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Cities against caste?
The political sociology of citizenship among labour migrants in India
Abstract:
India is urbanizing, albeit reluctantly. Nearly a tenth of its inhabitants- a 100 million people-
continue to straddle the rural and the urban. In this paper, I examine the political identities of such
‘circular labor migrants’ and the specific meanings they make of their changing social lives. In particular, I
critically review the arguments that urbanization leads to an erosion of traditional notions of hierarchy
and status and inculcates democratic citizenship. Through ethnographic interventions, I present two
arguments. First, I argue that migrants to urban areas, even first-time migrants, do not simply carry
allegedly ‘traditional’ values with them, but are already partakers of democratic political ideas. Second, I
argue that experiences in caste-segmented urban labor markets reinforce, rather than dissolve, notions of
hierarchy and status. The analysis of political ideas forged by labor migrants reveals that urbanization
and democratization are disjunctive vis-à-vis one another. The paper draws on preliminary research
among labor migrants who straddle the rural-urban divide in India, calling into question the very
categories of space that are associated with these.
Indrajit Roy (D. Phil, Oxon) ESRC Future Research Leader Fellow St Antony's College/ Department of International Development University of Oxford
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Cities against caste?
The political sociology of citizenship among labour migrants in India
Acknowledgements: I’d like to thank Professors Nandini Gooptu and Hein de Haas for useful leads and insights that helped me think about issues of remittances as well as urbanisation and citizenship in general. Also, like to thank participants of the International Growth Center (IGC) at Patna, India, for their comments and feedback to an earlier version of this paper, which focused more on migrants than on cities. The usual disclaimers apply.
The perspective that urbanisation threatens autocracies (Hobsbawm, 1973) and
induces democracy (Rustow, 1960) has remained enormously influential. This is
despite the emergence of highly unequal ‘megacities’ across the world: according to a
UN-HABITAT report, 40 ‘megacities’ are home to 18% of the world’s population,
concentrate 66% of all economic activity and 85% of all scientific and technological
progress. Nonetheless, scholars continue to normatively privilege the urban because of
its putative contribution to human well-being. In the influential Harriss-Todero
model, cities are the hubs of economic activity, which can potentially absorb the
surplus labour from the rural areas. Given the concentration of settlements, public
provision of basic services- such as electricity, health, education and potable water-
are easier in cities. Such a concentration of people also facilitates collective action.
Cities provide anonymity to inhabitants, allowing Liberal freedoms to flourish. The
socialities produced by cities allegedly undermine primordial identities such as caste,
religion and ethnicity. In general, the transition from the rural to the urban are
associated with such normative ideas as democratisation, citizenship, modernisation
and improvement.
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To be sure, many scholars have challenged the normative privileging of the
urban. Post-developmentalist writers, following the leads provided by Arturo Escobar
have criticised the hubris associated with such notions as development. James Scott, in
offering an anarchist analysis of the High Modernist projects of the postcolonial states,
condemns the utopian vision of planners. Ashis Nandy has gone so far as to allege that
the crimes with which urban residents are familiar, such as rape, are actually unheard
of in rural areas. The rural, rather than the urban, provides the space for human
freedoms and its eventual emancipation to flourish. Their criticisms are inspired by a
view of the rural as a timeless immutable space whose pristine purity has to be-
normatively- preserved.
Notwithstanding the obvious differences between the two perspectives, they
are both predicated on a reified view of social change. Modernisation theorists predict
an inexorable transition from the rural to the urban. Accepting this view, theorists
opposing their viewpoints bemoan such transition. As ‘transition-enthusiasts’,
Modernisation theorists celebrate the possibility that the rural will assimilate into the
urban, allowing democracy to flourish and the promise of citizenship to be fulfilled.
Their opponents, as ‘transition-pessimists’, pin their hopes on the preservation of the
difference between the rural and the urban, fearing that urbanisation will limit the
possibilities for democracy and citizenship. But both groups of scholars share a reified
analytical understanding of the rural and the urban. They conceptualise the two
spaces as distinct and separate. Notwithstanding the differences in their normative
salience, their analytical approach is predicated on a neat dichotomisation of the rural
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and the urban. Such an approach prevents them from appreciating the reality of the
entanglements between the urban and the rural, between cities and villages.
I offer the present paper as an attempt to understand people’s political
practices at the interstices of the rural and the urban. Through it I build upon the
work of scholars who have demonstrated the messy and often unpredictable ways in
which the rural and the urban are in fact enmeshed.
One facet of these entanglements pertains to the practices of what Henry
Bernstein (2002) calls the ‘peasant in the city’. In the Indian context, Dipesh
Chakrabarty (1989) reminds us that labour migrants who arrived from rural eastern
India to work in Calcutta’s fledgling industries brought with them very distinct idioms
of social relationships that drew on fictive kinship. Asef Bayat’s (2010) research in
Middle Eastern cities reveals the manner in which the ‘quiet encroachments’ of
migrants from rural areas who bring their distinctive socialities onto urban public
spaces are perceived as threats to order and authority by the privileged classes as well
as the authorities. Deborah Potts’ (2015) research tells about the ways through which
the circulation of migrants in fact blurs the boundaries between the rural and the
urban in Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Another facet of these entanglements are provided by the influence exerted by
the city on the countryside. Thomas Blom Hansen (2001) tells us about the ways in
which the spatial expansion of Bombay city led to the absorption of the religious
practices of the surrounding populations to assume communal salience, upon which
the religious nationalism of the city’s preeminent political parties was built up.
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Referring to Latin America, Henry Veltmeyer (2010) highlights the ways in which
peasant struggles in the Latin American countryside are inspired by the specific
experiences of agricultural labourers who live for short durations in the cities and
forge solidarities with other working class people. AbouMalik Simone’s (2007) work in
central Africa alerts us to the political circulations of people through town and country
as young people politically negotiate the constraints they face.
In this paper, I examine the political practices of circular labour migrants,
people who regularly straddle both spaces. I take a view of ‘political’ to refer not only
to electoral competition for institutional control but also to contests over material,
social and symbolic resources. Such a view of the political entails taking seriously
everyday contentions over apparently banal aspects of life. It compels me to shift
attention beyond electoral politics and spectacular events to the humdrum and the
mundane. As such, the methodology for collecting data must involve maintaining
sustained contact with research subjects as regular interlocutors. Therefore,
ethnographic methods are most appropriate for a study of this kind (Willis, 2000). By
exposing researchers to what might otherwise be perceived as insignificant,
ethnographic methods allow them to appreciate the quotidian ways in which people
create new identities and forge new practices that interrogate (or affirm) existing
relations of power, authority and influence. They provide a window to the ways in
which people forge their collective selves in tension and negotiation with one another
as well as the structures they encounter.
An ethnography of people circulating between urban and rural spaces
potentially unsettles several of the certitudes that social scientists hold in relation to
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citizenship, urbanisation, and modernity. The account of migrants straddling the two
spaces is not a straightforward account of ‘peasants turning into Indians’ or ‘subjects
transforming into citizens’. Rather, it is to confront the ambivalences and the
heterogeneities that attend to the categories of the urban and the rural, while
eschewing both unbridled optimism as well as nihilistic pessimism about a ‘transition’
process which may in fact be a far more fractured and multifaceted process of change.
The ethnography on which this paper draws is part of my ongoing academic
engagement with the political sociology of change in India, with an empirical focus on
Bihar State. In addition to conducting eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in
2009-10, I have since returned to the fieldwork locations for approximately two
months each year. In 2009, I conducted a census survey covering approximately 2200-
odd households to situate my ethnographic work against the locality’s socio-economic
profile. I complemented these with in-depth unstructured interviews with
approximately thirty key informants among the locality’s elites as well as formal group
discussions with members of different neighbourhoods. A scaled-up survey covering
10,000 households is currently under way to collect data about patterns of migration in
order to better contextualise ongoing ethnographic work, which will involve
developing life histories of individuals from select families. The material and the
analysis presented here is preliminary, and very much a work-in-progress.
I will first introduce the locality where ethnographic fieldwork was conducted.
Thereafter I will dwell on two cases pertaining to the ways in which labour migrants
remit political ideas across the spatial divide between the rural and the urban. To
anticipate the discussions, I will show that migrants’ experiences with electoral
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democracy and their participation in movements for caste dignity and class
mobilisation in their localities of origin in rural Bihar shape their notions of equality
and justice. These experiences shape their decisions to migrate out of Bihar to seek
employment in Delhi, India’s capital, where they expect caste to be withering away.
However, the caste-segmented labour markets in urban India, combined with poor
working conditions and absence of any form of social protection not only enhance
their vulnerabilities but also frustrate their political imaginations and force them to
confront the reality of caste as a structuring mechanism. While the ideas they remit
home to their friends and neighbours in rural Bihar continue to be shaped by the
notions of equality and justice, the constraints they face in urban Delhi prevent them
from engaging in any kind of collective action even remotely similar to the ones they
experienced in their villages of origin.
I
If Bihar is one of India’s most impoverished States (over 40% of its population
lives below the national poverty line), north Bihar – where my field sites are located- is
its most impoverished region. Agriculture provides the primary source of livelihoods
for most people, and 36% of all households in the district are categorised in the
Census as agricultural labourers. According to a census I conducted in the locality
where I undertook fieldwork 40% of the 2200-odd households affirmed that at least
one member of their household had been away for work at any time during the
previous year. For the overwhelming majority of these households, work meant ‘casual
employment’.
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In their rural homes, they usually find employment as agricultural labourers,
although some among them might own tiny parcels of agricultural land. In their
destinations across northern India, many among them work in the $ 157 billion
construction industry (figures according to Price Water Coopers). They find
employment either as workers employed during the construction of infrastructure and
buildings in Delhi or as workers in the millions of brick kilns that feed into the
industry. Others work as street vendors, rickshaw pullers, head-loaders, domestic
helps or manual scavengers. Yet others make their way to hire their labour to farmers
in north-western India, the States of Punjab and Haryana, as agricultural labourers.
They spend between two and three months in each of their destination locations,
before returning to their villages where they spend between three-to-four months with
their families. Contracts- oral or written- are rare.
Typically, then, in any given year, the people whose political practices I
investigate would have worked in- circulated between- at least three different
locations in the country. It is not uncommon for them to traverse up to 4,000 k.m.
each year. An overwhelming majority of them are men, whose wives and children stay
back in the villages, attend to their homes (or farms if they have any), go to school,
and sometimes hire their labour out to local employers or on state-funded public
works programs if these are operational. A huge majority of these circular labour
migrants are members of communities that have been historically oppressed and
stigmatised as ‘untouchable’ and ‘low caste’. Hindus as well as Muslims from among
these communities make up the migrants. Members of privileged communities also
migrate, but are less likely to circulate as labour migrants.
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The snapshots I will present in this talk are based on hanging out among and
preliminary interviews with Dalit (so-called ‘untouchable) labour migrants as they
straddle the blurred spaces between the rural and the urban in India. I propose to
follow these up with developing life histories as well as State-wide surveys and group
discussions to develop a more wholesome account of political remittances.
II
Urban-rural entanglements
I was introduced to the political sociology of citizenship among labour
migrants and their families during a chance meeting in early September 2013 with 35-
year old Maturi Rishi, a Dalit agricultural labourer while I was interviewing his
employer, a farmer who owned about 3 hectares of land. Maturi Rishi, his wife Sejni
Rishi and about five-six of their neighbors- all Dalits- were all engaged in
transplanting the paddy crop. The farmer I was interviewing was supervising the
operations while offering his opinions about the questions I was asking. I was a
familiar figure in the village, as well as to the farmer and the labourers, so the
conversations were relaxed and relatively unstructured. We had been talking for about
half-an-hour when Maturi Rishi’s mobile phone rang. It was his brother, Sapuri Rishi,
on the line, calling from Delhi. Both brothers had gone to Punjab earlier in the year
(April, I was told). While Maturi- the brother who was working on the fields- had
returned to their village in July, Sapuri- the brother who had called- had gone on to
Delhi. Sapuri, the Delhi brother was the older of the two.
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As they spoke, my interlocutor, the farmer, and I were both distracted. Like I
was, the farmer too was very keen to know what they were talking about. It was soon
clear that Maturi was reporting to his brother that he, his wife and their neighbours
were all working at the farmer’s. My interlocutor proceeded to complain- in hushed
tones- that Sapuri was inciting his brother and his team to not work or to work for
higher remuneration. From the snatches of conversations I heard, Maturi Rishi
appeared to be feebly defending their decision to work on the farmer’s field. But I was
not sure of the context of the conversation, and refused to believe what my
interlocutor said. A few minutes later, Maturi Rishi was off the mobile and began
conferring with his wife and neighbours. In a while, he came over to the farmer and
called him aside. I am not sure what transpired between them but after the labourers
went back to work, the farmer told me that what he had feared had happened: Maturi
and the other workers had asked for a raise, he said, failing which they threatened to
cease work. My interlocutor was sure it was the brother who had egged them on.
When I went later that evening to Maturi’s hamlet, as I did each evening during
my fieldwork, he and his friends told me of the way in which his brother had indeed
gotten angry with him for working on the farmer’s field. “Why do you not come to
Delhi to work,” his brother had told him, he said, as we served ourselves some chai.
“What was the need to work for someone else when there was so much work in Delhi,
in Punjab, elsewhere?” he had asked. Moreover, his brother had been very upset about
the fact that Maturi’s wife and other women of the neighbourhood were working on
the farmer’s field. Were there no public works schemes on which they could find
employment? Why were they labouring for someone else? Maturi should have realised
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that they were not kamaiyas any more- not bonded slaves. Rather, they were
majdoors- labourers- who were entitled to lead lives of dignity (ijjat).
Maturi was emphatic that his brother had said nothing about asking for
increased wages, as the farmer suggested he had. In fact, he denied that there was any
renegotiation of wages. By then, several of his neighbours had gathered at the raised
platform on which he and I had been chatting over chai. Some among them affirmed
their agreement with Maturi’s brother. They said that working on farmers’ lands
compromised their dignity (samman).
But other neighbours countered them. They said these were meaningless issues.
If the farmer was paying them the correct wages, they should not make an issue out of
nothing. This was their village as much as it was the farmers. Why was he asking his
brothers to go over to Delhi? If there was so much work in Delhi, why did Sapuri Rishi
keep coming back? He might as well stay on there. If people in the village did not
work for the farmers, what would they eat? Maturi Rishi sprang to his absent brother’s
defence. Remuneration was not all there was to life, was it, he asked. What about self-
respect and dignity? Did they forget the number of times the farmers served them
their meals in segregated utensils while they sat on the bare ground while workers of
other communities were given preferential treatment. Many of the neighbours had
themselves complained about such farmers. Sapuri Rishi and many of these
neighbours had protested such acts in the past by ceasing to work on the farms of such
farmers. As a result, many farmers professed to eschew such caste-based segregation.
But it was impossible to say whether the utensils in which they served food were
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actually de-segregated or not, since they all looked the same. That must be why his
brother did not want them to work in the farmer’s homes, Maturi reasoned.
But his interlocutors remained unconvinced. Delhi had driven his brother mad,
they said, hugging Maturi in fake sympathy.
Their debate was inconclusive and I had to leave because of commitments to
my host family. But I could not help thinking about the tele-conversation between the
two brothers, and the subsequent arguments that one conversation spawned- among
the labourers, between the labourers and the farmer, and in the neighbourhood of the
labourers. Sapuri Rishi, a construction worker in NOIDA, on the outskirts of Delhi,
seemed to have quite specific conceptions of the way in which he intended himself, his
family members and their neighbours to relate with their erstwhile employers, their
locality’s farmers. If his brother recounted their conversation correctly, and I have no
reason to believe otherwise, then one might say that his telephonic advice was a
political remittance that fuelled the ongoing contentions between the labourers and
the farmers and conversations among Maturi Rishi, his family and their neighbours
about their identity as workers.
The next evening, when I met Maturi Rishi and his neighbours at their usual
hangout, they continued to talk about this matter. Apparently, Sapuri Rishi had called
their other neighbours as well about it, and asked them to convince his brother to
cease work on the farmer’s fields. The following morning, when I passed by the
farmer’s fields, I observed that, inclusive of Maturi Rishi, only four of the seven
original labourers had reported for work. Three of their neighbours had decided to
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stay away. Maturi Rishi grumbled that his brother had prevailed upon them to stay
away. But he was a man of principle, he told me. He had committed to working this
season for the farmer. And he would fulfil his obligation, brother or no brother! The
political ideas remitted by Sapuri Rishi appeared to have some traction among his
neighbours, if not sufficiently enough on his own brother.
The farmer had been suitably enraged. At the bazaar later that afternoon, I
heard him in conversation with other farmers cursing the absent labourers. He was
abused Sapuri Rishi as a Naxalite, as someone fomenting discontent among
agricultural labourers. The figure of the Naxalite evokes images of armed radicals
threatening to overthrow the Indian state and wage relentless war against putative
class enemies. Of course Sapuri Rishi had made no calls for an armed revolution
against the Indian state. He made no arguments for an upward revision of wages that
would bring him into conflict with farmers, the hirers of labour. What he asked his
brother to do was far more modest, yet far more radical, to withdraw altogether from
relations of production that placed them in a subordinate position in the agrarian
hierarchy. By reminding his family members and neighbours that they were labourers,
not slaves, he was insisting that they renegotiate the relations of power, authority and
influence that privileged farmers at the cost of landless agricultural labourers, such as
themselves.
Caste and democratisation in rural Bihar
Political scientists have spoken about a democratic upsurge (Yogendra Yadav,
1999) in India, a ‘silent revolution’ (Christophe Jaffrelot, 2003) and the ‘plebianisation
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of public culture’ (Thomas Blom Hansen, 2001) of sorts since the end of the 1980s.
Assertions against the privilege and power cornered by the dominant castes has been a
centrepiece of this upsurge, this revolution. A number of scholars- Bela Bhatia (2005),
Jeffrey Witsoe (2013), George Kunnath (2012)- show that rural Bihar has been a key site
for these assertions, which have often led to brutal violence perpetrated by the
privileged against the poor, by branding them Naxalite- as the farmer had sought to
do. Many of these assertions were supported by underground communist parties as
well as caste associations. Membership, especially of the poor, in heterodox sects
preaching social equality against hierarchy has proliferated, and made social equality
fundamental to the political imagination of the State’s rural poor. Rural Bihar’s
ongoing democratisation has to be kept in mind when thinking about Sapuri Rishi’s
political ideas.
Caste has provided a key axis to the struggles for democratisation. For nearly
two hundred years, rural Bihar was governed under the Permanent Settlement
imposed by the region’s colonial rulers. Under the terms of the Permanent Settlement,
absentee landlords, who almost always belonged to Bihar’s tri-caste elite- comprising
members of such communities Brahmins, Rajputs and Kayasths- controlled the land
and levied cesses in addition to the officially mandated taxes. The overwhelming
majority of tenants tended stigmatised as ‘low caste’ or ‘untouchable’.
Such tenants and agricultural labourers, upon whom the burden of levies fell,
began to revolt against such arrangements through most of the twentieth century.
Supporting their movements were organisations committed to securing social and
economic justice. Until the middle of the twentieth century, organisations such as
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Kisan Sabhas (farmers associations) and the communist-party affiliated All India
Agricultural Laborers Association (AIALA) provided small and marginal farmers and
agricultural labourers with the platform to collectively demand agrarian reform.
Maturi Rishi’s grandfather was an active member of the agricultural labourers’
association. The postcolonial Indian state partially responded to their demands by
abolishing the Permanent Settlement, thereby enabling market-based land transfers
that permitted more social and economic mobility in rural Bihar than was hitherto
possible. Although the lot of the agricultural labourers remained precarious, a few
tenants were able to obtain land from their erstwhile employers, and contributed to
the shifting of the political balance from absentee landlords to small-holding peasant
proprietors.
Even such peasant proprietors who obtained land faced discrimination in
public life and political platforms dominated by the tri-caste elites of mainstream
political parties. They began to coalesce their political action in explicitly caste terms
under the category of the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs) to protest against such
prejudices. Their sheer numbers, coupled with their new-found, albeit precarious,
economic mobility, provided them with some leverage over the electoral mechanisms.
Their challenge to the tri-caste elite substantially democratised social relations in the
countryside, enabling agricultural labourers, who were mostly of the so-called
‘untouchable’ Dalit communities to assert their autonomy of their erstwhile masters.
Admittedly, Dalits were unable to wield the same influence over electoral politics as
the OBCs did. Their assertions were often met with brutal violence, as discussed
above. But the substantive democratisation of social relations meant that they were no
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longer beholden to their erstwhile masters. Despite living in dire poverty, Dalits gave
up practices such as the eating of left-over food from feasts, practices traditionally
imposed upon them by the tri-caste elites. They also began to assert their presence in
the public spaces in the villages by more confidently organising their festivals and
cultural observances, activities which the tri-caste elites had hitherto prohibited.
Maturi and Sapuri Rishi’s father, now in his fifties, had been at the forefront of
organising such festivals in their locality, an act that had caused a great deal of tension
with local elites. He had been among the earliest people to migrate for seasonal
employment to the richer provinces of north-western India during the 1970s. He told
me that the experience was exhilarating. In his words,
Here in [name of village], we had been demanding to be treated as human beings. But the dominant castes treated us like untouchables. In Punjab and Haryana, it was all very different. The sardarji would sit with us on the same charpai [jute-strung cot], eat with us and even drink water from the same pot as we did. It seems they could understand us better than our own people did.
The elderly gentleman’s eyes gleamed when he talked about his employers in
Punjab. More than the economic benefits of working in Punjab, it seems to me that he
valued much more the dignity accorded to him by his employers there. His and his
neighbours’ expectations of expectation, that they be “treated as human beings” were
met by employers in Punjab. But it is important to remember that the provenance of
such expectations lay in the struggles over democracy and social justice forged in the
Bihar countryside since at least the 1920s.
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Citizenship in the city?
The following month, I met Sapuri Rishi in a part of Delhi that was far from his
workplace in NOIDA, on Delhi’s south-eastern outskirts. When I called to set up a
meeting with him, he preferred to meet some distance away from his place of work. I
eventually met him and three of his mates, all from the same locality in Bihar, nearly
30 kim. away in North Delhi. Sapuri looked much older than his 40 years. He told me
had come to NOIDA as part of a 30-member gang of Dalit labourers, all of the same
Musahar community as him. They had been recruited by a labour contractor of their
community. Members of their gang lived together, ate together and went to work
together. Eight of the gang members were from the same locality as him, and they had
lived in the same neighbourhood back in the village. This brought him some comfort,
he said, as there were some familiar people in the town. They had made acquaintance
with other workers at the site, but had not really gotten to know them. Guards were
posted round the clock and a foreman kept track of their activities. The foreman was
also a Dalit man but from a different community. The guards were of another
community from the neighbouring State of Jharkhand. Sapuri Rishi and his mates said
they were on cordial terms with the guards and the foreman but were also confident
that they reported every activity and feelings of disaffection to the labour firm.
Sapuri Rishi was not clear as to who exactly his employer was- as far as he was
concerned, it was the labour contractor who did everything for him. Nearly four
hundred people were employed on that site: some came from his native State of Bihar,
but from different regions. A large number came from Bundelkhand region of Uttar
Pradesh as well as from States such as Jharkhand and Odisha. He and his group were
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paid ` 120 and were provided food and lodging. They lived on-site, and the contractor
was responsible for ensuring that provisions were being made. Payments were made
on a weekly basis.
Laborers had to work over ten hours (with no extra payment for overtime) and
there was no question of paid leave. Injuries at the work place were common, and the
days of work lost due to injuries were counted as days absent from work. During the
last two months, three people had lost some ten working days due to injuries. Some
payment was made during those days on compassionate grounds, but that was entirely
at the discretion and kindness of the contractor. Typically, the contractor would
promise the injured laborer that he would do his best to ensure that the company paid
the workers, but then would inevitably say that the company had refused, and that he
was paying them from his own pocket. Sapuri Rishi said he was never sure what went
on: whether the contractor was speaking the truth, or whether the company had
actually paid the contractor and it was the contractor who pocketed the money. One
laborer from Jharkhand had been killed by a fallen iron rod. Although that group of
fifteen laborers had gotten very agitated over this, they were eventually pacified by
their contractor.
The only social protection labourers such as Sapuri Rishi enjoyed was to cover
eventualities such as injuries or death. Between 2010-11 and 2013-14, the Bihar
Government compensated the families of 569 deceased workers. The subsidized food
to which they are entitled in their rural homes are not available to them outside their
villages, making them completely dependent on the open market (or their labour
contractors) to meet their food requirements. Likewise for shelter. Sapuri Rishi said
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they lived in temporary sheds covered with tarpaulin sheets, all provided by the labour
contractor.
Sapuri Rishi is one among India’s vast numbers of internal circular migrants,
streaming into its cities from great distances in the countryside for short durations
every year in search of employment so that they and their families are able to lead
dignified lives. Although scholars differ in their estimates of the numbers of internal
circular migrants in the country, with figures ranging from 30 million to 100 million,
they agree that vulnerability and insecurity mark their lives during their stay in
destinations such as Delhi. For instance, a study conducted by Professor Ravi
Srivastava of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) shows that 99% of all
labourers in the city’s construction sector are circular migrants from Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar and West Bengal. Further, as much as 94% of them have no formal labor
contracts, indicating a precarious life indeed.
Not only are labour migrants’ working conditions precarious, their conditions
of life are perilous as well. The majority of labour migrants live in fenced-in and
guarded worksites, with conditions similar to those of labour camps. Many of them
live under tarpaulin roofs with poor amenities. They work through day and by night,
with little by way of ‘overtime payments’. My preliminary research among
approximately 3,000 circular labour migrants with homes in north Bihar and who
work in Delhi for four-to-six months during the year reveals that they cannot access
their entitlements to subsidised food under the public distribution system (PDS) while
in Delhi because their ration cards are invalid here. They either depend on their
employer/ labour contractor for their food provisions or purchase it in the open
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market. Such dependence significantly increases the cost of living for them and
reduces the additional earnings they might hope to remit to their families. The only
social support their families possess is the compensation offered by the Bihar State
Government in case of their death at work. Because migrant workers are mostly in
informal employment across several sectors and industries, they have very little spaces
to voice their grievances and articulate even legitimate complaints. Their voting rights
are restricted to their villages, what the Census calls their usual place of residence
(UPR), despite the fact that they give the best part of their working lives to the city.
This reduces their value to the host cities’ politicians, who do not need their votes to
win elections at all.
Of late, policy-makers seem intent on formalizing such exploitation and
exclusion. At the recent seminar on ‘Smart Cities in India: Reality in the Making’,
where Shri Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Urban Development,
Government of India, gave the Keynote Address, the seminar brochure outlines this
exclusionary vision. After highlighting the infrastructural developments offered by the
‘Smart Cities’ program envisioned by the Indian Government, the authors of the
brochure (available, thanks to conscientious citizens, here:
https://aamjanata.com/wp-content/uploads/smart-cities.compressed.pdf) make the
abominable observation that:
“ … the conventional laws in India will not enable us to exclude millions of poor Indians from
enjoying the privileges of such great infrastructure. Hence the police will need to physically exclude people
from such cities, and they will need a different set of laws from those operating in the rest of India for them
to be able to do so. Creating special enclaves is the only method of doing so.”
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That labour migrants such as Sapuri Rishi will be recruited to actually construct
the Smart Cities of the government’s imagination appears lost on the organizers of the
conference and indeed, the planners of the Smart Cities. The idea of citizenship
espoused by the planners is designed to privilege the few at the cost of the many.
Caste and the city
The labour contractor who managed Sapuri Rishi’s gang, like other labour
contractors, reported to the chief contractor who was hired by the builder to manage
labour. The chief contractor depended heavily on the subordinate labour contractors
and rarely interfered in the way in they managed their labourers. This allowed
individual labour contractors considerable leeway in terms of the command they
exercised over their labourers. Because the chief contractors left them in control over
nearly every aspect of the workers’ lives, such as wages, food, health, shelter and even
leisure, labourers depended entirely on his goodwill for several of their needs.
The strategies of labour mobilization and labour management explicitly
emphasised communal, particularly caste-specific, affiliation. A chief contractor for a
private residential apartment, whom I met in another context, told me that village-
based labor contractors were lynchpins of the construction industry. Such contractors
mobilized their communal connections in order to secure labour. Far removed from
the norms of political correctness and polite conversation, the gentleman- the labour
contractor- minced no words when he told me that these connections were inevitably
molded by caste. “You see, jee, in other countries, they caste their vote. In India, we
vote our caste,” he guffawed as he recounted the well-worn cliché about the country’s
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electoral politics. Chief contractors such as him could not care less what the caste of
the labourers was, of course. But if their subordinate contractors found it efficient to
mobilize, and control, labour by activating their caste connections, why would he
complain, he winked.
Indeed, caste appears to have played a crucial role in shaping Sapuri Rishi’s
notions of work and employment in his urban destination. He referred to the ways in
which his labour contractor invoked their shared communal affiliations when he
sought their cooperation. Apparently he repeatedly emphasized their difference from
workers of other communities whenever he sensed the possibility that they might
align with one another. He would ask Sapuri Rishi and others to consider the honour
of the Musahar samaj when he thought they might act rashly. Or he would simply ask
them to think of him, as a community elder, and respect their oral commitments.
That caste provides a key strategy for mobilizing and controlling labour is an
argument attested to by several sociologists of the Indian economy. Jan Breman has
most famously pointed our attention to the ways in which caste networks are
mobilized in order to secure compliance and deference among a potentially
troublesome labour population. Barbara Harriss-White’s work, for instance, shows
that India’s capitalist transition does not dissolve caste at all, but entrenches it even
further. Even as the poor assert social equality in India’s rural heartlands, the
privileged deploy caste to nurture its capitalist economy.
Sapuri Rishi was considerably ambivalent about considering his labour
contractor as a community elder. Although I had no occasion to witness his actual
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dealings with his labour contractor, I noticed that during their discussions with me,
Sapuri and his mates abused their contractor liberally, and used several expletives to
refer to him. At the same time, they remained resigned to the fact that he was, after
all, known to them and would not intentionally harm them. After all, they reasoned,
he relied on these networks to mobilise labour and would not do anything to
jeopardise what was a convenient source of cheap labour.
III
Political sociologists of the contemporary changes experienced in India suggest
that migrants’ experiences in their destination localities politicises them and enables
them to challenge the hierarchical relations in their rural homes. Such politicisation is
vitally important to Dalits and people of other so-called ‘low caste’ communities.
Dipankar Gupta (2005) referred in 2005 to the ‘vanishing village’ to direct attention to
the ways in which Dalits no longer were beholden to the caste occupations that the
privileged castes had imposed upon them. Opportunities in urban areas and in rural
areas outside their villages allowed them to break free of local employers and to earn
their incomes independent of pursuing their ‘traditional’ bonds. More recently,
Surinder Jodhka (2014), writing about rural Haryana, tells us of similar processes
underway: Dalits and other poor people seeking employment outside of the village,
thereby reducing their dependence on local employers. Field economists studying
rural labour corroborate these accounts. Ben Rogaly and his colleagues (2003) tell us of
the manner in which Muslim workers in rural West Bengal refused to observe the
purity measures dictated by their privileged caste Hindu employers. Likewise, Vinay
Gidwani (1996) writes about the growing political consciousness that the experience of
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migration sows among Dalits labourers in Gujarat. Grace Carswell and Geert de Neve
(200?) notes that Dalit migrations to urban destinations in southern India precipitated
shortages of agricultural labour, facilitating an upward renegotiation of wages. The
Rodgers (2011), who have studied the impact of male migration on gender relations in
north Bihar, in a district adjacent to the one where I conducted fieldwork, point out
that the involvement of women in local agricultural operations had increased, and
women who did not previously undertake wage work were now hiring their labour out
to other farmers. Based on these accounts, it would appear that migration offers to
the rural poor the opportunity to assert their equality vis-à-vis their erstwhile
employers and other self-styled social superiors. We are tempted to ask whether their
experiences place migrants firmly on the road to becoming citizens in the substantive
sense that they have greater exposure to the country, are more aware of their rights,
bargain for higher wages and more able to undermine hierarchical assumptions of
locally dominant classes.
These broadly optimistic accounts are corroborated by scholars who write
about the contribution of circular labour migration to what they call ‘rural
cosmopolitanism’. K. Sivaramakrishnan and Vinay Gidwani formulate the idea of ‘rural
cosmopolitanism’ to direct our attention to the ways in which circular labour migrants
deploy the lessons they learn from one sector to some advantage in their dealings in
the other sector. Specifically, they define rural cosmopolitans as “those who, originate
in rural areas and who, having become bearers of cultural versatility, turn this to some
advantage in either their rural source areas and/ or their [other] destinations” (2003:
345). In deploying the figure of the rural cosmopolitan, Sivi and Gidwani draw on Mary
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Beth Mills’ (1999) account of south-eastern Asia as well as Charles Piot’s (1999)
interpretation of west Africa to sugest that rural migrants are able to appropriate ideas
from their localities to effect transformations of social space in their rural homes.
Other accounts caution against the optimism suggested by some of these
accounts. Hein de Haas (2008) alerts us to the fact that migrants rarely ‘choose’ their
destinations and streams of employment in a voluntaristic way. They depend upon
migrant networks, which quite often represent what Alejandro Portes (1998) calls the
‘downside of social capital’. Jan Breman’s pioneering work on the vulnerabilities and
insecurities to which migrants are subjected in their urban destinations is instructive
in this regard. In particular, he tells us about the wide-ranging role of labour
contractors in controlling key life decisions, such as labourers’ destinations, their
industry or sector of employment, and their control over their wages, boarding and
lodging- not to speak to expenses incurred during emergencies. David Mosse (2008),
David Picherit (2014), Jonathan Pattenden (2013) and Jonathan Parry (1999) are among
the anthropologists who have provided us with fine-grained accounts of the ways in
which labour migrants are subjected to extended networks of caste-based oppression
in the cities. Indeed, some of the authors who provide us with ‘optimistic’ accounts
(such as Ben Rogaly, Grace Carswell and Geert de Neve) aver that, all said and done,
the subjugations which such labourers face are debilitating socially and politically.
Caste-segmented labour markets affirm, rather than undermine, the place of caste in
economic organisation.
The segmentation of labour markets according to caste couples with the
informal character of labour. Together, they caste-based oppressive economic
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relations in urban India that is paradoxically under stress in rural India. The absence
of any form of social protection for migrants in the cities, contrasts with the provision
of such services- even in patchy- in the villages they call home. Such absence leads
them to be completely dependent on the labour contractors who introduce them to
their urban workplaces, thereby reinforcing the salience of caste for them. We have in
India the peculiar situation of caste coming under stress in rural India but being
resurrected in urban India.
An ethnographic approach to political remittances allows us to take account of
these dilemmas without endorsing either the optimistic narratives inhered in
frameworks of cosmopolitanism and modernisation or the pessimistic discourses of
distress and exodus. Through an analysis of the experience of members of a single
Dalit family of circular migrants, we get a sense of the ambivalence and heterogeneity
that attends to their collective self-making. We are also compelled to interrogate the
easy correlations that have often been drawn between urbanisation and
democratisation.
The political ideas that Sapuri Rishi conveys to his family and neighbourhood
of Dalit agricultural labourers builds on the democratisation processes underway in
their rural homes for nearly a century. They contribute to the processes through which
impoverished Dalits forge membership in the political community as labourers leading
dignified lives rather than as people subject to caste discrimination. But his own urban
experiences seem to be at odds with the notions of honour and dignity that Sapuri
Rishi advocates for his family, friends and neighbours back home. Far from appearing
to be a zone of modernity where he would live as an individual unencumbered by his
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caste identity, the urban appears as a zone of his subjugation to those very same
identities. An account of his experience leads us to be sceptical of the suggestion that
such identities as caste will disappear with urbanisation.
Nonetheless, Sapuri Rishi refuses to buy in his contractors’ appeals made on
communal grounds. Although I had no chance to observe his negotiations with his
labour contractor, the irreverential attitude he and his mates demonstrated vis-à-vis
his claims of acting as a caste elder indicate that ideas of social equality remained
crucial for them, notwithstanding the materiality of caste oppression. Such ideas of
social equality, of dignity, of honour, may not be the gifts of the urban. Rather, these
appear to have been forged on the anvil of struggles in the rural. Undoubtedly, uban
spaces allow labour migrants an alternative. Rural struggles are not possible without
the urban. But from this to privilege the urban as a space for democracy and
citizenship, and the rural as the bastion of hierarchy does not do justice to the
empirical material. Both the urban and the rural remain interlocked in tension, a
permanent provocation for migrants such as Sapuri Rishi, his brother, friends,
neighbours and millions such as him across the world.