Contested lands and contentious lines: Land acquisition for the railways in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Delhi

Abstract

Through a focus on the acquisition of land for the railways in Delhi from 1860 to 1930, this article explores the variegated ways in which people could respond to the threat of forcible acquisition. Scholars have highlighted the extraordinary powers that had been vested in the colonial state through successive Land Acquisition Acts which had made the acquisition of land for ‘public purposes’ incontestable. Railway lines, moreover, first began to be constructed in Delhi at a time when the city was being violently reshaped in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857. The aggressiveness with which the state reorganised the city in the decades following the revolt, therefore, severely restricted the ability of Delhi’s residents to resist the acquisition of their lands, as did the growing rigidity of the legal structure meant to facilitate the acquisition of lands. In such circumstances, the valuation of land became one of the only grounds on which the state’s claims over lands could be challenged by landowners. Beginning with a discussion of some legal disputes over land valuation and compensation from Delhi in the early decades of railway construction, this article goes on to examine how, by the turn of the century, political developments at the local and national levels had begun to allow religious communities to assert collective rights that could place certain lands beyond the reach of the law of acquisition.