ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that slum-tour operators face the epistemological questions raised within subaltern studies concerning the limits of ethical knowledge production about slums and their inhabitants. Consequently, the burden also befalls the NGOs facilitating this kind of tourism, as well as the journalists publicising it and the researchers of slum tourism trying to conceptually frame the experience and its repercussions. Subaltern studies in India began as a way of writing Indian history from a perspective that departed both from colonialist elitism and an Indian bourgeoisie-nationalist elitism that, according to Partha Chatterjee, permeated the environment of South Asian history in the 1970s. A report published 2010 on 'Urban Slums in Delhi' (Ali 2010), sets the percentage of inhabitants living in slums in Delhi National Capital Territory (NCT) at only 19% and this figure is startling, given that Delhi experienced a population increase of approximately 50%.
