Basti mediators: Building narrative land histories and incremental archives to challenge state categories of land and resist eviction

Building on the critical scholarship in urban studies about intermediaries, this paper explores the relationship between intermediaries and urban land struggles. Intermediaries as enablers of land tenure change contest land’s bureaucratic categories. They challenge the state categories of land through a narrative mode and in an archival mode. The narrative mode comprises oral-historical knowledge of the settling in of people in the Basti, creating occupancies and translating those oral narratives of land use change into paper documents. The archival mode constitutes the incremental archives sustained by intermediaries, including old record maps, accumulated historical written artefacts, and quotidian paper traces. The paper argues that these two modes co-produce knowledge categories and histories of these forgotten places, like Bastis. The oral narrative articulation by intermediaries helps the inhabitants effectively publicize historical land tenure change. The incremental archives complement and validate those claims through old paper archival artefacts. These processes, in effect, contest local bureaucratic categories to resist eviction and reinforce the tenure changes. The paper focuses on the often-overlooked tier-II cities within southern urban theories. The study also contributes to the research on intermediaries and urban-focused public policies.