Contested Imaginaries of Inhabitation: Navigating Insecurity in Contemporary Urban India

Abstract

Rooted in contemporary urban India, this paper maps the production of fraught socio-spatial boundaries and contested local geographies. It examines how these processes give rise to fear and everyday insecurity for particular communities in expanding urban landscapes. It addresses how othering and exclusion of Muslim residents are constructed in social and spatial terms, and the ways in which they seek to hold onto their familiar, lived-in worlds. Through sustained fieldwork, this paper focuses on Bhopal, a burgeoning city in central India with a sizeable Muslim population of about 26 per cent, and at the same time, goes beyond to interrogate the larger issues of space, place and intercommunity relations.

Over time, exclusivist imaginaries of inhabitation have been produced and strengthened in Bhopal. Ongoing processes of boundary-making and solidification have shaped the quotidian modes of living of Muslim residents, their housing preferences, feelings of security/insecurity, placement within the urban habitat, and the (un)ease with which they access the built environment.

The paper signals the wider implications of these processes, what they mean for people’s everyday existence and how they produce fractured urbanisms. It juxtaposes available chronicled records with oral narratives, collated through a chain of in-person field interviews I conducted. Thereby, it unwinds multiple enmeshing insecurities that Muslim residents face and their quest for a safe living environment.