1In her book The Promise of the Metropolis (2008), Janaki Nair traces Bengaluru’s transformation into a twentieth-century Information Technology (IT) hub. The city, she argues, stands at the cusp of modernity as the “nondescript small town” has transformed into an “internally recognized gateway to styles of globalized consumption” (Nair 2008:81). About two decades into this transformation, the promise of world class infrastructure and equal citizenship appears fractured. Deep inequality, lack of public services and recurring issues such as urban floods, mark the landscape of Bengaluru. We are now accustomed to monsoon images where “roads and residential areas [sink] under water as lakes overflow,” accompanied by a rising “crescendo of anguished complaints from citizens” about the government’s incompetence (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024:1). This review examines how two recent books on Bengaluru navigate the tensions between its celebrated IT identity and its ongoing urban issues. Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024) and Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi 2023) are, in different ways, focused on the narrative devices that mediate how residents in the city of Bengaluru imagine, inhabit, and transform the city.
2Chronicles develops the idea of “speculative urbanism,” a mode of city-making where financial speculation, planning imaginaries, and infrastructural ambitions coalesce into forward-looking stories that remake the urban present (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024). Through an urban geographic lens, the book assembles ethnographic chapters focused on sites such as luxury enclaves, urban lakes, infrastructure corridors, and villages on Bengaluru’s periphery. These chapters track how “speculative stories” about future value, from IT companies’ promises of Singapore-style development to farmers’ bets on rising land prices, both shape and are shaped by the city’s political economy, manifested through real estate development as well as anxieties about ecological collapse and livelihood security. Corruption Plots, on the other hand, draws on the dual meaning of “plot,” both as a piece of land and as a narrative, this spatial-narrative framework enables the authors’ analysis of six distinct urban topoi: slum, multistory building, periphery, swampland, infrastructure, and world-class city (Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi 2023). Each topos serves as a site where corruption narratives—stories used by people to understand, describe and discuss corruption—are constructed and contested. Drawing on urban and cultural geography, the authors argue that “corruption discourse” is not merely descriptive but a way of making sense of inequality and of enacting moral claims by various urban actors.
3In this review, I first trace the development of speculation and corruption as analytical concepts and situate the two books as an extension of this development. I then examine how both works contribute to postcolonial urban scholarship by provincializing these concepts through the lived experiences and practices of Bengaluru’s residents. A third section examines key dimensions of Bengaluru as late-capital city that emerges in these books. Finally, I consider what Bengaluru’s story reveals about the enduring structures of caste-based dispossession that underwrite contemporary urbanization.
4Writing at the height of the Bengaluru’s real-estate boom, Goldman (2011) framed the city’s transformation as a political choice, arguing that “parastatal” agencies driving “world-city projects” operate in a “temporary ‘state of exception’ … [that] reflects a shift into new forms of ‘speculative’ government, economy, urbanism and citizenship” (Goldman 2011:555). In this emerging milieu, the main tasks of the state government in Bengaluru are “land speculation and active dispossession,” where rural land is acquired for world city projects, with skewed distribution of ensuing profits (Goldman 2011:557). The promise of the world city holds uneven realities in this emerging vision, with local Dalit farmers being forced to give up their land for depressed prices.
5Reflecting on speculation in the aftermath of COVID and rising economic and social insecurity across cities, Fields insists that the present conjuncture is one “in which everyone is speculating, from local land aggregators to kampung [urban village] residents to state-owned enterprises to ride-hail drivers” (Fields 2023:511, emphasis in the original). Goldman (2011) insists on how a transition from urban actors to “speculative subjects” complements the speculative nature of rural to urban land transformation. This reworking of scales in the case of Bengaluru is captured in the notion of “articulation work” foregrounded by Gidwani and Upadhya, showing how, through negotiation work by a range of “middlemen”, Bengaluru’s land is “produced as a fungible commodity … a liquid, ‘investible’ asset” (Gidwani and Upadhya 2023:413). The scholarship on speculation thus shifts focus from state-led macro-projects to the meso-level circuits where caste capital, local knowledge and “fictional expectations” forge speculative value.
6Chronicles can be seen as a synthesis of these strands, advancing the idea of “speculative urbanism” at the level of citizens’ imagination. The editors observe that “[l]ife in Bengaluru today summons, even demands, an improvisational comportment … citizens must embrace speculative prospects of various kinds” (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024:17). Speculation, the book shows, extends from the state and the middleman to the everyday citizen, as it is “not just a type of economic action … it is also a cultural orientation and social practice” (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024:18).
7Just as speculation is seen as beyond the finance sector, the authors of Corruption Plots situate corruption as beyond economic framing. If Goldman (2011) situates a new historical moment in Bengaluru when land is appropriated through extra-legal processes, Doshi and Ranganathan (2017) argue that “corruption talk” by the marginalized “[advances] an ethical critique of [land] accumulation and dispossession” (Doshi and Ranganathan 2017:184). They bring attention to the ways in which corruption allegations justify actions of the state, such as “land-grabbing” in cities like Bengaluru (Doshi and Ranganathan 2017). By examining various oppositions to this process, they foreground corruption as a framework for the dispossessed and activists to “critically narrate land enclosures, a central driver of capitalist accumulation” (Doshi and Ranganathan 2017:195). Doshi and Ranganathan later examined corruption as a discourse that reveals “broader power relations and contestations in late capitalism” (2019:4). In cities like Bengaluru, marked by territorialized struggles, they describe corruption talk as inseparable from struggles over the meaning, resources and space of the city. In attending to this late-capitalist moment, urban geographers are encouraged to engage with the “politics of corruption,” asking when, where and for whom urban practices are politicized as corrupt (Doshi and Ranganathan 2019).
8Corruption Plots advances these ideas and shifts the emphasis to “emplotment,” referring to the narrative labor of city dwellers in bringing ideas of wrongdoing into a coherent plotline. The scope of corruption discourse expands as it “comes to life when narrated in conversation, text, and image” (Ranganathan, Pike and Doshi 2023: 8). Its function is “to make and remake urban forms” (Ranganathan, Pike and Doshi 2023:7). In this rendering, corruption is the narrative medium through which uneven urbanization of Bengaluru is not only narrated but also contested and, in some cases, reproduced. The aim of the book, then, is not only to understand corruption and its politics in the case of cities like Bengaluru, but to show how “corruption talk from the global South has the potential to shift the ground of long-entrenched commonplaces around poverty and inequity in the global North” (Ranganathan, Pike and Doshi 2023: 213). In other words, corruption talk is situated not as a local symptom but a generative critical lens capable of reorienting global understandings of inequality and urban politics.
9Examining the two books—Chronicles (wholly grounded in Bengaluru) and Corruption Plots (which examines Bengaluru and Mumbai)—shows not only how Bengaluru’s urban footprint has expanded in the last two decades, but also how attitudes toward this expansion have evolved. Whereas speculation creates the conditions of uncertainty and possibility that drive urban expansion, corruption talk emerges as the interpretive framework of these very conditions. Read together, they reveal how the proliferation of speculative practices which are at the heart of Chronicles shape and are shaped by “corruption plots” that help various actors to understand, critique, or justify their participation in the city's transformation.
10Divided into six thematic parts, Chronicles maps the terrain of Bengaluru by focusing on the “everyday that produces both the conditions of the lived experience in Bengaluru and the spatial dimensions and built environment in which people live” (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024: 20-21). This mapping is achieved by bringing together writings by activists, urban scholars, and journalists working on Bengaluru, covering themes like real estate financialization, labor, caste, ecology, and housing justice. “Speculative Stories” sets the historical stage where developers’ narratives, master plans and IT utopias are read as stories that naturalize land-as-asset and erase older commons. “Financial Stratagems” parses the global/private equity and low-finance chit funds, showing how Wall-Street logics meet everyday borrowing in Bengaluru’s property boom. Sections titled “State Speculation” and “Speculative Subjects” explore the state as land-broker and follow low-income households engaged in real-estate leverage, foregrounding aspiration and risk. “Labour in the Speculative City” tells the stories of platform-delivery and domestic workers whose toil underwrites speculative growth, while the last theme, “Ecologies of Speculation,” shows the city’s lakes as not only financialized, but also as sites of counter-politics and care.
11Chronicles explores these themes using individual stories from the city. We meet urban planners who envision turning Bengaluru into Singapore, enacting an imagination of the “world-class city” that has been richly documented in urban scholarship (Ghertner 2015; Roy and Ong 2011). But the scope of speculation as an analytical framework is broader, since “no one who can help it wants to be left behind in the property boom” (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024:78). For instance, we also meet small farmers, like ‘Palani’ who is waiting for the construction of a “Peripheral Ring Road [which] will be built very soon” (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024:256), in order to make profits by selling land at the right time.
12Corruption Plots is structured as six spatial chapters plus an opening “Statement on Caste, Positionality, and Privilege,” as well as an extended introduction and conclusion. “Slum” begins at eviction sites in Bengaluru and Mumbai, revealing how corruption talk around slum clearances exposes the “whitening” of elite real estate illegalities while “blackening” the urban poor settlement. “Multistory Building” shifts to apartment blocks, where “one-man army” activists embody what the authors call “middle-class respectability politics” that condemn developers while themselves practicing the same “gray ethics.” “Periphery” explores land-grab frontiers rife with rowdies, portraying the urban fringe as a Wild West zone where “outlaw publics”, that is, informal actors who move fluidly between legality and crime, lay bare the state’s entanglement with private capital. “Swampland” examines city’s wetlands and floodplains, tracing how “ecological publics,” referring to middle-class residents, experts, and NGOs who mobilize around conservation, deploy corruption talk to defend commons while often reproducing antipoor narratives. “Infrastructure” follows leaking pipes, collapsing bridges and garbage backlogs to reveal the life-and-death consequences of corruption through “biopolitical publics” that voice incompatible truths about liberal desire for a world without technological breakdown versus the inevitability of corruption in the provisioning of urban infrastructure. Finally, “World-Class City” examines high-rise developments where “democratic publics” challenge elite informality while questioning who constitutes the citizenship of the late capitalist city and on what conditions.
13Both texts contribute to critical urban theory's challenge to mainstream global urban theory, which fails to adequately explain the transformations reshaping cities like Bengaluru (Lawhon and Truelove 2019). They can be situated within postcolonial urban scholarship, a heterogeneous field united by its critique of the presumption that “concepts developed in Euro–American urban studies apply, ipso facto, to cities of the post-colony,” (Leitner and Sheppard 2016:229, emphasis in original). Instead, the two books enable a “provincialization” of speculation and corruption. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s provocation that “thought is related to place,” urban scholars have argued that urban concepts are not simply applied across contexts but are remade through local histories, institutions, and practices (Lawhon, Ernstson, and Silver 2014: 505). Provincializing, then, is not about rejecting universal (urban) theory, but rather about unsettling its presumed neutrality, asking how concepts are reconfigured in the post-colony (Leitner and Sheppard 2016).
14The books’ focus on the lives of urban residents reveals the complexity of their agency, affirming that it is “the primary” result of narrative (Ranganathan, Pike and Doshi 2023:207). We read about urban residents whose practical actions appear to conflict with their stated beliefs, resembling what Gramsci called contradictory consciousness (Gramsci 1992:641). Jayashree, an anti-corruption activist, denounces corruption as systemic yet navigates it, pursuing legal remedies through channels she knows to be compromised, as “corruption [has become] the structuring logic saturating everyday survival” (Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi 2023:111). Similarly, Jagannath, former president of a local body in Bengaluru, criticizes real estate speculation while himself becoming embedded in it, compelled by state acquisition threats. In this sense, speculation is experienced as “a volatile mix of anticipation, aspiration, avarice and desire” (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024: 78). These apparent contradictions foreground the insight that urban residents must participate in the very systems they critique in order to survive. Resistance and adaptation necessarily coexist in cities like Bengaluru. By attending to these contradictory trajectories that marginalized residents navigate, both Corruption Plots and Chronicles reveal how theoretical concepts are not merely applied to postcolonial cities like Bengaluru but are reconstituted through them.
15Bengaluru emerges in these texts as a late capitalist city where a “concentration of wealth and power for a narrow global elite class” accompanies a majority under “increasing economic precarity and dispossession” (Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi 2023: 1-2). Drawing on three interrelated themes that these works foreground, in this section I trace how Bengaluru is shaped by (a) the transformation of the state into an active agent of urban dispossession, (b) the contested fate of urban commons, and (c) the survival strategies of city-workers and the urban poor.
16First, Chronicles explores what Laura Bear terms “speculative state planning,” where ostensibly public infrastructure projects become vehicles for private capital accumulation (Bear 2013). The case study of Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) is an instructive example where the state emerges as a land-broker that deploys its sovereign powers to acquire land, then monetizes this real estate through commercial development. Corruption Plots takes this idea further, exposing the state as an active architect of urban dispossession that operates through the systematic blurring of public and private power. The Ejipura eviction, an inner-city eviction of Muslim and Dalit families that took place in Bengaluru in 2013, captures this argument. As one activist observed, in the context of eviction: “Where Garudachar [the developer who led the eviction] ends, where government ends, where Court ends, you can't tell. They are all one” (Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi 2023:42). This convergence signals the key premise of Corruption Plots, namely that corruption is not deviation from governance, but the very mechanism through which the state enables accumulation by dispossession.
17Second, attention to the city’s lakes reveals how urban commons become central arenas where struggle over governance, environment and livelihood intersect. Chronicles situates the current water crisis, where the city is “starved of water yet also periodically flooded by it” (p. 237) as the direct result of rapid urbanization. The processes that render traditional lake-related livelihoods increasingly unviable such as water scarcity, pollution and land conversion, also create new speculative opportunities. ‘Palaniamma,’ a local farmer, converts her lake-side house into rental units using proceeds from land sales. Local landowners rent uncultivated agricultural land to migrant workers, turning regulatory restrictions (of no structures within buffer zone of lake) into income streams. This transformation reveals speculation's dual character as both destruction and promise. Corruption Plots dissects how the language of “encroachment” on lakes becomes a tool of class warfare. While luxury malls secure state approval, state-led eviction drives target slum settlements on lake beds, ensuring that “[of] those that were targeted for evictions—the majority were poor people” (Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi 2023:130). This unequal deployment of anti-encroachment rhetoric reveals corruption discourse as a weapon wielded against the poor.
18Finally, both books speak to the embodied endurance and everyday practices through which city residents confront Bengaluru’s transformation. Chronicles brings attention to how speculative urbanism transforms labor itself into a speculative practice. Workers across sectors, from construction laborers to gig delivery drivers, must engage in their own forms of speculation to survive in the city. Corruption plots is alert to the physical and emotional labor undertaken by slum residents and activist allies under constant threat of eviction. When bulldozers arrived at Ejipura for demolition and eventual eviction, residents “formed a barricade between their homes and the bulldozers, a last-ditch attempt to stall the demolition” (Ranganathan, Pike, and Doshi 2023:27). Together, these dimensions show how state-led dispossession and reordering of everyday life drives the late capitalist city, even as it provokes counter-practices of endurance and repair.
19Chronicles extends the work of recent ethnographies on Bengaluru, such as Carol Upadhya’s Reengineering India (2016) and Supriya Roy Chowdhury’s City of Shadows (2021), by providing not just a lens onto particular segments of the city but a composite view that threads through the aspiration and precarity of city dwellers. Whereas those earlier works focus on the transformations of labor, industry, and informal settlements of Bengaluru, Chronicles offers a more textured account, showing how overlapping circuits of desire and survival by speculative subjects hold the city together, if unevenly. Corruption Plots also extends the body of scholarship on state power, law and urban politics. It builds on Akhil Gupta’s influential work on state and bureaucracy, engaging with his argument that the Indian state, in the form of its varied agencies, is brought into view through corruption discourse (Gupta 2012). Corruption Plots develops this idea, showing how corruption operates as a discursive terrain for people to understand the state’s duties and failures. It is also in dialogue with Jennifer Tucker’s Outlaw Capital (2023), where the relationship between state power and extra-legal economies in Latin America suggests that urban economies are shaped not by clean distinctions between legality and illegality, but by what she calls “accumulation by transgression.”
20Both books gesture toward what Lake (2024) calls a public geography, one that “replaces research about the subject constituted as the object of inquiry with conversation among multiple situated subjects” (Lake 2024:826). Unlike professional geography, which rests on “the confident claim to accurate representation of an antecedent reality,” public geography begins by relinquishing such certitude (Lake 2024:823). In Chronicles, Bengaluru emerges as a product of various imaginations instead of a static site of inquiry. The city of the real-estate agent coexists with the city of the food delivery executive, resisting the pull towards a unified portrait of the city. By refusing to pin corruption to a single explanatory logic, Corruption Plots echoes public geography’s challenge to the certitude of professional geography, insisting that the city can only be understood through the competing narratives of those who inhabit and remake it.
21Writing against the foreclosure of political imagination in social analysis, cultural critic D. R. Nāgarāj warned: “The more sharply the poor man is analyzed from social, economic, and political perspectives, the more circumscribed the life of his imagination becomes” (Nāgarāj 2011:211). His provocation can be read as a core challenge of southern urban theory: how to represent city dwellers without constraining the scope of their lives. Taking up this challenge, the two books make crucial contributions. Both texts draw, explicitly in Corruption Plots and implicitly in Chronicles, on a mode of analysis indebted to culture theorist Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling,” the emergent, not-yet-fully-articulated feelings that shape how people experience and navigate everyday urban life (Williams 2009). Both volumes, in their own ways, practice a sustained attentiveness to these structures of feeling as they are experienced and mediated by residents of Bengaluru. In so doing, they render the conditions of city life with a sensitivity that does not foreclose the imaginative lives of the people who inhabit it.
22In tracing these structures of feelings, the books reveal caste-based dispossession as a force that underwrites the very form and function of the city. From Dalit farmers dispossessed by new “world city” projects to the Dalit and Muslim families evicted from Ejipura in the name of redevelopment, caste/community-based dispossession, the two books confirm that such expropriation is central to how Bengaluru urbanizes (Sharma, 2025). The afterword of Chronicles points to this predicament of Bengaluru, stating how “in the same city that moon-roving technology was developed, sanitation workers still lack basic safety equipment” (Gidwani, Goldman, and Upadhya 2024:282). The promise of the metropolis, these books suggest, is especially flawed for the lower castes. Bengaluru’s caste-based dispossession bears striking resemblance to imperial forms of domination, such as social hierarchy, spatial segregation and the racialization of labor, now diffused and abstracted through globalization and the rhetoric of the “world-class city.” In this emerging landscape, the temporary “state of exception” that Goldman (2011) identified in Bengaluru has become a “permanent temporariness,” as described by geographer Oren Yiftachel, where the marginalized are “concurrently tolerated and condemned, perpetually waiting ‘to be corrected’” (Yiftachel 2009:90).
23The “world city” of Bengaluru becomes not an escape from caste but its globalized expression, where traditional hierarchies find new legitimacy through market mechanisms (Sreenath 2023). In charting these entanglements, Corruption Plots and Chronicles give us the ground from which to develop an urban theory capable of disentangling these new imperial relationships and examining how global capital and caste power mutually constitute each other in the contemporary city.
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