“Don’t take too many pictures”: Discomfort as urban ethnographic method in Rajarhat

This article draws on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Rajarhat, a planned township on Kolkata’s urban fringe, to develop what we term an “epistemology of discomfort”. Rajarhat, often portrayed as a frontier of neoliberal urbanism, is shaped equally by speculative real estate, displacement, and precarious inhabitation. As researchers situated within caste, class, and institutional privilege, we encountered discomfort—not despite our positionality, but because of it. Rather than treating these frictions as obstacles, we approach discomfort as a productive methodological and affective register that reveals the relational, contingent, and power-laden nature of ethnographic knowledge. Engaging with postcolonial and post-structuralist critiques, we explore three interlinked dimensions of discomfort in Rajarhat as a field. First, we interrogate the symbolic capital of academic authority and how institutional affiliations mediate access, trust, and visibility. Second, we reflect on the affective dissonances of having to navigate a familiar but evolving site that blurred the insider-outsider in unsettling ways. Third, we examine the discursive limits of our analytical tools when documenting the lived grammars of informality in Rajarhat. In foregrounding these frictions, we argue for a reflexive, ethically attuned urban anthropology that treats discomfort not as failure, but as a generative site of insight into India’s contemporary urban transformations.