ABSTRACT
The precedent which Manohar drew upon to make claims to the future was one of the few examples of a regularized slum carried out by the Delhi Development Authority in the 1980s. While morphologically the earlier Begumpur village might have resembled the camp, it was in fact its different classification under the master plan which had shaped a different future for its residents. In differentiating between legal/illegal through primarily morphological and material qualities of these places, Manohar was resonating the modernist logics of the urban planners and middle-classes who have also desired order and sanitization of the city since the colonial period. Zahira was well aware through Mahila Mandal's work with the feminist NGO of the layouts in other resettlement colonies across Delhi. Critiques of law found in the writings of Benjamin or Derrida are insightful about the ways that legal constructions of home are linked to the idea of justice in society.
