Nature and the extended city: Wasteland governmentality, the sacred, and anti-wasteland politics in the Aravalli region

Abstract

Wasteland governmentality has long shaped colonial and postcolonial landscape governance across the planet. While historically wasteland classification was deployed for agrarian land settlement and silviculture, with extended urbanisation it is increasingly used to consolidate landscapes of extended urban nature. These landscapes are in turn subjected to state-led land enclosures for urban and infrastructure development and for greenwashing. This paper investigates the political construction of one such landscape of extended urban nature, the Aravalli region, a geological feature which runs parallel to the extended corridor urbanisation in the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR). Particularly, I examine how in the name of regulating mining, urban development, and pollution in the Delhi NCR, the revenue wastes including sacred groves, hills, and other village commons falling in the Aravallis have been consolidated as a state space. I examine how the patchwork of communities assembled in the extended urban fabric of the region deploys the sacred to counter land enclosure and the emptying out of meaning. I discuss three such modalities of the sacred in the region, namely, its use by agrarian villages to assert land rights over sacred forests, the misuse of the sacred by temple committees to produce faux nature, and its use by emergent urban environmental movements in the region to frame an anti-wasteland politics. Focusing my attention on the state, I discuss the need for a nuanced understanding of emergent urban environmentalism in the region as restorative commoning beyond the binary framings of bourgeois versus the poor.