Nooreen Fatima

NOOREEN FATIMA, then a graduate student at Rutgers University, Brunswick, New Jersey, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Settling with the Settlement: Stories of Infrastructure Arrangements in Delhi’s Resettlement Colonies,” supervised by Dr. Sean Mitchell. Sarla and her family of five were relocated to the Savda Ghevra resettlement colony post-2006 slum evictions in preparations for Delhi’s Commonwealth Games redevelopment process. When she moved to Savda, it was merely a barren land, with only agricultural fields around, no buildings, public toilets, or water. Bit by bit, she and her family built a house and assembled everything to survive. Sarla’s story illustrates the experience and process of resettlement in the peripheries of Delhi and the failed promises of planned housing and adequate infrastructure. Focusing on the co-entanglement of people-things-space, this research explores how displaced residents build infrastructure in Savda, using their learned and lived experience of living in marginality and limited availability of resources, as well as the sensible predictability of future needs. This gathering is make-shift, mobile, cost-effective, and easily altered yet durable. Using visual ethnography as a method, or what the grantee calls EthnoGraphic stories, this study explores the spatiality, materiality, sociality, and temporality of displaced people’s decisions to navigate the inadequacy of infrastructure in Delhi’s urban peripheries. Building on existing scholarship in urban anthropology on subaltern infrastructure, it highlights the gendered material and spatial realities of living in the peripheries and settling with the settlement.