politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in calcutta

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellersin Calcutta

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay

Abstract In the last decade, several influential scholars have rigorously worked on

the impact of neoliberal globalization on the poor in the cities of the South. But they

have yet to provide a comprehensive account of how and why some groups in the

margins are seen to successfully negotiate with the new modes of governing pop-

ulations and increase their visibility as a ‘‘category,’’ while some groups fail to do

so. This paper seeks to bridge this research gap by comparing a successful and a

failed mobilization in Calcutta. In both cases, use of the footpath has been central.

The paper shows how the success of the hawkers in claiming the footpath is tied to

the marginalization of the claims of the pavement dwellers that has (a) homogenized

the representation of the footpath as only used by pedestrians and hawkers and (b)

led to the elision of the pavement dwellers as a governmental category. The paper

argues that by arrogating to themselves an archival function—which is conven-

tionally associated with the governmental state—sections of population like the

hawkers can become successful in their negotiations with the government.

Keywords Hawkers � Pavement dwellers � Footpath � Democracy � Archive �Informal economy � Governmentality

A number of influential theoretical positions such as Arjun Appadurai’s ‘‘deep

democracy’’ argument (Appadurai 2002), Partha Chatterjee’s ‘‘political society’’

(Chatterjee 2004) argument, and Ananya Roy’s powerful revisionism of Chatterjee

and Appadurai that she calls the ‘‘politics of inclusion’’ (Roy 2009) have recently

sought to understand the impact of neoliberal globalization on Indian cities. These

R. Bandyopadhyay (&)

School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies,

Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore, India

e-mail: [email protected]

123

Dialect Anthropol (2011) 35:295–316

DOI 10.1007/s10624-010-9199-1

Published online: 24 September 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V.2010e

scholars reflect primarily on two sets of questions: the capacities of the poor in relation to

the character of mobilizations, and the state’s responsiveness to such mobilizations.

They are fundamentally engaged with questions of what it means to make claim on

the state via technologies of governmentality. Building on this extremely impressive

corpus of literature, the present paper reflects on the hawkers’ question in Calcutta.

The paper looks at the landscape of knowledge production in Calcutta surrounding

the footpath hawkers—how surveys are conducted, how hawkers respond to them,

how surveys are received by the state. I call this world of survey and other forms of

documentations archive.

Michel Foucault’s (1991) governmentality perspective has initiated scholars to peruse

the ways in which political regimes since the seventeenth century have used enumerative

techniques or censuses to count, classify and thereby govern populations. Constituting the

core of the state archive, the census and surveys provide not only the key governmental

machine of intervention, but also the state’s ethical justification to have a certain kind of

author-function.1 Several scholars across the globe have considered how knowledge

is consolidated and used in various ways to craft grids of intelligibility: how, for ex-

ample, governmental programmes carefully select metrical patterns to ascribe value

and meaning to their targets. This means that the calculus at play in any moment not

only establishs the technical requirements of government, but also forms what

Ghertner (2010, 186) has called ‘‘a calculative foundation of rule’’—the epistemo-

logical basis on which assemblage of knowledge and verification of truths take place

to ‘‘guide and manage a population’s interests’’ (Ghertner 2010, 186–187). Various

studies have also bolstered the methodological relevance of calculative politics within the

exercise and execution of governmental power (see Elden 2007; Legg 2006). Sev-

eral works on governmentality have also reflected on the ways in which ‘‘the terms

of governmental practice can be turned around into forces of resistance’’ (Gordon

1991, 5). Ethnic groups, women, and minority groups have often used numbers and

cadastral surveys to make themselves visible, articulate their ‘‘difference’’ from the

mainstream, and to make claims upon the state and its services. Yet, these studies,

as Ghertner (2010) rightly points out, examine governmental knowledge as

1

296 R. Bandyopadhyay

123

In this connection, it should be mentioned that scholarly discussions on archive and information in colonial

and post-colonial situations embrace several ideological positions. If, for example, at one level, the recent

spurt of literature on the nature of the colonial archive especially in South Asian historiography reflects

the growing influence of Foucault’s notion of the knowledge/power problematic, it is also a product of

the ‘‘statist turn’’ in recent reflections on the South Asian past (Ballantyne 2001). This concern with the

history of the state in South Asia has been driven by both the so-called Cambridge school and the Subal-

tern Studies collective, a common analytical interest shadowed by hostile polemical exchanges between

the two ‘‘schools.’’ Within the former cluster, scholars like Bayly (1996) have drawn intellectual trajec-

tory from Castells’s (1989) model of the ‘informational city’ and Harold Inn’s (1950) classic work on

‘social communication’ to reflect on knowledge communities and communication networks. Bayly, in his

influential work, Empire and Information, talks about the dynamics of information gathering and dissem-

ination with the rise of the British power in South Asia. The Subaltern Studies group, influenced by Fou-

cauldian and Saidian reflections on knowledge production, on the other hand, has provoked us to imagine

archive not as a store of transparent sources but as a veritable site of power, a body of knowledge marked

by the struggle and violence of the colonial past. As Spivak emphasized, the archive of colonialism was

itself the product of the ‘‘commercial/territorial interest of the East India Company’’ (Spivak 1985).

something that the governed can strategically use to make claim on the state, the

precondition of which is that the knowledge is to be established as the ‘‘truth’’.

These studies thus preclude the possibilities of the counter-tactics developed by the

governed altering, at least temporarily, the strategies of government. The counter-

mapping literature on the other hand provides insight into how calculative practices

can themselves become sites of struggle (Appadurai 2002; Ghertner 2010).

Following this literature, one may seek to unravel the ways in which parties,

movements and unions actively take part in the production, manipulation,

classification, circulation and consumption of governmental knowledge and make

claims on the state in an archival space. In doing so, one may remember Ananya

Roy’s skepticism about any uncritical celebration of what Appadurai calls

‘‘governmentality from below’’ as it generates consent from the poor in favour of

massive urban renewals leading to the displacement of the poor. While Appadurai

takes the resilience of grassroots organizations and non-state actors as a sign of

‘‘deep democracy,’’ Roy hazards against any uncritical celebration of its strategies

precisely because they are always already implicated in a ‘‘politics of inclusion.’’

Thus, what Appadurai celebrates as the horizontal linking of NGO’s to state and

world institutions as a practice of deep democracy, Roy shows how this in fact

points to potential sites of complicity and practices of compromise effected at the

deeper structural changes for the urban poor.

I argue that the counter-mapping literature (Peluso 1995; Appadurai 2002)

depicts negotiations between the government and the governed in an archival space,

indicating a reversal of the process of archiving. This archival reversal enables us to

re-view a few academically overworked categories such as ‘‘appropriation’’,

‘‘cooptation’’, and ‘‘resistance’’ as mutually constitutive modes of engagement that

simultaneously occur and cross boundaries. I will show how such a politics of

knowledge production and political use of knowledge by the sections of the

governed are at the heart of the regimes of regulation and negotiation that I have

elsewhere described as the ‘‘institutionalization of informality’’ through the

formation of the ‘‘state-union complex’’ (Bandyopadhyay 2009b, c, 2010). What

are the governable subjects and governable spaces produced by such archival

negotiations? How do counter-archival drives influence public discourses on spaces,

practices and populations? How are margins drawn and exclusions created in a

counter-archive? Who is the archon of a counter-archive? What does it mean to

address a counter-archiving project through ethnography? What happens when the

counter-archive becomes the official archive of the state? The present paper seeks to

address these questions by studying the archival function of a particular hawkers’

union (the Hawker Sangram Committee), a particular space (the footpath) and two

particular groups (hawkers2 and pavement dwellers) in Calcutta. I will show how,

2 In literature, the term street vending appears more frequently than footpath hawking, as the former term

has a kind of universal appeal. Commenting on the National Policy on Urban Street Vendors in India

(Government of India 2004, 2009), Renana Jhabvala has recently said that ‘‘a consultation process was

required to ‘name’ the street vendor. Should they be called hawkers? Or market traders? Or just vendors?

Finally, the term street vendor was adopted by all, and has also been accepted internationally’’ (Jhavbala

2010, xv). I will replace the term street vendor by footpath hawker mainly because in Calcutta, (a) the

term street vendor is rarely used, (b) hawkers themselves apply a special vernacular meaning to the term

Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta 297

123

by arrogating to themselves a certain archival function that have hitherto been

associated with the state, sections of population such as hawkers might become

successful in their endless negotiations and tussles with the state. The case of

hawkers is then compared with the case of pavement dwellers, a band of urban poor

who work in various sectors of urban informal economy and squat on the footpaths.

Until the end of 1980s, the government had a good database on the pavement

dwellers, and they figure significantly in various discussions of urban poverty, rural–

urban migration and urban space. The paper shows that the success of the hawkers

in asserting their existence on the footpath has led to the marginalization of the

spatial claim of the pavement dwellers leading to a virtual elision of the pavement

dweller as a governmental category. Thus, a reversal of archiving does not support

the equation that if archiving from above is a tool of domination, then the reverse

archive or the counter-archive should be a weapon of emancipation for all sections

of the poor. The paper exemplifies how reverse archive produces new norms of

citizenship and how it shapes its own forms of domination and coloniality in urban

space, in relation to some other social groups.

The cases of hawkers and pavement dwellers have been chosen for comparison,

for three reasons. First, the histories of hawking and pavement dwelling in Calcutta

share some common themes of contemporary urban research, namely, rural–urban

migration, partition,3 problems of informal sector, unemployment, stagnation, and

homelessness, spatial practices of the urban poor, urban planning, and restructuring

of the urban space. Second, both hawkers and pavement dwellers use footpath and

infrastructures of survival (water, toilets) from the same sources leading to conflicts

and collaboration. Third, unlike the slum dwellers and squatter groups, hawkers and

pavement dwellers are not electorally significant as they are dispersed through wide

geographical areas within the city, and they are voters of different constituencies

where their electoral behaviours are shaped by different sets of questions and

different histories of political societies. So the story of popular mobilization that the

paper seeks to introduce is not a part of the history of competitive electoral

Footnote 2 continued

as linked with the Arabic word (used in Bengali) haq (phonetically nearly the same as the English word

hawk) meaning just, correct and ethical stake (exceeding the Bengali terms adhikar, and dabi, for its

ethical overtone) indicating the fact that the term gives meaning and sets goals to their sangram(struggle). One may claim that the term ‘hawker’ as used by hawkers in Calcutta is not just the English

‘hawker’. Rather, it contains its own meanings and perhaps stands for a different imagination of urban

space.3 The waves of refugee migration from the East Pakistan after 1947 changed the demographic features of

Calcutta. The city footpath provided a site for the refugees to settle and start hawking. Management of

hawking began to emerge as an important affair (involving eviction drives in select streets and

rehabilitation) both for the state government and for the Corporation. As a part of the general politics that

emerged with the post-partition rehabilitation and resettlement movements in the city and its suburbs, any

eviction could spark strong public sentiment and political support in favour of the ‘‘victim’’, who could

claim rehabilitation to the state by claiming his ‘‘refugee’’ identity. Hawking also appeared to the

government as a prospective way to rehabilitate refugees. Several ‘‘refugee hawkers’ corners’’ were

subsequently opened by the government. Thus, replying to a question in the state assembly, the Chief

Minister, Bidhan Roy, stated that ‘‘hawkers should be confined to certain parts of the city and to specified

locations where there might be no interference with the normal flow of traffic. Roy also added that his

government had constructed 384 stalls for the hawkers out of which 276 had so far been allotted to

refugees (quoted in Calcutta Municipal Gazette, May 12, 1951).


123

mobilization of urban poor in post-colonial India, often vilified in media as the

‘‘politics of vote bank’’, where there is a clear distinction between the ruling party

and the opposition.

What I would like to present to my readers through the case comparison is a

certain understanding—however hazy and indeterminate it may be—of a world that

is not familiar to many of us, though this is how millions of people across the globe

engage with the governmental state. I do not claim any privileged insider’s

knowledge. I have been, for the most part, myself an observer from the outside. The

paper is concerned with my positionality vis-a-vis what Partha Chatterjee (2004)

calls political society in trying to explore what it means to be in the outside of

political society while doing ethnographic research. In this sense, the paper is more

about the limits of knowing the mobilized subjects from outside. I call my task the

ethnography in archive. By this term, I mean reading the archive and archiving and

grounding that reading with ethnography of the subject community (Merry 2002).

This is how, I believe, record makes sense.

The ‘‘ethnography in archive’’ position seeks to contribute to the robust

‘‘informal economy’’ literature by bringing the archival/historical understanding to

an already existing tradition of ethnographic/anthropological research on the politics

of the informal economy. As Jonathan Anjaria has mentioned, in the past two

decades scholars have shifted their attention from the economics of informal

economy to the politics of the informal economy, unraveling the relationship

between subaltern agency, public space and modes of resistance (Anjaria 2008). As

a consequence, an interdisciplinary literature has emerged seeking to locate how

local city governments undertake urban renewal projects targeting street hawkers.

This literature also tells us how hawkers defend their livelihood in the face of this

hostility (Cross 1998; Stoller 1996, 2002; Duneier 1999; Rajagopal 2001; Popke and

Ballard 2004; Stillerman 2006; Donovan 2008). The ‘‘ethnography in archive’’

position is an attempt to bring ethnographic and archival/historical modes of

knowing together by exploring the limits and mutual constitution of these two

modes of enquiry.4 If the shift from economics to politics signalled a disciplinary

transition from economics to anthropology in addressing the informal economy, in

the last couple of decades a certain understanding of the same in the interstices of

ethnographic and archival research indicates how informal economy can be

addressed from the perspective of historical anthropology.

4 Anthropology and history were long seen as compatible enquiries into discrete spheres of alterity (the

past, elsewhere). As Levi-Strauss assured us several decades ago, the anthropologist ‘‘conceives [history]

as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other

in space’’ (1966: 256). But as Bernard Cohn cautions us, ‘‘it is relatively simple to suggest and explore

subject matters which are of joint interest to historians and anthropologists. It is much more difficult to

delineate a common epistemological space which can be termed historical anthropology’’ (quoted in Axel

2002, viii). Cohn’s discerning of the limitations of interdisciplinarity has been shared by many subsequent

works. As late as 1990 James Clifford could puzzle that ‘‘as yet no systematic analysis exists concerning

the differences and similarities of [historical and anthropological] research practice, juxtaposing ‘the

archive’ with ‘the field’—seen both as textual, interpretive activities, as disciplinary conventions, and as

strategic spatializations of overdetermined empirical data’’ (54–55).


123

Blocking the gaze

I started my field research in 2005 in several intersections of Calcutta. As an initial

ethnographic ritual, I prepared a questionnaire and tried to interview the hawkers.

Many of the hawkers knew my face as a regular customer. But when they

understood that I wanted to map out how the economy of the intersection works,

they began to resist my ethnographic gaze. I was making no headway and felt

increasingly frustrated. When, for example, I tried to interview Bikash, a garment

seller in Gariahat with the response sheet in my hand, Bikash said that he was not

bound to respond as he did not know how I would use the interview. Having

examined my documents, he told me that he would support my work if I could

manage to obtain permission from ‘‘Shakti-da’’ (the term da is the shorter version of

the Bengali term dada, meaning elder brother. Calling somebody da carries the

perception of closeness between two persons), the leader of the HSC. I began to

realize that the hawkers were questioning the legitimacy of somebody not belonging

to the community to create a database on the hawkers. The ethnographic field was

thus far from being transparent to me, though I had been a local resident and a

frequent visitor of many of the stalls as a customer. Without seeking to develop

some more ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘effective’’ ways of ethnographic penetration to the

subject’s world, I began to address the blockade itself. What does this blockade say

on the project of ethnographic representation?

Footpath hawking in Calcutta

This section presents some ‘‘facts’’ on footpath hawking in Calcutta, necessary to

ground the enquiry. The facts have mostly been gathered by triangulating three

sources: (a) contemporary newspaper reports, (b) ‘‘Daily Notes’’ of the Special

Branch of Calcutta Police and (c) the field data that I could gather after the HSC

affiliates began to trust me. Let me synoptically present a few interesting patterns in

the history of footpath hawking in Calcutta. First, one may find it important to

remember that there had been a phenomenal increase in the hawking units between

1966 and 1971. By 1981, it had spread to all parts of the city, irrespective of

functional land use, with little available space for subsequent spatial expansion.

Second, anti-street hawker drives are contingent to the operation of local economies

and complex relationships between different economic and political actors. These

drives are often manifestations of factional rivalry between different middle-to-low

ranking regime functionaries of ruling parties and their personalized calculations.

Third, the hawkers resist such operations by virtue of a complex patronage network

involving the local state functionaries, ruling parties and the opposition, and these

relationships can hardly be reduced to electoral calculations as street hawkers do not

form a clustered urban vote bank like slum dwellers and squatter groups; fourth, in

many cases, hawkers operate in a particular street on mutual agreement between the

neighbourhood political actors and commercial interest groups. These agreements

are often contextual and have nothing to do with another set of agreements on

another street.


123

Just before the official declaration of Operation Sunshine, the non-CITU hawker

unions (32 in number) decided to form an umbrella federation named Hawker

Sangram (struggle) Committee (HSC). The HSC took a confrontational path. As the

operation progressed, the HSC staged daily protests stopping traffic at key

intersections, burning buses, ‘gherao’ing police posts, blocking infrastructures of

circulation and moving to the Court seeking redressal (HSC 2006: 1–7). The

imagined dynamism of the world-class city, a space inserted into global circulations

of capital, thus came to be ‘‘encircled’’ by protest. The world-class city that

Operation Sunshine envisioned was made to stand still. Mobilized by opposition

leaders like Mamata Banerjee, and front leaders like Ashoke Ghosh, its members

also tried to return to the footpaths with baskets of goods.

Since then, HSC has been the largest and the most powerful hawker union in

Calcutta. It has horizontal linkages with many movements in India like the National

Alliance of Peoples’ Movement (NAPM). The HSC has been the nodal organization

of the National Movement for Retail Democracy (NMRD) that spearheaded massive

protest against corporate retailing in Indian cities. The HSC, today, is to be kept in

full confidence before implementing any regulation on hawkers. It enjoys enormous

authority in managing the informal labour market and other informal transactions

related to hawking and issues of governance. The HSC serves its members in

various ways. It, for example, ensures credit for them from informal bankers,

negotiates with the lower rung of bureaucracy, settles hafta (weekly bribe), settles

conflicts among hawkers, controls the selling and buying of footpath plots, and

regulates the number of hawkers in a particular area. However, it is important to

note that the functions described above are not historically unique to the HSC. At

least from the late 1960s various associations in the sector have been performing

such operations on behalf of their clients. The difference that the HSC has made

with the earlier organizations is that it has been able to hold together several

associations over a decade by commemorating the Operation Sunshine throughout

the year through a series of public events, and by emphasizing the fact that Sangramis a never-ending process. It collaborates with the government by regulating

hawking and by inducing civic disciplines among the hawkers while projecting the

state to its affiliates as eternally hostile to the hawkers. Its leader, Shaktiman Ghosh,

has mastered the craft of operating to the governmental space as a mediator. To the

hawkers affiliated to the HSC, many of whom gave me interviews; Shaktiman

Ghosh had proved to be more adept in dealing with the state. As early in 1975, he

joined the CPI. His CPI identity gave him the opportunity to negotiate with both the

CPM leaders in the government and the opposition Congress leaders. In 1981, when

the government sought to evict the Sealdah hawkers to construct a new flyover,

Shaktiman floated a new Hawkers’ Union named the ‘‘Calcutta Hawker Men’s

Union’’ and was able to resettle hawkers beneath the flyover. This act gave

Shaktiman prestige in the eyes of the hawkers. As Shaktiman told me, he used his

organizational experience and his repute as a sangrami neta (struggling leader), and

as a result, The Calcutta Hawker Men’s Union has been the major constituent if the

HSC, which has roughly 30 thousand affiliates. Shaktiman’s office maintains a

complete digital and paper database on them.


123

The world of survey

In December 2005, The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (henceforth the Corpora-

tion) decided to ‘‘identify and quantify’’ hawkers on the streets and footpaths of

Calcutta Municipal area. The idea was to locate hawkers who entered into the

business after 1977, the year when the ruling left coalition came to power in West

Bengal with a huge mandate. Citing a 1981 High Court ruling that declared all post-

1977 encroachment on roads and footpaths as completely illegal, the Corporation

now wanted to undertake a selective eviction drive to evict all post-1977

encroachers. Already in 1996, the State Government had declared 21 major city

intersections as ‘‘non-vending zones’’. Between November 1996 and December

1997, in a well-planned and coordinated action euphemistically called OperationSunshine, the Municipal authority and the state government evicted thousands of

street side stalls to make the enlisted intersections congestion free. Soon the tide

receded; the hawkers were seen to reclaim their lost spaces with baskets of goods,

backed by various political parties including many of the constituting parties of the

Left Front Government. In 2003, a middle-class environmental organization filed a

Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the High Court seeking the Court’s intervention in

the matter. The High Court, in November 2005, ordered the state government and

the Corporation to make the intersections congestion free within a stipulated time.

In such a situation, the Corporation undertook the survey. I accompanied the

surveyors to see the making of the survey.

When the Corporation surveyors began the survey process, the HSC workers

recognized that the categories for eligibility for the hawkers to continue business on

the footpath would lead to the displacement of a significant number of hawkers

without resettlement. The HSC made two significant interventions. First, its

members began to follow the surveyors around and eventually challenged the

accuracy of their assessment. If, for example, a stall was located vacant, and the

Corporation surveyor was on the verge of omitting it from the survey register, HSC

workers told them who the owner of the stall was and how long he had been trading

there. The surveyor had to depend on the local knowledge to avoid the heightened

administrative burden of the survey. The HSC ultimately questioned the legitimacy

of the survey on the ground of inaccuracy and its alleged non-participative nature.

Second, the HSC undertook a counter-survey, including a sample of 2,350 hawkers

distributed along the 21 intersections. It also took technical input from two activist

economists of the city. The preface of the survey writes:

From the beginning of the study we have decided to involve expert academic

skills with computerised data compiling and analysing system for the best

survey result. In this we have the great opportunity to get help from Dr.

Subhendu Dasgupta, Head of the Department, South and South East Asian

Studies, CU, and Prof. Dipankar Dey (HSC 2007).

The HSC however remained the author and the patron of the survey. However,

we come to know from the preface of the survey that Sujit Mukherjee, the Director

of an NGO of social workers, ‘‘extended his kind infrastructural support to

conduct the vast field survey’’. Sujit Mukherjee, popularly known as Naughty-da in


123

Kasba-Bosepukur region, had been a hawker in his early days. He is a member of

the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), a constituent of the ruling Left Front and

close to the Kshiti Goswami faction of the party which maintains a ‘‘rebel’’ image

within the Left Front. Naughty-da is a distant nephew of the Mayor of the

Corporation and a well-known figure in his office. He is known for his close relation

with the HSC as well. Apart from conducting the field research, Naughty-da had

mediated between the Mayor’s office and the HSC. Without a Naughty-da, it was

hardly possible to conduct the study. Naughty-da has a unique identity which made

him a key person in the survey. He had been a hawker and is now a social worker, a

Leftist but not a CPM. Yet he is close to the CPM Mayor, a Mayor who is not a

prominent figure in the mainstream hierarchy of CPM.5

In 2007, the Corporation took the initiative of creating an official database on the

hawkers operating in the public spaces of the city. But without taking much pain to

search for any ‘competent professional institution,’ the Corporation outsourced the

task to Naughty-da’s NGO, Pratibandhi Udyog. Gariahat Road and Rashbehari

Avenue had been chosen as a preliminary site for the pilot project (Pratibandhi

Udyog 2007). In January 2008, the survey received the Corporation’s sanction when

the Mayor released the report to the public.

An analysis of the two aforementioned surveys shows that the latter survey was

just a case sensitive application of the former survey. From the surveys, it can be

inferred that hawking is (1) a full-time bread-earning profession undertaken by

educated working persons aged between 18 and 60 years, (2) an employment

generating sustainable economic activity, managed predominantly by local people

with little involvement of their family members, and (3) self-financing and self-

sustaining economic activity. The study also reveals that though the direct link

between the hawkers and the manufacturers has become weak, hawkers still rely, to

a great extent, on local supplies and cater to the needs of the poor and lower middle-

class buyers by selling those goods at a considerably cheaper rate. The survey

asserts that hawkers are microentrepreneurs who rely more on market forces than on

the state. Since hawkers provide valuable service to the urban economy at low cost

and give employment to many people, the government should allow hawkers to do

their business in public spaces. In tune with the recommendations of the National

Policy on Urban Street Vendors, the report emphasized that the Corporation should

issue identity cards to the hawkers so that the legitimate hawkers can be identified

easily. The report claimed that the hawkers who occupied the footpaths before 1999

should be given identity cards. It should be mentioned here that in the post-

Operation Sunshine flashflood, the HSC gave the leadership and therefore it sought

to safeguard its clients, i.e. those who lost their stalls during operation Sunshine.

The HSC had adequate evidence in its archive that could prove the antiquity of its

affiliates. Let me cite an example. In 2005, the Mayor formed a municipal

consultative committee in which the HSC happened to be a participating

organization. Between 2005 and 2009, the committee met five times in the chamber

of the Mayor. If the Mayor put forward any proposal for eviction, Shaktiman

5 When I collected material and wrote the article, the Left Front was still in power in the Corporation. In

2010, the Trinamul Congress defeated the Front and assumed the governing power in the Corporation.


123

seemed to be ready with an alternative. When, for example, the Corporation decided

to evict hawkers from the Park Street, Shaktiman presented a map showing the exact

location of the HSC’s affiliate hawkers on Park Street footpath and how they were

observing the municipal ‘‘rules’’ by leaving three-fourths of the footpath for

pedestrians. To prove that the HSC’s affiliates had been operating in the said area

since the 1980s, he presented the past eviction records attested by the Corporation,

records of raid and confiscation of the hawkers’ wares by the police. With such

evidence in possession, Shaktiman argued that the new occupants did not belong to

his union and demanded a selective eviction in Park Street based on the record. To

the best of my knowledge, neither the Corporation, nor the Police Department has

ever made any centralized documentation of each and every operation and raid. But

individual hawkers preserve what they receive from the administration, be it an

eviction certificate, or a release order of confiscated goods. The papers contain

dates, signatures of officials and stamps. If necessary they also make use of blood

donation certificates, subscription bills of pujas and so on. A hawker can mortgage

these records and his stall to loan a large sum from informal bankers. Often these

records change hands. I have elsewhere written on the social life of documents in

the informal economy.

Ethnography in a private archive

I went to the office of the HSC at College Street for the first time in April 2007. It

was extremely difficult to talk to Shaktiman as he was a busy person. He was an

important leader of the National Alliance of People’s Movements and an active

participant in National Movement for Retail Democracy that successfully organized

massive Anti-Wal-Mart Campaign in many Indian cities in the recent past. When I

first visited the office of the HSC, Shaktiman was in Chile attending a conference.

But two of his trusted lieutenants who actually managed the office, Sudipta Maitra

and Murad Hussain, talked to me. Murad assured me that I would be able to see

some of the documents. But the organization’s confidential documents might not be

disclosed to me as ‘‘they would expose the inner contradictions of the committee’’.

Murad said that those documents could only be made public if they resolved to

document their history in the future.

Though I was denied access to the secret documents of the HSC, the

organization’s ability to maintain archival secrecy helped me understand the

archival field I was working with. Murad was acutely aware of the public nature of

the act of writing history, and he was not willing to allow me authorship of the HSC

story. His ability to mark the border between secrets and revelation sparked my

imagination regarding the meaning of secrecy in the life of the record. The secret

archive of the HSC can be constructed to stand beside or even compete with state

archives, but it can also be a hiding space in which subversive memories are stored

and preserved for possible future disclosure. It is also worth noticing that, when

Murad denied my request to see the secret archive, he revealed a tension, a

discomfort with those records (note the Marxist term ‘‘inner contradiction’’ in

Murad’s statement). Murad knew that those documents might contradict the official


123

position of the HSC. So, this secret archive is not only the strength of the HSC, it is

also a constant source of discomfort, if not a threat. The HSC thus preserves the

right to write its own history and to disclose its own ‘‘secrets’’. This archival closure

has fundamental contradiction with the principle of public sphere that any writing of

history presupposes. This principle requires open access to information and sources

required to be exposed to a hypothetical other’s examination and criticism. The truth

claim of an ethnographer lies more on her ability to engage with the prevailing

common sense. This is one of the reasons why I call my task ‘‘ethnography in a

private archive’’.

The HSC’s archival function, I argue, is a successful replication of the state’s

bureaucracy, and also its very own project of a ‘‘national history’’. Having its own

historical project, however, the HSC becomes a major constituent of the techniques

of the government. It makes the post-Operation Sunshine Sangram a public memory

by repeated recollections, propaganda and myth-making. It civilizes hawkers, trains

them to observe civic virtue and builds a populist infrastructure of Sangram which is

entangled with techniques of governing.

At my first overnight discussion with Shaktiman, I had a sense that Shaktiman,

for long, awaited a researcher who would write about him and the annals of the HSC

in academic journals. He had received a lot of media coverage, but unlike his

Mumbai and Delhi counterparts, Shaktiman and the HSC were still marginal in the

academic world. Interestingly, my closeness to the HSC seriously disrupted my

access to other unions that did not belong to the HSC. The CPM-dominated Calcutta

Street Hawkers’ Union, for example, did not give me access to its database owing to

the ‘‘trust issue’’.

Pavement dwellers

Poverty and housing crisis in Calcutta became the subject matter of the Bengali

literature (especially poetry) in post-partition years. The living city, ‘‘the footpath

groaning under the tin and makeshift walls, the wailing children born on the streets,

the refugees in a procession winding through the lanes are all images to be found in

this literature’’ (Sengupta 2007). They are also the manifesto of a new group of left-

wing poets who found their subject in the everyday city life and its mundane horror.

In Buddhadev Bose’s poem Udvastu (The Refugee), the writer-narrator goes for a

walk on the Dhakuria lakes and notices a woman dying on the footpath. Her

malnourished body partially hides a sleeping child and her wild staring eyes hold no

pain, no prayer and no protest. The impotently watching narrator, suffering from a

writer’s block, remembers a scene from Dante’s Inferno and realizes there is

nothing anybody could do that could keep intact the dignity of the dying woman.

‘‘Let humans leave her/And let Nature take over’’ he states (Sengupta 2007).

Calcutta, with her dying and homeless humanity, becomes a constant presence, a

telos, a meaning beyond ‘‘the play of the merely accidental’’ (Roy 2002:156) in the

poetry of a whole new generation of poets like Jibanananda Das, Samar Sen,

Buddhadev Bose, Naresh Guha, Premendra Mitra, Nirendranath Chakraborty, Sunil

Gangopadhyay, Bishnu Dey, Manindra Roy, Arun Mitra and Sankho Ghosh, some


123

of whom were also part of the burgeoning Left movements that articulated the rights

of refugees. These early post-colonial writers, many of whom were associated with

the left cultural movement in Calcutta, imagined the city space in general, and

footpath in particular, as a heterogeneous space—a site of several activities,

footpath hawking, footpath living, rallies, refugee claim-making and so forth. They

did not use the term pavement dwellers to locate a particular group of people. The

term came into being as a population category in anthropological studies on famine,

rural–urban migration, refugee problem and poverty. In these works, the pavement

dweller represented the destitute ‘‘migrant’’ who needed to be studied. In his path-

breaking ethnography, titled Bengal Famine 1943 that came out in 1949, Tarak

Chandra Das wrote:

Many of these families had a fixed place for passing the night. During day

time the adult members moved individually, or with one or two children, in

different parts of the city. But at night they all assembled at these fixed places

in order to keep contact with one another. It was not unusual to find groups of

twenty to thirty persons lying on the pavement, side by side, sleeping under

the open sky… Even during day-time when rest was needed, to this corner

they assembled. Often this place of refuge was nothing better than the

pavement of the street. (Das 1949: 57).

‘‘Beside the dwellers of the pavement’’, writes Das, there were others who

occupied the ‘‘air-raid shelters and railway shades’’. Between 1975 and 1987, three

massive socio-economic studies were undertaken on pavement dwellers by Calcutta

Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) and Indian Statistical Institute (ISI).

The first CMDA survey on pavement dwellers imagined the pavement dwellers as

essentially labouring citizens living ‘‘under the shadow of the metropolis’’

(Mukherjee 1975). These surveys sought to define the pavement dweller. The

survey of the ISI, for example, criticized the survey of CMDA as it incorporated

slums and squatter settlements in the census. The survey of ISI only included those

who ‘‘sleep on the pavements of the city’’ (1976, 2). In a similar fashion, the 1987

CMDA survey (Jagannathan and Halder 1988a, b, 1989) says that it would focus on

the ‘‘truly shelterless pavement dwellers’’. Targeting the ‘‘truly shelterless’’ in the

1987 survey implies that the study even excluded those who had a ‘‘home’’

elsewhere but chose to live on the footpath.

CMDA’s involvement in the surveys on pavement dwellers shows that the

governmental stand with regard to this particular social group was welfarist.

Releasing the 1975 survey, Bholanath Sen, the Public Works Department minister

said that he would send the copies of the report to the UN to request for some money

for the rehabilitation of pavement dwellers. We may remember that in 1975, this

minister played a key role in conducting a massive hawker eviction drive at the

wake of the Emergency. In 1975, then, pavement dwellers were largely viewed as

the poor deserving state welfare, while hawkers were treated as illegitimate

occupiers of public place.

Until 1980s, the pavement dweller was also a central object of Christian charity

and poverty tourism—Mother Teresa in her white robes blessing the poor; Patrick

Swayze as the saviour in the Hollywood film City of Joy. For poverty tourists, the


123

indigent body on the footpath was the much sought after visual proof of the post-

colonial urban predicament.

A story of forgetting

But this trend would change course in 1990s, when the growing concern for the

city’s world-class appearance came to be expressed through an environmental

discourse of cleanliness and pollution. This discourse ties deficiencies in environ-

mental well-being and appearance to the presence of hawkers largely through the

legal category of ‘‘nuisance’’ (Baviskar 2003; Fernandes 2008; Bhan 2009; Ghertner

2010). Operation Sunshine in 1996 was the first attempt by the Left Front

Government to aggressively remake the city as a ‘‘world-class’’ urban environment.

The discourses of sanitization of public space at the turn of the century targeted the

hawkers and completely ignored the pavement dwellers as an impediment to the

world-class image of the city. The publicity volume of Operation Sunshine (titled

Operation Sunshine, edited by Saumitra Lahiri), for example, introduced itself as

‘‘an anthology of articles on the removal drive of the illegal encroachers from the

pavements in Calcutta’’ (1997, see the blurb of the book Operation Sunshine). But

the volume did not make a single reference to the existence of pavement dwellers.

The discursive invisibility of the pavement dwellers was also caused by the

disappearance of the government funded socio-economic surveys on rural–urban

migration in the early 1990s. Unlike in 1970s, pavement dwellers were no longer the

subject of the state’s welfare intervention in 1990s. As a result, they ceased to be a

population group. Moreover, in accordance with the earlier studies, the socio-

economic survey of the CMDA on Pavement Dwellers in 1987 established the fact

that a majority of pavement dwellers were from West Bengal and that they were the

landless groups in the Left-ruled Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal). If this was the

case, then the myth of the left exceptionalism would be in jeopardy as the study

implicitly or unwittingly questioned the very success of the land reform programme.

Since then in the official papers, the pavement dwellers are hardly recognized.

In the post-Operation Sunshine flashflood, when hawkers returned, they not only

regained the lost land, but also freshly occupied some of the valuable sites where

pavement dwellers used to live. The pavement dwellers also returned, but did not

occupy the intersections. They occupied places in whose vicinity no vehicle is

allowed to stop. Thus, there emerged an interesting spatial distribution of hawkers

and pavement dwellers: hawkers in the busy intersections and pavement dwellers in

the in-between spaces of the footpaths. I have elsewhere documented how Ratan

Mandal, one of my first hawker-cum-pavement dweller informants experienced

serial displacement as a pavement dweller, while his tea stall at Gariahat intersection

remained in the same location from the last 30 years (Bandyopadhyay 2007).

The fate of pavement dwellers in Calcutta stands in striking opposition to what I

have read about the collective action of pavement dwellers in Bombay, at the behest

of a few powerful advocacy organizations forming a horizontal solidarity among

themselves (the ‘‘Alliance’’ in Appadurai 2002). In 1986, the pavement dwellers

were facilitated by the SPARK to produce survey on themselves—We the Invisible.


123

As the title of the document suggests, it was through this survey that they made

themselves visible—visible in the state and in public discourse to earn an enrolment

as a governmental category. Unlike HSC’s deployment of bureaucratic language, as

Appadurai informs us, the Alliance used the non-specialist knowledge of the

community which gives an authenticity to the survey as revealing the ‘‘voice’’ of the

subaltern. While Appadurai hails this as ‘‘deep democracy,’’ Ananya Roy (2009)

shows how the Alliance became a ‘‘native informant’’ of the international governing

organizations and promoted embourgeoisment of the city by pacifying the poor and

earning consent from them for urban renewal. But, overall, it should be accepted

that pavement dwellers exist as a governmental category in Bombay, while in

Calcutta they no longer surface in public discourse. Unlike Bombay, in Calcutta,

collective action based on housing rights seems to be absent. This has been evident

in Roy’s earlier work on Calcutta (Roy 2004). Though Partha Chatterjee has talked

at length about the political society in a particular squatter colony in Calcutta,

ironically, the colony was demolished soon after Chatterjee’s Politics of theGoverned was published. Yet in Calcutta, hawkers are more successfully organized

and more visible in the policy-making than any other city in India. In Jonathan

Anjaria’s thesis on street hawkers in Bombay (2008), I missed the presence of an

organization like the HSC. I guess, this is not his failure to see the existence of

strong unions in Bombay. Taken together, Anjaria’s research and my intervention

speak of the difference between two political fields. In Bombay, advocacy

organizations are important political and policy actors. In Calcutta, political parties

and their labour units are more hegemonic than NGOs.

From the mid-1990s, the ‘‘hawker problem’’ has become a prominent field of

quotidian media coverage where the lines between the citizen and non-citizen, civic

order and disorder, and the legitimate and the illegitimate are being continually

(re)defined. The local English print media has often targeted hawkers invoking a

liberal-democratic discourse of citizenship: the rights of the ‘‘common man’’ or the

‘‘pedestrian’’ to public space, the common man being a politically innocent,

classless, neutral entity. The local press appears to be remarkably united in taking

sides with the seemingly ‘‘class-less’’, ‘‘common-man’’-pedestrian, who is the citizen

and the ‘‘taxpayer’’ and has the legitimate claim over the public space of the pavement,

as against the ‘‘hawker’’, epitomizing ‘‘illegality’’ and ‘‘disorder’’ (Dutta 2007).

I argue that the representation of the hawkers in English language newspapers as

disagreeable, extraneous agents always ‘‘choking’’ circulation comes from the

middle-class apprehension of losing control over public space (Dutta 2007). What is

relevant to my presentation is the fact that these representations cited the footpath as a

space of contestation between the rightful pedestrian (the free, liberal citizen) and the

contentious hawker. In a number of PILs filed by middle-class environmental

organizations, the hawkers were held responsible for traffic congestion and pollution.

These organizations even argued that hawking in general and food hawking in

particular should be banned from the Central Business district for public health reasons

and to make Calcutta presentable to the foreign investors and tourists.

As the previous section shows, the HSC was able to intervene into and disrupt

such a citation of hawkers by intervening into the very production of the

governmental knowledge on the hawkers. They would gather evidence to argue that


123

there was no tension between the rightful pedestrian and the ‘‘entrepreneurial

hawker’’. They on their part would accept that their activities are often illegal and

contrary to good civic behaviour. They would profess a readiness to observe civic

regulations if the state implements any such things. But such an intervention would

also imagine the footpath as used only by pedestrians and hawkers. This is what I

mean by the discursive homogenization of urban space to the exclusion of other

elements and practices.

The hawkers would also subscribe to the hegemonic icon of the world-class city.

In 2002, for example, the HSC declared three model street-food corners in three

major streets in Calcutta frequently visited by the foreigners: Park Street–Jawharlal

Nehru Road intersection, Russell Street and Elgin Road. The Park Street–Jawharlal

Nehru Road intersection is close to the Central Business District (CBD) and is at the

heart of the heritage part of the city. In Both Russell Street and Park Street-

Jawharlal Nehru Road, the city’s major star hotels (linked to the international

tourism industries), restaurants, banks, giant corporation offices (such as TATA

centre, Reliance Industries) are located, while, Elgin Road has the pride of housing

the city’s one of the biggest multiplexes—the Forum. What are the rules and

practices that distinguish the model zone from the rest of the street food corners? In

model zones, it is mandatory for the hawkers to wear aprons and use gloves, to serve

hygienic steamed food always preserved in covered containers, not to sell cut fruits

and so on. In 2006, a DFID team visited the city as a part of its research on hygiene

and public health issues in street food vending in several cities of the developing

world. I accompanied the team. When the team approached to the HSC to guide

them to see the scenario of the city, HSC arranged a ‘‘tour’’ for the white researchers

and their native collaborators in these three model zones. When I asked some of the

HSC leaders about why they selected the model zones for the team’s rather

ceremonial survey, they gave me a three-point reply: (1) ‘‘we don’t want them to see

the filth of the city and make recommendation to the government,’’ (2) ‘‘we want to

be world-class hawkers in a world-class city and we want to show that Calcutta can

be made a world-class city without killing street food vending,’’ (3) ‘‘we have heard

that this team is going to prepare and promote a ‘best practice’ model in street food

vending, we want to be an example before other cities.’’ When I asked them how

they were so confident that the team would not visit other parts of the city, they said

that the native collaborators would also want to display the ‘‘models’’ and the

Corporation officials would ensure that the team would visit only the selected sites.

Entrepreneurial poor

On July 28, 1972, the Chowringhee Hawkers’ Association affiliated to Congress-R

released a public statement in a press conference where it demanded a rehabilitation

of the hawkers belonging to the Association ‘‘in the West flank of the Jawharlal

Nehru Road and the vacant plot facing the Maidan Market’’ (Statement made by the

president and general secretary of the Chowringhee Hawkers’ Association in a press

conference at 2 Jawharlal Nehru Road, Calcutta 13 on July 28, 1972 at 5 pm, in

connection with their impending fast unto death for the rehabilitation of


123

Chowringhee hawkers, reproduced in the Copy of the Secret Report Dated: 29.7.72,

on WB Hawkers’ Associations: 85). I located several such rehabilitation proposals

submitted by different associations to the government in the form of letters,

memoranda, and public statements. Bengal Hawkers’ Association affiliated to the

Forward Block, for example submitted a long letter to the Chief Minister on May 6,

1972, in which it reminded the Chief Minister of the fact that hawker eviction in

Calcutta indicated a policy reversal of the government which had set its goal to

eradicate poverty (goribi hathao), and proposed:

If the government is determined in evicting them from foot-path, then from

today, the state government shall have to take the entire responsibility to feed

and to give shelter to all the affected hawkers including their families…. A

temporary dalla or Tray System (3ft by 3 ft) should be introduced at once till

the final arrangement of permanent economic settlement is made.

In order to solve the problems of the hawkers in West Bengal especially in

Calcutta, the representatives of different registered Hawkers’ associations

must be consulted and their opinions and collaborations must be sought in

implementing the hawkers’ settlement plans (i.e. their representatives should

be included in project committees).

Documents submitted to the government by numerous hawkers’ associations in

the context of many such drives were always reflective of the bent to project the

hawkers’ problem as a manifestation of wider political and economic issues such as

the refugee problem and the problem of unemployment. These issues were often

presented in the documents in relation to the ‘‘honesty’’ of the ‘‘self-employed

poor’’ who maintained their families and sustained a wider chain of small

economies. Invoking contrast with the path of radical trade unionism, the

Chowringhee Hawkers’ Association, in its memorandum to the Chief Minister on

March 23, 1972 wrote:

Being democratic and nationally minded we do not believe in irresponsible

mass action and are patiently waiting for the government’s final disposal of the

matter, whereby bona fide hawkers like us, who are facing starvation and

suffering, will be ultimately rehabilitated to our normal vocations. We expect,

the government will understand that we are self-employed, poor businessmen

with very low overhead and capital base. But, in the days of stark poverty, we

did not depend on the government, beg, or indulge in criminal activities. The

only thing that we demand from the government is the security of our

enterprise (emphasis is mine) on the footpath.

These documents also displayed how the associations had mastered the modern

clerical and bureaucratic language (of the state) and technical economic terms to

engage with the government. The associations hardly used any terms in their

documents that could go against the constructive, argumentative and alternative-

providing image of the ‘‘poor hawker’’. The aforementioned memorandum formed a

moral critique of the state (which failed to look after its poor citizens) and justified

the hawkers’ trade on the footpath as an honest survival alternative in the condition

of abject poverty without causing extra burden on the state. The only demand that it


123

made to the state was an allowance of toleration. The document also defines what it

means to be a bona fide hawker: adequately poor, democratic and nationally

minded, adequately old in profession. These early mobilizations anticipated the

central argument of the state-union complex. The survey under discussion is the

official statement of the state-union complex that has placed the argument to the

policy table in a formal bureaucratic language. If the earlier statements described

hawkers as ‘‘enterprising’’, this survey presented them as microentrepreneurs

seeking some sort of tenurial security from the state.

Conclusion

To summarize, the paper enquires into the conditions whereby information

accumulated by the poor comes to be recognized by the state as legitimate, and

where archiving by the poor comes to be aligned alongside state-produced forms of

knowledge as permissible for consideration by the agencies of the state. In so doing,

the paper explains how battles over the politics of knowledge give rise to the

outcome that collectives of poor people are able to define the terms by which the

state recognizes them.

The case of pavement dwellers shows how such a politics of knowledge leads to

the erasure of demographic categories from the living memory of the state and the

public. The HSC has been able to continuously remember the sangram and create a

powerful discourse on the hawker as the ‘‘entrepreneurial poor’’ deserving a stake in

the city space. While projecting hawkers as honest, poor, and enterprising had been

an old strategy deployed by several unions in the moment of eviction, the HSC

transcended its precursors by making such projections part of an everyday

propaganda of an unceasing sangram that gives the HSC the political legitimacy to

act on behalf of the hawkers. The construction of the self as entrepreneurial shares a

historical conjuncture with the contemporary discursive construction of the poor

(thanks to the pervasive microcredit literature) as heroic entrepreneurs who serve

the economy without adding the burden of unemployment to the government.6 An

entrepreneur rationalizes his/her whole life by submitting to the imperative of self-

improvement. At the heart of this new subject modality that I call the

entrepreneurial subjectivity, lay business ethics, individual responsibility and

personal initiatives and perhaps, more importantly, a more powerful claim to the

6 Two recent Routledge books on street hawkers, namely Street Entrepreneurs, edited by Cross and

Morales (2006) and Street Vendors in Global Urban Economy, edited by Bhawmik (2010), have closely

drawn this global consensus on poor’s entrepreneurialism to the particular sector of street hawking. Both

Street Vendors in Global Urban Economy and Street Entrepreneurs acknowledge their intellectual debt to

the work of the Peruvian economist and policy guru Hernando de Sotho. A decade ago, de Sotho wrote

that the poor must be seen as ‘‘heroic entrepreneurs’’ who were part of solution rather than problem.

Another important policy interlocutor, C.K. Prahalad (2004) finds a ‘‘fortune in bottom pyramid’’ and

asserts that one should ‘‘stop thinking of poor as victim or as a burden and start recognizing them as

resilient and creative entrepreneurs.’’ At the heart of this new entrepreneurial subjectivity lie not only

business ethics, but also an assignment to an ultimate economic value to a particular set of disciplinary

technologies such as individual responsibility, personal initiative and autonomy. The self-sufficient, self-

providing entrepreneurs are valorized as the ideal citizens who qualify for credit without asset.


123

city space not as the subjects of welfare but as active citizens. But this citizenship

claim is not posited in the abstract, in the legal-juridical space. It is instead posited

as a collective ethico-moral as well as empirical claim in the terrain of what Partha

Chatterjee calls ‘‘popular politics’’. The entrepreneur (the hawker) is a more

consummate claim-maker on the state than a recipient of welfare (the pavement

dweller).

The hawkers’ claim to, and command over, the archive challenge the accuracy

and the very foundation of the state-led survey. As a matter of principle, if I am

allowed to invoke a few important political theorists, any counter-archive is a

counter to the middle-class cultural capital that establishes hegemony over the state

by monopolizing the field of knowledge production. The counter-archive not only

resisted the negative citations of the hawkers in the media, but also challenged the

ethnographer’s tendency to ‘‘speak in the name of the hawkers’’. When I make such

a formulation, I do not necessarily assume that the middle class and hawkers are two

opposing categories engaged in a class war over the urban space. Nor do I hold that

the middle class in Calcutta is a homogenous block. There is evidence to show that

both the lower and upper segments of the middle class engage with the hawkers in

mutual dependence. Even during Operation Sunshine the hawkers at Gariahat and

other places enjoyed strong neighbourhood support. Many of my respondents with

bhadralok dispositions invoked a shared notion of territoriality, community and

mutual dependence while talking of hawkers.

What happens when Pratibandhi Udyog makes a survey on hawkers in the name

of the corporation using the HSC’s archive? Is this a case of the state’s cooptation of

the movement? Or is it the movement’s willingness to be appropriated in its own

terms? If the first question is answered in the affirmative, then the HCS is just an

example of a parastatal developed in the crucible of an entitlement movement. But

if the second question yields an affirmative answer, then one can think of a space

that can be called the ‘‘state-union complex’’—an ensemble of administrative

techniques in which one find a complex unity and overlap in the action of the state,

the political NGO and the union. The survey of Pratibandhi Udyog is the prose of

the state-union complex. The preceding discussion suggests that the state-union

complex is a combination of three things: sangram (political legitimacy), archive(techniques of governing) and entrepreneurialism (claims of citizenship and civic

responsibility).

I started the discussion by mentioning a few hegemonic theoretical positions on

contemporary urban political formations in the cities of the global South. Each

position is associated with a particular city: Appadurai’s ‘‘deep democracy’’ with

Millennial Mumbai, Holston’s ‘‘insurgent citizenship’’ (2008) with Brasilia, Bayat’s

‘‘encroachment’’ (Bayat 2000) perspective with Cairo and Partha Chatterjee’s

‘‘political society’’ perspective with Calcutta. The significance of these positions

lays in the fact that despite their strong association with particular cities, their

appeal is universalizable. In a similar vein, the present paper argues that a re-

conceptualization of archive might provide a useful way to comprehend the popular

politics in Indian democracy. In this connection, I find it important also to specify

the points where I have departed from the political society argument with which I

share the empirical evidence, cultural proximity and theoretical unity.


123

The hallmark of Chatterjee’s political society argument is that it collectivelyviolates law and encroaches on infrastructure to survive. This collectivity in claim-

making is the community in political society. And here lies its major difference with

civil society in which one cannot find a community of those who violate law such as

tax defaulters. In civil society, then, it is individual who violates law.7 The recent

managerial turn into the political society argument in Chatterjee’s influential 2008

Economic and Political Weekly article frees political society from its transgressive

aspects and argues that while civil society is the site of the management of profit-

making corporate capital opening up new frontiers of Primitive Accumulation of

Capital, political society offers a space for the management of non-corporate

capital—the so-called informal sector (Chatterjee 2008). It is in the domain of the

political society that new dispossessions are to be looked after by governmentality.

This is what Kalyan Sanyal (2007) calls ‘‘decapitalization’’ or the ‘‘reversal of the

effect of primitive accumulation of capital’’ through a reunification of the

dispossessed labour with the means of production. If one goes by this new twist

to the political society argument that has made the concept palatable to the liberal

taste (Nigam 2008), then it can be argued that the HSC will still be a political

society even after the legalization of footpath hawking as it will keep on managing

the non-corporate capital of the hawkers. But, if for the sake of argumentation, we

forget about the new turn and celebrate political society as a constitutive outside of

both the state and the civil society whose hallmarks are population and paralegality,

then the HSC’s entrepreneurial discourse begins to trouble the distinction between

civil society and political society and produces citizenship norms for the poor in the

terrain of popular politics. Entrepreneurialism celebrates the self-employed and self-

governed individual as the ideal citizen. The collective claim of the HSC thus slips

into a claim for right-bearing entrepreneurs—a new qualifier for the poor to be

citizens globally produced by international funding organizations, states, NGOs and

unions like the HSC. An entrepreneur has a greater claim to being a rights-bearing

citizen, rather than as a recipient of welfare. The pavement dwellers failed to make a

transition from a population of welfare recipients to individual citizens with rights.

The entrepreneurial discourse makes it possible for hawkers to successfully

negotiate with the neoliberal state.

The operation of the HSC in the governmental space questions Chatterjee’s rather

decidedly un-Gramscian conception of civil society and un-Foucauldian conception

of governmentality. He asserts that the landless poor of India lie outside of civil

society, ‘‘because their claims are irreducibly political’’ (2004, 60), which assumes a

model of civil society and politics as operating in two separate spheres, though his

own examples of mobilizations show how urban poor operate in and through

(unequal) social networks and strategies of which government officials, unions, and

7 This is not to deny the emerging trend in many Indian cities of elite neighbourhood associations coming

together to go illegal in justifying elite informality or to wage violence on the poor (Baviskar 2003). I

have even heard from my Bombay-based researcher friend at UC Berkeley, Namrata Kapoor, that these

elite associations are very much active during corporation elections to favour particular candidates. The

civil society associations act together to pressurize the Court and the municipal government to legalizetheir illegality and not to tolerate illegality for their survival. But civil society acting as a pressure group

to justify illegality like tax evasion and corruption cannot be found.


123

political parties are a part (this is what I understand as the state-union complex).

Chatterjee writes that the politics of the governed is a ‘‘strategic politics in political

society,’’ where Gramsci would argue that politics are always strategic—about

constructing hegemony through the combination of coercion and consent. Moving

onto Foucault, Chatterjee’s conception of governmentality appears to impose a

binary between those who govern and those who are governed that seems heavy

handed in relation to Foucault’s theorization which sees all of us as interpolated by

these structures and rejects the idea of an outside from which to govern. In a more

Foucauldian tone, the present paper conceives of the state-union complex as an

intertwining of the ‘‘state-in-society’’ and the society-in-state. The paper thus does

not recognize the state as a mode of being—an institution that stands above the

society.

References

Anjaria, J. 2008. Unruly streets everyday practices and promises of globality in Mumbai. Unpublished

dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Appadurai, A. 2002. Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Public Culture14(1): 21–47.

Bandyopadhyay, R. 2007. From public to Pablik: Elementary aspects of street politics in postcolonial

Calcutta. Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society 42(3): 20–41.

Bandyopadhyay, R. 2009a. Contentious Politics and Human Rights: Who Benefits? In 2007 SYLFFregional forum selected papers on human rights and creative leadership. Tokyo: The Tokyo

Foundation Press.

Bandyopadhyay, R. 2009b. Hawkers’ movement in Kolkata. Economic and Political Weekly 44(17):

116–119.

Bandyopadhyay, R. 2009c. Archiving from below: The case of the mobilized hawkers in Calcutta.

Sociological Research Online 14 (5). http://en.scientificcommons.org/52638459.

Bandyopadhyay, R. (2010). Negociaciones del Archivo: El Caso de Los Venderores Ambulantes en

Calcutta. Estudios de Asia y Africa 141 45(1): 41–68.

Baviskar, A. 2003. Between violence and desire: Space, power, and identity in the making of

metropolitan Delhi. International Social Science Journal 55(1): 89–98.

Bayat, A. 2000. From ‘dangerous classes’ to quiet rebels: Politics of the urban subaltern in the global

south. International Sociology 15(3): 533–557.

Bayly, C.A. 1996. Empire and Information. Intelligence gathering and social communication in India,1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bhan, G. 2009. This is no longer the city I once knew’: Evictions, the urban poor and the right to the city

in millennial Delhi. Environment and Urbanization 21(1): 127–142.

Bhawmik, S. (ed). 2010. Street vendors in the global urban economy. New Delhi: Routledge.


123

Acknowledgments This article is a part of the author’s ongoing PhD Dissertation titled ‘Negotiating

Informality: Changing Faces of Footpaths of Kolkata, 1975-2005’. The project is funded by the

SYLFF Programme (2006-2009), at Jadavpur University, SYLFF-FMP visiting grant at El Colegio de

Mexico (2008), and Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Fellowship (2009-2010) at University of California,

Berkeley. The author is thankful to Samita Sen, Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, Raka Ray, Ananya Roy,

Joyashree Roy, Gautam Bhadra, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Partha Chatterjee, Anjan Ghosh,

Bodhisattva Kar, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Ritwik Bhattacharya, Shaktiman Ghosh, Sudipta Maitra, Anup

Sarkar, Carlos Alba Vega, Ishita Banerjee-Dube, Vinay Gidwani, Solomon Benjamin, Carol Upadhya,

Anup Matilal for helping him develop my arguments in several ways. The author is especially thankful

to the three anonymous reviewers of Dialectical Anthropology and the editorial team for their

insightful comments and technical assistance.

Axel, B. 2002. Introduction. In Historical anthropology and its futures: From the margins, ed. B.

Axel. Durham: Duke University Press.

http://en.scientificcommons.org/52638459

Castells, M. 1989. The informational city. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Chatterjee, P. 2004. The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world.

New Delhi: Permanent Black.

Chatterjee, P. 2008. Democracy and economic transformation in India. Economic and Political Weekly43(16): 53–62.

Clifford, J. 1990. Notes on (field) notes. In Fieldnotes: The makings of anthropology, ed. R. Sanjek.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Cross, J. 1998. Informal politics: Street vendors and the state in Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

Cross, J., and A. Morales (eds.). 2006. Street entrepreneurs: People, place and politics in local and globalperspective. New York: Routledge.

Das, T.C. 1949. Bengal famine 1943.Donovan, Michael G. 2008. Informal cities and the contestation of public space: The case of Bogota’s

street vendors, 1988–2003. Urban Studies 45(1): 29–51.

Duneier, M. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Dutta, A. 2007. Space, sanitization and the press: The coverage of street vending in Kolkata. See.

http://development-dialogues.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html.

Elden, S. 2007. Government, territory, calculation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space25(3): 562–580.

Fernandes, L. 2008. India’s new middle class: Democratic politics in an era of economic reform.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, M. 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, ed. G. Burchell,

C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 87–104. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Ghertner, D.A. 2010. Calculating without numbers: Aesthetic governmentality in Delhi’s slums. Economyand Society 39(2): 185–217.

Gordon, C. 1991. Governmental rationality. In The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, ed.

G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Government of India. 2004. National policy on urban street vendors (Draft Version), 1–10.

Government of India. 2009. National policy on urban street vendors, 1–22.

Hawker Sangram Committee. 2006. A brief chronology of the hawkers’ struggle from 1992–2004, 1–7.

Hawker Sangram Committee. 2007. An initial report of the socio-economic study of hawkers or streetvendors of Kolkata. Kolkata: Pratibandhi Udyog.

Holston, J. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.

Inns, H.A. 1950. In Empire and communications, ed. David Godfrey. Victoria, BC: Press Porcepic, 1986.

Jagannathan, V., and A. Halder. 1988a. Income-housing linkages: a case study of pavement dwellers in

Calcutta. Economic and Political Weekly 23(23): 1175–1178.

Jagannathan, V., and A. Halder. 1988b. A case study of pavement dwellers in Calcutta: Occupation,

mobility and rural-urban linkages. Economic and Political Weekly 23(49): 2602–2605.

Jagannathan, V., and A. Halder. 1989. A case study of pavement dwellers in Calcutta: Family

characteristics of the urban poor. Economic and Political Weekly 24(6): 315–318.

Jhabvala, R. 2010. Foreword. In Introduction: Street vendors in the global urban economy, ed.

S. Bhawmik. New Delhi: Routledge.

Lahiri, S.(ed.). 1997 Operation sunshine (in Bengali). Kolkata: Visvakosh Parishad.

Legg, S. 2006. Governmentality, congestion and calculation in colonial Delhi. Social and CulturalGeography 7(5): 709–729.

Levi-Strauss, C. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Merry, S. 2002. Ethnography in the archives. In Practicing ethnography in law: New dialogues, enduringmethods, ed. J. Starr, and M. Goodale, 128–142. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s.

Mukherjee, S. 1975. Under the shadow of the metropolis: They are citizens too: A report on the survey of10, 000 pavement dwellers in Calcutta. Calcutta: C.M.D.A. Publications.

Nigam, A. 2008. Political society and the fable of primitive accumulation. http://kafila.org/2008/06/

15/political-society-and-the-fable-of-primitive-accumulation/.

Peluso, N.L. 1995. Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping Forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Antipode 27(4): 383–406.

Popke, E.Jeffrey, and R. Ballard. 2004. Dislocating modernity: Identity, space and representations of

street trade in Durban, South Africa. Geoforum 35: 99–110.


123

http://development-dialogues.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html

http://kafila.org/2008/06/15/political-society-and-the-fable-of-primitive-accumulation/

http://kafila.org/2008/06/15/political-society-and-the-fable-of-primitive-accumulation/

Prahalad, C.K. 2004. The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid: Eradicating poverty through profits.

Upper Saddle River, N.J: Wharton School Publishing.

Pratibandhi Udyog. (2007). A pilot project survey report of street hawkers or vendors of Gariahat Roadand Rashbehari Avenue in Kolkata. Kolkata: Pratibandhi Udyog.

Rajagopal, A. 2001. The violence of commodity aesthetics: Hawkers, demolition raids, and a new regime

of consumption. Social Text 19(3): 91–113.

Roy, A. 2002. City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the politics of poverty. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Roy, A. 2004. The gentleman’s city: Urban informality in the Calcutta of new communism. In Urbaninformality, eds. N. AlSayyad and A. Roy, 147–170. Lexington: Lexington Books.

Roy, A. 2009. Civic governmentality: The politics of inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai. Antipode 41(1):

159–179.

Sanyal, K. 2007. Rethinking capitalist development: Primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge.

Sengupta, D. 2007. The refugee city: partition and Kolkata’s postcolonial landscape. http://bangalnama.

wordpress.com/2009/08/31/the-refugee-city-partition-and-kolkata%E2%80%99s-postcolonial-lands

cape/.

Spivak, G. 1985. The Rani of Sirmur: An essay in reading the archives. History and Theory 24.

Stillerman, J. 2006. The politics of space and culture in Santiago, Chile’s street markets. QualitativeSociology 29: 507–530.

Stoller, P. 1996. Spaces, places, and fields: The politics of West African trading in New York City’s

informal economy. American Anthropologist 98(4): 776–788.

Stoller, P. 2002. Money has no smell: The Africanization of New York City. Chicago, London: University

of Chicago Press.


123

http://bangalnama.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/the-refugee-city-partition-and-kolkata%E2%80%99s-postcolonial-landscape/



Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay’s ‘‘Politicsof archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellersin Calcutta’’

Michaeline A. Crichlow

Published online: 10 June 2011

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

In the wake of Keith Hart’s classic (1973) essay on Ghana and his popularization of

the concept of informal economy, a veritable academic industry on informality

arose—the bulk of which focused on the creativity and varieties of informality around

the world and its main structural characteristics. A plethora of case studies largely

addressed to the ‘‘developing’’ world tended to construct the formal and informal as

separate spheres. This approach eventually gave way to studies treating the dynamic

articulation of the sectors, highlighting the presence of informal economic spaces in

the developed world as post-Fordist casual work, ‘‘home’’ work, urban subsistence

and underemployment processes became more visible under neoliberal globalization.

This is despite neoliberalism’s touted benefits of growth and welfare gains (spewed

out by the academics invested in the truth of the optimality of market processes) and

its typecasting of the developmental nation-state as a liability, thereby severely

circumscribing its role in social empowerment. Other literature emerged from a

longue duree perspective arguing that capital had always incorporated a mix of labor

processes (Crichlow 1998; Tabak and Crichlow 2000). These writings embedded in a

world system approach emphasized the complex dialectical unity of the capitalist

world economy, mapped through spatial zones defined according to their political

economic weight and conceptualized relationally, as core, periphery, and semi-

periphery or more broadly, North and South. Yet, all of these perspectives were

variations on a singular theme that sought to account for informality within economic

structures. In short, the bottom line in the investigation and analysis of the informal

sector or informal economy was always the economy.

More innovative studies of the politics of the informal economy, particularly

coming out of ethnographic studies in Latin America, sought to dispute the so-called

charge that the informal sector was apolitical given its participants’ evasive

tendencies and examined the sorts of organizations that were springing up, as

M. A. Crichlow (&)

Duke University, Durham, NC, USA


123


DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9231-0

informal workers sought to defend their turf by engaging with the political through

the state and its various institutions. At any rate, this literature and others revealed

the transactions taking place between members of informal economies and state

institutions, which acted to sustain each other’s relative power. Certainly, these

analysts argue that the nature of such populist politics is necessary for the

mobilization of the votes of informal workers.

These studies, however, stem from a structuralist framework that leaves intact the

very categories that need to be unpacked for an understanding of the role of

informality in sustaining state/society relations. The ‘‘state,’’ for example, even

when its corruption and enduring patron/client relationships are duly noted, still

seems to be the ultimate horizon from which order and regulation proceed and

against which informality is weighed. In these studies too, the idea of informal

economy politics is defined more or less as the manipulation of state/society

relations ultimately for economic gains.

Indeed, it is those writings on new social movements, while not explicitly

drawing links between the new forms of cultural political mobilizations and the

politics of informality, that nonetheless set the stage for new understandings of

state/society relations under informality (Alvarez et al. 1998). This literature more

than anything else offered a way to think about informality in ways that considered

the role of the economic and its driving capabilities, without treating it in an overly

deterministic way. In short, they center people rather than structures, examining

closely the cultural politics deployed by those living on or near the margins of a

certain kind of power exercised by states and non-state actors. Of course, not all

those engaged in reconfiguring their identities and livelihoods in such movements

were necessarily informal workers, but significant numbers were. Because of this,

some general conclusions can be drawn about the way that these social movements

emerged as veritable alternatives to official projects of naming, developing, and

belonging. Yet most of these studies allude to how these marginals using ‘‘the

master’s tools,’’ so to speak, make themselves and their agendas more visible and

conclude, as one study does, that ‘‘the language and practice of democratic

participation thrive in a volatile age when inequities are on the rise throughout the

hemisphere.’’ (Fernandez-Kelly and Shefner 2006: 19).

It is to this body of work that this particular article contributes and against which

its claims are to be measured. In this article, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay seeks to shift

the focus from the economics of the informal sector to that of its politics. The writer

seeks to go beyond those studies that demonstrate how those ‘‘othered’’ populations

are able to use the tools of their own subjugation, or the ‘‘governmentalities of the

governors,’’ to eke out spaces of power from those margins.

Using the concept of counter archive or reverse archives, Bandhopadhyay

delineates the ways by which footpath hawkers in the Indian city of Calcutta were

able to not only define themselves through surveys and appropriate their own

mechanisms of governmentality that subverted those produced by state government

but also influenced the archiving techniques which those state officials used. The

author compellingly demonstrates that political governmentality relies on negoti-

ations between ‘‘governed and governors’’ to operate. Thus, the question about rule,

that is, the nature of governmentalities is not left to as an ahistorical imposition of

318 M. A. Crichlow

123

the Foucauldian notion of modern governmentality, but rather addresses the types of

negotiations that structure and engender these relationships of grounded power.

Reverse archives are used by a highly organized Hawkers Sangram Committee

(HSC), or Hawkers union, to redefine the subjectivities of hawker members. In that

way, hawkers become visible and less marginal and therefore more properly count

in the eyes of state officials. As those who are recognized as belonging to specific

governable spaces, they are in a position to continue to help direct their future.

Bandyopadhyay argues that HSC came into being following struggles against mass

evictions, euphemistically called ‘‘Operation Sunshine’’ that were organized by

Calcutta city officials in an effort to showcase it as a ‘‘world class’’ space. It is a

routine that is repeated globally, as marginals using crowded public spaces are

perceived as nuisances and their livelihood practices are considered annoying…presumably, they add to the clutter, and congestion, and city counselors take

extreme action against informal workers and the homeless. For example, on an

island in the Caribbean, some 2 years ago, city officials rounded up the homeless,

stripped them naked, and hosed them down en masse thus violating their privacy, all

part of the efforts to keep the city clean and sanitary.

These counter archives, states Bandyopadhyay, parallel and act as correctives to

those gathered by city officials and the organization of HSC. He provides rich data

that demonstrate how through its own authorization of its archives HSC was able to

successfully challenge notions of ‘‘illegality,’’ which ultimately served to stave off

the evictions and harassments that city officials saved for those who were

undesirable and those who did not belong. Taking charge in this fashion, hawkers

were encouraged to rethink themselves as entrepreneurs and indeed to reconstitute

the discourse in such a way that to be an entrepreneur became synonymous with

being bona fide citizens, and therefore like true citizens, their claims for government

support were legitimate.

However, as Bandyopadhyay notes, the production of counter archives was no

‘‘deep democracy’’ (Appadurai 2002) because it came at the expense of the

pavement dwellers, another marginalized group of subjects who lacked the

resources and organization of the HSC, and therefore, were ill equipped to render

themselves visible in this zero sum game of re-conducting the self and reconstituting

the conduct of the state. Indeed, one may legitimately argue that the HSC’s

successes in rendering the hawkers visible necessitated, or so it would seem, that

they replicate the state’s archiving with its inbuilt rationality of ‘‘othering,’’ where

one group’s freedoms, i.e., the very practice of the freedom to question, were

instantiated at the expense of another. Bandyopadhyay’s account here of the spaces

of power shaped through the informal zone operates to undermine Chatterjee’s

(2008) reliance on confusing binaries of political society (peasants and diverse

members of informal economy) and civil society (bourgeois-formal), which

coincide with the divide of ‘‘a non-corporate space’’ or a sort of ‘‘moral economy,’’

whose members are not oblivious to profit making but for whom livelihood

concerns constitute the bottom line and corporate space, which is shaped by its

focus on the maximization of capital. This binaristic representation of socioeco-

nomic life is hugely problematic, and the case presented here speaks to a dynamic

entanglement of formal/informal relationships. Certainly, this is also underscored in


123

the later informal economy literature, especially on Latin America, which directly

addresses this articulation. It would seem that Chatterjee’s grasp of governmentality

is intended to focus on power only as a tool of thinking beyond the power of

states—its negative sense.

The case presented here suggests both the governors (state) and the governed

(HSC/hawkers) actively influencing the governmental fields in which they are both

engaged. Or at least this is what is implied here, as the author seems to suggest that

the informal economy as transactional reality is being re-problematized here: that is

to say, its practices and its very dynamic undergoing significant transformation. This

point could have been drawn out more explicitly since the author convincingly

shows the centrality of negotiation to governmentality, and not only the liberal kind,

which is the focus in Foucault’s writings. Even authoritarian regimes, consider

‘‘how to govern,’’ (Cadman 2010) given the found socio-cultural terrain. Certainly,

as the author scrambles the hard distinctions between resistance, accommodation,

encroachment (Bayat 2000), and cooption, the ethnography produced here is

somewhat limited to the union’s agenda. One wonders how the changed

subjectivities of these poor hawkers, now cast as enabled entrepreneurs who

provide low-cost services, have actually shifted the inequalities inherent in the

social field enabling the government of themselves. This is especially pertinent

since in this attempt to practice a certain freedom, and question official archives,

they have been complicit with state-like conduct itself, in displacing another set of

marginals, viz., pavement dwellers. Somewhat uncannily, it would seem then that

the difference between this political form of challenge-reverse archiving, and those

others, which utilize the spaces of government technologies themselves to

manipulate conduct, and from which the author seeks to distance counter-archiving,

nonetheless bears a striking resemblance.

Reconfiguring citizenship is a game reflecting not only inclusions but exclusions

as well (Somers 2008). Certainly linking ethnography to the field of historical

archiving necessitates the voices of those whose ethics of the self undergo

transformative re-ordering under conditions of state evasions. What sorts of

disjunctures occurred between the field of informality and the ways in which

footpath hawkers imagined themselves? And can this reverse archiving really count

as a counter conduct that radically undermines state archives, considering that these

archives from below are then resubmitted to the state, and the forms of conduct by

the governors remain untouched, or so it would seem. In fact, what precipitated

these state openings, those interstices during which state officials reconsidered how

to govern?

References

Alvarez, Sonia, Evelyn Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar. 1998. Cultures of politics: Politics of cultures: Re-visioning Latin American social movements. Colorado: Westview Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2002. Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. PublicCulture 14(1): 21–47.

320 M. A. Crichlow

123

Bayat, Asef. 2000. From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’: Politics of the urban subaltern in the

global south. International Sociology 15: 533–557.

Cadman, Louisa. 2010. How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political. Environment andPlanning D: Society and Space 28: 539–556.

Chatterjee, Partha. 2008. Democracy and economic transformation in India. Economic and PoliticalWeekly 43(16): 53–62 (April 19–25).

Crichlow, Michaeline. 1998. Reconfiguring the informal sector divide: State, capitalism and struggle in

Trinidad and Tobago. In Latin American Perspectives 98, 25(2): 62–83.

Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia, and Jon Shefner. 2006. Out of the shadows: Political action and the informaleconomy in Latin America. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.

Hart, Keith. 1973. Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana. Journal of ModernAfrican Studies 11(1): 61–89.

Somers, Margaret. 2008. Genealogies of citizenship: Markets, statelessness, and the right to have rights.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tabak, F., and M. Crichlow (eds.). 2000. Informalization: Process and structure. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University.


123

Miguel Angel Centeno



More than 35 years ago, Steven Lukes reminded us that power is never a simple and

superficial thing. It is never enough to know or explain what happens in ‘‘smoke

filled rooms’’; we need to also ask who was and was not there, and most

importantly, how their various interests and preferences were shaped and expressed.

This continued the tradition from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, which sought

to penetrate how knowledge itself and its construction could be used to control and

exploit. Foucault went so far as to imply that power was knowledge and vice versa,

while Bourdieu made the ‘‘symbolic capital’’ of the state the center of his analysis of

political rule. In a beautiful encapsulation of these visions, James Scott demon-

strated that the lenses through which the state ‘‘saw’’ the society around it (censuses,

maps) shaped the definition of aspirations and the design of policies. How one sees

determines what one does.

Bandyopadhyay’s article demonstrates the value of such insights and forces us to

ask questions about how the liberal dreams of markets and democracy play out in

the streets of the developing world.

To the ‘‘poverty tourist’’ being shown the folkloric local color of the Calcutta

streets, the social and political distinctions between the hawkers and dwellers she

might encounter would be invisible. The gap between the observer and the two

objects of her gaze is so great as to make the lived differences of those selling goods

and those merely living on the streets apparently inconsequential. Both disappear in

the morass of poverty and apparent powerlessness. The opening of any path open to

political participation, any space left for self-realization and communal protection

would seem progress. But democratic action comes in many guises, and democratic

waves do not necessarily lift all ships. Bandyopadhyay shows us that even within

powerlessness, there are hierarchies and strategies and that some subaltern groups

M. A. Centeno (&)

Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA


123


DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9235-9

‘‘Who counts, rules’’: Comment on Ritajyoti

Bandyopadhyay, ‘‘Politics of archiving: hawkersand pavement dwellers in Calcutta’’

retain a significantly differential degree of agency in defining their relationship with

the state.

As I see it, the heart of the article documents how the politics of knowledge and

its control determine outcomes. Neither the dwellers nor the hawkers represent key

constituencies and neither appears to offer the state enough promises of votes or

threats of violence with which to exact political leverage. Instead, the hawkers have

reproduced some of the functions and structures of the state in order to develop what

might be called a junior partnership with it. If they cannot claim any privilege as

political or social actors, they may do so through their organizational form. In

perhaps the critical example of this kind of empowerment, the hawkers’ syndicate is

responsible for producing and issuing the identity documents needed to placate

policemen and regulators. The HSC thereby appropriates the political role (and

there is no denying that it is a political one) of deciding and labeling who belongs

and who does not.

The construction of the HSC also points out the error with taking informality at

face value. No matter our attempt at analytical sophistication, social scientists tend to

think in dichotomous categories. Thus, groups and social sectors are formal or

informal, organized or unorganized. The experience of the hawkers makes clear that

even if it is not recognized by the state (or taxed by it, which is often the same thing),

the informal economy does not exist in an institutional vacuum. Property rights and

market niches need to be mutually recognized: this is my corner and only I get sell

these goods. The HSC serves to safeguard these and even possesses that ultimate

Weberian characteristic of a complex organization: a sophisticated record keeping

apparatus and archive. Precisely because it does this, it is then recognized by the state

as a functional equivalent. Without necessarily any legal standing (Bandyopadhyay

is not clear on this point), it assumes many of the functions and characteristics of a

state agency. This simultaneously gives the HSC a great deal of power and

legitimacy; since it can keep records, it can determine who fits and who does not. The

surveys conducted by the HSC may be political tools, but they have the requisite

backing of expert knowledge and the appropriate technical patina of ‘‘social fact.’’

The lesson on the footpath is a familiar one from labor history: organize,

organize, organize. The power of institutionalization is never clearer than in the

account of how the HSC can determine which parts of the relevant areas are open

for inspection and tours. As with many arenas of social life (for example, college

admissions, tenure files, and bank balance sheets), the power of defining the

framework of judgment and the empirical sample is decisive. Only what is seen

exists in politics, no matter how biased or deceptive that vision may be. Perhaps not

surprisingly, this form of organization and level of power comes with its own

Kafkaesque dysfunctions as when the HSC prohibits access to records as these may

‘‘expose the inner contradictions of the committee.’’ No obstinate and officious

government clerk could have said it better.

The institutionalized visibility granted the HSC has its own negation: the

invisibility of the dwellers. Where prior to the 1970s they had been the subject of

government policies and efforts, the rise of a hawkers’ organization and the absence

of an equivalent for the dwellers makes their presence invisible. Since they are not

organized, they do not exist. They are not counted, so they do not count. One

324 M. A. Centeno

123

missing strand in the story is why the dwellers do not replicate the institutional

strategy of the hawkers. Certainly the years of welfarist reforms by the urban

agencies would have left some organizational residue? What explains the dwellers’

apparent silence? Is it that their transformation into the cinematized objects of pity

disempowered them? Does their scattering through the city during the daylight

hours make it structurally impossible to organize? Do they lack the resources to do

so (archives, after all, require papers, clips, pencils, and a room in which to house

them all)? Or have there been confrontations and a decision made by the state to

recognize one set of institutions and not another? Here I have a small complaint to

register: while the personalities and agents behind the HSC are well drawn, we get a

less clear picture of which agencies are involved here. The CMDA, the Congress

party and the Left Front make auxiliary appearances, but it is not clear who or what

represents them on the footpaths. Who are the enforcers? Who is the doing the

reading of the institutionalized material? This is an important missing aspect of the

story: why have the hawkers been able to apparently monopolize the production of

‘‘local knowledge’’? How was the vacuum created? These questions are particularly

important in light of very different patterns observed in other Indian cities.

Bandyopadhyay does provide one possible answer and this has to do very much

with the historical context in which these developments take place. The dwellers

appear to have been the focus of government attention until the 1990s. The ‘‘story of

forgetting’’ told here reminds us of the iron law of oligarchy no matter the

ideological colors of the organization. Since the pavement dwellers represented

something of an empirical affront to the claims of Left Front exceptionalism, their

presence had to be ignored. Since their existence indicated the continued problems

of the landless in Golden Bengal, it had to be erased from the visible record. If

problems or challenges remain unacknowledged, then uncomfortable truths or

difficult challenges can be ignored.

This was made infinitely easier because of the neoliberalization of India during

these years. Consider that one characteristic of neoliberalism is the supplanting of

political by economic rights; the interests of the customer and the producer trump

those of the voter. Moreover, the psychological and physical comfort of those whose

money and approval is critical for the state (i.e., the rich and the foreign) is more

important than the intrinsic rights of the locals.

The dwellers offered no currency accepted in the neoliberal market: their voting

block was dispersed, they had no money to invest or even with which to consume,

nor any skills to offer the global market place. All they possess (literally) is their

claim to an abstract Indian citizenship, but they belong to an ‘‘old’’ or ‘‘traditional’’

India that is supposed to have disappeared. Their very existence contradicts the

modernity narrative of an India transformed. They are citizens of the wrong country.

Contrast this with the narrative presented by the hawkers: perhaps equally poor (yet

what may appear to be marginal differences make a huge difference for those on the

bottom), but exhibiting that most important of attributes in the neoliberal narrative:

entrepreneurship. These are not huddled masses waiting for Patrick Swayze to save

them, but actors imbued with a form of protestant ethic. Moreover, they also possess

the wherewithal to establish themselves as bona fide actors and even wear latex

gloves when the tourists come to gawk. These are the deserving poor.

‘‘Who counts, rules’’: Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay 325

123

One might quibble with this article. As someone who has never been to Calcutta,

for example, I have to accept that the critical distinction on the footpath is between

dweller and hawker. Are these the most relevant categories or are other identities

hidden by this apparent functional dichotomy? Alternative identities or agendas are

not addressed. Yet, the insights remain: how governability can take many shapes

and how forms of representation matter. Perhaps most importantly Bandyopadhyay

reminds us to look beyond the simple categories of poor or disposed and note that

the same political and institutional forces shaping the life of those who reside in

Calcutta’s high rises are also relevant for those far below.

326 M. A. Centeno

123

Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, ‘‘Politicsof archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellersin Calcutta’’

Edward A. Rodrigues



The plight of the urban poor living in cities of the third world has been a subject of

continuing interest for scholars of urbanization as well as activists working among

such disadvantaged groups. Not only are the urban poor perceived as illegal

occupants and encroachers of the sites they dwell in, they are also seen as

overburdening scarce public utilities, creating the scenarios of overcrowding and

squalor as the endearing and persistent images of third world cities. Notwithstanding

the push and pull of urbanization that result in this squalid and decrepit state of third

world cities, it is important to note that unlike the urban areas of the first world, the

urban poor do not reside on the fringe of metropolitan cities, rather they constitute

an integral part of the city and their informal labor makes a significant contribution

to the urban economy in third world societies. Clearly then, third world urbanization

involves a vastly different trajectory of growth and development bringing into

critical focus not only the governmental role of the state overseeing large scale

inequalities, but also the different ways in which governmentality gets negotiated by

subject actors on both sides of the material divide within the urban setting.

It is within this larger canvas of third world urbanization that one must situate the

present study by R. Bandhopadhyay. The article engages with a body of political

thought that has attempted to theorize governmentality in the context of third world

societies. Borrowing on Chatterjee’s concept of political society, the author tries to

interpret two contrasting political engagements of marginalized groups as they

struggle to lay claim to urban space in Kolkata (aka Calcutta), India. The author

uses the Foucouldian concept of the archive, combined with the politics of

enumeration as implicit in state governmental actions, to illustrate the success of

one marginalized group as opposed to the failure of another. Such struggles between

the urban poor to overcome their material impoverishment are a persistent feature of

urban dynamics in third world cities. In the case of Calcutta, the hawkers and the

E. A. Rodrigues (&)

Department of Sociology, University of Mumbai, Mumbai 400 098, India


123


DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9236-8

pavement dwellers are the two marginalized groups faced with eviction by the

Calcutta Municipal Corporation [CMC]. The hawkers, however, are equipped with a

database of its members as opposed to the pavement dwellers who have no such

database. Archiving, as the author suggests, becomes a weapon in the hands of the

hawkers organization [HSC] in its engagements with the Calcutta Municipal

Corporation. Besides the authorities of the CMC, the hawkers must also engage with

a resentful public as well as the ruling political elites in the State of West Bengal. In

all three engagements, it appears that the strategic use of archival information has

served the hawkers well in helping them to establish their rights over hawking sites.

This is not withstanding the fact that the CMC authorities earn a fantastic 72,00,000

rupees for granting temporary legitimate status as a result of this information.

Yet, terming such strategic manipulation of archival information as a success for

the hawkers may actually be construed as misrepresenting the struggles of the urban

poor in third world cities. Would the material conditions of the urban poor improve

if they all had access to archives like the one maintained by these hawkers? Or

would the archive itself become a casualty of state manipulation in the event of its

large scale utilization by the urban poor? Clearly, such limited renderings of

struggles by the urban poor do not acknowledge the complexity of the relationships

and representations that circumscribe the sphere of governmentality in third world

societies. In part, it may be said that such scripting of urban social movements point

to the difficulty in rendering intelligible notions of political society in situations

where both state and civil society are themselves implicated in the illegitimate

pursuit and consolidation of power. Not surprising then, the way in which the term

political society has been deployed raises questions about state—society relations in

West Bengal, especially following the recent state use of violence in Singur and

Nandigram. Chatterjee’s idea of positioning ‘‘political society’’ between and outside

both state and civil society has several important implications, not the least of which

was the subtext of illegality and illegitimacy that finds very strong representations in

the consciousness of those inhabiting the terrain of political society. It was a site of

political activism whose mobilizations, contestations, and resistance were all deeply

infused with a politics that persistently challenged the legitimacy claims of both

state and civil society. Yet, given the structures of patronage as embedded in the

networks of patron client relationships, which in turn systematically subvert the

legitimate rule of government, it becomes difficult to separate the illegitimacy of

political society from that of state and civil society in the Indian context. Not

surprising then, that claims to legitimacy by the ruling classes are always perceived

with deep suspicion by the urban poor. It is therefore not the claim that is the object

of validation, but rather the power networks supportive of such claims that make

them move in the direction of success or failure. Clearly then, this raises serious

questions about the extent to which one would accept the claims of archival

legitimacy as presented by the hawkers. Given the economics of hawking and its

place within the informal economy of the city, encroachment of urban spaces is a

perennial problem affecting all Indian cities. In fact, there are no indications to show

that Indian cities have been able to deal with the problem of hawker’s

encroachment. Even where evictions are undertaken from time to time by the

municipal authorities, these are effective only for a while. In time, the hawkers

328 E. A. Rodrigues

123

return back and reclaim the space. Thus, irrespective of whether they have an

archive or not hawkers continue to proliferate wherever the pace of urbanization

begins to pick up momentum.

Additionally, notwithstanding the claims of their archival data, it would appear

that the hawkers are themselves the objects of governmental regimes that continue to

place them in a relationship of dependence and vulnerability to those in power at

different levels of the hierarchy within the municipal corporation. To that extent,

their success in holding claims to their hawking sites will always be of a temporary

nature dependant on a constellation of factors, of which the archival information they

have is no doubt important. Political and economic changes at the state level,

suggesting a neoliberal consensus among the governmental elites may very well

pursue an agenda of urban development far more intolerant of hawkers and pavement

dwellers than that of Operation Sunshine discussed in the text. Such efforts at spatial

transformations may reveal that the hawkers archive might not be of much use to

them. Quite clearly, there is a need to recognize not only the limited emancipatory

value offered by such archival undertakings but also to note that such engagements,

as the one undertaken by the hawkers, tend to have an exclusive as well as a divisive

role in mobilizing the dispossessed and disenfranchised sections of urban society.

The dissolution of class mobilizations in urban areas to be replaced by identity-based

mobilization based on one or another occupation will only further weaken the class

solidarity of the urban poor. To that extent, the hawkers movement not only

represents success of a limited nature but also the archive, in effect, functions as a

mechanism of inclusion/exclusion of the urban poor. Even if the nature of hawking

offers tremendous flexibility in the way that individual and groups come to get

associated with the label, it is only those hawkers with their identity secured within

the database who form part of the Hawkers Sangram Committee [HSC].

Interestingly, the role of the archive in the politics of the HSC suggests what

appears to be a very problematic causal relationship between the politics of identity

and that of legitimacy. There is no way of distinguishing between when the HSC

functions as a political NGO and when it resembles a grouping from within political

society. Equally interesting is the state’s response to both the hawkers and the

pavement dwellers. It would seem that even if hawkers are pavement dwellers, it is

their identity as hawkers that have an enabling effect for them. How does one

understand the nature of urban social movements from the standpoint of the

archive? Even if individual social groups are devoid of an archive as possessed by

the hawkers, archives of different kinds keep getting assembled together for the

urban poor by different agencies of the government as well as different

nongovernmental organization. The condition of the urban poor continues to get

increasingly more desperate as their numbers swell and the struggles between them

become increasingly harsh. Even worse is the increasing divide between them and

the other classes resulting from nearly two decades of neoliberal economic growth.

Given that both hawkers and pavement dwellers are marked by the state in their

status as illegal occupants of urban space, the archives of the poor seem to have

excluded some and included others. In this sense, it would appear that the hawker’s

archive in its functioning has much in common with the exclusionary politics of

governmental regimes under capitalism.

Comment on Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay 329

123

A historian among anthropologists: commentson ‘‘Politics of Archiving’’

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay

Published online: 8 September 2011


My paper in Dialectical Anthropology has received three very rich commentaries by

three leading social scholars working on related issues in different regions of the

world. The commentaries are, in many ways, reflections on my research that earned

me a doctoral degree. However, more than that, they stimulate me to bring to the

fore a few significant issues related to the paper coming out of my Ph.D.

dissertation. My thesis is on the labor movement and the operation of trade unions in

the so-called informal sector. The unions, I have argued, are neither independent

opponents nor are they compliant tools for the evicting authorities, they are the

result of state authority. Their emergence coincides with their subjection.

The present reflection piece gives me an opportunity to rethink my Ph.D. work

after a brief lapse of about a year, which has witnessed the consolidation of a

reflexive criticality on my own research. In this sense, the present piece is an

archiving of my changing sensibilities.

In general, the commentators have stimulated me to reflect on four intercon-

nected aspects that would, I am sure, make my argumentation in the paper clearer to

a reader who has never been to Calcutta. In three consecutive sections, I will try to

comment on (a) the specificities of the footpath as a heterogeneous and contested

urban space, (b) political parties and the hawker politics, and (c) asymmetric

presence of hawkers and pavement dwellers in my narrative. In conclusion, I will

reinstate my critique of Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of political society.

Section I: Footpaths

The footpath (variously called sidewalk, pavement, walkway) is an everyday urban

space not only in the empirical sense of the term, but also in the sense that Lefebvre

R. Bandyopadhyay (&)

National Institute of Advanced Studies, IISc, Bangalore, India


123


DOI 10.1007/s10624-011-9243-9

(1997) gives it: it is that uneven terrain of the familiar and the unperceived where

unspectacular negotiations of the widest questions of meaning and power can

continue. Moreover, there is a more particular spin in the case of the footpath

because the street in a bourgeois city represents and acts out a principle of

architectural order through which the cityscape is neatly structured between private

buildings and public spaces. A commercial terrain for various kinds of urban

retailers, a place of leisure for strollers and everyday street-people like cobblers,

itinerant hawkers and shopkeepers, a place for day-to-day survival of hawkers, a

periphery for householders, an urban forest for environmental activists, and a site

for the upkeep of public order for the state: Calcutta footpaths have hosted a range

of socio-political, economic and cultural uses and meanings and thus have been

integral to a contested democracy.1

Historically, the footpath has been conceptualized as a spatial means to govern

circulation in the city. An important comparison can be made between the

metropolitan and the colonial imaginations of the footpath in the second half of

nineteenth century and the early twentieth century when footpaths were constructed

in much of London, Paris and Calcutta. It might not be insignificant to mention that

the footpath was first constructed in Calcutta between 1854 and 1858. The colonial

anxiety over congested and serpentine urban streets as hotbeds of revolts and

revolutions must have informed the zeal to reorganize and regiment urban space.

The construction of footpaths in Calcutta also coincided with the coming of gas

street lamps, modern departmental stores, numbering of commercial buildings and

private houses and the reworking of the drainage system. In Calcutta, thus, footpaths

predate the automobile revolution and the sharp segmentation between different

forms of circulation.

The historically acquired distinctiveness of the footpaths from the streets and

other public spaces, I have argued in Politics of Archiving, has informed the kinds of

regulations imposed on hawkers, their subject formation and the kinds of claim that

they make on the state. The footpath hawkers in Calcutta, I have shown, distinguish

themselves from the street hawkers. They argue that their concentration in busy

street intersections do not cause impediment to automobile circulation and that they

trade on footpaths in collusion with pedestrians who benefit from their existence (for

details see Bandyopadhyay et al. 2011).

Section II: Political parties and hawkers

I have shown in Politics of Archiving how the HSC, which is a consolidation of

several hawker unions affiliated to various trade unions2 belonging to the non-CPI

(M) mainstream left, have successfully exploited the dissention within the ruling

Left Front rather than switch over to the opposition. Again, during my recent field

1 Here, I have been influenced by the work of Sideris and Ehrenfeucht (2009).2 These trade unions are registered under the Indian Trade Unions Act, 1926. The HSC does not have the

legal status of a registered trade union. It is a conglomeration of several hawker unions affiliated to

registered trade unions.


123

work with hawkers after the regime shift in 2011, I saw that the HSC had started

organizing rallies in favor of the ruling Trinamul Congress–Congress coalition.

Although hawkers in Calcutta are extremely powerful in their union activities,

because they live and work in disparate places, they hardly pose a serious threat to

the political parties as they do not exist as a consolidated voting block as do squatter

groups and slum dwellers. Therefore, a central argument of Politics of Archiving is

that theories of competitive electoral mobilization, such as Chatterjee’s political

society argument, are far from being exhaustive in explaining the problems of

subject formation in the context of a postcolonial democracy. The paper, therefore,

shows how the unions have been able to astutely gauge the most effective form of

politics for themselves and have been successful in acting in the market and

governmental spaces for decades. An exploration of the history of unionization in

the footpath hawking sector in 1970s may help strengthen my case. I will do so,

extracting and interpreting material from the Daily Notes (DN) files archived in the

Office of the Special Branch (SB) of Kolkata Police, and the contemporary

newspaper reportage on hawkers’ issues.

Three significant hawker eviction drives took place between 1969 and 1975. In

1969, the Second United Front Government evicted the refugee hawkers in

Gariahaat area of South Calcutta. The hawkers came back and reoccupied the

footpaths being mobilized by the Ballygunge Hawkers’ Association affiliated to the

Workers’ Party, which had been a part of the ruling United Front (The Statesman, 29

November, 1969).

In 1972, during the rule of the Congress Party (known as Congress-R whose

president was Prime Minister Indira Gandhi), both in the Municipal Corporation and

in the state government, a massive hawker eviction drive took place in a vast area of

central Calcutta, known as the Dharmatala-Esplanade area, the largest commercial,

retail and leisure hub of the city bordering the Central Business District (CBD). The

hawkers in this area traditionally belonged to the Muslim trading communities from

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. At this time, they were mainly organized by several trade

unions affiliated to the Indian Trade Union Congress, the labor wing of the ruling

Congress Party. The ‘‘Daily Notes’’ files of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police

recorded the day-to-day activities of these unions on the city streets. Frequent

entries were made between March 5, 1972, and June 11, 1972, under the subtitle,

‘‘West Bengal Hawkers’ Associations,’’ of six hawkers’ unions, whose titles and

affiliations were also asserted. The unions included the ‘‘Nationalist Hawkers’

Association’’ (belonging to the ruling Congress-R faction), Ballygunge Hawkers’

Association (Congress-R), Chowringhee Hawkers’ Association (Congress-R),

‘‘Bengal Hawkers’ Association’’ (Forward Block), ‘‘Calcutta Hawkers’ Congress’’

(Socialist Party) and ‘‘Jai Hind Calcutta Hawkers’ Union’’ (Congress-R). It is

interesting that there is no entry on the activities of the CPM labor Union, the Centre

of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) on the matter of the hawkers’ issues. One possible

explanation might be that affected hawkers found it more convenient to negotiate

with the government by expressing allegiance to the ruling party or at least to a

party which was not the staunchest opponent to the ruling party.

The third eviction operation in the Dharmatala-Esplanade area took place in

1975, just before the promulgation of the Emergency. The hawker eviction drive

A historian among anthropologists 333

123

was officially codenamed, ‘‘Operation Hawker.’’ The hawkers, as in 1972, were also

organized by street-based hawkers’ associations that regularly conducted protest

rallies, press conferences and fasting in public spaces. They submitted letters,

memoranda and proposals of resettlement on behalf of their client hawkers. Many of

the associations very soon came together and formed an umbrella organization

called, the ‘‘Coordination Committee of Calcutta Hawkers,’’ loosely affiliated to the

INTUC (Anandabazar Patrika 29 March 1975). Within a few days of its formation,

the Muslim League also joined the Coordination Committee (Office of the Deputy

Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal,

Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 636/75, 55, ORS

4679-80).

The Coordination Committee developed an effective strategy to resist eviction.

The members of the committee started public fasting beneath Lenin’s statue in

Esplanade’s old tram goomty and continued for more than 2 weeks. A Gandhian

technique of pressuring the state machine was thus observed beneath the statue of

Lenin, possibly indicative of the growing Marxist inclination of the unions. In

the politically explosive environment of Calcutta in 1975, in the context of the

Emergency, such a combination was itself politically suggestive. Secondly, the

committee in its rallies employed two slogans: Sara prithvir hawker ek hao(hawkers of the world unite) and Goriber devi Indira Gandhi amar rahe (Long live

the goddess of the poor, Indira Gandhi). This combination was also politically

suggestive. While the first saying invoked the popular left jargon of internationally

united struggle of the poor against class oppression, the second one declared the

committee’s conformity to the Congress and the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who

represented the Indian state during the Emergency. Thirdly, the Committee

developed a critique of the secularist claim of the Indian state by indicating that

Operation Hawker deliberately targeted the Muslims and the Scheduled Caste

groups. In a pamphlet issued by the Muslim League titled, Chawringhee ElakarHawker Uchchheder Poriprikshete Janasadharaner Nikat Muslim League ErAbedan (The submission of the Muslim League to the general public in the context

of Hawker eviction in Chawringhee), it was claimed (translated by the police) that

the majority of the evicted hawkers belonged to the Muslim and Scheduled Caste

communities among whom the problem of unemployment was already acute.

In the moments of crisis and evictions, the hawker unions have historically

shown skills to effectively justify the illegal occupancy of urban space by their

clients in the combination of three sets of instances. First, they expressed their

loyalty to the ruling party or the coalition. In 1969, for example, the Workers’ Party

leader, Jyoti Bhattacharyya, claimed that Gariahaat hawkers were loyal to the

‘‘left,’’ and therefore, a left government should reconsider its stand on hawker

eviction at Gariahaat. Similarly, we have seen that during Operation Hawker, the

Coordination Committee expressed its historical allegiance to the Congress and the

Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. Second, both in 1969 and 1975, the unions claimed

that their clients were poor, honest and industrious. They were the victims of

partition, deindustrialization and agrarian impoverishment and, therefore, deserved

an exception from the government. Third, if as hawkers they had violated the law of

property, they would hardly deny the fact, nor would they claim that their illegal


123

occupation is right. They would rather profess readiness to move out if they were

given a viable rehabilitation.

The previous discussion along with Politics of Archiving, establishes the reason to

comment on some of the elementary aspects of trade unionism in the so-called

informal economy. We may hold that the unions would negotiate with the state

bureaucracy and would come to terms with the lower rung of police and civic

administration to minimize the threat of eviction. They would also try to garner public

sympathy by organizing protest rallies. They would rarely wage violence against the

state authority or destroy public property to draw the attention of the authorities. We

have noticed how the Coordination Committee, during Operation Hawker, adopted a

Gandhian method of observing fast and satyagraha (passive resistance) to mobilize

their demands. Unlike squatters and slum dwellers (who exist as a clustered voting

block), they would rarely pose threat to the ruling party by switching sides at the time

of elections. They would rather remind the government of its recognized obligations

to take care of the poor and underprivileged and invite the government to declare an

exception (Chatterjee 2011). This is where the unions in the informal economy differ

from the unions in the formal/organized sector. The unions in the formal/organized

sector would typically pressure the government to comply with the legally and

constitutionally enshrined rights of their clients, often resorting to cease-work, strikes

and militancy. They would secure the rights of a particular group of workers. Their

success would depend on the extent of the workers’ indispensability to the production

process. The unions in the informal economy, on the other hand, would make strategic

use of the lived realities of the majority in the terrain of democratic politics, to hinge

onto the ‘‘generally recognized obligation of the government’’ (Chatterjee 2011, 15),

in order to obtain acceptance of the everyday violation of law by the poor.

Section III: Pavement dwellers and hawkers

In Politics of Archiving, I have argued that the pervasive populist neoliberal

conceptualization of the poor as ‘‘entrepreneurial’’ has dissolved the earlier construction

of the poor as deserving of charity. This shift in the discursive construction of the poor

coincides with the ability of the hawkers to claim urban space as important micro

market players and to mobilize public opinion in favor of them through organized

propaganda and self-survey. The pavement dwellers, who used to be visible in public

discourses until the 1980s as a governmental category in anthropological research, as a

site of international Christian charity and poverty tourism connected with charity, were

erased from public discourses although they were, and are still, no less visible on the city

footpaths. In order to give an idea of how pavement dwellers used to be depicted in the

state-sponsored anthropological surveys, which one of the commentators on my

previous paper wanted to know more about, let me summarize some of the interesting

findings of the survey of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA)

done by Jagannathan and Halder in 1987. Their research findings were published in

three articles in Economic and Political Weekly (1988a, b, and 1989). As I have

mentioned in Politics of Archiving, this survey is the last in an impressive queue of

anthropological surveys on pavement dwellers.


123

The CMDA survey of 1987 estimated that in March 1987, the total number of

pavement dwellers in Calcutta was 55571. The survey asserted that half of the

pavement dwellers concentrated in and around the Central Business District

stretching from Dalhousie square in the North, to Esplanade in the South, and

Lalbazaar in the East to the Strand Road in the West. Further, the survey informs us

that the concentration of the pavement dwellers were significant near wholesale

markets, dockyards and railway stations. The survey enumerates several occupa-

tional groups among the pavement dwellers among whom the number of transport

sector workers, service providers, head load carriers and porters dominate. The

survey also noticed that around 5% of the male pavement dwellers were connected

to footpath hawking. The women were mostly seen to work in middle class

households as maid-servants. The survey noticed that ‘‘temporary migrants’’ used to

send money back home, and living on the footpaths saved the cost of living in the

city. Therefore, the survey concluded that for many of the pavement dwellers,

pavement dwelling was not the last option and thus pavement dwelling could not be

conflated with homelessness and the subsequent condition of extreme poverty and

deprivation. The CMDA surveyors observed that three out of five pavement

dwellers were male and most of the pavement dwelling units housed single persons.

Only 30% of the units were observed to have a family structure with children. The

average size of such households was four. The survey noticed that inter-caste

marriages were not a rare phenomena among pavement dwellers. The surveyors

concluded that caste rules were loose among pavement dwellers and they considered

it to be the ‘‘city effect’’ on the subjects. The survey concluded, as I have mentioned

in Politics of Archiving, that most of the pavement dwellers migrated from the rural

areas close to Calcutta. This was the reason, I argued, why pavement dwellers were

targeted by rural–urban migration researchers in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the

research of this genre was funded by state agencies. In the 1980s, the Left Front

Government stopped funding on such research precisely to deny the reality of

primitive accumulation and dispossession in the rural West Bengal after much

publicized land reforms in the first half of 1980s. The left discourse of sonar banglathat was vigorously propagated by the mainstream left’s in India to showcase the

left exceptionalism was entangled with the neoliberal celebration of the entrepre-

neurial bottom billion, leading to a discursive erasure of pavement dwellers.

I have sought to understand this discursive erasure of the pavement dwellers and

connected it with the emergence of hawkers as a governmental category to form a

better understanding of the history of subject formation in the context of a

postcolonial democracy. Yet, I did not seek to rewrite the pavement dweller through

a conscientious ethnography, though it was easier for me to ‘‘speak for’’ the

pavement dweller. In my representation, the hawkers occupied the central stage,

though I found it extremely difficult to get the authentic ‘‘voice’’ from the field as

many of my subjects denied my ethnographic access to their life histories and trade

secrets. They trade under the open sky, in the presence of the state and the public.

Yet, they are particularly resistant to ethnography—they do not want to be spoken

for or re-presented beyond a point. In Politics of Archiving, I have described how I

was pushed to the office of the HSC, and how I was allowed to speak about how the

HSC spoke for the hawkers. I read the documents that the HSC collected and


123

preserved for a decade to govern the sector, to speak on behalf of the hawkers to the

government and to the public, and to participate in surveying the sector and in

policy-making. In a paper that preceded Politics of Archiving, I called this

knowledge politics as archiving from below.

As I described in the pages of Politics of Archiving, my access to the archive of

the HSC was under close scrutiny. I have narrated how I was denied access to much

of the HSC archive. Drawing the analogy of the organization of the state archives, I

have shown how such a ‘‘denial’’ shows the uncertain position of the archon in

relation to the archive. I argue that such closure is constitutive of archives and

archiving. The gap that remains in my ethnographic and archival research is

constitutive of my research and the understanding of my subjects. Here, my

methodological manoeuvres are largely drawn from the postpositivist thinking in

anthropology, history and archival theory developed in the last two decades that

proposes to view records not as ‘‘static physical objects’’, but as ‘‘dynamic and

virtual concepts’’ (Cook 2001). In other words, the postpositivist view of records

considers records and archives to be socially and culturally constructed and

maintained entities—that archive and archiving are outcomes of organizational

contexts within which they are generated and preserved (Stoler 2002). In Politics ofArchiving, I have treated archives not as sources, but archiving as a socio-political

process (Bandyopadhyay 2009). This means that along with the dominant mode of

postpositivist thinking, I made a strategic shift from establishing the ‘‘truth’’ to

understanding the cultural and political conditions of the production of truth.

As an ethnographer, I never claimed to have presented the view from the inside

of the subject community. Rather, my ethnographic engagement with my subjects

better explained the limits of my ability to represent the authentic voice of the

hawkers. Put differently, I did not imagine myself as an activist scholar presenting

the heroic subaltern subject—the hawker. I rather showed how conditions of

subalternity were relational and tied to the histories of subject formation in the

context of a multi-party democracy. The subaltern in my research marked the

‘‘limits of ethnographic and archival recognition’’ (Roy 2011, 224) that forced me

to question ‘‘dominant epistemologies and methodologies’’ usually deployed in

writing the subaltern. I have shown how archiving from below imbibes all the

power asymmetries and margins and erasures of the state archives. Thus, archiving

from below reflects on how all archives are formed and maintained in specific

organizational contexts. The ethnography in archive is then a position that refuses

to see archive as just a source and treats it as a subject and concentrates on

archiving as a process (Stoler 2002) in which record-making and record-keeping

involve political negotiations between mobilized social groups and the state. This

is how, I have argued, ‘‘facts’’ are produced in the ‘‘state-union complex’’. The

archive of the HSC certainly helps us understand the political and cultural

conditions of the production of the ‘‘truth’’, but it does not contain the authentic

voice of the hawker. The comparison between hawkers and pavement dwellers in

the paper shows how archiving from below is implicated in the discursive erasure

of the pavement dwellers and the emergence of the sangrami hawker as a

governmental category.


123

Conclusion

To summarize the theoretical intervention of the paper, let me say that I have made

three points in relation to Chatterjee’s classic exposition of political society. First,

the hawkers’ case depicts the history of subject formation in the last four decades

that cannot be exhausted in the classic framework of the ruling party, the opposition

and the electorate exerting collective choice and thereby earning targeted benefits

from the government. It is hard to deny that Chatterjee’s formulation does not have

a heavy investment of such an understanding of democratic politics. Second, the

‘‘entrepreneurial hawkers’’ are a collectivity of subjects who operate in a paralegal

space, but actively rationalize their whole life by submitting to the imperative of

self-improvement and civil obedience. At the heart of this new subject modality that

I have called the entrepreneurial subjectivity, lay the self-valorization of the

individual subject, not as the subject of welfare but as an active citizen. Such a self-

valorization takes place in a collective ethico-moral space in the context of a

contested democracy. The political society argument does not tell us how the notion

of civility can be constituted in the space of popular politics. Third, if the archive

turns out to be a space of political mediation between successfully mobilized

population groups and the government, then how would the contextuality and

momentary existence of political society come to terms with the spheres of

contested textualization and historical memory that are, as Politics of Archivingshows, implicated in the histories of subject formations?

References

Primary sources

Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal,

Daily Notes of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. SW 630, 1975.

Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta. Government of West Bengal,

Secret Report of the Special Branch of Calcutta Police. OR 4982, Communal Groups: Muslim

Affairs, Muslim League, 1975.

Newspapers and magazines

Anandabazar Patrika.

The Statesman.

Books and articles

Bandyopadhyay, R. 2009. Archiving from below: The case of the mobilized hawkers in Calcutta.

Sociological Research Online 14(5).


123

Bandyopadhyay, R, J. Roy, T.V.H. Prathamesh, P. Guha, R. Meheta, P. Sen, S. Dutta, C. Roy, and S. Sen.

2011. Hawkers’ question in Kolkata: History, Governance, Politics—A Study of Major Crossingsand Policy Recommendations. NIAS-URPP Report, ISBN: 978-81-87663-98-0.

Chatterjee, P. 2011. Lineages of political society: Studies in postcolonial democracy. Ranikhet:

Permanent Black.

Cook, T. 2001. Archival science and postmodernism: New formulations for old concepts. ArchivalScience 1(3): 3–24.

Jagannathan, V., and A. Halder. 1988a. Income-housing linkages: a case study of pavement dwellers in

Calcutta. Economic and Political Weekly 23(23): 1175–1178.

Jagannathan, V., and A. Halder. 1988b. A case study of pavement dwellers in Calcutta: Occupation,

mobility and rural-urban linkages. Economic and Political Weekly 23(49): 2602–2605.

Jagannathan, V., and A. Halder. 1989. A case study of pavement dwellers in Calcutta: Family

characteristics of the urban poor. Economic and Political Weekly 24(6): 315–318.

Lefebvre, H. 1997. The Production of Space (Extracts). In Rethinking architecture: A reader in culturaltheory, ed. N. Leach, 138–146. London: Routledge.

Roy, A. 2011. Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban andRegional Research 35(2): 223–238.

Sideris, A.L., and R. Ehrenfeucht. 2009. Sidewalks: Conflict and negotiation over public space.

Cambridge.

Stoler, A.L. 2002. Colonial archives and the arts of governance. Archival Science 2: 87–109.


123

politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in calcutta

Documents

central business district

street food vending

ruling left front

term street vendor

global urban economy

chowringhee hawkers association

urban street vendors

called informal sector