leader, promised him a space in the
marketplace, essentially as a dowry. He had set up a workshop where several
workers gold-plated metal jewelry. The peri-urban location was crucial for putting

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him in touch with middlemen and customers. For him, eviction from the space he
occupied would not only jeopardize his economic situation but also the relationship
between his side of the family and his wifes parents. Kalyan said that in Mumbai,
he had worked for others, but now he worked for himselfhe was swadhin.
Comparatively new, Asims shop was a small shack of cane and bamboo where
he sold betel leaves, bidis and other cigarettes, and chai. He was one of very few
merchants from the landless Bagdi, Bauri and Dom castes who owned a shop in the
marketplace. Asim had been a landless laborer who was recruited to work for the
CPM party. Thereby, he came to know the party bosses, who arranged for his stall in
the marketplace. Even though Asim did not have money to secure a space, his
brothers were all party cadres, so he received the space in exchange of their loyalty
to the party. Asim, however, was no longer active with the party.
I visited the lower-caste enclaves in surrounding villages with Asim. I found that
most of the lower-caste dwellings were built of mud, whereas middle-caste homes
were typically built of concrete brick and mortar. Asim told me that the people of
his community had had to fight with the middle-caste-dominated local government
to acquire formal title to the land on which they had their homesteads. Asim said
that he got involved with the CPM during this struggle, and in exchange for his
campaigning for CPM in the BagdiBauri neighborhoods, Asim was offered the
shack in the marketplace. Other BagdiBauri individuals were reportedly jealous of
Asim for his good fortune in being able to set up a business.
Somenath, a young man from a small landholding household, had a shop selling
mobile phones. He conceded to me that he had married for love, and his wifes
parents had sanctioned the marriage only because of his shop in the marketplace.
The shop was the sign of his ability to stand on his own two feet. Somenath had a
business degree. Whereas most other educated villagers his age joined one of the
political parties in order to get a job in the primary or secondary schools, Somenath
had tried that route without much success. He was happy to have his own shop
where he was not obligated to anyone. After paying a hefty sum to a political party
for the site and paying taxes to the municipality, Somenath said he was responsible
for his shop and was not answerable to anybody. It is like buying peace, he
affirmed.
The marketplace was strictly divided into areas under the control of the various
rival political parties. The usual method of acquiring a space was to approach one of
the political parties for favor. Being able to do so required more than money; it also
entailed a certain amount of networking via working for a party, knowing one of its
leaders, or securing support for the party in ones village. This demanded a certain
amount of social skill in order to operate in multiple urban, rural, political and
economic worlds. For example, the language used for addressing political leaders in
Birajpur was different from that used in interactions with neighbors or village
political leaders. The language used in Birajpur had more words of Sanskrit origin,
whereas the south Bengal dialect dominated in the villages. Moreover, most of the
small landholding villagers also switched sartorial codes as they went from their
village to the marketplace or an urban location. In the villages, they would wear
lungi (a traditional mens skirt) and an undershirt; for meeting with a political leader
or going into town, trousers or a well-ironed lungi and a shirt was the expected

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attire. Members of the lowest castes typically had access to neither the money nor
the social capital to switch codes in this way. Asim was among the fortunate few
exceptions who got space due to a politicians paternalistic attitudes toward lowercaste people. Thus, the body, space and linguistic practices were used to code social,
political and affective value of certain individuals over others.
The middle-caste small landholders viewed the lower-caste villagers as people
who led an improper existence and were unable to govern either themselves or
their goats. They looked down upon the lower castes drinking habits and the fact
that their goats would eat crops in the agricultural fields. On the other hand, the
lower-caste villagers did the most backbreaking agricultural laborsuch as tilling
the fields and sowing the seedsfor the small landholders. This social hierarchy
was often reproduced in the Birajpur marketplace, where most shop owners were
middle caste and their employees were often lower caste.
The party leaders with whom I had the opportunity to speak harbored similar
attitudes toward the lower-caste villagers, in marked contrast to their perceptions of
middle-caste villagers. I approached Prasanta for an interview because he was a
party leader, telling him that my research would benefit from his knowledge of local
conditions. Referring to the extralegal shops, Prasanta said, People come to us and
ask for space. What can we do? We have to attend to their problems. There is so
much unemployment. If people like to shop here, why cannot they have shops
here? I then asked him why only certain categories of villagers had shops in the
marketplace, why I rarely saw people from Bagdi, Bauri or Dom castes. To this
Prasanta replied, They (ora) do not want to leave their agricultural occupation.
They also have a drinking habit, they remain underdeveloped. Thus, he viewed
middle-caste villagers as ordinary people suffering from lack of employment, but
lower-caste villagers as the other (expressed by the word ora) who were still
entrenched in agriculture and remained underdeveloped. In fact, just the opposite
was true, because the lower-caste villagers were much more likely to migrate in
search of work.
Asim also pointed to a perception among landed individuals that lower-caste
people like him were not sufficiently hardworking to merit a shop in the
marketplace because they were ostensibly drunkards who lacked entrepreneurial
discipline. But he countered, We are the real hard workers; we work in the fields
under the blazing sun; the landholders sleep in the nice, cozy shade of their machas
or resting areas. Such hard work requires a couple of drinks at the end of the day.
Asim said, however, that he had given up drinking after he began working for the
CPM and gained a shop at the marketplace.
In sum, the claim to the space, the lease documents, and the shops themselves
embodied the shop owners diverse experiences of geographical and social mobility
and fighting against the odds to achieve upward mobility. Every person I
interviewed had a similar story to tell. The space was part of how local small
landholders planned their future. Having access to a space in the market also
indexed a certain social position and degree of influence in ones home village.
As mentioned, the rival political parties had distinct areas of control within the
marketplace. Party workers regularly came to collect donations from the
merchants in their area. There were regular disputes over the division of space

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among the parties. If a merchant who got a shop with the help of one party switched
his loyalty or made a donation to a different one, as Haren did, this became fodder
for local gossip. The space adjoining the highway, to which nobody except the
central authorities had legal claim, was thus turned into the site of a literal turf war
between political parties. Party leaders exercised control over the space by
requesting a public notary or the chairperson of the municipality to notarize or sign
lease documents that had no validity beyond the municipality.
Disputes with political parties might cause shop owners to abandon or be
excluded from the marketplace. Disputes typically involved either allegations of
illegal activity or refusal to pay donations. Most of the shop owners, irrespective
of their party loyalties, attributed their success to their own efforts and viewed the
political parties as evils that had to be tolerated. Therefore, they typically paid the
donations, albeit grudgingly, except when more than one person from the same
party approached them for money.
Whereas the means of gaining access to the market was visible, the exclusions
that this informal system produced were largely invisible and did not figure in the
local discourse or political discussions. But as I mentioned previously, exclusions
occurred on the basis of ones social background. These kinds of exclusions were
very implicit in that caste background never overtly figured in transactions with
political parties. But ones caste and status in the local villages as a small landholder
contributed indirectly to the relationships that one entered into with political leaders
and parties to attach oneself to power. First, ownership of even a small plot
provided economic security, and often the sale of a portion of the familys land
provided the initial down payment to secure a shop in the marketplace. Second,
individuals belonging to small landholding families and the middle castes (such as
Mahisyas or Goalas) were influential in their villages and therefore were better able
to curry favor with political parties than lower-caste people lacking such influence.
The middle-caste and small landholding groups were numerically and politically
dominant, so political parties needed to seek favor with them, whereas the lowercaste minority could be coerced to support a party through other means, such as
bribery or physical force. Also, most of the party leaders and workers themselves
came from middle-caste and small landholding households, so lower-caste people
lacked the social networks that granted access to space in the market.
Officials of the municipality never formally acknowledged the informal
entitlements, even though the municipality earned tax revenue from the shops in
the marketplace. These officials disapproved of the encroachments on state land and
welcomed the decision to expand the highway. An official I interviewed stated that
the encroachments were an impediment to improvement of the road and hence
progress in the municipality. Most shopkeepers, the so-called encroachers,
concurred with this official that highway expansion equaled progress, and they
looked forward to a more urban future. Many of them supported the highway
widening and were simply seeking compensation because their extralegal leases
represented many years of toil to acquire a spot close to the highway.
Thus, the marketplace was a space that emerged out of the political and economic
practices of villagers and the politicians with whom they engaged in order to earn a
living, plan a future, and achieve a particular lifestyle. Such situated relationships

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have a spatial dimension and the lease, despite having no legal force, represented
and indexed that dimension. Highways, in contrast, are planned based on abstract
ideas and visions of space in which roads serve as metaphors for development,
progress and connection to a global market. Exercise of sovereign power based on
such abstract notions often conflicts with local uses of space. In such cases, there is
always the possibility that one side will completely turn against the other, resulting
in violence, as has happened in other parts of India.
In my field site, however, the conflict did not escalate into open war or rejection
of state sovereignty for two reasons: First, the claims to the space of the marketplace
were unofficial, and local leaders collectively repudiated the validity of the informal
leases. Second, certain idea of progress and improvement undergirded the local
relationships and practices that had led to development of the market in the first
place. Although this idea was not identical with the states view of progress and
development, the two did partially overlap, especially in terms of how villagers
imagined their futures. This commonality created a space for the sovereign power of
the state and to come to an understanding and mutually influence each other. The
compromise of relocating the marketplace under the highway created a solution that
could satisfy the mutual desire for progress as well as the shop owners demand for
compensation.

Conclusion
Ann Anagnosts reading of Marxs concept of value as a concept metaphor is a
crucial move to understand the politics of value in the post-colonial context where a
vast majority of the population live and work in the unorganized sector. Moreover,
exclusion in the unorganized sector not only takes place in the form of labor
exploitation; it also takes place by denying space (urban footing), both literally and
metaphorically, in the economy. Sections of the population do not simply get the
resources to engage in the gainful livelihood activities. Value as concept metaphor
enables one to capture this dynamic yet complex reality where structural/epistemic
violence happens in layers. It helps us to go beyond a concept of structural violence
that sees the structure as one unitary formation. Rather, Anagnosts reconceptualization of value shows how the structure or the hegemonic formation that we
understand as capitalism is a suturing of multiple values and moralities each trying
to find its forms of expression in the other. I have shown how the marketplace at a
peri-urban site comes to represent opportunities for livelihood, social mobility and
accumulation of symbolic capital. The regime of representation draws on local ideas
and practices of becoming swadhin (independent) and unnoto (developed) or what
can be called a constellation of aspirational ideas that define proper life against a
bare life. Thus, value as a concept metaphor helps us to bring disparate ideas having
their own genealogies, i.e., Marxs concept of capitalist value, sovereignty as a
value realized through expansion of roads and highways and values of propriety in
Birajpur and adjoining villages in a singular framework. Not only does it allow me
to bridge the dichotomy between value (abstract economic value) and values
(morals of spheres not usually considered economic), the idea of concept metaphor

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brings theoretical, abstract and the etic close to the ethnographic. It thus has the
potential of lowering the gaze from the allure of the transnational, (Aiyer 2007:
647), a tendency among academic activists, and connect local struggles and events
with more dispersed and decentered processes that abet hegemonic presence of
global and dominant discourses of development. Also, vernacular discourses and
markers and associated practices and attitudes can be identified from a general
theoretical point of view without falling in the trap of a historicism, which Sanyal
identifies in the framework of passive revolution (Chatterjee 1993; Samaddar
2013).
Anagnosts emphasis on value as a concept metaphor contributes to the
understanding of structural violence within the sector that Sanyal (2007) describes
as the need economy (214) Sanyal defines need economy as a sphere
constituting of petty traders, self-employed merchants and entrepreneurs in the
unorganized sector who are primarily concerned with satisfying needs or wants
(214). Counterpoised to this is the accumulation economy interested primarily in
enlarging its stock of capital (217). The division between capital and labor is fuzzy
in the need economy, according to Sanyal. Hence, appropriation and accumulation of surplus is meager for Sanyal. Sanyal in his concept of need economy seems
to have underemphasized how needs are circumscribed by emergent selfunderstandings and identities formed in the context of local politics, the state and
its discourses of progress. The idea of value undergirding Sanyals need economy
is useful yet narrow. He identifies value only in terms of income accrued to the
small traders/entrepreneurs, i.e., he uses a substance metaphor to conceptualize
value and its appropriation. Anagnosts formulation of value opens up ethnographic
possibilities that Sanyals limits.
Understanding value in terms of a differential broadens the scope of the concept
of value. Anagnosts formulation can be applied to contexts where production does
not take place in conventional or classical sense and the difference between capital
and labor is fuzzy. It helps us discern the implication of the state in its magical
guise. The states rationallegal form seems to always confront the community and
the local. We see protests and interruptions to state projects and movement of
capital. Yet capitalist hegemony entrenches itself deeper in the sectors, which are
otherwise understood to be realms challenging the hegemony of the capitalist state,
such as the unorganized sector, family and household and hence seen as domains of
integrity and good intentions (Graeber 2001: 29).
Finally, I would like to bring Anagnosts (2004) and Graebers (2001) concepts
of value in a possible dialog with each other. Graeber (2001: 30) has refused to
define value in terms of a differential which he argues gives us a cynical view of
social reality. Rather he defines values as importance of actions oriented toward the
other and thereby toward the self (47). And the markers of value that individuals
yearn for are expressions of value and not value itself (ibid). The core of or
substance of value for Graeber lies in the selfs orientation toward the other in terms
of an emergent totality that defines or struggles to define what is life worth
living for (86). In the context of my ethnography, the protests and action of making
claims to the space would, from Graebers perspective, potentially point to emergent
and alternate ways of organizing space differently from the hegemonic goals of the

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state. I have shown that certain desire and aspiration for development and social
mobility undergirds protests against the highway expansion. Dominant discourses of
development, progress and entrepreneurialism articulate with local caste and class
discourses to produce an emergent system of what Ambedkar (1979) described as
graded inequality in which even small landholding aspiring villagers, ravaged by
government policies that neglected agriculture, get a feeling of upward mobility and
privilege vis-a`-vis the absolutely landless and lower caste. So, rather than contesting
the hegemonic goals of the state or indexing alternate totalities, the chits re-signify
the dominant discourses in the everyday lives of the small landholding villagers by
marking them off from the lower caste landless.
My ethnography and Ann Anagnosts rendering of the value concept may also be
seen as another instance of that cynical tendency that Graeber (2001:30) has
identified in Critical Marxism. However, what was beyond the scope of Graebers
analysis is a consideration of the reincarnation of the state and its discourses in
different guises at the margins of the state and capitalism. States implication in the
everyday life of the community through governing practices of political parties
make what Graeber (2001) calls certain forms of expression of value, i.e., the chits,
and the access to spots artificially scarce. This gives rise to ethics and moralities of
competition that gels with larger discourses of capitalism and neoliberalism
(Gershon 2011). Thus, the protests against expansion of highway or subversive use
of space may not index new kinds of totalities or radical ways of thinking about
what is life worth living for in potentia (Graeber 2001: 62). Rather, in this case,
subversion, like care (Gupta 2012: 24), is the site where violence and exclusion are
enacted.
Yet I think Anangnosts and Graebers views may complement each other if we
understand the role of the activist Left in post-colonial context as one of making
people aware of their collective rights to space and resources. The task of such
activism should be to implicate itself in a dialogical fashion in the everyday life to
counter and address the particular kinds of self-making that magical aspects of the
state and capitalist appropriation facilitates. This self-making constitutes of the
orientation of the self to the other and hence to self and its relationship with space
(i.e., value a la Graeber) in a manner that pits the relatively well off or not so poor
against the poor. In the case described here, the relatively well off happens to be
from middle castes and beneficiaries of redistributive land reforms. In other cases,
the divide between developed and un-developed may arise very arbitrarily (e.g.,
Gupta 2012). Therefore, the activists or activism of the Left should entail not only
challenging or critiquing the state in its rationallegal or spectacular guise but also
in its magical and everyday guise where states hegemonic presence forecloses
possibilities of cooperative or good intention-based engagements within communities and pushes it more toward a world that can be better described by Anagnosts
framework. A politics of value that can fight for a collective right to the city can
only emerge from an activism and anthropological critique that is double-edged
(i.e., critical of the state in its both rationallegal and everyday modes) rather than
simply romanticizing subversions or reading alternatives or potentials of alternatives in them.

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Acknowledgments This article is based on research that was supported by United States National
Science Foundation (NSF DDIG No. 0612845) and the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior
Research Fellowship. The author is thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments
and suggestions. The respondents deserve a special note of gratitude for their time, friendship, and
cooperation. The author is solely responsible for any errors.

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