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Indrajit, University of Oxford PSA Conference Draft sans Biblio April 2015

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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


4

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.


5

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


14

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


16

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


18

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


19

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


20

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.”

https://aamjanata.com/wp-content/uploads/smart-cities.compressed.pdf


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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


22

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


25

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.

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