Geo/Eco/Nomy: A tribute to Fernando Coronil
This work of realist fiction, on Bangalore’s urban transformation, is inspired by the late Fernando Coronil’s inventive and utterly original approach to geopolitical economy as anthrohistory.[1] People and place names have been anonymized.
Coronil’s insertion of nature in Marx’s theory of value, his keen insights on the fabulations of land rent, on the ruses of state power, and the dynamic, relational character of subalternity are particularly germane for contemporary students of urban and agrarian change.
A dazzle of lights surrenders to a pitch-black expanse as his airplane descends. Then, once more, an earthly glimmer. A pockmark of electricity. Then a double row of red pinpricks. He sees how they merge in the horizon. But he knows they run in parallel. They must. His mind absently flashes the name of paradox: Borges. A bump, the protest of engines forced to reverse their progress through time and space, an incandescent terminal adorned with aircrafts from distant lands. “Kempegowda International Airport,” announces the neon sign.
Soon he is in a chattering throng. He fills out the customs declaration, and with just that hint of anxiety, appraises the petty bureaucrat in black uniform who wields the power to thwart his plans. But the official is indifferent. He glances at the green card, flips the passport to a blank page, mechanically asks him to stare at the giant eyeball that masquerades as a camera. After a cursory look at his computer screen (what tales of misdeed does it display, the man idly wonders?), the bored bureaucrat stamps his passport, and he is through, forced to dodge people scurrying hither-thither in search of their possessions. Inhaling deeply, he pauses–momentarily unmoored from time–to bear witness to a strange yet utterly familiar place.
““the man marveled at how adroitly elites everywhere were able to weaponize the state’s machinery to service them””
He has never been here–this particular airport–before; but he has been somewhere like it more times than he cares to remember. The airport is a glittering marvel, winner of many international awards according to “GVK Group.” Who are they, he parenthetically wonders. He later discovers that they are a major developer in the country that won the lucrative private contract to develop and manage the new airport as part of the public-private consortium that was established via–what the financial sector in its insipid yet vaguely sinister jargon–calls a Special Project Vehicle, or SPV for short. GVK, he is told, was founded by a wealthy family that hails from the region’s dominant landed caste, the Reddys. The byzantine tale of collusion between developers, politicians, and state functionaries, with its murky subplots of forced land acquisition, graft, and super-normal profits, reminds him of “oilpacity.”[2] His bag arrives. He dutifully follows the green arrows for travelers with “Nothing to Declare.” Then, another throng, as the foyer’s hydraulic doors sigh open, releasing him into the cool and humid night.
His body adjusts to the spray of words that sting fast and furious, “Taxi, sir?,” “Which hotel, sir?,” “Best fare to city, sir.” Hundreds of eyes stare at him. He is bemused but also unsettled to find himself the object of anthropological curiosity. Subjected, not subject, fleetingly subaltern. But a few minutes later he spies a bored man standing with a placard that bears his name. He walks over, and is acknowledged. And imperceptibly, the gradient, which had so very briefly tilted from north to south, is restored to its “proper” state of operation. He is again in command.[3]
He follows the driver to the car that has been sent to pick him up, and eases into the backseat while the driver–“S. Devegowda” announces the government-issued photo ID card taped to the front passenger side headrest–loads his bag in the trunk. They exit to the airport highway, lined with solar-powered street lights, bougainvillea in bloom and planted signboards informing him of the improvements underway at the airport that will heighten his “passenger experience”–“inconvenience from construction is regretted”–if he chooses to visit again in 2020. A toll plaza. And then a stretch of darkness stretching on both sides of the highway, interrupted by solitary lights and at first infrequently–then with alarming frequency–by gigantic, garishly lit billboards featuring a parade of Anglo-Saxon couples or families, all smiles, enjoying the good life at “Brigade Atmosphere,” “Embassy Edge,” “Godrej Reserve,” “Elite Rose,” “Ozone Urbana Prime,” “Sobha Lifestyle Legacy,” “Continental Swisstown,” and more.
Figure 1: Ad for Godrej Reserve property. Photo credit: https://www.godrejproperties.com/bangalore/residential/godrej-reserve/overview
Figure 2: Ad for Embassy Edge properties. Photo credit: embassyedge.com
The driver tells him the airport is 40 kilometers from his guest house at the institute, but “don’t worry, sir, at night it only takes 30 or 40 minutes, not like during day.” Devegowda then volunteers that he is from the same community as the chief minister–“same name, sir, Devegowda also”–who conjured and then orchestrated the construction of the new airport (the site duly approved by a government-appointed panel) in a far flung area north of the city. When the passenger asked why, the driver grinned, “Money sir, lots of money! His family owned many plots here. Very clever, no?.”
In the coming days, the backstory dribbled out. BIAL (Bengaluru International Airport Limited), the Special Purpose entity set up to deliver the new airport, acquired 4,000 acres of land. The bulk of it through “eminent domain.” For the “public good.” An obscenely expensive “international airport” as public good? As he had done many times in life, the man marveled at how adroitly elites everywhere were able to weaponize the state’s machinery to service them. “The cunning of reason, the colony in the post-colony,” he thought with a flash of indignation. Landowners, he was told, are “notified” of plots that are to be acquired. This can happen several years before a project is initiated. Once notified, a plot cannot be sold. The state will acquire it, imminently or years later at what it calls, “guidance value”–a price per unit area that is significantly below “market value.” The notification process is political and secretive: powerful actors sway where boundaries are etched. Plots of land that fall just outside the notified tract commonly experience sharp capital appreciation. Devegowda, the erstwhile chief minister, made a killing through the art of rent.
““the water close to shore, he finds, has the consistency of sludge, foul-smelling white froth shimmers on the lake’s surface (caused by an upsurge in untreated sewage, he is told), weeds abound, plastic litter and styrofoam blobs jam the edges, fish carcasses interrupt the muddy path””
His taxi zooms through the night, village and villa yielding to dense habitations that aspire to be urban. “Progress High School” reads one sign. “Prolife Hospital” reads another. “Moongate: Plan Your Ideal Wedding Here” reads a third. The occasional high rise. They begin to sprout in bunches. His eyes droop. Time folds in on itself, the present, now past, its matter now motile memory, erupts in the future. Next week to be exact.
He is in another peri-urban locale, awkwardly attired like the many others he has seen since his arrival–part country charm, part rural squalor, part city chic, part urban drab. A place that doesn’t know its place. In the throes of (he later discovers) a moment of transculturation, in transit to the promised land of modernity.[4] He is here to explore how this adolescent habitation on the eastern fringe of the conurbation that imagines itself as a “world-class city” was enrolled to the cause. Who were the actors that sprung into action? Was it the adjoining lake? The real-estate developers anticipating a market for “country-living” by high-end service professionals in the nearby IT hub? The prospect of easy groundwater to slake the thirst of cement and people? Local landowners fed up with the demands of farmhands, who glimpsed a second nature more lucrative, less labor-intensive than the paddy-wheat regime that was the area’s mainstay? Politicians eager to manufacture that windfall?
Figure 3: Grey skies and new construction on Bengaluru’s peri-urban frontier. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
Figure 4: A process of transculturation. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
He is introduced to a village bigwig, now a major property broker: PR Reddy, an urbane man, who drives a black BMW. PR’s community, the Reddys, is the area’s dominant caste. PR traces his family’s lineage to 7th century CE. (Much later, the man learns from a historian that the members of the community who now bear the name “Reddy” arrived 250 to 300 years ago, as colonizers from adjoining regions.) PR owns the nearby petrol pump, the only one around in a 10 km radius. He has invested in the new shopping mall scheduled for construction next year. Oh, and the new “international school” that opened two months ago, PR’s brother is the principal partner in that venture. PR points to a 20-tower block of luxury apartments that is under construction in the distance. (Later, when he is escorted for a site visit by PR, the man notices how the unfinished husks are abuzz with workers.)
Figure 5: Construction workers. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
The apartment complex sits on 120 acres that PR proudly says he assembled from a maze of plots, some with multiple claimants. The process took him four years, lots of cajoling and cash (advanced by the developer), some strong-arming, and a great deal of metis. He tells the man how he spent the best part of those years assembling the family circumstances of each and every landowner. He plucked off the weakest first, those desperate, at the lowest rate. Then the slightly less weak. The ones who held out the longest, who could afford to bide their time, he approached last, making them offers–often exorbitant–that they couldn’t refuse. Until he had his 120 acres. “A good woodcutter takes the time to sharpen his axe,” he tells the man. “If it takes him a year to cut a tree, he spends eight months honing his tool.” He presents his triumph to the man, not as an exemplar of political economy but as a feat of craftsmanship. Of fragmented space painstakingly reassembled into a unitary form, a new use value able to enter a new circuit–a global one–of real estate and finance capital.
Figure 6: From land to real estate. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
PR’s story is dense and dazzling. The man realizes that the clandestine genius of rent-making in the neoliberal present far exceeds the earthly obsessions of crude matter. The value theory of nature no longer needs to confine itself to the colonial order of resources when land itself–nature writ large–can move like oil, thanks to the liberating instruments of finance.[5] Private equity ferried in special project vehicles, IPOs, real estate investment trusts, preferred stock offerings to investors and banks: all release land from its geographic captivity, allowing it to traverse the planet dressed as money. Or more precisely, bits and bytes that claim to be value in this self-proclaimed era of immaterial capitalism.
Figure 7: A lake chokes. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
But matter, he grimly discovers, continues to matter. He circumambulates the clogged lake: the water close to shore, he finds, has the consistency of sludge, foul-smelling white froth shimmers on the lake’s surface (caused by an upsurge in untreated sewage, he is told), weeds abound, plastic litter and styrofoam blobs jam the edges, fish carcasses interrupt the muddy path.
Figure 8: An untimely death. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
This new ecology has no place for the fishermen who once plied their livelihoods here, or the Dalit cultivators who tilled its fertile foreshores in the dry season for supplemental income. The 20-tower block of luxury apartments that PR midwifed? It struggles to supply water to the residents who have begun to trickle into the four towers that were built in phase one. The groundwater, which was once reached at 180 feet, now requires borewells to a depth of 1800 feet. Convoys truck in water from the adjoining countryside, mining an ancient life-source in a blur of inhuman time.
Figure 9: Ancient water is mined. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
He thinks about history’s nature in the world-class metropolis and, seduced by the mysteries of time (a sin he has never been able to forsake), of presents undone and futures past, when nature, relentlessly produced but never mastered by human design, exacted its due.
The general economy overflowing the containments of capital’s restricted economy. The city–or its ruins?–yet to come [6].
Figure 10: Urban, de-natured. Photo credit: Pierre Hauser
Notes
The findings in this essay are based on an ongoing project, “Speculative Urbanism: Land, Livelihoods, and Finance Capital,” funded by the National Science Foundation, award BCS-1636437. Thanks to my project associates, particularly Sanjiv Aundhe, Michael Goldman, Hemangini Gupta, Priyanka Krishna, Kaveri Medappa, Juwairia Mehkri, Sachin Rathod, and Carol Upadhya; and Pierre Hauser for permission to use his brilliant photographs. An earlier version of this was presented at the book launch of The Fernando Coronil Reader at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, on September 12, 2019. I am grateful to Julie Skurski and Gary Wilder for inviting me to participate in the event.
1. Most notable here is Coronil’s masterwork, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 1997). But see also, the excellent collection of Coronil’s writings in The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life is the Matter, ed. Julie Skurski, Gary Wilder, Laurent Dubois, Paul Eiss, Edward Murphy, Mariana Coronil, and David Pederson (Duke University Press, 2019). Fernando Coronil died on August 16, 2011 in New York City.
2. Fernando Coronil, “Oilpacity: Secrets of History in the Coup Against Hugo Chavez,” in The Fernando Coronil Reader, pp. 262-265.
3. In a provocative engagement with Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s much-cited essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Coronil writes: “The locus of engagement is inseparable from the enunciation of a locus; analysis must comprehend them as interrelated dimensions of a single historical process. A subject position, therefore, is not only a structural locus of enunciation but a topos partially defined by a positioned subject through speech, which in turn makes speech possible.” See Coronil, “Listening to the Subaltern: The Poetics of Neocolonial States,” in The Fernando Coronil Reader, p. 382.
4. Coronil borrows the term “transculturation” from the great Cuban anthropologist and essayist Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969). Ortiz’s classic, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Duke University Press, 1995 [1940]) profoundly influenced Coronil’s thinking on modernity from the margins. See Coronil’s chapter, “Transculturation and the Politics of Theory: Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint,” in The Fernando Coronil Reader, pp. 69-117.
5. Cf. Coronil, “History’s Nature”, Chapter One in The Magical State, pp. 21-66.
6. An ironic nod to Abdoumaliq Simone’s prescient book, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Duke University Press, 2004).
