This book has sought to explore processes of agrarian city-making on India's urban frontier. Gurgaon, like many peri-urban developments that have sprung up since the end of the twentieth century, has been developed through imaginative, calculative and political technologies that have been deployed to reorganise the countryside for real estate and industrial accumulation. As the narrative goes, Gurgaon's rapid ascendance as the figurehead for a ‘new urban India’, where private urban development and governance models cleanly capture mobile capital, has produced space for a hegemonic urban upper and middle class, signalling India's arrival at a global (capitalist) stage. This book has sought to complicate this well-run narrative. Since the early 1980s, Gurgaon's urbanisation has relied upon a terse remediation of agrarian spaces, institutions, actors and histories. As I have argued across this book, this project has depended upon the reproduction of a territorialised class alliance between capitalists, state institutions and so-called ‘dominant’ agrarian caste communities. It is this alliance that not only willingly opens and converts rural land into urban real estate but also manages the distribution and circulation of rents, wages and capital that underpin industrial accumulation.

This class composition was irrevocably shaped by uneven agrarian development in the colonial and post-colonial periods and are a result of hegemonic struggles engaged in by capital to forge the social and political conditions for its expansion into the countryside. This of course comes at a cost. Across this book I have sought to explore the subalternity of the frontier: the repurposing of state development agendas, the blockages in the ‘open field’ of capital circulation, the quiet delay and subversion of bureaucratic property-making and the disorderly class politics threatening the stability of the city's agrarian–urban alliances. Subalternity here describes unstable hegemonic alliances, not sociological or spatial identities. In this sense, many enrolled at the frontier are not ‘the subaltern’ classically defined. The first half of this book traces attempts led by landowner-cum-landlords and speculators to form part of a neo-middle class embedded in the urban economy, attempts not only marked by a structural subordination to global capitalist actors but also ones which are terse, incomplete and for some will inevitably fail.