radhika raj
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, School of Habitat Studies, Graduate Student
•
by radhika raj and Lalitha Kamath
This is the story of one man’s self-making through the making of a city. Starting off as associates of the well-known gangster Dawood, dreaded ‘dons’ Hitendra Thakur and his brother enabled explosive growth at the peripheries of Mumbai... more
This is the story of one man’s self-making through the making of a city. Starting off as associates of the well-known gangster Dawood, dreaded ‘dons’ Hitendra Thakur and his brother enabled explosive growth at the peripheries of Mumbai through the 80s and 90s by grabbing land, controlling water supply, and building chawls and apartments. With the onset of neoliberal governance and decentralisation reforms, however, we see a negotiation with the changing ideals animating urban India. Self-making of Thakur progressed through the merging of both business and governance interests: standing for assembly elections, and building an empire based on real estate, education, hotels. Today, the gangster turned benevolent patriarch of a rising city is (fondly and fearfully) called “Appa” (father) by all. City-making moved in tandem with the formation of a political party by Appa, formulated on the plank of ‘bahujan vikas’, a promise of inclusive progress for minorities and backward castes, along with the determined wooing of private investors, and the marketing of Vasai Virar as a real estate destination. By 2009, the transformation of both Thakur and Vasai Virar was rendered complete by the formation of the democratically elected Vasai Virar Municipal Corporation. With this, the former don became the business tycoon cum ruling patriarch and Vasai Virar was projected as the next “smart city”.
At the core of both narratives of powerful transformation is the performance of masculinity – one that is personalised and imbued in city governance networks and spaces. Recent writings on political strongmen in South Asia view their politics as muscular, with its appeal rooted in the concept of ‘mardangi’ or manliness, harking back to masculine ideals of honour, valour, and strength. In this essay, however, our study of strongman politics reveals how muscular posturing frames new city-wide domains of neoliberal infrastructure, cultural spectacle, and inclusive gender representation in electoral politics. This makeover from a ‘goonda’ to a more ‘genteel’ masculinity is geared toward representing a strongly aspirational middle class identity, which is not a unilinear, stable transition, as it reveals frequent slippage back into violence. This has strong bearing upon how urban residents experience themselves as men/women in the city, how they perform and negotiate their gendered identities. See:
https://cafedissensus.com/2017/05/15/smuggler-city-to-smart-city-masculine-city-making-on-the-urban-periphery/
At the core of both narratives of powerful transformation is the performance of masculinity – one that is personalised and imbued in city governance networks and spaces. Recent writings on political strongmen in South Asia view their politics as muscular, with its appeal rooted in the concept of ‘mardangi’ or manliness, harking back to masculine ideals of honour, valour, and strength. In this essay, however, our study of strongman politics reveals how muscular posturing frames new city-wide domains of neoliberal infrastructure, cultural spectacle, and inclusive gender representation in electoral politics. This makeover from a ‘goonda’ to a more ‘genteel’ masculinity is geared toward representing a strongly aspirational middle class identity, which is not a unilinear, stable transition, as it reveals frequent slippage back into violence. This has strong bearing upon how urban residents experience themselves as men/women in the city, how they perform and negotiate their gendered identities. See:
https://cafedissensus.com/2017/05/15/smuggler-city-to-smart-city-masculine-city-making-on-the-urban-periphery/