Between the highway and the red dirt track : subaltern urbanization and census towns in India

In the 2011 Census of India, more than 2500 settlements were inducted into the category of ‘census towns’ – the lowest size-class of urban settlements in India. Aerial images have established that a vast majority of these towns are situated away from million-plus metropolitan areas and have developed independently. Taking this geographical phenomenon of subaltern urbanization as a point of entry, this thesis attempts to make an empirical and conceptual intervention into our understanding of urba