Anish Vanaik

Borderlines inaugurates its first book forum titled “Shelter as Capital” which engages with urban politics in the Global South and draws the connections between Egyptian and Indian urban politics. This essay is the fourth part of five in a book forum dedicated to Yahia Shawkat’s book: Egypt’s Housing Crisis.

In foregrounding Friedrich Engels’ classic essay on the Housing Question, Sheetal Chhabria sets her finger on the core of a shared problem that her book Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay, Yahia Shawkat’s Egypt’s Housing Crisis: Shaping the Urban Space and my own Possessing the City: Property and Politics in Delhi 1911-1947 are outlining. The settings and periods are diverse and the particular histories diverge. But, in each of our work, we point to both the commodification of shelter and the paradoxical histories of efforts to oppose or mitigate that commodification. The Housing Question – how to provide decent and dignified shelter to every human – seems to be hummed to a drearily repetitive tune (with a few varying notes) in the Global South. Indeed, many of the same problems are reproduced in the Global North as well.

The stubbornness with which mass housing initiatives are reinserted into commodity circuits is a key lesson in all three works. This despite a related phenomenon that Chhabria points to the sheer variety of ways in which housing has been used by the state to ‘manage populations’. Chhabria and Shawkat both refer, for instance, to moments in which housing has been utilized as a tool to ensure the immobilization of working populations. Much like in a prison, to use housing as a way to prevent or restrict the mobility of working people. Part of the reason for this is that Chhabria’s work on Bombay culminates at a point of unique labor mobility: the migration away from the city of much of Bombay’s mill labor force in the wake of the late nineteenth century plague epidemic. Restoring Bombay’s “sanitary credit” (and restarting its mills) required a project of housing. But it was also a project of housing in which luring workers back to the city and holding them there was an essential component. The Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT), whose trajectory from inception to failure Chhabria meticulously chronicles, bears the marks of exactly such an origin point. The BIT was in the final reckoning a mix of welfarism, state-subsidy for financial speculation, attempts to signal a more sanitary city and immobilising labour. The BIT did build a small amount of housing for the urban poor in ways that were not dictated by profit. However, this limited decommodification  of shelter was a mere sub-theme among the other agenda of the BIT. Crucially, Chhabria points out, Indian elites and the colonial state joined in their appreciation of the opportunities for profit-making and governing on the cheap, while solving labor supply problems through the BIT’s housing initiatives. In Shawkat’s Egypt too, both in the late nineteenth century and in the present, the ‘izba recurs as a form of housing designed to immobilize labor – converting peasants more fully into workers.

But labor immobility is not always the motivating factor in housing projects. Other possibilities abound. The slum must also (unlike the prison) be an active source of a reserve army of labor. Or, as in my study of Delhi, housing projects might emerge quite apart from the question of labor. Here the establishment of a Delhi Improvement Trust (in 1937, nearly 40 years after the BIT) was initiated by a piece of bad press. Delhi’s “sanitary credit” had been condemned as too low by its health officer for many years before the Times of India picked up one of his reports in 1934 to suggest that – scandal of scandals – the Imperial capital had poor housing. The DIT was set up with the saving of Imperial face as the major motivation. Little wonder, with this impetus, that it simply ended up a means of side-stepping the rising power of the Congress within the Delhi Municipal Committee, and a new way to administer the vast estates in and around the old city seized by the colonial government from the Mughals before them. The DIT was predictably ineffective at improving either general sanitation or housing for the urban poor. Derisively little housing for the poor was built by the DIT. Much less than even the BIT and certainly less than its successor the Bombay Development Department. The DIT’s major success was in drawing government purse-strings ever more tightly shut and (something that Chhabria points out happened in Bombay too) participating in a round of speculative development in the Delhi countryside. While supposedly created to build housing for the poor, here again, new housing stock was simply instated into the circuit of capital. These and myriad other pathways have tended to return housing – even housing built at subsidized rates for the city’s working poor – to circuits of accumulation and profit.

Shawkat ends his book by laying out a vision for the future: “housing should start to be less about real estate and more about homes.” He is clear-sighted about the terminal point – decommodified housing. Any intermediate position, he argues, would prove unstable and return housing to the circuits of capital circulation. It is an impeccably Engelsian insight. As I have been pointing out, each of our three works provides templates by which waves of partial decommodification are clawed back into circuits of profit and loss. How, then, could a more permanent extrication of shelter from commodification be achieved?

The unsuccessful efforts to decommodify housing in colonial Delhi illustrate some potential pitfalls.  The difference between negligible housing for the poor in Delhi and inadequate housing for the masses in Bombay is the presence of the working class in the latter. Whereas in Bombay, capitalists were concerned to retain labor, no comparable constituency existed in Delhi until after Partition. In colonial Delhi, the battle for the decommodification of housing was, instead, fought by a series of splinter groups . Gandhians advocated for clean huts, but only for municipal sweepers. Government of India clerks fought for housing to protect themselves from inflated rental markets. Hindu revivalists thought they might attract lower caste support by becoming middlemen distributing government-supplied lands for housing. Within the Congress in Delhi, the Civil Disobedience movement sparked radical moves to deny rent in the economically distressed 1930s; efforts that the Congress leadership promptly disavowed. The splinters never cohered into a unified force. The issue of housing as a result, even when it came time to build a new country after 1947, would remain firmly within the sphere of the market. As the Birla Committee, in charge of reviewing housing in Delhi in 1951 (and presided over by the scion of one of India’s most prominent industrial houses) put it: “A house itself is a commodity.”

The weakness of struggles to decommodify housing in Delhi meant that even housing for Partition refugees would become the launchpad for what is today India’s largest private real estate firm– Delhi Land and Finance. Indeed, Delhi Land and Finance – founded in 1946 by Major Raghavendra Singh, who resigned from the Punjab Civil Services to strike out on this entrepreneurial venture – utilized connections to the state to gain an edge over competing local real estate firms. In the case of one of its layouts – Model Town - land could even be taken from the DIT and handed over to DLF. The telling detail about this early admixture of the post-colonial state and private enterprise is that the Birla Committee in its report cited Mr. Om Prakash, the employee who represented DLF, in two capacities. First as the Managing Director of DLF but also, in his previous capacity, as the Executive Officer of the DIT for over 10 years. The revolving door between private enterprise and government bureaucracies has a long and well-established history! The power of commodification on display here needs to be underlined. Partition refugees were members of the majority community, who had lived through a tragic displacement, and were recognised as deserving of help from a post-colonial state which was already showing distinct signs of majoritarian impulses. The refugees themselves had protested militantly, in the process attacking Muslims and their property in Delhi, to demand that the state be sensitive to the needs of refugees. Even for figures as sympathetically placed as this, for-profit housing composed a significant chunk of new housing stock. 

Paying attention to these histories can only serve to underline for activists and scholars the necessity of the broader view. The Housing Question, cannot be separated from the much broader question of power. Mobilizations from below which are committed to a vision of broad human emancipation are the only viable way forward. Neither a brilliant urban plan nor the temporarily persuaded ear of a state official can achieve the decommodification of shelter that Shawkat calls for. Even the substantial gains of Nasser’s authoritarian socialism seem to have been reversed, with little seeming opposition by Sadat (stealing a march on even Thatcher). For activists, the Housing Question must be answered through assembling a constituency that can win the right to the city. It is a question of winning social power.

Housing as a commodity – whether as shadow rental markets in precarious slums or in spanking new layouts planned by the state – has taken myriad forms in the Global South. It has reflected a variation in statecraft and culture. Stubbornly enough, though, at the heart of it tends to lie a nexus between industrialists, richer traders, real estate speculators, and the state. Yes, temporary relief might be won, yes there might be relatively better and worse outcomes across different locations in the Global South in terms of housing the urban poor. But, as the history of the return of housing to circuits of commodity demonstrates, much like the Global North, the battle to provide shelter as a right is first about building a constituency that can fight and win a broad decommodification of everyday life.

Anish Vanaik is currently Visiting Associate Professor at Purdue Honors College, and Associate Professor, Jindal Global University. His current areas of research include the history of urban real estate, political cartoons and left movements. His book – Possessing the City: Property and Politics in Delhi 1911-47 was published in late-2019.

Contributing Editor: Purbasha Das.