Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Nehru Memorial Library (New Delhi), CUNY Graduate Center, University of Minnesota, and Uni- versity of California at Berkeley and beneited from the astute comments of several individuals. Thanks to Manisha Anantharaman, Cesare Casa- rino, Erin Collins, Michael Goldman, Manu Goswami, Gopal Guru, Qadri Ismail, Nancy Peluso, Priti Ramamurthy, Raka Ray, Ajay Skaria, Mrinalini Sinha, and Gary Wilder. We also extend our gratitude to Zeenab Aneez, the staf of Hyderabad Urban Lab, and the inhabitants of Bholakpur. Last but not the least, we have beneited from the editorial guidance of Anu- pama Rao. 112 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 36, No. 1, 2016 • doi 10.1215/1089201x-3482159 • © 2016 by Duke University Press The Waste-Value Dialectic Lumpen Urbanization in Contemporary India Vinay Gidwani and Anant Maringanti B holakpur is a breeding ground for disease,” screamed a headline in the Hindu dated May 11, 2009, ive days after a devastating outbreak of ulcerative colitis in the area, due to sewage-contaminated drinking water supply, claimed fourteen lives. The tragic incident unleashed a torrent of alarmist media stories portraying Bholakpur as a “problem area”: a blot on the city of Hyderabad, a global hub for ofshored IT, which must at all costs be expunged and redeveloped. The author of the Hindu article, J. S. Ifthekhar, reported, “Diseases always have had a free run here. Respiratory infections, asthma, fever and headaches are the commonest complaints among the Bholakpur residents. Thanks to the hides, bones and plastic scrap units the area is a potential health hazard all the time.” Indeed, even in the absence of reliable statistical data, it appears that the disease burden in Bholakpur is disproportionately high; the soil in Bholakpur is contaminated with heavy-metal residues; and the neighborhood is prone to ac- cidents related to toxic fumes from septic tanks and used chemical containers. Yet this picture conceals the vitality and exuberance of life in Bholakpur: not only as an eatery, where dozens of restaurants serve delectable food late into the night to workers and visitors, but also as an economic hub that recycles and reprocesses vast quantities of commodity detritus. Consisting entirely of Dalits, Muslims, and Other Backward Class (OBC) residents, Bholakpur is an industrial cluster of hundreds of units that handle plastic scrap, raw hides, bones and tallow, metal scrap, and, lately, e-waste. These units collect waste from homes, factories, hospitals, shops, slaughterhouses, demolition sites, and oices and resurrect it for reuse, sometimes directly in the seconds’ markets, and sometimes after processing the waste into raw material forms for furnaces and factories. Over ive hundred auto-trolleys start and end their day in Bholakpur, making multiple sorties across the city collecting all manner of waste. Dozens of trucks leave Bholakpur daily carrying restituted waste to destinations as far as Delhi, Kanpur, and Mumbai and at times to ports serving overseas markets. In short, Bholakpur is a vital relay point in the dense but poorly understood infra-economy, which salvages, sorts, sequesters, and refabricates the unending waste that is daily gener- ated in Hyderabad and its hinterlands (see ig. 1). “