Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), this article illustrates the ‘field of fixing’, a brokerage structure that operates alongside Mumbai’s urban bureaucracy. Scholars of Southern urbanism have extensively written about the role of informalized state action in producing an unequal cityscape. Exploring a disaggregated view of this state space in the megacity of Mumbai, this article turns attention instead to the ‘paralegal’ or the ‘field of fixing’, a liminal space between the state, market and society dictating access to the city in postcolonial India. The expert fixers in this space manipulate and maintain the real estate industry’s relationship with Mumbai’s urban bureaucracy. This article highlights the practices of six such fixers—the follow-up boy, the watcher, the paper expert, the regulation expert, the regulation strategy expert and the liaisoning architect by following the movement of files seeking bureaucratic approvals for land development in Mumbai, elucidating a predatory politics that ensures the success of real-estate developers in the megacity.
The IJURR Editorial Board have voted this as the Best Article Prizewinner of 2025:
Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside Mumbai’s Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), this article theorizes a “field of fixing” that operates alongside and through land and construction bureaucracies. Detailing the hierarchies of fixers – from follow‑up boys and watchers to regulation experts and liaison architects – shadow, sustain, and subvert formal procedures in the production of urban space, Banerji argues that these expert fixers translate complex, paper‑based regulations into predatory but also generative brokerage structures that are integral to Mumbai’s real‑estate urbanism. Extending debates on Southern urbanism, state informality, and postcolonial bureaucracy, the article makes a powerful conceptual intervention into the anthropology of the state and urban political economy by treating fixing not as an individualized practice of corruption, but as a structured social field that stitches together bureaucratic and market power in the postcolonial city.
