This dissertation is a study of how contestations over public space, the nature of citizenship, and the everyday life of the state are intimately tied to the subjective experience of life in Mumbai. Based on long-term fieldwork in Mumbai with illegally operating street hawkers, hawkers' union leaders, the municipality, and middle-class civic activists, I argue that the street serves as a crucial site at which the everyday practices and promises of globality are conceived and contested, and where their consequences play out. ...
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This dissertation is a study of how contestations over public space, the nature of citizenship, and the everyday life of the state are intimately tied to the subjective experience of life in Mumbai. Based on long-term fieldwork in Mumbai with illegally operating street hawkers, hawkers' union leaders, the municipality, and middle-class civic activists, I argue that the street serves as a crucial site at which the everyday practices and promises of globality are conceived and contested, and where their consequences play out. Mumbai's hybrid colonial origin, history of transnational interconnection, radically heterogeneous urbanism, and contemporary incarnation as a future 'global' city that promises to transform India's place in the world make it a particularly rich site from which to explore how everyday practices on the street relate to the abstract question of globality. Thus, moving away from teleological accounts that tend to read changes in urban life from overarching narratives of globalization or neoliberalism, I connect the controversial place of street hawkers in Mumbai---as both integral to the everyday functioning of the city and also considered to constitute the city's most profound nuisance---with broader debates over Mumbai's potential place in the world through ethnographies of their mundane practices and their interactions, in conflict and coordination with middle-class residents and the local government. These sites provide crucial instances at which larger issues of transnationalism, urban reconfiguration, power and the everyday workings of the state play out. While it is the particular discourse of safeguarding public space from hawkers that operates as a dominant idiom through which larger concerns about the condition of the city are articulated, the moments of collusion, compromise and unlikely collaboration between hawkers, citizens' groups and the state reflect the complexity of the political and cultural landscape of contemporary Mumbai. The dissertation begins with a discussion of the way hawkers' daily practices on the street are shaped by the contingent manifestations of the law. I show how hawkers' everyday encounters with representatives of the municipality and police enable them to make claims on the state outside the norms of civil society. I then move to a discussion of middle-class civic activism against hawkers which seeks to impose a modernist ideal of how streets should look, and in the process reconfigure the practices and meaning of citizenship in the city. The next chapter explores how the recent arrival of the shopping mall---the perceived antithesis to the street market as well as harbinger of a globalized consumer culture---succeeds less in effecting actual transformations in people's practices than in offering the promise of participation in global modernity. Finally, I end with a discussion of narratives of urban dystopia, which often construct Mumbai as a paradigmatic Third World city, and suggest that a theory of urban form generated from the everyday practices of the street in Mumbai might offer an alternative to such narratives.
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