Glimpsing an Urban Future: Divergent Tracks of Gurgaon

As late as the 1980s Gurgaon was a sunstruck expanse of fertile earth at the empty edges of New Delhi. A small town with a smaller bazaar crowded with tea shops selling samosas and jalebis, small clothing stores, tailors, paan stalls, and old-style jewelers — a place full of bustle but, oddly, in no particular hurry. It was a noisy place, by western standards, but a whisper away from the bazaar lay quiet fields of green in seasonal incarnations of wheat, paddy, and pulses. Being next to a major metropolis, Gurgaon struggled to define itself, often leaning toward the character of Haryana, the agrarian state of sun-hardened folks whose straight talk aroused suspicions of rudeness, and whose culture was labeled "agri-culture" by the cultured populace of Delhi. Before Biharis started arriving in large numbers, migrants from Haryana were the people considered responsible for destroying Delhi's possible urbanity and refinement. Gurgaon, on the other hand, remained untouched by Delhi. Indeed, if a place worth any mention must have a past that connects to a seat of empire, religion, or trade, Gurgaon — a place of ordinary hard-working peasantry — was a nonplace on the cultural map of India. Just a couple of decades ago!

Gurgaon is still a nonplace but for reasons of a different kind. The problem is no longer about the past of no particular consequence, no major monuments of the Sultanate or Mughal times, or pilgrimages leading to Gurgaon, reconstructing the past through a collective renewal of memory. The city has, in fact, outgrown the need of a past for self-definition. It is defined by its future. As the future can never fully exist in the present but can only be imagined or glimpsed as a not-yet present, Gurgaon gains its full meaning only as a virtual city, as a place that exceeds its appearances.

It is not surprising that Gurgaon is a city of glass, crowded with buildings reflecting more than they contain, referring not to the past but to prospects briefly glimpsed in their flashy façade. Borrowed from colder climates of the West, its glassy architecture alone does not mark Gurgaon as a nonplace.

It gains the character of a nonplace through its evasion of memory and roots. Despite good agriculture, its life is no longer rooted in its fertile soil or its local bazaars; it is a global city of an export variety whose capacity for capital generation is increasingly dependent on the flows from across the seas. Its economy is intertwined with other economies in real time, and hence susceptible to global vicissitudes. It has become global before it could become a regional city. Gurgaon no longer looks up to Delhi for inspiration.

Many of Gurgaon's townships are named not after Delhi's plush localities; they have names that signify that the city has arrived on the global map: "Beverly Park," "Malibu Town," or "Sun City." Since the late 1990s, the city itself has been called the Millennium City, situating itself not in the history soiled by farmlands but on the horizon of a new millennium.

Gurgaon takes the logic of a modern city so far that it stops bearing resemblance to it. Let us first recognize how it remains well within Max Weber's definition of a city, medieval or modern, that is, primarily a market settlement where "the local population satisfies an economically significant part of its everyday requirements in the local market," and where "a significant part of the products bought there were acquired or produced specifically for sale on the market by local population or that of the immediate hinterland" (Weber 1921, 1213). What makes the city modern in Weber's sense is the fact that authority rests on a rational rather than on a traditional basis; the law is enforced on a universalistic basis rather than on a personal basis; and major divisions are based on class rather than family and clan. Gurgaon also remains faithful to Georg Simmel's diagnosis of the metropolis where life is coordinated less by interpersonal relationships always blemished by "irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits"; rather, its meaning and style, its color and content, its blasé attitude, owe more to the functional mechanisms of the money economy and rationalities of "punctuality, calculability and exactness" (Simmel 1903).

Beyond these understandings, however, Gurgaon takes functional mechanisms to a new level where it appears to lose the unity of a city. It starts to reveal diverse itineraries of multiple functional worlds that give it a look of cities within a city, some local, others global. If global processes mean a certain unhinging of social, economic, and political relations from their local-territorial preconditions, this unraveling does not suggest that the place has turned into a void. Just as cities located on the shores of oceans and rivers and other waterways developed a particular port- city form, we can explore Gurgaon as a city located at the nexus of global information highways, signaling a set of connections different from the ones that defined a regular city. To substantiate how global interactions reterritorialize contemporary cities and states (Brenner 2004; Harvey 1982; Sassen 1991), let me highlight Gurgaon as a variation on global cities.

I detect three essential features of Gurgaon, which may not cover all its aspects but they may help us decide if the city is part of a new urban variation that is emerging in fast-growing economies like India and China. While Gurgaon may have a lot in common with conventional cities, these three interrelated features seem to differentiate it from others. First, the shape and trim of Gurgaon is not that of a single city but a collection of mini cities. Second, the character of Gurgaon appears defined more by other places than the surrounding region. Third, the city is gradually emerging as a set of transnational enclaves, or more formally, of special economic zones (SEZS).

An Archipelago of Mini Cities

Shuchi Nayak, a human resource manager at an international call center, rented an apartment in one of the posh residential complexes of Gurgaon. As I started all my interviews with informants' personal stories, I came to know that she lived there with her husband and a three-year-old daughter. She mentioned that there was even a room for an aayaa (i.e., maid) in her apartment but she did not want a live-in maid, leading to an interesting conversation about her apartment complex. Shuchi was a bit unusual for her social class in Gurgaon where upper middle class often shows a callous disregard for the city's poor. Born in Orissa, an eastern state of India, she received her MBA from Calcutta where she worked for four or five years before moving to Gurgaon. Raised by a progressive father who worked for the central government, Shuchi had worked as a human resource coordinator for a U.S. subsidiary,...