Colonial Legacies and Fascist Tendencies: Housing Segregation in the Indian City
How colonial-era regulations created and maintained caste and religious segregation in what is now a stronghold of fascism: Gujarat.
Houses in Rakhiyal slums in dire strait. This slum is in Juhapura, a Muslim neighbourhood in the west of Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Image: Hrishi Raj Anand via Newsclick
Over the last several years, there has been an upsurge in the number of reported cases of housing discrimination against Dalits and Muslims across India. While many rightfully blame the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government for fanning anti-Muslim sentiments, the groundwork for discriminatory housing practices was laid early in the twentieth century, in a newly urbanizing British India, largely on the basis of caste.
Caste in the Colony
By the end of the nineteenth century, Bombay, Surat, and Ahmedabad’s booming textile industries had attracted waves of lower caste laborers from neighboring villages. These new mill workers included those displaced from their lands as cities expanded, those whose livelihoods were usurped by the growth of industry, and the lower caste Dalit laborers hoping to escape caste-based oppression in villages. However, Dalits were largely relegated to jobs seen as lower in status, mainly hired by the municipality as sweepers and sanitation workers.
Dalits often faced difficulty in finding residence, as caste Hindus were loath to live near them. Upper-caste Hindu, Jain, and Parsi merchants, wealthy from a thriving trade in opium, textiles, and precious gems, owned large swaths of land in the city. They often refused to sell or rent their lands outside of their caste and religious groups. This is where municipalities intervened. Municipal housing, initially intended for all city employees, soon became associated exclusively with Dalit sweepers. Those unable to obtain municipal quarters were relegated to slums on the outskirts of the city, often near dumping grounds, without access to the sewage lines that they maintained.
“In 1889, when sweepers in Bombay went on strike, the Bombay Municipal Corporation, which both employed and housed them, evicted the strikers from municipal housing and hired another Dalit subcaste for the job. ”
The role of the middleman, mukaddam, was also critical here. Mukaddams, hired by mill owners to supply the mills with labor, reached out to workers via extensive caste and family networks in villages across the Bombay Presidency. Workers were then employed in sectors determined by their caste status. Dalits were often relegated to menial positions due to concerns about ‘pollution’. Mukaddams served not only as recruiters, but also as property brokers. These middlemen found housing for the new recruits, more than often within neighborhoods organized by employment. Housing became intimately tied to work, and caste-based segregation became synonymous with job-based segregation.
Rapid urbanization was accompanied by proliferation of slums, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, successive plagues overtook Bombay and Ahmedabad, killing tens of thousands and prompting a mass exodus of workers back to rural villages. Poor living and working conditions, the termination of temporary ‘plague bonuses’ that mill owners offered to incentivize workers to return to the city, and growing anti-colonial fervor culminated in an outbreak of labor strikes and nationalist protests across the Indian subcontinent. These strikes and protests were met with immediate, and often violent, repression. Sweeper strikes in particular were brutally quashed. In 1889, when sweepers in Bombay went on strike, the Bombay Municipal Corporation, which both employed and housed them, evicted the strikers from municipal housing and hired another Dalit subcaste for the job.
Infected houses being sterilized using a flushing engine to combat spread of Bubonic Plague in Bombay in 1897. Image: National Army Museum
Furthermore, through laws on contested areas, the British declared specific neighborhoods or regions ‘disturbed’. This exempted them from regulation and allowed for mass atrocities to be committed by police forces with little oversight. These decrees were later codified in the Indian constitution as ‘Disturbed Areas Acts’. At the same time, British officials moved to consolidate their control over urban areas. Dismal living conditions in working class neighborhoods, described in newspapers as “squalid hovels” in which up to twenty people were housed in rooms as small as twelve square feet, exacerbated existing concerns among both British and Indian upper classes about the spread of disease. Slum housing became synonymous with disease. Cities were seen as a prime site of both disease and resistance. Luckily, both could be combatted through what at the time was an innovative new tool: town planning.
In Bombay, the municipal government embarked on a massive urban cleansing campaign, demolishing hundreds of slum dwellings before establishing the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) in 1897. In Ahmedabad, the colonial government formed a municipal corporation for the same purposes—opening up congested cities through selective demolition and street widening projects, building sanitary housing for the working poor, and expanding the boundaries of the city to create new ‘high status’ suburbs.
New town plans and property registers designated previously common lands as ‘public’, laid out street networks, and decreed the population densities allowed in each neighborhood. Developments in violation of these regulations or on newly public land could then be declared illegal ‘encroachments’, and their tenants evicted.
Over the following decade, the BIT acquired vast quantities of land covering nearly 20 percent of the city’s land area and housed thousands of workers, still only a fraction of the number that it had displaced. In Ahmedabad, the newly created Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) demolished the public quarters housing municipal sweepers, and redeveloped lower-caste Muslim neighborhoods to make room for upper classes.
When displaced workers were rehoused, units in chalis were allocated based on caste and religion. In Ahmedabad, where private millowners largely owned tenement housing, the Millowners Association decided to create mixed-caste neighborhoods structured by workers’ occupations in the mill in order to undermine potential labor organization. Still, caste was taken into consideration. Caste Hindus’ general aversion to sharing residential spaces with Dalits resulted in the construction of two sets of chalis: those that housed caste Hindus, and those that housed Dalits and Muslims.
The Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) built Chawls (tenements) in the early 1920s, however due to high rents people displaced by redevelopment were rarely able to stay there. Image: Burnett-Hurst (1925).
In an effort to provide additional housing options for the working poor, the British decided to expand existing funding mechanisms for agricultural cooperatives to urban housing cooperatives through the Bombay Cooperative Housing Association. Initially, British officials aimed to create mixed-caste cooperatives. However, heeding advice from upper-caste auditors about the necessity of caste for organisations to function, the association eventually decided to “accept caste as a basic fact of society and make use of it”. Shared caste, class, or occupation became one of the primary requirements for creating a housing cooperative.
“Colonial planning and housing schemes formed the basis for postcolonial cities, and were quickly expanded by upper-caste elite power brokers in municipal governments.”
Early rural cooperatives were largely made up of lower caste weavers, sweepers, and farmworkers. In cities, however, forming a housing cooperative required a high capital investment. Caste and class have been historically intertwined, meaning that most lower caste groups lacked access to the capital necessary to form urban cooperatives. After failing to introduce lower caste housing cooperatives, British officials decided to change the guidelines governing these cooperatives, and encouraged private financing. Municipalities in the Bombay Presidency soon followed suit. These governments created low-interest loans, especially for housing cooperatives, and sold publicly owned land to new cooperatives at heavily subsidized prices. This lowered the cost of developing a housing cooperative by up to 65 percent. More importantly, these subsidies primarily flowed into upper-caste housing societies, who had the capital required to secure loans.
Following Indian independence, these colonial policies were continued by the nationalist elites. Colonial planning and housing schemes formed the basis for postcolonial cities, and were quickly expanded by upper-caste elite power brokers in municipal governments.
The Sordid Affair of Religion, Caste, and Class in Post-Independence Gujarat
In the 1950s, in a nascent Indian nation, new subsidies for housing cooperatives were introduced. Their success in lowering rents for their tenants gained the movement considerable popularity. Housing cooperatives proliferated across Bombay and Ahmedabad through the mid-twentieth century. More than 80 percent of cooperative society tenants came from the upper- and rising middle-castes: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Patels, and Vaniyas. The vast majority were also from upper classes—white-collar salaried employees or owners of private businesses. Slum clearance programs likewise gained traction, and municipal corporations throughout the Bombay Presidency introduced legislation to facilitate slum demolition, relegating unwanted slum populations from valuable, centrally-located urban land to the peripheries of cities.
Elite caste-class hegemony did not go uncontested. In the 1970s, Gujarat’s Congress Party started to recruit lower-caste Hindu, Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim politicians, in a strategy they termed the Kshatriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim, or KHAM, coalition. The KHAM coalition gained widespread popularity and increased Congress’ mandate, successfully averting a potential loss of power. Upper-caste students reacted immediately and angrily, and KHAM rule was punctuated by riots that periodically broke out across the state.
The KHAM theory was put forward by Madhavsinh Solanki, who went on to become Congress’ most popular chief minister of Gujarat in the 1980s. Image: The Hindu Archives
Initially, rioters largely targeted Dalits. Much of the violence targeted homes in areas populated by both upper and lower-castes. Media sources reported that many upper-caste residents launched rocks, flaming rags, and acid onto Dalit slums from the balconies of their apartments. As the KHAM coalition continued to gain power, caste violence slowly turned into religious violence, and Muslims became the primary targets. Eventually over a hundred people were killed, and approximately twelve thousand were rendered homeless.
Many attribute the shift from caste to religious violence to the success of Hindu right-wing groups in displacing upper-caste anger from Dalits to Muslims. Indeed, investigative commissions later determined that the violence was intensified by the Hindu supremacist Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad and Bharatiya Janata Party.
After the violence subsided, Gujarat passed the Disturbed Areas Act of 1986. Instead of suppressing dissent among groups termed ‘dangerous’, legislators claimed the act was intended to curb segregation. As Dalits and Muslims fled mixed neighborhoods en masse, fearing for their safety, advocates of the bill argued it would prevent distress sale of property. However, the law in effect served to cement the city's caste and religious segregation—property sales between Hindus and Muslims became increasingly difficult and rare as the portion of the state deemed ‘disturbed area’ continued to expand.
In many neighborhoods, people began to refer to the streets that divided Muslim areas from Hindu ones—largely lower-caste and Dalit—as ‘borders’, and the respective communities as ‘Pakistan’ and ‘India’. Muslim neighborhoods also faced increased surveillance and police presence. The KHAM coalition was successfully destroyed, and upper-caste, wealthy groups were able to maintain segregated communities away from both Dalits and Muslims.
The riots strengthened the Bharatiya Janata Party, and cast it as a voice for the frustrations of the upper-caste and wealthy elites abandoned by the Congress. They also propelled leaders of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad into politics, most notably then-student leader Narendra Modi, who was elected Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001. Under Modi’s rule, many earlier property regulation and town planning policies were repurposed once more to serve upper-caste Hindu interests—this time largely weaponized against Muslim communities. Across India, reports abound of developers refusing to show homes to prospective Muslim homebuyers, cooperative societies refusing membership to Muslim tenants, and governments allocating relief housing based on religion.
Making the Modern Metropolis
Narendra Modi’s reign over Gujarat solidified and expanded the burgeoning neoliberal state. Under Modi, the Gujarat government unleashed a mass pogrom against its minority Muslim population in 2002: months-long riots, supported and abetted by government and police forces, devastated Muslim neighborhoods and communities across Gujarat, and over a thousand dead. Rioters systemically targeted Muslim properties, particularly in neighborhoods housing both lower-caste Hindus and Muslims, resulting in the displacement of approximately 150,000 people, the vast majority being Muslim.
The 2002 pogrom fueled an international outcry, leading the Modi government to undertake a massive rebranding campaign in Ahmedabad in order to transform its image from a ‘riot-prone’ city to a modern, middle-class city. While the terror unleashed on Muslims in 2002 was seen by the ruling party as a disciplining force, it also led to a precipitous drop in foreign investment. Fearing for its global image, Gujarat accelerated its turn toward neoliberalism, initiating large scale city beautification and infrastructure projects and courting capital investment. Ahmedabad, and Gujarat by extension, quickly became leading examples for the nation for what Hindu supremacist rule could achieve for its population—cleanliness, wealth, efficiency and—ironically—safety. Large-scale urban infrastructure projects simultaneously served to dispossess those ‘slum dwellers’ or ‘encroachers’ whose existence represented a disjuncture from imaginations of urban modernity.
“Nearly all of the tens of thousands displaced for development projects were Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and other lower-caste groups.”
The Gujarat and Ahmedabad governments undertook a series of capital-intensive projects in the city, including a Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), several road-widening schemes, construction of overground flyovers, and redevelopment of the Sabarmati riverfront. Municipal ‘town planning’ schemes redrew streets, boundaries, and zones, rendering all existing developments that were in violation of these maps ‘illegal encroachments’. Nearly all of the tens of thousands displaced for development projects were Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and other lower-caste groups.
Following mass displacement due to violence, development projects, and natural disasters, relief and government housing was allocated on the basis of religion and caste. Muslims were often not provided with formal resettlement at all. Although the city conducted similar numbers of basti evictions on both the eastern and western sides of the Sabarmati river, over 80 percent of resettlement sites were located on the eastern side of the city.
A Continued Denial of Life and Space
As the city continues to expand, land on the periphery has become increasingly coveted. The upper classes over the last two decades have developed ‘farmhouses’—massive enclaved developments where they enjoy weekend getaways and host lavish parties— on the western periphery of the city.
Simultaneously, developers continue to informally buy land on the eastern and southern peripheries of the city from farmers, then subdivide it to develop (illegal) housing societies catering to low and middle-income households. Due to a dearth of housing available to Muslims in the formal market, these societies often become Muslim ghettos. Moreover, they are poorly serviced due to a lack of tenure security, and remain constantly vulnerable to eviction and demolition by the municipality.
In spite of being allowed by the state, restrictive residential covenants are seen as largely redundant, as housing societies are able to cite arbitrary reasons for the denial of membership to undesired groups. Calls for ‘vegetarian-only’ tenants and buyers have become acceptable and effective ways to deny entry to Dalits and Muslims.
Today, over 770 neighborhoods, comprising nearly half of the city, are classified as ‘disturbed areas’, effectively prohibiting property sales from Hindus to Muslims (Hindus are still typically able to obtain permission to buy property from Muslims). Though it was initially enacted in Ahmedabad, the law now applies to all major cities within Gujarat. Backed by state forces, Hindu supremacists protest any sale of property to Muslims as a violation of the law, pushing Muslims into ever-shrinking spaces in the city.
Where these tactics fail, upper-caste vigilantism and collusion serve to maintain separate housing colonies for caste Hindus. Developers discourage Muslims from buying or renting housing in Hindu-dominated localities. Hindu supremacists continue to employ extralegal methods to target Muslim properties and forcibly evict people from their homes. Reports abound of right-wing militant outfits, including the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, inciting protests, boycotts, and forced evictions to prevent Muslims from occupying houses in Hindu-dominated locales.
“Ahmedabad holds the distinction of being the most segregated city in India by both caste and religion”
When all else fails, the state intervenes. In August 2020, the sale of a housing complex to a Muslim buyer was stopped by the Vadodara municipal governement after Hindu right-wing opposition—the municipality welded an iron grill to the gate to block entrance to the society. In another case, the Vadodara electricity department cut off the power supply to an entire building following its sale to a Muslim. Following these cases, Gujarat decided to enact further restrictions on property sales to Muslims, stating that ‘improper clustering’ of people of ‘a particular community’ should be discouraged.
Ahmedabad holds the distinction of being the most segregated city in India by both caste and religion, and the city in which these practices are the most commonplace. Colonial segregation practices, enthusiastically taken up and expanded by postcolonial caste and class elites, have allowed for complacency within the elite classes.
Caste and religious segregation have become largely self-sustaining, and little action is needed on the part of upper-caste Hindus to ensure that they live far away from Dalits and Muslims. Nonetheless, Gujarat’s ruling BJP has taken further steps to deepen existing segregation, creating apartheid conditions for its minority Muslim population. What remains to be seen is how tactics tested in Gujarat are deployed—and resisted—across the remainder of the country.
Maansi Shah works in tenant defense and organizing in New York City, where they are based. Their educational background is in urban studies and policy, with a focus on land and housing struggles in the United States and South Asia.