Vishan was walking me through his neighbourhood in Nathupur village, Gurgaon. The village sits on prime real estate in the city, enclosed on three sides by DLF Cyber City commercial hub and DLF Phase-3 residential complex, and encircled by the elevated Rapid Metro system that overshadows the neighbourhood. Nathupur sits on some of the most high-value real estate in India. Vishan was from an agriculturalist Gujjar family, his grandfather owned agricultural land long sold to DLF in the 1970s and 1980s and his father spent time in the Indian army. Today Vishan and his two brothers work ‘in property’. From the balcony of his three-storey whitewashed villa on Nathupur's eastern flank, Vishan pointed towards the various buildings he owned along with his two brothers. The family business owned five buildings in Nathupur, two tall tenement buildings in the centre of the village that are rented out to ‘labouring classes’ and two ‘apartment-style’ tenement buildings that house middle-class call-centre and office workers. In a city with a dearth of public or low-rent housing, Vishan's village property business extracts rents from and facilitates the daily reproduction of Gurgaon's army of incoming workers. Vishan explained how he and his brothers, after coming into some cash from a property sale, had upgraded a tenement building into one- and two-bedroom set apartments for ‘professionals’ arriving from Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. Vishan's family had diversified their rental revenues across Gurgaon, investing in private schools, commercial and residential plots and a car lease business in the city. Standing on the balcony of Vishan's villa, overseeing the family's empire of densely packed tenements and apartment buildings surrounded by the glistening monuments of global real estate, the subaltern relationships between global real estate capital and agrarian institutions, political actors and territories come to the fore. How were Vishan's family able to develop a mini-property empire amid some of the highest value real estate in India? Vishan, like all members of Nathupur's proprietary body, holds non-alienable, non-transferable property rights to land within Nathupur's lal dora boundaries. The liberalisation of Gurgaon's land market was facilitated by colonial-era property relations that vested monopoly property rights to agriculturalist caste communities within the village abadi deh.