Book Review: The Industrial Ephemeral

The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction, by Namita Dharia (2022). Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Namita Dharia opens her new book The Industrial Ephemeral by presenting a powerful contradiction: permanence is built on transience. Even as the construction industry produces the most durable features of our built environment—skyscrapers, highways, housing complexes, and other structures—it operates through an ephemeral logic grounded in the continuous transformation of materials, atmospheres, and labor. For Dharia, atmospheres structure how construction is lived and organized through immersive, multisensory force fields of dust, noise, and heat. This atmospheric logic enables the rapid and often violent restructuring of space for accumulation, sustained by the constant circulation of people, money, and sensory experiences. Ultimately, the construction industry serves a core political function: determining what—and who—is allowed to become permanent, and what must remain temporary and disposable. Studying the city of Gurgaon (now Gurugram, in the state of Haryana), through its rapid transformation from farmland into a metropolis of private real-estate enclaves, Dharia rethinks the story of India’s urban development, which is one that she posits is based on a political economy of ephemerality.

Foregrounding this ephemeral-durable dialectic, Dharia’s book mirrors the life cycle of a construction project, from survey and finance to excavation and building. She traces how these material processes generate political and affective forces—the experiences of fear, love, affection, and desire that fuel the industry. Across six chapters, the author embeds architecture within broader chains of labor and capital, showing how temporary and sensory atmospheres of construction generate the durable social and material foundations for both industrial accumulation and political action. These atmospheres act as a techno-aesthetic force that discipline bodies and forge social bonds, arising from the tensions inherent in using transient labor to produce durable real estate. As she argues, durable infrastructures are in fact “formed by an ephemeral core… the primary site of class, caste, religious, and gender struggle” (24), operating at multiple scales: from the $90 billion Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) to the intimate scale of the human body—marked by occupational injuries, erasure, and often death. For Dharia, ephemerality is not a byproduct but rather a central engine of industrial accumulation.

The Industrial Ephemeral moves between two construction sites: Wandering Woods, a large-scale residential complex, and Haveli, a smaller architect-led bungalow project. This scalar focus reveals the profound social and spatial effects of a multinational industry as it interdigitates with the region. She traces the movement of global real estate, investment, and construction firms into India after the 2008 crash—showing how this multimillion-dollar business “utilizes the ephemeral to perpetuate itself” in a process “doubly embedded in industrial violence” that erases and displaces workers from fast-financializing land (19-20). Dharia shows how a mobile and temporary workforce faces constant displacement, how land becomes financially dematerialized and turned from a tangible social entity into speculative capital, and how architectural practice generates cycles of ephemeral intensity.

Crucially, this entire system is powered by kin-based networks of capital accumulation, where the boundaries between formal and informal are entirely porous. Financial transactions and employment are secured through apna aadmi (“our man” in Hindi)—networks woven from caste, family, and ethnicity. Within these networks, vocal agitators are fired or moved—while money is laundered, and opportunities are funneled to kin. To comprehend the affective power of these networks, in Chapter 2, Dharia introduces the concept of the “sublime”—an overwhelming mix of wonder and terror inspired by stories of swindles and hawala (transnational money laundering). She argues that this pervasive anxiety, which she terms an “ephemeral atmospheric experience” (71), actively disciplines behavior and secures the industry’s oppressive social order.

In Chapters 4 and 5, the politics of labor are crystallized through a distinct vernacular. Majboori (compulsion), mazdoori (wage labor), tez (speed), and jugaad (improvisational fix) overlay a tripartite structure of industrial discipline: the external pressure of the machine, the internalized demand for speed, and the tactical navigation of systemic scarcity. This lexicon circulates as a shared idiom of survival. “Can it be proven in court that the sound of a machine forces workers to work faster and harder, to the point that they cannot cope?” (203), Dharia provokes. Against the backdrop of the “industry of sound,” backhoes, jackhammers, and steel beams produce a new temporal and sensorial regime: the worker who keeps pace is prized as tez ladka (quick boy). Machines accelerate rhythms, compress time, and create new standards of disposability for human bodies. Enforced by the structural compulsion of majboori, the construction industry traps its workers in inescapable cycles of precarity.

Dharia’s “situated and circulatory methodology” (6) reveals how the industry’s operational model—its reliance on temporary fixes—coalesces into a permanent system of exploitation. This approach, which she defines as a “bodily, sensory, and aesthetic approach to understanding urban development” (9), also reveals the world of reproductive labor that flourishes at the interstices. It is within these intimate circuits that Dharia, in Chapter 6, locates the flickering of political consciousness. She shows how bonds of pyaar (love and affection)—domestic, romantic, and spiritual—circulate through worksites, creating temporary households and kinship networks that sustain the very labor market that exploits them. The visceral, shared experience of “the sawdust, the heat, the sweat” (141)—a sudden wage cut, a stolen meal—forges fleeting solidarities. In these moments, gareeb ka paseena, khoon (the poor’s sweat and blood) briefly congeals, allowing laborers to grasp their collective subjectivity before it disperses (195). By attending to these ephemeral textures of sound, smell, and sociality, Dharia shows that the very intangibility of the ephemeral is what makes it a potent industrial tool. Fleeting affects, aesthetics, and material states are, after all, fundamental to contemporary regimes of capital accumulation. (203)

In bridging the anthropology of labor with affect theory and sensory studies, Dharia makes an important intervention to show how capitalism works through the intimate governance of emotions, senses, and social relations. Contributing to a central effort in the contemporary social sciences—demystifying the vernacularizing forms of capital—The Industrial Ephemeral reveals capitalism’s ability to thrive on movement and transience. By tracing the relationship between global capital and ephemeral intimacies, Dharia reframes the city as being the result of a fundamentally unstable process, one where exploitation and political potential are inextricably linked. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in urban studies, political economy, anthropology and architecture, and the often-invisible human and ecological costs that stem from the making of our built environment.