Urbanizing Citizenship

Book excerpt: Urbanizing Citizenship examines processes of urbanization in contemporary Indian cities through the lens of urban citizenship. It provides a fresh understanding of the multiple arenas and practices through which citizenship and urbanism are co-constituted in India. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on India, this book looks closely at six Indian cities—Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, and Varanasi—and examines a range of processes and contested urban spaces, thus exploring and analyzing their myriad implications for urban inhabitants and their right to the city. Through ethnographies and histories of the urban, this book unsettles theories generated in the Euro-American context to show how urban citizenship might be differently practiced, understood, and reconfigured within the Indian context.