Agents of change or maintenance women? Networks of control among women in a resettlement colony for former basti dwellers

Gentrification is typically understood as a process in which middle class residents move into working class areas, resulting in displacement and exclusion of original communities. Utilizing the dynamics afoot among a diverse group of women involuntarily displaced from their homes in Mumbai’s bastis and currently residing in Asia’s largest basti resettlement site, this chapter shows that such exclusion can also be provoked by pre-existing, informal networks among those displaced that are reconnected in response to a poorly managed post-displacement resettlement. Talk about gentrification with a sole focus on an outsider displacing an insider bypasses the varied, rarely expressed placemaking strategies and expanding social differences at work among residents of the resettlement site. Gentrification as experienced and articulated by women is found to be a useful relational lens through which the frailty of post-displacement resettlement and rehabilitation processes can be seen.