‘Inauthentic’ \u3ci\u3eSukumbasi:\u3c/i\u3e The Politics of Aesthetics and Urgency in Kathmandu

This article discusses how claims of the urban poor for the right to the city come up against governmental programs seeking to secure norms of private property, environmental sustainability, and elite aesthetics. Here, the city in question is Kathmandu, Nepal, and the urban poor are referred to as sukumbasi, squatters. Baviskar (2011) defines ‘elite politics’ as a mode of expressing anxieties of the self in relation to one’s physical surroundings. I interpret a liberal environmentalist project— the Bagmati Action Plan—in terms of such an elite politics, and explore the ways in which this river restoration program was taken up by the Nepali state. I show how bourgeois liberal environmentalism, when it encounters ‘the slum,’ produces spatial imaginaries, such as ‘pure rivers’ and ‘green riverbanks,’ and representations of sukumbasi as ‘inauthentic’ residents. This logic often furnishes the rationale for violently expelling sukumbasi from the slum and the city. Adopting the state’s governmental frames to distinguish between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ sukumbasi, the Bagmati Action Plan’s leadership produced class cleavage among the landless—between squatters, who were alleged to be ‘landed’ and those given a ‘landless’ designation. As such, this article asks two questions: How does the threat of violence forge sukumbasi political subjectivity and inform renewed strategies of inhabitance? And, what implications these strategies have for understanding the challenges facing the politics of the poor? These inquiries locate the practices of the poor within the context of a ‘politics of urgency’— an ad hoc creative and counterintuitive ‘non-movement’ forged in the crucible of crisis, in which the organized practice of everyday life is disrupted and stretched in new and uncertain directions