Description:

Please join the South Asia Research Forum for a talk given by Eric Beverley (SUNY Stony Brook)

Indian cities are being remade by a massive and continuous urban population explosion, as is the case in much of the global south and the world. The southern Indian city Hyderabad exemplifies this trend, expanding from under half a million in 1900, to one million at mid-century, to over 10 million by 2020. Even as most city dwellers struggle for necessities, urban property and construction as financialized real estate are now a central means of capital accumulation, and land grabs are rampant. Possession and use of lands in Hyderabad are shaped by long histories of dynastic or national state control and land granting and popular or community access and entitlement via squatting or social development initiatives. This lecture considers the complex ways practices of inhabiting and asserting control over urban lands are translated into new regimes of property in the context of state capitalist and post-liberalization developmentalism. Reflecting on property and lives in cities such as Hyderabad offers the opportunity to consider other possible urban futures for South Asia, the global south, and the world. 

About the speaker:
Eric Beverley’s research on South Asia and the Indian Ocean world examines transnational connections and urban change, sovereignty and global state systems, and borderlands and law from the early modern era to the present. He teaches History at SUNY Stony Brook and is author of Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850-1950 (Cambridge 2015; Delhi 2016), as well as numerous articles, and is currently working on a history of urban land in twentieth-century Hyderabad City, and a short volume on Indian Ocean urbanism.