Book review: Rahul Ramagundam, Including the Socially Excluded: India’s Experience with Caste, Gender and Poverty
| Author | Navprit Kaur |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023018762833 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
154 Book Reviews
appears curious: why would judicial interventionism be necessary in Delhi but not in Mumbai, whose
popular neighbourhoods and jhopadpattis are famously better organized and more politicized than
Delhi’s bastis?
A second striking difference between the Delhi and Mumbai evictions relates to what happened after-
wards: while the lands cleared in Delhi’s eviction exercises are still by-and-large vacant as of 2017, the
tracts of Mumbai cleared in 2004 were (barring two notable exceptions) quickly reoccupied by previous
residents, who rebuilt their homes on-site and have remained largely undisturbed since. This startling
difference begs questions of a key part of Bhan’s argument: that it was not the legality but the legitimacy
of any particular neighbourhood that predicted whether it would be slated for demolition (if legality
predicted demolition then most of Delhi’s built space would have been flattened). But this argument too
appears curious given the experience of Mumbai, where the swift and relatively undisturbed on-site
rebuilding of demolished neighbourhoods testified to illegitimacy not of the spatial claims of the urban
poor but rather of the demolition exercises of the state. In Mumbai, that is to say, the demolition and then
successful rebuilding of demolished neighbourhoods may well have shored up the strength of the spatial
claims of area residents—as well as of the sociopolitical networks that enabled the rebuilding. Could
it be that the legitimacy of a neighbourhood (or conversely the legitimacy of an eviction) is not a
pre-condition but rather an outcome of demolition?
If the mark of an important book is not only in the quality of its evidence and analysis but also in the
extent to which it brings new questions to light then Bhan’s book succeeds admirably. In the Public’s
Interest should command a wide readership and will inspire new and important avenues of research.
Lisa Björkman
University of Louisville, Kentucky
E-mail: lbjorkman6@gmail.com
Rahul Ramagundam, Including the Socially Excluded: India’s Experience with Caste, Gender and Poverty.
Orient BlackSwan. 2017. 302 pages. `850.
DOI: 10.1177/2321023018762833
The concept of exclusion has been generally invoked in economic theory as capability deprivation.
Amartya Sen conceptualizes exclusion as deprivation but at the same time differentiates exclusion from
unfair inclusion. Rahul Ramgundam’s book is an attempt to understand the complex riddle pertaining to
the relationship between social exclusion and phenomena of poverty in context of Indian realities. Are
people poor because of the deprivations arising out of their being socially excluded or does poverty itself
cause their being excluded from structures of society? For Ramagundam, these questions are not simply
theoretical in nature but have a strong bearing on the lives of the most marginalized of this country. The
book, robustly embedded in the author’s fieldwork over a span of many years, is an attempt to answer
these questions through delving deep into questions pertaining to lives of the socially excluded. At the
very outset of his work, the academic in Ramagundam does not shy away from bringing to the fore his
own political subjectivity as an activist who worked amidst the most marginalized in rural Bihar and
parts of Uttar Pradesh, at times risking his own safety. The book is divided into two sections. The first
section deals with the idea and practice of social exclusion and the second part deals with phenomena of
social inclusion.
While delving into the theme of social exclusion in Chapter 1, Ramagundam not only charts out the
important debates on social exclusion in the Indian context but also outlines academic debates around
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