We live in cities whose borders have always been subject to expansion. What does such transformation of rural spaces mean for cities and vice-versa? This book looks at the spatial transformation of villages brought into the Delhi's urban fray in the 1950s. As these villages transform physically; their residents, an agrarian-pastoralist community - the Jats - also transform into dabblers in real estate. A study of two villages - Munirka and Shahpur Jat - both in the heart of bustling urban economies of Delhi, reveal that it is 'rent' that could define this suburbanisation. 'Bhaichara', once a...

Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of...