Land, Politics, Work and Home-Life in A City Slum: Reconstructing History From Oral Narratives

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.