Ethnicities and Urban Inequalities: Resources, Entitlements, and Social Exclusion in Indian Cities

Walk through any large Indian city and you’ll notice something interesting: people from the same state, language group, or caste tend to cluster together. South Indians in one pocket, Bengalis in another, a particular caste dominating a specific neighbourhood. This isn’t coincidence. It’s a pattern anthropologists have studied for decades, and it tells us a lot about how cities distribute opportunity, and how they don’t.

What makes a group “ethnic” in a city 🔗

Ethnic groups form around a shared sense of common origin. This could be a shared language, region, religion, or ancestry. Cities are natural breeding grounds for ethnicity because they pull in people from different tribal, linguistic, and regional backgrounds and put them in close proximity with one another.

What makes an ethnic group distinct isn’t just shared culture. It’s the emotional weight members place on a common history and bloodline, even when that ancestry is more symbolic than literal. This sentimental attachment builds group loyalty that outsiders can find hard to penetrate. But there’s a numbers threshold too. A handful of migrants from the same region rarely gets noticed. Once a group grows large enough to be visible, occupy space, and interact regularly with other communities, the city starts to recognise it as a distinct ethnic entity, with its own name, reputation, and turf.

How ethnicity shapes economic life 🔗

Cities promise opportunity, but that opportunity is rarely distributed evenly. Discrimination and limited access to formal job markets often push members of the same ethnic group toward the same trades. Someone gets a foothold in a particular business or occupation, then pulls in relatives and community members through personal networks rather than open hiring. This is how you end up with entire communities associated with a single trade or sector.

Over time, this shared economic position reinforces the group’s social cohesion. People who work together, live near each other, and share similar economic struggles interact more intensely with each other than with outsiders. The result is a kind of feedback loop: economic niche strengthens ethnic identity, and ethnic identity strengthens the economic niche.

Boundaries, cohesion, and caste as ethnicity 🔗

Every ethnic group draws lines, some visible and some not, that separate insiders from outsiders. Inside these boundaries, groups build cohesion through shared symbols, rituals, and institutions that only make sense to members. In the Indian context, this is where caste enters the picture. While caste is often studied as a religious or ritual hierarchy, it functions in cities much like an ethnic identity: a bounded group with its own sense of common descent, internal solidarity, and recognisable position relative to other groups.

The Jatavs of Agra 🔗

One of the clearest illustrations of this comes from the American anthropologist Owen Lynch’s long-term fieldwork among the Jatavs of Agra, a Dalit community traditionally associated with leatherwork and shoemaking. Lynch documented how the Jatavs formed a tightly bound social unit, culturally distinct from surrounding groups, with dense interaction within the community and a shared narrative of ancestry that other urban groups came to recognise them by. In other words, it wasn’t just self-identification that made the Jatavs a caste-based ethnic group. It was also how other communities in Agra catalogued and reacted to them.

Ethnic enclaves across Indian cities 🔗

This clustering shows up geographically as ethnic enclaves, entire neighbourhoods known for hosting one community. Mumbai’s Matunga has long been nicknamed “Little Madras” for its concentration of South Indian residents, complete with Udupi restaurants and Carnatic music schools. In Delhi, Chittaranjan Park emerged when the government allotted land to Bengali refugees displaced by Partition, and the colony grew into what locals still call “Little Kolkata,” complete with its own fish markets and Durga Puja festivities.

Religious identity produces similar clustering. Areas like Zakir Nagar, Shaheen Bagh, and Jafrabad in Delhi are widely recognised as Muslim-majority localities. Research on housing discrimination shows that many residents don’t cluster here purely out of preference. Rental discrimination and the fear of being turned away by landlords or brokers elsewhere in the city push people toward neighbourhoods where their identity won’t be a barrier to finding a home. What looks like a lifestyle choice from the outside is often a survival strategy shaped by exclusion.

Caste produces its own version of this pattern through settlements like Ambedkar Basti and Kabir Basti, names that openly declare the dominant caste identity of the neighbourhood. These aren’t just addresses. They’re markers of how caste continues to organise urban space long after migration to the city.

The Gadulia Lohars: identity without recognition 🔗

Not every ethnic group in the city enjoys even the modest stability of a named enclave. The Gadulia Lohars, a nomadic community of ironsmiths originally from Rajasthan, illustrate what happens when ethnic identity collides with a complete lack of state recognition. Scholarship on the community, including a detailed housing rights survey of Gadia Lohar settlements in Delhi, found that the overwhelming majority of families lack caste certificates altogether, which locks them out of government welfare schemes meant for marginalised communities. Most live in temporary structures along roadsides, with no secure land rights and a constant risk of eviction.

This precarity does something unexpected to group identity. Rather than eroding under pressure, the community’s traditions and internal cohesion often become more important, not less. The everyday threat of being uprooted, of losing whatever cultural footing they have, functions almost like glue, holding traditional institutions and practices together even as the community remains invisible to formal state structures. It’s a striking example of how ethnicity in the city isn’t only about pride or heritage. Sometimes it’s a defence mechanism against precariousness.

Urban inequalities: who gets the resources 🔗

Ethnic and caste-based clustering doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It intersects directly with how cities distribute basic resources. Neighbourhoods with more power, status, or wealth tend to receive dependable water supply, functioning sewage systems, reliable electricity, and better roads. Neighbourhoods without those advantages, disproportionately home to poorer, lower-caste, or minority communities, are left to make do with whatever informal arrangements they can build for themselves.

A study of a Mumbai slum found this divide operating even within a single settlement. Households in the officially “notified,” or government-recognised, section of the slum had markedly better water infrastructure and access than households in the unrecognised, “non-notified” section, even after accounting for income and religion. Legal status alone, decided years earlier by administrative boundaries, was enough to determine who got water and who didn’t.

This isn’t a fringe issue limited to a handful of neighbourhoods. A large-scale comparative analysis of slums across Indian cities found that access to piped water, private toilets, and domestic electricity in slums consistently lags behind the rest of the city, though the gap narrows somewhat in larger metros compared to smaller towns. The pattern holds across regions: proximity to power and formal recognition by the state determines who gets counted, and who gets served.

Put together, ethnicity and inequality reinforce each other in Indian cities. Groups that arrive with fewer resources or face discrimination in housing and employment often end up concentrated in neighbourhoods that the state formally or informally neglects. Their ethnic identity becomes both a source of belonging and, in a strange way, a marker the city uses to justify unequal treatment.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Do you think ethnic enclaves in your own city form more out of cultural preference, or out of the kind of exclusion described here? And how might better recognition of communities like the Gadulia Lohars change their access to the entitlements other city residents take for granted?

References

1. https://sova.si.edu/record/naa.2013-11
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08865655.2019.1653786
3. https://tribe.article-14.com/post/cities-divided-how-exclusion-of-muslims-sharpens-inequality
4. https://hlrn.org.in/documents/Press_Release_Gadia_Lohar_Report.pdf
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10237587/
6. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.05728