Vernacular Urbanism

Collected Material

I carried out intensive ethnographic fieldwork in three selected neighborhoods in the city. The first was an older well-established area that had started as a slum area and had gradually been upgraded to a mainly legalized lower middle class/blue collar area. The second was a newer and more socially mixed area of that comprised lower middle-class colonies of independent houses, as well as one of the biggest and most volatile slums in the city. The third area was less than twenty years old and was settled by Muslim families that had fled violence in Aurangabad’s old city in the nineties, as well as many recent migrants from the countryside, mostly Hindus. I selected these areas because they were of different age and reflected the various stages of the city’s growth. They were all socially mixed, both in economic terms and in terms of religion and caste – a pattern that had become increasingly rare across the city since the long and bloody conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in the 1980s and 90s. I lived in one of these areas, and visited the other areas on an almost daily basis for months on end, meeting a wide cross section of individuals and families in each of the localities.

I had hundreds of informal and repeated conversations with people from all walks of life and communities in these areas – shop keepers, ordinary residents, caretakers of local shrines and temples, policemen, local social workers and activists, and local elected representatives to the City council and other public fora. Some of these interactions turned into formal and recorded interviews, others remained at the level of everyday informal chats and banter. In addition to these regular interactions, I managed to identify fifteen households in each area that were willing to do longer and in-depth interviews, lasting from one to three hours.

I collected more than a hundred longer interviews (115) most of which (95) have been translated and transcribed, a material running into almost 2000 pages alone.

The survey covered 750 households who were asked 25 questions covering their family and migration history, the employment status, details about income, their house/dwelling, as well as more evaluative questions about their neighborhood/area. This survey is still being coded and analyzed and I expect to access the coded material in a few weeks.

Finally, I have collected more than 3000 newspaper clippings, as well as a very substantial number of shots/copies of official documents from the city administration (planning documents, regulations, circulars, etc.) as well as a considerable amount of ‘grey’ material – pamphlets, flyers, adverts, etc. – collected in the course of my fieldwork from local organizations and individuals. This material includes complete lists of voters’ rolls in the three neighborhoods I worked in (numbers range from 7,000 in the smallest to 15,000 individuals in the largest) that will allow for a rather fine-grained analysis of caste and community composition of these areas based on an estimation of names.