Book review forum: Properties of rent: Community, capital and politics in globalising Delhi

Sushmita Pati, Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022: ISBN: 9781316517277, Price: INR 895.

Introduction

Karen Coelho, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand; Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India

Properties of Rent, Sushmita Pati’s first monograph, is one of those cornucopian books that will continue to spark productive conversations for years to come. It was published nearly three years ago, reviewed over a score of times, and has received two international awards. Yet it remains a linchpin for ongoing reflections on key themes in contemporary Indian urban studies. I take great pleasure in introducing one such set of reflections through this Review Forum featuring two commentaries on the book and a response from the author.

The book animates the abstract figure of rent, an under-theorised aspect of contemporary urban capital, through an immersive study of two urban villages of Delhi. It probes the thickness of rent as a social relation by tracing the shifting fortunes, subjectivities and power of Delhi’s Jats as they transform from a dominant agrarian landowning caste to a powerful rentier cartel facilitating Delhi’s urban odyssey. They leverage their communally owned village homestead lands, exempted from the state’s sweeping agrarian land acquisitions in the 1950s and 1960s, to construct and control critical stocks of affordable rental housing for the city’s low-wage and migrant workers. Nine chapters, including a compellingly written introductory set-up and an epilogue, trace the social biography of rent through multiple storylines that interweave within the congested, overbuilt streets and cramped housing units of these villages. The narratives are framed against a layered historical account of Delhi’s early urban planning and expansion efforts and subsequent shifts in its economic bases and political formations leading up to and following liberalisation in the 1990s. The writing combines a fine eye for the narrative and plot potential of field encounters with rigorous archival and documentary research and a facility for theoretical abstraction from these data to offer important insights into ‘small political economy’.

The book signals two important frontiers in Indian scholarship which are marking new theoretical terrain in global urban studies. The first is a rich and diverse set of conceptualisations of the urban–rural relation through rubrics like subaltern, provincial, frontier, agrarian and peripheral urbanisation (Balakrishnan, 2019; Gururani and Dasgupta, 2018; Mukhopadhyay et al., 2020; Upadhya et al., 2018). The framework of agrarian urbanism in particular posits histories of the urban as constitutively linked and closely implicated with histories of the rural, calling for closer conversations between urban and agrarian studies (Gururani, 2019). Through analyses of rapidly transforming peri-urban spaces like Gurgaon near Delhi and Sriperumbudur near Chennai (Cowan, 2022; Raman, 2018), scholars have examined how vernacular modes of land tenure and control, organised along caste lines and shaped by colonial and postcolonial legal and planning instruments, intersect with state/corporate real estate interests to produce deeply segmented urban landscapes. Stark inequalities in infrastructure and services are underpinned by hybrid governance regimes in which rural caste institutions are refashioned and redeployed alongside municipal and state bodies.

The second scholarly agenda signalled by the book examines how caste operates as a crucial structuring principle in the Indian urban, not only to reproduce the socio-spatial segregation of urban dalits and indigenous communities (Ranganathan, 2022), but to organise industrial production, land and labour markets, circuits of capital and modes of accumulation (Chari, 2004, Upadhya and Rathod, 2021). In sum, the book enriches a literature that shows how the Indian urban, even in large metropolitan centres, takes form and meaning from its imbrication in various marginal, anomalous and liminal social geographies like fishing villages, unauthorised colonies and peri-urban settlements, that challenge the hegemony and negotiate the contradictions and exclusions of state laws and plans.

The two reviews in this Forum skilfully locate the book within these domains. Aditi Dey’s lucid commentary reprises the book’s contributions to understanding frictions in urban–rural placemaking through its account of how the state’s land-grab, giving rise to various forms of kabza (land capture) by the Jats, has determined the socio-spatial character of these urban villages. Dey also highlights the ambivalent caste subjectivities that unfold through these processes, as the Jats’ senses of loss – of lands, caste pride and masculinity – are channelled into new deployments of caste solidarity, networks and resources through which they take their place in the urban political and cultural landscape of Delhi. Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay, who travels with this work from its early journey as a PhD dissertation, situates the book as a venture to dismantle categorical boundaries between rural and urban, university and field, vernacular and global, rent and finance, community and capital, thus emancipating enquiry and expanding possibilities of learning across social and epistemic worlds. While noting that the book’s inspiration is in showing that ‘one can do serious political economy with experience-near concepts’, he poses some critical provocations for the author by asking what rent might mean for tenants as a lived category beyond monthly dues, and by pointing to the limits of an intimate social history of rent for understanding the larger contours of global capital. Pati’s response underlines the inquisitive, open-ended conversation that the work embodies, the sense of the book as a commons allowing for various readings and meanings rather than providing conceptual closure.

Much has been said and more can be said about the rural in the metropolitan, caste in the city, community in capital, and other edgy assemblages that constitute Indian and Southern urbanisms. This book, like any good book, will continue to provoke thinking that pushes into theoretical interstices and horizons, making space for new conversations.

References

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Commentary I

Aditi Dey, The New School for Social Research, New York, USA.

The inability of postcolonial urban planning regimes to acknowledge the many agrarian lifeworlds that make India’s cities has long led to the creation of ‘a curious mosaic’ in-between spaces (p. 2). The history of Delhi’s interstitial spaces, within the urban villages of Shahpur Jat and Munirka, are the subject of Sushmita Pati’s fascinating book, Properties of Rent. Their chief protagonists are Jats, the dominant landowning caste, who are, at times, active agents and, at other times, resentful victims of the changing regimes of capital and state power. The book traces the community’s evolving relationship with vernacular forms of capital, specifically through rent, as a way of placemaking in a rapidly globalising and metamorphosing city. Pati narrates an account of the urban in conjunction with the agrarian, which she shows have been discursively and materially constructed.

Chapter 1 charts Delhi’s mid-century history of large-scale land acquisitions, tracing the emergence of urban property, wherein land acquisition for ‘public good’ was accompanied almost immediately by kabza or illegal land grabs by those communities differentially affected by state dispossession. Turning a legalistic discourse on its head, people often viewed the state’s own land acquisitions as ‘sarkari kabza’, state-led land grabs; Pati argues that ‘legal land acquisition and illegal kabza, or land grabs’ were remembered as ‘two sides of the same coin’ (p. 35). What mushroomed in the shadows of the formal state were lived spaces and communities whose agricultural lands were acquired, often with paltry compensation, for the project of national development. Between the throes of the state’s claims and people’s counterclaims over the city’s commons, land emerged as this lumpy object, layered by histories of communal ownership, people’s identities, and collective memory, impossibly turned into modern urban property. But battles over land became the most thoroughly contested terrain in matters related to the determination of the value of land. Pati points out that the challenge lay not just in equating agricultural land pricing tracing back to Mughal era customary law into an emergent urban land value, but also in navigating the many deliberate mistranslations of Persian and Urdu language land tenure documents (p. 47). Value in many ways, was brokered by experts of patwaris and tehsildars offices, the only ones who embodied the knowledge of multiple, overlapping and competing documentary regimes. Such instances of value extraction and meaning-making became sites for acts of subversion of the truthmaking authority of state technologies and diverting them towards alternative imaginaries of hegemony (Strassler, 2010).

During the early decades after independence, multiple postcolonial publics and counterpublics were born out of the state’s project of spatial modernisation. Through Chapters 2 and 3, Pati traces the trajectory of Jats as one such community within lal dora villages of Delhi, as a key prehistory to their emergence as an entrepreneurial rentier class. Here ‘entrepreneurship’ differs from its 21st-century savvy connotations of high-tech or big business. Instead, Pati shows how political subjectivities born out of resentment, are mobilised towards the consolidation of power over the city’s local politics networks. The project of postcolonial modernisation is remembered as a deeply elitist one, by communities like Jats who felt ‘that they have been shortchanged by the state’ (p. 108), despite the sacrifices of their lands for a ‘greater good’. Chapter 4 traces how as a response to and in the face of a rapidly modernising city, the Jat community doubles down on ties of community. Communal property ownership, or the bhaichara system, and parallel governance forms of the khap panchayat, are reproduced within logics of the modern city as a way of reinforcing caste solidarity. Through a collection of life histories from Jats across multiple generations, Properties of Rent sheds light on a powerful subaltern group known for its rustic and often violent masculinity, that made Delhi from its margins. The detailed examination of how a dominant landowning caste inserts itself into the sinews of capital and political power in Delhi confirms what other scholars have asserted about caste being the central organising principle in Indian cities (Crowley and Ghertner, 2022; Guru, 2012). Pati demonstrates how vernacular capital and ground rent, rooted in complex agrarian–urban property regimes, constitute the political economy of such caste power. Moreover, the uneven and differentiated trajectories of Jats and neighbouring landowning Dalit communities like Valmikis in urban villages shows that consolidation of such power depends on active dispossession and class differentiation. Through Chapters 5 and 6, we learnt how a caste community is consistently reproduced and defined by its ‘outsides’ and the figure of the ‘other’, often Dalits or working-class North Eastern migrants, or even Muslims.

The fortunes of Jats did not change overnight and were long in the making, part of a wider regional story of post-Green Revolution political economic transformation (p. 61). Jats were able to place themselves in multiple patronage links through rent-seeking relations with the state through the 1960s and 1980s. These clientelist links in Delhi were spread across several lower-level government jobs and subcontracting chains of a declining License Permit Raj state. The remarkable ability of Jats to translate robust caste networks into social capital ultimately led to their rise as landlords when market reforms of the 1990s transformed land into real estate, making their homestead land the most valuable form of capital. The idioms of the community found a new lease of life, as Jats determined the social relation of ground rent, strictly around the ‘spine of the community’ (p. 11). As owners of communal land in the urban villages of Shahpur Jat and Munirka, they monopolised a rapidly emerging rental market of informal housing for working-class migrants of the city. They were able to reconfigure the peripheral and interstitial spaces within the planned city, capitalising on their illegibility, into critical sites for the accumulation of vernacular capital, based on circuits of liquid cash and masculinised imaginaries of risk-taking.

Chapter 7 offers a remarkable socio-historical examination of how Jats have participated in electoral politics in Delhi. Pati illustrates how the post-1990s real estate-based urban economy, which Delhi’s Jats benefited from, created fractures within the broader imaginations of the historically agrarian and land-based community of North India. This has had important consequences for national politics, specifically within the context of social movements across India demanding Other Backwards Caste status, led by several intermediary castes, including Jats (p. 205). But it also sheds light on the formulation of a subaltern elite or lower middle-class identity in a large metropolis, with uneven links to a broader regional identity. Such an account of the political practices of a dominant caste group has immense potential for comparative studies in many other Indian cities, in order to unpack the consolidation of the ‘urban vote’ and poorly understood phenomena such as ‘subaltern Hinduttva’.

So much of the story of Delhi’s Jats is actually a sociospatial history of the evolving Indian state narrated from its margins. Key to this narrative is the persistence of the old, the endurance of money in parallel to finance, the growth of unauthorised spaces in tandem with the planned city, or how the rustic patriarchal is reasserted, with the rise of a swanky neoliberal urban aesthetic. Similarly, rent and global capital are distinct, Pati argues, and unfold in conjunction, with key moments of convergence and divergence (p. 11). There is an evidently mutually dependent and even parasitic relationship between both. While Properties of Rent demonstrates how the value derived from either ‘inscribed different registers’ (p. 19), one could ask more about the mechanisms and underlying logic by which they mutually produced each other. How is the illegibility of urban villages, actively made and remade by the state through deliberate policy interventions, such as the 1963 circular exempting lal dora villages from building byelaws, among others, to maintain them as key sites of social reproduction and accumulation (Fraser, 2017)? As the works of Solomon Benjamin (1996, 2004) have shown, informal urban spaces are the prime sites for deregulated industries and home-based workshops, as well as surplus precariat labour. Powerful intermediary classes maintain the potentially lucrative opacity of such spaces, as they actively oppose formalisation and regularisation. A second point of inquiry emerges about how certain caste groups, such as Jats (and not others like Gujjars), get enrolled by capital to become key intermediaries between global finance and vernacular capital, brokering crucial class relations necessary for these arrangements. Contributing to a burgeoning scholarship on urban entrepreneurship and brokerage (Björkman, 2021), Properties of Rent calls for further exploration on how intermediaries and mediatory work emerge historically and how they can be theorised within the logics of capitalism.

Overall, Pati makes an invaluable contribution towards a much-needed postcolonial historiography of Indian urbanism. For this, she mobilises a cross disciplinary perspective, working through history, political science, anthropology and urban sociology, wielding methodological innovation in the archives and in the field. Such a dynamic mode is indeed necessary, she says, when ‘information and gossip melded into each other’ (p. 62) and the rumour mill became as crucial as ‘verified knowledge’ (p. 202). The resultant scholarly work has been an indispensable intervention in not only exemplifying a thoroughly historical account of the urban, but also setting an example for those of us who are interested in carrying out interdisciplinary work to unpack ‘small’ political economy from the Global South.

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Commentary II

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Mohali, India

This is a late review of Sushmita Pati’s important and award-winning monograph Properties of Rent (henceforth, PR). Several scholars have already written summaries and critical appreciation for this volume. The author too has clarified the content and argument of the book in several places. Rather than going into those well-known details of content and contingencies that the book offers, I attempt some provocations for some more debate around this book. My critique will investigate the conditions of possibility and limits of the theoretical universe that the book builds through a historically sensitised ethnography of two urban villages of Delhi. Like every serious piece of scholarship, PR opens with a puzzle: the oxymoronic ‘urban village’ whose lived hybridity calls into question the epistemic certainty and self-evidence of various dyads that we deploy in social science research quite indiscriminately: the rural and the urban, the vernacular and the global, the ‘traditional’ social organisations and the modern civil social institutions, rent and capital, and money (understood as hard cash) and finance. Pati’s well-crafted narrative is able to show the traces of the former category in the latter and vice versa in each pair which makes it possible for us to discover these dyads as more than simple binaries, but existing as interpenetrating dialectical tensions. This is a story of transformation without a stagiest autobiography of capital that hosts the urban and is hosted in the urban as a site of investigation. The urban villages are both ethnographic sites and epistemic categories in themselves.

Pati’s project began as part of her PhD research from JNU. One of the urban villages – Munirka – where she studies is just outside the university’s frighteningly fortified walls. The other village – Shahpur Jat – is also not far away. Anybody going out of the JNU campus is bound to encounter these urban villages as an ‘immediate’ (here, I mean elementary appearance before mediations) phenomenon. I, too, live in a walled campus, cut off from the surroundings, and I feel that above all, this book is an attempt to breach that epistemic and methodological wall from ‘inside’. My first appreciation of the project comes from this desire to sabotage the university wall. Pati is very successful in demonstrating how that can be done – how the university can learn from the neighbourhood and how that learning can transform the ways in which the university perceives the world beyond it. As an ethnographer, Pati remains committed to the ‘immediate’ and through that forms an understanding of the more complex mediations – the questions of value in land, capital, institutions, etc.

For Pati, rent is THE window to analyse the complex assemblages of capital and the social world it inhabits. Rent is a social relationship of possession and control which allows various caste groups to collectively negotiate the will of capital. Accumulation in and through the city is possible via this uneasy entanglement between rent and capital, money and finance. As we read the book, we discover that capital and community are reciprocally interdependent, each is always reinventing and refunctioning the other. Pati establishes this ‘thesis’ over seven chapters. Each chapter gives you a collage of ethnographic vignettes – Jat community leaders, Dalit social activists, local politicians and power brokers, ordinary people, and their lifeworld around a piece of property. Each chapter invokes larger histories of planning, statecraft, and capital, and weaves together the transforming world of these ordinary people. Rent remains the optic throughout and Pati is smart enough not to rigidly define rent anywhere in the book. Rather, she allows the reader to make their meanings of it from the narrative.

In the recent past, studies of Indian capitalism have correctly identified caste as central to any understanding of the trajectories of Indian capitalism. There is now a need to study the overwhelming presence of caste as a predicating factor in shaping the destiny of rural labour as agrarian labour or as surplus population absorbed in various forms of petty production, including artisanal mining, and small-scale and medium-scale industries, or as a reserve army of labour, or simply forming the vast army of footloose labour in the country. The relative absence of caste as a critical factor in a discussion on post-colonial political economy is stunning. PR is a bold intervention in this literature. The author shows us the importance of two things in this regard: firstly, the need for more and more organisational analysis – the organisational and structural process of accumulation, and secondly, the need for a sustained analysis of what Charles Tilly had called ‘durable inequality’ through ‘opportunity hoarding’. There are sections in several chapters that show us the comparative fortunes of various caste groups (and not just the dominant Jats) as various markets rose and fell.

I have three minor criticisms about the book. First, I think a social history of rent (the stated objective of the book) is a bit incomplete without presenting a deep ethnographic account of the ‘tenant side’ of the story. Tenants come and go in the narrative, but there is a glaring asymmetry in importance of their role in the rental economy as compared with the landlord side (for the tenant, rent is a mode of payment). Pati acknowledges this in the book. I think a more detailed analysis of majboori (does it refer to involuntary forces of a social formation?) and what it means in her ethnographic context would have been great in this context. As Pati seems to suggest, both the community of landlords and tenants are tied in an intimacy defined by a sense of majboori.

Secondly, I am not sure if ‘global capital’ and ‘finance’ serve any major role in the book beyond being a background to float the ‘vernacular’. On page 10, PR claims itself to be a study of ‘global capital from the vantagepoint of vernacular rent’. Certainly, we get to know a lot about the vantagepoint itself through the book without ever understanding what that vantagepoint does to global capital and our current state of knowledge about it. Is global capital devoid of the social or does the social exist only in the vernacular world? How does Pati’s innovative understanding of rent sit with the political economy debates about rent and capital? I also feel that an overemphasis on rent might have repressed the richness of the material. Rent is literally everywhere, and it tends to slip between multiple registers.

Thirdly, at times, I found the terminologies confusing, which may be because of the book’s highly original approach. Pati, for instance, uses value in multiple ways, deriving its meaning from various intellectual traditions. I am not saying that one cannot or should not do so. But, at the same time, one should be a little concerned about the difficulties of comprehension that might emerge in the narrative as a result. At times, I failed to make a distinction between value and price, which is most glaring in Chapter 1. In addition, I failed to understand what the author meant when she derived a correspondence between rent and use value (pp. 18–19). She writes: ‘I argue that use value finds expression in the language of possession of rent’ (p. 19). This is an unusual connection. Some more elaboration might have made it more useful for my own intellectual purpose. Similarly, I was initially confused about the author’s use of ‘money’: ‘Rent circulates within the logic of “money” that works within community chains as opposed to that of “finance”’. I had always thought of money as a measure of value, a means of exchange and payment, and a means of hoarding (note: these functions are separate from money’s ‘concrete forms’). It was only when I reached page 119 that I began to understand money in terms of hard cash. There is a certain eclecticism in the use of categories.

That said, this is one of the most impressive monographs I have read recently. Above all, the book shows that one can do serious political economy with experience-near concepts. The attention it got in academic discourse is well-deserved. This book will have a long shelf-life and it will continue to inspire me to do research worth this much.

Author response

Sushmita Pati, National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India.

I would like to begin by thanking both the reviewers for such generous comments. One of the reviewers, Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay, has been a close reader of many of my drafts and a sounding board for several of the ideas that are there in the book, whose keen understanding of political economy has informed and inspired a lot of my own writing. I cannot begin this response without acknowledging his impact on the writing of this book.

Reading these reviews only reconfirms how readers read in such different yet exciting ways that continue to give the written word meaning way beyond what the author ever intended. Both these reviews illuminate aspects of the book that I never gave much thought to. Bandopadhyay calls my method ‘doing political economy with near-experience concepts’ while Dey calls it ‘postcolonial historiography of Indian urbanism’. These are far better ways of explaining my methodology than I do in the book. In the same way, readers also find better ways of articulating the confusion in your head that you never found words for. Methods open up conceptual and analytical doors for us, but methods also come with their own challenges.

Both authors raise concerns about the theoretical relationship between rent and capital, which hits the nail right on its head. What am I really saying about this relationship when this literature has been so intently written about in political economy? How can this very historiography driven, ‘near experience’ driven methodology contribute to these theoretical debates? As both Dey and Bandopadhyay, as well as some other reviewers, have noted, the relationship between rent and capital sometimes comes across as too strong, almost forcibly overdetermined and sometimes as almost vague, loose, as if they were interchangeable.

I have spent considerable time on this both while writing the book and after it and I cannot say I have found great clarity on it. As I see it, the relationship between the two is never stable. Consider the vignette that is in the book about an entrepreneur in one of the villages who in desperation borrows money from his landlord and makes him a partner. In this moment, the relationship between labour and capital seems absolutely seamless in the way they merge with each other. But then, the moment the same entrepreneur approaches a Venture Capitalist to raise funds, they raise an objection about the presence of an uneducated landlord and the entrepreneur is forced to restructure his company to get rid of his landlord. What then does it tell us about this relationship between rent and capital in terms of these debates? These are also the limits placed by methodological choices. I think I am now coming around to the fact that I am not intervening in that debate on the terms that have been set. What I am able to show through Delhi is the ways in which rent and capital interact. Rent and capital have always had a conflictual relationship, and I am possibly able to show how social relations between rent and capital are shaped around existing social cleavages. How does that contribute to the big debate around capital and rent? I think I am now slowly growing confident in saying that maybe it does not. I am more interested in looking at cracks and fissures at their interface and what that may mean.

This connects to the other observation that Bandopadhyay makes. That global capital is merely a backdrop in this book where we get to understand a lot more about vantage point, but not so much about how that changes and transforms the nature of global capital. PR does leave these connections unattended to. But in some ways it chooses to study global capital at the scale of the local. Taking my inspiration from critical geography’s understanding of scale, I feel that these categories of ‘local’, ‘regional’ and ‘global’ can be studied into each other. In the context of the book, PR is trying to show that social relations of rent sustain the world of global capital. Xenophobia and racism, that are often common in closed kin groups, take on a form that feeds into a particular kind of surveillance on working classes which only is beneficial for the world of global capital. But this mechanism is not neat and it is also met with resistance. This ‘violence of rent’ that we see, my argument really is that it should be seen in conjunction with the ‘violence of capital’. Precarity that is harboured and created by global capital also then seeps into a different kind of precarity that working classes experience in their living spaces and these two are interrelated kinds of violence. The fact that migrant workers had to lift all their belongings and start walking back home the moment lockdown was announced is the result of violence in both these forms. Dey asks how these omissions are deliberate acts of the state to create spaces of exploitation. While it may be generally true, in this case as in many other cases as well, these are often also simply a result of the state’s shortsightedness which later is appropriated differently by global capital.

In hindsight, I see the confusion of terminologies that Bandopadhyay refers to. Partly these confusions are a reflection of my own conceptual confusions which could have been ironed out. But some, like the confusion between ‘value’ and ‘price’ has continued through the thesis. Bandopadhyay is right in pointing out that they are two distinct concepts, but since I am relying on the meaning of value from other disciplinary traditions as well, the meanings and experience of ‘value’ and ‘price’ sometimes get conflated. Often during land acquisition, the sense of humiliation, and deep reproach for the state comes from the fact that the price fixed for their land was not sufficient. In this manner, a lot of times, people’s sensibility of ‘value’ and of being valued is directly proportionate with the price of land offered. Dey also notes how sometimes value of land gets determined in the strangest of ways, including by the act of reading land documents by low level bureaucrats. While they are never really directly fixing price, how they are reading the status of land determines its value and by extension also its price.

Thinking back, majboori or compulsion does refer to the involuntary forces of a social formation like Bandopadhyay surmises. But while all social formations have their own involuntary forces, this form that is premised on rent creates a lot more dependence on other actors. Landlords are dependent on other landlords, no matter how fraught their relationships may be. Similarly, because these exist in a particular kind of vacuum of state and law, it necessitates this dependent relationship between the landlord and the tenants despite intense mistrust between these two groups. Suspicion of the other results in the gated and walled cities that Teresa Caldeira shows us. But when walls and gates cannot be erected because of a certain dependence on the other, then it results in this relationship that is governed by this sense of majboori where both tenants and landlords feel like they are condemned to live together. Majboori or compulsion could very well be the metaphor for how suburban spaces are shaping up. While upper middle classes in prime areas are able to push out tenants who defy their cultural sensibilities, suburban landlords with far less capital, saddled with housing loans, cannot say no to any tenant. Majboori is therefore also a metaphor for this simmering suspicion that can erupt into violence that a lot of suburban areas now seem to be palpable with.

By way of ending this, I find myself now increasingly troubled by the relationship between methods and theory. Thinking back, I am unhappy about the fact that I keep referring to rent as ‘vernacular’ or ‘local’. Why does a study located in Delhi need to constantly add the caveat that this is a theory that has a location whereas a study located in London does not need to? Taking the provocation from both the reviewers seriously, what would it mean for someone like me, who is informed by the field, to be able to intervene in these big debates? But possibly, our worth need not come from being able to wedge ourselves into the same debates but possibly by opening up new theoretical questions to ask and explore.

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