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 populations 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 conventionally associated with the governmental state—sections of population like the hawkers can become successful in their negotiations with the government.
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Notes
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. This concern with the history of the state in South Asia has been driven by both the so-called Cambridge school and the Subaltern 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 trajectory 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 dissemination with the rise of the British power in South Asia. The Subaltern Studies group, influenced by Foucauldian 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).
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 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.
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).
Anthropology and history were long seen as compatible enquiries into discrete spheres of alterity (the past, elsewhere). As Lévi-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).
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.
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.
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 legalize their 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.
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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 me develop my arguments in several ways. I am especially thankful to the three anonymous reviewers of Dialectical Anthropology and the editorial team for their insightful comments and technical assistance.
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Bandyopadhyay, R. Politics of archiving: hawkers and pavement dwellers in Calcutta. Dialect Anthropol 35, 295–316 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9199-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9199-1