Scaffolding Sentiment: Money, Labor, and Love in India’s Real Estate and Construction Industry

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography of the building and real estate construction industry in India’s National Capital Region (NCR). It is a cross-class study based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in NCR with real estate developers, planners, contractors, architects, engineers, foreman, migrant laborers, and locals. Within the dissertation, I excavate creativity from its relegation to artistic realms and examine the politics of creative action in real estate. The building construction industry, I argue, deploys creativity as a fetish through the celebration of creative terms and actions such as jugaad, improvisation, fixing, corruption, innovation, and quick thinking. This discourse enables social mobility and survival, but at the same time enhances unequal conditions of work and life. Chapters play with the human and non-human duality of tropes such as plans, money, labor, love, and roads to demonstrate the processes of creative destruction. A critical phenomenology of life in the industry serves as a critique of its political economy.