Abstract:
This paper is a limited attempt at sketching the history of a
prominent slum in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, using mainly the
memories of residents collected as oral narratives. It stops in the mid90s, when decentralization and women’s self-help-groups began a new
phase of social change. It focuses mainly on changing vicissitudes of
land, politics, work and domestic life in this urban slum to reflect on the
specific form of marginalization that the residents of this pocket of
extreme disadvantage have suffered since its earliest days, in the mid20th century, which I refer to as ‘marginalization by abjection’. It also
examines the usefulness of widely-used concepts such as ‘political
society’ to make sense of politics there, and concludes by cautioning
against the perfunctory use of concepts such as political society and
clientalism.
