Wealth, Mobility, Accretive Citizenship and Belonging: Why Everyone Comes to Kullu and How they Remain

Abstract

This chapter examines the contemporary multi-layered and multi-axial production of the fast-growing Kullu-Bhuntar urban area, in Kullu district, Himachal Pradesh, from a number of perspectives. The first part of the chapter illustrates Kullu’s contemporary growth as linked to its historical emergence as an urban centre—firstly, as a princely capital under successive rulers and as a trading and transport hub along inter-Asian trade routes. Kullu’s historical and contemporary urbanisation, is thus informed by longstanding modes of mobility and interaction, including with the rural hinterland, across interconnected valleys, and between the North Indian plains and the cold desert areas of Ladakh and Tibet, as described on the basis of primary and secondary sources. In the post-Independence period, Himachal state policies have yielded a relatively broad based prosperity for the district’s rural hinterland, as horticulture has expanded, and land has been distributed to the landless. Such agricultural wealth has cemented and augmented Kullu’s historic urban role as an important site for service provision for a relatively prosperous rural and regional hinterland, that is increasingly investing in the town. In the contemporary moment, these locally inflected dynamics continue to inform Kullu’s expanding urban space even as Kullu district is seeing various new capital flows into the region, mainly in the form of building by state institutions, the construction of hydroelectric power projects, and increasing tourism. The second part of the chapter describes the contemporary and multiple drivers of growth in the area as forms of state-initiated and facilitated ‘institutional urbanisation’ or ‘self-urbanisation’. It also speaks to the kind of urban form that is emerging - in terms of urban morphology itself, as a form of metropolitanisation, encompassing both rural and urban jurisdictions, mainly through ribbon development following the national highway, emanating from Kullu town. In the third and last section of the chapter, I consider the implications of Kullu’s growth in terms of the relationships between so-called ‘locals’, settled migrant communities, and various streams of newer migrants who have come to work in the expanding metropolitan region. Given the restrictions on ownership of land on non-Himachalis, what the section shows is how non-Himachalis acquire what can be termed an accretive citizenship, gaining local citizenship rights over time. Simultaneously, however, it is often suggested that anyone who comes to Kullu remains. What this adage refers to are the comforts of a town located within a district with overwhelming, and fairly widely distributed natural resources—suggesting that a capacity for a languid plenitude is one of the most critical dynamics shaping Kullu’s expanding urban growth, situated as it is, at the intersection of numerous mobile flows: of people, things and monies.