When Is the State? Topology, Temporality, and the Navigation of Everyday State Space in Delhi

This article seeks to insert questions of temporality into the core of geographical analysis of the state. It does so by drawing on extended fieldwork in slums and so-called unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India, to describe how those who live on the margins of the state employ a topological sensibility in accessing, influencing, and “timing” the state. By attending to the temporal rhythms of these residents' everyday efforts to secure water, electricity, and building permission, the article proposes two topological figures that move beyond narrower spatial metaphors that read that state either as a fixed, hierarchically scaled entity or as a flat, wholly malleable assemblage without consequential spatial order or historicity. These are the topological state and the state outside itself. The analysis of the topological state centers on how real-time connections are forged between residents and key nodes in the bureaucracy, producing momentary reconfigurations of state form that allow low-level state actors to capture authority even as bureaucratic hierarchy is maintained. The analysis of the state outside itself focuses on how the routine actions of water engineers and municipal officers challenge the common conceptual mapping of the state as a surface with an inside and outside. Taken together, these figures reveal a temporally adept mode of political agency open to conjunctural possibilities and proximate connections but often dismissed as a near-sighted political disposition symptomatic of the poor and marginal classes' submission to clientalist politics.