Capital owners

PROPERTIES OF RENT IS ABOUT THE TENSION BETWEEN RAPIDLY CHANGING ECONOMIC REALITIES AND THE PARALLEL ATTEMPTS BY COMMUNITIES TO HOLD ON TO KINSHIP ASSOCIATIONS, AS WELL AS TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF RESPECT AND HONOUR 

- AMIT KUMAR

HAVE YOU ever wondered how rental markets, operating through bypassing municipal laws, maintain their durability in Indian cities? What shapes the landlord-renter relationship? How caste hierarchies continue to manifest themselves despite all the rhetoric of globalisation? Sushmita Pati's Properties of Rent sheds light on these via a detailed ethnographic investigation of the politics of rent in two urban villages of South Delhi Munirka and Shahpur Jat.

The book is about the tension between rapidly changing economic realities and the parallel attempts by communities to hold on to kinship associations, as well as traditional notions of respect and honour.

This tension has distinctly shaped the forms of accumulation that have evolved in spaces like urban villages. Known for farming in the northwestern region of India, the Jat community is dominant in both these villages.

While presenting to her reader the post-liberalisation rental market controlled by Jats, Pati shows how global capital makes space for these messy, grey zones (in terms of law). The author has analysed how, in grey zones, rental economy operates in the shadows of global capital in ways that predate neo-liberalism. The author's central argument is that rent is not merely an economic and political category, but a lived one. Rent is about micro-processes of controlling resources, emotive expressions of belongingness, community, honour and channels to extract economic value.