Akshay Ragupathy

AKSHAY RAGUPATHY, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was approved funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Unreal Estate: NRIs, Land Scams, and the Modernization of Hyderabad,” supervised by Dr. Rosalind Morris. Retitled “Kabza and the Spirit of Commodity Fetishism,” this dissertation examines contrasting notions of dignity, violation, and the commons put forward by the discourses of “encroachment” and “kabza” (Dakkani: capture, seizure) in contemporary Hyderabad, India. Since the early 90s, Hyderabad has emerged as one of “India’s Silicon Valleys” and a booming real estate market (if one perennially fearing a bust), such that an “IT-real-estate complex” — an alliance between multinational Information Technology (IT) firms, real estate developers, and the Andhra Pradesh government, and post 2014 the Telangana government — has changed the face of Hyderabad city. Encroachment and kabza as metonyms of the city’s informal land markets name both the enabling and limiting conditions of Hyderabad’s recent growth, at once enabling the enclosure of land while threatening the security of investments. Drawing on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork with ecological activists, mohalla-level social and party workers, and amateur “whatsapp” journalists, this dissertation investigates the widespread use of the metaphors of encroachment and kabza as forms of socio-diagnostic of the state and nature of “corruption” and everyday housing politics in Hyderabad city.