“Surplus Humanity” and the Margins of Legality - Chapman University

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30 Chapman Law Review [Vol. 14:1
reconfigured selected urban areas to serve these ends. 191 A
defining feature of the designed colonial cities was the spatial
divide between the centers of gravity of colonial presence and the
native quarters. Zoning and institutionalized governance whose
jurisdiction is coextensive with the territory of the city, the
hallmarks of a modern city, were but rarely extended to the
native quarters. 192 Natives not recruited into colonial security,
administrative, and commercial regimes, remained at or beyond
the spatial and social margins of reconfigured urban areas. 193
Colonizers‘ fears of racial contamination, dilution of imagined
tribal and ethnic divides, and the threat of anti-colonial
solidarities resulted in restrictions on urban land ownership,
pass laws, vagrancy ordinances, criminalization of urban
migration, and racially zoned areas. 194 When vigorously enforced
encroachment laws targeted squatting and street vending,
municipal authorities removed so-called ―plague spots‖ from
better residential and commercial areas, thereby enforcing
restrictive zoning around areas where the colonizers and
gradually enfranchised native elites lived. 195 A policy of neglect
toward even minimal water and sanitation needs of native
neighborhoods graduated into a de facto housing policy of
reliance on local elites who built overcrowded and unsanitary,
but highly profitable, tenements that still house a bulk of urban
dwellers. 196 For the story of Dharavi, it is important to note that
Mumbai, historically a coastal fishing village, emerged as an
urban center under colonial rule; a development rooted in the
colonial control of opium production and trade. 197 The new city
was carefully segregated to separate colonial masters, the native
191 See generally MARIAM DOSSAL, IMPERIAL DESIGNS AND INDIAN REALITIES: THE
PLANNING OF BOMBAY CITY, 1845–1875 (1991); WILLIAM J. GLOVER, MAKING LAHORE
MODERN: CONSTRUCTING AND IMAGINING A COLONIAL CITY (2008); NARAYANI GUPTA,
DELHI BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES, 1830–1931 (1981); YASMIN LARI & MIHAIL S. LARI, THE
DUAL CITY: KARACHI DURING THE RAJ 58 (1996).
192 LARI & LARI, supra note 191, at 60–68 (1996).
193 KING, supra note 190, at 37–39.
194 See, e.g., Swati Chattopadhyay, Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of ―White Town‖
in Colonial Calcutta, 59 J. SOC‘Y ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS 154, 157, 172–73 (2000);
Narayani Gupta, Military Security and Urban Development: A Case Study of Delhi 1857–
1912, 5 MOD. ASIAN STUD. 61, 64–66 (1971); A. J. Christopher, Urban Segregation Levels
in the British Overseas Empire and Its Successors, in the Twentieth Century, 17
TRANSACTIONS INST. BRIT. GEOGRAPHERS 95, 95–102 (1992).
195 See NANDINI GOOPTU, THE POLITICS OF THE URBAN POOR IN EARLY TWENTIETH-
CENTURY INDIA 74, 82–88 (2001).
196 See id. at 91–102.
197 See AMAR FAROOQUI, OPIUM CITY: THE MAKING OF EARLY VICTORIAN BOMBAY xi–
xiii (2006).