Session 66: Globalization, Spatial Practice, and Power in South Asia: From the Old "Urban-Rural" Divide to New Peripheries?

Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Carol Henderson, Rutgers University

Keywords: globalization, rural-urban divide, hierarchy

One of the most significant outcomes of globalizing processes in Asia is the emergence of new forms of peripheries and new spatial interconnections among levels of settlement and their associated social groups. Hitherto characterized as an eroding "urban-rural" divide symptomatic of urban hegemony, we question and urge a reconstitution of spatiality—seen in settlement pattern, contested meanings, and modalities of social action—along with the reconstruction of understanding of the inscription on space of emerging power relationships. Practices of mobility, commodity production, and symbolic meaning are increasingly implicated in the inscription of urban functions in rural spaces, even as urban peripheries themselves are undergoing transformation linked to shifts in their relationship to rural hinterlands. We therefore question the implications of the vocabulary of difference embedded in the "urban-rural divide" and its valorization in academic practice. Three arenas for investigation may be outlined: one is the immediate level of face-to-face interaction of actors and space and the movements of individuals, commodities, and consumer goods among different sites. The second focal point is that of interaction of semi-localized collectivities, both organized units, and as emergent properties of clusters of individually operating units, which results in differential patterns of spatial, behavioral, and symbolic outcomes. Third, we analytically distinguish among levels of spatial and political integration, such as in political collective behaviors within the state-level system.

Urbanization and Its Effects on the Rural Community of Karimpur

Susan S. Wadley, Syracuse University

From the jeans now worn by young men (and rarely a young woman) to the televisions that blare away (in the two hours of electricity a day) to the consumption of shampoos and Dettol to young daughters working in cellphone factories in Delhi, globalization has come to India’s villages. Karimpur, in western Uttar Pradesh, has been studied for more than 75 years. Facets of a global culture provide new materials with which peoples can forge new identities and new traditions.

Based on my own almost forty years of research in Karimpur, I focus here on issues of urbanization and social change, with the related factors of globalization through the study of one village over time. While very few men, and essentially no women, had migrated from Karimpur to nearby urban areas prior to 1984, by the late 1990s, some fifteen percent of the potential population of the community had migrated, more or less permanently, to Delhi and other urban locales across north India. With constant interchange between urban migrants and those remaining in the village, the resulting influences range from new brick houses with bathing cubicles and latrines to new understandings of what is fashionable to new challenges for both men and women regarding employment and related aspirations. Based on research in late 2004, I explore here the influences of urban ways, and the related influences of the global supermarket, on those remaining in Karimpur.

Margin Practices or the Resource of Being In-Between: Some Examples in the Urban/Rural Fringe of Udaipur, Rajasthan

Nicolas Bautes, University of Paris

Mobility is redefining the material and symbolic frontier between the urban and the rural for a growing number of inhabitants of the rural peripheries. This territory is concerned by new practices of spaces and new socio-economic functions in which it appears that urban peripheries are showing new territorialities based on new modalities of social action, producing important shifts in what is understood as the "urban-rural fringe." In this, mobility may be understood as a mode of social practice and valorization, involving the relationships of individuals to space and the individual to society. Looking at discrete cases, I ask, what is the actor’s relationship with the urban, urban space and urban society? How do actors take advantage of their mobility, their social and spatial distance with the City ? What are their constraints in taking part in the centre’s dynamics? How do these actors represent themselves, their space of action and their space of life, and what are their perspectives of social mobility through their uses of spatial mobility? The paper explores modalities of mobility associated with three groups: first, the workforce employed in the hotel industry of Udaipur, who work in the city and live in the periphery; second, the landowners and new residents concerned with growing demand for land for urban uses in the Udaipur outskirts; third, intermediaries involved in tourism, who provide tourist cultural products originating from specific villages or regions (Molela, Barmer, Kutch) to the Udaipur shopkeepers.

India Shining (albeit in Bits and Pieces): Spatial Perception and Political Choice-Making in and around Indian Globalized Cities

Sanjeev Vidyarthi, University of Michigan

This paper examines the recent parliamentary election results from the regions of the "globalized" Indian cities. The "globalized" Indian cities have been identified as those which have benefited from new economy activities like Business Processes Outsourcing (BPO) and Information Technology (IT), etc. For the purpose of this study the term "region" is employed rather loosely and is identified as parliamentary constituencies in, abutting and just beyond the globalized cities. The election result from the Indian globalized city regions reveal that the right wing Bhartiaya Janta Party (BJP)-led ruling coalition that presented itself as the champion of economic reforms and economic liberalization lost 28 out of the 33 parliamentary constituencies. This is indeed surprising as the globalized cities and their regions are perceived to have economically benefited from the liberalization process and the ruling coalition naturally expected to win in these cities and their regions. This study shows that at best the most affluent parliamentary constituency in the selected cities elected the BJP led ruling coalition while both the peri-urban and the rural constituencies, surrounding the selected cities, rejected it.

This anomaly is explained with the hypothesis that the political choice made by the residents of Indian globalized cities and their regions bears a direct reference to the physical transformations in the fabric of these cities that exacerbated the already existing rural and urban divide. Residents have thus voted because the globalization led physical transformations have been perceived as emphasizing growing inequalities.