A place in the city: Narratives of ‘emplacement’ in a Delhi resettlement neighbourhood

Abstract

In this article I examine the impassioned yet ambivalent accounts of ‘resettlement’ recalled by the residents of a neighbourhood settled as part of a wider slum clearance drive during the state of Emergency, a period of autocratic rule declared in India between 1975 and 1977. In the context of a sometimes overbearing and at times violent postcolonial state, this article seeks to understand what people do with these accounts. Considering how narrators ‘emplot’ themselves in relation to their neighbourhood within these stories, I suggest these accounts can be understood as narratives of ‘emplacement’. By engaging with both the content of the stories narrated, but also their social and spatial dimensions, narration can be seen as a social act and a spatial practice, as residents seek to emplot, incorporate and exclude others in difficult social relations. By considering the narration of place as a spatial practice, the more subtle and contradictory processes of dwelling in the city are opened up for consideration, how people create spaces to live in and speak from in the maelstrom of city life.