Given the sheer scale of informal land and labor markets in non-Western contexts, the “slum” is often a privileged analytic for understanding the South Asian city, ranging from development studies that have spawned a veritable industry around sites and services, slum upgrading, titling, and other housing policies and programs, to postcolonial theorists who argue that the “informal city” constitutes a historical difference in the trajectory of capitalism at the edges of empire. Two recent books, by Sheetal Chhabria and Adam Michael Auerbach, take up the “slum” question but from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Chhabria's Making the Modern Slum reveals the making of the “slum” as a stigmatized category of rule in late colonial Bombay. Auerbach's Demanding Development shows the workings of local democratic politics in contemporary “slums” in Bhopal and Jaipur. What can be gained from reading these two books, by a historian and a political scientist, on “slums” in different historical periods and in varied Indian regional contexts? Juxtaposing these books enables us to pose the questions that emerge from one inquiry to the other, thus deepening our understanding of labor and democracy in Indian cities through the category of the “slum.”

In Making the Modern Slum, Chhabria situates the genealogy of the “modern slum” within the longer histories of colonialism and capitalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bombay. The slum, along with the conjoined category of the “city,” is a framing device that excludes and renders invisible the processes of rural colonization that are constitutive of capitalist accumulation. In one of the most powerful contributions of the book, Chhabria argues that the “slum” question is the agrarian question (p. 11): urban crises find their counterparts in agrarian crises, but the city is a “powerful and persistent spatial category of rule . . . that divides farmers’ suicides from slum settlements, seed privatization from dehydration of the urban poor, and rural usury from urban precarity” (p. 195). In destabilizing these analytical categories of the city and the slum, she brings into sharp focus the laboring migrants who create value for the city, but whose spatial journeys of work do not fit within the classificatory regimes of agriculture/industry, urban/rural, and premodern/modern. Chhabria's argument is a searing critique with contemporary salience for urban studies and planning: rather than problematizing our scholarly and analytical categories, when well-meaning architects, planners, and labor organizers uncritically deploy these categories of city and slum, they can become unwittingly complicit in endorsing planning projects that lead to “closures for migrants and laborers and openings for capital” (pp. 192–93).

The context for Chhabria's book is the commodification of land, labor, and shelter in colonial western India, organized around some key moments of crisis—the famines of the 1830s, the famines of the 1870s, and the plague of 1896. Chhabria's method of reconnecting “fragmentary archives” allows her to challenge the classificatory regimes of urban and rural. Her reading of the archives of the Bombay City Improvement Trust (the housing parastatal) alongside the colonial state's Report of the Indian Famine Commission reveals the tactics of power/knowledge that produced the slum as separate from agrarian crises. In two insightful chapters on “Land” and “Famine” (chapters 2 and 3), Chhabria shows how the advent of new regimes of land revenue and the introduction of commercial cash crops in Bombay's hinterland, coupled with the dismantling of older institutions of poor relief, commodified peasants’ access to shelter and other forms of nested entitlements. Dispossessed peasants migrated to the city in search of work, but the boundaries of the city became key sites for sorting, separating, marking, and managing the movement of bodies. A case in point is the blockade on the Sion Causeway in the early 1800s that sorted out able-bodied migrants from the famine-stricken countryside from the “paupers and indigents”; the former could become sources of flexible labor, while the latter were stigmatized as “nuisance” (pp. 73–77).

Chapters 3 (“Shelter”), 4 (“Disease”), and 5 (“Capital”) explore the other connected theme of the book: how housing is “rendered technical” and the “slum” became the space of governance for migrant workers. Though recent scholarship points to the derogatory language of “slums,”Footnote ¹ Chhabria reminds us that the category of the slum does useful work for managing labor and reconstituting the power of capital. For instance, as colonial officials catalogued housing types into pucca (durable) and katccha (temporary), Chhabria stresses the planned flexibility of these housing classificatory regimes. Sprawling shacks at the edges of the city were praised as ingenious migrant solutions, while similar structures inside “the city” were stigmatized, thus prefiguring contemporary critiques on state informality.Footnote ² Though Chhabria highlights how labor is managed both through urban/rural and housing classificatory regimes, she is careful to note that these tactics are foiled by various forms of ground realities and subaltern resistance, such as the messiness of quantifying housing by census officials and the difficulties of managing the mobile labor force of Halalkhors.

By “historicizing the city rather than doing history inside the city” (p. 9), Chhabria exposes the laboring bodies that constantly move across occupations and spaces; this “floating population,” she argues, can be better thought of as “urban peasantry” and “rural proletariat.” Here, it is worth probing the forms of industrial capitalism in colonial Bombay and its hinterland that made circular seasonal migration the most viable strategy for peasant workers. Chhabria gives us some glimpses into colonial capitalism (particularly in chapter 2 on “Famine” and the cotton boom and bust), but this is a theme that is taken up more fully by historians such as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar.Footnote ³ Enmeshed as they were in an “empire of cotton” with the colonial state mediating price fluctuations in the global cotton market in the interests of the metropolitan core, Bombay's cotton textile mills, Chandavarkar reminds us, were not organized as vertically integrated factories, but around various forms of putting-out and small workshops. This form of industrial organization made sense for Bombay's industrial capitalists in its peripheral location, but it also meant that Bombay's mill workers were never fully proletarianized and they retained connections with agricultural land and agrarian kinships to hedge against uncertain urban employment. These are not explorations that one expects Chhabria to undertake in her already richly researched book, but this wider historical conjuncture takes us a step closer toward Chhabria's own urging, following Eric Wolf, to not just celebrate labor agency but to understand laboring conditions (p. 190).

In her epilogue, Chhabria ends with the consequences of the labor question getting taken up, and subsumed, by India's nationalist movement (p. 192). Nationalist leaders asking workers to sacrifice for the nation became a defining feature of the postcolonial state, driven by “the logic of deferral: nation first, then labor justice” (p. 192). Moving from Chhabria's late colonial historiography to the postcolonial present in Auerbach's book, the question arises: what difference does electoral democracy make for “slum” residents and migrant workers? If anything, the conditions of flexible capitalism have resurged in the 1980s, but capitalist logics now have to contend with electoral imperatives. The “slum” in the context of an electoral democracy and competitive party politics is the key focus of Auerbach's book, Demanding Development.

Auerbach's research focuses on “squatter settlements” (as opposed to “old-city slums”) that were largely occupied in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Jaipur and Bhopal. The key protagonists are slum leaders who are party workers (pp. 16–21)—that is, slum residents who are not formally elected to these leadership positions but hold positions within political party organizations and mediate everyday claims-making between informal residents and the state. Auerbach situates his research within the growing multidisciplinary scholarship on “urban informality and the state,” which illuminates how “the urban poor shape the politics and built space of cities” (p. 27). Auerbach's intent, however, is to move beyond broad theorizations on urban popular politics and instead to home in on the “variety of organizational responses that slums have to the politics of the cities, and why some have secured public services while others fail to.”

His analysis relies on a careful research design of 4 + 4 squatter settlements in Bhopal and Jaipur; in each of these cities, the selected squatter settlements are located within the same state assembly constituency and have similar labor market characteristics, but they vary in their capacity to organize and demand local public goods from the state. Another impressive and insightful source of data is informal archives “that slum leaders keep on their public engagement—petitions, community meeting notes, newspaper clippings, photographs of protests and rallies, correspondence with officials” (p. 37). Slum leaders have maintained these archives since occupying their lands in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and these “several thousand” informal archival documents are “useful in reconstructing the histories of settlements” (p. 38). In addition, these eight case studies are part of a wider survey of 111 squatter settlements, through which Auerbach constructed an accurate census of party workers in each of these settlements, and correlated the density of party workers with public service provision.

Auerbach's key insight is that squatter settlements with a higher density of party workers have better public service provisioning. Chapters 3 (“How Party Workers Impact Local Development”) and 4 (“India's Slum Leaders”) delve into how slum leaders are knowledge brokers, sometimes referred to as “dalals” or fixers (p. 102). If India's urban middle-class activists are dismayed by the maze of government agencies and the institutional chaos of Indian cities, slum leaders gain their reputational capital through their ability to navigate these myriad public agencies and to get things done. Also crucial is the ability of slum leaders to have face-to-face connections with the party's political elites, which explains why publicly listed numbers are often defunct, but they are rarely a source of grievance as party workers regularly bypass them and directly approach political elites to amplify certain claims (p. 22). The density of party workers also affects the capacity to mobilize for protests, with party workers facilitating mundane logistical details such as providing buses for residents to reach government buildings (pp. 78–80).

Chapters 5–7 rely on the “historical narratives from eight squatter settlements” and “evidence from 111 settlements” to explain “why party networks spread unevenly across settlements.” To explain the variations among slums in demanding public services, Auerbach points to two variables: settlement size and ethnic diversity. Settlement size is parlayed into vote banks, and there is a higher likelihood of political parties allocating scarce party positions to slum leaders who can mobilize larger vote banks. The variable of ethnic diversity “cuts against the grain of a large literature in political economy that shows ethnic diversity [dampens] public goods provision” (p. 5). Instead, in pointing to the electoral advantages of social heterogeneity, Auerbach contends that strangers from varied regions, religions, and jatis who are forced into dense spatial proximity in urban informal settlements can make effective collective demands on the state. Auerbach's survey reveals a staggering 300 jatis living in the surveyed 111 settlements, and slums that are more ethnically diverse—along lines of caste (jati), religion, and region—have a higher density of party workers and better public services.

Taking a cue from Chhabria's book with its focus on labor, it is worth unpacking further the labor regimes within which party workers are embedded. The squatter settlements in Indian cities need to be differentiated from older inner-city “slums” as the former mirrors a wider global trend of post-1980s unauthorized settlements that burgeoned in Mexico, Brazil, and other countries that were also witnessing an unravelling of import-substitution-industrialization in the context of an electoral democracy.Footnote ⁴ In the context of post-1980s economic restructuring, are the party workers in India's squatter settlements a surplus population that resembles the “educated unemployed youth” in Craig Jeffrey's Timepass,Footnote ⁵ who are unable to be absorbed within the formal urban economy but whose survival has to be ensured by a democratic state? Auerbach has some striking insights on party work as a form of employment. For instance, he finds that during elections, “a slum leader in Jaipur . . . was able to make Rs. 30,000—an amount equal to almost six months of income for most of his neighbors . . . These incentives can go up to a lakh (Rs. 100,000) depending on the importance of the slum leader” (p. 108). Even if it is not election time, everyday claims-making is also a source of income, with seemingly fixed rates for gaining access to various forms of entitlements (p. 108). In short, the party workers are a clear triumph of democratic claims-making, but do they also reveal deeper structural insights on India's transition narrative?

Both of these books will be invaluable reading for scholars of South Asia and for anyone interested in “slums” in the Global South. Not only do they pry open the category and workings of “slums,” they also raise seminal questions on the constitutive role of slums in the capitalist transformations in the Global South.